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When FISA Court Rejects a Surveillance Request, the FBI Issues a NSL Instead
An anonymous reader writes We've talked quite a bit about National Security Letters (NSLs) and how the FBI/DOJ regularly abused them to get just about any information the government wanted with no oversight. As a form of an administrative subpoena -- with a built in gag-order -- NSLs are a great tool for the government to abuse the 4th Amendment. Recipients can't talk about them, and no court has to review/approve them. Yet they certainly look scary to most recipients who don't dare fight an NSL. That's part of the reason why at least one court found them unconstitutional. At the same time, we've also been talking plenty about Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, which allows the DOJ/FBI (often working for the NSA) to go to the FISA Court and get rubberstamped court orders demanding certain 'business records.' As Ed Snowden revealed, these records requests can be as broad as basically 'all details on all calls.' But, since the FISA Court reviewed it, people insist it's legal. And, of course, the FISA Court has the reputation as a rubberstamp for a reason — it almost never turns down a request. However, in the rare instances where it does, apparently, the DOJ doesn't really care, knowing that it can just issue an NSL instead and get the same information. At least that appears to be what the DOJ quietly admitted to doing in a now declassified Inspector General's report from 2008."
It's good we elected Obama who has made sure to bring us "Hope and Change". It's good to know we elected someone who has limited and stopped all the abuses from the Bush era. Just imagine if he had just lied to us and instead simple extended and expanded these abuses of his predecessors. Hopefully we will get a constitutional amendment passed so we can vote our Glorious Leader in for a third term.
Obama alone can't turn the entire government of the United States of America rogue
He has a lot of help from the inside --- people whose sole aim is to turn America into a police state
The bad news is, the government of the United States of America is out of control
The worse news is, we have NO ONE to reign in the government of the United States of America
And that is not enough, the ABSOLUTELY WORST NEWS is, too many of the American citizens have turned into sheeples, and never care how their government functions nor how bad it has turned into
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I can't believe any FISA request was ever turned down. Basically, I thought the purpose of the FISA act was to suspend the constitution. What went wrong?
I am not surprised in the least. The National Security Letters are really nothing more than an end-run around the courts. I'm actually surprised that the FBI even bothers with the FISA court to obtain warrants to go on its fishing expeditions.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
Citizens would never let an NSL stand in their way of their Constitutional Rights.
Not privileges, Rights.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Basically, Law and a Programming Language should basically be the same, from the basic definition they are, but sometimes law is interpreted (this is good and bad both at the same time)
a.) in human interaction law specifies rules & processes for man
b.) in machine operation a programming language specifies rules & processes for machines
And in both domains people try to (ab)use the specified rules to behave in a way, which was not forseen/intended by the rule maker.
I judge this as an exploit of type priviledge escalation.
But we should start hacking law, FBI has a head start!
If I received a NSL and I were in the mind to ignore it to whom should that hypothetical me send that NSL to in order to get maximum press coverage before being shuffled off to prison?
Would a NBC or a CNN publish it?
We have to throw all of them out. All of them. And repeat until they do what they should.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
>. What went wrong
When the judicial branch ruled it unconstitutional, the executive branch ignored the Constitution and do it anyway.
When the Congress choose not to change the law and make illegal immigrants legal, the executive branch chose to ignore the Constitution and write their own law.
The head of the executive, President Obama, has clearly announced that he considers "the failure of Congress" to do exactly what he wants somehow authorizes him to override Congress. In other words, according to his announcement, he actually believes the only legitimate role of Congress is to rubber-stamp whatever the executive wants - choosing not to implement his policy is a "failure" of Congress , and as such is illegitimate and requires him to override their decision. Never mind his oath to "faithfully execute the law".
Perhaps even worse than only 36% voting, the majority of voters couldn't name the incumbent VP. This indicates that they are not nearly informed enough to cast an informed, meaningful vote. They vote based on physical appearance, headlines, and Comedy Central.
I think that the problem is far worse then people not knowing or caring. It seems like the overwhelming majority are strict authoritarians who almost demand that the government is involved in everyone else's life every waking second.
The 'I have nothing to hide' crowd are the most unamerican, morally bankrupt, cowardly scumbags on earth, and they vastly outnumber the rest.
Put it to you this way; if a thousand teenagers can rush and overwhelm a mall, then the NSA isn't all powerful.
Did you seriously just try to use the existence of flash mobs as an argument that the NSA surveillance state is inept?
I don't even...
Obama alone can't turn the entire government of the United States of America rogue
Maybe he can't, but we'll never know, because surveillance is one thing he's supported since before he was elected. He is on the side of the NSA, and has been, publicly, for a long time.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
NBC and CNN are far more likely to cave, foreign outfit much less. Now the problem would be for you to interrest them into your story. An alternatrive would be to publish it on ACLU or EFF forums or similars.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
They have found a way to game the system, and then found others who will finance and follow their criminal model. Eventually with time and money the foam rises to the top of the septic tank...
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
I wish you would all crawl back into your bunker full of hot-pockets and stop poluting the air with your rancid breath
Well, see here, that's not how democracy works. You don't get to suppress someone else's view simply because it is not in accord with your own.
So go fuck yourself
You seriously think fascist cares about democracy?
To the fascists 'democracy' is, borrowing a term coined by a very well known fascist from Turkey, a 'bus'
According to Recep Tayyip Erdogan, democracy works like a 'bus'. He hops on that bus, use the bus to get him to his destination, and then, he gets off
Fascists are all alike, no matter if they are Islamists from Turkey or Obama-cronies from the United States of America. To them, democracy is but a tool for them to attain what they want, and once they got what they want, democracy can go to hell
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
It happens all the time, at all levels. Another common example is carefully crafting laws to work around judicial decisions.
