The FCC’s review of the XM-Sirius merger is a perfect example of the type of quagmire that’s inevitably created when a government agency is given broad, discretionary authority over private businesses. Various special interest groups have proposed that the merger be subjected to a laundry list of requirements. Lefty groups want an open device mandate. A rent-seeker entrepreneur named Chester C. Davenport wants the merged entity to set aside 20 percent of its spectrum for minority-controlled broadcasting. There are a variety of other proposals to require the firm to lease spectrum to unaffiliated entities. Clear Channel is demanding that it be subjected to the same “indecency” regulations that now plague terrestrial radio.

There are good arguments against each of these proposals, and there are some plausible arguments for some of them as well. But what I find most problematic about the situation is the way the proposals are handled. We have a constitutional system of government in which Congress is supposedly in charge of writing laws, the executive branch is in charge of executing them, and the courts are in charge of interpreting them. This ensures that laws are written by the most politically-engaged branch—Congress—and interpreted by the most impartial branch—the courts.

But in this case, as in many others, Congress has effectively given the FCC its blessing to wear all three hats. It can dream up new “conditions” (read: regulations) for the merger focusing on virtually any subject that strikes its fancy. The conditions are specific to one company, so there’s ample scope for favoritism and arbitrary decision-making. And once the conditions have been announced, and XM-Sirius have been blackmailed into “accepting” them, the FCC effectively wears executive and judicial hats as well. Yes, supplicants before the FCC can and do appeal decisions to federal courts, and the FCC is sometimes overruled. But the courts tend to give the FCC relatively wide deference in its policy decisions, and firms that practice regularly before the FCC may be reluctant to too aggressively defend their prerogatives in the courts for fear of souring their relationship with the FCC going forward.

The fundamental problem (aside from the courts’ failure to require that lawmaking powers be limited to Congress as required by the Constitution) is the FCC’s baroque process for apportioning spectrum. The right way to handle it would be for XM, Sirius, and every other broadcaster to have a property right in the spectrum they use, which would entitle them to do as they please with that spectrum (as long as it didn’t interfere with other broadcasters) or to lease or sell the spectrum to anyone else. In a world with genuine property rights, spectrum would find its way to owner with the highest-valued use, and anyone who wanted to enter a market like satellite radio would be able to do so simply be purchasing spectrum rights in the appropriate bands. The FCC’s role would be limited to keeping track of who held which license and verifying that spectrum uses did not create interference with one another.

My suspicion is that in such a world, satellite radio would prove economically infeasible because the spectrum would be more valuable in other uses. But I don’t know, and the FCC’s soviet-style spectrum allocation process is certainly not a good way to figure it out. The FCC should approve the XM-Sirius merger without conditions. But the more important lesson is that, Congress should be moving toward genuine property rights in spectrum, so that the 21st-century wireless market ceases to be micro-managed by an anachronistic 20th-century bureaucracy.

Once we have a real market for spectrum, Congress may choose to enact general regulations governing the use of that spectrum. But the current system, in which the FCC has the arbitrary power to single out individual companies for arbitrary restrictions on virtually any subject the FCC’s commissioners happen to be concerned with, is deeply flawed. It’s not fair to companies that have the misfortune of attracting the FCC’s scrutiny, and it’s not good for consumers, who are deprived of the benefits of a robust and competitive market for spectrum.

Over at Ars Technica, I’ve got an in-depth write-up of the White House’s problems with email archiving. Federal law has required executive branch officers’ official emails to be preserved for legal and historical purposes. Unfortunately, the Bush administration has had some difficulties with this:

In 1994, the Clinton administration reacted to the previous year’s court decision by rolling out an automated e-mail-archiving system to work with the Lotus-Notes-based e-mail software that was in use at the time. The system automatically categorized e-mails based on the requirements of the FRA and PRA, and it included safeguards to ensure that e-mails were not deliberately or unintentionally altered or deleted.

When the Bush administration took office, it decided to replace the Lotus Notes-based e-mail system used under the Clinton Administration with Microsoft Outlook and Exchange. The transition broke compatibility with the old archiving system, and the White House IT shop did not immediately have a new one to put in its place.

Instead, the White House has instituted a comically primitive system called “journaling,” in which (to quote from a recent Congressional report) “a White House staffer or contractor would collect from a ‘journal’ e-mail folder in the Microsoft Exchange system copies of e-mails sent and received by White House employees.” These would be manually named and saved as “.pst” files on White House servers.

As you can imagine hijinks ensue. The White House developed a new archiving system that was ready to go in 2006, but the White House CIO reportedly canceled the system just before it was due to go live. They’re supposedly working on yet another archiving system, but it’s looking increasingly likely that it won’t be ready before the Bush administration leaves office.

Transparency is an important tool for limited government. Senior administration officials are more likely to behave themselves if they know their correspondence is subject to subpoena and will be available for the scrutiny of future historians. It’s therefore troubling that for most of the last 8 years, the Bush administration has failed to have an automated system in place for complying with the law as his predecessor did. More pressure needs to be placed on the next administration to ensure that the law is followed.

Matt Yglesias points to an article in Sunday’s Washington Post by economist Robert Frank that makes a strong case for school choice. Well, OK, he doesn’t explicitly talk about school choice, but he certainly does a good job explaining the problems caused by the absence of choice:

In the 1950s, as now, families tried to buy houses in the best school districts they could afford. But strict credit limits held the bidding in check. Lenders typically required down payments of 20 percent or more and would not issue loans for more than three times a borrower’s annual income.

In a well-intentioned but ultimately misguided move to help more families enter the housing market, borrowing restrictions were relaxed during the intervening decades. Down payment requirements fell steadily, and in recent years, many houses were bought with no money down. Adjustable-rate mortgages and balloon payments further boosted families’ ability to bid for housing.

