No False Dogs Before Me

MAKES ME BLUSH: It’s come to this: The only real way to keep other people from invading the sanctity of your underwear drawer is not to wear any underwear. I mention this in light of recent developments with the National Security Agency (NSA) and, oddly enough, our friends in charge of Cottage Hospital.

Recent revelations about the NSA ​— ​which has been strip-mining the metadata of phone records of millions of American citizens far more rapaciously than any coal company ever pillaged Appalachia ​— ​demonstrate that no matter how warped and creepy Edward Snowden might be, he’s done a great service by exposing this practice. No, they may not be listening to what we say, but they’ve been tracking whom we’re talking to. The good news is that a fat-faced federal judge named Richard J. Leon ​— ​armed with the facts that creepy Snowden brought to light ​— ​termed the practice “almost Orwellian.” Leon declared the practice unconstitutional, explaining that it violated protections against warrantless search and seizure by government agencies. “I cannot imagine a more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary’ invasion than this systemic and high-tech collection of personal data on virtually every single citizen,” he wrote, “for the purpose of querying it and analyzing it without prior judicial approval.” Leon pointedly noted the government failed to present a single instance in which this invasion of privacy thwarted a terrorist attack.

Given Leon’s political history as a legal hit man for the Republican Party and the imperial presidency, this story clearly qualifies as the dog-eats-dog variety. Before his appointment to the federal bench by George Bush II, Leon churned out legal opinions arguing if a president committed a crime, it wasn’t a crime because the president committed it. Once on the bench, he flowered into a far more interesting and unpredictable character. On the issue of Gitmo detainees, Leon has issued rulings both affirming and denying their rights. More recently, he ruled the Food and Drug Administration is required to certify that drugs imported into the United States to kill condemned death row inmates can do so safely and humanely. In his NSA decision, Leon challenged the Supreme Court’s 1979 wiretap ruling that has been used to justify the NSA’s war on our phone records. That case involved a Baltimore man who stole a woman’s car and then peppered her with threatening phone calls. When the cops caught him by tapping her phone, he objected they never got a warrant. The Supremes concluded no warrant was needed because phone customers ​— ​knowing that the phone company kept records of all their calls ​— ​had no expectation of privacy. The most important fact here is that the car thief’s name was Michael Lee Smith, which ​— ​yet again ​— ​proves my theory that people with the first, last, or middle name Lee (or any variant) are disproportionately prone to sociopathic behavior. Judge Leon argued the feds could no longer use a case in which one person had her phone tapped for a few days to justify tracking every phone call made in the United States. The telephonic realities of 1979 and the present had changed in ways exceeding the scope of science fiction. To liken one to the other was akin to equating a grain of sand to the whole beach.