The Orwellian Present

Interesting news today about the wiretapping fiasco in the US. Seems that a lawsuit against AT&T brought on by the ACLU in the name of AT&T customers has been dismissed by a US court. In case you're not aware, AT&T and several other large American telecoms freely gave information to the US government such as phone records and all this without warrant or consent of any kind. The NSA had offices within all the large telecoms where they gathered information relating to "security purposes".

It turns out that the lawsuit was dismissed by the courts today under the grounds that forcing AT&T to disclose information about this program and whether or not it did indeed give access to large amounts of phone records would give the US' enemies valuable insight into the government's intelligence activities.

This is a really disgusting situation to be in. Here is something that is completely unconstitutional -- essentially a broad domestic surveillance program without any kind of court approval, and the court itself refuses to hear a case as to the legality of this surveillance. In effect, they are endorsing the program. We have to be very careful about things like these. The loss of rights in the name of security happens on a step-by-step basis, not from one day to the next. This is a huge step in the wrong direction.