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Surveillance Court: NSA Can Resume Bulk Surveillance
An anonymous reader writes: We all celebrated back in May when a federal court ruled the NSA's phone surveillance illegal, and again at the beginning of June, when the Patriot Act expired, ending authorization for that surveillance. Unfortunately, the NY Times now reports on a ruling from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which concluded that the NSA may temporarily resume bulk collection of metadata about U.S. citizens's phone calls. From the article: "In a 26-page opinion (PDF) made public on Tuesday, Judge Michael W. Mosman of the surveillance court rejected the challenge by FreedomWorks, which was represented by a former Virginia attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, a Republican. And Judge Mosman said that the Second Circuit was wrong, too. 'Second Circuit rulings are not binding' on the surveillance court, he wrote, 'and this court respectfully disagrees with that court's analysis, especially in view of the intervening enactment of the U.S.A. Freedom Act.' When the Second Circuit issued its ruling that the program was illegal, it did not issue any injunction ordering the program halted, saying that it would be prudent to see what Congress did as Section 215 neared its June 1 expiration."
"Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, â" That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government,"
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Like they ever stopped?
not sure if serious ... CIA people have been in the Whitehouse since 1980, out in the open (it's debatable before then). They spy on Congress, have their own secret kangaroo courts, and carry out overseas executions all admittedly. One could suppose that there's nothing worse behind closed doors but that would be generous towards spies. Who doesn't really think they're blackmailing anybody in Congress or other high elected office?
Politics remains the entertainment arm of the military-industrial complex. After all, people would be mildly non-plussed to learn that they were secretly ruled by spooks and banksters.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
"The total resources of 300 million people is taxed and at the disposal of under 1000 elected people..."
...at the Federal level.
And that's the fundamental problem - the government which should have the most influence, and over which the electorate should have the most control, should start at the local level.
We're supposed to be the United States, but the Feds have used the supremacy clause to take over almost everything with real significance, ignoring the 9th and 10th Amendments, which are treated as an inconvenient speed bump.
IMHO, the biggest problem with the Constitution is that the Supremes should really be under the direct control of the States, instead of the Feds deciding what the Feds can do.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
One other interesting note - all the judges on the FISC are solely appointed by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, without any confirmation or oversight by Congress required.
While Congress does not get any oversight of the appointing process itself, the Chief Justice can only appoint the judges from the pool of US District Court Judges. This means the judges on the FISA Court were first nominated by the President to become District Court Judges, and then confimed by the Senate, so there was some congressional oversight in terms of who could be appointed.
I don't know if all of the current judges were picked by John Roberts or not, ...
The FISA judges serve for seven years, and Roberts has been the Chief Justice since 2005, so yes, he picked all of the current judges.
It will take it being a serious campaign issue at the federal level for it to stop- and that's just the first step. Every toll road has a toll for X years. Then after X years... it keeps the toll. Every time, no one can turn the tap off. As a nation, we voted in a guy who was gonna close gitmo. 8 years later, still gitmo. As long as the red and blue teams can keep dangling the threat of losing personal freedom if the OTHER team gets in, it's essentially impossible to get policy level things changed.
Surely it wouldn't be beyond the collective wit of the internet to set up a parallel surveillance system targeting judges, politicians and others involved in dismantling these freedoms. After a couple of months of having their every private movement made public I suspect they'd change their outlook.
Quite a while back I posted a comment suggesting a smartphone application that allows people to take a snapshot of a government official/bureaucrat/judge/LEO/agent as well as officials/employees of NSA/NRO/CIA/etc private contractors and upload it and location/time and other relevant data to a website in a non-5-eyes nation where facial recognition and data-mining software could analyze it and make that information and analysis publicly available. Track all their travel, associations, purchases, everything possible.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.