Wikipedia and other organizations, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and The Nation magazine, sued the U.S. National Security Agency today in an effort to halt the NSA’s pervasive eavesdropping on internet users. They’re represented by the ACLU.
The Constitution is not self-enforcing. It means nothing more than the courts’ willingness to uphold it and the executive branch’s willingness to enforce court orders. The racist South ignored the Equal Protection Clause for 100 years, and it finally took federal troops to enforce the decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court. Even today, in places like Alabama and Oklahoma, state judges and legislatures openly defy the plain meaning of the Constitution and federal court orders.
The U.S. government defies it, too. Eric Snowden is a fugitive, hiding out in Russia under the protection of the likes of Putin, for revealing that our government doesn’t trust its own law-abiding citizens and behaves like the KGB once did. Our national paranoia has real-life consequences; some of our public schools are managed by people who equate innocuous grade-school behavior with terrorism. The adults have taken leave of their senses.
Let’s face it, humans are imperfect; they’re prone to from racism and bigotry, ignorance and stupidity, emotional volatility, and other shortcomings that impair their judgment and common sense. The guiding principles of the Constitution provide a lodestone with which 
to test and measure our behavior against our ideals. In America, government surveillance of citizens has spun out of control, and this lawsuit creates both an opportunity and a responsibility for our courts to guide those leading our government back to those principles.
Photo: NSA headquarters, the box that Darth Vader came in.
Nice article ai enjoyed it.