President Barack Obama has assured us that we need not be worried about the National Security Agency listening to our phone calls or monitoring our Internet use. The NSA’s programs, he said, represent “modest encroachments on privacy” that are “worth us doing” to protect the country from terrorists. Count me among those who are not reassured by Obama’s statement. I know better—from my schoolboy knowledge of the Constitution and from my own experience during the '60s with unwarranted government surveillance.

I don’t usually like to base moral judgments on what the Constitution does or does not allow, but in this case, it makes sense to do so. The Constitution had two very different purposes: One was to create a functioning government; the other, forged in the wake of the American revolution, was to establish constraints that would prevent the abuse of state power. The First Amendment was designed to do the latter; and so was the Fourth, which prohibits “unreasonable searches and seizures.” The administration’s obsessive pursuit of press leaks threatens the First Amendment’s freedom of the press; and the NSA’s surveillance violates the Fourth Amendment’s ban on general warrants—on indiscriminate searches without probable cause.

The administration claims that these actions were approved by Congress and authorized by the courts. But I am not impressed that some senators and judges approved these efforts. American history is littered with bad decisions from narrowed minded, short-sighted legislators and jurists. I’ll take my stand with senators Wyden, Udall, Durbin, and Paul on these issues rather than with Senator Lindsay Graham or Roger Vinson, the judge who signed off on the NSA’s surveillance and who also ruled that the Affordable Care Act was unconstitutional.

One reason that I am particularly angry about what the administration has done is that I’ve seen it all before. In the wake of the Cold War, both the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Central Intelligence Agency acquired tremendous power to investigate and deter what Washington believed was political subversion. There was little oversight of either agency. In the late '40s and '50s, the FBI identified and monitored domestic Communists, whom its director J. Edgar Hoover believed to be under every bed sheet, while the CIA operated abroad. Then, in the 1960s, both agencies turned their considerable power and attention to the domestic threat to official Washington posed by opponents of the Vietnam War. Some of what they looked at it was genuine criminal activity—people planting bombs or kidnapping newspaper heiresses—but most of it had nothing to do with criminal activity or with any foreign directed subversion. It simply consisted of determined dissent from what the Johnson and Nixon administrations were doing.





Take my own case. I was a politically active radical and socialist during much of the '60s and the first half of the '70s. I got started in the civil rights and anti-war movements; I was a member of Students for a Democratic Society, although in northern California that didn’t mean much. I was an editor of a theoretical journal euphemistically titled Socialist Revolution (at a time when the real hardliners described themselves as small-c communists), and I was a leader of a nationwide socialist organization called the New American Movement, which tried to pick up where the less crazy parts of SDS left off.