America... Spying on Americans

Dahlia forgets a 3rd possibility, low comedy:

How else to account for FBI agents following lady members of P.E.T.A. like Pamela Anderson dressed only in bikinis and body paint imitating fur??

A less likely lot of suspected terrorists never lived!!!

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Does that mean that the FBI is....
http://www.aclu.org/spyfiles/

....following members of PETA ...legally??

The PETA links are halfway down that link!!

Does that mean that I now have an FBI file....
....because I donated some money to the local animal shelter???

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This page has TONS of information, links to details and cases as well as challenges. I haven't made it all the way through, but it appears some of this was known before the NYT story, unless I'm missing something. (Haven't distinguished FBI from NSA)

http://www.epic.org/privacy/terrorism/fisa/

.

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Nice links, guys.

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More here. http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002698174_spying22.html

Quote:

That's interesting in and of itself, but the most interesting thing to me was this part.

Quote:

Still, Bush and his advisers have said they need to operate outside the FISA system in order to move quickly against suspected terrorists. In explaining the program, Bush has made the distinction between detecting threats and plots and monitoring likely, known targets, as FISA would allow.

Bush administration officials believe it is not possible, in a large-scale eavesdropping effort, to provide the kind of evidence the court requires to approve a warrant. Sources knowledgeable about the program said there is no way to secure a FISA warrant when the goal is to listen in on a vast array of communications in the hopes of finding something that sounds suspicious.

If that's true, I get the impression that we are talking about widespread monitoring which would not meet the requirements of a FISA warrant due to lack of proof that those being monitored had anything to do with terrorism.

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I can understand GW's argument relative to acting swiftly given the types of communications and communication devices we are dealing with in the 21st century.

In this regard, I would think we need to somehow allow a President the ability to act swiftly but somehow, create an oversight that does not inhibit their ability to act swiftly.

An example might be finding scores of names/phone numbers/e-mail address on a PC of a suspected terrorist or sympathizer. Of course the Govt would need to check those numbers/addresses out but I think under current procedure, individual warrents would need to be obtained. By the time they get the warrents (let's assume a week), the suspect could be long gone and the information could be useless.

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Sounds like they just want to cast a net and see what they can drag in.

While I can understand their desire to do this, I certainly don't agree to their choice of simply unilaterally deciding to do so. I prefer not to have to speak in code during every conversation, thank you very much.

On cannot firewall an entire society and then call that society "free." Iran and China being examples that come to mind.

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woiyo wrote:

I can understand GW's argument relative to acting swiftly given the types of communications and communication devices we are dealing with in the 21st century.

In this regard, I would think we need to somehow allow a President the ability to act swiftly but somehow, create an oversight that does not inhibit their ability to act swiftly.

An example might be finding scores of names/phone numbers/e-mail address on a PC of a suspected terrorist or sympathizer. Of course the Govt would need to check those numbers/addresses out but I think under current procedure, individual warrents would need to be obtained. By the time they get the warrents (let's assume a week), the suspect could be long gone and the information could be useless.

I can understand that argument too, and I think that's why Congress extended the period for getting a retroactive warrant to 72 hours (via the patriot act). The fact is they could do what you're talking about within the rules of FISA.

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woiyo wrote:

I can understand GW's argument relative to acting swiftly given the types of communications and communication devices we are dealing with in the 21st century.

then you come down on the side of an argument that the personal liberties americans have believed are sacred are now obsolete in the 21st century.

that is not only a slippery slope to tread, it is a two-edged sword and opens up a frontal assaault on everything both liberals and conservatives hold sacred.

for instance, if we admit that we are now in a "new" world in telecommunications, then the old admonitions against socialistic programs such as a national health program are suspect to assault, since we are now dealing with "new realities" in providing health care to american citizens. the same can be said for education, for job security, for personal lifestyles, for just about everything that is a part of our everyday life that is now different than the past way we have lived as americans.

How conservative is it; that because circumstances change policies must change? It isn't, it is a liberal realization that we are going to have to think anew, and act anew, but not only in the area of defending ourselves, but in the very nature of how we go about our everyday lives in other matters as well.

Is the right wing conservative faction in america prepared for that?

In this regard, I would think we need to somehow allow a President the ability to act swiftly but somehow, create an oversight that does not inhibit their ability to act swiftly.

