Bush Lets NSA Spy on Callers Without Courts

Dolemite · May 14, 2006

Makkonnen said:
the nsa monitors all phone,fax,emails etc worldwide and has been for a long time

project echelon

[frame]http://duncan.gn.apc.org/echelon-dc.htm[/frame]

Loud and Clear
The most secret of secret agencies operates under outdated laws.

By James Bamford

Sunday, November 14, 1999; Page B01

On the Yorkshire moors in northern England, dozens of enormous white globes sit like a moon base, each one hiding a dish-shaped antenna aimed at a satellite. Acres of buildings house advanced computers and receiving equipment, while tall fences and roving guards keep the curious at a distance. Known as Menwith Hill station, it is one of the most secret pieces of real estate on Earth. It is also becoming one of the most controversial.

For decades, Menwith Hill has been the key link in a worldwide eavesdropping network operated by America's super-secret National Security Agency (NSA), the agency responsible, among other things, for electronic surveillance and code breaking. It is the NSA's largest listening post anywhere in the world. During the Cold War, the station played a major role in the West's ability to monitor the diplomatic, military and commercial communication behind the Iron Curtain. But rather than shrinking in the decade since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Menwith Hill has grown.

People in Europe and the United States are beginning to ask why. Has the NSA turned from eavesdropping on the communists to eavesdropping on businesses and private citizens in Europe and the United States? The concerns have arisen because of the existence of a sophisticated network linking the NSA and the spy agencies of several other nations. The NSA will not confirm the existence of the project, code-named Echelon.

The allegations are serious. A report by the European Parliament has gone so far as to say "within Europe all e-mail, telephone and fax communications are routinely intercepted" by the NSA. As one of the few outsiders who have followed the agency for years, I think the concerns are overblown--so far. Based on everything I know about the agency, and countless conversations with current and former NSA personnel, I am certain that the NSA is not overstepping its mandate. But that doesn't mean it won't.

My real concern is that the technologies it is developing behind closed doors, and the methods that have given rise to such fears, have given the agency the ability to extend its eavesdropping network almost without limits. And as the NSA speeds ahead in its development of satellites and computers powerful enough to sift through mountains of intercepted data, the federal laws (now a quarter-century old) that regulate the agency are still at the starting gate. The communications revolution--and all the new electronic devices susceptible to monitoring--came long after the primary legislation governing the NSA.

The controversy comes at an interesting time. Throughout much of the intelligence community, the cloak of secrecy is being pulled back. The CIA recently sponsored a well-publicized reunion of former American spies in Berlin and is planning a public symposium on intelligence during the Cold War later this month in Texas. Even the National Reconnaissance Office, once so secret that even its name was classified, now offers millions of pages of documents and decades of spy satellite imagery to anyone with the time and interest to review them.

The NSA is the exception. As more and more questions are being raised about its activities, the agency is pulling its cloak even tighter. It is obsessively secretive. Last spring, for the first time, it denied a routine request for internal procedural information from a congressional intelligence committee.

Headquartered at Fort Meade, halfway between Washington and Baltimore, the NSA is by far America's largest spy agency. It has about 38,000 military and civilian employees around the world; the CIA, roughly 17,000. The agency's mandate is to monitor communications and break codes overseas; it also has a limited domestic role, with targets such as foreign embassies. It can monitor American citizens suspected of espionage with a warrant from a special court. It is potentially the most intrusive spy agency. Where scores of books have been written about the CIA, the only book exclusively on the NSA is the one I wrote in 1982.

Echelon, which links the NSA to its counterparts in the U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand, amounts to a global listening network. With it, those agencies are able to sift through great quantities of communications intercepted by satellites and ground stations around the world, using computers that search for specific names, words or phrases.

Whether the NSA will go too far with Echelon is not an idle question. In the mid-1970s, the Senate and House Select Committees on Intelligence were created in part as a result of NSA violations. For decades, the NSA had secretly and illegally gained access to millions of private telegrams and telephone calls in the United States. The agency acted as though the laws that applied to the rest of government did not apply to it.

Based on the findings of a commission appointed by President Ford, the Justice Department launched an unusually secret criminal investigation of the agency, known only to a handful of people. Senior NSA officials were read Miranda warnings and interrogated. It was the first time the Justice Department had ever treated an entire federal agency as a suspect in a criminal investigation. Eventually, despite finding numerous grounds on which to go forward with prosecution, Justice attorneys recommended against it. "There is the specter," said their report, which the government still considers classified, "in the event of prosecution, that there is likely to be much 'buck-passing' from subordinate to superior, agency to agency, agency to board or committee, board or committee to the President, and from the living to the dead."

As a result of the investigations, Congress in 1978 passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which stated in black and white what the NSA could and could not do. To overcome the NSA's insistence that its activities were too secret to be discussed before judges, Congress created a special federal court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, to hear requests for warrants for national security eavesdropping. In case the court ever turned down an NSA request, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Appeals Court was created. It has never heard a case.

In the more than two decades since the FISA was passed, the law has remained largely static, while cell phones, e-mail, faxes and the Internet have come to dominate how we communicate. The point hasn't been lost on the NSA. Last month, Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden, director of the NSA, gave a speech inside the agency. I was one of the few outsiders invited to attend. Hayden warned of the "new challenges" in "information technology" that the agency now faces. "The scale of change is alarmingly rapid," he said, noting that "the world now contains 40 million cell phones, 14 million fax machines, 180 million computers, and the Internet doubles every 90 days."

That's not all Hayden acknowledged. He had just returned from England, he said, where he had met with colleagues at Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), Britain's equivalent of the NSA. He added that they had renewed a long-standing commitment to work together. No director had ever spoken publicly of that close partnership. "We must go back to our roots with GCHQ," Hayden said.

The cooperation between the Echelon countries is worrying. For decades, these organizations have worked closely together, monitoring communications and sharing the information gathered. Now, through Echelon, they are pooling their resources and targets, maximizing the collection and analysis of intercepted information. Officials from many of the European Union countries fear that the NSA may be stealing their companies' economic secrets and passing them on to American competitors. "We're hoping we can use our position to alert other parliaments and people throughout the European Union as to what's going on," Glyn Ford, a member of the European Parliament, told the BBC. "Hopefully that will lead to a situation where some proper controls are instituted and that these things are done under controlled conditions."

The issue has also caught the attention of the House and Senate intelligence committees, and the NSA's response has been anything but reassuring. As part of its normal oversight responsibilities, the House Select Committee on Intelligence last spring requested from the NSA a number of legal documents that outline the agency's procedures for its eavesdropping operations. The agency, in essence, told the committee to take a hike. It refused to release any of the documents based on a unique claim of "government attorney-client privilege." Despite repeated requests by the intelligence committee, the NSA insisted that those documents "are free from scrutiny by Congress." Eventually, after months of negotiation, the NSA complied.

It is highly unlikely that Echelon is monitoring everyone everywhere, as critics claim. It would be impossible for the NSA to capture all communications. It has had personnel cutbacks in the past five years as its national security targets have increased in number: North Korean missile development, nuclear testing in India and Pakistan, the movement of suspected terrorists and so on. Listening in on European business to help American corporations would be a very low priority, and passing secret intercepts to companies would quickly be discovered.

Still, the NSA's stonewalling of Congress should serve as a warning bell. Under Section 502 of the National Security Act of 1947, as amended, the heads of all U.S. spy agencies are obligated to furnish "any information or material concerning intelligence activities . . . which is requested by either of the intelligence committees in order to carry out its authorized responsibilities." Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), the House committee's chairman and a former CIA officer, has long argued for a stronger intelligence community, and even he seemed stunned by the NSA's arrogance. The NSA's behavior, he said, "would seriously hobble the legislative oversight process contemplated by the Constitution."

Rather than disappear further from view, the agency should publicly address these concerns, and the intelligence committees should hold hearings to update the laws governing the NSA and to close what now amount to loopholes. For example, the 1978 FISA prohibits the NSA from using its "electronic surveillance" technology to target American citizens. But that still leaves open the possibility that Britain's GCHQ or another foreign agency could target Americans and turn the data over to the NSA. Another problem is that the FISA appears not to apply to the NSA's monitoring of the Internet. While covering such things as "wire" and "radio" communications, there is no mention of "electronic communications," which is the legal term for communicating over the Internet as defined by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986. Worse, FISA applies only "under circumstances in which a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy."

In the recent film, "Enemy of the State," the NSA was portrayed as an out-of-control agency listening in on unwitting citizens. As the nation begins a new century, congressional hearings to redefine the agency's boundaries are the best way to prevent life from imitating art.

James Bamford, author of "The Puzzle Palace: A Report on America's Most Secret Agency" (Viking Penguin), is working on a new book about the NSA.

© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

out echelon and see what people think about the illusion of privacy

Greed · May 14, 2006

poor democrats, they deserve better.

QueEx · May 15, 2006

<center>Negroponte Had Denied Domestic Call Monitoring
Administration Won't Comment on NSA Logs</center>

Washington Post
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 15, 2006; Page A03

When he was asked about the National Security Agency's controversial domestic surveillance program last Monday, U.S. intelligence chief John D. Negroponte objected to the question and said the government was "absolutely not" monitoring domestic calls without warrants.

"I wouldn't call it domestic spying," he told reporters. "This is about international terrorism and telephone calls between people thought to be working for international terrorism and people here in the United States."

Three days later, USA Today divulged details of the NSA's effort to log a majority of the telephone calls made within the United States since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks -- amassing the domestic call records of tens of millions of U.S. households and businesses in an attempt to sift them for clues about terrorist threats.

To many lawmakers and civil liberties advocates, the revelation seemed to fly in the face of months of public statements and assurances from President Bush and his aides, who repeatedly sought to characterize the NSA's effort as a narrowly tailored "terrorist surveillance program" that had little impact on regular Americans.

But, as illustrated by Negroponte's remarks last week, administration officials have been punctilious in discussing the NSA program over the past five months, parsing their words with care and limiting comments to the portion of the program that had been confirmed by the president in December.

In doing so, the administration rarely offered any hint that a much broader operation, involving millions of domestic calls, was underway. Even yesterday -- after days of congressional furor and extensive media reports -- administration officials declined to confirm or deny the existence of the telephone-call program, in part because of court challenges that the government is attempting to derail.

On Dec. 27, for example, about two weeks after the New York Times disclosed NSA eavesdropping on international calls to and from the United States, White House spokesman Trent Duffy said the effort was "a limited program."

"This is not about monitoring phone calls designed to arrange Little League practice or what to bring to a potluck dinner," Duffy said. "These are designed to monitor calls from very bad people to very bad people who have a history of blowing up commuter trains, weddings and churches."

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales also was circumspect, though he prompted widespread speculation with a handful of cryptic remarks to lawmakers.

In a February letter clarifying his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, for example, Gonzales appeared to suggest that the NSA program might extend beyond the outlines of what Bush described in December. In early April, during an appearance at the House Judiciary Committee, Gonzales said he could not rule out the possibility that Bush could order warrantless wiretaps on telephone calls occurring solely within the United States.

Caroline Fredrickson, Washington legislative director for the American Civil Liberties Union, said the administration has purposely misled Congress and the public about the scope and character of the NSA's domestic intelligence activities. She pointed to comments in January by Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden, Bush's nominee for CIA director, who said the NSA program "is not a driftnet" over U.S. communities.

"Clearly they actually were using a net; a vacuum cleaner might be a better way to put it," Fredrickson said yesterday. "I think it is misleading what they've said, even if you might not characterize it as lying in every instance. There are far too many times where they basically play it way too cute . . . and it just makes you wonder what else is out there."

White House spokeswoman Dana M. Perino denied that the administration was misleading when it described the NSA program as narrowly drawn.

"It is narrow," she said. "The president has been very specific and very accurate in all of his comments. He said that the government is not trolling through personal information and that the privacy of Americans is fiercely guarded."

At the same time, she said, the government has been aggressive in exploiting intelligence resources to target al-Qaeda. "He's going to continue to use those tools to their fullest lawful extent until they're no longer necessary," she said.

During television appearances yesterday, lawmakers from both parties said they would demand more details about the NSA's surveillance activities, with Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) vowing to obtain many of the answers from executives of major telephone companies that aided the government by turning over consumer records.

Specter and other lawmakers also said they will seek to learn more details about the NSA efforts from Hayden, who ran the agency from 1999 to 2005 and is scheduled to appear before the Senate intelligence committee on Thursday.

