Via Open Left, Senator Russ Feingold gives a very tight encapsulation of the fundamental problem with the Protect America Act and current efforts by Republicans in the Senate to keep there from being judicial and congressional oversight of domestic surveillance activities. “Trust us” is not adequate when we’re dealing with the powers a government has over the rights and privacy of our citizenry.

Senator Feingold notes that as the law stands now, Americans surrender to the government tremendous powers to eavesdrop on their phone calls and read their emails. Glenn Greenwald summarizes it in slightly greater detail:

With all the focus on the travesty of telecom amnesty, it has been easy to forget just how Draconian the Protect America Act really is, how radical are the warrantless eavesdropping powers it vested in the President. In essence, that bill allowed the Government to eavesdrop on every single international telephone call made or received by an American with no restrictions or judicial oversight whatsoever, and further empowered the Government to read every international email sent or received by an American with no restrictions or judicial oversight.

I know something about what it feels like to be an American whose communications would fall into the categories listed above by Feingold and Greenwald. Prior to joining the Dodd campaign, I worked at a non-profit organization called Students for a Free Tibet (SFT). SFT is an international campaigning organization that works towards Tibetan independence. Though SFT is headquartered in New York, it has offices in Canada and India. On a daily basis, I was making and receiving phone calls to India, Canada, England, Germany, France, Italy, Mexico, Switzerland, and countless other countries around the world. Emails, faxes, text messages, and VOIP calls came in and went out from around the world too. Yet as Senator Feingold notes in the video, my colleagues and I had to trust that every single one of these communications between students and young people and nonviolent organizers around the world was something worthy of respectful privacy from the Bush administration. Trust was the extent of our safety net.

I don’t know if anything we said or wrote was ever opened and analyzed by the Bush administration. But I know the thought that doing work that I believed in guaranteed that my communications were not private, that I could only trust my government to honor my privacy, makes me deeply uncomfortable.

Trust is not the basis of law. Laws are past to ensure that there is something deeper, stronger than men. Throughout the Bush administration, those in power have consistently sought to expand their power in contravention of existing laws. Sometimes, when caught, they tried to change the laws themselves. But that was never their first inclination, as we saw illegal, warrantless surveillance practices begin shortly after President Bush took office and long before the September 11th attacks.

The PAA was a law passed under duress, a law that replaced the structure of oversight with the discretion of men. The Intelligence Committee’s revision is equally bad. As Marcy Wheeler notes, “the SSCI has inadequate protection for the privacy of Americans, particularly when they communicate with people in other countries.” Retroactive immunity may be getting much of the attention in the FISA fight, but it is by no means the only concern in front of the Senate. We have to continue to recognize the scope of the issue in front of us and work diligently to pressure the Senate to do the right thing by ending warrantless wiretapping and stopping retroactive immunity.

Cross posted at the CREDO Blog.