Electronic surveillance and Obama – worries.

So while I am all for supporting and celebrating our new President I feel it is our responsibility to not let that grow into a blindness. We need to see the good and the bad. And while I have pointed out the good things Obama has done for our freedom so far I have to question this one:

(via Wired) The incoming Obama administration will vigorously defend congressional legislation immunizing U.S. telecommunication companies from lawsuits about their participation in the Bush administration’s domestic spy program.

“The duty of the Justice Department is to defend statutes that have been passed by Congress,” Holder told Sen. Orin Hatch (R-Utah), who asked whether the Obama administration would continue the legal fight to uphold the legislation that the Electronic Frontier Foundation is seeking to overturn.

—————-

And then we have this one: The Obama administration fell in line with the Bush administration Thursday when it urged a federal judge to set aside a ruling in a closely watched spy case weighing whether a U.S. president may bypass Congress and establish a program of eavesdropping on Americans without warrants.

In a filing in San Francisco federal court, President Barack Obama adopted the same position as his predecessor. With just hours left in office, President George W. Bush late Monday asked U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker to stay enforcement of an important Jan. 5 ruling admitting key evidence into the case.

Thursday’s filing by the Obama administration marked the first time it officially lodged a court document in the lawsuit asking the courts to rule on the constitutionality of the Bush administration’s warrantless-eavesdropping program. The former president approved the wiretaps in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

“The Government’s position remains that this case should be stayed,” the Obama administration wrote in a filing that for the first time made clear the new president was on board with the Bush administration’s reasoning in this case.

The government wants to appeal Walker’s decision to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, a legal maneuver requiring Judge Walker’s approval. A hearing in Walker’s courtroom is set for Friday.

The legal brouhaha concerns Walker’s decision to admit as evidence a classified document allegedly showing that two American lawyers for a now-defunct Saudi charity were electronically eavesdropped on without warrants by the Bush administration in 2004.

The lawyers — Wendell Belew and Asim Ghafoo — sued the Bush administration after the U.S. Treasury Department accidentally released the Top Secret memo to them. At one point, the courts had ordered the document, which has never been made public, returned and removed from the case.

——————

So what the fuck, guys? He made the right moves with Gitmo, wanted transparent Government and made steps toward it but then falls down on this? It makes me wonder, it makes me want to look closer and it makes me, frankly, think that while some things have gotten better we are going to have to look closer than ever to keep an eye on the ones that have not.

2 comments

  1. Greg says:

    Yeah, I was really disappointed when I came across this the other day. But remember, it was the Labour party in the UK that rolled out all the big brother surveillance tech and not the Tories. I think the appeal of surveillance technology is less of a liberal/conservative thing and more of a politician thing.

    Caveat emptor.

  2. APK says:

    Totally, I agree that it is a political thing more than a side of the fence thing. But it is a bad one to get into and just kinda sad that everyone needs to go there, it would seem. This doesn’t undo the good he has done and will do, but nor does that undo this.

Leave a Reply