Bill Bans NSA Eavesdropping 424
An anonymous reader writes "The US house of representatives today passed a bill outlawing illegal domestic wiretapping by the government. Now government agencies are only allowed to access your private communications under terms of FISA. 'As the Senate Report noted, FISA "was designed . . . to curb the practice by which the Executive Branch may conduct warrantless electronic surveillance on its own unilateral determination that national security justifies it." The Bill ends plans by the Bush Administration that would give the NSA the freedom to pry into the lives of ordinary Americans. The ACLU noted that, despite many recent hearings about 'modernization' and 'technology neutrality,' the administration has not publicly provided Congress with a single example of how current FISA standards have either prevented the intelligence community from using new technologies, or proven unworkable for the agents tasked with following them.'"
"Outlawing illegal domestic wiretapping." (Score:5, Funny)
Re:"Outlawing illegal domestic wiretapping." (Score:5, Funny)
I smell... (Score:3, Insightful)
Either way, it's not going to have an effect on the current President.
-Rick
Re:I smell... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Sure I support the troops. (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess there are differing levels of support...our retard-in-chief seems to see things in a binary fashion tho.
I support most of them at least. (Score:5, Interesting)
I have had friends who served in Iraq, and one who committed suicide a year after she returned.
There are certainly cases where people involved should be prosecuted and where it is right to insult people for what they took part in. If I knew someone who was involved in Abu Ghraib, or any of the other instances where it looks like war crimes occurred, you can bet I would let them have it and call them all sorts of unpleasent names. Heck I would even accuse them of trashing America's reputation to the world and not living up to any of the ideas of our great republic. I would say that such people are unworthy to call themselves Americans in any way other than whatever their case for citizenship was (probably an accident of birth).
This being said, I think it is wrong to paint everyone who serves with the same brush. THere are many who I believe would turn down illegal orders, and people who would refuse to be part of such war crimes. We need to recognize that war is a supreme test of character and some are not going to pass that test. My friend was among those who I believe would have passed that test. She served out of a sense of duty in a war which she opposed for reasons that were born out later (and not the usual ones either). While I suspect that the war crimes problems are more institutionalized that we can easily prove, soldiers have a duty to respect the laws of war and many take that duty very seriously. Such are true heroes among us and whether or not we agree with this war, those individuals deserve our respect.
Re:I support most of them at least. (Score:4, Insightful)
Too bad none of them are generals. Or attorney generals.
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Now, there are cases right now which allege that the order to deploy was illegal, and I support inqueries on this matter even though neither the civil nor military courts are in a position to answer this question. The civil courts are not designed to answer things pertaining to political questions, and the military questions are not allowed to question public policy (and for good reason). For those who felt that their conscience mea
Re:I support most of them at least. (Score:4, Insightful)
What people tend to forget is that problems such as the abuse of prisoners only came to light because they WERE the anomaly.
I am not so sure. If it was one person in Abu Ghraib, I would agree, but when more are involved you have to ask what exactly lead to this and how systemic they are. My own suspicion is that these problems are caused not by just a few trouble makers but rather by a dispersed group of people (still a small minority) who believe that what they watch on '24' makes for good interrogation practices because they identify with the character of Jack Bower. This qualifies to me as systemic but is not a matter of the chain of command.
However, this does not really matter. The real issue is: soldiers have an obligation to uphold the laws of war. THis is even in the oath our military men and women take to faithfully execute all lawful orders. We do train our soldiers to handle these situations, and to uphold such laws. Those who fail in this regard do not deserve our respect or support. However, as the title of my post indicates, I think that they are a minority.
The reason that they tend to forget this is because our domestic enemies, aka the left, work very hard to create the false impression that our military is in the business of abusing people.
To confuse dissent with treason is to undermine the very liberties we hold dear.
In a Free Nation, I do not believe anyone, by expressing any political idea, can ever be a domestic enemy on the basis of that expression. That even includes those demogogues, like Coulter, who seem intent on destroying the very basis for our free society. For if our nation does not have the choice to give up that very freedom that defines us, can we really be truly free?
Look, at the point where we start to confuse dissent with treason, we are in serious danger of losing the very liberties which have defined our great republic. However, the proper response to people who suggest that those who differ politically are somehow to be defined as domestic enemies is to respond with rational, thought-provoking, well-framed arguments.