Hayden, currently the deputy intelligence director, was named last week as Bush's pick to replace CIA director Porter J. Goss, who abruptly announced his resignation May 5 after less than two years on the job. The Times reported yesterday that Hayden argued against a proposal by Vice President Cheney to allow the NSA to eavesdrop on domestic telephone calls and e-mails without warrants.

"There's no question that his confirmation is going to depend upon the answers he gives regarding activities of NSA," Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), who has expressed support for the nomination, said yesterday on ABC's "This Week." "One of the questions I want to ask is 'Who set that policy?' "

Several Democrats were especially critical. Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, said the administration is "breaking the law. We all want to catch terrorists, but I am against an effort to have the executive branch monitor itself."

But Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), who was briefed on the program, said the collection of call records was legal and that disclosures of its existence harm national security.

National security adviser Stephen J. Hadley refused to confirm or deny news reports about the massive telephone database but said NSA's intelligence activities are lawful and do not infringe on the privacy rights of Americans.

"A lot of lawyers in the executive branch spend lots of time to try to make sure that the things we did are within the law," Hadley said yesterday on CBS's "Face the Nation." "That is what you'd expect and that's what we do. But the terrorist surveillance program that has been talked about in the press is a narrowly defined program."

Staff writer Peter Baker and researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...6051400762.html?referrer=email&referrer=email

muckraker10021 · May 15, 2006

The bush junta's attempt to intimidate and destroy "The Fourth Estate" is in full throttle. Read the ABC News blog entry below.

If they succeed, and in my opinion they won't, the American media and the internet will become like Communist China's. You will have government controlled media. All channels will be like <s>FOX</s> FAKE News. Internet access will be censored like China or Saudi Arabia. When you type the word 'democracy' into google in China , the result comes back "not permitted".

There is a legislative debate currently going on that I assume and hope you peeps are aware of that will determine if American internet users start on the slippery slope toward a censored China style internet. Contact your senator & congressional representative. Fight to retain the unfettered internet that we are all accustomed to.

READ:
<a target="_blank" href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20060513/cm_huffpost/020951">
The Net Neutrality Act: Telcos' Big Lie</a>
<a target="_blank" href="http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20060213&s=chester">
The End of the Internet?</a>

<hr noshade color="#ff0000" size="8"></hr>
<img src="http://cache.kotaku.com/gaming/abc_logo_240_001-thumb.jpg" width="125" height="103">


Federal Source to ABC News:
We Know Who You're Calling

 May 15, 2006 10:33 AM
 Brian Ross and Richard Esposito Report:
 A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we call in an effort to root out confidential sources.
 "It's time for you to get some new cell phones, quick," the source told us in an in-person conversation.
 ABC News does not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.
 Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.
 One former official was asked to sign a document stating he was not a confidential source for New York Times reporter James Risen.
 Our reports on the CIA's secret prisons in Romania and Poland were known to have upset CIA officials. 
People questioned by the FBI about leaks of intelligence information say the CIA was also disturbed by ABC News reports that revealed the use of CIA predator missiles inside Pakistan.
 Under Bush Administration guidelines, it is not considered illegal for the government to keep track of numbers dialed by phone customers.
 The official who warned ABC News said there was no indication our phones were being tapped so the content of the conversation could be recorded.
 A pattern of phone calls from a reporter, however, could provide valuable clues for leak investigators.
 May 15, 2006 | <a href="http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2006/05/federal_source_.html" lid="Permalink">Permalink</a>

<hr noshade color="#0000ff" size="10"></hr>

NSA Whistleblower To Allege Unlawful Acts,
Will Name General Hayden

May 15, 2006 9:47 AM
 Vic Walter Reports:
 NSA whistleblower Russ Tice says he will tell Congress Wednesday of "probable unlawful and unconstitutional acts" involving the agency's former director, Gen. Michael Hayden, President Bush's nominee to run the CIA.
 Tice, a former technical intelligence specialist at NSA who first went public on ABC News, says he has been asked to testify Wednesday before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
 In a letter to the committee, Tice says the alleged illegal acts involved "very highly sensitive intelligence programs and operations known as Special Access Programs (SAPs)."
 Gen. Hayden said last week that all activities he oversaw as director of the NSA were in compliance with the law.
 <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/images/WNT/Tice_letter_Warner.pdf" fn="Tice_letter_Warner.pdf" lid="Click here to read Tice's full letter to the Senate in our Dossier section.">Click here to read Tice's full letter to the Senate in our Dossier section.</a>
 May 15, 2006 | <a href="http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2006/05/nsa_whistleblow.html" lid="Permalink">Permalink</a>


<hr noshade color="#590059" size="14"></hr>

Greed · May 16, 2006

Verizon: NSA Didn't Ask Us for Records

Verizon: NSA Didn't Ask Us for Records
By PETER SVENSSON, AP Technology Writer
8 minutes ago

Verizon Communications Inc. on Tuesday joined fellow phone company BellSouth Corp. in denying key points of a USA Today story that said the companies had provided records of millions of phone calls to the government.

Verizon has not provided customer call data to the National Security Agency, nor had it been asked to do so, the company said in an e-mailed statement. The statement came a day after BellSouth Corp. made a similar denial.

"One of the most glaring and repeated falsehoods in the media reporting is the assertion that, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Verizon was approached by NSA and entered into an arrangement to provide the NSA with data from its customers' domestic calls," the statement read.

The denials leave open the possibility that the NSA directed its requests to long-distance companies, or that call data was collected by other means. Long-distance calls placed by BellSouth and Verizon subscribers can traverse the networks of other carriers who collect a variety of information for billing purposes.

A story in USA Today last Thursday said Verizon, AT&T Inc. and BellSouth had complied with an NSA request for tens of millions of customer phone records after the 2001 terror attacks. The report sparked a national debate on federal surveillance tactics.

The newspaper story cited anonymous sources "with direct knowledge of the arrangement."

"Sources told us that BellSouth and Verizon records are included in the database," USA Today spokesman Steve Anderson said.

"We're confident in our coverage of the phone database story," Anderson added, "but we won't summarily dismiss BellSouth's and Verizon's denials without taking a closer look."

An attorney for the former chief executive of Qwest Communications International Inc., on Friday lent support to USA Today's story. He said the Denver company had been approached by the government, but had denied the request for phone records because it appeared to violate privacy law.

Qwest is a regional phone company with a substantial long-distance business. It was not clear if the government's request applied only to Qwest's long-distance business.

Verizon's statement suggested that USA Today may have erred in not drawing a distinction between long-distance and local telephone calls.

"Phone companies do not even make records of local calls in most cases because the vast majority of customers are not billed per call for local calls," Verizon said.

Tuesday's denial did not apply to MCI, the long-distance carrier Verizon acquired in January. In an earlier statement, Verizon said it is in the process of ensuring that its policies are put in place in the former MCI business.

Three smaller phone companies, with mainly local business, contacted by The Associated Press on Tuesday also denied being approached by the NSA. Representatives at Alltel Corp., Citizens Communications Co. and CenturyTel Inc. all said they had no knowledge of NSA requests to their companies.

The denials by Verizon and BellSouth leave AT&T as the sole company named in the USA Today article that hasn't denied involvement. On Thursday, San Antonio-based AT&T said it had "an obligation to assist law enforcement and other government agencies responsible for protecting the public welfare," but said would only assist as allowed within the law.

AT&T spokesman Michael Coe said Tuesday the company had no further comment.

AT&T Inc. was formed last year when regional phone company SBC Communications Inc. bought AT&T Corp., the long-distance and corporate carrier, and adopted its name.

BellSouth, Verizon and AT&T are facing a number of lawsuits by customers who allege violations of their privacy. On Monday, a Democratic member of the Federal Communications Commission said the FCC should investigate whether the companies violated federal communications law.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060516...GhI2ocA;_ylu=X3oDMTA5aHJvMDdwBHNlYwN5bmNhdA--

Greed · May 18, 2006

Civil liberties debate leaves much of America cold

Civil liberties debate leaves much of America cold
By Caroline Drees, Security Correspondent
Thu May 18, 1:44 PM ET

A furor over the trade-off between civil liberties and security in the fight against terrorism is raging in the U.S. Congress, think tanks and the media, but the heated debate leaves much of America cold.

In Washington, attention was focused on Senate confirmation hearings of Gen. Michael Hayden, the nominee for CIA chief who ran a domestic spying program, and on a report last week that the government gathered phone records of millions of Americans.

But the debate was unlikely to change many minds in a country where opinion polls show more than half of the people believe that sacrificing some rights is a necessary price to pay for safety after the September 11 attacks.

"People look at it through the lens of 9/11 and understand that we haven't been attacked since then and that there are reasons for that other than just good luck," said Mac Thrower, editorial page editor at The Paducah Sun in Kentucky.

"I think for that reason there's pretty strong support for what the president is doing in that area, not a great deal of concern about a threat to civil liberties," he said.

A CNN poll released on Thursday showed 54 percent of Americans support gathering phone records to find terrorists. A few days earlier, a Washington Post/ABC News poll showed 51 percent approve of the way Bush was protecting their privacy.

According to a USA Today/Gallup survey last week, 53 percent of Americans think the government has restricted civil liberties appropriately or "not far enough."

EXPLAINING THE NUMBERS

Analysts see many factors behind the poll numbers, including a preoccupation with other issues like the war in Iraq, the economy, jobs and immigration that means people are giving a lower priority to rights protection.

Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democratic member of the September 11 Commission which investigated the 2001 attacks, said the numbers reflected an indifference which was discouraging, but not surprising.

"Unless it directly affects an individual, people are not as vigilant as they ought to be and perhaps not as educated as they ought to be on the importance of our constitutional privacy and civil liberties protections," he said

Some experts also said many Americans believed the civil liberties debate was exaggerated, and was undermining a vital weapon against terrorism.

"Hyperventilating worrywarts fret that fascism has descended," Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations, wrote in a commentary published by the Los Angeles Times this week.

"If civil liberties agitators, grandstanding politicians and self-righteous newspaper editorialists have their way, we will have to give up our most potent line of defense because of largely hypothetical concerns about privacy violations."

Other analysts say the polls highlight underlying resignation due to an erosion of civil liberties over time.

"There's been an assault on Americans' privacy. Everything we do in our society seems to be monitored, every purchase we make is collected by private entities. I think people are just used to it today," said Lewis Katz, a law professor and privacy expert at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.

While America as a whole may not be overly concerned, Arab Americans -- who feel hardest hit by the measures -- say the country needed to realize everyone's rights were at risk.

"This is not just about Arab Americans. What people really need to understand is that this affects every single person living in this country. Everyone's civil liberties are at stake," said Rana Abbas-Chami, deputy director of the American-Arab Anti Discrimination Committee's Michigan office.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060518...NdZ.3QA;_ylu=X3oDMTA5aHJvMDdwBHNlYwN5bmNhdA--

Greed · Jul 3, 2006

May Commencement 2006 > Arthur Sulzberger's Address

May Commencement 2006 > Arthur Sulzberger's Address
May 21, 2006

Good morning and my most heartfelt congratulations.

As the father of two relatively recent college graduates, I know how important this moment is to all of you. Whether mother or father, you are now breathing a huge sigh of relief. Your child has the possibility of a future and, while the bills remain to be paid, at least they’ve stopped growing.

But as much as I’d like today to be about us parents, I know it’s not. It’s about the rest of you – our children and our future. So, to all of you – well done.

This is my first ever commencement speech and, depending on your reviews, maybe my last.

Worse, the truth is I even skipped my own graduation. It was a glorious day. My cousin and fellow graduate and I heard the road calling.
Motorcycles; speeches – no brainer. Thank goodness it’s gray and overcast today, so most of you are here.

So, given my lack of commencement experience I prepared for today the way good journalists are supposed to – I reported out the story. I read what generations of other commencement speakers had said and what themes they hit.

Ninety five percent of them come down to this: “Today you enter the real world. Follow your heart. Find what you love and do it.”

Who can argue with such wisdom? It’s sort of a motherhood and apple pie statement. It sounds so easy.

So let’s all tip our hat to the honesty of our favorite non-news caster, Jon Stewart of the Daily Show. Two years ago he told a graduating class at William and Mary:

“So how do you know what is the right path to choose to get the results you desire? The honest answer is this. You don’t. And accepting that greatly eases the anxiety of your life experience.”

As a journalist; as a media executive; as a human being -- I come to you fully aware of the need we all have to heed Mr. Stewart's words and ease our anxieties. The vagaries of life are enormous, and it is those very vagaries about which I want to talk with you.

