Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) has cast his agreement with the White House on legislation concerning the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance as a compromise -- one in which President Bush accepts judicial review of the program. It isn't a compromise, except quite dramatically on the senator's part. Mr. Specter's bill began as a flawed but well-intentioned effort to get the program in front of the courts, but it has been turned into a green light for domestic spying. It must not pass. [emphasis added]I guess whatever loony-bug has scrambled our junior Senator's brain, it's also touched our other senator - the supposed "rational" one. The editorial also says:
The bill's most dangerous language would effectively repeal FISA's current requirement that all domestic national security surveillance take place under its terms. The "compromise" bill would add to FISA: "Nothing in this Act shall be construed to limit the constitutional authority of the President to collect intelligence with respect to foreign powers and agents of foreign powers." It would also, in various places, insert Congress's acknowledgment that the president may have inherent constitutional authority to spy on Americans. Any reasonable court looking at this bill would understand it as withdrawing the nearly three-decade-old legal insistence that FISA is the exclusive legitimate means of spying on Americans. It would therefore legitimize whatever it is the NSA is doing -- and a whole lot more.[emphasis added]Wait a minute. So the law as it stands now says that all domestic national security surveillance has to take place under FISA? But that would mean that whatever's (still) happening over at the NSA is then...uh...illegal?
Damn that liberal media for keeping this violation of the law from the people!
Here's the end:
This bill is not a compromise but a full-fledged capitulation on the part of the legislative branch to executive claims of power. Mr. Specter has not been briefed on the NSA's program. Yet he's proposing revolutionary changes to the very fiber of the law of domestic surveillance -- changes not advocated by key legislators who have detailed knowledge of the program. This week a remarkable congressional debate began on how terrorists should face trial, with Congress finally asserting its role in reining in overbroad assertions of presidential power. What a tragedy it would be if at the same time, it acceded to those powers on the fundamental rights of Americans.Thanks, Senator Spector. Thanks for all your help protecting our rights.
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2 comments:
NSA's domestic wiretapping's legality is based upon the premise that if you get a warrent (NSA has power to listen to foreign calls) to wiretap someone, you get to listen to whoever calls them or whoever they call. This has been upheld constitutionally. If my drug dealer is being wiretapped, they not only get to listen to what I say to him (even though they have no warrent to listen to me), they get to use what I say in my prosocution.
For Christmas I bought my son a copy of Busted, Drug War Survival Skills by Chris Fabricant. My son said, “Dad, I don’t do drugs.”
I said, “This book isn’t about being poor, black, personal choices, and pedophilia, it is about criminal justice in the United States.”
Fabricant points out in the chapter ‘The New Millennium Drug War’ Agent Smith is among you. You can feel him, you can taste him. But you won’t even know he’s there. Nothing you transmit electronically is protected. ”Forget the Fourth Amendment online. …anything that you “knowingly expose to the public”….. and it will be assumed you do so ‘knowingly’ no matter if the Internet is as baffling to you as sign language to a monkey…..” Just imagine being able to capture, store, and correlate not only the ‘cookies’ containing the IP addresses of all electronic traffic but the detail of the traffic itself! Every e-mail you have ever sent. It would take the largest data base ever created…. which happens to be owned by….. Duh!….the NSA. And thanks to the 1,140 pedophiles (and more every day) who have been arrested and convicted using warrantless internet surveillance, it is both completely legal and constitutional. No politician is ever going to stand up and demand that a thousand child molesters be released into the public because the evidence against them was obtained through illegal, warrentless search and seizure. (That is what I assume you are advocating.)
Good Luck, guys. I can’t believe you are as stupid and naive as you appear but then the world’s elites have never had a clue. You have about as much chance of saving the 4th amendment as the NRA has in saving the second. Fabricant’s book, from the buy to the bust to begging for mercy. is a must read if you want to understand and keep from getting flushed down the black hole of American criminal justice.
Specter has been playing both sides of the street for so long I can't believe a word he says.
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