"High court hears challenge to surveillance law; FISA expansion harms citizens, plaintiffs charge" by Jesse J. Holland | Associated Press, October 30, 2012
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court seemed skeptical Monday of a government request to invalidate a lawsuit challenging the expansion of a surveillance law used to monitor conversations of suspected foreign spies and alleged terrorists.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, passed in 1978, allows the government to monitor conversations of such suspects abroad for intelligence purposes.
The 2008 FISA amendments further allow the government to obtain from a secret court broad, yearlong intercept orders, raising the prospect that phone calls and e-mails between those foreign targets and innocent Americans in this country will be swept in.
Although the law is aimed at foreigners, Jameel Jaffer, who represented a group of lawyers, journalists, and organizations, argued in front of the court that Americans who think they are getting caught up in the government monitoring should be allowed to sue to reverse the law’s 2008 expansion.
Jaffer said his colleagues are already taking costly measures like flying overseas to talk to people instead of using telephones and e-mails to keep their conversations private.
The justices are expected to make a decision on the injunction request next year....
The court is not considering the constitutionality of the expansion, only whether lawyers can even file a lawsuit to challenge it in federal court.
Solicitor General Donald Verrilli said opponents should not be allowed to sue because they have no proof that their conversations will be listened to by the US government, and no one is making them change the way they do business....
Verrilli insisted that the opponents’ arguments were a ‘‘cascade of speculation’’ about whether the government was going to use its surveillance powers.
‘‘You are saying that the government has obtained this extraordinarily wide-reaching power, and we have extraordinary risks that face this country and the government’s not going to use it? It’s hard for me to think that the government isn’t using all of the powers at its command under the law in order to protect this country,’’ said Justice Anthony Kennedy....
The court’s four liberal justices — Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan — peppered Verrilli with questions over whether anyone would able to sue over the FISA expansion, considering that the people targeted for the wiretapping are foreigners and the Americans caught up in the wiretapping will never know that their overseas conversations are being listened to.
That's why there is never any proof.
In another matter Monday, the high court took no action on cases asking it to end the Voting Rights Act’s advance approval requirement, under which certain states and localities must obtain federal approval for changes in election laws. The provision has been held up as a crown jewel of the civil rights era, but opponents maintain it is no longer needed.
See: You Can Vote on This Supreme Court Post
The requirement was adopted in the Voting Rights Act in 1965 to give federal officials a potent tool to defeat efforts to keep blacks from voting. The provision was a success, and Congress has renewed it over the years.
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Related:
"Congress extends foreign surveillance law" by Larry Margasak | Associated Press, December 29, 2012
WASHINGTON — The Senate gave final congressional approval on Friday to a bill renewing the government’s authority to monitor overseas phone calls and e-mails of suspected foreign spies and terrorists — but not Americans — without obtaining a court order for each intercept.
They say its overseas and all, but a few years ago there was a mini-scandal regarding Bush wiretapping that sucked it all in, so....
The classified Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act program was scheduled to expire by year’s end. The 73-to-23 vote sent the bill to a supportive President Obama, whose signature would keep the warrantless intercept program in operation for another five years.
But it's not a totalitarian state, and he's no dictator.
The Senate majority rejected arguments from an unusual combination of Democratic liberals and ideological Republican conservatives, who sought to amend the bill to require the government to reveal statistics showing whether any Americans were swept up in the foreign intercepts. The attempt lost, with 52 votes against and 43 in favor.
I WISH WE COULD SEE THAT MORE OFTEN; however, I'm tired of reaching across and espousing or agreeing with their ideas (national health care, for one) when the gesture is never returned.
The Obama administration’s intelligence community and leaders of the Senate’s intelligence committee said the information should be classified and opposed the disclosure, repeating that it is illegal to target Americans without an order from a special US surveillance court.
This from the TRANSPARENT PRESIDENT!
The group seeking more disclosures also sought — unsuccessfully — a determination by the government of whether any intelligence agency attempted to use information gained from foreigners to search for information on Americans without a warrant, referred to as ‘‘back-door’’ searches.
And that is where you are getting it, Americans -- right in the back door. All of this spying based on the big lie of 9/11, too.
The prohibition against targeting Americans without a warrant protects Americans in the United States and abroad.
After the bill was approved, Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said communications collected under the program ‘‘have provided the intelligence community insight into terrorist networks and plans’’ and have ‘‘directly and significantly contributed to successful operations to impede the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and related technologies.’’
Boyd said intercepted communications also revealed potential cyberthreats against the United States, including specific potential computer network attacks.
The debate focused on the need to balance national security with civil liberties. Senators Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, and Saxby Chambliss, Republican of Georgia, the chairwoman and top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, warned that the classified intercept program would be jeopardized if even statistical information was disclosed.
They sparred repeatedly with Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, who held the bill up for months until he was allowed to argue on the Senate floor that Americans’ civil liberties were in danger under the law.