The result was a painful dilemma for any family determined not to borrow beyond its means. No one would fault a middle-income family for aspiring to send its children to schools of at least average quality. (How could a family aspire to less?) But if a family stood by while others exploited more liberal credit terms, it would consign its children to below-average schools. Even financially conservative families might have reluctantly concluded that their best option was to borrow up.

This is an eloquent indictment of our perverse system of linking schools to real estate. We don’t generally limit access to hospitals, libraries, or colleges by geography, and there’s no good reason children’s schools should be determined that way either. People should be able to live wherever they want, and then they should be free to send their children to any school that meets their needs. There are a variety of ways to allocate space in the most sought-after schools—academic merit, aptitude in the school’s area of focus, demographic diversity, or by lottery—that would be more reasonable than our current policy of arbitrary geographic boundaries.

And yes, some schools would choose students based on their ability to pay. What Frank’s article nicely illustrates is that our current system of geographically-based school assignment already segregates children by their parents’ income, it just does so in an unnecessarily cumbersome manner. If we had a free market in education, parents who wanted to invest in sending their children to a better school would be able to do so directly, instead of having to buy more house than they might want just so they can get a spot at a better school.

The most important thing to note, though, is that the scarcity of good schools Frank identifies is not an inherent fact about the universe, but a consequence of the public school monopoly. In a competitive education market, a shortage of good schools in a given area would spur people to either start new schools or expand the best of the existing ones. But the public school system has few mechanisms for doing either of those things (charter schools are a very limited mechanism for starting innovative public schools). Which means that the supply of good public schools is artificially limited, leading parents to bid up their price. The way to alleviate the shortage of good schools is not to re-regulate the mortgage market, but to reform the education system so that it’s easier to start and expand high-quality schools. Few things would do that as effectively as a robust program of school choice.

Kerry Howley has a great article on the supposedly common-sense proposal to create a massive federal database of eligible workers as a disincentive to illegal immigration:

While undocumented workers probably contribute more in federal taxes than they consume in federal services, no one doubts that they pose some fiscal burden to border communities where they arrive. Still, you’d have to take an improbably extreme view of these costs to deem the SAVE Act fiscally rational. According to the Congressional Budget Office (pdf), the act would decrease federal revenues by $17.3 billion between 2009 and 2018 as formerly tax-paying workers go underground. The costs of expanding E-verify and a bunch of other goodies stuffed into SAVE (thousands more border agents, a program to recruit former members of the armed forces to join the border patrol, more SUVs and unmanned aerial vehicles, hundreds of full time immigration investigators, expanded immigration detention centers) come to $23.4 billion in discretionary spending during the same period. And that doesn’t touch the cost to individual employers, who are being slapped with a huge regulatory burden in the midst of impending recession.

No presidential candidate has come out in favor of Schuler’s bill, most likely because the bill includes no avenue for undocumented workers who wish to become legal. Herein lies the ambitious stupidity of SAVE: If the bill works as intended, it will instantly turn the population of 12 million undocumented workers with no way of becoming legal into 12 million unemployed undocumented workers with no way of becoming legal. For a political constituency constantly worried about “anarchy,” this does not appear to be an ideal situation.

The SAVE Act may or may not come to a vote this session, but employment verification will almost certainly be a part of future compromise legislation on immigration reform. That’s worrying. Walls offend us aesthetically and symbolically; they’re clumsy and primitive and cruel. But they’re also easy to tear down; far easier than a slowly metastasizing system of total employment surveillance, of growing databases and expanding bureaucracies.

Our own Jim Harper has justifiably called the e-verify program Franz Kafka’s solution to illegal immigration. According to the Social Security Administration’s own estimates, almost 18 million Social Security records contain errors, many of them pertaining to US citizens. If even a small fraction of those problems find their way into the e-verify program, we’d be looking at millions of American citizens suddenly forced to “prove” to federal bureaucrats that they’re “eligible” to have a job. Giving the federal government the power to decide which US citizens are allowed to work for a living seems to me like a much bigger threat to our freedoms than anything illegal immigrants have done.

One of the big challenges of writing about tech policy is the difficulty of explaining the subjects I write about for a general audience. This was a particular challenge a couple of years ago when I wrote a Cato Policy Analysis about the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act—just typing that out is a chore. I wish I could have pointed to this story as an example, because it brilliantly illustrates my argument.

A few years back, Microsoft developed a copy-protection scheme called PlaysForSure (it will become clear shortly how ironic that name was) that was supposed to prevent music customers from engaging in Internet piracy with music they bought from online music stores. Microsoft licensed the format to a variety of different companies and aggressively promoted it as an alternative to Apple’s iTunes-iPod ecosystem. Unfortunately, Microsoft failed to close the gap with Apple, so in 2006 Microsoft unveiled a new product line called Zune, effectively discontinuing development of PlaysForSure. Zunes are incompatible with PlaysForSure music. If you built up a music library in the PlaysForSure format, it would, um, not play for sure (or at all) on a Zune music player.

Up to this point this is just an ordinary business story, and nothing for libertarians to be concerned about. Companies drop old product lines all the time, and sometimes that means customers are stuck with compatibility headaches. But there’s just one problem: not only will Microsoft not help you play your PlaysForSure music on a Zune, but it’s illegal under the DMCA for anyone else to develop software to convert PlaysForSure music to a format that could play on Zunes, iPods, or any other format. Such software would be considered a “circumvention device”—ostensibly a piracy tool—and could bring civil and criminal penalties. If you were stupid enough to buy music in PlaysForSure format, you’re stuck with the dwindling number of PlaysForSure-compatible music programs still left on the market. You can burn your music to CDs, and then re-rip them to an open format, but this is a time-consuming process if you have a large music library, and it will lead to some degradation in the quality of the music.

