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Cold War Warrantless Wiretapping
somanyrobots writes "President Gerald Ford secretly authorized the use of warrantless domestic wiretaps for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes soon after coming into office, according to a declassified document. The Dec. 19, 1974, White House memorandum, marked Top Secret / Exclusively Eyes Only and signed by Ford, gave then-Attorney General William B. Saxbe and his successors in office authorization 'to approve, without prior judicial warrants, specific electronic surveillance within the United States which may be requested by the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.'" And reader jlaprise1 adds, "My research [from 2009] makes the news! President Ford authorized warrantless wiretaps in December 1976 and laid the foundation (PDF) for US telecommunications security policy."
This can't really surprise anyone. I'm sure there are plenty of things our government has kept from us either "for our own good" (their rationale for hiding their actions) and for national security reasons (we can't disclose everything). But how much do we really want to know? No matter how much they tell us we always suspect more ... and the conspiracy theorists will only use the truth to build even more elaborate plots of imaginative intrigue and nefarious actions.
What's the big deal--good guys fighting bad guys to protect America and the free world. Too bad George W. Bush didn't take some similar initiative before allowing 9/11 to happen.
If you believe in Democracy, then you implicitly endorse secret police.
If you believe in anything else, then you explicitly endorse those same powers out in the open.
The only difference is how much we are willing to delude ourselves. We call ourselves Free, but we haven't been so since September 24, 1862.
President Ford, General Motors... What's next? Actors in politics?
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was passed in 1978. Prior to that, there were no legal checks on government surveillance. I assume every president was doing it from the moment the equipment was invented.
I remember an old joke that went something like this...
"NSA is conducting advanced research in the fields of applied mathematics, signal processing, and cryptography. To apply for one of these exciting positions, just pick up the phone, call your grandmother, and ask for one!"
Life imitates art :-)
I guess we'll find out in ~40 years, when we are either dead, or too old to care any more.
Although, "Get off my lawn!" crimes have no statute of limitations, and you are never to old to scream it.
So what secret authorizations were issued by Bush . . . and are still in effect under Obama?
I guess I will probably never know.
Ah, isn't ignorance bliss?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Who was Ford's first Chief of Staff? Donald Rumsfeld. And when Rumsfeld became his Secretary of Defense, who did Ford appoint Chief of Staff in his place? Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld's assistant. And who did Ford make his head of the CIA? George H. W. Bush. All of this happened during the "Halloween Massacre" of November 1975. This put Rumsfeld and Bush on Ford's NSC. Cheney would not have on the NSC, but he certainly would have known about it. Consider this story about memos Cheney wrote in 1975 regarding a Seymour Hersch story about the US tapping Soviet underwater cables. Cheney was clearly in the loop on intelligence and surveillance programs. So three of George W. Bush's closest advisors - his father, his Secretary of Defense, and his Vice-President - would have known about this. Don't you think when Cheney or Rumsfeld suggested this, they said to W. "Gerry Ford did it, and no one complained that it was unConstitutional - just ask your father." (Admittedly, Rumsfeld and Bush Sr. aren't exactly friendly - Rumsfeld tried to push Bush Sr. out at CIA back in the Ford days, and Bush Sr. was one of the main critics in the back-office attempts - eventually successful - to push Rumsfeld out at Defense in 2006. But it's very interesting to see how closely the Ford Administration was tied to the W. administration.) My point is that there was a cabal in the Ford and Bush administrations, with Rumsfeld and Cheney at its core, who have a history of evangelizing the idea of broad electronic surveillance which I would argue violates our Constitutional guarantees against arbitrary searches. There were other cliques in the W. administration with similar ideas (John Poindexter), so perhaps we should see this as something that W. believed in, strongly.
President Gerald Ford secretly authorized the use of warrantless domestic wiretaps for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes soon after coming into office, according to a declassified document.
Obligatory image link:
http://images.google.com/images?q=ford+cheney+rumsfeld
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
What finally pushed the Congress into preparing to impeach Nixon was the revelation that Nixon was secretly (and, of course, warrantlessly) wiretapping Congress. Keeping Vietnam going, using the CIA to break into Democratic campaign HQ at the Watergate (and a shrink's office) - all just "business as usual". But the wiretapping was enough to push them over the edge.
So George Bush Sr, Republican National Committee Chair, went to Nixon to explain that enough Congressional Republicans would vote to impeach that he would be impeached. So Nixon resigned. And Ford, who Nixon had got to replace his original VP, Spiro Agnew, when Agnew was convicted of income tax evasion (on massive bribes he'd taken but not reported to the IRS), inherited Nixon's evil empire. George Bush Sr inherited the CIA.
