Is Warrantless Spying Here to Stay?

Maybe this is what Obama means by transparency- making citizens' communications available to the government.

Nat Hentoff is now at the Zanesville Times Recorder (who aren't so good with the spellcheck on this one).

After testimony by our new Attorney General, Eric Holder, on Jan. 14 before the Senate Judiciary Committee, I have regained my skepticism about how much of our Constitution President Barack Obama intends to restore - for one example, our privacy rights under the Fourth Amendment. Holder declared that the Obama administration will defend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments of 2008 immunizing and protecting America's telecommunications companies from many lawsuits about their involvement with the Bush administration's mass surveillance of Americans' telephone and Internet communications.

Sen. Obama, after'eoedging his opposition to thaI bill by intending to filibuster it, wound up voting for it, to the deep disappointment and surprise of some of his ardent supporters. Now, under President Obama, Verizon, AT&T and other major telecommunications organizations are assured that they can continue to provide continuous streams of our communications data to the omnivorous National Security Agency, which will share the information with other intelligence agencies.

So broad and sweeping is NSA's reach under this legislation that, as the ACLU charges in its current lawsuit, "The new law permits the government to conduct intrusive surveillance without ever telling a court who it intends to spy on, what phone lines and email addresses it intends to monitor, where its surveillance targets are located, why it's conducting the surveillance or whether it suspects any party to the communication of wrongdoing."

Is this President Obama's America?

Continued.

And a related interview with The Nation's sportswriter by Rachel Maddow.