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FOCUS | I Despair As I Watch the Erosion of the Liberal Views I Hold Dear |
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Sunday, 09 June 2013 11:34 |
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Hutton writes: "Gay marriage is a crucial and socially legitimate enlargement of gay people's ambitions to live with dignity. Yet the case is rarely made in those positive liberal terms.
The U.S. Capitol building. (photo: M. Scott Mahaskey/Politico)
I Despair as I Watch the Erosion of the Liberal Views I Hold Dear
By Will Hutton, Guardian UK
09 June 13
 ast Wednesday, there was a memorial service for one of the doyens of American liberalism – Professor Ronnie Dworkin – who died in London, his adopted home, earlier this year. A succession of some of Britain's best-known liberal writers and thinkers took to the rostrum to pay tribute to a man who continued to honour Roosevelt's New Deal, insisted law and morality were indivisible and argued that to live well and with dignity was every human being's aim – one that law and government should support.
It was a moving occasion, but, as his wife, Irene Brendl, wrote in the service notes, this great liberal tradition is increasingly beleaguered. She is right. We live in rightwing times. Law and justice, which Ronnie Dworkin cherished so much, are depicted as burdens on the taxpayer whose costs must be minimised. If you want justice, you must pay for it yourself and have no embedded civic right to expect others to contribute. The good society and moral individuals are those who do without the state. The public sphere is derided and positive public action to promote the common or international good is acceptable only if it involves less, rather than more, government. Instead, what we are invited to hold in common is nationhood, national identity and hostility to foreigners and immigrants. The open society is in retreat.
This may seem an odd commentary in a week in which gay marriage has been agreed by the House of Lords and where companies are increasingly hounded for avoiding their tax. Both are surely liberal rather than conservative preoccupations. In an idiosyncratic leader recently, the Economist proclaimed the strange rebirth of liberal England, arguing that young people's tolerance of ethnic and sexual differences, along with growing distrust of the state and welfare, was proof positive of the emergence of a new liberalism. Ronnie Dworkin should have been happy.
He would have turned in his grave. Such a view of liberalism does not go to the heart of what it means to live well. Tolerance of other people's differences is a core element of a liberal order, but a good society is one where we go beyond just shrugging our shoulders at someone's sexual preferences, religious beliefs or ethnicity. It is one in which we engage with each other, create law and justice as a moral system enshrining human dignity and accept mutual responsibilities. The aim is to live with dignity, to be able to make the best of one's capabilities and to expect that the consequences of undeserved bad luck – what Dworkin called brute bad luck – would be compensated by society in a mutual compact. This is a million miles from the Economist's arid conception of liberalism.
Nor are these disputes just airy-fairy differences between intellectuals – they go to the heart of how we live, what we do and say. Unless we take a much more robust and rounded view of liberalism, tolerance ends up as indifference, disengagement and refusal to respect other people's ambition to live with dignity. Anything goes. One alarming dimension of value-free tolerance is the new licence it gives for men publicly to say noxiously sexist, demeaning or plain wrong things about women. If a woman dresses to appear attractive, that does not mean, as Nick Ross argues in his new book, Crime, that if they succeed they are partly responsible if they get raped. Rape is not gradable to the extent of a woman's dress or character: it is a crime and is the responsibility of – and problem for – men and women alike. To define it in any other way is to make any woman both apart and demeaned, a reversal of the century-long fight for genuine equality between the sexes.
In successive areas of public policy – "reform" of criminal justice and legal aid, the health service, climate change, employment law, social security – the debate is similarly defined wholly in terms of the need to assert individual rights and choice, to minimise social and public responsibilities and, above all, to roll back taxes. If the facts or scientific evidence do not support this drive, then the facts are changed or the science ignored.
The most breathtaking example is climate change. What fires the sceptics' passionate opposition is that preventing global warming will become the rationale for an extension of public initiative and government action, which by definition must be bad. Therefore, the science must be wrong. It is the wholesale inversion of a liberal society. The importance of limiting the state, reducing the scope of law and maximising individual choice with no compensating responsibilities defines how science should become interpreted and understood, even if it indubitably proves that global weather patterns are changing.
