We have a problem. The American people support the NSA’s program to track every phone call we make.
The new survey found that 63 percent of Americans said they found the NSA program to be an acceptable way to investigate terrorism, including 44 percent who strongly endorsed the effort. Another 35 percent said the program was unacceptable, which included 24 percent who strongly objected to it.
A slightly larger majority–66 percent–said they would not be bothered if NSA collected records of personal calls they had made, the poll found.
What this means is that the Bush administration has succeeded in scaring the American people sufficiently that it is a difficult political position to take to stand up for our fourth amendment rights. To be clear, the program that was revealed by USA Today yesterday is not a clear-cut violation of the fourth amendment. And it is not a clear-cut violation of FISA. The problem is that there is no court or Congressional oversight, and that the information gathered under the program can be easily cross-referenced with other databases to violate our privacy and our rights.
In other words, it is not the program itself that is the problem, but the program in concert with other programs. It’s also probably true that the telecommunications companies that cooperated violated privacy agreements they made with their customers (but that is not a constitutional issue).
It’s a very disturbing reality that the American people support extreme invasiveness into their personal privacy. This allows Bush a wide berth to abuse the system and not pay a political price. It also intimidates Democrats that would otherwise raise holy hell. But, there is only way to deal with this problem, and that is to join up with libertarians and fight back with everything we’ve got.
