Letters to the Editor
ondelette
Published Letters: 1986 Editor's Choice: 19
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@kovie
[Read the article: The administration's FISA falsehoods continue unabated]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Well, not according to the 4th amendment or the way that FISA is supposed to work. I suppose that if enough FISA judges are dishonest and Bushite enough, it doesn't really matter what either the constitution of standing statute says. But if they are honest and competent, then such an assertion by Bush or his people would be immediately rejected by FISA if it lacked accompanying evidence compelling enough to constitute being "reasonable suspicion".
I.e. it doesn't matter what the circumstances are, for the president to assert that anyone is a suspected terrorist or accomplice and be able to lawfully spy on them, he has to provide solid--and lawfully obtained--evidence demonstrating it beyond a reasonsable doubt, and then get the FISA judges to issue him a warrant to do that. If he does not, or they reject his request, he simply cannot lawfully spy on them, PERIOD, as there is simply no constitutional or legal basis to do so (whatever specious claims Yoo & Co. make to the contrary).I/i>
Well... not if the new changes go through. First off, the changes get rid of the "solid evidence" provision, only a summary is needed. Next, the "lawfully obtained" provision is also gone, since the Attorney General can declare unlawfully gained evidence be 'of significant foreign intelligence interest' and use it. Third off, the AG can authorize information gathering and physical searches for a week and then go to the FISA court. If the FISA court says no, under the proposed changes, the AG can determine that the information gained before going to the court is of significant foreign intelligence interest and keep it. And then he can go back to the court over and over, and does not have to tell each judge he sees that he has already seen other judges who have turned him down.
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@rana019
[Read the article: The administration's FISA falsehoods continue unabated]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Under the proposed changes, the government doesn't have to spell out what equipment and devices it will use, ever, just turn in a summary. Under the current one, the government needs to spell out in detail to get the warrant. Also, the government will no longer need to spell out how they will obtain intelligence on property of a foreign power anymore. And...when and if someone ends up charged and in court, the government does not have to tell the person on trial how they got the information.
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The draft bill is located here
[Read the article: The administration's FISA falsehoods continue unabated]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The bill is at:
http://tinyurl.com/3b5agl
It is 66 pages long, and it is as much another power grab and legalization of the long illegal as the Military Commissions Act was. It would probably make the entire NSA wiretapping program legal and retroactively legal, plus it has some great new features that allow the Attorney General to rule on the authority of the District Courts, allow the President to have people who are not confirmed by the Senate in charge of surveillance certifications, and generally allow anything for at least a week.
That this isn't getting any and all the press coverage that MCA got is an abomination.
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Kovie I think this is about getting rid of the Constitution...
[Read the article: The administration's FISA falsehoods continue unabated]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...not about ignoring it. Mark Helprin sent up a trial balloon yesterday in the NYT Week in Review, arguing that the provision that copyrights, trademarks and patents be temporary is an artifact of a Constitution formulated in an agrarian age, that doesn't fit the society of today.
We've already heard from John Yoo that the Geneva Conventions are quaint.
And there were enough quotes in the administration back in their high popularity days about "we're and empire now" and about comparisons to Rome to indicate that at some point, they thought they would be leading the transition from republican to imperial rule.
I don't know if they have a possibility of succeeding, but you can get anything you want through the modern Congress if nobody says anything, because nobody will read it unless someone does. So what is needed is lots and lots of noise and clamor audible through the Congressional stupor so that someone will actually read the thing before they vote. Otherwise, most of them will think it says what was reported in the papers, and what was reported was a paraphrase of Mike McConnell's piece.
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@Arne can you explain?
[Read the article: The administration's FISA falsehoods continue unabated]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Trap and trace and pen registers, please? The proposed law makes it somewhat automatic that if the FISA judge gives a warrant, they are entitled to have the judge give them an approval of these two to go with it. It's in both the electronic surveillance and the physical search sections.
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@Arne, thanks
[Read the article: The administration's FISA falsehoods continue unabated]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Thanks for the explanation. Given what you quoted, you'd be interested to know that the proposed changes have:
(e) CONTENTS.—Subsection (n) of such section is amended to read as follows:
"(n) 'Contents', when used with respect to a communication, includes any information concerning the substance, purport, or meaning of that communication."
it will no longer protect source and destination info.
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Damn, I didn['t know the connection was that close
[Read the article: The administration's FISA falsehoods continue unabated]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Huh? How is this all that different from these proposed FISA changes? Seems set up to pretty much accomplish the same thing, i.e. grant the executive branch the power to spy on us "legally", and for "justifiable" reasons. Just another attempt to lower the threshold for fascism.
kovie
I knew that Mark Helprin article was a trial balloon. I didn't think they'd be moving on it so quickly. Somebody is counting things, they seem so confident with this powergrab. Do they have a sympathetic Court? They've bagged habeas, now they're bagging the 4th, do you think they'll get the 1st by election time? Scalia once said he did not want to be the first to restrict the 1st amendment, do you think he's changed his mind? Or is it easier to leave the rights in place and make it too scary to exercise them?