Even gay marriage and the quest to end tax avoidance are part of this wider trend. Gay marriage is a crucial and socially legitimate enlargement of gay people's ambitions to live with dignity. Yet the case is rarely made in those positive liberal terms: rather, gay marriage is portrayed as a harmless extension of an unobjectionable entitlement. Faith communities feel that in those terms the proposition is frivolous: their sensibilities are not respected. They feel harmed – and outraged. The row became much more intense than it should.
Equally, David Cameron and George Osborne's quest to limit the now rampant corporate abuse of tax havens is not because they believe that the state is a force for good whose services everyone must legitimately pay for – that taxation is a badge of citizenship. It is because they are against cheating and if big companies don't pay their taxes then taxes are higher for everyone else. You may think the difference is irrelevant, but crucially it offers the tax cheats a perfect line of defence – and one exploited by Eric Schmidt, chair of tax-minimising Google. Companies have no moral responsibility to respect the spirit of the law, he says; if Google can lower its taxes though obscure if legal loopholes, then it is government's responsibility to change the law. The law is not a moral proposition, as in Dworkin's conception: it is simply something to be endlessly gamed by clever tax lawyers.
Schmidt's vision is as arid as the Economist's. But if the right is dominant, a rounded liberalism has one advantage. The right's world leads to economic stagnation, social atomisation and a destructive nationalism. Nor, ultimately, is there happiness and dignity to be found by living as a tax-avoiding, climate-change-denying anti-feminist while mouthing how tolerant you are. There is a quiet and mounting crisis in conservatism. Liberalism, in its best sense, could capitalise on the opportunity. It is a pity Ronnie Dworkin won't be around to be part of the fight back. We'll just have to do it by ourselves.
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FOCUS | The Quiet Closing of Washington |
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Sunday, 09 June 2013 09:52 |
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Reich writes: "Conservative Republicans in our nation's capital have managed to accomplish something they only dreamed of when Tea Partiers streamed into Congress at the start of 2011: They've basically shut Congress down."
Portrait, Robert Reich, 08/16/09. (photo: Perian Flaherty)
The Quiet Closing of Washington
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
09 June 13
 onservative Republicans in our nation's capital have managed to accomplish something they only dreamed of when Tea Partiers streamed into Congress at the start of 2011: They've basically shut Congress down. Their refusal to compromise is working just as they hoped: No jobs agenda. No budget. No grand bargain on the deficit. No background checks on guns. Nothing on climate change. No tax reform. No hike in the minimum wage. Nothing so far on immigration reform.
It's as if an entire branch of the federal government - the branch that's supposed to deal directly with the nation's problems, not just execute the law or interpret the law but make the law - has gone out of business, leaving behind only a so-called "sequester" that's cutting deeper and deeper into education, infrastructure, programs for the nation's poor, and national defense.
The window of opportunity for the President to get anything done is closing rapidly. Even in less partisan times, new initiatives rarely occur after the first year of a second term, when a president inexorably slides toward lame duck status.
But the nation's work doesn't stop even if Washington does. By default, more and more of it is shifting to the states, which are far less gridlocked than Washington. Last November's elections resulted in one-party control of both the legislatures and governor's offices in all but 13 states - the most single-party dominance in decades.
This means many blue states are moving further left, while red states are heading rightward. In effect, America is splitting apart without going through all the trouble of a civil war.
Minnesota's Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, for example, now controls both legislative chambers and the governor's office for the first time in more than two decades. The legislative session that ended a few weeks ago resulted in a hike in the top income tax rate to 9.85%, an increased cigarette tax, and the elimination of several corporate tax loopholes. The added revenues will be used to expand early-childhood education, freeze tuitions at state universities, fund jobs and economic development, and reduce the state budget deficit. Along the way, Minnesota also legalized same-sex marriage and expanded the power of trade unions to organize.
California and Maryland passed similar tax hikes on top earners last year. The governor of Colorado has just signed legislation boosting taxes by $925 million for early-childhood education and K-12 (the tax hike will go into effect only if residents agree, in a vote is likely in November).
On the other hand, the biggest controversy in Kansas is between Governor Sam Brownback, who wants to shift taxes away from the wealthy and onto the middle class and poor by repealing the state's income tax and substituting an increase in the sales tax, and Kansas legislators who want to cut the sales tax as well, thereby reducing the state's already paltry spending for basic services. Kansas recently cut its budget for higher education by almost 5 percent.
