Editorials

American ideals and values have taken a beating in recent years, and the fight ain’t over yet.

This week’s challenge is a White House-backed bill that would grant retroactive immunity to telephone companies that aided the administration in post-9/11 spying on Americans. At the same time, the bill loosens safeguards against spying on U.S. citizens.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is heading up a class-action lawsuit against one phone giant. EFF accuses AT&T of “violating the law and the privacy of its customers by collaborating with the National Security Agency (NSA) in its massive, illegal program to wiretap and data-mine Americans’ communications.”

Though the details are clouded and specifics absent, it appears that the core of the allegation is on the money. After 9/11, the administration pressured phone companies to hand over the goods without the benefit of a warrant.

We have been here before.

In the late 1970s, Congress granted telecoms a process to avoid the litigation AT&T now faces. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act specified (a.) how the federal government could obtain a wiretapping warrant through a secret court and (b.) how telecoms could protect consumer information until the government produced said warrant.

That changed after 9/11. The Bush administration pressed the phone companies to hand over the lines of communication, sans warrant.

Though over the years FISA had been upgraded to keep up with technology and changing threats, the president’s men scrapped the whole thing in pursuit of suspected terrorists after Sept. 11, 2001.

Oddly enough, FISA owes its creation to the heedless pursuit of an enemy in a previous era.

For more than five decades, the federal government spied on Americans. The self-described protector of the United States, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, used his power to snoop on those who were believed friendly with that age’s threat — communism.

Those spied upon were frequently not in league with the Commies; instead, they were liberals, activists, actors, civil-rights workers — including Martin Luther King — antiwar protesters and so on. More likely, these groups were targets because they offended the sensibilities of Hoover, a man, it was discovered after his death, who had a closet full of skeletons himself.

Awakening from the lies of Vietnam and Watergate in the 1970s, Americans were shocked by what they learned about government spying.

Sen. Frank Church, a Democrat from Idaho, led the reform effort. Church publicly fretted about how abuses such as these could lead to an authoritarian United States with “no place to hide.”

His committee led the way in reversing the spying, eventually inspiring the passage of FISA in 1978. The goal: Create a law that would protect Americans’ privacy yet give the government the authority to go after the bad guys under a court’s supervision. It worked fairly well. The secret court that supervised wire-tapping was a low bar for the feds, only denying a handful of requests in more than two decades. Heck, one part of the law even allowed for a retroactive warrant, telling investigators to wiretap first and then seek a court’s permission later.

All this seems largely forgotten in the current D.C. debate over giving the government — this one and future ones — nearly unlimited power to spy on Americans. The argument goes that liberties and privacy cannot be tightly held if we are to defeat the age’s great foe — Islamic terrorism. The fear: giving government unchecked power here will lead to the sorts of abuses we witnessed in earlier times.

If it feels as though we’re on a continuous loop, damned to repeat mistakes of the previous century, it may be because we are.