Daily Kos: Cleaning Up After the Worst Presidency in History

by mcjoan
Tue Jul 01, 2008 at 07:00:45 AM PDT

If the government becomes a law breaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means 'to declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal' would bring terrible retribution.
[From dissenting opinion in Olmstead vs. United States, in which the court upheld the use of wiretaps in a case involving an investigation of bootlegging. Brandeis strongly defended the individual right to privacy from government intrusion.]
-Louis D. Brandeis, 1928

That's what Congress is poised to do, "to declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal" with passage of the FISA Amendments Act. Except, of course, that they haven't even secured any convictions through the warrantless surveillance, at least not that they've made public--and believe me, if they had any convictions to justify the program, we'd have heard about it.