James P. Brochin
This unit will address the following essential question: What are the proper limits on governmental surveillance or intrusion on the privacy rights of its own citizens during a time a war? Put another way, under what circumstances might the government be justified in using warrantless wiretapping on its own citizens? Consider these examples, from different historical contexts, of arguably illegitimate use of government power to intimidate or spy on suspected threats to American security, or in the case of Watergate, the illegal use of surveillance to sabotage the Democratic Party:
In the Soviet Union, KGB agents regularly planted spying devices in the homes of foreign ambassadors, journalists, and intellectuals, in an ambitious, decades long effort to blunt any criticism of the State. In America, we believed that the Bill of Rights protected us from such excesses by the government. We feared those excesses; we feared the Soviet Communist policies of justifying all manner of human rights violations in the name of state security.
As the Cold War deepened and intensified, Joseph McCarthy rode a wave of anticommunist fear into the Senate. Professors, Democrats, and many others were targeted as potential enemies of America. McCarthy was popular at one time, helped get Republicans elected, intimidated New Deal Democrats, who he dubbed traitors, and helped Eisenhower win his first term. In the great fear that was called the McCarthy Era, Hollywood, public schools, universities, and the television industries implemented loyalty oaths, used blacklists, censored themselves, and waited. Eventually, McCarthy’s strident tone and relentless accusations began to alienate the country, and McCarthy became an embarrassment even to the Republican Party. And when he accused the Army of harboring Communists, his own party sought to censure him and the full Senate did censure him. Americans believed and have since believed that the country had survived one of the most serious threats to our civil liberties in our history. We believed that the system worked, that McCarthy’s tactics of intimidation and innuendo had finally shown themselves as un-American. We had seen Joseph Welch, the Army’s attorney, stand up to McCarthy. We believed that plain decency would protect us.
In an attempt to assure the reelection of President Richard M. Nixon, burglars break into National Democratic headquarters, to copy files and to plant listening devices. Some of the burglers had direct connections to the CIA. The money for the break in came from Nixon’s Committee to Reelect the President, and the Washington Post gradually uncovered a nationwide “dirty tricks” campaign to discredit and defeat Democratic challengers to Republican control of the White House. The money trail led to Attorney General John Mitchell and Nixon aides Bob Haldeman and John Erlichman. President Nixon had, to the surprise of many, recorded scores of meetings in the oval office, catching him and others organizing a cover up of theWatergate affair and the broader reaches of the dirty tricks campaign. The Supreme Court ordered the President to turn over the tapes, Congress threatened to impeach, and Richard Nixon resigned.
A week after the catastrophic attacks of September 11, 2001, I flew to Florida from Bradley International Airport. Passing through security, I was so scared to fly that I thought, upon the approach to and departure from the metal detectors, “Please inspect my bags. Please inspect my bags. That was too easy, you should inspect my bags!” while National Guardsmen with guns, looked eager yet slightly embarrassed. It was within this atmosphere that President George W. Bush signed the USA PATRIOT Act into law on October 26, 2001. The acronym stands for “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001.”
During the War on Terror in Afghanistan and Iraq, has America’s citizenry relinquished its essential role of criticizing governmental violations of citizens’ constitutional rights? How do the lessons of the Soviet Union, the McCarthy Era. and Watergate helps us determine what the proper limits on domestic spying should be, even in a time of war?
In early 2003, The National Security Agency (NSA), at the command of the Bush administration, began the most extensive, and highly secret, use of warrantless wiretapping in our history.
Marc Klein, a 22-year AT&T employee, discovered a secret room at the company’s San Francisco office. Marc Klein didn’t go looking for the switch room, but once he discovered its existence, he did his own investigation, revealed it to the media, retired from his AT&T job, and fought against giving immunity to ATT and other companies for cooperating in the NSA program.
