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Wiretapping Program Ruled Legal
BuhDuh writes "The New York Times is carrying a story concerning that well known bastion of legal authority, the 'Foreign Intelligence Surveillance' court, which has ruled that the National Security Agency's warrantless eavesdropping program was perfectly legal. It says, 'A federal intelligence court, in a rare public opinion, is expected to issue a major ruling validating the power of the president and Congress to wiretap international phone calls and intercept e-mail messages without a court order, even when Americans' private communications may be involved, according to a person with knowledge of the opinion.'"
You should ask the people in Cairo where they think we're heading. Egypt's a "democratic" country terrorizing its people under the guise of a "war on terror." Really, you just need to intercept communications of those people who oppose you in any form or fashion and simply provide even the slightest proof that they belong to The Muslim Brotherhood. The screams in the night are nothing to concern you, comrade, you haven't done anything wrong so why should you be worried?
I don't think anything really bad is being done against the American people at this moment. I do think that boundaries are being crossed whereby if the wrong person gets into power, there is no going back. Just ask yourself: What Would Nixon Do?
My work here is dung.
So what time do the riots and looting start? I'm not off work til 5pm but I gotta pickup the kids and get them home by 6pm, oh and I have to watch an episode of House MD before I can head out. On second thought, I do have to work tomorrow and don't want to be inconvenienced, so lets put them off until its warmer outside as well, maybe next year, or the year after?
*Goes back to staring at the god box and doing as told.
cheers.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
"Seriously, can anyone tell me ANYTHING whatsoever that the 4th amendment does now?"
A communication coming in abroad is no different than a package. The government has *always* had a right to intercept foreign shipments and communications. The 4th applies to American citizens *in* America not aything about people who are not Americans or persons (be they American or not) overseas.
"Ahh! Arrogance and stupidity in the same package, how efficient of you!" --Londo Molari
"The question whether the judges are invested with exclusive authority to decide on the constitutionality of a law has been heretofore a subject of consideration with me in the exercise of official duties. Certainly there is not a word in the Constitution which has given that power to them more than to the Executive or Legislative branches."
--Thomas Jefferson to W. H. Torrance, 1815. ME 14:303
http://www.landmarkcases.org/marbury/jefferson.html
"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."
In other words, it isn't very hard for 5 lawyers to screw things up for everyone!
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
But I strongly suspected this already. Most people who actually analyzed the situation and the LAW thought it was a strong possibility.
Unfortunately, every time I attempted to discuss the actual LAW, I (and others) were shouted down (and modded down) by the "WHARGARBLL FUCK BUSH BLAHGHGHG!!" crowd, who'd rather not have their prejudices disproven.
Things can be legal, and still be intrusive and wrong on a moral level.
Perhaps in the future, all of you who screamed "Illegal wiretaps!!!!" at the top of your lungs will take the time to listen.
PS, I think it's shitty too, but that doesn't make it illegal.
"The government grants you rights, not the other way around."-- beav007. Yes, these people really exist...
Every last one of these sons of bitches should be in jail.
What, without a speedy trial by a jury of their peers? Isn't that unconstitutional?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
The FISA court is simply recognizing that no one has a right to privacy when making an international call. Freedom of Speech does not make any guarantee of privacy, nor does Freedom from Search & Seizure exist at the border. The NSA program specifically targeted phone calls between the US and a foreign country.
The FISA court still needs to exist to temper abuse for domestic wire taps.
I've explained this several times on this site and I'm glad to see the court has finally figured out how to read.
This is about the program under the law passed by Congress which authorized warrantless wiretapping after the President was doing it; not the program which was carried out prior to that by the President in direct contravention to the prohibitions of the statute law existing at the time.
Of course, one might reasonably question whether the decision comports with the Constitution even there, but its an important distinction to make, since there have been issues both with the power of government as a whole and the independent power of the President, regardless of the laws passed by Congress relating to warrantless wiretapping, and the two issues sometimes get muddled.
