The FISA debate as an example of rightward drift in American politics

countezero, its policy and therefor can be held publicly

For instance if i could be bothered going back through Hansard i could get the second reading speaches from the anti terror laws. Now they were "national security" too but they were also pieces of legslation which means the debate must be open to the public as must the voting and the legslation itself.

Its the same as the way suicides are reported. An indervidual suicide is not reported in Australia but the statistics on suicide are. You can protect the indervidual cases while still having an open debate about the way cases should be investigated

 

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I'm not certain of procedure, and clearly you are even less so, based on your various wrongheaded analogies, but there are plenty of "debates" about policy that are held in private by the Congress in this arena. Consider, the House and Senate Committees on Intelligence routinely sign off on covert operations without holding public debates. Typically speaking, the only thing required to be in the public is the vote, but someone who knows more about Congressional procedure should chime in here perhaps...

That they would like to do so here shouldn't surprise anyone. As I've written, this issue has become politicized by both sides to a ridiculous degree. Perhaps, without the cameras rolling, they can get something done that will be good for the nation, as opposed to the childish squabbles we have about FISA now...

Your country, Britain, has the National Secrets Act, which allows it all kinds of leeway to debate policy behind closed doors.

 

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not to get my fingers in the pie but asguard is an aussie

 

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heheheh your right, im not british and there is no offical secrets act here (no laws about treason either actually)

ALL debates must be held publically for legislation to pass the house and the senate, its possable that SOME of the commitie consultation maybe held behind closed doors but in the end the legislation must be publicly debated.

 

That's my mistake then...

 

House Democrats make a stand

Source: Unclaimed Territory
Link: http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/03/14/fisa/index.html
Title: "House Democrats reject telecom amnesty, warrantless surveillance", by Glenn Greenwald
Date: March 14, 2008

Since I'm on a Greenwald kick for this topic ....

Let us hope he's right. Let us hope, in fact, that this bill is significant of the foothold Democrats have been looking for. Especially since the bill has no chance of becoming law:

It's more than a pyrrhic victory for the Dems, but just barely. Greenwald includes an excerpt from Jonathan Weisman's Washington Post article on the vote. Sen. Reid appears prepared to step up to the challenge this time, and perhaps a gamble he took some weeks ago will pay off. I recall I was disappointed when he passed a certain bill out of the Senate and looked to Pelosi to actually stop it, saying she had greater power to actually do something of note with the bill. I'm pretty sure it was the FISA bill, and I still consider that philosophy a cop-out on the part of the Senate Democrats. However, if Reid is willing to his House counterparts' success to rally the caucus and actually offer some sort of substantial resistance to the White House agenda, that would go a long way toward increasing the value of what seems, for now, a minor political victory.

Nonetheless, as Weisman points out, "Lawmakers from both parties said the gulf between the administration and House Democratic leaders is now so wide that the issue may not be resolved until a new president takes office next year."

The GOP might wish to consider compromising, else they hand the Democrats a powerful issue come November:

And as the particulars of this debate filter out to the public's attention, it will be hard for GOP spinners to manipulate the facts on this one: the Democrats have given the telecoms an out; the GOP and the President have said no, and demand a retroactive suspension of the people's rights against unreasonable search.

Or, perhaps, if the public discourse moves any farther to the right, the people will rally behind that particular suspension and demand that they be targets of domestic espionage at the whim of any president's paranoia.

Stay tuned ....
____________________

See Also:

Weisman, Jonathan. "House Passes a Surveillance Bill Not to Bush's Liking". Washington Post. March 15, 2008; page A02. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/14/AR2008031400803

 

tiassa the veto is a HUGE problem for the US. Either you have a system like ours where whoever is in control of the house is the goverment or you have a system like yours where executive and legilative are seprate but why the hell the people who drafted the consitution thought giving the president more power than 2/3 minus one of the house and the senate was a good idea i will never understand

 

The Crown

Two words: the Crown.

The President has very little inherent power. It's why they like to declare crises. When a crisis is afoot, their power increases.