As if all that weren’t enough, Microsoft yesterday announced the next step in its campaign to make the DMCA look ridiculous: this fall, it will be switching off the license servers that allow customers to “authorize” new computers and operating systems to play music from customers that bought music from its now-defunct MSN Music store. This means that if you have a library of music from the MSN Music store, and you buy a new computer or upgrade your operating system, there will be no legal way to take your music library with you.

If Congress hadn’t enacted the DMCA, this wouldn’t be a big deal. Third parties could develop software utilities that would automatically convert peoples’ PlaysForSure-formatted music collections into an open format like MP3, which would allow it be played on almost any computer or music player. Customers wouldn’t have to worry about whether their computer had been “authorized,” or whether the company they’d purchased the music from was running the necessary “license server.”

The most frustrating thing about this is that forcing consumers to jump through these hoops hasn’t made a dent in illicit file sharing. To this day, the music industry sells most of its music in the copy-protection-free CD format. Anyone can buy a CD, rip it to MP3 format, and upload it to the Internet. And music downloaded from peer-to-peer networks comes free of copy protection. Which means that the hassles imposed on consumers by the DMCA and copy protection formats like PlaysForSure haven’t slowed down piracy at all. All they’ve done is created unnecessary headaches for customers who were foolish enough to obey the law and pay for the music they downloaded.

The Supreme Court has long held that laws of nature, physical phenomena, and abstract ideas are not eligible for patent protection. Because these things are discovered rather than invented, they are “free to all men and reserved exclusively to none.” In recent years, however, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which hears most patent appeals, has begun to relax the restriction on such patents. I’ve written before about the problems created by software patents. Software is is ultimately just a sequence of mathematical formulas, and in their pure form they’re not patentable. But in a series of decisions in the 1990s, the Federal Circuit opened the door to patents that cover software when it’s loaded onto a computer, which of course is the only useful thing to do with software. Since then, we’ve seen an avalanche of patents on software, which have started creating serious problems for innovators in the software industry.

The latest example of the problems on patenting abstract concepts comes via Mike Masnick of Techdirt: a company had some problems with a satellite launch, and wanted to use a maneuver called a Lunar flyby to correct it. Unfortunately, Boeing holds a patent covering the maneuver they wanted to use, and they have been unable to negotiate a license of that patent. So they’re planning to let the satellite go down in flames and try to collect the insurance money on it.

Now, as Mike points out, the maneuver in question is just an application of basic physics to spaceflight. The basic principles have been understood since Newton, and NASA has been computing these kinds of orbital trajectories since the 1960s. The patent office should have rejected the patent for trying to patent a straightforward application of basic physics. Unfortunately, thanks to the Federal Circuit’s increasingly permissive standards for patentable subject matter, Boeing was granted the patent, and this company now faces the unappetizing choice of leaving the satellite in the wrong orbit or getting embroiled in litigation with Boeing.

Crucially, the Supreme Court has never endorsed the Federal Circuit’s experiment with allowing patents on abstract ideas, and several justices have voiced concerns about the direction the Federal Circuit has taken the rules for patentability. Apparently, the widespread outrage over the abuse of such patents has gotten the Federal Circuit’s attention, as it has decided to re-hear a case called In Re Bilski that could give it an opportunity to tighten up the rules for patenting abstract concepts. Several public interest groups have filed briefs in the case urging the court to do just that.

The Federal Circuit will be hearing the case en banc next month, and it has already become one of the most closely-watched cases on the Federal Circuit’s docket. Given the Supreme Court’s heightened interest in patent issues in recent years, it’s not hard to imagine the Supreme Court deciding to review the decision as well. Given that Congress has so far ducked the issue of reining in patents on abstract concepts in its pending patent reform legislation, In Re Bilski may be our best chance of reform.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve pointed out a few of the misleading arguments being deployed on behalf of expanding executive power in the wiretapping debate. But I think this op-ed in my home state’s largest newspaper, the Star Tribune, may take the cake. It’s written by Rep. Michelle Bachman (R-MN), and it’s a brazen effort to mislead my fellow Minnesotans about the wiretapping debate without saying anything that’s technically false. Rep. Bachman writes:

One of the critical tools that has allowed us to keep the homeland safe after 9/11 has been the Protect America Act. It updated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to deal with new, deadly challenges in this age of terror — enabling intelligence services to immediately listen to phone calls made between foreign terrorists.

Now, it’s true that the Protect America Act was passed “after 9/11.” It’s also true that the Protect America Act was passed after Pearl Harbor. And the Battle of Hastings, for that matter. The key point is that the Protect America Act was passed in August 2007, six years after 9/11.

This matters because, as Kurt Opsahl at EFF points out, Bachman goes on to imply that “attack after attack,” including the liquid explosives plot in the summer of 2006, was stopped by the Protect America Act. Indeed, she writes, “last year, the Heritage Foundation compiled a list of 19 confirmed terror plots against American targets that had been thwarted.”

Here is the report Bachman is presumably referring to. The 19 attacks range from the Richard Reid shoe bomb attack in December 2001 to the JFK Airport plot in June 2007. In other words, all 19 thwarted attacks occurred before the Protect America Act was enacted in August 2007. Bachman never explicitly says otherwise, but she’s obviously doing her best to give her constituents the impression that the PAA was enacted sometime in 2001 or 2002. Reasonable people could disagree about whether this qualifies as a lie. But I think it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Rep. Bachman has a low opinion of her constituents’ intelligence.

