"We shouldn't be grateful when the administration agrees to abide by the law. That is expected and required, not something that occurs when the king deigns that it should."

This reminded me of a Chris Rock bit where he talked about people who want kudos for acting like decent, responsible people.

"I take care of my kids!" --You're supposed to you dumb MF!

"I ain't never been to jail!" --What do you want? A cookie!

No. He won't obey the law.

What really disturbs me is that the executive is using a "crisis" to extend its powers at the expense of the other branches of government. Other republics have given absolute power to leaders in timesof crisis. Rome gave up its powers to a "dictator." Athens gave its powers to a "tyrant." Eventually both of these republics lost their self-governing powers to a single person. Has this lesson been learned?

A secret agency having secret proceedings with a secret court? Oh yeah that's a recipe for following the law. Especially with this gang.

Just found out that a friend of mine was detained by Homeland Security at the Houston airport upon return from Mexico.

He was held for 2-1/2 hours with no explanation. Compared to some horror stories - like the eight hours Keith Olbermann spent naked in Gestapo - I mean Homeland Security - custody after criticizing the Usurper - it was minor, but I'm still shaking just from knowing this could happen to a quiet, law-abiding, middle-class, anglo-saxon white, 12th-generation American, albeit a registered Democrat.

This is a person so annoyingly white-bread and conventional he is regularly mistaken for a republican.

Yet there he was, unable to call on the protections of the Constitution his very own ancestors had fought and died to create.

If he can be targeted and unconstitutionally held like this, so can ANYBODY.

If you're not completely terrified by this regime, you deserve what they've got in store for you.

For all of us.

It is always good to read Glenn Greenwald's clear thinking on these horrific issues.

When Octavian became the first Roman Emperor he declared himself the "savior of the Republic," keeping the outward trappings of the Roman Republic (Tribunes, Senators, etc) but ruling as an autocrat for 41 years. As Tacitus points out in his "Annals of Imperial Rome," by the time Augustus died, there was no living memory of the Republic to inspire people to oppose Tiberius, except for reasons of personal politics and power.

We haven't had 41 years of G.W. Bush, but it seems to me that not too many politicians opposed Bush's secret, warrantless wiretap program on the basis of republican and democratic values. Most high-profile opponents, Arlen Specter for example, were opposed because they had been left out of the loop, an affront to their personal power and prestige. Once included in discussions, Specter pretty much went along with the administration's program, much like he did with the Military Commissions Act of 2006. I don't think that the Democratic Party are much better in this regard as their programme doesn't seem that much different from the Republicans'. Both rule through "bread & circuses," with the Democrats simply distributing more bread.

This is not to say that their aren't principled politicians in both parties, but I sincerely doubt that an American Brutus or Cassius is going to come along to rally a principled defense of our republic (for one thing, our politicians don't have private armies like the Romans did) or roll back via legislation the creeping tyranny that arguably has been growing since our country's beginning.

In the words of Juvenal: Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who watches the watchmen?

The Administration's Answer: How cynical and devisive of you to even suggest that the brave, honorable, and patriotic men and women who serve our country (not to mention the good public servants of this administration slaving away to keep America safe) might even experience the temptation to abuse the power vested to them by the American people, let alone succumb to such a temptation. We demand that in the name of Freedom (TM) and Liberty (TM) you stop playing politics with this issue and apologize for your misguided, petty, and slanderous statements.

The Constitution requires that search warrants be issued only on "probable cause." This means giving a judge enough to show that you reasonably believe that something illegal is going on.

FISA uses a different, toothless version of "probable cause" -- simply a statement that "we want to find out about something."

That definition is unconstitutional for domestic use. That's why FISA is the FOREIGN Intelligence Security Act.

The administration's commitment to go to the FISA court for domestic investigations is STILL unconstitutional.

They didn't back down. They just threw up a smoke screen.

While the empirical meaning of "probable" is minimally "more likely than not" (ignoring for the moment the difficulties involved in independent objective quantification of such in any given case), the historical constitutional context is interesting. At the time of the framing of the constitution "probable cause" as a legal phrase of art simply meant that someone in authority attested that "x happened/is true" before a magistrate.

See Cuddihy, "The Fourth Amendment: Origins and Original Meaning." The 4-volume, 1,800+ page seminal work in this area (I used it as a major cite in my grad work).

While there may be more overall bench level skepticism today, I rather doubt that anyone as done any comprehensive studies showing that "probable cause" warrants yield, in the aggregate, convictions more than 50% of the time. Short of that, it remains mostly a subjective (and inextricably political) phenomenon as far as we know.

While US citizens may feel slightly reassured (or more frustrated depending on their viewpoint) that there are attempts to regulate domestic wiretaps (however feeble this regulatory pressure may be) the fact of the matter is that citizens outside the United States will not and do not enjoy similar protection under US jurisdiction.

A little research would reveal that the NSC in Maryland monitors approximately 3 billion e-mails a day not to mention telephone calls – and by the way word spotting software has been in place for at least 20-25 years to my knowledge so wiretaps and eavesdropping are bog-standard in the spook business and the telecoms companies have been coerced into voluntary participation….

Coupled with attempts to get Google’s search engine data, let’s face it, none of us enjoy ANY privacy at all. The main concern is who plays God? If a conversation was for example taken out of context based on the racial profile of the monitored subscriber, let’s have a show of hands as to who wants to end up in one of the secret prisons in Eastern Europe being grilled without any humanitarian or legal concerns for the Geneva Convention…any takers?

Oh, it can’t happen inside the United States. Given the frauds perpetuated by this Administration in the name of National Security, how will you ever know?