During the last war that was an overseas extension of our ongoing war with our domestic enemies, aka the Vietnam war, the left painted our soldiers as "baby killers," a characterization of the military that is still prevalent among the leftists of that generation to this day.
I have talked with at least one Vietnam Vet who did shoot and kill a child in self-defense. This is not a war crime, though the VC committed one when they had this kid throw grenades at our army.
If other soldiers committed war crimes by indiscriminatly killing civilians within target areas, then those soldiers and those soldiers specifically can and should be excluded from our support. However, my point is that even so, the actions of such criminals should not be used to withold support from those who faithfully executed lawful orders out of a sense of duty.
I once knew a girl whose mother "disowned" her when she joined the army after high school. The rationale was that the military was made up of nothing bu "baby killers." I was only 18 at the time, and while I knew her mother was mad, I didn't realize that her insanity was the result of leftist indoctrination. I was too young to realize that large groups of people can be hopelessly and completely full of shit. Impervious to logic, resistant to experience, and all but immune to encounters with the clue-bat. Some forms of insanity are communicable. Some do eventually come to their senses and join the rest of us in the real world, but sadly for many it is a life-long ailment.
I come from a Quaker family. Quakers have forbid members from serving in the armed forces since well before the American Revolution. There are other religious groups too with a long history of conscientious objection (Mennonites, Hudderites, and a few others). Under current statutory and con
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No invader, no matter how good his intentions are, no matter how much he only follows orders, is never going to gain my respect.
The whole war is illegal as far as I am concerned, so every single person there has no moral justification whatsoever.
OTOH, every Iraq parson who fights against the occupying forces (instead of each other) gets my highest respect. They are outpowered by high tech equipment and ruthless spray-n-pray "soldiers".
First, I have never said I don't respect those who are fighting for what they feel is the right to form their own government without interference from outside. Many of these Iraqis have spent a long time fighting Saddam. Saddam knew this of course, and because he knew he could not win, armed them as we were preparing to invade (the BBC covered this interestingly enough, but the full context was made clear by International Crisis Group reports-- the only group I have ever found to have consistantly good i
Re:Sure I support the troops. (Score:4, Insightful)
That is exceptionally fallacious logic.
Our armed forces exist for one purpose and one purpose only: DEFENSE. Not policing other countries. Not invading other countries. Not preventing other countries from falling apart. DEFENSE.
The fact that we are draining OUR resources in order to CONTINUE using the same flawed logic is plain wrong. You don't fix a fuck-up by continuing fucking up.
This administration fucked up. They fucked-up bad. I don't see any logical reason to continue punishing our armed forces (and our children) for the idiocy of this administration. Iraq needs to take care of Iraq.
"Of course, the quickest way to end a war is to lose it (also Orwell)"
The quickest way to end a war is to not have one in the first place.
We won the war militarily. We lost the war ideoligically. Which means we lost. The people are figthing against us. The religious extremeists are fighting against us. They don't want us there. All we are doing is acting as a lightning rod.
~X~
Re:Sure I support the troops. (Score:4, Insightful)
You're saying that Bush, on a hunch, decided to spend hundreds of billions of our dollars and get tens of thousands of people killed. I would not want a president to be that stupid, and I sincerely hope you don't either.
If I were a Bush apologist, I would rather be arguing that it's okay for Bush to lie because he's the big boss. (This is the view of most conservatives.) You're taking the angle that Bush is an idiot who does whatever Putin and Chalabi say without thinking. What does that say about his skills as a leader?
You don't know that. (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't know that.
And the reason you don't know that is that the court providing oversight that would ensure such was specifically avoided.
All you have is their claims about the specifics of the wiretaps.
Re:I smell... (Score:4, Insightful)
Attention Moderators: (Score:3, Funny)
Only in a divided government, yeah (Score:5, Insightful)
This bill doesn't really change anything legally, but when it comes time for the third branch of government to have their say on the issue, Congress' intentions will be unambiguous: yes, they do mean that FISA is the ONLY way you can do domestic wiretapping.
It would be nice if laws could be simple and unambiguous, like a well-written piece of software. Instead, laws are written over a long time by a lot of different people, just like real software. Software crashes; laws get inconsistencies. You can point it out for laughs but when it's your phone they're tapping, or your right to life/liberty/property sitting in the ambiguity, it's not so funny.
Re:Only in a divided government, yeah (Score:5, Insightful)
Legislators and lawyers are the coders.
