>>Hang that traitor Snowden! sarc/
Comrade Snowden, like Bwadley Manning, is a reflection of the self-serving inbred TSSCI-LIFER bureaucracy that created, and failed to vet them.
Government overreach / post-911 overreaction bump for later...
Why, the NYT sounds like wacko-bird Tea Party paranoids.
This court isn’t that secret. Its members, offices and meeting sites have been published for decades.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Court#Composition
The United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) is a U.S. federal court established and authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA) (50 U.S.C. § 1803, Pub.L. 95–511, 92 Stat. 1788, enacted October 25, 1978). The court oversees requests for surveillance warrants against suspected foreign intelligence agents inside the United States by federal law enforcement agencies (primarily National Security Agency and the F.B.I.). Congress created FISA and its court (also called the FISA Court) as a result of the Church Committee recommendations.[1]
Since 2009, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has been located in the E. Barrett Prettyman United States Courthouse in Washington, D.C.[2][3] For roughly thirty years of its history, it was housed on the sixth floor of the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building.[2][3]
In 2013, a top secret warrant issued by this Court was leaked to the media. That warrant, which ordered Verizon to provide a daily feed of all call detail records – including those for domestic calls – to the National Security Agency, sparked a public outcry of criticism and controversy.
For some interesting specifics of current members and past members got to the site and check out the other data:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Court#Composition
January 12, 2006
Under Clinton, NY Times called surveillance “a necessity”
By William Tate
The controversy following revelations that U.S. intelligence agencies have monitored suspected terrorist related communications since 9/11 reflects a severe case of selective amnesia by the New York Times and other media opponents of President Bush. They certainly didn’t show the same outrage when a much more invasive and indiscriminate domestic surveillance program came to light during the Clinton administration in the 1990’s. At that time, the Times called the surveillance ‘a necessity.’
‘If you made a phone call today or sent an e—mail to a friend, there’s a good chance what you said or wrote was captured and screened by the country’s largest intelligence agency.’ (Steve Kroft, CBS’ 60 Minutes)
Those words were aired on February 27, 2000 to describe the National Security Agency and an electronic surveillance program called Echelon whose mission, according to Kroft,
‘is to eavesdrop on enemies of the state: foreign countries, terrorist groups and drug cartels. But in the process, Echelon’s computers capture virtually every electronic conversation around the world.’
Echelon was, or is (its existence has been under—reported in the American media), an electronic eavesdropping program conducted by the United States and a few select allies such as the United Kingdom.
Tellingly, the existence of the program was confirmed not by the New York Times or the Washington Post or by any other American media outlet — these were the Clinton years, after all, and the American media generally treats Democrat administrations far more gently than Republican administrations — but by an Australian government official in a statement made to an Australian television news show.
The Times actually defended the existence of Echelon when it reported on the program following the Australians’ revelations.
‘Few dispute the necessity of a system like Echelon to apprehend foreign spies, drug traffickers and terrorists....’
And the Times article quoted an N.S.A. official in assuring readers
‘...that all Agency activities are conducted in accordance with the highest constitutional, legal and ethical standards.’
Of course, that was on May 27, 1999 and Bill Clinton, not George W. Bush, was president.
Even so, the article did admit that
‘...many are concerned that the system could be abused to collect economic and political information.’
Despite the Times’ reluctance to emphasize those concerns, one of the sources used in that same article, Patrick Poole, a lecturer in government and economics at Bannock Burn College in Franklin, Tenn., had already concluded in a study cited by the Times story that the program had been abused in both ways.
‘ECHELON is also being used for purposes well outside its original mission. The regular discovery of domestic surveillance targeted at American civilians for reasons of ‘unpopular’ political affiliation or for no probable cause at all... What was once designed to target a select list of communist countries and terrorist states is now indiscriminately directed against virtually every citizen in the world,’ Poole concluded.
The Times article also referenced a European Union report on Echelon. The report was conducted after E.U. members became concerned that their citizens’ rights may have been violated. One of the revelations of that study was that the N.S.A. used partner countries’ intelligence agencies to routinely circumvent legal restrictions against domestic spying.
‘For example, [author Nicky] Hager has described how New Zealand officials were instructed to remove the names of identifiable UKUSA citizens or companies from their reports, inserting instead words such as ‘a Canadian citizen’ or ‘a US company’. British Comint [Communications intelligence] staff have described following similar procedures in respect of US citizens following the introduction of legislation to limit NSA’s domestic intelligence activities in 1978.’
Further, the E.U. report concluded that intelligence agencies did not feel particularly constrained by legal restrictions requiring search warrants.