I’ll start with an apology.

When I graduated from college in 1974, my fellow students and I had just ended the war in Vietnam and ousted President Nixon. Okay, that’s not quite true. Yes, the war did end and yes, Nixon did resign in disgrace – but maybe there were larger forces at play.

Either way, we entered the real world committed to making it a better, safer, cleaner, more equal place. We were determined not to repeat the mistakes of our predecessors. We had seen the horrors and futility of war and smelled the stench of corruption in government.

Our children, we vowed, would never know that.

So, well, sorry. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

You weren’t supposed to be graduating into an America fighting a misbegotten war in a foreign land.

You weren’t supposed to be graduating into a world where we are still fighting for fundamental human rights, be it the rights of immigrants to start a new life; the rights of gays to marry; or the rights of women to choose.

You weren’t supposed to be graduating into a world where oil still drives policy and environmentalists have to relentlessly fight for every gain.

You weren’t. But you are. And for that I’m sorry.

Starting today, it will be more and more up to you to decide what world you will bequeath to your children (yes, most of you will be having children – it just goes with the territory).

As you continue to make the choices that define your life – and by the way, attending and graduating from college was a critical one – you also will be defining the world you live in. Think of it as your personal version of what in the scientific world (or perhaps the science fiction world) is known as the butterfly effect. The butterfly effect holds that the smallest of actions -- say, the flapping of the wings of a butterfly in the mountains of Bolivia -- can lead over time to enormous consequences -- say, a hurricane in Africa.

Each of you will face many crossroads, some of them seemingly small and inconsequential. You will choose at each point whether to be bold or hesitant; inclusive or elitist; generous or stingy. And each one of your choices will result not only in how people define you. Each one will help shape the world you make for the rest of us.

So I have a plea and I have a piece of advice. The advice is to focus on the small decisions, because they add up very quickly. And I don’t mean what job you take or what town you live in. Those will change as you change. I mean decisions like whether to pick up that overturned trash can or whether to stop for that stranded motorist. Those are the decisions that can change our world just as surely as a butterfly can create a hurricane.

Yes, it’s important that those of us at The New York Times have the courage of our own convictions and defend the rights of our journalists to protect their sources or, after much debate and discussion, publish the news that our government is bypassing it’s own legal systems to tap into phone calls made to and from the United States.

But those big decisions rest on a stable foundation which has been built by thousands of small decisions – from the way we protect our reporters and photographers in war-torn areas such as Iraq (and even then lose too many) to how we’ve shattered the glass ceiling that for too long stopped women from moving into the highest levels of leadership.

And my plea is: engage. Our world needs you. It needs your energy and your caring; it needs your commitment and your values. If we don’t get them our society – all of us – will continue to aimlessly drift, failing to make our country and our world a place that makes us proud.

Engage. Help make decisions. Vote. Read a newspaper (what, you thought the publisher of The New York Times wouldn’t get there?) Knowing what’s happening in your world, your country, your neighborhood is the critical precursor to being a citizen of a democracy. Each one of you who forsakes your role in keeping our democracy alive by either inaction or, perhaps worse, by action based on ignorance, threatens all the rest of us. So, read a newspaper and build a community.

As you already heard, I’m here in large part because I’m a rock climber. I work in New York City but I come to New Paltz to clear my head and batter my body against those beautiful cliffs up there. And this ties in to another bit of reporting I did in preparation for today. I found what may well be one of the shortest commencement speeches every given.

It was 1941. Following what was no doubt an excessive introduction, - sort of like mine - our speaker walked to the lectern, glared out at the assembled multitude and in his trademark bark intoned: “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never -- in nothing, great or small, large or petty -- never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.”

And then Winston Churchill sat down.

With a philosophy like that, Sir Winston would have made one hell of a rock climber. Life is relentless. When you think you’ve made the crucial move – what in climbing parlance is called The Crux – it always throws you another one. And another. And another.

These are the vagaries of which I spoke earlier in these remarks. In my experience, the only way to prepare for them is inside each of you. It is not about the job you have or the money you make. It is about commitment and courage; it’s about caring and fortitude. It’s about supporting those around you and, just as importantly, it's about letting them support you. In the parlance of the climber, trust that you’re “on belay”.

Engage; get the small decisions right; never give in and please -- please – build us a world of which we can be proud. Go make a damn difference.

None of you wants to be standing where I am 30 years from now apologizing to the next generation of bright and shiny college graduates.

Thank you,

Arthur Sulzberger Jr.

http://www.newpaltz.edu/commencement/sulzberger.html

GET YOU HOT · Jul 8, 2006

All this is reminisant of the constant reports of monitoring by the Government, of "INTERNET CHATTER" following the fallout of 9/11.

Makeherhappy · Jul 9, 2006

[FRAME]http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-6091942.html[/FRAME]

GET YOU HOT · Jul 12, 2006

Soon a force of Internet Police will emerge...

Makeherhappy · Jul 13, 2006

Does anyone have good information on I2? besides the googleable information.

Greed · Aug 17, 2006

Judge nixes warrantless surveillance

free speech?

Judge nixes warrantless surveillance
3 minutes ago
DETROIT - A federal judge ruled Thursday that the government's warrantless wiretapping program is unconstitutional and ordered an immediate halt to it.

U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in Detroit became the first judge to strike down the National Security Agency's program, which she says violates the rights to free speech and privacy.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060817/ap_on_go_pr_wh/warrantless_surveillance

muckraker10021 · Aug 18, 2006

For you peeps who are part of the "reality based" community, the federal judge's ruling today (Thursday August 17th, 2006), has put a serious crimp in the Cheney-bush junta's march toward the full implementation of the <a target="_blank" href="http://rawstory.com/news/2005/CanExecutive_Branch_Decide_0923.html">
"Unitary Executive"</a> concept.

The term "Unitary Executive is a more genteel way of saying fascist dictator. As the superb lawyer and legal scholar Glenn Greenwald points out on his blog, the response to this ruling from the RepubliKlan zealots has been nothing more than racist, non-fact based, ad hominem attacks on the courageous Black female judge who made the ruling.

This ruling will add weight to the movement that is pushing-back against the criminal machinations of this disgraceful administration. If you still don't understand how much contempt the White House has toward the 'Constitution' and how nasty this crew is, read
<a target="_blank" href="http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060703fa_fact1">
THE HIDDEN POWER</a> .


<table border="10" width="600" id="table1" cellspacing="5" cellpadding="5" bordercolorlight="#0000FF" bordercolordark="#000066" height="750" bgcolor="#000000">
<tr>
<td><center>
[WM]http://movies.crooksandliars.com/Countdown-NSARuling-Turley.wmv[/WM]
<hr noshade color="#0000FF" size="16"></hr>
[QT]http://movies.crooksandliars.com/CaffertyFile-NSA-ruling.mov[/QT] </center></td>
</tr>
</table>

<hr noshade color="#333333" SIZE="12"></HR>

<img src="http://images.salon.com/src/salonlogo.gif">


The Bush Doctrine Under Surveillance
The first court ruling on NSA's warrantless spying delivers
another stinging rebuke to the president's wartime power grab. 



By Glenn Greenwald

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/08/17/nsa_michigan/print.html

Aug. 17, 2006 | A federal district judge ruled Thursday that the Bush administration's warrantless eavesdropping program is unconstitutional, and on that basis ordered that the controversial program run by the National Security Agency cease immediately. The judge, Anna Diggs Taylor of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, found that warrantless eavesdropping violates both the First and Fourth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, as well as the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which makes it a criminal offense to eavesdrop on Americans without first obtaining warrants.
<div align="right"><table border="3" width="300" id="table1" bordercolorlight="#000000" bordercolordark="#000000" height="300" align="right"><tr><td height="204"><img src="http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/08/17/nsa_michigan/cover.jpg"></td></tr><tr><td>American Civil Liberties Union lead counsel Ann Beeson, Judge Anna Diggs Taylor and George W. Bush</td></tr></table></div>

The decision is the first ruling by any court on the legality of the NSA program, a secret Bush program that was first revealed last December by the New York Times. In a ruling striking for its unusually emphatic language, the court rejected every argument advanced by the administration to defend its right to eavesdrop without warrants. The court also rejected the administration's claim that mere adjudication by the court of the legality of the NSA program would risk the disclosure of "state secrets," an assertion the administration has used repeatedly to avoid judicial review of its actions. And perhaps most significantly, the judge resoundingly rejected the administration's broad theories of executive power: "There are no hereditary kings in America," Taylor wrote, "and no powers not created by the Constitution."

The decision has already been appealed by the Bush administration to the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, considered to be conservative-leaning, and the parties have agreed that the District Court's order will be stayed (that is, not enforced) until Sept. 7, when the court will further decide if the order will be stayed pending an appeal.

It is important to be clear about what this decision means and what it does not mean -- particularly since the White House, among others, is already depicting this ruling as some sort of epic blow to the administration's efforts to fight terrorism. This ruling does not, of course, prohibit eavesdropping on terrorists; it merely prohibits illegal eavesdropping in violation of FISA.

Thus, even under the court's order, the Bush administration is free to continue to do all the eavesdropping on terrorists it wants to do. It just has to cease doing so using its own secretive parameters, and instead do so with the oversight of the FISA court -- just as all administrations have done since 1978, just as the law requires, and just as it did very recently when using surveillance with regard to the U.K. terror plot. Eavesdropping on terrorists can continue in full force. But it must comply with the law.

This ruling also has critical implications for the administration's efforts to change the law so as to legalize its warrantless eavesdropping activities. Sen. Arlen Specter, working in collaboration with the White House, has introduced legislation that would effectively eliminate all restrictions on the president's power to eavesdrop on Americans. That bill would make the process of obtaining warrants optional, rather than mandatory, and it would all but kill off judicial challenges to the legality of the president's eavesdropping.

But the court's ruling today strongly suggests that the Specter bill would be just as unconstitutional as the president's current eavesdropping program. This is because the court found warrantless eavesdropping generally to be a violation of the Fourth and First Amendments. Thus, Congress cannot authorize warrantless eavesdropping via legislation -- Congress cannot authorize activities that are unconstitutional -- which would preclude enforcement of the Specter bill.

Still, commentators of every ideological stripe have quickly agreed that this opinion is argumentatively weak and thus vulnerable on appeal with respect to several critical issues. The court, for instance, barely explains why warrantless eavesdropping violates the Fourth Amendment, and its discussion of why such eavesdropping violates the First Amendment borders on the incoherent. And with respect to the most difficult hurdle the plaintiffs faced -- whether they have "standing" to challenge the NSA program in light of their inability to prove that their conversations were monitored -- the court made the best case it could as to why the plaintiffs should be allowed to proceed, but it relied on reasoning that is far from decisive.

Nonetheless, the political significance of this decision cannot be denied. The first federal court ever to rule on the administration's NSA program has ruled that it violates the constitutional rights of Americans in several respects, and that it violates criminal law.

And in so holding, the court eloquently and powerfully rejected the Bush administration's claims of unchecked executive power in the area of national security. The court observed that "it was never the intent of the Framers to give the President such unfettered control, particularly where his actions blatantly disregard the parameters clearly enumerated in the Bill of Rights ... We must always be mindful that '[w]hen the President takes official action, the Court has the authority to determine whether he has acted within the law.' Clinton v. Jones, 520 U.S. 681, 703 (1997)."

Ever since the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration has insisted that nothing can restrict the president's decisions in any way with regard to national security, including laws enacted by the coequal branch of government, the Congress. Such a theory is wholly alien to the most fundamental principles that have defined this country since its founding. The court's decision today reaffirms that even in times of war, the president is bound by the rule of law and constrained by the protections guaranteed to Americans by the Bill of Rights. And that the Bush administration simply has no justification for acting outside the parameters of the law. 