The Constitution has little to say about the president. In fact, the four sections on the presidency are:

1. Electing a president
2. Powers of the president
3. Obligations of the president
4. Impeaching a president​

The whole of that second section pertaining to the powers of the president is reproduced here in its entirety:

 

see the crown has NO power here and the PM only has the power to declare war (i belive) all other powers are inhernt in legislation (like the ability to deal with disaster relife and use the army to deal with floods ect). The one thing the PM CANT do is veto a bill, he has to relie on a) having the numbers in at least the house and b) having no one cross the floor (which HAS happened, most noticably Barnapy Joice). That is why the minor parties are so important in our politics, its them not the major parties who tend to hold the balance of power in the senate which means they decide if a goverment bill passes or not rather unless it has bi pardisan surport

 

A glimmer of hope?

Source: Unclaimed Territory
Link: http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/04/10/fisa/index.html
Title: "Have Republicans given up on FISA and telecom amnesty?", by Glenn Greenwald
Date: April 10, 2008

Politics. On the one hand, that's all anything is worth in Washington, D.C., these days. To the other, that's really sad. It seems that all of the badger-badger-badger from the Republican Party about terrorists suing the phone company, or the Afghanistan safe-house telephone call lie/confession (circle one), is all for show.

I mean, come on. I suppose the only reason we had to take the GOP at its word through that whole debate was for the sake of political correctness. You know, appeasement. It's not nice to call people fearmongers and liars. Especially when that's exactly what they're being.

Of course, since it was all politics, it wasn't like they were really lying or fearmongering, right?

Right?

Er ... um ... right.

I still hate "transition" as a verb.

So the good news: The GOP is looking for a different tack, scrambling away from its earlier apocalyptic FISA-mongering.

The bad news: None of it's sincere, anyway, and the election is still about seven months away.

Maybe we've drifted into a wall. Stay tuned.
______________________

See Also:

Harrison, Chris. "On KFKA, Independence Institute's Oliver let Allard's chief of staff falsely assert that House Dems 'allowed FISA to expire'". Colorado Media Matters. February 22, 2008. http://colorado.mediamatters.org/items/200802220006

Murphy, Logan. "Countdown: Mukasey’s FISA Fables - Lies or Admissions?" Crooks and Liars. April 1, 2008. http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/04/01/countdown-mukaseys-fisa-fables-lies-or-admissions/

 

I'd like to post some passages from James Risen's State of War, which I am currently reading, to reassert some perspective. Risen is, of course, a strident critic of the administration, but his book, which is almost entirely based on anonymous sources, is a good read whatever your persuasion.

We should remember, too, that he is the reporter who first broke the NSA wiretapping story, and won a Pulitzer for it.

Anyway, here we go:

"The NSA is now eavesdropping on as many as five hundred people in the (US) at any given time and it potentially has the phone calls and e-mails of millions more."

"As al Qaeda operatives began to fall into American hands, their seized laptops, cell phones and directories led to the discovery of telephone numbers and e-mail addresses of people with whom they had communicated. ... the NSA began monitoring those numbers, as well as the numbers of anyone in contact with them, and so on outward in an expanding network."

"(The NSA) has set up its own internal checklist to determine whether there is 'probable cause' to begin surveillance."

Now, Risen doesn't specifically say so, but I imagine one of the reasons they did this, relates to the following: "The NSA was collecting more communications than anyone could ever listen to; even its supercomputers, with artificial-intelligence software, had trouble separating the wheat from the chaff." In other words, they don't want to waste their time with non-essential surveillance.

"Bush administration officials say the NSA is using the Program (as its called) to conduct suveillance on the telephone and e-mail communications of about 7,000 people overseas. They also acknowledge that the NSA is targeting the communications of about 500 people in the US. Each one of those ... is likely to make several phone calls and send several e-mails each day," which obviously widens the scope of the watching.

Given the various networks is built and watched, Risen estimates that the NSA has eavesdropped on millions of phone calls and e-mails messages since the program began. However, to put that number in perspective, he reports there are in excess of nine trillion e-mails sent in the US per day and well over a billion cell phones and landlines making telephone calls each day.

So maybe big brother isn't listening?

 

Exactly.They aren't doing anything legitimate and effective they couldn't get a FISA warrant for, easily and without the slightest disruption in their work.

So what were, and are, the motives behind defying FISA and Congress and the Constitution, and setting up the agencies for warrantless search of US citizens ?

Could they include the same motives every bad government on earth has always had for warrantless search and wiretap and clandestine, unaccountable surveillance of whomever piqued its interest ? The motives whose results in practice caused the Founders to specify in the Constitution itself that no US government was permitted such behavior ?

