Surveillance is essential to a police state. As the Federal government consolidates its power, it will aim increasing numbers of cameras and microphones at us.

Americans still cling to the tradition that they are a free people, so the Feds scramble to justify spying on us. Their pretexts include the newest boogeymen, terrorists, as well as the old favorites: connoisseurs of illegal drugs or guns, immigrants who haven’t asked a bureaucrat’s permission to live here, white Caucasian bigots, and fanatics for either Christ or the Constitution. But as the Feds become impregnable in their power, and as they teach Americans first fear and then subservience, they will no longer throw us the sop of an excuse. Victims of Nazis and communists can attest that dictators seldom deign to explain themselves.

Multiplying the Feds’ microphones is the amended Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which President George Bush signed earlier this month. FISA authorizes the Feds to monitor international communications without obtaining a search warrant. That pretty much pulls the plug on the dying Fourth Amendment. Politicians defend FISA by claiming they only listen to certain conversations and then only to keep us safe. Terrorists’ chats, for example -- though the government’s definition of “terrorist” is considerably broader than ours. Nor has it proved that those it labels “terrorists” are guilty of any crime at all, let alone “terrorism.”

While they’re at it, the Feds want to tap the phones and computers of another group, too, one without any overt connection to terrorism: the world at large. They lust to listen to "non-U.S. person[s], someone who is neither a citizen of the United States nor a legal resident,” though they promise to eavesdrop only “as long as that individual is located outside the United States.”

You might be thinking, “So what? The CIA will catch foreign agents who spy on the White House or Congress.” Nope. Even the rabidly pro-State Government Executive Magazine admits: “the requirement that the [U.S.] government have ‘probable cause’ to believe the target is, say, a terrorist or a spy” is “gone.”

The implications are chilling. Where does the government of the United States get off spying on other nations’ citizens? Haven’t they got their own governments for that? Who put Washington, DC, in charge of Planet Earth, subjecting everyone everywhere to the same abuses Americans suffer? OK, that’s a rhetorical question since we all know neoconservatives did. Still, those who love liberty should be as outraged at our government’s wiretapping Turkish teachers or French farmers as we would be at their regimes’ wiretapping us. In manlier times, such aggression would have sparked diplomatic protests and perhaps a war.

The Bush Administration presumably justifies FISA’s foreign eavesdropping with the same reasoning it uses to deny habeas corpus to captured “enemy combatants”: the Bill of Rights shields only American citizens from politicians’ rampages. This obviously contradicts the Constitution’s spirit and letter – and even its grammar.

The Founding Fathers knew their syntax. Children in eighteenth-century America began studying Latin and Greek as soon as they could read. Both languages require mastering grammar. By the time boys applied to college around age 14, they could parse sentences that would flummox modern linguists.

The classicists who wrote and then amended the Constitution realized the ramifications when they made government their subject without an indirect object for its forbidden actions: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” It doesn’t matter whose religion we’re talking, mine, yours, or a Tibetan Buddhist’s, Congress may not interfere with the exercise of it. It can’t censor what anyone says, reads, or writes, either, nor keep him from peaceably assembling whether he’s American, Armenian, or Afghani. The proscriptions are absolute, without regard to the nationality of those the government’s actions affect. Otherwise, the amendment would read, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion for the American people.”

Likewise, the Fourth and Sixth Amendments lack precisely the adjectives that would authorize the Bush Administration’s tyranny. The Fourth says, “The right of the people [notice no “American” modifies “people,” nor did the Founders restrict this right to “citizens”] to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated...” That outlaws FISA’s eavesdropping, whether domestic or foreign. We find the same adjectival absence in the Sixth, which describes the rights of “the accused” suspect – not the “accused American” or “accused citizen” but simply “the accused.” The Feds may not deprive him of “a speedy and public trial,” whether he’s John Q. Public of Iowa charged with burglary or Salim Ahmed Hamdan,  lately of Guantanamo Bay, charged with “conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism.” 

Constitutions do not endow rights; the Creator does. They don’t codify them, either: that’s impossible because we own an infinite number. Instead, constitutions list the powers the governed grant their governors. They are a government’s operating manual, as Thomas Jefferson explained in his “Draft of the Kentucky Resolutions.” Because “free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence[,] it is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power.”
 
That the Constitution restricts the Feds regardless of the object of their misdeeds crystallizes in Jefferson’s discussion of the Alien and Sedition Acts. This abomination from John Adams’ administration preyed alike on non-citizen and citizen, yet Jefferson doesn’t differentiate between the government’s attack on one versus the other: “let the honest advocate of confidence read the alien and sedition acts, and say if the Constitution has not been wise in fixing limits to the government it created… In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”

Those figurative fetters bind down American politicians from their mischief, period, at home or abroad. A government that tyrannizes anywhere will tyrannize everywhere.

Becky Akers, an expert on the American Revolution, writes frequently about issues related to security and privacy. Her articles and columns have been published by Lewrockwell.com, The Freeman, Military History Magazine, American History Magazine, the Christian Science Monitor, the New York Post, and other publications.