Other rightward-moving states are heading in the same direction. North Carolina millionaires are on the verge of saving $12,500 a year, on average, from a pending income-tax cut even as sales taxes are raised on the electricity and services that lower-income depend residents depend on. Missouri's transportation budget is half what it was five years ago, but lawmakers refuse to raise taxes to pay for improvements.
The states are splitting as dramatically on social issues. Gay marriages are now recognized in twelve states and the District of Columbia. Colorado and Washington state permit the sale of marijuana, even for non-medical uses. California is expanding a pilot program to allow nurse practitioners to perform abortions.
Meanwhile, other states are enacting laws restricting access to abortions so tightly as to arguably violate the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. In Alabama, the mandated waiting period for an abortion is longer than it is for buying a gun.
Speaking of which, gun laws are moving in opposite directions as well. Connecticut, California, and New York are making it harder to buy guns. Yet if you want to use a gun to kill someone who's, say, spray-painting a highway underpass at night, you might want to go to Texas, where it's legal to shoot someone who's committing a "public nuisance" under the cover of dark. Or you might want to live in Kansas, which recently enacted a law allowing anyone to carry a concealed firearm onto a college campus.
The states are diverging sharply on almost every issue you can imagine. If you're an undocumented young person, you're eligible for in-state tuition at public universities in fourteen states (including Texas). But you might want to avoid driving in Arizona, where state police are allowed to investigate the immigration status of anyone they suspect is here illegally.
And if you're poor and lack health insurance you might want to avoid a state like Wisconsin that's refusing to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, even though the federal government will be picking up almost the entire tab.
Federalism is as old as the Republic, but not since the real Civil War have we witnessed such a clear divide between the states on central issues affecting Americans.
Some might say this is a good thing. It allows more of us to live under governments and laws we approve of. And it permits experimentation: Better to learn that a policy doesn't work at the state level, where it's affected only a fraction of the population, than after it's harmed the entire nation. As the jurist Louis Brandies once said, our states are "laboratories of democracy."
But the trend raises three troubling issues.
First, it leads to a race to bottom. Over time, middle-class citizens of states with more generous safety nets and higher taxes on the wealthy will become disproportionately burdened as the wealthy move out and the poor move in, forcing such states to reverse course. If the idea of "one nation" means anything, it stands for us widely sharing the burdens and responsibilities of citizenship.
Second, it doesn't take account of spillovers - positive as well as negative. Semi-automatic pistols purchased without background checks in one state can easily find their way easily to another state where gun purchases are restricted. By the same token, a young person who receives an excellent public education courtesy of the citizens of one states is likely to move to another state where job opportunity are better. We are interdependent. No single state can easily contain or limit the benefits or problems it creates for other states.
Finally, it can reduce the power of minorities. For more than a century "states rights" has been a euphemism for the efforts of some whites to repress or deny the votes of black Americans. Now that minorities are gaining substantial political strength nationally, devolution of government to the states could play into the hands of modern-day white supremacists.
A great nation requires a great, or at least functional, national government. The Tea Partiers and other government-haters who have caused Washington to all but close because they refuse to compromise are threatening all that we aspire to be together.
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PRISM: NSA Just As Guilty As Manning |
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Saturday, 08 June 2013 08:16 |
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Cole writes: "The sordid police states that have a paltry few tens of thousands of domestic spies monitoring the activities of ordinary citizens turn out to be minor players in this game compared to the home of the brave and the land of the free."
PRISM has delved into all our online communication. (photo: Steve Wood/Shutterstock)
PRISM: NSA Just As Guilty As Manning
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment
08 June 13
 radley Manning, who spilled the beans on the US blowing away of unarmed Iraqi journalists and overlooking war crimes by the US military and allied Iraqi troops, released thousands of low-level cable messages. He has been charged by the US government with thereby being a traitor, giving aid and comfort to the enemy. It is not clear which enemy benefited from the catty remarks in some embassy cables, or how exactly their revelation harmed national security. What did happen was that millions of people in the US and around the world discovered some of the more egregious sins of commission and omission of the US government, especially with regard to Iraq. The treason charge against Manning is outrageous, and has been pursued because otherwise what he did is not obviously very serious and even a military judge might not return a severe sentence. While the scatter shot character of his revelations may be troubling, some of what he revealed was government crimes, for which Americans should thank him.