In other news, the Fox Court has ruled that hen-house raids by foxes are legal. Shocking.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
We can hope with fingers crossed that one of the conservative scumbags retires or dies very soon.
Scumbags really depends on your point of view and the particular case in question. I can think of at least three cases off the top of my head where the so-called liberal justices were the scumbags:
Gonzales v. Raich: The Federal Government can arrest cancer patients for using cannabis even where such use is legal under State law. The liberals (joined by Scalia and Kennedy) all voted in favor of it. O'Connor, Rehnquist and Thomas opposed it.
Kelo v. City of New London: The State can seize your private property for the benefit of private (i.e: Wal-Mart) development. The Liberals (joined by Kennedy) didn't have any problems with this. Scalia, O'Connor, Rehnquist and Thomas all dissented.
District of Columbia v. Heller: The Liberals all dissented in this case, which held that the 2nd amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. Apparently that's too much freedom for them.
Those are just the ones that I can think of off the top my head. Trust me when I say that the Liberal wing of the court is no better at protecting our rights.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The tag "bushcrimesyndicate" is inaccurate. For those of you who haven't read the Constitution, Congress is responsible for setting up all Federal courts, including the FISA court (surely nobody believes that Bush created FISA...).
"politiciancrimesyndicate" is much more accurate.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
It's not like they don't have what's best for you in mind.
Actually, in all seriousness, I believe that they do. I think that all the paranoia about them trying to enslave our minds to support some massive corporate/governing elite by censoring our movements, restricting our speech, and stripping our rights away is nonsense. I think that the Intelligence agencies and probably better than half of our governing body is motivated (mainly) by wanting to do what's best for us and keep us safe.
The problem is that their idea of what's "best for us" may not line up with mine and I'll be damned if I'm going to voluntarily abandon rights because it may-or-may-not make some minimal impact on my safety that would be dwarfed by efforts on the non-terror front. I don't so much question their intentions (although I don't object too loudly when other people do - blind trust is usually a bad idea), I just object to their methods.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
You leave out the interesting case where the person abroad is a foreign correspondent for an American news agency. Its been established by whistle blowers that journalists have been a particular target of this eavesdropping, along with aid workers. You are in fact trampling freedom of the press if you let the government read and listen to all the emails and phone calls of a journalists without a warrant. It allows the government to immediately identify all of the journalists sources unless the contact is only made face to face which is pretty constraining. It places an immediate chilling effect on an independent press and on anyone telling a journalist anything. This is a big plus for the government and military which would prefer the public not know about all their dirty laundry.
@de_machina
Since December 15, 1791.
The first amendment allows freedom of expression, even if the idea being expressed is to abolish the existing government.
The second amendment was not passed to protect the rights of hunters. It was passed so that common citizens could, in the inevitable instance that their government becomes tyrannical, can be overthrown. In 1791, "well-regulated" did not mean that the militia would be "regulated" or licensed by the government (you didn't need a license for anything in 1791). "Well-regulated" meant a militia that could shoot straight.
These ideas were not outrageous to the founding fathers. They themselves had just violently overthrown their government. While not law, these ideas are expressed clearly in the opening of the Declaration of Independence:
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
That's bull. What hate America, left wing source gave you that information and tried to compare us to Egypt in terms of democracy? This is patently false on it's face. Egypt instantly fails the first test anyone would do when trying to determine see if a country is a democracy. They don't have any free or fair elections. Hosni Mubarak proved that beyond a shadow of a doubt. They have been a mild dictatorship at best for decades, and everyone knows it. Contrast that to the US... if we were a dictatorship under president Bush, as so many on the left wildly claim, then why is he voluntarily leaving power? A dictator doesn't care about term limits. And why is someone he didn't vote for coming to power? Because we still respect the will of the people in this country. We actually are a democracy and don't have hand picked successors.
