Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)

[pedalinbob]

Self edit, of my own accord...

Bob

 

[gadget_lover]

I don't see how this thread has not been locked by the admins, since it's political to it's very core. But since it seems to be OK this time......

Peddlinbob's found a lot of quotes, but none of them appear to be authoritative sources. The appear to be political analysts and pundits.

Personally, I'm scared that our president claims that there are checks on his power while he's deliberately sidestepping those very checks with impunity. He's dreamed up this war on terror; It's not a war if your opponent is a loosly organized group of people who disagree with you. He's using it as an excuse to rule as he pleases.

I would not be surprised if Bush tries to pull a Willie Brown in 2008. Brown was kicked out of office as California's top legislator by term limit laws. He tried to fight it saying he would not leave office because the initiative was invalid. I can just see Bush thinking that, because of his "war" he can stay in offfice an extra term or two.

I don't see much difference between Bush and a dictator. He ignores the laws, he appoints cronies, he authorized subversive practices and represses free speach in the name of "security". He runs prison camps where torture has taken place.

The FISA works well enough for every other investigation, why not these? Probably because there was not enough probable cause or because there were alternate motives for the taps.

have looked at the FISA info (I have some specific thoughts on the language, and it appears that when a US citizen interacts with with a known foreign enemy, the US residents then are not considered a US person,

Personally, I think this is a really bad idea (and probably incorrect). These taps were, according to Bush, on calls to suspected affiliates and associates. Ok. So you call your girlfriend who's brother works with the wife of a guy suspected to be somehow connected to alqueda????


We need to get real. The FBI, CIA, NSA and all the rest had a lot of information about the 9/11 hijackers and they ignored it. It was not a case of inability to gather info, it was a case of not recognizing it's importance. That has not changed.

 

[Diode]

"Every president since FISA's passage has asserted that he retained inherent power to go beyond the act's terms. Under President Clinton, deputy Atty. Gen. Jamie Gorelick testified that "the Department of Justice believes, and the case law supports, that the president has inherent authority to conduct warrantless physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes."

It's not clear whether Gorelick claimed authority to conduct warrantless searches on American citizens. In any case, that doesn't make it right.

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin

 

[C4LED]

Something more to condsider:

http://www.slate.com/id/2132810/nav/tap1/

"Since 1978, the NSA has insisted that when it intercepts a communication between a targeted foreigner and a nontargeted American it will redact the name of the American from the resulting intelligence report. The redactions are made to protect the privacy of the individual who was not the target, and to satisfy the Constitution's prohibition of warrantless searches. Yet at his hearings, Bolton admitted that on several occasions while he was an undersecretary of state he had asked the NSA to reveal the names of Americans in agency intercepts. The NSA obliged without any showing of cause or process of review. Newsweek investigated and learned that during one 18-month period in 2004 and 2005, the NSA supplied the names of 10,000 U.S. citizens to interested bureaucrats and spies.

That violation is arguably more egregious than the new revelations of warrantless eavesdropping. It involved vastly more people. (Bush's warrantless eavesdropping reportedly targeted between 500 and 1,000 people a year.) And it was an informal practice, without even the thin legitimacy of a secret executive order."

 

[pedalinbob]

I don't believe I have been political, nor have I been impolite or caustic in any way.

If anyone believes this, I will delete my posts.
Edit: nobody has complained, but I have chosen to simply remove much of my posts, since the thread may be getting a little hot.


I am only stating my opinion, not attackng anyone.
What is rather surprising is that some appear pretty annoyed with this.
If so, I apologize sincerely.

Bob

 

[gadget_lover]

I don't believe I have been political, nor have I been impolite or caustic in any way.

No, you have not been impolite nor caustic. I hope I did not imply that you were. Some would say that pointing out articles that support a political view or support a politician's actions is the same as discussing politics. That's my take on it.

I'll back of fon this one for a while and see what others say.

Daniel

 

[ikendu]

I don't see how this thread has not been locked by the admins, since it's political to it's very core.

Hopefully because we are trying to focus on exploring what this act is and how it interacts with legal notions like "we are at war" ...plus trying to avoid terms like "lefties" or "righties", etc.

 

[C4LED]

Oops...how did this get here?

Take care,
Bob

Bob,

Regarding your edits, it looks like you may be reconsidering your view... and with a sense of humor.

Good show!

C

 

[DieselDave]

Other than Gadget Lovers next to last post, which was filled with baiting, politically driven comments, the thread has proceeded pretty smoothly considering.

Press on

PS: Gadet Lover, my comment is not intended as a bait, it's a caution as you strayed over the edge for "above" ground conversation.

 

[ikendu]

Apparently today, the New York Times is reporting that the wire taps go way beyond just people talking to overseas Al Queda connections.

I haven't been able to figure out why the President would even risk violating this act. It seems to allow for emergencies and in time of war you have 15 days after doing an emergency tap to bring it before the court for review.

I've been wondering... why would they do this? One worrisome explanation is that they were doing taps that they were sure would be denied. I saw on one of the news networks (NBC?) that only 4 have been denied since the beginning of the program decades ago.

 

[gadget_lover]

I haven't been able to figure out why the President would even risk violating this act. It seems to allow for emergencies and in time of war you have 15 days after doing an emergency tap to bring it before the court for review.

I've been wondering... why would they do this? One worrisome explanation is that they were doing taps that they were sure would be denied.

That would be one explanation. Another would be that he simply didn't care. Evil intent is not required. Many rich and powerful people figure that the details and paperwork don't apply to them. They have lawyers and lackeys to clean up after them. The President (any president) has a whole adminstration to clean up the mess.

Yes, what he did would have been made legal by simply filing the paperwork after the fact. I don't know of any penalties for applying after the fact if it's denied. The FISA court acts in secrecy, so I'm not sure we'd even find out that something was denied.