It turns out that Manning, in making government correspondence available for us to read, was just turning the tables on the US government, which The Guardian and the Washington Post today reveal has a back door called PRISM into all our internet communications (emails, over-the-internet phone calls, browser search history, etc.) with 9 major companies, including Microsoft, Google and Yahoo! (but not, interestingly, Twitter). The program is detailed in a Powerpoint slide presentation for initiating new NSA employees into its workings.
The sordid police states that have a paltry few tens of thousands of domestic spies monitoring the activities of ordinary citizens turn out to be minor players in this game compared to the home of the brave and the land of the free. Eat your hearts out, North Korean secret police and Baathist mukhabarat in Syria!
The NSA is supposed to use the back door only for communications going abroad or originating abroad, but it only has to be 51% certain that there is a foreign component. That is a low bar. But anyway nowadays how many of us have no email or social media communication with people living overseas? In practice, domestic communications will inevitably be swept up in this program. And, someone should explain to me why Americans' correspondence going abroad is suddenly without Fourth Amendment protections? The FBI appears to be deeply involved in the operation, and how likely is it that, say, Occupy Wall Street activists or environmentalists haven't been subject to surveillance? Apparently, unlike with the case of the Verizon phone call records, the NSA has access to the content of emails, not just records of to whom they were sent. In any case, meta data like who you are talking to is in most cases more important than content, as Jane Mayer explains.
Apparently the back door was installed under the provisions of the misnamed USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 that allow for requisition of "business records," and the FBI and National Security Agency interpreted that language to allow installation of the equipment allowing direct access to the companies' servers. The large internet companies' spokespeople are puzzled by the news and denying it, but there is every reason to think that the CEOs and other authorities at these companies were strictly enjoined against revealing what had been done, and so the rest of the company and the world hadn't known about it. One of the ways the anti-PATRIOTic Act subverted American norms of public life is that it allows the FBI to not only request your records without a warrant but to forbid the provider of the records from ever revealing that the request was made. In other words, it turned librarians and internet company officials into liars and stool pigeons and mafiosi, under a goonish seal of silence.
Oregon Senator Ron Wyden has known about PRISM for some time and been appalled, but could not speak openly about it because it is classified, and has pleas to fellow senators to do something about it were shamefully deep-sixed by his colleagues. Me, I have dark suspicions that PRISM and telephone record surveillance has allowed the FBI, NSA and other agencies to accumulate damaging information on our representatives' private lives so as to be able to blackmail them into not rocking the boat. At least, these programs make such a way of proceeding entirely possible at any time.
It isn't just the government. PRISM is only using the resources of private companies, and we cannot depend on them always being upright. We know that billionaire Rupert Murdoch has deployed his "news" organizations to hack into people's voice messages and has attempted to use his known surveillance capacity to intimidate high-level politicians into accepting his policy diktats.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has made a timeline of NSA domestic spying and the EFF's own so far fruitless attempts to get the courts to enforce the Constitution.
One reason Eric Holder should be fired is that his likely response to the revelation of PRISM will be to pull out all the stops to find and punish the NSA employee that turned the Powerpoint slides over to the Guardian and WaPo. Stepping back from this massive incursion against the Constitution? On past evidence, that won't be on his agenda.
In any case, the US Government has been gleefully getting access to your private correspondence and that gave the Government Class an inherent superiority over ordinary Americans. Manning announced that turnabout is fair play, and we should be able to see their correspondence, too, especially given the war crimes in Iraq. That's why they're trying to execute him.
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No Amount of 'Rebranding' Will Win Back Young Voters to the GOP |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9456"><span class="small">Ana Marie Cox, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Saturday, 08 June 2013 08:10 |
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Cox writes: "The College Republicans National Committee report focuses on the GOP's image problem. It's way more fundamental than that."