My friend (and Cato alum) Julian Sanchez has a great op-ed in the Los Angeles Times on the history of wiretapping abuse. Supporters of warrantless wiretapping act as though it’s outrageous to suggest that unchecked surveillance powers might be abused. But history suggests that abuses of wiretapping power was the norm, rather than the exception, in the pre-FISA legal regime:

In 1945, Harry Truman had the FBI wiretap Thomas Corcoran, a member of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “brain trust” whom Truman despised and whose influence he resented. Following the death of Chief Justice Harlan Stone the next year, the taps picked up Corcoran’s conversations about succession with Justice William O. Douglas. Six weeks later, having reviewed the FBI’s transcripts, Truman passed over Douglas and the other sitting justices to select Secretary of the Treasury (and poker buddy) Fred Vinson for the court’s top spot.

“Foreign intelligence” was often used as a pretext for gathering political intelligence. John F. Kennedy’s attorney general, brother Bobby, authorized wiretaps on lobbyists, Agriculture Department officials and even a congressman’s secretary in hopes of discovering whether the Dominican Republic was paying bribes to influence U.S. sugar policy. The nine-week investigation didn’t turn up evidence of money changing hands, but it did turn up plenty of useful information about the wrangling over the sugar quota in Congress — information that an FBI memo concluded “contributed heavily to the administration’s success” in passing its own preferred legislation.

Julian also describes abuses in the Harding, Johnson, and Nixon administrations. He concludes:

It’s probably true that ordinary citizens uninvolved in political activism have little reason to fear being spied on, just as most Americans seldom need to invoke their 1st Amendment right to freedom of speech. But we understand that the 1st Amendment serves a dual role: It protects the private right to speak your mind, but it serves an even more important structural function, ensuring open debate about matters of public importance. You might not care about that first function if you don’t plan to say anything controversial. But anyone who lives in a democracy, who is subject to its laws and affected by its policies, ought to care about the second.

Harvard University legal scholar William Stuntz has argued that the framers of the Constitution viewed the 4th Amendment as a mechanism for protecting political dissent. In England, agents of the crown had ransacked the homes of pamphleteers critical of the king — something the founders resolved that the American system would not countenance.

In that light, the security-versus-privacy framing of the contemporary FISA debate seems oddly incomplete. Your personal phone calls and e-mails may be of limited interest to the spymasters of Langley and Ft. Meade. But if you think an executive branch unchecked by courts won’t turn its “national security” surveillance powers to political ends — well, it would be a first.

One of the common talking points of advocates for warrantless wiretapping is that the debate is really about lining the pockets of “ravenous trial lawyers.” As I’ve said before, this is a particularly silly argument. An op-ed in Sunday’s Chicago Tribune makes this argument particularly well:

The Bush administration and its acolytes now claim that we must give giant telecoms amnesty for breaking the law, or else those telecoms will no longer cooperate with the government in spying efforts that help protect America. The truth is that telecoms do not need a special deal. These companies have immunity from lawsuits for turning over customer records to the government if they do so in conformity with existing law. But, in this instance, the telephone companies knowingly violated that law. If we give them a free pass this time, won’t the telephone companies feel free to violate the laws protecting our privacy in the future?

The Bush administration and its supporters in Congress complain that these lawsuits are simply about money and enriching trial lawyers — suggesting that the litigation should be stopped because of the potential damages that might be awarded in such lawsuits. This criticism ignores the fact that, according to the rules in the federal court, the only way that we could ensure that a federal judge could continue to explore previous violations if the companies simply changed their participation or the government changed or ended the program was to ask for minimal damages. We are not interested in recovering money for ourselves, nor is our counsel, the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois. We, however, are committed to assuring that these giant companies are punished for violating the law and thus dissuaded from violating the law in the future.

More important, amnesty not only lets the companies off the hook without answering any questions, it assures that the American people will never learn about the breadth and extent of the lawless program. Some seem to suggest that we should not have our day in court because a select few members of Congress have been able to review documents about the spy program operated by the White House. The judgment of a few Washington insiders is not a substitute for the careful scrutiny of a federal court.

This is ultimately not about money, but about the principle that nobody is above the law. I actually think that a reasonable compromise would be to limit damages due to past FISA lawbreaking. This would ensure that telecom companies aren’t driven into bankruptcy while upholding the principle that violating your customers’ privacy—and the law—comes with consequences. Of course, I’d bet money that supporters of warrantless wiretapping wouldn’t accept that compromise, because they, too, know that this is an issue of principle, not money.

I’ve noted before that the current FISA debate is an example of the goalposts being repeatedly shifted in the direction of ever more executive power and ever less executive oversight. Glenn Greenwald documents just how far the goalposts have been moved over the last 30 years. Back in 1978, the venerable conservative columnist William Safire wrote this of the newly-proposed Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act:

Predictably, opponents of warrantless wiretapping cheered; the act seems to require a court warrant before tapping can begin. But nobody is reading the fine print, which adds up to the most sweeping authorization for the increase and abuse of wiretapping and bugging in our history.

Conservatives like to assist law enforcement, and to curtail espionage; we do not like to make it harder for “our side.” But this natural inclination to help the law must be outweighed by a responsibility to protect the law-abiding individual from the power of government to intrude. And this bill would turn every telephone instrument in every home into a suspected household spy.

Huey Long once said that if fascism ever came to America, it would come in Democratic form; in this bill, Big Brother is on the way, and he is cloaked in the mantle of civil liberties.

Since Safire wrote those words, FISA has been repeatedly amended to further reduce judicial oversight of eavesdropping, most importantly with the Patriot Act in October 2001. The law on the books in early 2006 was even more permissive than the legislation Safire is blasted as an assault on civil liberties. Yet the Bush administration has been so successful at shifting the terms of the debate that even a lot of self-described civil libertarians are conceding that FISA still places too many restrictions on domestic wiretapping activities. The debate is now between a House bill that further waters down judicial oversight over Americans’ international communications and a Senate bill that virtually eliminates judicial oversight of international calls.

