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Judge Orders DOJ To Turn Over FISA Surveillance Documents
itwbennett (1594911) writes "In a victory for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which is suing to make the DOJ release information about surveillance on U.S. citizens, a California judge on Friday ordered the Department of Justice to produce 66 pages of documents for her review. The judge said the agency failed to justify keeping the documents secret and she will decide whether the documents, including one opinion and four orders by the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), were improperly withheld from the public."
The executive branch has thought itself above the constitution since 1789
Fixed it for you.
(If you want to cut Washington a break you could say 1801. Jefferson thought the Louisiana purchase unconstitutional but did it anyway, perhaps the first "the ends justify the means" rationalization used by an American President. Then of course we have 1861 and Abe's questionable activities during the American Civil War)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
All three branches of government along with the intelligence agencies have proven that they cannot be trusted to hide behind the shield of 'classified information'.
Our rights are rapidly vanishing and a police state is being erected. It has become a competition between each newly elected or appointed set of government to see how they can break more laws than the last guys. It's not a democrat or a republican thing, it's a wealthy-and-powerful thing. The wealthy and powerful are using government to find new ways to control you, spy on you, rob you and imprison you.
If ever there was a time to push for the 'classified information' curtain to be torn down, that time is now. Information is being kept secret not for national security reasons, but to make it harder to expose overreach and lawlessness by our own government.
Last I checked, poor people don't have monopolies on TV and Radio shows so so they can attempt to shape society. They don't influence tax code to give themselves more money and screw over those rich guys. They are not paying lobbyists to get favorable laws passed. They are not spending billions of dollars in foreign countries to start civil wars, and they are not out generating propaganda so that they can send the rich kids off to die in a war for profit.
Sure, there are people in every society that will take advantage of others for gain. We are supposed to have laws protecting us universally from that happening, yet today if you are rich you can take billions and walk but if you are poor and sell a joint you are doing 1-5 years.
So yeah, the ideologies are always going to be around. Those ideologies have been around since our earliest political writings (read Plato's "The Republic"). This is why we (you included) should be fighting to clean up the corruption, end the monopolization of media, and break up the financial cartels.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Stalemate continued, EFF showed some promise, but the DoJ has to 1) actually comply with the order, 2) The judge actually agree on merits, 3) The DoJ not immediately file for an appeal due to matters of national saftey, 4) the DoJ actually give the information to the EFF.
Don't get me wrong, what happened today was good, however calling it a victory is a bit premature.
There is a limit to this. For reference, see Iran 1979.
The Iran in 1979 was a police state if there ever was one. Ubiquitous secret police, extreme suppression of dissenters, the fourth largest military on the planet (all thanks to us, btw).
And then the students hit the roads by the millions. Interviews with them later revealed that they well expected to die that day. And they were not the religious jihadist kind, that came later, they were simply fed up with the regime to the point where their stance towards the Shah was "you or me. At the end of this day, one of us is gone. Either is fine by me, but that's how it will be".
The military pretty much noticed that. What do you want to do? What are you going to do after the 30 bullets in your rifle are shot? Sure, your kill/death ratio will be 30:1.
The problem is: the 1 is you. And no respawn.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You are suggesting that having any confidential information in a democracy is anti-democratic. That is clearly nonsense.
No, that's not it at all. Look, *nobody* is saying that the nuclear launch codes shouldn't be top secret information and not given out to the public, and *nobody* is saying that our nuclear bomb research (in depth) shouldn't be secret... but it's not a secret that there *are* launch codes and bomb secrets. Nobody is saying that we shouldn't have secret research for new military hardware, Lockheed Skunkworks type stuff, etc - we know it exists and much of it is "black budget" stuff, but there's a reason it's secret.
Nobody (I don't think) is saying the government shouldn't be able to *get a warrant* (with reasonable suspicions) to wiretap someone, track their cell location, and any number of other things. Even if the warrant is issued by a secret court on a person-by-person basis, there may well be reasons the warrant shouldn't be "public record". That being said, *everyone* should be against warrantless tracking/wiretapping of citizens of your country, not of select people but of *everyone* in bulk. If they can't come up with a reason for someone, much less *everyone*, to be a "suspect" and get a properly issued warrant from a judge for that person (or people) *by name*, then they shouldn't be doing it because it is illegal. They don't want the documents of even just what they are doing (in general, without any specific names/people) released - nobody is asking them where the 'taps' are for the internet cables, what the exact technology is they are using, etc... but when they can go in front of Congress and flat out *lie* about gathering information on everyone, there's an obvious problem.