A young female voter proudly displays her 'I voted' sticker outside DC voting precinct 135 November 4, 2008 at the Mount Bethel Baptist Church in the NW section of Washington, DC. (photo: Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty Images)
No Amount of 'Rebranding' Will Win Back Young Voters to the GOP
By Ana Marie Cox, Guardian UK
08 June 13
The College Republicans National Committee report focuses on the GOP's image problem. It's way more fundamental than that.
 n reading the report on the GOP and young voters from the College Republicans National Committee, one should keep in mind that they were clearly hamstrung in making recommendations for broadening the party's appeal beyond the "old white guy" bloc by the party's core certainty that there is nothing wrong with the policies they've put forward. Written between the lines of the report (and often in the lines themselves) is the belief that issue is marketing and message, not values or beliefs. (This is nothing new: Republicans who have faulted GOP policies, while media darlings, don't seem to have gained traction in the party itself.)
There's a section in report superficially about policy, but that's just it - it's superficial. The recommendations revolve around how to talk about policy, not engineer it. This isn't the fault of the report's authors, I think: around the edges, there are glimmers of self-awareness, hints that the CRNC would do things differently if they were given the chance.
For example, they emphasize over and over the advantage Obama gained by his attempts to actually pass legislation - even legislation opposed by the "winnable" conservatives and moderates the CNRC interviewed. Even respondents who didn't like Obamacare, for instance, believed "that Obama had attempted to change things." The mere acknowledgment of Obama as someone who, in good faith, "attempted to change things" would be watershed moment for the GOP leadership, and could shift the national conversation from mutual "NANANA, I CAN'T HEAR YOU" to dialogue.
The parties shout at each other rather than converse because we live in the era of the permanent campaign. It's only in campaigns that politics is a winner-take-all scenario, where shouting the loudest is what makes you a success. In crafting policy, it's possible for everyone to win something; this isn't something the authors of the report (following the lead of their elders) emphasize. The belief in, and consequences of, zero-sum politics are painfully evident in the section about the traits young people value and how the GOP might align itself with them.
First, the bad news:
"Asked which words least described the GOP, respondents gravitated toward 'open-minded' (35%), 'tolerant' (25%), 'caring' (22%), and 'cooperative' (21%)."
But, hey!
"Theoretically, the good news in all this is that while the Republican party's negative brand is being driven heavily by a perceived lack of open-mindedness and caring, the other brand attributes that matter to young people - intelligence, a strong work ethic, and competence - are not out of reach and certainly up for grabs."
First, let us note the weight of faith placed on the word "theoretically" there. (It's adorable!) Second, we need to award the report's authors a gold medal in Olympic-level silver lining hunting. But then, let's be kind of sad that they assume only one party can claim ownership of any given trait: young people don't associate us with "intelligence", but they don't think that about Democrats, either! We can hunt down intelligence and kill it, put its head up on the clubhouse wall.
Even more disturbingly, the CRNC seems to think that traits such as intelligence are to be claimed rather than earned: "Intelligence, competence, hard work, and responsibility matter a lot, too, and neither party has cornered that market" - in its polling, young people don't associate either party with those things - but, they write:
"These are brand attributes that, if the party makes real efforts to emphasize them over and over, can begin to turn the tide on the GOP's negative brand image."
Right. The idea that Republican candidates would take to heart the strategy of "emphasizing over and over" how smart, competent, and responsible they are is probably the best news Democrats have had in ages - or at least, the last month.
You want people to think you're smart and competent? Try developing policies that aim for the best possible benefit for the most possible people. Though, to be honest, that doesn't always mean people in Washington will think you're "smart". In DC, there are all-too-many policy proposals that pundits deem "smart" but are really just shiny new outfits for the same ideologically-driven assumptions about outcomes. Newt Gingrich is awesome at this.
And that's essentially what the report does, too. Its focus groups and polling show again and again that young people believe the GOP to be hostile to immigrants in general and, more specifically, that its policies would make it more difficult for illegal immigrants to eventually participate in the American dream of social mobility. I want to be clear: the focus group participants emphasize that they are sympathetic to 'illegal' immigrants: "But sometimes," one says, "it's not really their fault." Another whose parents immigrated legally - "and now have nothing to retire on" - notes that she understands why others wouldn't: "It's really expensive to do it the right way. And it was just really difficult."
But the report doesn't endorse changing GOP policy to, you know, make it easier for illegal immigrants to participate in the American dream or even to make it easier to immigrate. No, the ultimate suggestion:
"It is important for the Republican party to be clear about the difference between legal and illegal immigrants."
As if that were the problem? Those folks in the focus groups seem to understand what the difference is - indeed, seem to understand it better than most Republicans.