Say, the supreme court rules that women have a right to first-trimester abortion as an extension of the right to privacy in medical and personal matters. There's not enough political agreement throughout the country to get a constitutional amendment passed changing this, which would be the appropriate solution for those who disagree with the ruling. So what's the solution? Keep abortion legal. But mandate background checks on all women, require clinics be subject to ridiculous health regulations just to dispense a pill, require they all have a doctor granted admitting privlidge at a local hospital while knowing full well that many hospitals will refuse to grant it to anyone who performs elective abortion, require a two-day waiting period, and require women be informed against all medical knowledge that the procedure will increase their risk of cancer. The supreme court is thus subverted: Abortion is legal, but effectively unavailable to many.
There's a similar approach with the Mount Soledad Cross - every time a court rules it illegal, the government quickly shifts ownership to another jurisdiction and thus takes it out of the authority of that court, or renders the decision inapplicable. Nearly thirty years that legal battle has been going on now, and late last year (2014) congress snuck a clause in an appropriations bill authorising the sale to a private party in order to pull the same trick again.
Or the issue with sex offender exclusions. Courts have ruled that cities cannot pass laws prohibiting released sex offenders from residency, because that would be effectively an extra punishment on top of that which the court has authorised as a proper part of the justice system, plus it's legally prohibited to retroactively increase the severity of a sentence. So instead they pass exclusion zones, saying that sex offenders may not live within so many yards of any school. Or shopping mall. Or daycare center. Or school bus stop. Or ice rink. Or cinema. Or playground Anywhere children might be encountered. With enough exclusions, entire cities are rendered off-limits. Or they can impose reporting requirements that are intentionally impossible to comply with, like requiring the offender to go around to every neighbour within a certain radius and announce their address and sex offender status - thus ensuring they are subject to vigilantee attacks and destruction of property, with the ultimate intention of making life so unbearable they are forced to leave the city. Once again the court is subverte by achieving indirectly what cannot be done openly.
You mention some reasonably good examples, though clearly from a very one-sided viewpoint.
Obama has chosen not to "work around" decisions of the courts and the Congress, but rather to simply declare new law. He then declared that he MUST write new law because the Congress "failed to" (chose not to) pass the law he wanted. I think that might be a completely new precedent, for a president to say "Congress decided not to approve my proposal to chanhe the law, so I must therefore proceed as if they did" (rather than faithfully executing the law). The implication is that it's illegitimate for Congress to do anything but rubber-stamp the president's proposals. That may be new in American history.
Examples include Congress (at his urging) passed a health insurance law with certain dates and deadlines in it. Obama then unilaterally changed the deadlines, and also unilaterally changed the qualifications for eligibility that Congress wrote into the law. More concerning, probably, are his statements about illegal immigrants. Congress voted down his proposal - so he implemented it anyway, claiming that it's the job of Congress to approve whatever he wants to do. That's new, isn't it, or do you know of any earlier examples of that doctrine?
Unfortunately, any law can be abused. Just look at the drug laws. Even though minorities use illegal drugs less, they make up a majority of the arrests. I agree there are serious problems with these laws and they need to be modified or eliminated. However, we also have laws that allow confiscation of property if there is suspicion of that the property was or will be used to commit a crime. Even if no charges are filed, people are forced to sue to get their property back. Enforcement of laws can be and often is subjective. We need good laws and good people to insure that the laws are enforced fairly. Ensuring both is not an easy task.
Once a year—like today perhaps—everyone and their dogs needs to Tweet out "As of $PRESENT_YEAR I have never received an NSL letter".
Unless, of course, a year comes and goes and one suddenly and forever forgets to participate in this strange custom.
And that is not enough, the ABSOLUTELY WORST NEWS is, too many of the American citizens have turned into sheeples, and never care how their government functions nor how bad it has turned into
The absolutely worst news is that many of the American citizens not just don't care, but enthusiastically support the abuses of the government. Just look at the public opinion polls regarding the CIA torture report.
You do understand that Obama did not make illegal immigrants legal, right? He does not have the power to do so. What power he has - the power that executive branch has always had, since the founding of the republic - is to only partially enforce some law. That is itself a check on the power of the legislature, and why legislative and executive are two separate and distinct branches. Legislature, in turn, has a check on that power of the executive - they can impeach the president.
The federal court has already ruled against that argument. The executive, sworn to faithfully execute the law, properly has the power to implement the legislative intent, "the spirit of the law", to a PARTICULAR case, a specific individual. One example would be that I have about dozen permits from the ATF to possess professional fireworks. The reason there are a dozen of them is that the company I work with operates in several states and therefore has a subsidiary incorporated in each state, modeled on that state's law. If ATF showed up and I had my stack of permits, but the specific permit for that subsidiary was left at home, the prosecutor could decide not to charge me with illegal possession of explosives because the intent of that legislature is that operators be trained and have permits - not to throw people in prison for misplacing paperwork.
What Obama has tried to do is change the rules, not apply the rules. Congress said "people may not remain in the country unless they received a permit prior to entry, if they entered illegally". Obama has said "yes people can stay. Once you cross the river you're allowed to be here". That's changing the law, not applying to a particular case. That's the ruling of the federal court, and supported by petitions filed by 24 state's attorney general.
How long will it take until Congress fixes this? This search and seizure without any publicly elected court weighing in needs to stop. Is there really nobody in the House or Senate who thinks this is wrong? Apparently not and with the right-wingers running the country now I expect no change, more likely that bills will be passed that require the three letter agencies to not even send a letter. They can just barge in and take your stuff. Shame on everyone who still calls this a democracy and freedom!