“...why, in a free society with a supposedly..."

“...why, in a free society with a supposedly independent media, did arguably the most influential in the United States keep Americans in the dark about a program like this?  The answer we were given involved unspecified national security concerns that the Times supposedly did not want to jeopardize.  But that explanation does not hold water at all.   We may safely assume that terrorists are clever enough to realize that our government is listening in on their conversations, even without the Times telling them so.  The very name of the Foreign Intelligence Act (FISA) of 1978 is a dead giveaway.  

As far as we have been told, the only way that this program, administered by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), diverged from previous intelligence efforts is that this one operated without FISA warrants- warrants issued in secret by special courts, in conformity with the 1978 Act.  Awareness of this aspect of the program would have done nothing to aid terrorists.  FISA warrants are issued in secret anyway, so neither under FISA nor under the NSA program would a terrorist know for sure that the government was eavesdropping on his conversations. 

It looks very much like the old story:  the government says “national security” and the natural and normal skepticism that our Founding Fathers taught us to have toward the government is promptly abandoned.  The simple and straightforward reason the executive branch wanted the program kept secret, its consistent obfuscation notwithstanding, seems to be that it violated the laws. 

The reasons we were given for why the program was necessary were at least as unconvincing as the Time’s defense of concealing it.  On the one hand, we were told that only targets of the program were people with links to terrorist organizations like al Qaeda.  At the same time, we were told that the sheer number of targets made FISA warrant applications impracticable. 

I believe that constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald has identified a fatal contradiction in these claims.  It is is true that the executive branch knew the locations of so many people with al Qaeda links, why were they seeking merely to eavesdrop on their conversations?  Why were they not arresting them instead?  This, after all, is an administration that has detained people indefinitely, without charges, on the basis of sometimes shaky evidence of an al Qaeda connection.  This time, we are supposed to believe that the administration had knowledge of countless al Qaeda figures and decided to let them remain free?  Not plausible, and that is why it seems likely that the targets of this surveillance included many Americans who had no ties to al Qaeda or terrorism at all.”  -Pages 109-111 of The Revolution, A Manifesto