During debate that began Thursday, Feinstein bluntly told Wyden, a fellow liberal, that she opposed his disclosure amendment because, ‘‘I know where this goes. Where it goes is to destroy the program.’’
I'd say Feinstein the fascist, but that would be unfair to fascists.
Wyden insisted his group was interested only in making public government estimates that already existed. In insisting on information about whether the foreign intercepts led to warrantless ‘‘back door’’ searches of Americans, the senator said there already had been one instance of such a violation.
He said the finding of a violation, details of which remain classified, ‘‘demonstrates the impact of the law on Americans’ privacy has been real and is not hypothetical.’’
‘‘How many phone calls to and from Americans have been swept up in this authority?’’ he asked.
A member of the Intelligence Committee, Wyden said he was trying to ‘‘strike a balance between security and liberty’’ and that ‘‘the 300 million Americans who expect us to strike that balance . . . are in the dark.’’
When Americans are targeted for surveillance, the government must get a warrant from a special 11-judge court of US district judges appointed by the Supreme Court. In contrast, when foreigners abroad are targeted, the surveillance court approves annual certifications submitted by the attorney general and the director of national intelligence that identify certain categories of foreign intelligence targets.
The House in September approved the same five-year extension of the law by a vote of 301 to 118.
Feinstein said the surveillance law has procedures to restrict use of information on Americans that is inadvertently captured in the intercepts.
She said there were 100 arrests in terrorism cases between 2009 and 2012, some of them as a direct result of the surveillance program.
The Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, tried to substitute a three-year extension of the law instead of five, but the proposal was defeated, with 52 votes against and 38 in favor.
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"Obama makes gun-limit law 2d term priority; Says day of Conn. shooting was worst of his presidency" by Michael Schwirtz and John M. Broder | New York Times, December 31, 2012
WASHINGTON — In a separate development, Obama signed into law a five-year extension of the US government’s authority to monitor the overseas phone calls and e-mails of suspected foreign spies and terrorists without obtaining a court order for each intercept.
The warrantless intercept program would have expired at the end of 2012 without the president’s approval. The renewal of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act won final passage in the Senate on Friday.
They can't get a spending plan through, but they shove through a spying bill hours before it expires!
They can't get a spending plan through, but they shove through a spying bill hours before it expires!
"Supreme Court rejects challenge to surveillance law; Says journalists, lawyers lack standing to sue" by Adam Liptak | New York Times, February 27, 2013
WASHINGTON — In a 5 to 4 decision that broke along ideological lines, the Supreme Court on Tuesday turned back a challenge to a federal law that authorized intercepting international communications involving Americans.
Not only did they validate torture, now this.
Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said that the journalists, lawyers, and human rights advocates who challenged the constitutionality of the law could not show they had been harmed by it and so lacked standing to sue. Their fear that they would be subject to surveillance in the future was too speculative to establish standing, he wrote.
Alito also rejected arguments based on the steps the plaintiffs had taken to escape surveillance, including traveling to meet sources and clients in person rather than talking to them over the phone.
“They cannot manufacture standing by incurring costs in anticipating of non-imminent harms,’’ he wrote of the plaintiffs....
The decision, Clapper v. Amnesty International, No. 11-1025, concerned a 2008 measure that broadened the government’s power to eavesdrop on international communications. The law, an amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, was passed after the 2005 disclosure of the Bush administration’s secret program to wiretap international communications of people inside the United States without obtaining court warrants. The electronic spying, intended to help pursue terrorists, began after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The 2008 law was challenged by Amnesty International, the American Civil Liberties Union, and other groups and individuals, including journalists and lawyers who represent prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The plaintiffs said the law violated their rights under the Fourth Amendment by allowing the government to intercept their international telephone calls and e-mails.
In 2011, a unanimous three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, ruled for the plaintiffs on the threshold question of whether they had standing.
Judge Gerard E. Lynch, writing for the court, said the plaintiffs had shown that they had a reasonable fear that their communications would be monitored and had taken ‘‘costly measures to avoid being monitored.’’
The full Second Circuit declined to rehear the panel’s ruling....
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And what has the court to say about the tools citizens can use to fight tyranny.
"Court orders look at health care challenge" by Mark Sherman | Associated Press, November 27, 2012
WASHINGTON — Recording police: The court rejected an Illinois prosecutor’s plea to allow enforcement of a law aimed at stopping people from recording police officers on the job.
One of our few defenses against police brutality.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit in 2010 against Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez to block prosecution of ACLU staff for recording police officers performing their duties in public places, one of the group’s longstanding monitoring missions.
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Related:
"Firearms ban: The high court said it would not overturn a Georgia law banning firearms in churches and other places of worship. It refused to hear an appeal from GeorgiaCarry.org, which wanted the justices to overturn a lower court decision upholding Georgia’s law banning guns in places of worship."
That's a sliver of hope as long as Obama doesn't alter the court.