And you thought <despised> had cruft/stability/performance issues...
Re:Only in a divided government, yeah (Score:5, Funny)
Legislation, on the other hand, is created by people who absolutely despise each other, over the course of centuries. Whenever the balance of power shifts, they add MORE source code to the mix, trying to counteract what the other guys added.
And there's no debugger. The best you can hope for is to throw the legislation out there and hope that it has the effect you want.
It would be nice to throw it out and start all over every so often, but it's impossible to know if the new bugs and switchover costs outweigh dealing with upgrading the existing hunk of crap.
Note the sage: (Score:3, Insightful)
Every branch
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The fundamental foolishness of government is that, short of bloody revolution, it lacks some aspects of a degenerative feedback loop to stabilize it.
Separating the legislative, executive, and judicial powers of the government is certainly a step in the right direction. Some might argue that the balance of federal, state, and local separati
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Legislators and lawyers are the coders.
The problem is that not only are they the coders they are the CPUs too. So the law "runs" one way according to one lawyer and "runs" a different way according to a different lawyer.
To stretch the analogy to the breaking point, it is as if each individual x86 CPU manufactured by Intel had a random distribution of computation errors such that 1+1 usually equaled something close 2, but occasionally you got one so far out of spec that it would compute 1+1 = i.
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Re:Only in a divided government, yeah (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with that reasoning is that there isn't another law that grants this authority to the President.
This bill doesn't really change anything legally, but when it comes time for the third branch of government to have their say on the issue, Congress' intentions will be unambiguous: yes, they do mean that FISA is the ONLY way you can do domestic wiretapping.
President Bush is quite fond of "signing statements". When President Carter signed FISA, he issued a signing statement saying that FISA is the only way you can do domestic wiretapping.
It would be nice if laws could be simple and unambiguous, like a well-written piece of software. Instead, laws are written over a long time by a lot of different people, just like real software. Software crashes; laws get inconsistencies. You can point it out for laughs but when it's your phone they're tapping, or your right to life/liberty/property sitting in the ambiguity, it's not so funny.
This particular law is already unambiguous, and the administration has been unambiguously violating it.
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In the view of some opportunists there is - there's the one that grants divine right to rule as granted by God on coronation which is really what he wants and is getting due to no opposition that can stop him. The British threw that out with Magna Carta, but unfortunatly the shift back to monarchy by a branch of the Republicans no less has reintroduced that rule that trumps any "goddam peice of pape
FISA is unconstitutional (Score:5, Insightful)
No. It is about a power that was never made available to the federal government in the first place. Warrantless wiretapping is unconstitutional, period. That includes FISA. FISA represents exactly the same kind of reasoning as the ridiculous topsy-turvey interpretation of the commerce clause. The premise is that wiretapping itself does no harm, completely ignoring the breach of your security. Here is the fourth amendment:
You'll note the order there - it isn't an accident: first they get the warrant, then then they can search, seize and generally violate you security. This is the basis for telecommunications law that outlaws wiretapping in the first place.
FISA is based upon the very peculiar notion that they can first tap, and then ask for a warrant, and if a warrant is not issued, then they just "forget" about the tap and - somehow - everything is just peachy. But clearly, it isn't. Your security and privacy was violated, without a warrant. This of course is entirely aside from the fact that FISA is a rubber-stamp organization; just look at the statistics for warrants granted as opposed to warrants refused. Consider further the fact that I am not allowed to put a tap on your phone line. For any reason. I'm not even allowed to listen to a cell phone conversation you broadcast on an analog mode cell connection or an RF-based portable home phone. This is because it is an invasion of your privacy; and because your security is threatened. It isn't because I didn't get a warrant (I can't, as I am a citizen, not a member of law enforcement) and it isn't because I could get a warrant later, if it seemed like I needed to - I still can't. No, it is simply because your security is guaranteed by the constitution, and it is very clear that such an action would be in violation. But this is exactly what the government does with FISA. They don't bother to get a warrant, they just listen whenever they decide they want to. Clearly, FISA is unconstitutional.
Lastly, all arguments that the constitution is irrelevant here somehow because of "need" are false. If there is a real need, the constitution contains the tools required so that it may be modified such that those needs may be met. No, this is simply an end-run around the intent of the document without having to be inconvenienced by its restrictions. Remember, the constitution is the constituting authority for the federal (and state, with regard to amendments 1-10, as per the 14th) government, and any action that is forbidden on the one hand, or not an enumerated power in the case of the feds, is both unconstitutional and lacking any legitimate authority. Don't confuse power with authority.