 

I've said I am in favor of some kind of oversight, probably in the form of an amended FISA court that is brought up to date. I merely posted what I posted because you and a few others continue to blow this issue totally out of proportion, alleging a scale and violation that just isn't there.

I think the motives have been alluded to this thread, and if not, I've surely argued them in the past. I can quote directly from the Risen, if you like?

There is no indication or evidence for that at all...

 

What are you in favor of doing about a government that has and will defy your wishes for oversight ?

The scale of the violation I allege is that admitted by the administration, as well as implicit in the campaign for retroactive legal immunity for participating corporations.

The setting up of warrantless phone and email monitoring secret from Congress and in defiance of enacted law is all the evidence anyone needs.

It's like watching someone pull a ski mask over their face and pull a gun as they walk into the bank lobby - the presumption of innocence is not warranted.

 

Such a dark mood herein.

More, please.

 

Well, Hayden came up with the plan. So we charge him? Charge Bush for agreeing to it? You might like that, but I'm not sure that such a punishment fits the crime, if a crime has indeed been committed (and on paper, one probably has, though I'm certain Hayden and Bush could never be convicted, given the language of post 9/11 legislation).

If there were rampant abuses, if there were something akin to the CHAOS program in the 1960s, maybe I would lean in that direction. But this program is nothing of the sort. It's specific and focussed. The law should be adjusted to facilitate most, if not all, of what it is doing. In conjunction, oversight should be established and strict guidelines set up so that it does not spiral into something more broad-based and evasive.

Additionally, a strict line should be drawn: In the future, no agency head or president can establish such a program without first seeking Congressional authority from the relevant committees.

You wrote, previously in this thread, about intelligence agencies being supplied "with feed of every single call routed through those centers." Based on Hersh, on Risen and on pretty much everything else I have read about the program, that has not happened.

The NSA was granted access to the switches at the telecoms, but as my last post detailed, it was not randomly pulling millions upon millions of calls, as your angst seems to suggest.

The whomever "piqued their interest" part of your statement was what I objected to. You make it sound as though the NSA spends its time listening to people on whims or because it is inherently nefarious.

 

My "angst" is in the fact of the US government installing wiretap access to anyone's phone and email without a warrant - the setup was an installed tap on the phone line and email server of every US citizen contracting service with those companies.

And yet you talk about "international calls to terrorists" and similar irrelevancies.

Whether they are listened to or not, that is or should be automatic impeachment and jail time for every official involved. There is no excuse for it. That is forbidden by laws at every level from the Constitution on down to phone service contracts.

There is no need to demonstrate abuse of such a system, in fact - and in fact there is no way to demonstrate abuse once such a system is tolerated. That is why warrantless wiretaps are forbidden - they are impossible to oversee.

We have seen two or three cases already dismissed from court, because there was no way to compel production of records showing either the presence or absence of governmental wiretaps. There is no accountability.

You have no way of knowing whether there were or not. No similar system has ever existed without being abused - the usual reason for installing something like that is to take advantage of its ease of abuse, and some circumstantial evidence of abuse has turned up - but that is and will always be speculation, since there were no warrants.

If they did, or have, or even are now, it would be impossible to stop them or hold them to account.

No doubt the select few in the agency with the special missions would would have the highest of motives - in their own eyes.

Elliot Spitzer was somebody who needed to be stopped, for the good of the country, for example. Letting Democratic Congressmen meet with suspicious people or keep mistresses is a security risk, and immoral. Don Siegelman was an amoral liberal, and framing him was a patriotic duty. The 7/1 ratio of indicted local Democratic politicians to indicted Republican ones was a reflection of the country's needs, and the wiretapping that greased the skids just an example of the fact that people have to get their hands dirty sometimes in defense of their country.

We haven't even begun to consider the advantages to Halliburton, or Chevron.

And for all that those are probably fictions, in plain fact they were and are easily possible, completely untraceable and unaccountable, and a constant temptation in Rove's toolbox (he of the top secret security clearance and no apparent duties) as long as warrantless wiretaps are tolerated.

And that isn't even the worst of it, probably. There is the intimidation. Anyone who gets crossways with any government official has to consider the possibility that their phone,their email - and their lawyer's, doctor's, accountant's, etc - is now monitored with impunity by their enemies.