-- By Glenn Greenwald

<hr noshade color="#0000ff" size="8"></hr>

<IMG SRC="http://harpers.org/art/cartoons/mrfish/Snow_450.jpg">

<hr noshade color="#0000ff" size="8"></hr>

Unclaimed Territory - by Glenn Greenwald

Breaking The Law Has Consequences

http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/

Thursday, August 17, 2006

My overall analysis of today's extraordinary federal court decision on the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program is in the <a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/08/federal-court-finds-warrantless.html">post below, here</a>. I also have an article up at Salon summarizing the importance of this ruling, <a href="http://salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/08/17/nsa_michigan/">here</a>. But I wanted to emphasize in a separate post what I think is one of the most important consequences of today's events. 
In <a href="http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/05pdf/05-184.pdf">Hamdan v. Rumsfeld</a> (.pdf), the Supreme Court -- as Marty Lederman was the <a href="http://www.scotusblog.com/movabletype/archives/2006/06/hamdan_summary.html">first to note</a> -- rejected the Bush administration's principal defense for its violations of the Geneva Conventions not only with regard to military commissions, but generally. By holding that Common Article 3 of the Conventions applies to all detainees, and a failure to treat detainees in compliance with Common Article 3 constitutes "war crimes," the Supreme Court effectively found that Bush officials have authorized and engaged in felony violations of the <a href="http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode18/usc_sec_18_00002441----000-.html">War Crimes Act</a> (18 U.S.C. sec. 2241), which makes it a federal crime to violate war treaties such as the Geneva Conventions. That is why the administration <a href="http://balkin.blogspot.com/2006/07/and-while-youre-at-it-wed-like.html">is busy at work</a> trying to change that law so as to retroactively legalize their conduct -- because the Supreme Court all but branded them war criminals, and the consequences of that can be severe. 
And now, a federal court in Michigan -- the first to rule on the legality of the President's NSA program -- just rejected all of the administration's defenses for eavesdropping in violation of FISA, effectively finding that the administration has been engaged in deliberate criminal acts by eavesdropping without judicial approval. And as I <a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/06/significance-of-hamdan-v-rumsfeld.html">documented</a> <a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/06/will-hamdan-have-any-effect-on-bush.html">previously</a>, Hamdan itself independently compels rejection of the administration's only defenses to its violations of FISA. Eavesdropping in violation of FISA <a href="http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode50/usc_sec_50_00001809----000-.html">is a federal crime, punishable</a> by up to 5 years in prison and a $10,000 fine (50 U.S.C. 1809). 
Thus, judicial decisions are starting to emerge which come close to branding the conduct of Bush officials as criminal. FISA is a criminal law. The administration has been violating that law on purpose, with no good excuse. Government officials who violate the criminal law deserve to be -- and are required to be -- held accountable just like any other citizens who violate the law. That is a basic, and critically important, principle in our system of government. These are not abstract legalistic questions being decided. They amount to rulings that our highest government officials have been systematically breaking the law -- criminal laws -- in numerous ways. And no country which lives under the rule of law can allow that to happen with impunity. 
 
* * * * *

Federal court finds warrantless eavesdropping unconstitutional, enjoins the program 

<blockquote>A federal judge ruled Thursday that the government's warrantless wiretapping program is unconstitutional and ordered an immediate halt to it. 
U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in Detroit became the first judge to strike down the National Security Agency's program, which she says violates the rights to free speech and privacy. 
</blockquote>
This is the case brought by the ACLU against the Bush administration directly. Some background on the case is <a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/06/judiciary-reminds-bush-administration.html">here</a>, where I previously noted that it seemed the judge was, at the very least, intent on scrutinizing, rather than blindly accepting, the Bush administration's claims. This also means, presumably, that this is now the <a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/07/huge-news-judge-refuses-to-dismiss-nsa.html">second consecutive federal court</a> to reject the Bush administration's invocation of the "state secrets" doctrine as a means of avoiding judicial review. 
This is huge news, obviously. More to follow. 
* * * 
I went to the <a href="http://www.cnn.com/">CNN website</a> to see if they had anything on this decision, and saw a bright red box at the top with urgent "BREAKING NEWS" language in it, so I naturally assumed they were reporting it. Then I read this inside the flamboyant box: 
<blockquote>
BREAKING NEWS - Boulder DA: Ramsey murder suspect John Karr started working as second grade teacher in Thailand Tuesday.<a title="CNN Pipeline" href="javascript:cnnVideo("> Watch live on CNN Pipeline now.</a> 
</blockquote>
I have no doubt that infinitely more coverage will be devoted to that issue on every news program today than on the fact that a federal court just ruled that the President's warrantless eavesdropping program is unconstitutional and, perhaps, illegal.
* * * * 
The opinion is <a href="http://www.mied.uscourts.gov/eGov/taylorpdf/06%2010204.pdf">here</a> (.pdf); the injunction order is <a href="http://www.mied.uscourts.gov/eGov/taylorpdf/06-10204Injunction.pdf">here</a> (.pdf). I will have analysis on this shortly. 
* * * *
I have read the opinion. Here is my immediate analysis of it. It is a very strong opinion in some places, weak in others, but is rather straightforward -- and sometimes eloquent -- in its almost always unequivocal rejection of the Bush administration's arguments: 
First, the court rejected the administration's assertion of the "state secrets" doctrine with regard to the NSA eavesdropping program on the ground that the program has already been publicly confirmed by the administration, and that all of the known facts necessary to rule on the plaintiffs' claims -- namely, that the administration is eavesdropping without warrants -- are already publicly known. The court adopted the reasoning of Judge Walker who, as noted above, <a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/07/huge-news-judge-refuses-to-dismiss-nsa.html">rejected</a> the administration's invocation of this doctrine on the same ground. 
(The court here did, however, grant the administration's motion to dismiss the part of the case challenging the constitutionality of the data-mining program, on the ground that it has not yet been confirmed, and litigation of its legality would therefore require disclosure of state secrets). 
Second, the court ruled that the plaintiffs have standing to challenge the legality of the NSA program even though they cannot prove they have been eavesdropped on, because they have suffered actual harm merely from knowing that the Government is eavesdropping. They all allege that they have extensive communications with the Middle East by telephone and fear that the administration is listening in without a warrant. Some are attorneys who fear the administration is eavesdropping on their conversations with their clients and witnesses, and they allege that these clients and witnesses have ceased communicating with them openly as a result. 
Thus, the court held that these plaintiffs are suffering actual harm in their ability to carry out their professional duties as a result of the administration's warrantless eavesdropping program. That actual harm confers on them standing to challenge the legality of the program. The court also emphasized, in an excellent section I will quote shortly, that it is vital to our democracy that the administration's conduct not remain beyond the reach of judicial scrutiny. 
Third, the court ruled -- rather emphatically and without much doubt -- that warrantless eavesdropping violates the Fourth Amendment's prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures (generally speaking, searches undertaken in the absence of a probable cause warrant). Citing the 1972 Supreme Court decision in the Keith case (more on that <a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2005/12/new-constitutional-excuse-for.html">here</a>) -- which held that warrantless eavesdropping is unconstitutional in the context of investigating domestic terrorist groups -- the court held (admittedly without much reasoning or even explicit arguments) that the same reasoning applies to make warrantless eavesdropping unconstitutional in the context of investigating international terrorist groups. 
Fourth, the court ruled independently -- again, without all that much reasoning -- that the NSA program violates the plaintiffs' First Amendment rights, apparently because it chills (deters) their free expression. Since the plaintiffs know the Government can eavesdrop without warrants on conversations of those groups and individuals deemed "subversive," the program abridges free expression in a way that the First Amendment prohibits. 
Fifth, the court relied upon Youngstown to hold that the Executive's powers in the national security area do not entitle him to act beyond the law or the Constitution, and that courts are empowered under our Constitution to enjoin and restrict the exercise even of national security powers, even in times of war, when the President's conduct violates the law or the Constitution. 
Sixth, the court swiftly and dismissively rejected the administration's claim that the AUMF constitutes authorization to eavesdrop in violation of FISA, noting that FISA is an extremely specific statute while the AUMF says nothing about eavesdropping. In any event, as the court noted, since the court found warrantless eavesdropping unconstitutional, Congress could not authorize warrantless eavesdropping by statute. 
Seventh, the court made its scorn quite clear for the administration's Yoo theory of executive power because, as the court put it, "there are no hereditary kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution." Citing Youngstown again, the court made clear that even in time of war, and even with regard to the President's Commander-in-Chief powers, the President is subject to constitutional restrictions -- a proposition long unquestioned in our system of government until the Bush administration began inventing radical theories of executive power. 
Finally, and really quite extraordinarily, the court (a) declared the NSA program to be in violation of FISA, the First Amendment and Fourth Amendment and (b) issued a permanent injunction enjoining the Bush administration from continuing to eavesdrop in violation of FISA. 
This is not the most scholarly opinion ever. It has argumentative holes in it in several important places. But it is correct in its result and it is an enormous victory for the rule of law. It took real courage for Judge Diggs Taylor to issue this Opinion and Order -- it is hard to overstate how much courage it took. It will obviously be appealed. But as of right now, it is illegal, according to this federal court, for the Bush administration to continue to implement its "Terrorist Surveillance Program," and since it is grounded in constitutional conclusions, nothing -- such as Arlen Specter's dreaded bill -- could change that. 
* * * *
I've heard reports that the reliably vile Rush Limbaugh is already attacking the judge personally -- she's a Carter appointee, etc. First, the judge who rejected the Bush administration's attempt to have the California/AT&T litigation dismissed (Judge Vaughn Walker) -- on whose reasoning Judge Diggs Taylor relied -- is a Bush 41 appointee. Secondly, the Judge's <a href="http://www.micourthistory.org/resources/women-and-law/taylor.php">background</a> is extremely impressive, making it quite hard, even for the likes of Rush Limbaugh, to demonize her or demean her abilities:
<blockquote> 
In 1979, Anna Diggs Taylor became the first black woman judge to be appointed to the <a href="http://www.mied.uscourts.gov/">United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan</a>. Nineteen years later, she became the first black woman Chief Judge for that circuit as well. 
Taylor had great difficulty obtaining her first job as an attorney for the Office of Solicitor for the U.S. Department of Labor, despite graduating form the prestigious Yale Law School in 1957. Very few opportunities existed for a black woman in law at this time. In 1961, Taylor relocated from the Washington D.C. area to Detroit, Michigan. Here she was involved in both public and private practice until her appointment to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, on which she continues to serve. Taylor’s position has enabled her to open doors for other women and minorities to pursue and achieve their dreams. She strives for gender and racial equality in the law and currently serves on the Joint Steering Committee of the Gender and Racial Ethnic Fairness Task Forces for the Sixth Circuit.
</blockquote>
 
One can only fathom the personal attacks that will be spewing forth against her. 
* * * *
According to the ACLU, the Justice Department has notified them that they intend to ask the District Court Judge to stay her decision pending appeal to the Sixth Circuit (meaning the injunction would not apply immediately, but would only be activated if the decision were affirmed on appeal). Typically, with a decision of this magnitude -- particularly one that changes, rather than preserves the status quo -- a court would stay the decision. I was surprised that she did not stay it on her own (perhaps the Government did not ask). 
Ordinarily, I would be inclined to think that it was almost automatic that the decision would be stayed, but given how dismissive she was of the administration's arguments -- and how unequivocal were her conclusions that this program violates the constitutional rights of Americans -- I wouldn't be all that shocked if she refused to (the administration could still then ask the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals to stay the Order). 
* * * * *
Let's see what our friends in the Bush follower crowd are saying. Legal scholar Jeff Goldstein immediately <a href="http://proteinwisdom.com/index.php?/weblog/entry/20822/">puts the spotlight</a> on the Judge personally, and highlights "that she was married to Michigan Democratic Representative (1955-1980) Charles C Diggs, Jr. (divorced 1971) and S Martin Taylor (active in both the Coleman Young and Jimmy Carter campaigns)" and that "was the first African-American woman appointed to a federal judgeship in Michigan . . . . Taylor has used her positions to advance civil rights throughout the United States." He then announces that he "think(s) this ruling will be overturned on appeal." And, needless to say, included in the first 10 comments is a plea that the President defy the order, along with a call for the judge to be drowned. 
Ace of Spades is so beside himself that he seems sadly deflated; he merely dutifully launches the two standard Bush smears at the Judge, but without much feeling -- he doubts she "takes terrorism seriously" and he "question(s) her sanity." <a href="http://michellemalkin.com/archives/005773.htm">Writing</a> on Michelle Malkin's blog, Mary Katherine Ham also focuses on the Judge's background, quoting a Detroit Free Press <a href="http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2006608070381">profile</a> which describes her as "a liberal with Democratic roots and defended civil-rights workers in the South in the 1960s." The article (and Ham) point out, however, that "people who know her say she will follow the law -- not her politics -- in deciding the case... " And this is what National Review Corner readers learned about this decision: <a href="http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MjIyNjMyZGQ3YjM4OTI5NWMzZjdjNTQxMjFkNDljYzY=">It's a</a> "Terrorist-Friendly ruling" <a href="http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ODc5NTkwNGRkMWQzYzRlY2M4ODE2ZDg4ZTMwMmViYjI=">from a</a> "Carter appointee." 
So, so far we have - (1) the Judge was appointed by Jimmy Carter; (2) the Judge is African-American and works on "civil rights" matters; (3) she is insane; (4) she does not take terrorism seriously; (5) this is a victory for the terrorists; (6) President Bush should defy the Order. That's a predictable enough beginning, but the smear machine is going to have to work a little harder, because that is not all that impressive of an attack so far. I recommend the Free Press <a href="http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2006608070381">profile</a> -- read that and decide if her abilities and fairness can be legitimately demonized. 
* * * *
More pro-Bush reaction is compiled <a href="http://liberalcatnip.blogspot.com/2006/08/right-wing-reactions-to-warrantless.html">here</a>, including <a href="http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/184361.php">this</a> from Jawa Report ("lets hope the first bomb that comes here is dropped on this judges head&quot

and <a href="http://www.debbieschlussel.com/archives/2006/08/nsa-opposing_ju.html">this</a> from Debbie Schussel ("She seems to hate America and fairness almost as much as the Plaintiffs do&quot