Re:FISA is unconstitutional (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, how exactly do you have a warrant "particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized" when you're not searching a place and no persons or things are being seized. Unless telephone conversations have some sort of copyright protection and you consider making a copy as seizure, then again you are on shaky ground.
I'm not saying there can't be laws with these protections, I'm just saying basing them on the 4th amendment seems like a stretch.
It's actually illegal for the NSA or any government agency to tap any communication between US citizens whether inside our country or not. However, the idea of giving constitutional protections to everyone who makes it inside our borders, even those planning to do us harm, seems like a more serious threat than any amount of illegal wiretapping.
Re:FISA is unconstitutional (Score:5, Informative)
I'm sorry, but you are mistaken. Not only that, but the case that extended the Fourth Amendment to prevent wiretapping phone lines without a warrant was a landmark ruling that shook constitutional law down to its roots. Here is Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967). Since the case is not that long, I will quote it in nearly its entirety, only making minor adjustments. Read all of it, slowly and carefully. Then read it again.
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MR. JUSTICE STEWART delivered the opinion of the Court.
The petitioner (ed: Katz) was convicted in the District Court for the Southern District of California under an eight-count indictment charging him with transmitting wagering information by telephone from Los Angeles to Miami and Boston, in violation of a federal statute. At trial the Government was permitted, over the petitioner's objection, to introduce evidence of the petitioner's end of telephone conversations, overheard by FBI agents who had attached an electronic listening and recording device to the outside of the public telephone booth from which he had placed his calls. In affirming his conviction, the Court of Appeals rejected the contention that the recordings had been obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment, because "[t]here was no physical entrance into the area occupied by [the petitioner]." We granted certiorari in order to consider the constitutional questions thus presented.
The petitioner has phrased those questions as follows:
"A. Whether a public telephone booth is a constitutionally protected area so that evidence obtained by attaching an electronic listening recording device to the top of such a booth is obtained in violation of the right to privacy of the user of the booth.
"B. Whether physical penetration of a constitutionally protected area is necessary before a search and seizure can be said to be violative of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution."
We decline to adopt this formulation of the issues. In the first place, the correct solution of Fourth Amendment problems is not necessarily promoted by incantation of the phrase "constitutionally protected area." Secondly, the Fourth Amendment cannot be translated into a general constitutional "right to privacy." That Amendment protects individual privacy against certain kinds of governmental intrusion, but its protections go further, and often have nothing to do with privacy at all. Other provisions of the Constitution protect personal privacy from other forms of governmental invasion. But the protection of a person's general right to privacy - his right to be let alone by other people - is, like the protection of his property and of his very life, left largely to the law of the individual States.
Because of the misleading way the issues have been formulated, the parties have attached great significance to the characterization of the telephone booth from which the petitioner placed his calls. The petitioner has strenuously argued that the booth was a "constitutionally protected area." The Government has maintained with equal vigor that it was not. But this effort to decide whether or not a given "area," viewed in the abstract, is "constitutionally protected" deflects attention from the problem presented by this case. For the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places. What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection. But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.
The Government stresses the fact that the telephone booth from which the petitioner made his calls was constructed partly of glass, so that he was as visible after he entered it as he would have been if he had remained outside. But what he sought to exclude when he entered the booth was not the intruding eye - it was the uninvited ear.
Says who? (Score:5, Insightful)
And where does the Constitution say that?
It doesn't. Why doesn't it? Because in 1789, there was no such thing as electronic communication.
In 1967, the Supreme Court ruled that the protections of the fourth amendment applied to electronic searches as well as physical searches. But you must keep in mind than in 1967, electronic searches pretty much meant having people listen to other people's phone calls.
It's now 2007. Electronic searches mean a lot more than just people listening to other people's phone calls. Whether a computer monitoring all phone calls constitutes an illegal search or not is not a given. It is not unreasonable that the courts could say that computerized monitoring of phone calls is not due the same 4th amendment protections as human monitoring. Or they could say that it is. But neither has happened yet.
In the meantime, a law which says you can't use computer systems to monitor masses of phone calls isn't a bad thing - it makes it illegal now, definitively, without waiting for court interpretation of the scope of 1789's 4th amendment in 2007.