And then Ford started warrantlessly wiretapping people, just like Nixon had. Nixon was wiretapping not only Congress, but all kinds of political enemies, including anti-war and environmentalist activists, counterculture figures like John Lennon. Nixon turned the White House into a Republican Kremlin. And Ford kept it that way.
In 1978, with Democrat Carter in the White House a Democratic Congress passed FISA, which was designed to be the supreme law controlling wiretapping. Nominally subordinate to only the 4th Amendment, which it violated by allowing exceptions to the Amendment's requirement of a warrant issued prior to any wiretapping.
Republican George Bush Jr inherited the presidency in 2000. And soon wiretapped every American, all our phonecalls and email, without a warrant. Even though the FISA court issued a warrant, before or after the fact, for every single one of the hundreds of thousands of requests it got, however invalid any of those requests might have been.
Even to the point of wiretapping conversations between defendants and their lawyers in cases brought by the Bush "Justice" Department, which was just ruled illegal, years later. With Bush leaving office unimpeached.
The Congress should've impeached Nixon. It should have impeached Bush. Hell, it should've impeached Reagan, for running the secret Iran/Contra wars, illegally supplying Iran with weapons and shipping drugs like cocaine and opium around on CIA planes - the investigation probably would have turned up warrantless wiretapping to protect the other illegal programmes.
But we didn't. And Republicans, even Bushes (and Cheneys) get to walk around free, free to run for office. And a large section of the public that believes "it's only a crime if you get caught" treats those criminals and traitors to their oaths to protect the Constitution as "statesmen".
As every time before, the next one will be even worse. Hi, president Romney, how ya doin'?
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make install -not war
I am afraid you folks down south of the border (I am Canadian) have been reduced to having an illusion of democracy and your Constitutional Rights. I know the average American supports the Constitution and believes implicitly in the American system of government etc. Its a great system overall, but I think its been abused for the past 50 years or so - at least by the Republicans when in power. You don't have a right to privacy, you don't have the right of free speech, you don't have the right to avoid unlawful search and seizure - all those things have been stripped away systematically by succeeding US presidencies. These things have been done in the name of "National Security", but really they are in large part a way for the party in power to stay in power, and for the Republicans to keep control over US society and its laws. I hope something is done to rectify this, perhaps Obama can manage it, but I highly doubt much will change.
Good luck getting your country back!
Sadly, under Prime Minister Harper, my country is heading the same way. We have a prime minister who is willing to prorogue Parliament whenever there is the possibility that he might be challenged over his cavalier actions. He has done so twice so far and I see no signs he is likely to stop until he is unelected. Sadly the opposition parties can't find their asses with both hands at the moment, so the whole country suffers.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Wiretapping is not mentioned in the Constitution, but one's "persons, houses, papers, and effects" have been interpreted in many but not all cases to include electronic communications. Some of the cases where the courts have not extended constitutional protection in this way are for foreign communications and for domestic communications with agents of foreign powers.
A few years after the Ford memo mentioned above, Congress passed the FISA statute, in an attempt to somewhat restrict these constitutionally-permitted warrantless wiretaps. However, it is not a settled question whether the Congress has the right, through legislation, to restrict the President's authority, as Commander-in-Chief, to conduct otherwise-constitutional foreign intelligence operations.
The bottom line is that the issue is not as clear as you might think.
What I find so sad is that every time a leader commits a crime in the United States someone finds new history to say "they've always done it that way". I think the country and the system deserve to actually follow their own laws maybe that way it might get better. Laws should apply to people in power, not just the downtrodden.
The majority of people would just label the answers as conspiracy theories. Do you know that THERE WERE people during cold war times who accused the government of warrantless wiretapping? And what did those people receive in return? They were either labelled as conspiracy theorists or KGB agents or communist sympathizers. Pretty much the same is happening now against intellectuals like Noam Chomsky.
That should read:
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
dist0rbing. I8f you conversation and
And we tried "hopey changey" with Jimmy Carter... It's not much of a stretch to say we are in Nixon's 11th term in office.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Seems our overlords learned from history and chose to repeat it.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
The really big deal in the document is the redaction. In the earlier version, item C allowing minimal physical intrusion was redacted. In the version I FOIAed it was declassified.
What's the big deal? In 1974, electronic surveillance wasn't covered by the law. The law didn't even envision such a thing. Breaking and entering, however the law was well prepared to deal with.