. And some nice race-based smearing can be found by Gateway Pundit <a href="http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2006/08/liberal-judge-nixes-warrantless.html">here</a> (her husband was a Congressman whose "district included downtown Detroit and some of the city's poorest neighborhoods. He was the first chairman of the Congressional black Caucus&quot

. That's really relevant. 
* * * *
Let's resoundingly clear up two widely disseminated misconceptions, the first of which is being quite deliberately tossed around: 
(1) Even with this Order, the Bush administration is free to continue to do all the eavesdropping on terrorists they want to do. They just have to do so with approval of the FISA court -- just like all administrations have done since 1978, just as the law requires, and <a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/08/legal-surveillance-not-illegal.html">just as they </a><a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/08/legal-surveillance-not-illegal.html">did</a> when eavesdropping as part of the surveillance they undertook on the U.K. terror plot. 
(2) The court's ruling that warrantless eavesdropping violates the Fourth and First Amendments clearly means (although the decision is far from a model of clarity) that Congress cannot authorize warrantless eavesdropping with legislation, which would preclude enforcement of the Specter bill. 
This is clearest when the court rejects the administration's argument that the AUMF implicitly authorized violations of FISA. The court ruled that: (a) the AUMF cannot be read to amend FISA, but that (b) even if it could be so read, it would not matter, because Congress cannot authorize an unconstitutional program: 
<blockquote> 
The AUMF Resolution, if indeed it is construed as replacing FISA, gives no support to Defendants here. Even if that Resolution superceded all other statutory law, Defendants have violated the constitutional rights of their citizens.</blockquote>
 
Op. at 39 (emphasis added). If Congress is not empowered to authorize this program through the AUMF (because the program is unconstitutional), then there is no good argument as to why the Specter bill can.
 


<hr noshade color="#333333" size="10"></hr>

<img src="http://mywebpage.netscape.com/camarilla10028/thumb.jpg">

<hr noshade color="#333333" size="10"></hr>

QueEx · Aug 18, 2006

<center>Bush Blasts Court Ruling on Surveillance 
Bush criticizes court ruling saying warrantless
wiretapping program is unconstitutional</center>

CAMP DAVID, Md., Aug. 18, 2006
By DEB RIECHMANN Associated Press Writer

AP) President Bush on Friday criticized a federal court ruling that said his warrantless wiretapping program is unconstitutional, declaring that opponents "do not understand the nature of the world in which we live."

"I strongly disagree with that decision, strongly disagree," Bush said, striking his finger on a podium to underscore his point. "That's why I instructed the Justice Department to appeal immediately, and I believe our appeals will be upheld."

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/08/18/ap/politics/mainD8JJ3MGO2.shtml

gene cisco · Aug 19, 2006

First off the majority of the american people(white folks) get their legal system education on tv.

Illegal tactics are used all the time in law enforcement. THEY JUST CANNOT BE USED IN COURT!!!!!!!!!!

How many black folks had their car illegaly searched? Doesn't matter dam near impossible to prove, your word against theirs.

Cops wouldn't make most their dope busts if they didn't bend or break the law.

Same thing with terrorism.

How you gonna prove your phone was tapped WHEN they just happened to pull you over when you just copped the dynamite for your suicide vest.

Cops use illegally gotten info all the time to make LEGIT busts. They just leave that convienent fact out and say they pulled said suspect over for a broken tailight and.........whoa 50 kilos of blow.

Warrant or not they still will tap phones, thing is they want it legal to erase more rights.

They don't need the shit to be legal. Big game aimed at humanoids, white ones in particular.

They really think cops bust cases by the book. They really believe the government doesn't profile arabs and muslims OR doesn't have the white militias on lock(see aryan nation trial).

They do not need any more laws to stop terrorism. They could have stopped 9/11 if it wasn't for infighting between agencies.

You see its a lot different when a tactic used is legal. It then can be expanded to anything.

Maybe you didn't report that lucky night playing poker with the boys. Oh well your fucked pay the IRS back taxes and penalties.

The government is like pringles, once they start, they don't stop fucking you. They say now its only this, next year its something else added to the spying.

Humanoids, shakedowns,illegal searches, taps are done all the time. They lead to evidence which the law just says they used another means to get.

Don't tell that to joe humanoid who still thinks the police helps little beaver get his cat down from the tree................

That's why we have legal minds in the checks and balances. They are logical and not supposed to be activist in nature. Look at que. lol.

Any logical mind would uphold this decision BUT a lot of judges appointed seem to be activist.

The constitution is clear on the subject, it is up to the courts to protect us. But hey they ruled income tax illegal and look what happened.

Illegal wire taps are gonna happen, face it. Its this broad warrantless tapping being legal that's the real boogeyman.........fuck a binny laidem.

QueEx · Nov 29, 2006

[frame]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/28/AR2006112801438.html?referrer=email[/frame]

muckraker10021 · Jan 19, 2007

Bush Backs Down On Wiretaps

Stop celebrating - it's not yet clear whether the administration really intends to start obeying the law. The president has been committing felonies on purpose for the past five years<center> -President Bush used to suggest that trying to bring judicial oversight to his warrantless wiretapping program was tantamount to supporting the terrorists. So the announcement yesterday that the program will now operate under court jurisdiction was undeniably a reversal -</center>
January 18th 2007

By Glenn Greenwald

www.salon.com

On Wednesday, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales notified the Senate Judiciary Committee by letter that the administration would now be seeking FISA court approval for wiretaps. As a result, the administration said that it will discontinue the president's so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program and will now instead conduct all eavesdropping under the purview of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, as the law requires. Not coincidentally, on Thursday morning, the attorney general will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee. New chairman Pat Leahy and the rest of the committee's freshly empowered Democrats will, presumably, flay Gonzales for the Bush administration's failure to abide by the law for the past five years, press him to explain its sudden change of heart, and try to determine whether the administration's new posture will result in genuine compliance with both the spirit and the letter of the law.

On one level, it is encouraging that the attorney general has blinked and that he will be forced to answer questions from the likes of Russ Feingold at a hearing with the pleasing title "Oversight of the U.S. Department of Justice." And, all other things being equal, it is certainly preferable that the administration eavesdrop with oversight rather in secret. But on another, deeper level, there is no cause for celebration. 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.

But why might the president have agreed to cease violating the law? Last fall, a federal judge ruled that he had violated both the Constitution and criminal law, and an appellate court was about to hold arguments about that decision. And his loyal servants no longer control Congress. Clearly, a desire to avert a now inevitable confrontation with the courts and Congress over the lawless eavesdropping motivated the decision to abide by the law. Other than a rank fear of consequences, there is simply is no coherent explanation for the Bush administration's sudden abandonment of an illegal program that it had emphatically insisted was central to the "war on terror."

1) Why couldn't the new procedural rules pointed to by Gonzales simply have been instituted years ago, as part of a newly amended Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (which the administration requested and obtained from Congress in 2001, and which Congress repeatedly asked to do multiple times both prior to and subsequent to revelation of the president's lawbreaking in December 2005)?

2) If, as Gonzales claims in Wednesday's letter, the administration was working to develop new rules as early as the spring of 2005 to enable eavesdropping under FISA, why didn't it say so when the controversy arose over its lawbreaking?

3) For those who claimed that our national security was jeopardized and that terrorists were given our state secrets when the New York Times revealed that the president was eavesdropping without warrants, didn't Alberto Gonzales just "give the terrorists our playbook" by telling them how we are eavesdropping, i.e., that we are now doing so with warrants?

In January 2006, current CIA Director and former National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden warned that even discussing eavesdropping issues helps terrorists because it reminds them that we eavesdrop:

"You know, we've had this question asked several times. Public discussion of how we determine al-Qaida intentions, I just -- I can't see how that can do anything but harm the security of the nation. And I know people say, 'Oh, they know they're being monitored.' Well, you know, they don't always act like they know they're being monitored. But if you want to shove it in their face constantly, it's bound to have an impact."

Gonzales said this repeatedly, too -- that merely by raising the issue of eavesdropping, we remind terrorists that we eavesdrop. As a result, allegedly, they won't make the calls that they otherwise would have made to talk about their plots, and we won't know what they're doing and we won't be able to catch them.

Yet here the administration is not just reminding terrorists that we eavesdrop but detailing its new eavesdropping procedures in public.

4) Could the administration possibly think that this "concession" (what we call "obeying the law") is going to forestall or preclude congressional investigations into all of the eavesdropping it has been doing over the past five years without anyone watching? Clearly it won't, in either the Senate or the House. Here is new House Intelligence Committee chairman Silvestre Reyes on Wednesday:

"This announcement does not end our committee's interest in this matter. Until our committee has the opportunity to review the court orders and conduct in-depth oversight over this program, I am withholding judgment on whether it is effective and whether it protects the rights of the American people."

5) Is this magnanimous agreement to comply with the law supposed to relieve the administration of the consequences of lawbreaking? Defense Tech quotes Patrick Keefe, author of "Chatter: Dispatches From the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping," as wondering whether the "agreement" with the FISA court described in Gonzales' letter includes some sort of retroactive approval by that court for prior eavesdropping. I find that extremely difficult to believe -- among other things, retroactive approval beyond 72 hours of eavesdropping is barred by the FISA statute.

6) Is the Bush administration now going to tell the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit that there is no reason to bother with figuring out whether federal District Court Judge Anna Diggs Taylor was correct when she ruled recently that the president violated both the Constitution and the law by eavesdropping on U.S. citizens without the warrants required by law? That appellate decision is likely months away, but another highly respected federal judge in New York is expected to issue a ruling shortly on the legality of the Terrorist Surveillance Program.

7) The administration line now is that the problems with FISA were procedural -- i.e., that the process of obtaining warrants was too slow and cumbersome. In reality, the administration complained as much if not more about the substantive requirement under FISA for obtaining a warrant. It claimed that the requirement to show "probable cause," rather than mere "reasonable basis" (the standard under its illegal program), meant that it could not do the eavesdropping it needed to do to stop terrorists. The supposed problem with FISA was not the procedures but the substance of the law itself.

Perhaps Sens. Leahy et al. will raise some of these points with Attorney General Gonzales on Thursday morning. And perhaps we will find out what the administration actually intends, because we still do not know the details or mechanics of how the administration's eavesdropping will be conducted in compliance with FISA. Has a general warrant been issued approving of the program itself? Have so-called anticipatory warrants been issued by the court to allow the administration in advance to eavesdrop whenever specifically defined circumstances arise? Or will the administration be required, on a case-by-case basis, to apply to the FISA court for permission to eavesdrop and be further required, as the statute contemplates, to make a probable-cause showing?

If the administration has changed its eavesdropping program to some extent, but is still not fully complying with FISA, then nothing of significance has occurred because the administration is still violating the law. One cannot yet exclude that option. Gonzales' letter affirms, as one would expect, the administration's belief that it was legally entitled to violate this law. That means that it can violate it again at any future point, it can violate other laws under the same theories, and whatever other lawbreaking is already occurring as a result of those theories is not going to stop.

But if the administration is now complying fully and exclusively with FISA when eavesdropping, all of its prior claims that it could not do so and still fight terrorists are false. These are claims that, incidentally, the administration tried to use to win the last election; if you wanted to make it comply with FISA, it meant that you loved the t`errorists. But the arrogation of power in failing to comply with FISA was always about only that -- power. An administration with a radical theory of executive power grabbed what it could while Congress was compliant.