Re:Says who? (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, you can read it as specifically saying that without stretching at all. It says, in part:
Papers were what they had to communicate with. Mail, diplomatic packets, notes, diaries, etc. Clearly, they were trying to safeguard communications, as well as a person's records, until or unless a warrant was issued for cause. When there is no cause, there will be no search of a person's communications. The mail isn't allowed to be interfered with either, again as a fourth amendment issue, because your papers, in transit, represent your communications and they are still protected. Your words in transit on a wire or a fiber are conceptually the same, and I mean really 1:1, exactly, precisely, 100% the same, as your letter to someone that is sitting in a postal collection box or a carrier's bag. When that letter is at your home it is protected, when it is in transit it is protected, and when it is delivered to the recipient it is protected. Your telephone communications clearly deserve the same protections, and given what the founders knew at the time, there is no question that this is what they were trying to accomplish.
Yes. It is. Because the result is the same as the human and machine (tape recorders, etc) acts forbidden in telecommunications law: Your privacy is sundered, your actions in speech that were purportedly private are not, you may very well be held accountable as a direct result of said computer monitoring, and information you did not expect to become public, or intend to become public, or want to become public, or formulate with the notion of public consumption... becomes public. How broadly varies from case to case, but regardless, your privacy is gone. Hyperbole can be interpreted as statements of intent, hypotheticals can become presumed reality, flights of fancy can be perverted into nefarious plans, statements of disgust with public figures can be taken as plots and subversion. It is critical that we know we are speaking for public (or law enforcement, even more so) consumption if that is in fact the case. There are immense consequences that arrive without justification or the knowledge of the persons communicating otherwise.
Now, mind you, I am not saying that the courts - those same courts that think the enumerated and limited power to interfere with interstate commerce means they can interfere with intrastate commerce... those same courts that think the absolute prohibition against ex post facto laws means it is perfectly OK to make ex post facto laws... those same courts that think that the requirement they not infringe upon the right to bear arms means that they can outright forbid you to bear them and that's perfectly OK... those same courts that have trampled the first amendment to the point where people are arrested for "speaking against religion" - would not go right ahead and do this.
However, to any clearheaded human being not a member of the sophist bunch coming out of law school, there is no question that regardless if it is a machine or a person that does the listening and the snitching and the character assassination, your privacy has been violated when said listening is done without the mechanism of a warrant as required by telecommunications law, which, as I mentioned earlier, is based on the fourth amendment and for perfectly obvious reasons. It is still unauthorized, still wrong, and still represents a use of power not enumerated on the one hand, and forbidden on the other.
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FISA (presently) allows wiretapping first, with up to 48 hours before a warrant has to be applied for. This is ass-backwards. Warrant first, then security violation. That is what the bill of rights allows for. Not the other way around. So the sentence you were concerned with was, and is, 100% correct. FISA is absolutely unconstitutional.
Re:Only in a divided government, yeah (Score:5, Insightful)
Except he doesn't. Congress hasn't declared war. By his logic every president in the last 30 years could spy on Americans without warrant because we're in a "war on drugs." We're not legally at war until declared by Congress. We're just technically at war, and reality has no bearing in the legal system.
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It only became an issue when an ideologically driven group of reporters chose to make a program the FISA court judges themselves have repeatedly said they have no jurisdiction over, an issue. No one was filing suit. No one was complainin
Pray tell.... (Score:2)
Which do you suppose we will see first?
And would the expression "GO TO JAIL" be replaced by:
IF {Guilty}
WHILE (sentence)
jail
ENDWHILE
ELSE
home
Re:Only in a divided government, yeah (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no war. War is a legal term, with a defined enemy, defined conditions for a win/loss, recognizable leadership structure for the enemy, etc. War has to be decalred against a nation-stare War can olny be declared by Congress.
Congress did not declare war on any nation. There is no defined conditions for winning or losing (or even a "screw you, I am going home!" situation).
The war on terror is like the "war on drugs". A war on a concept can never end or be won.
We do have combat zones and deaths. However, "war" is not needed to have those.
Re:Only in a divided government, yeah (Score:5, Interesting)
I myself got back from my tour in Iraq in '05. I would like to add that there are no 'terrorists' in Iraq. Well, I'll qualify that by saying there are no Iraqi terrorists in Iraq (we did capture some foreign fighters while I was there, and I'm sure al Qaeda has people there).
