At National Review Online this morning, Andrew C. McCarthy says, “The New York Times strikes again”:
So, have you heard the latest? Your business records can now be taken away by Big Brother without a warrant, thanks to that Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act-reform bill Darth Bush — an unstoppable force of nature with 30-percent approval ratings — just slammed through the notorious wallflower also known as the Democratic Congress. Yup, all the government has to do is pretend it needs your records — or your phone calls, or even your person — for a national-security investigation of someone overseas and — Presto! — your privacy rights are shredded.
It must be true. After all, it’s in the New York Times.
Mr. McCarthy goes on:
I checked with the radical American Civil Liberties Union. Certainly, I imagined, it would elaborate on the hidden landmines the Times has found. After all, the ACLU so despises the bill that it has put out a “fact sheet” sniping that the new law should be called the “Police America Act” (it is actually called the “Protect America Act”). Yet for all its predictable bombast, nowhere does the ACLU repeat, much less explain, the Times’s spin that FISA reform has left us wholesale exposed to the snatching of our files, the scrutinizing of our phone usage, and even the violation of our persons.
…
The Times is engaged here in the worst kind of journalistic abuse. Risen and Lichtblau sprinkle their story with the names of several experts, but not a single one is identified as standing behind the explosive claims quoted above. Those are attributed to “experts” — unnamed. And unnamed for good reason: What the Times represents as a respectable, mainstream interpretation of the new law is actually a fringe construction unsupportable by any coherent reading.