One of the lessons here, I think, is that civil liberties won’t be preserved through compromise. The partisans of ever-increasing executive power aren’t likely to go away any time soon. If Congress compromises and agrees to further expand executive wiretapping powers, a future president will come back to Congress and argue that the law is still too restrictive and still more compromises are needed. President Clinton did it in the 1990s. President Bush is doing it now. At some point, Congress just has to say no.

Newt Gingrich’s organization recently released a poll purporting to show that Americans overwhelmingly support renewing the Protect America Act. But as a blogger at the Economist painstakingly explains, the high levels of support might be because the poll blatantly misrepresented what’s at stake in the surveillance debate.

Amazingly, even the first four words of the story, “in July of 2007,” are inaccurate, as the Protect America Act was actually passed in August. And it only gets worse after that. Not surprisingly, if you repeatedly misrepresent the state of the FISA debate, it’s possible to get randomly sampled voters to come to the conclusion you’re looking for. I think it’s telling that they seem to believe this level of deception was necessary to get the result they were looking for.

In case you’re curious how voters respond to a less blatantly biased poll, 61 percent of voters believe that “the U.S. government should have to get a warrant from a court before wiretapping the conversations U.S. citizens have with people in other countries,” while only 35 percent believe that “the government should be able to wiretap such conversations without a warrant from a court.” Similarly, 31 percent of voters believe that “Congress should give the phone companies amnesty from legal action against the companies,” while 59 percent believe that “citizens who believe their rights have been violated should be free to take legal action against those phone companies and let the courts decide the outcome.” That poll is from the ACLU, so it may be worth taking with a grain of salt, but its questions are certainly more representative than those of Gingrich’s group.

Julian Sanchez notes this absurd post at The Corner about the Supreme Court’s refusal to review a decision of the Sixth Circuit ruling that the ACLU lacked standing to sue the NSA over the president’s warrantless wiretapping program. Andy McCarthy thinks that…

This underscores that the President had constitutional authority to order warrantless surveillance; that the cooperating telecoms were not only being patriotic but exercising sound judgment when they complied with requests for assistance; and that the House Democrats are acting reprehensibly by refusing to consider the intelligence reform bill passed overwhelmingly in the Senate.

Julian is right to call this an insane non sequitur. The amazing thing is the number of levels on which it’s nonsensical. Let me see if I can count them.

In the first place, the Supreme Court gets thousands of appeals every year, and only accepts a few dozen of them. So the Supreme Court declining to hear a case, in and of itself, tells us absolutely nothing about the merits of the case. It simply suggests that the justices had other cases they were more interested in hearing.

Second, the Sixth Circuit decision the Supreme Court allowed to stand didn’t address the merits of the ACLU’s lawsuit—i.e. the legality of the so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program—either. Rather, the Sixth Circuit held that because the plaintiffs couldn’t prove that they personally had been spied upon, they lacked standing to bring the lawsuit. This has absolutely nothing to do with whether the program is legal or constitutional.

Third, the telecoms were not a party to this lawsuit at all, so I’m baffled as to how it could have any implications for whether what they did was legal. The legality of the program and the legality of the telecoms’ participation in it are distinct questions. One could perfectly well argue that the program was legal but the telecoms’ participation in it was not, or vice versa. So the fact that a lawsuit against the government failed tells us nothing about whether the lawsuits against the telecoms will succeed.

(more…)

Fox News correspondent and former judge Andrew Napolitano has a great op-ed in the Los Angeles Times arguing that FISA, which the Bush administration claims places too many restrictions on the administration’s intelligence-gathering activities, has itself eroded the privacy rights guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment:

The FISA statute itself significantly — and, in my opinion, unconstitutionally — lowered the 4th Amendment bar from probable cause of “crime”to probable cause of “status.” However, in order to protect the 4th Amendment rights of the targets of spying, the statute erected a so-called wall between gathering evidence and using evidence. The government cannot constitutionally prosecute someone unless it has evidence against him that was obtained pursuant to probable cause of a crime, a standard not met by a FISA warrant.

Congress changed all that. The Patriot Act passed after 9/11 and its later version not only destroyed the wall between investigation and prosecution,they mandated that investigators who obtained evidence of criminal activity pursuant to FISA warrants share that evidence with prosecutors. They also instructed federal judges that the evidence thus shared is admissible under the Constitution against a defendant in a criminal case. Congress forgot that it cannot tell federal judges what evidence is admissible because judges, not politicians, decide what a jury hears.

Then the Bush administration and Congress went even further. The administration wanted, and Congress has begrudgingly given it, the authority to conduct electronic surveillance of foreigners and Americans without even a FISA warrant — without any warrant whatsoever. The so-called Protect America Act of 2007, which expired at the end of last week, gave the government carte blanche to spy on foreign persons outside the U.S., even if Americans in the United States with whom they may be communicating are spied on — illegally — in the process. Director of National Intelligence J. Michael McConnell told the House Judiciary Committee last year that hundreds of unsuspecting Americans’ conversations and e-mails are spied on annually as a consequence of the warrantless surveillance of foreigners outside the United States.

So where does all this leave us? Even though, since 1978, the government has gotten more than 99% of its FISA applications approved, the administration wants to do away with FISA altogether if at least one of the people whose conversations or e-mails it wishes to monitor is not in the U.S. and is not an American.

I’m not sure I entirely agree with the characterization of FISA as it was originally enacted in 1978. We do, I think, want our intelligence agencies to be keeping tabs on foreign governments, and so I think there’s a decent argument for allowing surveillance of people who are likely to be agents of a foreign power rather than requiring probable cause that a specific crime has been broken. The far more important point, though, is that since 1978, Congress has repeatedly and dramatically expanded the president’s ability to conduct surveillance with minimal oversight. Whether those changes went too far in 1978, 2001, or somewhere in between is debatable. But it’s clear that since 2001, the executive branch has had sweeping powers to eavesdrop on suspected terrorists with minimal judicial oversight.