Calling an Iraqi fighting against a foreign occupier a terrorist, is in my mind like calling an American fighting in the Revolutionary war a terrorist. Cause god dammit, if someone did that shit to my country, you can be sure I would be deep in that shit, hurting them in any way i could, every day until they were gone. For that reason I have no hatred towards any of the Iraqis that tried to kill me, and did kill several of my friends. No, that hatred is reserved for the bastards that initiated this travesty.
Yeah, I'm bitter
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It seemed to work to me. Iraq did not hijack any airplanes. Iraq didn't train or help in any way the highjackers. Iraq basically did not have WMDs. Seems like peace was working pretty well.
Yes i know, Saddam was a real asshole, a murderer even. Well if we are going to go around invading countries to control their domestic policy there are a lot of places we should be going. Lets invade Thailand so we can stop child
Exactly. Respect for sovereignty... (Score:3)
Parent is right -- if the U.S. administration really believed its own bullsh*t, it should be deploying troops to at least a dozen other nations that don't do th
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Re:"Outlawing illegal domestic wiretapping." (Score:5, Funny)
Don't worry, Bush will be along shortly to double-un-re-de-ban it (no backsies!) any second now.
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In the US, making something illegal is but the first step in outlawing that action or thing. The next step is to outlaw it, but even then, the thing has to be ostracized, vilified, hog tied, circumcised, deep fried, and then finally, it can be made to be a "bad thing", which is often punishable by a lot of hooting, halooing, and in more serious cases a downright hullabaloo; but only when it is made a "terrible t
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but does not your Fourth Amendment rule out blanket wiretapping of your own citizens without a warrant? Making this wiretapping illegal?
Perhaps I'm reading this too simplistically or something. Are
"Outlawing illegal eavesdropping"? (Score:2)
What a world... where you have to specifically outlaw the illegal behavior of the government.
"What a world" (Score:4, Insightful)
Premature Especulation (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Premature Especulation (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signing_statement [wikipedia.org]
Clinton certain had a fair number of them, but half as many as George I, and in twice the time... and 1/6 the number of George II.
Total bullshit all around
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It's up to us to put pressure on our representatives to do it. Don't give up and leave it in Bush's hands. The United States is a democracy of, by, and for the people. If Bush gets away with vetoing this, it will only be because we let him.
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From the outside, it looks more like a corporate state, run by various lobbyist groups and "advisors", with a fun show thrown every four years with spectator participation to keep the masses entertained.
Re:Premature Especulation (Score:4, Informative)
Its the annual funding bill for the intelligence community. Presumably, the President would like to have some authority to spend funds for intelligence purposes.
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Well, a bill, though he is threatening another one that has passed the House but not yet the Senate.
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Scratch that. You can't lose what's already lost.
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Yeah, I know, never going to happen.
Huh? (Score:5, Funny)
Good thing they outlawed illegal wiretapping, since outlawing legal wiretapping would have made it illegal, thus making the above sentence redundant. Wait. I think I hurt my brain.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Funny)
What's that smell (Score:4, Insightful)
*shrug* (Score:2)
It's a pissing contest now, but it doesn't affect me since I don't fucking call anyone or even email anyone except for work. In-person communication FTW!
Don't we already have this (Score:3, Insightful)
"Amendment 4
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and
effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and
no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or
affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the
persons or things to be seized."
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If they'd had phones back then, you can bet your ass they would have included them!
The idea is that the government has to leave you alone unless it can articulate some reason that a judge would find convincing that you have committed a crime. *That* is the essence of the 4th amendment. Anything more than listening to you as you walk down the street should require a warrant. The framers kne
Veto Coming? (Score:2, Insightful)
Unconstitutional (Score:4, Interesting)
The Legislative branch doesn't have the authority to take Executive powers away whenever it wants to. The Executive branch either has a power under the Constitution or it doesn't. The Congress doesn't have the authority to take away Executive powers it didn't grant in the first place.
Re:Unconstitutional (Score:4, Insightful)
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The separation of powers argument is fairly clear, however.
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No, the two arguments are connected.
Yes, and one factor that some of that case law points to in whether or not a search is "reasonable" under the Fourth Amendment is whether or not it is consistent with, or in conflict with, statutory controls, the latter being a factor which weighs against reasonableness.