An example might be finding scores of names/phone numbers/e-mail address on a PC of a suspected terrorist or sympathizer. Of course the Govt would need to check those numbers/addresses out but I think under current procedure, individual warrents would need to be obtained. By the time they get the warrents (let's assume a week), the suspect could be long gone and the information could be useless.

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FreeDuck wrote:

woiyo wrote:
I can understand GW's argument relative to acting swiftly given the types of communications and communication devices we are dealing with in the 21st century.

In this regard, I would think we need to somehow allow a President the ability to act swiftly but somehow, create an oversight that does not inhibit their ability to act swiftly.

An example might be finding scores of names/phone numbers/e-mail address on a PC of a suspected terrorist or sympathizer. Of course the Govt would need to check those numbers/addresses out but I think under current procedure, individual warrents would need to be obtained. By the time they get the warrents (let's assume a week), the suspect could be long gone and the information could be useless.

I can understand that argument too, and I think that's why Congress extended the period for getting a retroactive warrant to 72 hours (via the patriot act). The fact is they could do what you're talking about within the rules of FISA.

I have heard arguments that it could take more than the 72 hours just to prepare the case to go before the court to get the warrent. I do not know if it it true or not.

With regard to the above hypothetical, would a warrent be required for ALL the numbers/addresses listed? If so, that my no be possible inside the 72 hour window.

Could/Should the warrent be so broad to include "any/all" activity by the suspect?

If so, then the 72 hour window may be long enough.

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woiyo wrote:

I have heard arguments that it could take more than the 72 hours just to prepare the case to go before the court to get the warrent. I do not know if it it true or not.

That's the closest thing I've heard to an argument on that point.

Quote:

With regard to the above hypothetical, would a warrent be required for ALL the numbers/addresses listed? If so, that my no be possible inside the 72 hour window.

Could/Should the warrent be so broad to include "any/all" activity by the suspect?

If so, then the 72 hour window may be long enough.

I don't know, but the FISA court traditionally has had very low standards for probable cause and I'm sure they would allow the government to apply for all the warrants using just one argument. But I really don't know.

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blatham wrote:

, and I spat at his avatar and stopped.

Well ..... I'll have you know I fart in your general direction on a regular basis.

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woiyo wrote:

I can understand GW's argument relative to acting swiftly given the types of communications and communication devices we are dealing with in the 21st century.

In this regard, I would think we need to somehow allow a President the ability to act swiftly but somehow, create an oversight that does not inhibit their ability to act swiftly.

An example might be finding scores of names/phone numbers/e-mail address on a PC of a suspected terrorist or sympathizer. Of course the Govt would need to check those numbers/addresses out but I think under current procedure, individual warrents would need to be obtained. By the time they get the warrents (let's assume a week), the suspect could be long gone and the information could be useless.

Names on a computer of Al Qaeda would be enough probable cause to get a warrant. 72 hours should be long enough to take a list in to a judge. We are talking survelliance of communication which is pretty easy to do and pretty easy to get warrant for under FISA. You have presented no case that wouldn't provide a warrant yet and would require going around the court. I can't think of any case that would require it unless they are listening to conversations without any probable cause.

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Wiretap Furor Widens Republican Divide
Wiretap Furor Widens Republican Divide

While Security Camp Claims Justification,
Civil Libertarians See an Intrusion on Rights
By NEIL KING JR.
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
December 22, 2005; Page A4

WASHINGTON -- President Bush's claim that he has a legal right to eavesdrop on some U.S. citizens without court approval has widened an ideological gap within his party.

On one side is the national-security camp, made even more numerous by loyalty to a wartime president. On the other are the small-government civil libertarians who have long held a privileged place within the Republican Party but whose ranks have ebbed since the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The surveillance furor, at least among some conservatives, also has heightened worries that the party is straying from many of its core principles the longer it remains in control of both the White House and Congress.

But the current debate over using the National Security Agency for domestic surveillance -- which the administration has defended as legal and necessary -- hit a rawer nerve because it pits national-security concerns against a core constitutional right, in this case, the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures.

"It seems to me that if you're the president, you have to proceed with great caution when you do anything that flies in the face of the Constitution," said Warren Rudman, a former Republican senator from New Hampshire who has served on a number of government intelligence advisory boards. He calls the administration's surveillance program "a matter of grave concern."

