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(Image Source: Wikimedia Commons)
BY SHANLEY REYNOLDS and STEVEN SPARKMAN
ANCHOR:
BRICE SANDER
The U.S. Supreme Court decided in a 5-4 vote Tuesday to refuse to
let Americans challenge the eavesdropping law.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act, or FISA, was originally passed to allow spying on other country’s communications.
But RT reports the act was greatly expanded in 2008.
“Under the FISA Amendments
Act of 2008 (FAA), the NSA is allowed to conduct electronic surveillance on any US citizen
as long as they are suspected of conversing with any person located outside of the United
States.”
A lawsuit by several organisations, including Amnesty International, says the
act lets the government use “dragnet surveillance,” monitoring all kinds of communications without
having to prove any national security interest to a judge. WLWT reports ...
“...the
suit was filed by a group of lawyers, journalists and activists... who were concerned the government
could eavesdrop on communications with clients and sources.”
Instead of hearing the case, the Supreme Court dismissed the claims that the plaintiffs
were being watched, saying they had no standing because none of them had been actually harmed
by the policy.
USA Today quotes Justice Samuel Alito, saying:
"This theory of future
injury is too speculative," He said it was "hypothetical future harm."
The decision
has privacy advocates like the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald fuming. He says the government’s
post-9/11 surveillance programs essentially sidestep the U.S. Constitution.
“As
both the Bush and Obama administrations have repeatedly proven, they are free to violate
the Constitution at will just so long as they do so with enough secrecy to convince subservient
federal courts to bar everyone from challenging their conduct.”
Or as a writer for
Ars Technica sums it up: “One by one, the legal challenges to expanded government spying
in the post-9/11 era are failing in court.”
But a lawyer for the ACLU isn’t surprised at
the ruling, telling The New York Times there has never been a serious challenge to any
of the government’s most controversial security policies.
“More than a decade after
9/11 we still have no judicial ruling on the lawfulness of torture, of extraordinary rendition,
of targeted killings or of the warrantless wiretapping program. These programs were all
contested in the public sphere, but they have not been contested in the courts.”
Four
judges dissented in the opinion, saying the Court has found standing in cases where the
future harm was far less likely than in this case.