Watch Al Gore's Speech On Executive Power

In Martin Luther King Day address, Gore compares wiretapping of Americans to surveillance of King

.......Yet, just one month ago, Americans awoke to the shocking news that in spite of
this long settled law, the Executive Branch has been secretly spying on large
numbers of Americans for the last four years and eavesdropping on "large volumes
of telephone calls, e-mail messages, and other Internet traffic inside the
United States." The New York Times reported that the President decided to launch
this massive eavesdropping program "without search warrants or any new laws that
would permit such domestic intelligence collection."
During the period when
this eavesdropping was still secret, the President went out of his way to
reassure the American people on more than one occasion that, of course, judicial
permission is required for any government spying on American citizens and that,
of course, these constitutional safeguards were still in place.
But
surprisingly, the President's soothing statements turned out to be false.
Moreover, as soon as this massive domestic spying program was uncovered by the
press, the President not only confirmed that the story was true, but also
declared that he has no intention of bringing these wholesale invasions of
privacy to an end.
At present, we still have much to learn about the NSA's
domestic surveillance. What we do know about this pervasive wiretapping
virtually compels the conclusion that the President of the United States has
been breaking the law repeatedly and persistently.
A president who breaks the
law is a threat to the very structure of our government. Our Founding Fathers
were adamant that they had established a government of laws and not men. Indeed,
they recognized that the structure of government they had enshrined in our
Constitution - our system of checks and balances - was designed with a central
purpose of ensuring that it would govern through the rule of law. As John Adams
said: "The executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers,
or either of them, to the end that it may be a government of laws and not of
men.".............

Watch the full speech here.

It's long but informative and important.