I'm busy today and it's always a waste of time to get into these conversations with you New Yorker, but to be brief: There is nothing currently preventing Bush and his admin of spying on anyone they just don't like or have any other shady reason to spy on except the legally required warrants. The FISA court exists to create the easiest possible situation for spying while maintaining some small amount of oversight. The laws have been amended several times to prevent any roadblock to spying that might be useful, but they continue to require warrants (even approved after the fact) in order to provide a small modicum of oversight. And I repeat, the Bush admin has presented ZERO reasons why they shouldn't have to comply. I don't care to speculate what specific actions might cause them to not want the secret FISA court to know who they're spying on -- I will only speculate that if they refuse to tell a secret court who they're listening in on and refuse to say why they are against any and all oversight for some reason and that would seem to indicate the reason is untoward. As an aside, I can't ever have one of these conversations without recalling Jorge's (or was it basso's) hilarious concern that once the gov't presented warrants to those they were spying on they'd be tipped off. Oh, that was rich. Have a nice day.
Doubt it. I've raised it in each of the ten or so threads on this issue and the response is the same each time. Silence. Well, except for the time Jorge or basso said we couldn't issue warrants because we'd tip off the terrorists when we handed them to them. LOL. Always good for a laugh.
have you never heard of fisa? go find how many have been denied. why not? that isn't a concern of mine. we should limit government. we should ensure that our government isn't breaking the law that could get them jailed. secondly the immunity thats being discussed in the latest rounds isn't for nsa employees. its for telecommunication companies that were accomplices in this crime. and without proper warrants and reasonable suspicion etc it is illegal. just because im talking to someone outside of the US doesn't mean im donig something that can cast reasonable suspicion. actually it doesn't apply to you because you are canadian. and you've really done nothing criminal? never said anything criminal? download music ever? federal law i think.
If there is no need to get a warrant until after you have done the spying, then what is the point? Are you going to unspy somehow? Or is the evidence just inadmissible? If the evidence is just inadmissable, then you would only need to get a retroactive warrant on the cases you want to prosecute with that evidence, and the rest of the intel that you are using for operational planning wouldn't need a warrant. If there is some penalty if the warrant is denied after you have already done the spying, then that will have a chilling effect on using that process and you get right back to the original problem of time. Another issue could be the amount of spying done in comparison to the number of FISA judges. Even in normal state court systems there are critical shortages of judges, so much so that our system is entirely dependent on the vast majority of cases not going to trial. Now a trial is a lot longer than a determination of whether or not to issue a warrant, but there are less judges (only 11 per the PATRIOT ACT) and more requests I would guess. I imagine the FISA court could become overwhelmed by the NSA, CIA, FBI, etc. just submitting a massive number of warrant requests such that they will either never be addressed or just rubber stamped, at which point requesting a warrant just wastes everyone's time (at least that is what I would do if I worked in the intelligence community, send a warrant request for every phone number in the world, and they could never review all of them). Another issue may be proving probable cause in terrorism cases. We want to cast a wide net and listen for suspicious "chatter" not try to hone in on who the terrorists are and THEN listen to what they are saying. Getting warrants for every wiretap is fine for building a case against someone, but not for a fishing expedition. If we knew who to get warrants against, we wouldn't need to wiretap them. Just change the rules such that only wiretaps with warrants are admissible evidence, the rest can be used for the purposes of gathering intelligence only.
Not true. There it is in Post #4 of this thread: As a Constitution-loving conservative, I know I am butting in here .... apologies. However, whereas I do prefer a Congressionally-mandated procedure for these actions, I ... do not see a problem here -- especially if the actions prevent people like mc mark, samfisher, newyorker, etc. from being removed by a 9-11-style terrorist. It's the pragmatic side of me winning over the idealistic side. Granted, the post is not lengthy but the essentials are there -- Congressionally-mandated procedures -- as per the Patriot Act. Also granted, many do not agree with the actions taken under that decree, but it was a bill legitimately passed. Now, Congress can write another better Patriot Act that passes the smell test, but I personally had no problem with the first.
