Trusting Government Too Much, When Civil Liberties Are At Stake?
On the other hand, the potential cost to civil liberties is considerable. FISA warrants are a powerful tool to hand over to prosecutors, who are under tremendous pressure to root out terrorists. The Court of Review let prosecutors use relatively scant, and always secret, evidence to wiretap and conduct searches against anyone falling into the rather amorphous category of “foreign agent.” By doing so, the Court of Review’s opinion raised substantially the risk that innocent people will be subjected to highly intrusive government surveillance. The FISA decision, moreover, does not come in isolation. Rather, it comes from the same Administration that has brought us a host of other civil-liberties-endangering programs. There is the use of secret military tribunals for those the government accuses of terrorism. There is the mass closure of immigration hearings, and the secret detention and quarantining of suspected terrorists (even those who are U.S. citizens). There is the “TIPS” program e