Since 1978, Congress has required the executive branch to seek warrants through a secret federal court for domestic eavesdropping on foreigners or U.S. citizens suspected of terrorism or espionage. Such permission is all but automatic and usually is granted within hours. The court granted warrants at the rate of almost five a day last year -- and rejected none.

President Bush and his top aides argued this week that they were on solid legal ground in ordering -- without going through the secret court -- large-scale eavesdropping of communications between the U.S. and other countries to thwart potential terrorist attacks. They claim they had the authority to conduct the spying under the president's powers as commander in chief, as well as under a congressional resolution that approved the use of force in Afghanistan in 2001.

Yet some prominent conservatives reject that argument. Some even have accused the administration of treading on the Constitution and stretching the prerogatives of the presidency to the detriment of balanced government.

David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, described the spy program as a case of "presidential overreaching" that he said most Americans would reject. Columnist George Will wrote in a Washington Post opinion piece that "conservatives' wholesome wariness of presidential power has been a casualty of conservative presidents winning seven of the past 10 elections."

Bob Barr, a Georgia conservative who was one of the Republican Party's loudest opponents of government snooping until he left Congress in 2003, says the furor should stand as a test of Republicans' willingness to call their president to task. "This is just such an egregious violation of the electronic surveillance laws," Mr. Barr says.

Sen. Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who chairs the Judiciary Committee, has called the program "inappropriate" and promised to hold hearings early next year. Republicans joining him include centrist Sens. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and John Sununu of New Hampshire, along with limited-government types like Larry Craig of Idaho.

The three, along with Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, have sided with Democrats in the Patriot Act fight, citing concerns the government is running rough-shod over civil liberties in the name of the war on terrorism. Without Senate approval by Dec. 31, a bulk of the law's key provisions would expire. Negotiations over a compromise continued yesterday.

Some other top Republicans have defended the president's right to conduct surveillance outside congressionally mandated rules. Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi summarized the argument: "I want my security first," he told reporters when news of the program broke last week. "I will deal with all the details after that."

Prominent neoconservatives William Kristol and Gary Schmitt opined earlier this week that the president has the authority to collect foreign intelligence "as he sees fit," even within the U.S. And no matter how much people might wish it, they wrote, "Congress cannot legislate for every contingency."

Vice President Dick Cheney portrayed the dispute as one entirely about presidential power. "I believe in a strong, robust executive authority, and I think that the world we live in demands it," he told reporters while traveling abroad on Tuesday.

Some conservative critics contend that the fault lines within the party are easy to trace. As with so much else, they say, the trail leads to Iraq.

"From the beginning, the folks who thought it was a good idea to go into Iraq have found good reason to think that all other Bush policies, from torture to domestic surveillance, are justified," said Robert Levy, a conservative legal scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute. "This is just one in a litany of ongoing events that have separated the noninterventionist wing of the Republican Party from the neocon wing."

--Anne Marie Squeo contributed to this article.

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What does it require to make a statement that x was found on y's computer and y is a foreign agent so we need to have survellience of x. The FISA court is very lenient in its warrant process. Basically if the President asks they will provide.

The biggest threat is in not getting a warrant. Without the warrant anything gathered can't be used in any court. It creates a system where you have to jail without trial or release them. This is completely contrary to what the US stands for.

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parados wrote:

What does it require to make a statement that x was found on y's computer and y is a foreign agent so we need to have survellience of x. The FISA court is very lenient in its warrant process. Basically if the President asks they will provide.

The biggest threat is in not getting a warrant. Without the warrant anything gathered can't be used in any court. It creates a system where you have to jail without trial or release them. This is completely contrary to what the US stands for.

If the surveillance was intended to develop and prosecute a criminal case against an individual, the lack of a warrant would be of concern, but it is not. It is intended for use in identifying and interrupting planned attacks on this country.

I can understand the concern expressed over this program, and I can understand the incredulity of some concerning the professed need to bypass the FISA profess.

As for the latter, while it is true that the FISA court has, from what we know, been generally accommodating in granting warrants, it is also true that the requests have been vetted by the Justice department, and not all go to the Court. The Mousawi case provides a good example of a request that never made it to the Court. This, of course, raises the question as to why the Administration simply doesn't do away with the vetting process. I certainly am not privy to the answer to the question, but it seems logical to me that the when the DOJ has refused to take a request before the Court, it was because it didn't think the warrant would be granted, not that it didn't necessarily agree with the need for surveillance.

