It was only a matter of time before Bush’s warrantless-search program faced a serious court challenge. It looks like two court filings will get the ball rolling today.
Two leading civil rights groups plan to file lawsuits Tuesday against the Bush administration over its domestic spying program to determine whether the operation was used to monitor 10 defense lawyers, journalists, scholars, political activists and other Americans with ties to the Middle East.
The two lawsuits, which are being filed separately by the American Civil Liberties Union in Federal District Court in Detroit and the Center for Constitutional Rights in Federal District Court in Manhattan, are the first major court challenges to the eavesdropping program. Both groups are seeking to have the courts order an immediate end to the program, which the groups say is illegal and unconstitutional. […]
The lawsuits seek to answer one of the major questions surrounding the eavesdropping program: has it been used solely to single out the international phone calls and e-mail messages of people with known links to Al Qaeda, as President Bush and his most senior advisers have maintained, or has it been abused in ways that civil rights advocates say could hark back to the political spying abuses of the 1960’s and 70’s?
There are a few interesting angles to this story, but I’m struck by the list of plaintiffs, which includes James Bamford, Christopher Hitchens, and The American Prospect’s Tara McKelvey, all of whom are journalists and all of whom “suspect that the program may have been used to monitor their international communications,” according to the ACLU lawsuit.
“We don’t have any direct evidence” that the plaintiffs were monitored by the security agency, said Ann Beeson, associate legal director for the A.C.L.U. “But the plaintiffs have a well-founded belief that they may have been monitored, and there’s a real chilling effect in the fear that they can no longer have confidential discussions with clients or sources without the possibility that the N.S.A. is listening.”
I’m glad these suits are moving forward and I hope they’re successful. But while the litigation is ongoing, I’m intrigued by the idea that some very high-profile reporters have “well-founded” suspicions that they’ve been spied on.
If these reporters have some insights into warrantless searches on law-abiding American journalists, shouldn’t they, you know, report on it?