Stripping away all our rights as you are distracted by the other one and the mass media focus on wedge issues.
"The 11-member Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, has quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court, and carved out an exception to the Fourth Amendment’s requirement of a warrant for searches and seizures"
I take exception to exceptions carved out of the Bill of Rights!
It's supposed to be the founding and governing document of this fine Republic, and the GOVERNMENT is NOT ALLOWED to PICK and CHOOSE what it wants to OBEY!
If that is the road they want to go down, then THEY ARE AN ILLEGITIMATE GOVERNMENT!
"Court’s classified rulings expanded powers of NSA; FISA has evolved into a parallel of US high court" by Eric Lichtblau | New York Times, July 07, 2013
WASHINGTON — In more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation’s surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans while pursuing not only terrorism suspects, but also people possibly involved in nuclear proliferation, espionage, and cyber attacks, officials say.
What is a "foreign" court doing signing off on domestic spying?
Is this the freedom we were supposed to be celebrating this Fourth?
I'm sorry, but there is something about SECRET LAWS and SECRET COURTS that seems UNAMERICAN to me!
The rulings, some nearly 100 pages long, reveal the expanded role of a court that regularly assesses broad constitutional questions and establishes important precedents, almost always without public scrutiny, according to current and former officials familiar with the court’s classified decisions.
The 11-member Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, was once mostly focused on approving case-by-case wiretapping orders. But since major changes in legislation and greater judicial oversight of intelligence operations were instituted six years ago, it has quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court, serving as the ultimate arbiter on surveillance issues and delivering opinions that will most likely shape intelligence practices for years to come, the officials said.
They are already scooping up every single communication on the planet, so what more can they really decide?
Last month, a former National Security Agency contractor, Edward J. Snowden, leaked a classified order from the FISA court, which authorized the collection of all phone-tracing data from Verizon business customers. But the court’s still-secret decisions go far beyond any single surveillance order, the officials said.
“We’ve seen a growing body of law from the court,” a former intelligence official said. “What you have is a common law that develops where the court is issuing orders involving particular types of surveillance, particular types of targets.”
In one of their most important decisions, the judges expanded the use in terrorism cases of a legal principle known as the “special needs” doctrine and carved out an exception to the Fourth Amendment’s requirement of a warrant for searches and seizures, the officials said.
That smell you are noticing is the Constitution being burned by the FISA.
The special needs doctrine was originally established in 1989 by the Supreme Court in a ruling allowing the drug testing of railway workers, finding that a minimal intrusion on privacy was justified by the government’s need to combat an overriding public danger.
And now you have to take a pi$$ test for just about any job.
Applying that concept more broadly, the FISA judges have ruled that the NSA’s collection and examination of Americans’ communications data to track possible terrorists does not run afoul of the Fourth Amendment, the officials said.
Then America is no more.
That legal interpretation is significant, several outside legal experts said, because it uses a relatively narrow area of the law — used to justify airport screenings, for instance, or drunken-driving checkpoints — and applies it much more broadly, in secret, to the wholesale collection of communications in pursuit of terrorism suspects.
All of this spying on you based on the f***ing lie of "terrorism."
“It seems like a legal stretch,” William C. Banks, a national security law expert at Syracuse University, said in response to a description of the decision. “It’s another way of tilting the scales toward the government in its access to all this data.”
As if they didn't have enough power.
While President Obama and his intelligence advisers have spoken of the surveillance programs leaked by Snowden mainly in terms of combating terrorism, the court has also interpreted the law in ways that extend into other national security concerns.
In one recent case, for instance, intelligence officials were able to access an e-mail attachment sent within the United States because they said they were worried that the e-mail contained a schematic drawing or a diagram possibly connected to Iran’s nuclear program.
That must be a GOOD LEAK!
In the past, that probably would have required a court warrant because the suspicious e-mail involved American communications.
In this case, however, a little-noticed provision in a 2008 law, expanding the definition of “foreign intelligence” to include biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons, was used to justify access to the message.
You know, the ones Democrats passed and then sent to Bush.
The court’s use of that language has allowed intelligence officials to get wider access to data and communications that they believe may be linked to nuclear proliferation, the officials said. They added that other secret findings have eased access to data on espionage, cyber attacks and other possible threats connected to foreign intelligence.
“The definition of ‘foreign intelligence’ is very broad,” another former intelligence official said in an interview. “An espionage target, a nuclear proliferation target, that all falls within FISA, and the court has signed off on that.”
The official, like a half-dozen other current and former national security officials, discussed the court’s rulings and the general trends they have established on the condition of anonymity because they are classified. FISA court judges refused to comment on the scope and volume of their decisions.
Unlike the Supreme Court, the FISA court hears from only one side in the case — the government — and its findings are almost never made public.
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