The issue really comes down to just how important these wiretaps are in preventing terrorist attacks on the US.

If you are convinced they are necessary and fully intend to carry them out, then you are faced with two choices:

Take them all through FISA but conduct them all - even if the Court rejects some warrant requests, or bypass the FISA process altogether. Both, obviously, have legal thorny legal implications, but the option with the greater potential for sustainability would seem to be the one that involves making the case for executive authority to conduct surveillance without warrants rather than involves defying a Court's ruling.

By now someone is probably yelling at the PC screen; "And then there's the option of obeying the law! Put them all through the FISA process and don't conduct surveillance if and when the Court rejects a request!"

Let's return to the Mousawi case. We now know that there was a legitimate reason to place Mr. Mousawi under surveillance. We will probably never know whether or not a surreptitious visit by the FBI to his apartment would have led to the foiling of the 9/11 plot, but it is reasonable to conjecture that it might have. For some reason, the DOJ did not believe the FISA Court would have granted the warrant and so it was never sought.

We do not know if the decision to not bring the request before the Court was simply the result of an overabundance of caution or incompetency on the part of a DOJ staffer or if the Court would have granted it if petitioned, or if in light of 9/11, the Court would now grant the request, even if it would not have before 9/11.

All we know is that a request was not brought before the Court because there was a question as to whether or not the Court would grant it, and it turned out to be a very important request that potentially could have led to the aversion of, arguably, the single greatest tragedy in our nation's history.

Now, faced with protecting the American people from additional tragedies of the same or greater scope, the President is, understandably, reluctant to take any chances that a similar gaffe will occur.

The need for secrecy in this process is unquestionable, and so it is not possible for the Administration to provide full details and examples to fully support its position. Because some of us cannot imagine a situation where literally immediate surveillance efforts are required, doesn't mean such situations do not exist.

It boils down to a few simple questions:

1) Do you trust not only the President but the layers of government involved in the process from the FBI special agent in the field up through the Attorney General?

2) Do you believe that the possibility of that the unwarranted surveillance will be abused is a risk worth taking to prevent another 9/11?

3) Do you trust our system of democracy to unearth and put a stop to any abuses that might occur?

There are no shortage of folks in this forum for who the name Bush is poisonous and they will never trust him or his administration. They already believe that he has the establishment of a dictatorship as his goal, and so see this as a logical step in his plan to achieve that goal. There is no point in my addressing these people's concerns.

Presumably, however, there are also folks who while not being fans of Bush's policies believe that he is sincere in his commitment to protect the American people, and has no sinister designs to stage a coup and make himself President for Life. There are also folks who will argue on principle that no President, no matter what he is like, should be trusted with extra-legal authority.

There will be some who argue that the loss of any measure of our liberties is not worth increased security, that they would rather see us sustain future terrorist attacks rather than have our liberties diminished. "Give me Liberty or give me Death!" This is noble talk when skyscrapers aren't falling in your neighborhood. If it is possible for them, I ask these folks to really imagine the murder of their entire families by terrorists, and then reaffirm that that they would prefer this to happen rather than have someone's overseas cell phone calls spied on without a warrant from a court.

Finally, there are lots of folks who believe every conspiracy theory ever formulated and who believe our system of democracy has already failed to unearth or stop all sorts of nefarious plots and so how can it possibly be trusted to respond to the possible abuses discussed here? Presumably, though, there are other folks who, like me, have witnessed our system of democracy detect and purge itself of corruption and abuse time and time again over decades, and have faith in it still.

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A patriot is one who defends his nation from his government.

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Finn d'Abuzz wrote:

parados wrote:
What does it require to make a statement that x was found on y's computer and y is a foreign agent so we need to have survellience of x. The FISA court is very lenient in its warrant process. Basically if the President asks they will provide.

The biggest threat is in not getting a warrant. Without the warrant anything gathered can't be used in any court. It creates a system where you have to jail without trial or release them. This is completely contrary to what the US stands for.

If the surveillance was intended to develop and prosecute a criminal case against an individual, the lack of a warrant would be of concern, but it is not. It is intended for use in identifying and interrupting planned attacks on this country.

What do you propose we do with people found to be planning an attack then? Let them go merrily on their way? Or are you proposing we incarcerate them without trial? Either way is MORE of a threat to the US in the long run.

America... Spying on Americans

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