Twisted wires via Image Abstraction.

With the release of the most recent spate of OLC memos on torture, the revelations that there have been multiple questions about FBI national security letter privacy violations and more recent allegations of expansive NSA spying on Americans — including spying on government officials?

There should not be any question that principled leadership, guided by the rule of law, at OLC is necessary at this point.

Shouldn’t be. But apparently Paul at Powerline didn’t get the memo:

As I understand it, this program was nixed as a result of the objections of Goldsmith and Comey (backed by Ashcroft) in or around March 2004 when it was still secret. The revised program was revealed to the public in late 2005. Johnsen objected to the revised surveillance program, not the discarded one, the details of which remained unknown. The fact that the Justice Department rejected the original secret program in way no supports Johnsen’s position on the publicized program the Justice Department approved.

Gee, you mean THIS program?

Since 2002, the agency has been conducting some warrantless eavesdropping on people in the United States who are linked, even if indirectly, to suspected terrorists through the chain of phone numbers and e-mail addresses…

The next year, Justice Department lawyers disclosed their thinking on the issue of warrantless wiretaps in national security cases in a little-noticed brief in an unrelated court case. In that 2002 brief, the government said that "the Constitution vests in the President inherent authority to conduct warrantless intelligence surveillance (electronic or otherwise) of foreign powers or their agents, and Congress cannot by statute extinguish that constitutional authority."

So if you ever got a chain letter e-mail forward that got forwarded on by someone else who then forwarded it to some terrorist suspect’s mom’s cousin’s best friend?  You, too, could be a terror suspect without any further proof!  And you’d deserve it, too, you dirty SPAM e-mail receiver.

Because, as we all know, there’s no more solid legal reasoning about unilateral executive fiat than John Yoo’s writings.  *cough* 

Who could possibly object to a wholesale violation of clearly written law with no checks, no balances, no limits, no oversight and no questions allowed from the unpatriotic legal types who want to uphold the rule of law?

As Jack Balkin succinctly put it, "the more powerful government becomes in knowing what its citizens are doing, the easier it becomes for government to control people’s behavior."

If monitoring within the US needs to be done, the enforcement agency merely has to apply for a warrant showing some probable cause for needing it.   Law enforcement officers across this country do this every single day: for mobsters, drug dealers, you name it.

Why a warrant, you ask? Because we have these things called laws which protect individual rights against the enormous powers of the state precisely because sometimes individuals in government can be vindictive assholes who like to use those powers to their own ends or for improper, broad purposes which are not legally viable.

You know, such as using the NSA to spy on American email, phone calls, text messages, cell phone calls, texts, and other forms of electronic communication in a giant hoovering operation…even though both the federal government and the NSA specifically know this is patently illegal on its face.  Laws which provide for neutral third-party judicial review to prevent just this sort of unchecked violation from happening.

I don’t know what’s more insulting:  that the Bush Administration thought that they could snooker us into handing over our hard-won civil liberties by trying to make us cower in the corner — or that people are still cowering.

Call me crazy, Paul, but when the government lies about willfully violating your rights, you don’t bend over, smile and say "please sir, violate my rights some more, and punish the people who were smart enough to call the scam for what it was."