The Patriot Act doesn't cover warrantless domestic wiretapping. In fact, Bush in 2004 campaign speeches, said something to the effect of, "Whenever you talk about wiretapping, you have to get a warrant" to defuse speculation about warrantless wiretapping. That was back when they were keeping the program from everyone, including the congressmeen they since said they'd briefed but hadn't. This program is not covered by the Patriot Act and it is in direct violation of the FISA court. They tried to cover up, it came out and then they asserted that it was legal on the grounds that anything the president says is legal is. When I said no conservative had responded, it was to the question of why the admin would so vigorously resist required warrants that could be obtained even after the fact. To date, not a single conservative here or anywhere else to my knowledge has addressed that. I'm not asking if you have a problem with warrantless wiretaps (though it blows my mind that any patriotic American wouldn't have a problem with them) -- I'm asking what's the problem with getting the warrants? To that question, there has been continued silence here and elsewhere for as many months as this story has existed.
I agree with this. If info is obtained without a warrant it's not admissable. And only information obtained for use in national security (to save lives) should be used for intelligence. Thus, if information is collected about someone's recipe's, that should be destroyed after a max of say 30 days. I think this protects people, prevents abuse of power, but still insures that we are giving our gov't the full ability to fight terrorism.
Oh, Lord! This means I have to go back and find a Cliff's Notes on the Patriot Act. IIRC, reading the whole legislative act would be akin to reading a telephone book. I could well be wrong, but my memory cells tell me the wiretapping rules were in there. That's the trouble with getting older, the brain's logbook keeps getting thicker and the ink keeps fading.
Wiretapping, yes. Warrantless wiretapping, NO. Which is why, when Bush was still trying to cover it up, he said on the 04 campaign trail that any time there was wiretapping there was a warrant. He was lying about that. Pray tell what would the reason be for that particular lie if WARRANTLESS wiretapping was covered by the Patriot Act? And while you're here, why not be the first conservative on the block to give just one reason the wiretaps have to be warrantless? You'll be the very first one, after months and months of discussion.
Forget the fact that Carter's FISA court is a pretty sick idea in and of itself, and Clinton's idea for the ability to get a warrant after the fact is even more sick. At least, under FISA rules, there is a paper trail, and it's public record. If you want to find out if you've been legally spied on, you can petition the court and find out. If the NSA doesn't get a warrant, you can't find that out.
The only changes to the FISA court from the PATRIOT Act were to expand it, and require at least 3 judges to live in the District of Columbia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Court [rquoter] Because of the sensitive nature of its business, the FISC is a "secret court": its hearings are closed to the public, and, while records of the proceedings are kept, those records are also not available to the public. [/rquoter] Try again.
I really didn't know that. OK, I'm with StupidMoniker. I don't know the point any more. (Although I come to a different conclusion. They should just get rid of it.)
Who do you think wrote it...The Loyalists? The Loyalist were the consevatives, wanting to maintain the status quo (not surprisingly it was largely those who benefitted economically from the the patronange of the King)...without the Liberals we would still be a colony. The Constutution ensures freedom, freedom allows for differing views and actions. Consevative are trying to co-opt the interpretation of the constitution to promote their restrictive agenda.
I'll bite. While I believe that defending our country against terrorist attack is critical, the fact is that the infrastructure to do so through legal process is in place. It is so amazingly easy to obtain the proper warrant that it is almost a non-issue. There is no overwhelming reason why we should not require the government to jump through the Constitutional hoops required to wiretap.
what about listening to "chatter"? Let's say you get wind that there is a suspected plot, and that it stems from Karachi and there may be a cell in Florida - so you want to monitor all communications between Karachi and Florida to try to pick up a conversation in Urdu and try to listen in for keywords that might tip you off as to the plot details and who is involved.... Now, how do you get a warrant to do that? Against whom? The entire population of Florida?
Hey, after the 2000 election, why not? Honestly, and I hate to type this,* that's a good question, if a little hyberbolic. Even if it's just one town in Florida, or area code... how would you warrant that? And if you can't, do you just shut down that wide-net approach? I don't know diddly about NSA capabilities right now, but could they really monitor the vast streams of voice data flowing in and out of an entire area code, to and from an entire country overseas? Maybe that's easy now... dunno. * = for the record, I only gave NewYorker props after two stiff drinks.
