Spying Violates the Constitution: A Groundbreaking Ruling

Washington’s federal district court ruling that the massive collection of telephone data is a breach of the Constitution is a groundbreaking one, but has not yet overturned the government’s spying activities. Everything will depend on whether or not the decision will be held up by the Court of Appeals, if the government disputes the federal district court’s finding.

Judge Richard Leon, who was appointed, believe it or not, on Sept. 10, 2001 by George W. Bush, justified his stance by using expressions that shocked commentators. Explaining the grounds for the ruling, Judge Leon argued that the National Security Agency (NSA)’s surveillance program is “almost Orwellian” and that the author of the Constitution, James Madison, would be “aghast.” He emphasized that the work of the NSA undermines the meaning as well as the scope of Article IV of the Constitution,* which protects the citizen’s private life and forbids invasion of privacy — more precisely, against “unreasonable searches or seizures” of “their persons, papers and effects.”

With this in mind, let us add that the work carried out by Judge Leon is important in the most profound sense of the word, in that it is a contradiction of the avalanche of legal clauses designed and put into practice by the executive branch for the longest time, including, unsurprisingly, under Presidents Bush and Obama. It must be emphasized that the current occupant of the White House has taken the opposite stance from the one he took regarding invasion of privacy when he was a senator, after his predecessor had resorted to all imaginable variations of spying through legal wrongdoings. In this regard, a look back at recent history is necessary; history is full of lessons on the methods and tactics carried out behind the scenes to spy on citizens, as revealed by a survey conducted by The New Yorker.

This history is not exempt from a tendency toward totalitarianism and began on Oct. 4, 2001, when Bush secretly signed the President’s Surveillance Program (PSP). Immediately afterward, on Oct. 6, 2001, the three American telecommunications giants, Verizon, Bell South and AT&T, began gathering metadata that revealed the exact telephone number called, the length of the conversation, the date, the time of the call, etc. On Oct. 13, after delivery of 50 computers equipped with the latest technology, the government began monitoring Internet users’ emails and searches on Google and other search engines. Following this, Congress passed the Patriot Act, which grants discretionary powers to the president, an unprecedented privilege in the modern history of the United States.

It must be understood that first Bush, and then Obama, stepped up the legal shenanigans involved in such coercion so that Americans may swallow the inherent pack of political lies concerning invasion of privacy. In fact, if one has grasped the complexity of the spying activities undertaken, which Judge Leon deemed “almost Orwellian,” it becomes clear that the goal of erecting a legal wall was to create a gray area. More specifically, [it was] to exclude those elected officials that are too curious or too concerned about respecting people’s private lives, such as Oregon’s Sen. Ron Wyden, who has battled [this issue] virtually by himself. This proves that the code of silence imposed by Bush, former Vice President Dick Cheney and Obama would still be the order of the day had it not been for the revelations of Edward Snowden.

Furthermore, the government was unable to provide any evidence that the spying, which has been going on for the past 12 years, prevented loss of life — a fact that did not elude Judge Leon. Hopefully, this ruling will bring to light the defects in enforcement that have led to the “installment” [of measures] in opposition to a healthy democracy.

*Editor’s note: The author appears to have been referring to Article IV of the Amendments to the Constitution (the Fourth Amendment), not Article IV of the Constitution.