This is how totalitarian government sets its hooks. Not by monitoring everyone - by making it known that they can monitor anyone, at their pleasure, and maybe publicizing a couple of examples. This pattern is as old as China, as common as dirt, as dangerous as anything there is.

 

Risen talks about the installation and the access to the switches, basically saying that the NSA had the ability to peek and what you claim, but did not do so. Risen, like yourself, was troubled by the access and the potential for abuse, but even he doesn't go as far as you do, largely because there is no evidence of the sort of massive campaign you've imagined.

Again, I discussed the numbers involved in the program earlier in this thread, and have cited my sources regarding them. What's key is that something is put into to law that ensures the NSA uses its access properly. That is, that it limits is listening to the foreign calls being routed through US networks and whatever other calls they obtain warrants for, under a new and improved FISA. If this happens, I see no problem with the switch arrangement.

They're not irrelevant, they're the crux of the fucking discussion because they are the reason for the program and the substance of it. Your continual denial of this and your specious attempts to spin this into something more informs us of nothing but your own perversion and bias. Get a grip.

That's your opinion — and you're welcome to it. Personally, as I already said, I doubt this will ever happen or that such charges could ever be proved in court. But hey, feel free to engage in your delusional, ideologically-driven wet dreams of seeing all the political and intelligence officials you so obviously loathe doing the "perp walk." Just don't expect it to happen.

And yet here we are, talking about them. Talking about them, I might add, because some of those pesky NSA and CIA people you constantly trash leaked the substance of Risen's reporting to him. Those fascists...

Good for the courts. Shows they're working, despite the claims to the contrary...

Yes, I do. I have numerous media reports, from Risen and others, detailing how the program worked. The person who doesn't have a leg to stand on here is you. You constantly make claims about what this program did or what it might be doing, but none of it is born out by what we actually know about it. Now, it's possible we're both wrong or we're both right — or some other combination of those extremes — but at least I'm basing my appreciation of the situation on the data that I can muster. To contrast, you've siezed on the absence of evidence as proof of abuse. That's speculative, and as such, meaningless. In doing so, you pretend as if there isn't all this information out there about the program, information that tells us plenty about its scope, etc.

Right, there's no management structure at the NSA that isn't interested in its employees producing useful intelligence, and in doing so, avoid the sort of flaps we saw with the State Department's violations of records pertaining to the presidential candidates. It's just willy-nilly at NSA. Eavesdrop on who you like, right? This despit, the Risen quote that says: "(The NSA) has set up its own internal checklist to determine whether there is 'probable cause' to begin surveillance."

Oh, please. Spare me the paranoid, conspiracy-mongering. It's Friday, and I just don't have an appetite for it.

Ice, you're a smart guy. If you're going to give me conspiracy, the least you can do is come up with something a little more original. I mean, are you really so obtuse that you have to reach to these easy marks? Next, you'll be comparing people to the Nazis, because, you know, nobody EVER does that...

Well, I will sleep better tonight, knowing that you and Tiassa — and probably Hype and PJ — are on the case. Nothing could make me feel safer, unless, of course, you get Sam involved.

 

No, out of pragmatism we mutually surrender certain "passive" freedoms like the freedom not be looked at by law enforcement.

Because, first, I am not in the shadows and you and I can debate the proper limits on the freedoms we all desire. Your position seems to be either that there are no new enemies in the shadows or that there are, but that we should not change our behavior as a result of the new threat (i.e., "let's close our eyes and just pretend we're safe!"). Either way, that's not rational.

Second, though, we are the ones who will keep you alive when the actual enemies come around. The truth is that the world is divided up into three sorts of people: wolves, sheep and sheepdogs. The sheepdogs are the bulwark that help to keep the wolves at bay, and the only defense the sheep really have from attacks. Unfortunately, the sheep are often afraid of both the wolves and the sheepdogs, and don't always understand that there's a difference between them.

In other contexts, the roles reverse. The "sheepdogs" that have their eyes peeled for the terrorists might be blind to threats from tyrants. They might be as "sheep" relative to the threats of the government. Similarly, some sheep like you who (apparently) think that no one died on 9/11 might be as "sheepdogs" against the threat posed by the government.

As someone who worked in the World Trade Center as of 9/11/01, I'd like to say FUCK YOU to the "illusory fears" comment. You are either retarded, or no older than seven, if you think my fears are illusory. I have 19 no-so-"illusory" graves of people I knew that I could take you to visit, dipshit. And six of those graves are empty, as their remains were never discovered in millions of pounds of rubble.

