What a Tool!
Great quote from Bushie the other day -- "We know that a two-minute phone conversation between somebody linked to al Qaeda here and an operative overseas could lead directly to the loss of thousands of lives. To save American lives, we must be able to act fast and to detect these conversations so we can prevent new attacks."
That's what NSA has always done - spying on foreign citizens. Oh wait, or did you mean to infer that the operative overseas was an American citizen? In that case, do you think anyone over there has bothered to let Bush know that with the Patriot Act, they CAN act fast and detect those conversations? The Patriot Act's Secret Court can set up a warrant that is so vague and long lasting as to be applied to pretty much anything.
As noted on the Slate site:
. . . secret court that granted search warrants so long as a pleading before a closed court asserted that the "primary purpose" of the search or wire tap was to gather foreign intelligence. The warrant needn't be based on a suspicion of criminal behavior. But the target had to be "linked to foreign espionage." In theory, American citizens were safe unless they were suspected "agents of a foreign power." A good indicator of the objectivity of the FISA court: It rejected only five of the 14,000 warrant applications it received before 2001, although it recently became clear that many of those warrants were based on false allegations. The FISA court is not supposed to second-guess the government. These are not adversarial proceedings. Nor does the FISA court maintain ongoing oversight over the surveillance. Patriot amends FISA to allow searches when "a significant purpose" is intelligence-gathering. Not "primary," but significant. Now you can be subject to secret searches authorized by a secret court so long as there is any foreign intelligence component (and increasingly, drug-related offenses are deemed to have a terrorist component). Moreover, the party to be searched need not be connected to foreign espionage anymore. It's enough that the government may merely learn something about a terror investigation. . . .
That's what NSA has always done - spying on foreign citizens. Oh wait, or did you mean to infer that the operative overseas was an American citizen? In that case, do you think anyone over there has bothered to let Bush know that with the Patriot Act, they CAN act fast and detect those conversations? The Patriot Act's Secret Court can set up a warrant that is so vague and long lasting as to be applied to pretty much anything.
As noted on the Slate site:
. . . secret court that granted search warrants so long as a pleading before a closed court asserted that the "primary purpose" of the search or wire tap was to gather foreign intelligence. The warrant needn't be based on a suspicion of criminal behavior. But the target had to be "linked to foreign espionage." In theory, American citizens were safe unless they were suspected "agents of a foreign power." A good indicator of the objectivity of the FISA court: It rejected only five of the 14,000 warrant applications it received before 2001, although it recently became clear that many of those warrants were based on false allegations. The FISA court is not supposed to second-guess the government. These are not adversarial proceedings. Nor does the FISA court maintain ongoing oversight over the surveillance. Patriot amends FISA to allow searches when "a significant purpose" is intelligence-gathering. Not "primary," but significant. Now you can be subject to secret searches authorized by a secret court so long as there is any foreign intelligence component (and increasingly, drug-related offenses are deemed to have a terrorist component). Moreover, the party to be searched need not be connected to foreign espionage anymore. It's enough that the government may merely learn something about a terror investigation. . . .
posted by Anonymous at 12:13 PM
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