But whether the reversal is partial or total, reversal is standard operating procedure for the Bush White House. Every time it is about to face consequences for its conduct, it stops doing what it is doing and finds another way. When the Supreme Court was about to rule on the legality of its detention of Jose Padilla, the administration transferred him to a criminal court and finally charged him, thentold the court that the questions about his detention were "moot." When the Supreme Court in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld ordered the administration to give Yaser Hamdi (a U.S. citizen) a venue to charge him with a crime and prove his guilt, it simply let this extremely dangerous terrorist go free instead of charging him.

This is what the Bush administration does and how it always operates. It has not conceded anything and it has certainly not done anything that mitigates its lawbreaking -- its crimes -- over the past five years with regard to eavesdropping without warrants. The president has been committing felonies on purpose and systematically for the past five years because he wants to. The fact that he might have decided he should stop does not excuse his lawbreaking and must not be allowed to shield him or anyone else from accountability.


<hr noshade color="#000000" size="6"></hr>

QueEx · Jan 31, 2007

<center>
Justice to Release Spy Program Details</center>

Jan 31, 2:22 PM (ET)
Associated Press
By LARA JAKES JORDAN

spying program, ending a two-week standoff with the Senate Judiciary Committee over surveillance targeting terror suspects.

"It's never been the case where we said we would never provide access," Gonzales told reporters.

"We obviously would be concerned about the public disclosure that may jeopardize the national security of our country," he said. "But we're working with the Congress to provide the information that it needs."

The documents held by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court - including investigators' applications for permission to spy and judges' orders - will be given to some lawmakers as early as Wednesday.

Gonzales said the documents would not be released publicly. "We're talking about highly classified documents about highly classified activities of the United States government," the attorney general said.

The records will be given to Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and the panel's top Republican, Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., who two weeks ago lambasted Gonzales for refusing to turn over documents that even the FISA Court's presiding judge had no objection to releasing. At the time, Gonzales said it was unclear whether the court orders could be released without exposing sensitive security information.

The documents also will be available to lawmakers and staffers on the House and Senate intelligence committees. These people already were cleared to receive details about the controversial spy program.

Leahy said he welcomed the Bush administration decision to release the documents, which he said he would review to decide "what further oversight or legislative action is necessary." Specter stopped short of calling for them to be publicly released, but said "there ought to be the maximum disclosure to the public, consistent with national security procedures."

"They will not be made public until I've had a chance to see them," Specter said.

But the administration still won't release other crucial documents that explain how FISA Court's orders comply with the 1978 surveillance law that the court oversees, said Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M., a senior member of the House Intelligence Committee. She said the deal to release the documents stems from a briefing in front of that panel last week, which included Justice Department officials, and left many lawmakers frustrated.

"We are playing hide the ball down at the Justice Department," said Wilson, who has told House Intelligence Chairman Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, that she will support a subpoena, if need be.

The documents are being turned over two weeks after a testy Senate hearing, during which lawmakers hammered Gonzales for refusing to provide details about the court's new oversight - and whether it provides adequate privacy protections.

President Bush secretly authorized the spying program after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, allowing the National Security Agency to bypass court review and conduct domestic surveillance of people suspected of links to terrorism.

The program, which a federal judge last August declared unconstitutional, monitors phone calls and e-mails between the United States and other countries when such a link is suspected.

On Jan. 17, the day before the Senate hearing, Gonzales announced that the FISA Court had assumed oversight authority of the surveillance program a week earlier, and had already approved at least one warrant targeting a person suspected of having terror ties.

Senators demanded to know more about how judges on the secret court might consider evidence when approving government requests to spy on people in the United States. And FISA Court Presiding Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, in a letter released at the hearing, said she had no objection to giving lawmakers copies of orders and opinions relating to the secret panel's oversight of the spy program.

Gonzales' remarks Wednesday came as the Justice Department asked a federal appeals court in Cincinnati to dismiss a civil lawsuit against the spy program. Government attorneys have said the American Civil Liberties Union's lawsuit is moot since the surveillance now is monitored by a secret court.

The ACLU, however, is asking the appeals court to uphold the earlier decision in August, declaring the program unconstitutional, since Bush retains authority to continue warrantless surveillance.

Gonzales described the decision to release the documents to Leahy and Specter as the result of ongoing negotiations between Congress and the administration. He said lawmakers most likely will not have to review the documents at the Justice Department, which keeps a tight grip on classified information, but offered few other details.

"It's important for us that they understand what we're doing," Gonzales said. "All they have to do is ask."

---

Associated Press reporter Katherine Shrader contributed to this story.

http://apnews1.iwon.com//article/20070131/D8N0EP3G1.html

muckraker10021 · Feb 2, 2007

Listen to bush LIE!! To an audience on April 2004, watch the video or read the transcript

<table border="8" width="500" id="table2" bordercolorlight="#800080" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="4" bordercolordark="#800080" bgcolor="#000000" height="400"><tr><td><center>[FLASH]http://a9.g.akamai.net/7/9/8082/v002/democratic1.download.akamai.com/8082/flash/wiretap/wiretap.swf[/FLASH]</center></td></tr></table>

<blockquote>

"Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution." [President Bush, 4/20/04]
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/04/20040420-2.html#
</blockquote>

Bush knew he was lying when he said the statement above. He knew as he said the lie above that he was committing a felony, which was violating the FISA laws. 
<hr noshade color="#0000ff" size="4"></hr>

 
<img src="http://proquest.umi.com/i/pub/7818.gif"> 
Bush Is Not Above the Law

To allow a president to break the law and commit a felony for more than five years without even a formal independent investigation would be the ultimate subversion of the Constitution and the rule of law. As Judge Taylor warned in her decision, ''There are No Hereditary Kings in America.''

January 31, 2007

by James Bamford 

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/31/opinion/31bamford.html
.....

LAST August, a federal judge found that the president of the United States broke the law, committed a serious felony and violated the Constitution. Had the president been an ordinary citizen -- someone charged with bank robbery or income tax evasion -- the wheels of justice would have immediately begun to turn. The F.B.I. would have conducted an investigation, a United States attorney's office would have impaneled a grand jury and charges would have been brought.

But under the Bush Justice Department, no F.B.I. agents were ever dispatched to padlock White House files or knock on doors and no federal prosecutors ever opened a case.

The ruling was the result of a suit, in which I am one of the plaintiffs, brought against the National Security Agency by the American Civil Liberties Union. It was a response to revelations by this newspaper in December 2005 that the agency had been monitoring the phone calls and e-mail messages of Americans for more than four years without first obtaining warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, as required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

In the past, even presidents were not above the law. When the F.B.I. turned up evidence during Watergate that Richard Nixon had obstructed justice by trying to cover up his involvement, a special prosecutor was named and a House committee recommended that the president be impeached.

And when an independent counsel found evidence that President Bill Clinton had committed perjury in the Monica Lewinsky case, the impeachment machinery again cranked into gear, with the spectacle of a Senate trial (which ended in acquittal).

Laws are broken, the federal government investigates, and the individuals involved -- even if they're presidents -- are tried and, if found guilty, punished. That is the way it is supposed to work under our system of government. But not this time.

Last Aug. 17, Judge Anna Diggs Taylor of the United States District Court in Detroit issued her ruling in the A.C.L.U. case. The president, she wrote, had ''undisputedly violated'' not only the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution, but also statutory law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Enacted by a bipartisan Congress in 1978, the FISA statute was a response to revelations that the National Security Agency had conducted warrantless eavesdropping on Americans. To deter future administrations from similar actions, the law made a violation a felony punishable by a $10,000 fine and five years in prison.

Yet despite this ruling, the Bush Justice Department never opened an F.B.I. investigation, no special prosecutor was named, and there was no talk of impeachment in the Republican-controlled Congress.

Justice Department lawyers argued last June that warrants were not required for what they called the administration's ''terrorist surveillance program'' because of the president's ''inherent powers'' to order eavesdropping and because of the Congressional authorization to use military force against those responsible for 9/11. But Judge Taylor rejected both arguments, ruling that even presidents must obey statutory law and the Constitution.

On Jan. 17, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales unexpectedly declared that President Bush had ended the program, deciding to again seek warrants in all cases. Exactly what kind of warrants -- individual, as is required by the law, or broad-based, which would probably still be illegal -- is as yet unknown.

The action may have been designed to forestall a potentially adverse ruling by the federal appeals court in Cincinnati, which had scheduled oral arguments on the case for today. At that hearing, the administration is now expected to argue that the case is moot and should be thrown out -- while reserving the right to restart the program at any time.

But that's a bit like a bank robber coming into court and arguing that, although he has been sticking up banks for the past half-decade, he has agreed to a temporary halt and therefore he shouldn't be prosecuted. Independent of the A.C.L.U. case, a criminal investigation by the F.B.I. and a special prosecutor should begin immediately. The question that must finally be answered is whether the president is guilty of committing a felony by continuously reauthorizing the warrantless eavesdropping program for the past five years. And if so, what action must be taken?

The issue is not original. Among the charges approved by the House Judiciary Committee when it recommended its articles of impeachment against President Nixon was ''illegal wiretaps.'' President Nixon, the bill charged, ''caused wiretaps to be placed on the telephones of 17 persons without having obtained a court order authorizing the tap, as required by federal law; in violation of Sections 241, 371 and 2510-11 of the Criminal Code.''

Under his program, President Bush could probably be charged with wiretapping not 17 but thousands of people without having obtained a court order authorizing the taps as required by federal law, in violation of FISA.

It is not only the federal court but also many in Congress who believe that a violation of law has taken place. In a hearing on Jan. 18, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Patrick Leahy of Vermont, said, ''For years, this administration has engaged in warrantless wiretapping of Americans contrary to the law.''

His view was shared by the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, who said of Mr. Bush, ''For five years he has been operating an illegal program.''

And Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who is the ranking member on the Judiciary Committee, noted that much of the public was opposed to the program and that it both hurt the country at home and damaged its image abroad. ''The heavy criticism which the president took on the program,'' he said, ''I think was very harmful in the political process and for the reputation of the country.''

To allow a president to break the law and commit a felony for more than five years without even a formal independent investigation would be the ultimate subversion of the Constitution and the rule of law. As Judge Taylor warned in her decision, ''There are no hereditary kings in America.''

<hr noshade color="#0000FF" size="12"></hr>

QueEx · Mar 10, 2007

<center>Report Details Missteps in Data Collection
Over a three-year period ending in 2005, the FBI collected
intimate information about the lives of a population roughly
the size of Bethesda's -- 52,000 ... without systematically
retaining evidence that its data collection was legal, without
ensuring that all the data it obtained matched its needs or
requests, without correctly tallying and reporting its efforts
to Congress, and without ferreting out all of its abuses and
reporting them to an intelligence oversight board</center>

Washington Post
By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 10, 2007; Page A01

Over a three-year period ending in 2005, the FBI collected intimate information about the lives of a population roughly the size of Bethesda's -- 52,000 -- and stored it in an intelligence database accessible to about 12,000 federal, state and local law enforcement authorities and to certain foreign governments.

The FBI did so without systematically retaining evidence that its data collection was legal, without ensuring that all the data it obtained matched its needs or requests, without correctly tallying and reporting its efforts to Congress, and without ferreting out all of its abuses and reporting them to an intelligence oversight board.

These are the conclusions of the Justice Department's uncontested examination of one of the most sensitive and widely used intelligence-gathering tools of the post-Sept. 11 era -- the national security letter (NSL). A report released yesterday by the department's Office of the Inspector General offers the first official glimpse into the use of that impressive tool, and the results, according to the report, are not pretty.

"We believe," the inspector general's office said in a summary of whether and how often the tool might have jeopardized the privacy of U.S. residents, "that a significant number of NSL-related violations are not being identified or reported by the FBI."

The 199-page report, which Congress ordered the inspector general's office to produce over the Justice Department's objections, does not accuse the FBI of deliberate lawbreaking. But it depicts the bureau's 56 field offices and headquarters as paying little heed to the rules, and misunderstanding them, as they used the USA Patriot Act and three other laws to request the telephone records, e-mail addresses, and employment and credit histories of people deemed relevant to terrorism or espionage investigations.

Congress significantly lowered the threshold for the government to obtain such information after the 2001 terrorism attacks, producing what the FBI itself reported as at least a fivefold increase in annual requests. Its tally cited 39,000 requests in 2003, 56,000 in 2004 and 47,000 in 2005 -- involving a total of 24,937 "U.S. persons" (including citizens and green-card holders) and 27,262 foreigners in the United States. In 2004, nine letters alone requested telephone-subscriber information on 11,100 phone numbers.

