Posted on 2/12/2006, 7:58:18 PM by mumps
Seven judges on a secret court have authorized all but one of over 7,500 requests to spy in the name of National Security. They meet in secret, with no published orders, opinions, or public record. Those spied on May never know of the intrusion. Now, Clinton has expanded the powers to include not only electronic, but physical searches.
The aftershock of the Oklahoma City bombing sent Congress scurrying to trade off civil liberties for an illusion of public safety. A good ten weeks before that terrible attack, however with a barely noticed pen stroke President Bill Clinton virtually killed off the Fourth Amendment when he approved a law to expand the already extraordinary powers of the strangest creation in the history of the federal judiciary.
Since its founding in 1978, a secret court created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA rhymes with ice -a) has received 7,539 applications to authorize electronic surveillance within the U.S. In the name of national security, the court has approved all but one of these requests.... Each of these decisions was reached in secret, with no published orders, opinions, or public record. The people, organizations, or embassies spied on were not notified of either the hearing or the surveillance itself. The American Civil Liberties Union was not able to unearth a single instance in which the target of a FISA wiretap was allowed to review the initial application. Nor would the targets be offered any opportunity to see transcripts of the conversations taped by the government and explain their side of the story.....
OPEN-ENDED SURVEILLANCE When Clinton signed Executive Order 12949 on February 9, the frightening mandate of the FISA, court was greatly expanded: It now has legal authority to approve black-bag operations....
(Excerpt) Read more at freerepublic.com ...
Any chance of Bush rolling some of this back? It sounds amazing on its face. Why didn't Wen Ho Lee just "disappear" into one of these Star Chambers, never to return?
Please read the whole article and thread. It's amazing how far we've come in 5 years.
Very strange that this provocative thread has not gotten any responses yet...
Good find.
Thing must not work.
"W" is absolutely correct in ignoring it.
I think the concept of "let them blow up the buildings and then we'll take them to court" is dead.
Of course, to be fair, I must point out that today we are at war, whereas when this thread appeared, we were not. That's a nontrivial difference. Also, the defenses I have heard (at least, the reasonable ones) of the current NSA data-mining (or whatever it is, exactly) all rest on a Chief Executive's inherent authority during wartime. They're not even based on FISA at all (which Bush may in fact be violating); instead, the argument goes that FISA is partially unconstitutional, in that it attempts to restrict powers which constitutionally belong to the President and which Congress cannot take away at all.
This argument may or may not hold water (I think it's pretty sound, but there's an interesting debate to be had), but it wasn't even available to defenders of Clinton's actions back then.
I'm much more concerned about law-abiding Americans enjoying their full constitutional privacy protections.
Don't forget, by 2000, when Clinton signed the executive order, the country had already experienced the 1993 WTC bombings and the Oklahoma City bombing. It's not as though we were terrorism virgins; it's not as though no one could imagine these things (except maybe Condoleeza Rice).
Tough times, tough questions, tough decisions. It's always easy to proclaim your devout belief in civil liberties, due process, and a restrained federal government during good times. But it's amazing how many erstwhile conservatives bailout during the tough times.
You seem to have forgotten that the aforementioned terrorist attacks were treated as law enforcement issues....and I think we all know how effective that was. Right?
There really isn't a burdensome amount of history to study here: just US history from 1900 onward. Time after time, some threat or threats -- real or imagined -- are used to erode civil rights and liberties. Unfortunately, once the perceived threat fades, the legal precedents for government intrusion remain. Absolutely. Time after time.
Now we are a nation of people compelled to urinate on demand for random drug testing, to have our vehicles searched at police discretion, to have our phone conversations and computer activity netted in huge (so huge as to be pointless) data-mining efforts, and on and on.
I'm old school. Actually, I'm just old. I can remember a time when it wasn't this bad. But the slide started long before 9-11. In my youth, it was the war on drugs -- that was the convenient excuse. For my parents' generation, it was the Cold War. And for today's generation, it's the war on terror.
Just look at modern US history. The pattern is there; the court decisions are there; it's never "the people" who go into the courts insisting that one or another right be curtailed for their safety; it's the Attorney General, or the states' attorneys general, or the US Department of Justice. Every decade marks a new onslaught on civil liberties and privacy in the name of some war on something or other. I wonder what will run out first: something new to declare war on or our rights.
Actually, in this case, and these circumstances, the argument was made and won before you were born. The new argument is that collecting foreign intelligence is merely a criminal prosecution. The direct applications have been in place since FDR, with precident from other parallel technologies going back a century from that.
I mean it's not like FISA can write a warrant to search a home or listen to conversations in Germany or France that would stand up to public (and certainly not international) scrutiny.
This is simply political opportunism which relies on the fact that we have not been in a war where the U.S. mainland was under threat of attack since the 1940s, and thus the issue can be misframed to sound like something which has not been actually claimed.
This is not purported to be idle monitoring of political groups, nor intentional collection of information for a criminal prosecution...but monitoring of communications of a group which has declared war on us.
It's like the confusion between holding POWs and holding prisoners. People are doing their darndest to equate them.
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