Today, a Federal judge ruled that the Bush administration's warrant-less wiretapping is unconstitutional and illegal. There's nothing like good news in world lately full of bad news. Basically, this ruling means that the government must cease eavesdropping on innocent citizens. It's the second lawsuit in a row where the Bush administration has lost its argument that 'State Secrets' should protect scrutiny of its programs in court, even when the details of said programs are widely known. But a little catch-up for anyone who might not have been paying attention for the last year or so: the US government (with the cooperation of most of the major telecom companies) has been recording a massive amount of telephone calls placed within the United States to recipients both in the United States and abroad. Essentially, there's a decent chance that several of your phone calls (if not many, many more) have been recorded, documented and analyzed by the US government if you live in this country. This was all under the lame excuse of "national security" when really it's some straight up big-brother, 1984 type shit. First, this was a huge data mining program. Secondly, the government actually has a special court set up under the FISA act back in the 60's, made especially to allow special flexability in getting warrants for matters of national security. This court has only turned down something like 4 warrant requests in over 30 years, so it seems like it was working just fine. However, the Bush administration has always been more interested in breaking the law than following it.

The New York Times learned about the existence of this program in the months before the 2004 presidential election. For reasons that make me wonder about the folks running the Times, they chose to with-hold publication of the story for about year, probably not to ruffle any feathers, or god forbid influence a close election by telling the public about the misdeeds of the current administration. Strangely, I thought that was one of the things that "news" organizations were meant to do...

Anyway, this is great news. I can't wait until the telecoms that went along with this (without court-orders, even) get their asses sued. I believe in a right to privacy and a government that doesn't listen to my phone calls without a damn good, legally justified reason. Here's to hoping that this ruling is another step back in that direction.