-
I worked at AT&T for 22 and a half years. My job was basically to keep the systems going … In 2002 I was sitting at my workstation one day, and some e-mail came in. I opened it up, and it was just a notice saying that somebody from the National Security Agency, NSA, was going to come visit for some business. That struck me as a little odd to begin with, because I remember from back in the '70s, the NSA is not supposed to be doing domestic spying, so what were they doing in an AT&T company office …
-
Some time later, maybe a few weeks … this NSA representative showed up at the door. I let him in. I directed him to the appropriate people. He was very closemouthed and unsmiling, and he did his business. The guy that the NSA had interviewed [at our office on Geary Street] we heard was working on something over at Folsom Street. And I heard from our manager, Don, that he's working on some new room that's being built …
-
-
Then I started learning that it's not only a new room; it's a room that all the technicians cannot go into. I got to see the room. It was right next door to the phone switch room … I didn't know whether there was a definite connection between the two or not, or whether that was just a coincidence, but I finally found out what they're doing, by sheer accident… As it turned out, one of the key pieces of spy equipment they installed was in the Internet room. It didn't seem to be an obvious connection, and I had said to him, "Well, it seems to me that the secret room is right next to the phone switch room, so I assume they're listening to phone calls," and his answer was: "No. Internet." That was his instant answer. He said, "I'll show you."
-
He was referring to what I found later, was what we called the splitter cabinet. The seventh-floor Internet room has whole lineups of equipment, row after row after row of equipment. In one row, they installed a cabinet that had optical splitters in it. So there were optical splitters, which basically were connected by fiber-optic cable down to the secret room on the sixth floor. …
-
-
The analogy I can give you, which most people are familiar with is, say you get cable TV in your living room and then want to watch all the channels you get in the living room, you want to get all those same channels in your bedroom. So they install on the cable what they call a splitter, which splits off all the signals, duplicates of the same signals which go to the bedroom. …
-
What the splitter does is make a duplicate copy of all the signals going across the fiber-optic cables. … We're talking about billions and billions of bits of data going across every second. They were basically sweeping up, vacuum-cleaning the Internet through all the data, sweeping it all into this secret room. … It's the sort of thing that very intrusive, repressive governments would do, finding out about everybody's personal data without a warrant. I knew right away that this was illegal and unconstitutional, and yet they were doing it.
-
So I was not only angry about it; I was also scared, because I knew this authorization came from very high up -- not only high up in AT&T, but high up in the government. So I was in a bit of a quandary as to what to do about it, but I thought this should be halted. I think I'm looking at something Orwellian. It's a government, many-tentacled operation to gather daily information on what everybody in the country is doing. Your daily transactions on the Internet can be monitored with this kind of system, not just your Web surfing. All kinds of business that people do on the Internet these days -- your bank transactions, your e-mail, everything -- it sort of opens a window into your entire private life, and that's why I thought of the term "Orwellian." As you know, in [George] Orwell's story [1984], they have cameras in your house, watching you. Well, this is the next best thing. …
My students have been confronted by events that are terrifying. Terrifying to themselves, to their parents, to nearly everyone: September 11, 2001, the war, here and in Afghanistan, against terrorism, and the war in Iraq. These times supply “teaching moments” in quantity. Should the discovery and exposure of the NSA program lead to criticism and civil liability for the NSA, the administration, and the companies that cooperate? Students will identify and evaluate ways to avoid the most destructive consequences of justifiable fears of today’s new enemies.
The Unit will begin by examining the Bill of Rights, with particular emphasis on the Fourth Amendment. We will begin with essential ideas such as the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizures, probable cause, privacy, and warrants. The Fourth Amendment provides:
-
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Students will examine the history of The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA”), signed into law in 1978 by President Carter, which was largely a reaction to warrantless government and CIA surveillance of American civilians taking place in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. In January of 1970, Christopher Pyle, then an army captain teaching constitutional law at the U.S. Army Intelligence School in Fort Holabird, Maryland, uncovered evidence that the U.S. Army Intelligence Command had commissioned over 1,500 officers to spy on protests or demonstrations with more than 20 participants.
Senator Sam Ervin (D-NC) and Senator Frank Church (D-ID), launched committee investigations into warrantless government surveillance of civilians. Senator Ervin was concerned about Pyle’s allegations but had little power to act on them. In 1975, after the resignation of President Nixon, Church led the U.S. Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, which found that the executive branch had frequently violated the Fourth Amendment. The Church Committee’s findings led to changes in U.S. policy. Onewas the establishment of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a court through which the executive branch may secretly obtain warrants for electronic surveillance while remaining subject to judicial review.
