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Domestic Spying Program to Get Judicial Oversight

Posted by samzenpus on from the who-watches-the-watchmen dept.

Alchemist253 writes "The U.S. Justice Department has consented to court oversight (albeit via a secret court) of the controversial domestic wiretapping program (the "Terrorist Surveillance Program") previously discussed at length on Slashdot. From the article, "[oversight] authority has been given to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and [it] already has approved one request for monitoring the communications of a person believed to be linked to al Qaeda or an associated terror group.""

15 of 151 comments (clear)

  1. So it was 100% legal before ... by khasim · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... but with a different Congress ... suddenly it's going back to the court with warrants and everything?

    Makes you kind of wonder how "legal" it was in the first place. And whether this is just an attempt to avoid an investigation.

    1. Re:So it was 100% legal before ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      suddenly it's going back to the court

      And is this Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court actually a court? I mean given that its hearings are in camera by default, it doesn't seem to satisfy the criterion of public scrutiny which characterizes a true judicial court. Any constitutional lawyers here?

    2. Re:So it was 100% legal before ... by mrogers · · Score: 5, Insightful

      By backing down they don't just avoid an investigation, they avoid testing the legality of the program. That could be useful if they want to reinstate the program under the next Congress. But more importantly, the claims about wartime Presidential powers that were used to justify the wiretapping program are still being used to justify other questionably legal actions (perhaps even including the covert expansion of the Iraq war into Iran and Syria). The administration wants to avoid a direct court battle over those powers, and by backing down over the wiretapping program it's hoping to pacify Congress without establishing any precedents.

    3. Re:So it was 100% legal before ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Written constitutions Just Don't Work.

      This has been proven time, and time again - especially in America. More time is spent arguing about the syntax of the document than is spent fighting for and legislating towards the semantic meaning.

      Massive fail all round.

    4. Re:So it was 100% legal before ... by Omestes · · Score: 3, Insightful

      And the alternative is?

      It seems that the American constitution HAS worked rather well in its 200+ year history, sure there are some small glitches from time to time, like McCarthy, and now. But on the whole it has worked, only one superfluous amendment (added, promptly deleted). The strength of it is that it is a living document, meaning its interpretations are supposed to change with the times, arguing about it is a good things. Imagine if it was fixed, the word has changed much in the last 200 years, including people, their values, and what they judge important.

      The constitution is the only thing America has going for it, and the only real hope it has.

      --
      A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
    5. Re:So it was 100% legal before ... by iminplaya · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Massive fail all round.

      Not for Exxon. Or Halliburton. Some folks have done remaarkably well. It turns out that most things don't exist for the reasons we think they do. There's always a "rest of the story" which isn't so pretty as the fairy tale being portrayed as American history.

      --
      What?
    6. Re:So it was 100% legal before ... by omeomi · · Score: 3, Insightful

      usually ascribed to by liberals who cannot achieve their will through the legislative process. It is this philosophy that has lead to the incredible divisiveness that currently infects the US.

      So the current mess we're in is the liberals fault?

      Yeah, right. Pull the other one...

      --
      ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
    7. Re:So it was 100% legal before ... by hey! · · Score: 2, Insightful

      What you are describing is a relatively new judicial philosophy, usually ascribed to by liberals who cannot achieve their will through the legislative process.


      It's hardly an exclusively liberal process. Conservative activist judges have got their interpretive licks in as well.

      The US Constitution was innovative for its day, but it has two major flaws. The first is that it is much more vague than a modern constitution would be, failing to define its terms and spell out clearly the extent and limitations of powers. For example Article 1 Section 8 where the copyright and patent power is granted to Congress. It is extremely vague about the actual extent of the power. Instead it tries to give guidance about how they hope the power will be used via useless dicta: "To promote the progress of science and useful arts...". The same problem infects the Second Amendment: "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State..." It wouldn't have been difficult to eliminate the dicta and spell out the full range of implications.

      The second problem with the Constitution is that it is too hard to amend. The most important thing a law must do is consistently spell out what one may do with impunity, and what one is restricted from doing. The Constitution is constantly being called upon to limit or empower the government in situations beyond the imaginging of the founders (for example wiretapping, see Justice Brandeis' famous dissent in the 1928 case of Olmstead v. United States, a position that was eventually adopted by the court in Katz v. United States in 1967).

      Unfortunately, the second problem finds a solution which is ready made by the first : the nature of the language in the US Constitution is that it demands judicial interpretation. Judges of every stripe, conservative, liberal, statist and libertarian, are called upon to interpret the Constitutoin creatively for each new generation, because the law demands answers from the Constitution which, strictly speaking, aren't in there.

      --
      Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
  2. About %@!#% time! by Kelson · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If they'd just gone through court procedures in the first place (it's not like it's difficult to get a FISA warrant), there wouldn't have been such a controversy in the first place.

    Ironically, it wouldn't surprise me at all to find that the administration's insistence last year that they didn't need judicial overview contributed to the electoral frustration that cost the Republicans control of Congress.

  3. Not good enough by schwaang · · Score: 5, Insightful

    1. It sounds like they won't be pulling NSA cables out of the AT&T (and other) facilities. They're just claiming to use them under FISA now. This wired blog raises some interesting questions about this.
    2. During Attorney General Gonzales' previous congressional testimony on this topic, he was very careful and lawerly in asserting that his statements only applied to the program under discussion, that is the "Terrorist Surveillance Program". The clear implication is that there are other programs besides TSP which have not seen the light of day.

    In short, don't let this stop the oversight hearings.

  4. It still won't be traditional warrants by the+Gray+Mouser · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Which is a good thing.

    First they need to troll through all the communication looking for patterns. Once they find something, then they can eavesdrop specific targets and go for a warrant.

    But you don't know what you're looking for until you find it.

    It sounds like not much is changing really, except FISA has given the ok to the datamining.

  5. Great! by tacokill · · Score: 2, Insightful

    That's exactly what should have happened from the very beginning

    It was obvious then and its obvious now.

  6. Re:THIS PROGRAM MUST END! by kevin_conaway · · Score: 3, Insightful
    FUCK OVERSIGHT! I want this program OVER. Unless I am an actual proven threat in a court of law, there should be nobody listening to anything I'm doing.

    Thats what they're doing. Agency X goes to the FISA court (a court of law mind you) and with A, B and C pieces of information showing that you are a "threat" and that they would like a warrant on you.

  7. Re:THIS PROGRAM MUST END! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Anything less is traitorous fascism

    I don't think those words mean what you think they mean. But treason is defined in the Constitution so you can go ahead and look it up.

    Anyways, all that the FISA courts are doing are approving warrants. A normal court does not require a jury of your peers to do that.

  8. Re:Hunh? by Orange+Crush · · Score: 2, Insightful
    I was hoping that the administration was on the up and up, but this is definitely a signal that what they are and were doing has highly questionable legal merit.

    There's the rub. Even if everything was handled well and no innocent person's privacy was violated without good cause, the lack of oversight makes it wrong. I don't care if they were being nefarious or not, I want the spying investigated and overseen by the judiciary then, now, and forever always. Any organization that says "Trust us, we're working in your best interests!" without accountability is almost certainly not.