What the Bush administration is doing here is moving the goalposts. In 2001, the president said that the changes to FISA that were found in the Patriot Act gave him plenty of authority to spy on terrorists that were using the latest communications technology. Now, seven years later, he’s saying those reforms weren’t good enough and that he needs even broader powers to spy with minimal court supervision. If Congress approves the changes the president is requesting this year, we can expect a future president sometime in the next decade to insist that she’s still subject to too much judicial scrutiny. At some point, we have to say that enough is enough.

This is pretty cool. Not because it quotes me (although that’s pretty cool too), but because it’s the Washington Times, which is occasionally criticized for the right-ward slant of its news coverage, running an article that basically says that that President Bush and his allies in Congress are wrong about FISA:

Many intelligence scholars and analysts outside the government say that today’s expiration of certain temporary domestic wiretapping laws will have little effect on national security, despite warnings to the contrary by the White House and Capitol Hill Republican leaders.

Of course, this has been true all along. There wasn’t an emergency last August when Congress was stampeded into passing the Protect America Act. There wasn’t an emergency last month when the two-week extension got passed. And nothing catastrophic is happening now that the PAA is lapsing. But as long as the president said there was an emergency and the Democrats acted like there was an emergency, journalists weren’t going to say otherwise. When both “sides” of a dispute agree on some point, most journalists will simply accept that point as valid and don’t dig any deeper.

Now that House Democrats are willing to forthrightly state that the expiration of the PAA isn’t a big deal — and act like it’s not a big deal — journalists suddenly have to do their homework and find out who’s telling the truth. And once they do their research, it’s not hard to figure out who’s got the better argument.

Sometimes, good policy is good politics. I think this is one of those cases. If the House leadership capitulates to the president in the next few weeks, it will reinforce the impression that the president was right all along, and we really do need to sacrifice Americans’ privacy in order to fight terrorism. If, on the other hand, House Democrats refuse to enact legislation that undermines judicial oversight or the rule of law, it will cause journalists to write stories like this one, that dig deeper into the arguments of each side. Since in reality, the argument for eviscerating FISA is built on little more than distortions and alarmist rhetoric, that heightened scrutiny will only help those who believe in the rule of law.

The president has argued that “[i]f these companies are subjected to lawsuits that could cost them billions of dollars, they won’t participate. They won’t help us. They won’t help protect America.” Pretty scary stuff. But as Kurt Opsahl at EFF points out, if this is an accurate reflection of the telecom companies’ position (and it’s quite possible the president is misrepresenting their position), it’s little more than blackmail. It suggests that the telecom companies would hold the nation’s security hostage for a get-out-of-jail-free card.

Kurt also points out that complying with judicially-issued warrants isn’t optional. The intelligence community isn’t reliant on the goodwill of the telecom industry to ensure compliance. A company that refuses to participate in a lawful eavesdropping program would be ordered to do so by a judge and held in contempt if it refused. So there’s no reason to worry about the telecom companies “not cooperating.” Judges will compel them to cooperate if they’re legally required to do so.

In a sense, complying with lawful surveillance requests and refusing to comply with unlawful ones are two sides of the coin called the rule of law. It’s outrageous that a company would voluntarily violate its customers’ privacy when the law prohibits them from doing so. It would be equally outrageous for a company to refuse to cooperate after the government had gone through the appropriate legal channels. We don’t want decisions about who gets spied on to be subject to the whim of either the president or telecom executives. That’s why we entrust that decision to judges, who are knowledgeable about the law and insulated from corrupted influences.

I’ve been reading a lot of coverage of the FISA debate this week. I’m getting a little tired of reading commentary from supporters of eliminating judicial oversight who seem to have no clue what they’re talking about. Consider this from FrontPageMag’s Jacob Laksin:

Instead of enjoying the flexibility necessary for real-time intelligence gathering, government officials would be forced to revert to the antiquated standards of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which requires the approval of a special court even to monitor terrorist targets overseas.

In the first place, FISA has been updated repeatedly since the September 11, 2001, so the idea that it’s “antiquated” is silly. Don’t listen to me, listen to the president: “The new law [in 2001] recognizes the realities and dangers posed by the modern terrorist. It will help us to prosecute terrorist organizations — and also to detect them before they strike.”

In the second place, FISA does not, and never has, required a warrant to eavesdrop on foreign communications. FISA only comes into play when intercepting communications between foreigners and Americans, or when conducting surveillance entirely within the United States.

Laksin continues:

One of the signal virtues of the PAA is the fact that it provides liability protection to private companies, like telecoms, who cooperate with the government and aid surveillance efforts. Companies like AT&T already face multibillion dollar lawsuits from leftist activist groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who charge that the companies broke the law by assisting government efforts to prevent terrorist attack. With the expiration of the PAA, these companies will lose their legal protections. In the current litigious climate, it is more than likely that they will simply stop aiding the government in its intelligence work.

The Protect America Act, which was passed last August, did not include retroactive immunity. That’s why there are pending lawsuits against the telecom companies from those “leftist activist groups.” The PAA does include liability protection for firms that cooperate after the law takes effect, and those provisions will expire on Saturday. However, the idea that this will cause telecom companies to stop “cooperating” is absurd. Telecom companies cooperate with eavesdropping not out of the goodness of their heart, but because (once the executive branch has gotten the appropriate warrant) they’re legally required to do so. That will continue to be true after the PAA expires. And in any event, the law is pretty clear on this subject. The only “liability protection” they really need is to follow it.