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Not by themselves, but certainly they can get the ball rolling by suggesting a Constitutional Amendment. See Article 5 [wikipedia.org].
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Re:Unconstitutional (Score:5, Interesting)
I just quickly read up on some of the powqers of the Executive Branch and its actually quite scary as to how many powers the President uses during his term in office that aren't actually codified in US law anywhere but seem to be used as wide ranging systems to get around law - executive orders and signing statements are the two most obvious ones, both used to circumvent laws meant to restrict certain acts and both are powers that are not granted by the Constitution nor current US law.
You people really need to do something about that!
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The standards for wiretapping in a law enforcement capacity are different than the standards for wiretapping foreign agents in an intelligence capacity. Are you claiming they are precisely the same?
Are you also claiming that the penalty for this wiretapping should simply be that the evidence can't be used in a criminal trial? Since the goal is to prevent terrorism rather than to win in court rooms, that's no
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So it seems that it is Bush who has confused "legal" with his own preferences, and that you somehow believe that this is true, that his preferences define legality. Well they don't. The law is perfectly clear, and it is perfectly clear t
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The Legislative branch does have the authority to decide how to allocate funds and what purposes they may be used for, and this is the annual funding bill for the intelligence community. The Executive branch has no authority spending money to do anything not authorized by the legislation appropriating the money used.
That fails to ex
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Why do we need this? (Score:3, Interesting)
Simple... (Score:4, Insightful)
The fact that the USA is always at war and that pretty much anything seems to count as "national security" means that on an average day they've already broken several laws before breakfast.
This bill is Congress trying to put a stop to the farce. The only fly in the ointment is that no law is final until the president signs it, and he's the one abusing the law. Is he really going to sign away his own powers? Based on his track record ("Patriot act", etc.) I doubt it.
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We already have a law (Score:3, Interesting)
The only way to fix this is to vote straight Libertarian as the Republicrats or Democans are so adamant at keeping control rather than adhering to the Constitution.
_________________________________________
A vote against a Libertarian candidate is
a vote to abolish the Constitution itself.
Please visit the Pal-Item Forums at forums.pal-item.com [pal-item.com]
dumb (Score:2, Insightful)
Apologies to Jack Sheldon and SchoolHouse Rock (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, I'm only a bill.
And I'm sitting here on Capitol Hill.
Well, it's a long, long journey
To the capital city.
It's a long, long wait
While I'm sitting in committee,
But I know I'll be a law some day
At least I hope and pray that I will
But today I am still just a bill.
Courtesy of http://www.jacksheldon.com/school.htm [jacksheldon.com]
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I'm just a bill
Yes, I'm only a bill
And if they vote for me on Capitol Hill
Well, then I'm off to the White House
Where I'll wait in a line
With a lot of other bills
For the president to sign
And if he signs me, then I'll be a law.
HOW I hope and pray that he will,
But today I am still just a bill.
Boy:
You mean even if the whole Congress says you should be a law, the president can still say no?
BILL:
Yes, that's called a veto. If the president vetoes me, I have to go back to Congress and they vote on m
Of course they haven't. (Score:5, Informative)
They haven't provided it privately, either, and the reason is simple.
The FISA court is well-known as being basically a warrent rubber-stamping court. Out of thousands of requests sent in the last few years, only a handfull have been rejected, and most of those were accepted with changes suggested by the court. Since the court will issues warrants post-facto, even temporal urgency isn't an obstacle to getting a FISA warrant. Basically in any situation where the request is properly made and has any merit whatsoever the FISA court grants the warrant, it can be done retroactively, and there's pretty much no reason to skip the process. So why would the administration bypass the court in order to conduct a search?
Because the searches had so little merit that even FISA would not grant warrants.
So no, Bush's administration is not going to give an example of a situation where FISA got in the way of conducting legitimate security operations because no such case exists, it could only give examples of illegitimate ones and it isn't going to do that either.
This is a great start, though I hesitate to support the inherent thinking behind it -- which is, the President has the power to do whatever the fuck he wants until Congress specifically steps in and removes one of these infinitely many powers. But that's okay, we have to do something to at least make it explicit that when the President breaks the law, that means it was illegal, not that the Pres can put the pieces back together however he chooses. And I hope they continue to pass laws constraining government power, increasing oversight, and that they do this right up to the point where one of them gets in office and realizes they are subject to those same laws.
Re:Of course they haven't. (Score:4, Insightful)
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But he can't be a diabolical mastermind and an idiot.
