Last week a federal judge ruled that the Bush administration’s program to wiretap international communications of American citizens without warrants violated the US Constitution. The Justice Department filed an immediate appeal, allowing the warrantless wiretapping to continue until a 7 September hearing.
The vast majority of the Bush administration’s arguments in support of the warrantless wiretapping program were rejected by Judge Anna Diggs Taylor of the US District Court in Detroit, who ruled that the program violated the Fourth Amendment (an assertion that has never been addressed by the US Supreme Court) and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). FISA specifically requires warrants from a secret court for intelligence wiretaps on US citizens.
Judge Taylor was adamant in her decision:
“It was never the intent of the framers to give the president such unfettered control, particularly when his actions blatantly disregard the parameters clearly enumerated in the Bill of Rights. The three separate branches of government were developed as a check and balance for one another.”
Jameel Jaffer, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the plaintiff in the case, told the New York Times that the decision was “another nail in the coffin of executive unilateralism.”
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