-By Warner Todd Huston
The ACLU released a report this week that shows that under Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder, warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of American’s electronic communications is “sharply on the rise.”
After months of litigation and Freedom of Information Act requests, the ACLU obtained documents from the federal government proving that real-time monitoring of electronic communications inside the U.S. has climbed 60 percent since 2009 and far surpasses that under President Bush.
The ACLU reports that the Dept. of Justice used “pen register” and “trap and trace” techniques 23,535 times in 2009 and 37,616 times in 2011.
A “pen register” captures outgoing data from a phone or email account while “trap and trace” captures incoming data.
During that same time period, the number of people whose telephones were the subject of pen register and trap and trace surveillance more than tripled. In fact, more people were subjected to pen register and trap and trace surveillance in the past two years than in the entire previous decade.
(ACLU’s bold above)
“The number of authorizations the Justice Department received to use these devices on individuals’ email and network data increased 361% between 2009 and 2011,” the ACLU says.
It should be noted that all of this is perpetrated by the Dept. of Justice without obtaining traditional warrants.
The ACLU complained that it has been constantly stymied by the Obama administration in seeking this information. The ACLU also noted that since Obama became president his administration has repeatedly neglected deadlines required by law to release reports on the DOJ’s actions.
The civil rights group charges the federal government with “frustrating democratic oversight” and obviating a basic measure of accountability by neglecting its duties to fulfill these transparency measures.
Warrantless wiretapping, when initiated by the Bush administration, was one of the left’s most dear causes, but since Obama came to office — and been proven to have tremendously increased such wiretapping — silence has prevailed over the practice.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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