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Over the last several days there have been many heated discussions on the FISA bill that’s coming up shortly for a vote in the Senate. Most of the discussions have revolved around Senator Obama and his expressed support for the highly controversial bill, which includes a provision virtually guaranteeing legal immunity for telecommunications companies like AT&T, Verizon and Bell South who have helped the Bush administration illegally spy upon the American people in violation of their Fourth amendment rights. Many are looking to Obama as a Constitutional scholar, a consensus builder, and the de facto leader of his party to stand up for the rule of law and rally his party against this bill. Thus far, Senator Obama has expressed support for the FISA legislation and it appears that he will not hold to his pledge to filibuster any bill that includes immunity for the telecoms. The majority of “netroots” in my view are simply outraged that the man they’ve been supporting, volunteering for, and contributing to is not living up to their expectations. And it seems fair to say that those expectations are not the ideals of the “starry-eyed but sadly naive purist” but rather the very rule of law, the foundation of order within our country, and the contract between our people and our government that vests the government with rank and authority in exchange for the simple protection of our liberties as elaborated in our founding documents.

The response to this outrage within the online community has led some Obama supporters to proclaim that the FISA bill is simply not worth all the fuss. “Purist” liberals must stop obsessing on this and focus all their energies on the election, or else they’ll be be complicit in a McCain win. To these posters I think there is something worth considering:

How far will the Bush administration go to ensure a McCain win in November?

We have the elections of 2000 and 2004 as benchmarks, and lest we forget, we also have the election of 1972. To quote an earlier post on the topic:

Nixon’s White House relied on law enforcement and intelligence agencies, ex-F.B.I. and C.I.A. agents, and cadres of miscellaneous and unsavory personnel in their efforts to identify, root out, and embarrass “political enemies.” In the name of national security, they wiretapped those opposed to the war in Vietnam and those within its own administration suspected of leaking to the press. It also sought to surveil and sabotage the Democratic Party. Morton Halperin, once on the Nixon payroll was wiretapped while later working for Democrat Ed Muskie, then a contender for that party’s nomination to the presidency. “I was working on the Muskie campaign for president,” Halperin recalls in a 2005 interview for NPR “They picked up calls about that. They picked up many personal calls. My little kids were on the phone and they got those. My wife’s phone calls — everything was intercepted.” Nixon’s “Plumbers” unit broke into the office of whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in an effort to gather information that could be used against him in retribution for leaking the Pentagon Papers. The Committee to Re-elect the President attempted to wiretap the headquarters of eventual Democratic nominee and Nixon opponent Senator George McGovern, and were known to have wiretaps on journalists within The New York Times and CBS.

That one needs repeating: ***Nixon’s administration attempted to wiretap the Democratic nominee***

Of course, technology has come a long way since the 1970′s:

The specifics of how government surveillance programs operate has until very recently been a matter of pure speculation. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal has, however, shed some light on the massive scope and capability of these programs. Government intelligence agencies can begin with something as simple as a phone number or an Internet address and quickly track “all domestic and foreign transactions of people associated with that item — and then the people who associated with them, and so on, casting a gradually wider net.” They may also choose to begin more broadly, by directing “the government’s spy systems” “to collect and analyze all electronic communications into and out of” a given city. Information collected would include: “records of phone calls, email headers and destinations, data on financial transactions and records of Internet browsing” as well as “a cellphone’s location, whom a person is calling, and what Web sites he or she is visiting.” The system would collect information about other people, including those residing in the U.S., who communicated with the original target through the use of sophisticated social network tracing technology.

In the face of such an overwhelming intelligence gathering apparatus, one wonders what checks are left to protect the “persons, houses, papers, and effects” of average citizens, but also of opposition party candidates during an election period. The “Opponents List and Political Enemies Project” revealed by Nixon White House Counsel John Dean III during the Watergate Hearings reminds us the depths to which the Executive Branch can sink in its effort to retain the presidency. In a memorandum to Presidential Advisers H.R. Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman, Dean wondered how they could “maximize the fact of our incumbency in dealing with persons known to be active in their opposition to our Administration; stated a bit more bluntly—how we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.“

Now I think its worth asking ourselves a question: What reason do we have to think that the present administration is above such tactics? As we know, FISA was set up in the wake of Watergate era spying to put a check on government spy power.

And once immunity is granted and spy power expanded how do we expect to ever know just how these powers have been abused? Must we wait until McCain takes the election to consider the possibility that perhaps massive unchecked illegal surveillance power really was worth all the fuss?

Want to know more about FISA, AT&T, and the NSA? You can watch an excellent Frontline segment on FISA here. This is the third of 5 segments. If you ‘d like to watch the full (hour long) episode you can do so here, be sure to click “watch the full episode” on screen right.

[UPDATE] June 28, 2008: AT&T Whistleblower: Spy Bill Creates ‘Infrastructure for a Police State’, Obama social networking group forms to pressure the Senator to oppose FISA bill

[UPDATE II] June 28, 2008: Full text of the FISA bill (pdf)