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The Democratic leadership in the House has called the president’s bluff and stood up for the rule of law. Ryan Singel has the details:

The Protect America Act, a temporary but expansive warrantless spying bill passed by Congress last summer, will likely expire Saturday at midnight, a casualty of a battle between President Bush and House Democrats over amnesty for phone companies that aided his secret, warrantless spying program and how much of that program should be legalized. The House leadership announced there will be no more votes before the long President’s Day legislative break.

The bill’s expiration is largely symbolic, but demonstrates that House Democrats are willing to fight Bush on anti-terrorism policies, where fear-mongering rhetoric had previously cowed their opposition.

One of the most interesting things about the last 24 hours is the subtle shift in rhetoric. The New York Times wrote today that “The lapsing of the deadline would have little practical effect on intelligence gathering” — an accurate statement, but one that most people were missing a few days ago. Even conservative pundits such as David Freddoso started hedging their previously sweeping claims about the dire consequences of letting the PAA expire:

If the president does not sign the bill before Saturday, then we revert to the previous FISA law. The feds will be able to continue certain ongoing terrorist monitoring activities, but they cannot initiate new ones. (It becomes easier to start up a terror cell on Saturday.)

Freddoso is not insinuating, as his colleague did, that all surveillance everywhere in the world will grind to a halt after the PAA expires. But Freddoso’s version is still misleading. The Bush administration can initiate new terrorist monitoring activities after the PAA expires. It just has to get a FISA warrant, the same way it did in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006. Indeed, Bush himself praised the changes Congress made to FISA in the wake of the September 11 attacks, noting that they “will allow surveillance of all communications used by terrorists, including e-mails, the Internet, and cell phones” and makes the intelligences community “able to better meet the technological challenges posed by this proliferation of communications technology.” If we were able to get by with those provisions for nearly six years, surely we’ll be OK living under them again for a couple of weeks.

One of the biggest problems in the FISA debate is that a lot of the reporters writing about the subject seem to be seriously confused about the details of the legislative process. Take, for example, the lede to this write-up of yesterday’s action from the Politico:

House Democrats were unable to hold together their caucus on a key intelligence vote on Wednesday, as a coalition of Republicans, Blue Dog Democrats and liberals helped defeat a measure to extend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act as the deadline approaches.

The measure, which failed 191 to 229, would have extended the bill an additional three weeks to work out differences with the Senate on the issue of granting immunity to telecom companies which aided the federal government in wiretapping.

FISA is not expiring this weekend. FISA was passed in 1978 and isn’t slated to expire ever. What’s going to expire this weekend is the Protect America Act, which gave the president some additional spying powers beyond those he enjoyed under FISA. And in fact, even that is misleading, because all that’s really going to expire is the ability to authorize new surveillance activities. The PAA allowed the government to authorize surveillance programs for a year, which means that any surveillance programs that have already been approved will continue to be authorized until August at the earliest.

What this means is that the only real effect of the PAA’s expiration is that if a new terrorist suspect comes to the government’s attention, and he makes a phone call or sends an email that passes through the United States, then the government would need to fill out the extra paperwork required to get a FISA warrant in order to surveil that call. This paperwork can be filled out after the interception begins, so we’re not talking about the NSA missing any important phone calls, we’re just talking about bureaucrats doing some paperwork. That’s a problem, to be sure, but it’s a pretty minor one.

Yet virtually every press account I’ve seen seems to accept the White House’s story that the expiration of the PAA would completely shut down terrorist surveillance activities. My guess is that this is a combination of ignorance on the part of reporters and the desire to make the story seem more dramatic. (And conservative pundits like Andrew McCarthy have made no effort to clear up the confusion) But it’s a real problem, because it may allow the president to stampede Congress into passing legislation they’ll regret later.

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Over at Slate, I wonder what ever happened to the Republican devotion to the rule of law:

Press reports suggest that the Bush administration has created at least two warrantless surveillance programs with the cooperation of major telecom companies. The first, reported by the New York Times in 2005, involved the warrantless interception of several hundred Americans’ international phone calls and e-mails. Under the second, first reported by USA Today in 2006, Verizon and AT&T (then called SBC) reportedly provided the government with access to the domestic calling records of its customers. Qwest CEO Joseph P. Nacchio declined to participate in the latter program, believing that doing so would be against the law. Nacchio now alleges that the NSA retaliated for his refusal by canceling an unrelated, lucrative government contract. (He faces unrelated charges of insider trading.) Last summer, the Heritage Foundation’s Matthew Spalding insisted that giving amnesty to illegal immigrants would be “deeply unfair to the millions who obey the law and abide by the rules.” By the same token, letting AT&T and Verizon off the hook would not only be unfair to the customers whose privacy they violated, it would also be unfair to Qwest, which was put at a competitive disadvantage for obeying the law.

Last year, when the Senate was debating immigration reform, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson was arguing that “America is based on the rule of law, and that law must be enforced.” Many other Republican Senators expressed similar sentiments, opposing any leniency for illegal immigrants. But yesterday she voted with every one of her Republican colleagues to forgive telecom companies for their illegal activities. If migrant workers are obligated to obey our laws, surely our largest corporations have the same obligation.

The Wall Street Journal has an editorial today that makes some blatantly misleading assertions about the FISA debate:

By far the worst threat is an amendment from Senator Chris Dodd (D., Conn.) to deny legal immunity to telephone companies that cooperated with the government on these wiretaps after 9/11. The companies face multiple lawsuits, so a denial of even retrospective immunity would certainly lead to less such cooperation in the future.

This is precisely the goal of the left, which has failed to get Congress to ban such wiretaps directly but wants to use lawsuits to do so via the backdoor. We’re told that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are co-sponsoring the Dodd amendment, no doubt for political reasons as they compete for left-wing votes in their nomination fight. But they had better hope the effort fails, because as President they’d surely want the same telecom cooperation.