How about we ask, "What would George Washington do?" Answer: The exact same thing. Ever since this country was founded we have done this same sort of stuff. The early presidents all found spying ok, all engaged in it, and all inspected foreign mail during war. Move forward a little and you'll find that FDR and JFK did the same sorts of warrantless wiretapping we are doing now, and they are Democrat heroes. In fact, Robert Kennedy did more than probably anyone in history. There is a difference between regular criminal mischief and war, and a difference between American citizens protected under the constitution and people from other countries. Most reasonable people recognize this. During wars especially, but even when not at war, the US (and all other nations) have the right to spy on each other without asking for a warrant from the international court. Only our own citizens are protected from illegal search and seizure under the constitution. Foreign enemy terrorists are not. Sorry.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Intelligence collection on non-US Persons outside of the US has never required a warrant, throughout the entire history of the United States.
The difference occurred when traffic of non-US Persons outside of the US started traveling through the US. Suddenly a warrant is required because digital traffic passed through a routing center in Chicago when one end is in Pakistan and the other is in Saudi Arabia? That's what the now-sunset Protect America Act temporarily fixed, and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 permanently fixes.
If you believe that a warrant should be required for intelligence collection on persons outside of the US with no legal standing of any kind with the US (i.e., citizen, vistor, legal resident, etc.), then you are completely out of step with all law, intelligence policy, and scholarship on the issue.
FISA is a dedicated branch of the Federal Court system set up for the sole purpose of handling warrants for the intelligence agencies. All of it's members are required to have a Top Secret or better security clearance and it is very much a closed door court.
Most of the paperwork that goes through FISA is classified in some way or another, so its not available for review like normal court documents. In some ways, it's a lot more like a Grand Jury where everything is sealed until after the trial. The only problem is that Intelligence agency work is almost never done, so nothing ever becomes unsealed.
As for history, FISA was created in response to Nixon & Watergate. It satisfied the needs of the intelligence community to be able to work in secret inside the US to handle cross border work, while still maintaining checks & balances on the actual activity. Currently, god only knows what kind of check it's actually performing - last report I saw was rating @ 99+% approval of warrant requests.
The reason that the Constitution is so short, and so vague, is that it is a Treaty among the states that could not agree on anything. Prior to the failure of the Articles of Confederation, the states, having just rebelled against a Federal Power in Great Britain, did not want any power over them at all. They only adopted the Constitution because the founders recognized that there existed a need for a small, but powerful, Federal Government, to provide for some basic, common things, like military and regulation of commerce among the states.
Anything else, not in the Constitution, is explicitly left to the states, and that says, essentially, that if it is not in the Constitution, then the Federal Government is NOT allowed to do it.
So yeah, you could make a pretty strong case that, in the strict sense, Bush's wiretapping is illegal as it is not an enumerated power. However, this country, perhaps wrongly, largely believes that the Constitution is a "living document", not the treaty that it is. While this view is propagated by the American left wing - Obama even spells this out in his book, it is also true that the right wing, particularly under President Bush, has also taken the "living document" approach. Thus, the Federal Government now has the power to regulate the environment, local schools, hiring practices, voting within the states (and THAT is blatantly unconstitutional), and any other number of things.
So, it's not just that Bush is unconstitutional. It's that, every President since even Jefferson and arguably even George Washington has been unconstitutional! Jefferson, you will recall, argued rather violently against a strong federal government, but then had no problem with actually going out and purchasing the Louisiana territories from the French, lying to Congress, fighting an undeclared war against the French and Barbary Pirates, all the while writing about Freedom in an enormous set of letters to Madison and everyone else, bitching about slavery while knocking his own slaves up.
So yeah, you -could- make the case, that all the Presidents are unconstitutional, and the whole damn thing was a failure, except that, there were those who actually saw the Constitution as the creation of a President as essentially a king for a democratically restricted length of time, his power for war and taxation removed from him, but pretty much able to do whatever he wanted, and within that history then, you would really have to square Dick Cheney's view of the Presidency as Hamiltonian, more than anything else.
This is my sig.