The inspector general's report discloses, however, that these numbers understated the FBI's use of national security letters to collect data. After checking 77 investigative case files at four FBI field offices, investigators found that those offices had "significantly" underreported the number of requests they had made and that, in this small subset alone, the real number was 22 percent higher.

The FBI also did not keep correct records of the investigations to which these requests were linked, according to the inspector general's report. Its agents did not always obtain the correct, internal authorization for those requests; they made typographical errors in listing key telephone numbers and e-mail addresses; they sought information the laws did not permit them to have; and they were given little to no policy guidance on what they could request or when to report mistakes and abuses, the report said.

"I think it shows that the bureau has failed to comply with the very minimal requirements that the law imposes on the use of this authority, and underscores the problem that arises when an investigative agency can unilaterally exercise such an invasive power," said David Sobel, senior counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group.

Although the FBI's tally throughout the period studied understated the proportion of U.S. persons targeted by the letters, a trend was evident: National security letters -- which are not subject to judicial review or public disclosure and were initially conceived as useful tools against suspicious foreign nationals -- were used increasingly by the FBI to collect data on U.S. citizens and green-card holders, the report said.

Moreover, these requests were frequently the leading edge of even more intense federal scrutiny, according to the report. Many FBI officials told investigators that an important use of the collected data was to support court "applications for electronic surveillance, physical searches, pen register/trap and trace orders."

"Many FBI personnel used terms to describe NSLs such as 'indispensable' and 'our bread and butter,' " the report said. "Once information is obtained in response to a national security letter, it is indefinitely retained and retrievable" by authorized personnel, the report noted.

The tens of thousands of data-collection requests have produced few criminal charges directly related to terrorism or espionage, according to the inspector general's report. About half of the FBI's field offices did not refer any of those targeted by such requests to prosecutors, the report said, and the most common charges cited by others were fraud, immigration violations and money laundering.

Commercial firms and institutions, which face court action and contempt fines if they do not comply with data-collection requests, were generally exceptionally eager to do so, the report said.

In 19 of the 26 instances in which the FBI itself found a possible violation of the rules during this period, the recipient of such letters "provided more information than was requested or provided information on the wrong person," according to the report. In other instances of abuse discovered by the office of the inspector general, the FBI received "unauthorized information," such as unrequested telephone billing records or e-mail information for longer periods than the bureau sought, the report said.

But the field office errors were small compared with what the report described as major abuses by counterterrorism officials at FBI headquarters.

For example, the FBI on 739 occasions used secret contracts with three telephone companies to obtain records related to 3,000 phone numbers after asserting -- in most instances -- that the records were needed because of "exigent circumstances" and promising that requests for subpoenas had already been sent to U.S. attorney's offices.

In fact, many of these claims were false, according to the report: The letters were mostly used in "non-emergency circumstances"; no documentation existed of a connection to "pending national security investigations"; and "subpoenas requesting the information had not been provided to the U.S. Attorney's Office before the letters were sent."

In a second abuse, the headquarters staff sent 300 requests for data "in connection with a classified special project" without tying the requests to specific investigations, a violation of internal FBI rules, the inspector general's report said.

Staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/09/AR2007030902353.html?referrer=email

muckraker10021 · Mar 24, 2007

Muckraker May-11-2006 said:

The ‘Bush Crime Family’ continues to display utter contempt and amoral petulance, for the Constitution of the United States, and the Senate & House which are this nations co-equal branches of government

…..But they reserve their highest level of despisement for the citizens of America, who they regard as nothing more than gravel beneath their feet, to be stepped on and be grinded perpetually into useless dust. 

<hr noshade color="0000FF" size="14"></hr>

Peeps,It's all unraveling now. We're going to need an expandable map to be able to keep track of all the criminal culprits as they attempt to escape the "bush crime family".

<hr noshade color="#333333" size="4"></hr>

My National Security Letter Gag Order

Friday, March 23, 2007

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/22/AR2007032201882_pf.html

<blockquote>
It is the policy of The Washington Post not to publish anonymous pieces. In this case, an exception has been made because the author -- who would have preferred to be named -- is legally prohibited from disclosing his or her identity in connection with receipt of a national security letter. The Post confirmed the legitimacy of this submission by verifying it with the author's attorney and by reviewing publicly available court documents.</blockquote>

The Justice Department's inspector general revealed on March 9 that the FBI has been systematically abusing one of the most controversial provisions of the USA Patriot Act: the expanded power to issue "national security letters." It no doubt surprised most Americans to learn that between 2003 and 2005 the FBI issued more than 140,000 specific demands under this provision -- demands issued without a showing of probable cause or prior judicial approval -- to obtain potentially sensitive information about U.S. citizens and residents. It did not, however, come as any surprise to me.

Three years ago, I received a national security letter (NSL) in my capacity as the president of a small Internet access and consulting business. The letter ordered me to provide sensitive information about one of my clients. There was no indication that a judge had reviewed or approved the letter, and it turned out that none had. The letter came with a gag provision that prohibited me from telling anyone, including my client, that the FBI was seeking this information. Based on the context of the demand -- a context that the FBI still won't let me discuss publicly -- I suspected that the FBI was abusing its power and that the letter sought information to which the FBI was not entitled.

Rather than turn over the information, I contacted lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union, and in April 2004 I filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the NSL power. I never released the information the FBI sought, and last November the FBI decided that it no longer needs the information anyway. But the FBI still hasn't abandoned the gag order that prevents me from disclosing my experience and concerns with the law or the national security letter that was served on my company. In fact, the government will return to court in the next few weeks to defend the gag orders that are imposed on recipients of these letters.

Living under the gag order has been stressful and surreal. Under the threat of criminal prosecution, I must hide all aspects of my involvement in the case -- including the mere fact that I received an NSL -- from my colleagues, my family and my friends. When I meet with my attorneys I cannot tell my girlfriend where I am going or where I have been. I hide any papers related to the case in a place where she will not look. When clients and friends ask me whether I am the one challenging the constitutionality of the NSL statute, I have no choice but to look them in the eye and lie.

I resent being conscripted as a secret informer for the government and being made to mislead those who are close to me, especially because I have doubts about the legitimacy of the underlying investigation.

The inspector general's report makes clear that NSL gag orders have had even more pernicious effects. Without the gag orders issued on recipients of the letters, it is doubtful that the FBI would have been able to abuse the NSL power the way that it did. Some recipients would have spoken out about perceived abuses, and the FBI's actions would have been subject to some degree of public scrutiny. To be sure, not all recipients would have spoken out; the inspector general's report suggests that large telecom companies have been all too willing to share sensitive data with the agency -- in at least one case, a telecom company gave the FBI even more information than it asked for. But some recipients would have called attention to abuses, and some abuse would have been deterred.

I found it particularly difficult to be silent about my concerns while Congress was debating the reauthorization of the Patriot Act in 2005 and early 2006. If I hadn't been under a gag order, I would have contacted members of Congress to discuss my experiences and to advocate changes in the law. The inspector general's report confirms that Congress lacked a complete picture of the problem during a critical time: Even though the NSL statute requires the director of the FBI to fully inform members of the House and Senate about all requests issued under the statute, the FBI significantly underrepresented the number of NSL requests in 2003, 2004 and 2005, according to the report.

I recognize that there may sometimes be a need for secrecy in certain national security investigations. But I've now been under a broad gag order for three years, and other NSL recipients have been silenced for even longer. At some point -- a point we passed long ago -- the secrecy itself becomes a threat to our democracy. In the wake of the recent revelations, I believe more strongly than ever that the secrecy surrounding the government's use of the national security letters power is unwarranted and dangerous. I hope that Congress will at last recognize the same thing.
 
<hr noshade color="#0000ff" size="10"></hr>

Makkonnen · Jan 23, 2009

Re: President had legal authority to OK taps

bump

Makkonnen · Jan 23, 2009

Re: President had legal authority to OK taps

Whistleblower: NSA Targeted Journalists, Snooped on All U.S. Communications
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/01/nsa-whistleblow.html

Just one day after George W. Bush left office, an NSA whistleblower has revealed that the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance program targeted U.S. journalists, and vacuumed in all domestic communications of Americans, including, faxes, phone calls and network traffic.

Russell Tice, a former NSA analyst, spoke on Wednesday to MSNBC host Keith Olbermann. Tice has acknowledged in the past being one of the anonymous sources that spoke with The New York Times for its 2005 story on the government's warrantless wiretapping program.

After that story was published, President Bush said in a statement that only people in the United States who were talking with terrorists overseas would have been targeted for surveillance.

But Tice says, in truth, the spying involved a dragnet of all communications, confirming what critics have long assumed.

"The National Security Agency had access to all Americans' communications," he said. "Faxes, phone calls and their computer communications. ... They monitored all communications."

Tice said the NSA analyzed metadata to determine which communication would be collected. Offering a hypothetical example, he said if the agency determined that terrorists communicate in brief, two-minute phone calls, the NSA might program its systems to record all such calls, invading the privacy of anyone prone to telephonic succinctness.

Tice was involved in only a small part of the project, that involved trying to "harpoon fish from an airplane."

He said he was told to monitor certain groups in order to eliminate them as suspects for more intense targeting. Those groups, he said, were U.S. journalists and news agencies. But rather than excluding the news organizations from monitoring, he discovered that the NSA was collecting the organizations' communications 24 hours a day year round.

"It made no sense," he said.

Tice did not identify the reporters or organizations allegedly targeted.

Olbermann asked if this means there's a file somewhere containing every e-mail and phone conversation these reporters ever had with sources, editors and family members.

"If it was involved in this specific avenue of collection, it would be everything, yes." Tice answered.

[flash]http://www.youtube.com/v/UUSZHC1Gu7U&fmt=18[/flash]

All Americans

All

QueEx · Feb 28, 2009

Re: President had legal authority to OK taps

<center>
Court rules that warrantless
surveillance suit can proceed</center>

McClatchy Newspapers
By Marisa Taylor
February 27, 2009

WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court on Friday allowed a lawsuit alleging that the U.S. illegally eavesdropped on two American attorneys and an Islamic charity in Oregon to proceed despite a last-minute plea from the Obama administration to delay the case.

The order, by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, means that U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker can grant the plaintiff's lawyers access to top secret documents under secure conditions and allow them to litigate their case against the administration.

The Justice Department had argued that the lawsuit jeopardized national security, and the ruling puts the Obama administration in the awkward position of defending the Bush administration's secret warrantless surveillance program, which began shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Unlike other lawsuits alleging warrantless surveillance, the plaintiffs are certain that they were targeted because in 2004 the government accidentally gave lawyers in the case documents detailing the spying.

The lawsuit, filed by Washington lawyers Wendell Belew and Asim Ghafoor and the now defunct Al Haramain Islamic Foundation chapter in Oregon, accuses the government of violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires domestic surveillance to be authorized by a secret court.

In 2004, the Treasury Department declared the Saudi-based charity an organization that supports terrorism and froze its assets. Former officials from the organization are challenging the designation in a separate lawsuit.

Jon Eisenberg, one of the lawyers for the plaintiffs, said he was elated by Friday's order, which he called "the best-case scenario."

Six weeks after the accidental release of the documents detailing the eavesdropping, the government demanded them back. Without access to them, Eisenberg said, "It would have been much, much harder for us" to justify the lawsuit.

Signaling that the Justice Department had no immediate plan to back down, department lawyers late Friday told the district judge that he didn't have the authority to override the executive branch's determination that the plaintiffs' lawyers had "no need to know" the information.

Instead, they said, the judge should review the documents himself in his chambers to determine the merits of the lawsuit. Before issuing any ruling on the record, they asked the court to give the department time to appeal.

If the judge was determined to grant access, the government lawyers demanded to be given notice so they could determine whether to withdraw the information from the court.

Eisenberg called the government lawyers' threat of taking the documents from the court's custody "astounding."

"That would be a shocking violation of the constitutional separation of powers — the sort of thing that just doesn't happen in America," he said.

The 2005 disclosure of the warrantless surveillance program provoked an outcry from civil-liberties groups and members of Congress, including some Republicans. The Bush administration had authorized the National Security Agency, which conducts electronic surveillance, to monitor Americans' international phone calls, e-mails and other electronic communications without court authorization when at least one party was suspected of supporting or engaging in terrorist activities.

At the time, administration officials asserted that the president had the power to authorize domestic eavesdropping without court oversight.