To believe a party's popularity is simply a matter of branding is a profound disservice and insult to the electorate, one that young people are more apt to recognize than most. (Maybe the GOP can just "emphasize over and over" that they're trying to "rebrand" themselves as appealing to young people ... see how that will work. See also, Poochie.)
In our modern age, it's easy to cynically dismiss all politics as "branding", sure, but voters have more depth than that - even if politicians don't. Todd Akin didn't lose because of bad "branding"; he lost because of his beliefs and policies.
This is the flaw at the center of the GOP's "image problem", which is really a "substance problem". It's not that the party is - as the report has it - "disliked"; it is that they are disagreed with, that they are working from a set of assumptions and values that young people recognize as, at best, misguided or uninformed and, at worst, destructive.
The focus group members (remember: made up of "winnable" moderates and conservatives) say a lot of things that, if the GOP took seriously the statements about what young people actually want, would change the very nature of the party. They told the CNRC:
- "everyone in America should have access to health coverage"
- "reducing big government" does not make sense as a policy goal
- there is a worthwhile difference between "fixing" and "reducing" the national debt
- gays should be allowed to get married
- "we are spending way too much time out there fighting other countries' wars"
- "taxes should go up on the wealthy" (Not kidding: 54% of the young Republicans surveyed agreed with this sentiment. Obviously, "takers")
There are conservative policies that can flow from these values and goals, ways that conservative principles can shape the actions taken toward making them a reality. But these sentiments and aims simply aren't in line with the modern GOP. If you believe, as many Republican leaders do, that big government is an evil in and of itself, that gays don't deserve to get married, that America is still the world's policeman, and the wealthy should be extended the privilege of not paying their fair share, then no amount of "branding" can convince voters you're going to work to accomplish what they want you to do. Your task as a candidate will be to attempt to either change their minds or to convincingly lie to them, about either your beliefs or the way policy works, or both.
Take focus groups' lack of interest in lowering taxes on the wealthy. Advises the report:
"The challenge for Republicans is to connect lower (or simpler) taxes to economic growth, a link that is not currently strong in the minds of many young voters."
Points for disingenuously eliding "lower" and "simpler"! You're already on your way to confusing the issue. Respondents didn't see those as synonyms. Indeed, they told the CNRC that they believed the "wealthy were able to take advantage of loopholes to ensure they paid less in taxes than young (and not particularly wealthy) people do."
And you can connect lower taxes with economic growth rhetorically all you want, but the reason that the "link is not currently strong in the minds of young voters" is because nothing in their life experience suggests it to be the actual result of such policy. To connect the two isn't objectively educating voters; it's asking them to believe an ideological conviction as a statement of fact. That is, lying to them.
There are those who scoff at the very notion of conservatives broadening their reach to young voters. But there's nothing inherently antagonistic between youth and conservatism. Being under 30 doesn't biologically determine progressive beliefs: if youth has a political persuasion, it's to be idealistic. And idealism doesn't have an inherent bent, either. Heaven knows, there are idealistic conservatives. The question at the moment is whether there are enough idealistic Republicans.
Cynicism is endemic to any professional politician, sure. But Democrats and the progressives who support them manage to retain hopefulness and compassion as a part of their policies, not just of their image. In fact, optimism about human nature is probably the central flaw in many of those policies. But clearly, that's the side young people (including young conservatives) would rather err on.
The polling done by the CRNC bears this out. Asked how they would like to be seen by others, the most frequent response was "intelligent" (39%) - and that's the trait the CRNC latched onto as the GOP's entry to favor. But second on the list was "caring" (30%) with "open-minded" and "helpful" coming in 18% and 13% respectively. So I'd say that young conservatives told the CNRC that, more than anything, they want to embody some form of compassion - to be seen as caring, as open-minded, as helpful.
This gives me greater hope for the future of the Republican party, and the future in general. I just hope it's not too far off.
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he Verizon Business customers who learned, this week, that the company had given records of every call they made within and from the United States to the National Security Agency might also have been surprised to find out that, under current law, the government did not need a warrant (or probable cause) to access that information. The records are not considered private, and all the government needed was an order from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court. That might sound like a safeguard against government overreach, but the court approved all but one of the five thousand one hundred and eighty 