‘Comint agencies conduct broad international communications ‘trawling’ activities, and operate under general warrants. Such operations do not require or even suppose that the parties they intercept are criminals.’
The current controversy follows a Times report that, since 9/11, U.S.
intelligence agencies are eavesdropping at any time on up to 500 people in the U.S. suspected of conducting international communications with terrorists. Under Echelon, the Clinton administration was spying on just about everyone.
‘The US National Security Agency (NSA) has created a global spy system, codename ECHELON, which captures and analyzes virtually every phone call, fax, email and telex message sent anywhere in the world,’
...the (FISA) court has taken on a much more expansive role by regularly assessing broad constitutional questions and establishing important judicial precedents, with almost no public scrutiny, according to current and former officials familiar with the court’s classified decisions.
The 11-member Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, was once mostly focused on approving case-by-case wiretapping orders. But since major changes in legislation and greater judicial oversight of intelligence operations were instituted six years ago, it has quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court, serving as the ultimate arbiter on surveillance issues and delivering opinions that will most likely shape intelligence practices for years to come, the officials said.
More than a Supreme court...more powerful, more sinister
This article highlights the problem.
There is no provision for a FISA court at all, and particular not with these powers in the US Constitution.
There is a provision where a case by case basis for probable cause could be determined against specific US citizens to see if they were about to commit a crime, and then a judge approving a warrant regarding that specific case...all of which would come out in open court at a trial and be able to be contested. Each and every time.
Here, you have a secret court, in the name of "national security," stepping far outside its constitutional bounds and amassing data on all people. With no conceivable probable cause whatsoever. And then approving en masse collection of data clearly against the 4th amendment...and approving it themselves. So, a secret court, outside of being contested or scrutinized, which was never called for in the constitution, approving unconstitutional actions.
Such power is the very basis and foundation for corruption and ultimately for despotism. Such a horrible precedent establishes a temptation to use that data for much, much more than any terror related plot on an individual basis. To use it to silence, intimidate, blackmail, or influence purely political considerations. And we are seeing an administration succumb to that temptation almost on a daily basis.
And now even higher level whistle blowers have come forward, detailing and punctuating what Snowden revealed.
Interview with three high level PRISM Whislt Blowers - Part 1
Interview with three high level PRISM Whislt Blowers - Part 2
See tagline....
Bookmark
So....nullifying the Fourth Amendment and surveillance Of ALL Americans is supposedly justified as a result of testing railway workers for drugs back in 1989?? Is this not unbelievable?
...Obama issues an Executive Order to the Sun...
....to increase it's magnetic field....
and make a good crop of sunspots before elections in 2016....
(PhysOrg.com) -- Sunspot formation is triggered by a magnetic field, which scientists say is steadily declining. They predict that by 2016 there may be no remaining sunspots, and the sun may stay spotless for several decades.
The last time the sunspots disappeared altogether was in the 17th and 18th century, and coincided with a lengthy cool period on the planet known as the Little Ice Age....and lasted 400 years.
Good luck surviving with no electricity and GE modified seeds.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news203746768.html#jCp
The NYT is only about a month behind English newspapers on all of this.
This crud is old news, folks.
The “Gray Lady” is not relevant any more.
“In denying the right [the Supreme Court usurps] of exclusively explaining the Constitution, I go further than [others] do, if I understand rightly [this] quotation from the Federalist of an opinion that ‘the judiciary is the last resort in relation to the other departments of the government, but not in relation to the rights of the parties to the compact under which the judiciary is derived.’ If this opinion be sound, then indeed is our Constitution a complete felo de se [act of suicide]. For intending to establish three departments, coordinate and independent, that they might check and balance one another, it has given, according to this opinion, to one of them alone the right to prescribe rules for the government of the others, and to that one, too, which is unelected by and independent of the nation. For experience has already shown that the impeachment it has provided is not even a scare-crow... The Constitution on this hypothesis is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please.”
—Thomas Jefferson to Spencer Roane, 1819.
“Contrary to all correct example, [the Federal judiciary] are in the habit of going out of the question before them, to throw an anchor ahead and grapple further hold for future advances of power. They are then in fact the corps of sappers and miners, steadily working to undermine the independent rights of the States and to consolidate all power in the hands of that government in which they have so important a freehold estate.”
—Thomas Jefferson: Autobiography, 1821
“This member of the Government was at first considered as the most harmless and helpless of all its organs. But it has proved that the power of declaring what the law is, ad libitum, by sapping and mining slyly and without alarm the foundations of the Constitution, can do what open force would not dare to attempt.”
—Thomas Jefferson to Edward Livingston, 1825.
.
.