I was kidding, but the truth is that without the ability to look for the terrorists, we will never find the terrorists. As such, as a society, we all have to accept some level of scrutiny to protect us against all varieties of crime, terrorism included. After all, *any* police investigation necessarily requires that they determine information about those involved. The only thing that makes you comfortable with the role of the state in those cases is "tradition". In the state of nature, all police investigations, even merely asking questions, would be "intrusive," but as a society we have established certain boundaries for such things. In light of the new threat, some of us now believe that the boundaries may need to be adjusted because the new threat is not entirely like the old ones. Other's believe that sticking their heads in the sand makes the terrorists disappear.

Put the crack pipe down. Oh noes! They may listen to my lawyer's and police chief's calls! And if my lawyer and police chief (and I) are not terrorists, life will continue as it did before. Admittedly, the surveillance might be misused, and sometimes police beat confessions out of people. That things might be misused does not make the thing in and of itself a bad idea. Free speech is misused all the time by people who use it to spread hatred, racism, sexism, Naziism, etc., but I don't think the solution to the abuse is to eliminate it.

In the same way, that surveillance might be abused is not a sufficient reason to ban all surveillance.

As for allies, if those people under surveillance are terrorists, I don't want them as my allies. If they are not, then they will never likely know they were under surveillance and so our "alliance" will be unaffected.

It does not apply to those detained in military custody, that's true (though to land in military custody the law says that you have to have engaged in acts of war against the United States). I personally have little fear that this power of the military to detain suspected terrorists will be used capriciously or simply to punish political opponents (though beyond question mistakes will be made, I have no fear that though mistakes will be anything other than in good faith). Further, there is no doubt in my mind that, apart from the detention and questioning, no greater punishments will be inflicted on those people without a tribunal of some sort determining their actual culpability in crimes).

Further still, if my expectations are violated, there are political ramifications to the politicians involved, as they will be voted out of office. Even now the three candidates for President are all clear (and I agree with them) that the Guantanamo Bay detention facility must be shut down. The politics are such that candidates who disagree with that were weeded out early on.

The politics are also such that moves have been made to establish military or other tribunals to give everyone a fair hearing. Once again we see the U.S. government and political system moving in a rational way to curb abuses, in precisely the way I would expect (just as it moved in a rational way to curb the threats posed by terrorists), and contrary to your dire belief in the military locking up average citizens without charges for not good reason other than the political benefit to the Administration.

 

"We" didn't "mutually" surrender anything. Secret warrantless wiretaps were installed on my phone by the Federal government, without my permission, by executive order.

Freedom from warrantless search is not a "passive" freedom, and you have no right to take it from me because you are pissing your pants over terrorism. I'm not as fearful and cowardly as you are, and I don't agree to give up my Constitutional rights in this fashion. Install warrantless, unsupervisable, unaccountable, secret government taps on your own phone, if you're so keen on the idea, but leave mine - and my lawyer's, doctor's, accountant's, mistress's, local Congressman's, local peacenik activist's, etc etc etc, out of your cowardly schemes.

Bullshit. You are making yourself an enemy of my freedoms, and corrupting my government. When actual enemies come around, my ability to resist them will have been sabotaged by you.

Your cowardice, and willingness to buy an illusion of security for yourself with other people's freedoms, has at least some excuse.

Whatever. Some of us think we are the farmers. But in any case: Many wolves work in your government. Even some sheepdogs turn on their sheep. Never forget that. Anyone who hands the powers of warrantless search over to their government is putting themselves at very great risk. In this case, you are also risking others -that is not admirable, or acceptable.

So look. With a warrant. What's wrong with getting warrants ? They are available retroactively, 24/7/365 - the FISA judge is doing nothing but stand by ready to hand them out.

There's nothing new about the threat of a government acquiring the power of warrantless search through exploitation of fear and excuse of "new" and "more terrible" enemy. Every tyranny that ever was pulled that routine.

LOL. Your childlike faith in your government is no doubt a virtue of some kind, but even you must have noticed what has already been involved in "detention and questioning" in recent years. Suspension of habeas corpus, denial of lawyers, rendition, torture, - the US government has not been shy about using its newly seized powers.