Impulse

The FISA Amendments Act comes up for a vote tomor­row in the Senate.  For those not in the know: FISA extends the 4th Amendment so that wire­tap­ping or elec­tronic sur­veil­lance requires a war­rant.  The Amendments Act com­ing up tomor­row guts FISA so that the exec­u­tive branch can lis­ten to your phone con­ver­sa­tions with­out a war­rant.  At issue here too is whether or not the tele­coms who allowed war­rant­less wire­taps (even before 9/11!!!) should be granted immunity.

Here’s a really inter­est­ing video that describes many issues and actu­ally changed my mind on a few things:

Regardless of whether you’re for or against this, time is of the essence to influ­ence your sen­a­tors.  EFF has made it easy to find your sen­a­tors & call them; just type your zip code in here. 

Myself, I think that if elec­tronic sur­veil­lance were around in 1789, they’d have writ­ten it straight into the 4th Amendment.  Further, in this world where infor­ma­tion is power, keep­ing FISA keeps a bal­ance of power between gov­ern­ment & cit­i­zens as well as between the branches of gov­ern­ment.  As all the iden­tity theft prob­lems have shown: infor­ma­tion is more impor­tant nowa­days than phys­i­cal belong­ings — if it takes a war­rant to search my phys­i­cal belong­ings, why should it not take a war­rant to search or tap my information?

I used to think that we should give the tele­coms immu­nity if it means we can keep FISA strong.  The video above changed my mind.  Immunity means no law­suits, which means no inves­ti­ga­tions into what the gov­ern­ment did, which means no way to hold the gov­ern­ment account­able.  We have to hold every­one account­able to hold the gov­ern­ment accountable. 

I just called my sen­a­tors and it takes only about 60 sec.  Pretty amaz­ing when you can defend your con­sti­tu­tion in only 60 sec­onds (and a whole lot eas­ier than what sol­diers in Iraq have to do).