INTERVIEW
terrorist or a criminal, and that’s why we
want to look at their records. With the
lawsuit, the other big thing for me is that
right now these questions are being decided in secret. The President says, “fifteen
judges have ruled this to be constitutional.” Well, he isn’t telling you the whole
story. Most of these fifteen judges were
in a secret court called the FISA (Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance) court. If I’m the
phone company, I’m not allowed to have a
lawyer in the FISA court, and if I lose the
judgment, which is done in secret so I have
no representation, I can’t appeal it to another court. That to me is wrong, and I’m
trying to change that legislatively as well.
But it’s important that a constitutional
question about the Fourth Amendment
be decided in public, and I think because
we live in a digital age where so much of
our information is online now, that you
do retain a property interest – a privacy
interest – in that information even if the
phone company holds it. People ne Y