In fact, “the left” got Congress to “ban such wiretaps directly” thirty years ago, when Congress passed FISA in the first place. Glenn Greenwald cites chapter and verse here, but the Journal’s position doesn’t even make sense on its own terms. If warrantless domestic eavesdropping isn’t illegal, then why is the White House pushing so hard for immunity? If the White House or the telecom companies believe that they haven’t violated FISA, or that FISA is unconstitutional, they have every opportunity to make that argument to the courts. If the Ninth Circuit doesn’t give them a fair hearing, the Supreme Court—which now includes two Bush appointees and seven Republican appointees—certainly will. AT&T and Verizon haven’t advanced the argument that warrantless domestic wiretapping legal under FISA because they know perfectly well that it’s not.

The idea that Pres. Obama or Pres. Clinton will be unable to get the “cooperation” of the telecom companies in the future is equally misguided. FISA requires telecom companies to cooperate with the government after the government gets a warrant. What’s at issue in this debate isn’t whether companies should “cooperate”; everyone agrees that they should. The issue is whether the “cooperation” should occur with or without judicial supervision. Some of us believe that judicial supervision of domestic eavesdropping is an important safeguard for Americans’ privacy. Others, apparently including the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, want to return us to the pre-FISA days when the NSA routinely rifled through innocent Americans’ international communications. Strangely enough, they never seem to phrase it that way.

I’ve got a new article in Reason taking the Democrats to task for their tepid defense of civil liberties. I suggest they take their cue from that noted civil libertarian Newt Gingrich, who in 1996 resisted President Clinton’s demands for expanded wiretapping powers:

Bush’s predecessor was also an ardent supporter of increased wiretapping authority. For example, on July 29, 1996, Bill Clinton unveiled a proposal to expand government surveillance by permitting the use of “roving wiretaps.” The nation was still reeling from terrorist attacks on the Atlanta Olympics and American barracks in Saudi Arabia, and many suspected that the explosion of TWA Flight 800 was also the work of terrorists. Clinton argued that these tragedies highlighted the need for legislative changes, and he pressed Congress to act before its August recess.

But Congress had a bipartisan tradition of its own to defend. As they had done since Watergate, Congressional leaders raised concerns about civil liberties. Then-Speaker Newt Gingrich said he was willing to consider changes to the law, but vowed to do so “in a methodical way that preserves our freedoms.” Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott vowed that Congress would not “rush to a final judgment” before going on vacation. In the end, the 104th Congress finished its term without giving President Clinton the wiretapping authority he sought.

Today’s Democratic Congress has been far less protective of Americans’ privacy rights. Last August, in a virtual repeat of the events of 1996, Bush demanded that Congress approve expanded wiretapping powers before going on vacation. This time, Congressional leaders showed few qualms about “rushing to judgment.” Indeed, both houses of Congress approved the White House’s preferred legislation with minimal changes within three days of its introduction.

Meanwhile, it seems to be Opposite Day over at the Heritage Foundation, as they chide U.S. senators who want to “include measures in an otherwise bipartisan reform of FISA that would punish US companies that helped US intelligence agencies.” Of course, these senators’ proposals wouldn’t punish anyone; they would merely remove provisions that excuse companies for breaking laws that are already on the books. The companies will only be punished if they broke the law.

Heritage says that these companies “cooperated with government requests to ignore possible technical violations of FISA’s outdated provisions.” That’s a lot of adjectives for one sentence, but it doesn’t change the fact that breaking the law — even a “technical,” “outdated” law — is illegal. I find it surprising that Heritage scholars, who are normally strong champions of the “rule of law” would enthusiastically push the theory that following the law is optional or that the president — who takes an oath to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” — has the power to authorize other people to break the law on his behalf. He doesn’t, and it would set a dangerous precedent to let those who relied on such assurances off the hook for breaking the law.

Via EFF, a fascinating article on the possible constitutional issues raised by the push to give telecom companies retroactive immunity for illegal surveillance. Anthony Sebok points out that the courts have historically held that plaintiffs in tort suits have a constitutionally-protected property interest that the court cannot wipe away without compensation. I’m not a constitutional lawyer, so I won’t venture an opinion on whether his argument is right or not. But I think it does remind us of an important fact: the plaintiffs in these lawsuits are real people whose rights have allegedly been violated by these companies.

The FISA debate raises a lot of interesting policy questions about the appropriate relationships among the government, the courts, and the telecom industry. But while those questions are important, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that this debate is also about a contractual relationship between those telecom companies and millions of ordinary customers. Customers had a reasonable expectation that those companies would not share their private data with third parties unless doing so was legally required. It appears that certain large telecom companies may have violated that trust. If so, it seems to me that the customers should have their day in court.

There’s some fantastic back and forth between Chicago law professor Richard Epstein (a Cato adjunct scholar) and Berkeley law professor Peter Menell about the similarities and differences between physical property and what’s often called intellectual property—patents and copyrights. The exchange is a response to Menell’s previous contribution to Regulation.

I think Menell has the better of the argument. They both devote a considerable amount of ink to the eBay v. MercExchange, which centered around the question of when it’s appropriate to grant injunctions for patent infringement. Epstein has generally advocated a rule that grants injunctions more freely, arguing that this creates more certainty for the patent holder. Menell, in contrast, has argued that damages are often more appropriate.

The reason this matters is that if an injunction is granted, it can often drive the losing party into bankruptcy. In 2006, for example, Research in Motion, makers of the popular BlackBerry mobile device, was forced to pay $612 million to a company called NTP that had no employees, no products, and patents that were subsequently ruled invalid by the patent office. By rights, NTP shouldn’t have gotten a dime (because there was ample prior art for its “inventions”) but because RIM would have been fo