In December 2005, the
New York Times
reported that the Bush administration had conducted illegal warrantless searches as part of the war on terror. In January 2007, the Bush administration agreed to place its surveillance program under the FISA court. In August 2007, Congress passed a law exempting the Bush administration from FISA for six months. In President Bush’s 2008 State of the Union Address, he ask Congress to pass law giving retroactive civil immunity to telecommucations companies that had cooperated with the NSA surveillance program. In June, the House of Representatives passed the FISA Amendments Act, and on July 9, 2008, The U.S. Senate joined the House, broadly expanding the president’s warrantless surveillance authority and granting retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that participated in the president’s domestic wiretapping program.
The students will study the events leading to and following the events of 9/11/01: Islamic Radicalism, The Afghan War against the Soviet Union, Desert Storm, The Patriot Act, FISA, The NSA spying program, its uncovering, its defense by the Bush Administration, and the current state of the program.
The class will be able to identify and evaluate the issues raised in the unit in a CAPT type essay or essays, one of which could involve taking a position on the legality and dangers to the Constitution of warrantless wiretaps. In this persuasive essay or essays, all points of view are welcome.
Students will be assessed throughout the ten-day unit. At the close of the course, the class will be given an examination, which will primarily involve writing a persuasive essay on the central questions of the unit, and the question will involve an application of the lessons learned during the study of the Cold War to various situations in the world and to their lives.
Students, adolescents in general, tend to believe that the events of the world are unique to their generation. Many students talk about the threat to civil liberties arising from the war on terror as if it is the first time that such measures have been contemplated or taken. Students will benefit by knowing that others have come before, and that the Bill of Rights has survived other trials, including the Sedition Acts of the late 1700’s, Martial Law under Lincoln, the Japanese Internment, The McCarthy Era’s blacklists and loyalty oaths, and Vietnam Era suppression of dissent.
Relevant Portions of The Bill of Rights
The First Amendment provides for a free press, free speech, freedom to assemble, freedom to petition the government for redress of grievances, free exercise of religion and prohibition of the establishment of religion. In the context of this Unit, a free press, freedom of speech, freedom to assemble, and the freedom to petition the government for redress of grievances, and the freedom of religion and the prohibition of the establishment of religion have each and all been involved.
The Fourth Amendment guarantees the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. The Sixth concerns our right to counsel. In our treatment of related cases and history, the Fourth Amendment has been a constitutional justification for the right to privacy.
The right to privacy appears neither in the U.S. Constitution nor the Bill of Rights, but has been recognized by the United States Supreme Court (after the McCarthy Era was over) and other Courts as a “common law right to be left alone,” the right to be free from intrusion upon a person’s seclusion or solitude, the right to be free from intrusion into a person’s private affairs, and the right to be free from public disclosure of embarrassing private facts. The Right to Privacy has served as the Supreme Court’s rationale for the landmark
Roe v. Wade
abortion case
The McCarthy Era: Its Causes, Impact, and Significance For Today
Joseph R. McCarthy, elected as junior Senator from Wisconsin in 1948, rode the wave of postwar anti-Communist fear, and along the way gained great power and worldwide political fame. Conditions are rarely right for the emergence of a demagogue in America, but in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s they were.
McCarthy burst upon the national scene, and revealed his favorite technique for getting press attention, with a speech made in Wheeling, West Virginia on February 9, 1950. He claimed to have a list of 205 Communists or Communist sympathizers who worked in the State Department. Eventually the alleged list was greatly reduced, and ultimately the charges were found nearly baseless. This technique amounted to declaring someone guilty without requiring any proof of guilt, and is known as the “smear.”
Another important technique for discovering alleged Communists or other subversives was to force witnesses to “name names” of people they knew or knew of who might have had some association with leftist organizations.
McCarthy’s political career has been compared to a Roman candle, but while it burned brightly the civil liberties of many Americans were violated, jobs were lost forever, families impoverished, and some even committed suicide.