Ford authorized the DoJ to conduct break-ins without a warrant. I know really ironic coming on the heels of Nixon, but I have to reiterate; Ford was a really stout defender of privacy rights based on all the research I've done.
John Laprise Ph.D.
Visiting Assistant Professor
Northwestern University in Qatar
On the contrary, I doubt the government is doing anything illegal. They are using techno-legal arbitrage.
Current laws do not protect metadata. The government likely analyzes metadata to find possible terrorist suspects by looking for patterns. It presents those analyses to the FISA court as evidence to look at the content of suspect individuals and FISA grants a warrant. All of this is strictly legal or at least extralegal.
The problem is that telecommunications companies are likely complicit. Private telecommunications law does address such things. That was why they fought so long and hard for immunity. While the government couldn't be held liable, the telcos could.
John Laprise Ph.D.
Visiting Assistant Professor
Northwestern University in Qatar
Well, for starters, Obama has continued Bush's warrantless wiretapping policy. Second, he's continued the tradition of re-authorizing the ongoing state of national emergency which has existed, continuously, since at least 1979. (Each President has issued executive orders, publicly available, declaring that a "state of emergency" exists because of the 1979 Iran Hostage Crisis, not to mention other extreme emergencies like diamond smuggling in Sierra Leone.)
I wouldn't be too upset about these, because the assault on the Constitution is now mostly open rather than secret.
Revive the Constitution.
There's information available, and someone who wants it, and can pay. Beyond unfairly-authorized, there are sure to be lots of undocumented, secret abuses, at several levels of access to the technology, authority, information, and personnel, etc involved.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
For consistency's sake, you also want Obama impeached for continuing the policy, right?
Revive the Constitution.
The judicial branch has no teeth, and no balls. SCOTUS regularly place judicial precedence over what the Constitution actually says, and the actual intent of the Framers' words. I understand that when the shit hits the fan, the Constitution can and should be set aside. This applies to invasions, rebellions, repeated terrorist strikes, etc. But if it isn't an EMERGENCY, they should go to prison. Once the emergency is over, all unconstitutional executive actions should cease. At this point, we should focus on what went wrong, how to fix it in the future, and how to prevent it. An example is the health care bill. Sure, health care is fucked up in most states. What part of the Constitution grants the Federal government power to mandate all Americans to hold health insurance? If it isn't there, and enough people want it (ya know, that whole "democracy" thing), then amend the Constitution. I know it is not an easy or quick process, but doing it any other way is very dangerous. Hell, why not amend the Constitution to speed up the amendment process (if that is possible to do without damaging it)? I hear people say "oh, but how would they have known what would be going two hundred years later?" They knew about tyranny, and oppression, but not about the internet and nuclear weapons! If the Constitution is lacking, and people WANT change, they can amend it. And if not enough people want change, do it in your state. If you can't accomplish what you want in the United States of America, or in any state, vote with your feet.
'Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.' - Mao Tse-tung
One supposes, if there is any sanity in our legal system AT ALL, that information so gathered would never be admissible in court.
But if the idea was to use it to figure out stuff like which previously trusted CIA employee shouldn't have further access to classified information, or should be deliberately fed misinformation, during the cold war, I suspect a lot of people would have been pretty okay with that.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
All modern presidents have done the same thing. http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=75&aid=96665
Its a great system overall, but I think its been abused for the past 50 years or so - at least by the Republicans when in power.
It's been abused by politicians and bureaucrats of all political persuasions for as long as there have been politicians and bureaucrats.
And the US doesn't have a monopoly on that kind of behavior BTW.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
...in America.
What strikes me is that some of the discussions here are STILL about Republicans Democrates. Those people don't get it.
The topic SHOULD be about the fact that a president that spies on his own citizens.
Privacy is terrorism.
History in some cases does repeat itself as there are very few items that have not been done before. This is an unfortunate state of affairs.
Where is the back bone of the US presidents that would even consider this type of flagrant violation of the constitution? I suppose the same place that Bush and company get their idea for commission of torture to prisoners of war. This is perhaps worse than wire tapping but it is still against the constitution.
What we may want to do in the future is too put wires on the president of the US and every time he authorizes an illegal act a nice volt of electricity would come down the wires and send a jolt to his gonads (or if its a woman to her vagina).
Hey its legal according to Bush's special commission" he is not in uniform and he is a combatant as he orders soldiers into wars. This sounds like officer to me.