In 2007, the Bush administration disclosed that it had obtained approval for its domestic surveillance program from the FISA court and no longer would resort to warrantless wiretaps.

To this day, little is known about who was targeted or why, and in court filings, Justice Department lawyers said that's why they didn't want the case to proceed.

Earlier this month, the Obama administration said that it would be asserting the same state secrets argument in another lawsuit, provoking outrage from civil libertarians. In response to the outcry, Attorney General Eric Holder ordered a review of such cases.

"Not only would disclosure of information to plaintiffs' counsel be wholly improper because the NSA director has determined that counsel have no valid 'need to know,'" said Michael Hertz, the acting assistant attorney general, "but, in addition, even issuance of sealed orders in this case risks revealing classified information."

Eisenberg said his lawsuit doesn't seek to uncover details about the inner workings of the program.

"The broader purpose is to challenge President Bush's and Vice President Cheney's theory that in times of national emergency the president can disregard acts of Congress," he said. "I don't care how they did it. I don't care why they did it. I just want to hold them accountable."

[/url]http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/62997.html[/url]

thoughtone · Feb 28, 2009

GREAT!

I don’t understand what Obama’s motives are, but “the truth shall set you free!”

QueEx · Aug 23, 2009

<center>
Obama DOJ punts on warrantless taps' legality

Obama's Justice Department is declining to defend the
legality of President George Bush's warrantless
wiretapping program and urging a federal
court to dodge the issue of
whether the surveillance
violated federal law</center>

P O L I T I C O
Josh Gerstein
August 21, 2009

President Barack Obama's Justice Department is declining to defend the legality of President George Bush's warrantless wiretapping program and urging a federal court to dodge the issue of whether the surveillance violated federal law.

In a court filing submitted close to midnight Thursday in San Francisco, the Justice Department asked a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit brought by a Muslim charity, the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, and two of its lawyers, all of whom contend they were illegally wiretapped as part of Bush's so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program.

The foundation and its attorneys allege that the government inadvertently revealed the surveillance in 2004 by sending them a top secret log of communications that were intercepted. However, the courts have taken that document off the table in the litigation after the Bush administration asserted the state secrets privilege, a claim the Obama administration later joined in even though candidate Obama complained that the privilege had been overused.

In the new filing, the Justice Department said the foundation and its lawyers don't have enough other evidence to prove that they were actually subjected to the allegedly illegal wiretapping program.

"Plaintiffs are now required to set forth specific, uncontroverted facts establishing that they were the targets of, or have been subjected to, warrantless electronic surveillance. Plaintiffs instead continue to rely on the same speculative 'inferences' and conjecture that plainly fail to establish their standing.
Plaintiffs’ evidence is no more than a string of speculation that fails to demonstrate that plaintiffs were in fact subject to any surveillance, that any such surveillance was 'electronic surveillance' as defined by the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act], or that any such surveillance was undertaken without judicial authorization," the government's new brief declares.

During the campaign, Obama and other officials who would later take up senior roles in his administration asserted that the warrantless wiretapping program was illegal. Lawyers for the foundation had hoped the Justice Department would repeat or repudiate that position, but the new brief doesn't take a position one way or the other, and instead urges Judge Vaugn Walker not to rule on the issue.

"The Court should not reach the issue of whether the President has inherent power to authorize warrantless surveillance outside of the FISA," the brief says. "This Court should not venture into complex constitutional questions concerning a now lapsed program where an actual case of controversy cannot be established."

At one point, the Justice Department suggests that the dangers Bush was trying to address could be relevant to the legality of the surveillance, but the brief stops short of arguing that the terrorist threat would be a license for the president to break the law.

"Facts concerning whether surveillance may have occurred, how any surveillance may have been undertaken, under what authority, and the need or exigent threat the surveillance (if any) was intended to address in particular circumstances, would be relevant to assessing the lawfulness of any such surveillance, but have been properly protected by the Government’s privilege assertion," the brief says.

Government lawyers insist that their continued drive to use the state secrets privilege to end the case —an effort which has drawn an outcry from civil libertarians — is not intended to shield illegality, though they don't dispute that it could do just that.

"The Government does not rely on an assertion of the state secrets privilege to cover-up alleged unlawful conduct. The central concern in a case such as this is that the disclosure of whether or not someone is or has been subject to surveillance (and, if so, what type of surveillance) would reveal intelligence sources and methods — in this case, sources and methods concerning alleged surveillance of an entity determined to have provided support to the al Qaeda terrorist organization," the brief says.

The brief says whatever allegedly illegal surveillance may have been imposed on the plaintiffs is unlikely to recur because Congress authorized a version of Bush's program in 2007.

Another hearing in the suit is set for Sept. 23.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/joshgerstein/0809/Obama_DOJ_punts_on_warrantless_taps_legality.html

Dallas Bueller 2010 · Feb 7, 2010

gene cisco said:
First off the majority of the american people(white folks) get their legal system education on tv.

Illegal tactics are used all the time in law enforcement. THEY JUST CANNOT BE USED IN COURT!!!!!!!!!!

How many black folks had their car illegaly searched? Doesn't matter dam near impossible to prove, your word against theirs.

Cops wouldn't make most their dope busts if they didn't bend or break the law.

Same thing with terrorism.

How you gonna prove your phone was tapped WHEN they just happened to pull you over when you just copped the dynamite for your suicide vest.

Cops use illegally gotten info all the time to make LEGIT busts. They just leave that convienent fact out and say they pulled said suspect over for a broken tailight and.........whoa 50 kilos of blow.

Warrant or not they still will tap phones, thing is they want it legal to erase more rights.

They don't need the shit to be legal. Big game aimed at humanoids, white ones in particular.

They really think cops bust cases by the book. They really believe the government doesn't profile arabs and muslims OR doesn't have the white militias on lock(see aryan nation trial).

They do not need any more laws to stop terrorism. They could have stopped 9/11 if it wasn't for infighting between agencies.

You see its a lot different when a tactic used is legal. It then can be expanded to anything.

Maybe you didn't report that lucky night playing poker with the boys. Oh well your fucked pay the IRS back taxes and penalties.

The government is like pringles, once they start, they don't stop fucking you. They say now its only this, next year its something else added to the spying.

Humanoids, shakedowns,illegal searches, taps are done all the time. They lead to evidence which the law just says they used another means to get.

Don't tell that to joe humanoid who still thinks the police helps little beaver get his cat down from the tree................

That's why we have legal minds in the checks and balances. They are logical and not supposed to be activist in nature. Look at que. lol.

Any logical mind would uphold this decision BUT a lot of judges appointed seem to be activist.

The constitution is clear on the subject, it is up to the courts to protect us. But hey they ruled income tax illegal and look what happened.

Illegal wire taps are gonna happen, face it. Its this broad warrantless tapping being legal that's the real boogeyman.........fuck a binny laidem.

good post gene :yes:

Greed · Apr 2, 2014

NSA performed warrantless searches on Americans' calls and emails – Clapper

Greed said:
...this is the part of our government we dont like, and wont ever like. 10 years we'll be hearing how the executive pushed the limits of the law again.

Boy, these 10-year old threads are the best. Thanks thoughtone for reminding me of the good times the board use to have.

Too bad all the passion has left you guys depending on who's president does what.

Greed · Apr 2, 2014

Does the Fourth Amendment protect the privacy of telephone conversations?

Constitution Check: Does the Fourth Amendment protect the privacy of telephone conversations?
By Lyle Denniston
Posted 8 days ago

Lyle Denniston looks at recent remarks by Justice Antonin Scalia that the Fourth Amendment might not prevent the government from listening to your phone calls.

THE STATEMENT AT ISSUE:

“Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia made it clear the issue [of National Security Agency surveillance of Americans] would likely come before the high court, and he hinted he would rule that ‘conversations’ (i.e., the conversations that the government might listen to) aren’t protected by the Fourth Amendment. The Fourth Amendment, Scalia pointed out, prohibits the government from searching our “persons, houses, papers, and effects” without a warrant – not ‘conversations.’ ”

– Excerpt from a story by Erin Fuchs on the Business Insider website on March 22, about an appearance by Justice Scalia before students of the Brooklyn Law School in New York City.

WE CHECKED THE CONSTITUTION, AND…

When a Justice of the Supreme Court, speaking outside the court, makes a comment on the meaning of the Constitution, one can never say for sure that such a remark is wrong: the Justice can always try to persuade other members of the court to rule that way, sooner or later.

But in order for telephone conversations to be placed outside the privacy protections of the Fourth Amendment, a majority of the court would have to be persuaded to overrule several of its most important decisions limiting the government’s power to eavesdrop on private conversations without a search warrant.

Justice Scalia’s comment (if accurately recounted), that the Fourth Amendment does not protect telephone conversations, at one time was, in fact, the court’s view. In the Prohibition era case of Olmstead v. U.S., in 1928, the Supreme Court decided a case involving a crude form of physical wiretapping to listen to the conversations of liquor dealers. The court said explicitly: “One who installs in his house a telephone instrument with connecting wires intends to project his voice to those quite outside, and…the wires beyond his house and messages while passing over them are not within the protection of the Fourth Amendment.”

That decision established the privacy principle that, unless government agents intruded physically into a constitutionally protected area, such as carrying out a “trespass” inside the home, there was no violation of the Fourth Amendment.

In 1961, the Supreme Court was asked to overrule the Olmstead decision, in a case involving the use of a microphone on the end of a long pole that was poked through a wall to enable federal agents to listen in on gamblers’ conversations. The court had been told that advancing technology made it easier for government to intrude into private spaces, so the Fourth Amendment should take account of that.

In that case, Silverman v. U.S., the court said it need not delve into “the large questions which have been argued,” based on “the vaunted marvels of the electronic age,” because this case involved a physical invasion into or encroachment on a private space. It thus ruled that the use by the agents of a “spike mike” did violate the Fourth Amendment.

What is at least implicit in the court’s perspective, at least by the time of the Silverman decision, was that there could be factual scenarios in which government eavesdropping on private conversations was an unconstitutional invasion of privacy.

The Supreme Court went further, in the 1967 decision in Katz v. U.S. That case, involving an illegal gambling prosecution, challenged federal agents’ use of a device from outside of a telephone booth that had been used by a suspect to make bets. The court did what it had refused to do in the Silverman case: it cast aside the Olmstead view that there could be no Fourth Amendment violation unless eavesdropping was done by a physical intrusion into a private space.

The Fourth Amendment, the court said, “protects people, not places.” So it abandoned the notion that the Fourth Amendment applied only to private physical space or areas. Instead, the court adopted the concept that what an individual “seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.”

When an individual steps into a telephone booth, closes the door and puts a coin in the slot, that individual, the court said, “is surely entitled to assume that the words he utters into the mouthpiece will not be broadcast to the world. To read the Constitution more narrowly is to ignore the vital role that the public telephone has come to play in private communication.”

The court stressed in that case, however, that it was not ruling on a scenario in which government agents had eavesdropped, without a warrant, on a suspect in a case involving “national security.”

Five years later, the Supreme Court took up that open question, in the case of U.S. v. U.S. District Court, involving government eavesdropping on the conversations of suspects in the dynamite bombing of a Central Intelligence Agency office in Ann Arbor, Mich. Relying on what it had said in the Katz and Silverman cases about eavesdropping in ordinary criminal cases, the court ruled that there is no national security exemption to the Fourth Amendment requirement that the government obtain a warrant before conducting surveillance of telephone conversations.

“Those charged with investigative and prosecutorial duty,” the court said, “should not be the sole judges of when to utilize constitutionally sensitive means in pursuing their tasks.”

The National Security Agency’s global program of monitoring telephone calls, as well as Internet and cable communications, one day – perhaps soon – will be tested in the Supreme Court, under the Fourth Amendment. There will be a lengthy history of constitutional protection for the privacy of conversations that will be at stake, and Justice Scalia probably will be on the court then to say – in his formal role as a judge – whether that history was all a mistake.

http://blog.constitutioncenter.org/...otect-the-privacy-of-telephone-conversations/

Bush Lets NSA Spy on Callers Without Courts

Star

Star

Rising Star

Superstar *****

Star

Star

Star

Superfly Moderator

Potential Star

Superfly Moderator

Potential Star

Star

Superstar *****

Rising Star

Not A BGOL Eunuch

Rising Star

Superstar *****

Rising Star

Superstar *****

Rising Star

Superstar *****

The Quizatz Haderach

The Quizatz Haderach

Rising Star

Rising Star

Rising Star

Potential Star

Star

Star