The McCarthy Era is an example in American history of when government, acting out of fear, even a justifiable fear, arguably oversteps its bounds in the name of national security. The NSA surveillance program has obvious differences from the McCarthy Era. The NSA program was intended to be secret; the government investigations by HUAC and other agencies were largely public. During the McCarthy Era, many Americans watched the government intimidate and bully, and many comforted themselves by saying, “It’s ok with me. I have nothing to hide and did nothing wrong.” Similarly, students, and adults, react similarly to the notion of the NSA reading their Email and having access to their Internet history: “I haven’t done anything wrong, so let them read my Email.” Fear of Communism was the justification for aggressive pursuit of the left during the McCarthy Era, and world events clearly painted a terrifying picture of the Communist threat. In the wake of 9/11, a very real fear combines with the information age, where many believe that it is normal for personal information to be accessed by third parties.
Some Important People, Events, and Organizations of the McCarthy Era.
The House On Un-American Activities Committee (“HUAC”) was established in the 1930’s to investigate German sympathizers, in 1945, HUAC became a permanent investigative committee with broad subpoena powers, which were used primarily to investigate American Communists or alleged sympathizers. HUAC became most famous for its interrogations of Hollywood figures and for the refusal of the “Hollywood 10” to give testimony or otherwise cooperate. Refusal to cooperate, or the assertion of the Fifth Amendment privilege against self- incrimination (those who did assert the privilege were labeled as Fifth Amendment Communists), often resulted in “blacklisting.” Blacklisting was, in effect, an unofficial ban from employment in a person’s profession or job.
The Smith Act. Passed as the Alien and Registration Act of 1940, the Smith Act made it a crime to advocate or belong to a group that advocated the violent overthrow of the government.
Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain Speech. In 1946, on a tour with President Harry Truman, Winston Churchill made a speech at Westminster College in Missouri. The speech coined the term “Iron Curtain” to describe Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, which started immediately after the end of World War II. Churchill warned the world of the danger of Soviet Communism and of “Fifth Columns” working within the borders of Western Europe and the U.S.
Russia’s first test of the atomic bomb (1949)
Chinese Communists’ victory over Nationalists (1949)
Korean War between Communist and non-Communist forces (June, 1950 to July, 1953) and Chinese incursion (November, 1950)
Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican, was elected to the Senate from Maine in 1948, became an outspoken critic of McCarthy’s methods. In 1950, along with six other senators, she issued the “Declaration of Conscience”, which, while not mentioning McCarthy by name, decried the climate of fear and the danger to Americans’ constitutional freedoms that such fear presented.
Edward R. Murrow, CBS television journalist whose broadcast on the program “See it Now” ridiculed McCarthy as reckless, and calling on Americans not to stand silent in the face of McCarthy’s tactics.
Army-McCarthy Hearings. On March 11, 1954, the Army accused Senator McCarthy and his staff of using improper means in seeking preferential treatment for G. David Schine, a consultant to McCarthy’s committee, after Schine was drafted into the Army in November 1953. It developed into an investigation into McCarthy’s charges that Communists had infiltrated the Army. McCarthy’s reputation was dealt a mortal blow during the hearings.
Joseph Welch, Counsel for the Army at the Army McCarthy Hearings, a soft-spoken Boston attorney from the old line firm of Hale and Dorr, was made famous in the stunningly simple question to McCarthy “At long last, have you no sense of decency?”
Ralph Flanders, Republican Senator from Vermont, proposed the Senate censure motion that resulted in McCarthy’s censure on December 2, 1954.
The Watergate Scandal
Although it is not immediately apparent what connection the Watergate Scandal would have with the NSA program, studying it briefly and discussing it will draw some essential connections and point out essential contrasts to the NSA program. In that case, the Nixon administration and its supporters funded and/or ran a political sabotage campaign against the Democratic Party, at a time that President Nixon was running for reelection. The Watergate burglars were caught trying to copy files and plant bugging devices a Democratic National Headquarters. There was no argument made at the time that national security concerns justified a claim of “inherent executive authority” to order such acts. The Vietnam War was going on and opponents to the war were a strong force in opposing Nixon’s reelection. In fact, opponents of the war were subject to domestic surveillance and wiretaps, out of which later came the FISA law.