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That's a very good point. For a while now my personal emails have had this sig:
"When the president does it that means that it is not illegal."
- Richard Nixon on domestic surveillance, 5/19/1977
"Do I have the legal authority to do this? And the answer is, absolut
Re:You've got that kinda right. (Score:4, Insightful)
How is FISA going to approve tens of thousands of warrants?
Irrelevent, because even if they could issue 10,000 warrants, 9,999 of those search requests would be completely and utterly without any merit whatsoever because the government had absolutely no reason to think that person had any useful information. FISA would not issue any of those warrants individually, why on earth would they issue them en-masse?
FISA or any other court wouldn't issue warrants for the kind of searches Bush wants. They are meritless searches. They are unconstitutional searches. They are illegal searches. That's the real reason FISA can't issue such a warrant.
Separate from FISA itself, is computerized monitoring of millions of phone calls as intrusive as a human agent listening to a particular person's phone calls? I think we'd all say no. So should we be willing to accept a lower burden on the governement for this sort of automated search?
Oh, I highly disagree. I think monitoring millions of phone calls of innocent people is WAY more intrusive than the monitoring of a single person who the agent has reason to think is doing something illegal sufficient to convince a judge that a warrant should be granted. The whole reason we have the 4th Ammendment is so that the police can't just search everyone in the desperate hope of finding a crime. Now that computers have let them do this to literally millions of people, you think it's less intrusive?!
And maybe you feel better if it's only a computer listening to you, but how exactly do you know that an agent didn't decide to listen in on your call? What do you think all that data does sitting on NSA computers; you think the NSA agents can't access it?
The 4th amendment was written in a time when 'search' meant agents of the government came into your home or business and actually PHYSICALLY SEARCHED it. Automated search of electronic communication could not possibly have been considered then, and is thus something we need to consider now.
Or a "search" meant agents of the government read your mail. What's the difference between automated search of electronic communication, and a huge room in the back of the post office with federal agents reading the mail of random U.S. citizens, other than e-mail and NSA computers allows many more random citizens to be illegally searched?
The great thing about the founding fathers is that they worded things such that they described basic principles and not specific technologies, and thus we don't actually have much to consider. The invention of the telegraph and the phone didn't do much to change the way this was viewed. Neither has the computer.
But you're right, we should consider automatic en-masse surveilance without a warrant. Hmm... nope, still unconstitutional. Well that was easy. Time for tea.
What does it do, again? (Score:3, Informative)
It's already criminal for government to access those outside of the provisions of FISA, that's, actually, the entire point of FISA. That it was already outlawed should be obvious from the fact that it is "illegal wiretapping". The description presented here and in TFA, if perhaps not the law itself, is clearly redundant.
The link to the actual amendment in TFA seems to be broken, and while I can find references to the amendment (H.AMDT.182 to H.R.2082) I can't find the text of either the amendment or the amended bill (the amendment passed after the latest text I can find, the May 7 version of the bill.)
So I'm not sure what this new bill does in this regard if anything, whether it is just a clarification, or whether it creates some new enforcement mechanism that provides a remedy when the executive isn't interested in prosecuting themselves for the crime of violating FISA.
Bush Will Ignore It (Score:5, Informative)
Although Bush did lie about stopping his crimes when this issue first blew up in the news, last week he said he'd continue [wired.com].
FISA was created after Congress (and America) learned about some of the extent to which Nixon had abused his power to spy on Americans without cause or Constitutional process. It has been amended over a dozen times since, to keep pace with changing technology and suspects. But Bush will ignore it all, because he's used to the Republican Congress Nixon lacked to perpetuate his tyrannies.
Bush is a committed criminal. Congress must impeach him immediately. While we still can.
Yay for Dems ! (Score:2)
People are missing the point: (Score:3, Insightful)
Why this bill is important... (Score:3, Insightful)
Wait, wait (Score:3, Informative)
This is dangerous (Score:3, Insightful)
Creating a bill like this implies that the current practices are legal, and that this law changes that. In the minds of the players, the law actually weakens exactly what they are trying to protect.
Re:Errr (Score:5, Funny)
By declaring war on it, dummy.
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In the US, the love has been stripped as we've seen with the former prez. Only in war everything's fair now. I bet Clinton would have had less troubles when he shot Monica instead. And declared her a child-porn possessing terrorist.
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