Top Ten Myths About the Illegal NSA Spying on Americans
SOURCE: American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
Bush's "terrorist surveillance program" plainly violates the clear language and intent of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), and is inconsistent with Americans’ fundamental First and Fourth Amendment rights.
MYTH: This is merely a “terrorist surveillance program.” REALITY: When there is evidence a person may be a terrorist, both the criminal code and intelligence laws already authorize eavesdropping. This illegal program, however, allows electronic monitoring without any showing to a court that the person being spied upon in this country is a suspected terrorist. Plus, there already is a legitimate “terrorist surveillance program”—it’s called the “Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act” (FISA). This federal law requires judicial approval of all electronic surveillance in this country in investigations to prevent “international terrorism” or “sabotage.” It unequivocally requires court approval of such surveillance, whether by the NSA or FBI. And it applies to any telephone or email to or from any American person in this country. FISA protects the constitutional rights of Americans, but if a person in the US were suspected of assisting al Qaeda then that would be the basis for getting a court order authorizing a wiretap under FISA, not for ignoring the law.
Without judicial oversight, there is no way to ensure that each person whose emails or phone calls are monitored by the NSA actually is a suspected terrorist. And, investigative reports that FBI intelligence agents have been flooded with worthless tips from the NSA about innocent schoolteachers and law abiding Americans cast serious doubt on this claim. And, as the New York Times noted: "The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged...”<1>
MYTH: The program is legal.REALITY: The program violates the Fourth Amendment and FISA and will chill free speech. The Fourth Amendment protects the right of the people of the United States to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures and requires court approval except in an emergency. As a bipartisan group of legal experts—including Judge William Sessions, the former Director of the FBI under President Ronald Reagan—concluded after analyzing all the constitutional and statutory assertions of the administration: “the Justice Department’s defense of what it concedes was secret and warrantless electronic surveillance of persons within the United States fails to identify any plausible legal authority for such surveillance.”<2>
The Supreme Court has long held that the conversations of Americans cannot be seized under the Fourth Amendment without court oversight.<3> In a case involving warrantless wiretapping by President Nixon in the name of national security, the Supreme Court stressed that “Fourth Amendment freedoms cannot properly be guaranteed if domestic surveillance may be conducted solely within the discretion of the Executive Branch.”<4> In that case, the Keith case, the Court reaffirmed that “prior judicial approval is required for the type of domestic surveillance involved in this case and that such approval may be made in accordance with such reasonable standards as Congress may prescribe.”<5>
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http://www.baltimorechronicle.com/2006/020906ACLU.shtml 
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