Daniel

 

[BB]

Here may be one reason that Bush has bypassed the FISA court...

Why Bush decided to bypass court in ordering wiretaps
Panel of judges modified his requests

Stewart M. Powell, Hearst Newspapers Sunday, December 25, 2005

Washington -- Government records show that the Bush administration was encountering unprecedented second-guessing by the secret federal surveillance court when President Bush decided to bypass the panel and order surveillance of U.S.-based terror suspects without the court's approval.

A review of Justice Department reports to Congress shows that the 26-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court modified more wiretap requests from the Bush administration than the four previous presidential administrations combined.
...
The 11-judge court that authorizes FISA wiretaps has approved at least 18,740 applications for electronic surveillance or physical searches from five presidential administrations since 1979.

The judges modified only two search warrant orders out of the 13,102 applications that were approved over the first 22 years of the court's operation. In 20 of the first 21 annual reports on the court's activities up to 1999, the Justice Department told Congress that "no orders were entered (by the FISA court) which modified or denied the requested authority" submitted by the government.

But since 2001, the judges have modified 179 of the 5,645 requests for court-ordered surveillance by the Bush administration. A total of 173 of those court-ordered "substantive modifications" took place in 2003 and 2004, the most recent years for which public records are available.

Warrant requests rejected

The judges also rejected or deferred at least six requests for warrants during those two years -- the first outright rejection of a wiretap request in the court's history.

-Bill

 

[Hookd_On_Photons]

In a nutshell: if you aren't calling Al-Qaeda, you don't have to worry about your privacy.

"If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear."

Where have we heard *that* before?

I am not some pot-smoking Commie hippie. I believe America needs a vigorous defense against the assymmetric threats posed by Al-Qaida and similar groups. I believe that surveillance is justified against agents of those groups living in America. However, the Executive cannot be granted carte blanche to perform such surveillance without oversight.

I do not know enough about the law nor this particular situation to render a qualified opinion about whether or not President Bush has exceeded his authority.

It *does* bother me that so many pundits who call themselves "conservatives" wholeheartedly endorse domestic spying without any legislative or judicial branch oversight as long as President Bush does it. It bothers me that Jose Padilla, an American citizen, can be detained for years and stripped of his due process rights by Executive order. Granted, Padilla is a bad man, who was likely conspiring with other bad men to do bad things. But he is still an American citizen, arrested and detained on American soil. If the case is so strong against him, charge him, grant him his day in court, and be done with it. If he walks like OJ, then our guys didn't do their jobs well enough.

Who is to say that a future President could act in a similar manner, in a way that would be displeasing to the "conservatives" who see nothing wrong with President Bush doing so?

What if there were a series of coordinated bombings at abortion clinics across the nation? Or a series of African American church burnings? Or what if one of those prominent Christian televangelists is found to have lent support to a foreign leader to protect his holdings in that country (diamond mines, gold mines, whatever)?

Would, for example, President Hillary Clinton declare that antiabortion groups, Christian activist groups, or other persons of conservative persuasion are "potential domestic terrorists" and should be subject to secret surveillance without oversight? Do you think it couldn't happen?

What's fit for the goose is fit for the gander, how do ya like dem apples, etc.

 

[BB]

Well,

We, apparently, already have a completed report about wholesale corruption of our government organizations--at least partially focused around misuse of the IRS to punish political enemies and of pulling prosecutions of politically connected individuals back to Washington DC to be buried in the Justice Department.

But, for some reason, major portions of our government (legislative and juditial) don't seem to want this report to ever see the light of day.

A Cover-up of the Barrett Report?

There has been a major setback for people working to secure the full public release of the report by Clinton-era independent counsel David Barrett. A House and Senate conference committee has agreed on language that could keep key portions of the report secret forever, despite the efforts of Iowa Republican Sen. Charles Grassley, a senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Wisconsin Republican Rep. James Sensenbrenner, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, to make it public. Democrats, led by North Dakota Sen. Byron Dorgan, led the fight to keep the report away from public scrutiny.
...
Barrett was appointed in May 1995 to investigate allegations that Henry Cisneros, Bill Clinton's secretary of housing, lied to the FBI about payments he had made to his mistress. In September 1999, Cisneros pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and paid a $10,000 fine. But the investigation did not stop there, because during the course of the probe, Barrett reportedly sought information about Cisneros' taxes and ran into a roadblock erected by the IRS. There have been reports that Barrett then spent a significant amount of time trying to investigate possible IRS misconduct, and what happened in the course of that investigation is apparently the subject of some of Barrett's final report.

The report has been finished since the summer of 2004, but the panel of judges never gave Barrett the O. K. to release it publicly. Frustrated by the inaction, Grassley last month demanded that the court give him a copy. The court then ordered that parts of the report — excluding Section 5 — be made public, but so far that has not happened. Why even those portions of the report thought to be non-controversial have not been released is not clear.

Somehow, the New York Times can't seem to get to excited about this scandel:

10 Years and Counting:

...A 400-page report on this crime of the century was completed a year ago and awaits possible release by a special court. Anti-Clinton diehards, yearning for a time-warped return to their Top 10 scandals of yesteryear, are speculating something murky will emerge, or be alleged, or be hinted at - and, imagine that, just in time for Senator Hillary Clinton's next career move...

Remember how many times people where subjected to an IRS audit in the last administration (many of them seemed to be of women with ties to President Clinton)? Well, if the NYTimes was so hot in running down misuse of government powers they seemed have missed this one.

In ten years, the NYT has run a grand total of 9 articles/editorials about this (that are all pretty much of the opinion that this was a complete waste of time and money to investigate). I am not going to hold my breath that these sets of disclosures are much more than politics as usual…

-Bill