It's the first time I can ever remember on a contested vote where both the two Democratic Senators from my current bluer than blue state voted the same (nay) as the two Republican Senators from my former redder than red state. Strange bedfellows in interesting times.
That reminds me of Wellington's response under similar circumstances.
A former lover tried to blackmail Wellington. His response was 'Publish and be damned.' It was published to the delight of many. But he still went on to become Prime Minister.
Reminds me of when the KGB and the CIA tried to use knowledge of the sexual exploits of Indonesia's president Sukarno to blackmail him. Instead of falling in line, he told them to release what they had so his countrymen could be impressed by his sexual prowess. The KGB went as far as having a group of their agents pose as flight attendants to engage him in an orgy, which they secretly filmed. When confronted with the film, he asked if KGB for extra copies for him to take home.
I obviously can't guess your age, but I'm gonna wager you weren't around much prior to 9/11. The world was getting on quite well without massive surveillance creep, and none of the stuff FISA has done in the last 23 years would have stopped it. The authorities already had all the info they needed back then and just didn't act on it.
FISA has been in existence since 1978. It did not prevent 9/11, so honestly your comment undersells how worthless the program has been in light of the constitutional freedoms we willingly cede in reauthorizing it. The fact is though it remains law and the officials we elected feel the value is worth it. I hope its being done solely based on the benefits it provides us as a whole and is not being used for self-serving purposes
People just toss comments like this around as though they were facts when in fact it’s completely paranoid made up q-anon level nonsense.
These laws work a very specific way and have very specific controls in place to prevent shit like you describe from happening which you could go and read up on if you wanted to but it’s much easier to fear monger amongst one another because it plays to your ego that somebody who is important enough to be under surveillance by an intelligence agency.
Agree with the sentiment, but spying capabilities have been abused before FISA, just ask Martin Luther King Jr. So I don't think things were particularly fine before 9/11 either. It's just that technological advancements have made abuse on a mass scale possible for the first time in human history. AFAICT surveillance used to be much more targeted and labor intensive. That all changed after 9/11.
I didn't downvote you, btw (I upvoted you). I think MLK Jr's problems with the government weren't traditional spying, they were more harassment of government employees acting on their own because they were bigots. The organized government actions that did happen, IIRC, were in places were the local government was highly corrupt and infiltrated by the KKK.
> Are you aware the alternative is less oversight?
Yes, I am. That is in fact what I want.
> FISA protects Americans
No, it does not. At this time, the greatest threat to me (and other Americans) is in fact the glowies who want to use this sort of law to violate our civil liberties.
The alternative is requiring a warrant, which means following the Constitution. Due process doesn’t disappear because you want it to. Even if someone is supposedly a terrorist or criminal.
If you’re hoping the Supreme Court, and in particular this Supreme Court, is going to agree that the Constitution requires the executive branch get a warrant before spying on cross-border communication with a non-citizen, you’re going to be disappointed.
FISA is Congress exercising the only authority it has here, which is oversight & regulation. You could argue FISA should be stricter, but it can’t extend the Constitutional reach of the Fourth Amendment, nor can it contract it the way many in this thread believe it’s somehow doing.
It's baffling to many people how FISA is even a thing. To a layperson, the Fourth Amendment leaves no room for a rubber stamp court authorizing mass surveillance. And no one except politicians and bureaucrats are buying the argument that this is somehow targeted surveillance.
Also, free nations should have higher standards than "Not a citizen? Too bad, anything goes."
This is not complicated: If you run a telegraph wire between El Paso and Juárez, the executive has the Constitutional authority to tap it to intercept communication to or from a non-citizen not in the United States, warrant-free.
Congress can regulate the process that must be followed, the documentation that must be made, even require judicial review at the program level to ensure it doesn’t also record traffic that is Constitutionally protected. That’s what FISA is.
But it can’t ban that tapping, nor can it require the executive to get a warrant for a particular otherwise Constitutional intercept from an Article 3 court.
> You could argue FISA should be stricter, but it can’t extend the Constitutional reach of the Fourth Amendment, nor can it contract it the way many in this thread believe it’s somehow doing.
Congress can't pass a law violating the Fourth Amendment. They can certainly pass a law constraining the executive from doing something that is otherwise constitutional, if the courts are reading the Fourth Amendment too narrowly.
They could also straightforwardly require the FISA court to publish its opinions, or have the same cases heard in ordinary federal courts with public accountability for the decisions. There is nothing in the constitution requiring secret courts.
I used to work for several of the US intel agencies. I can say with great confidence that we never have acted gainfully on preventing a major event using intel and we never will. The catalyst for acting boldly to prevent or defend a major event is much mor political than informational. No intel will ever play a big role in deciding whether a country lives or dies.
But we most certainly WILL abuse individual civil rights my abusing that intel. THAT has been confirmed in history again and again.
> The catalyst for acting boldly to prevent or defend a major event is much mor political than informational.
Could you explain what you mean by this? On a tangential note, have you considered talking/explaining this with politicians/academics studying this field? Or is it more of something that's already known to those familiar with the field?
The most relevant example I know is the Zimmerman telegram in 1917 which British intelligence decrypted and passed along to Pres Wilson. It detailed plans Germany had made to invade the US with Mexico's help. Wilson released it to newspapers in March as support for his decision to declare war on Germany in April. However the primary justification for war wasn't the telegram, but the public decision by Bismark to fully resume uboat attacks on merchant ships in the Atlantic.
So even as damning and revealing as the Zimmerman telegram was, ultimately it was Germany's bold resumption of the torpedoing of US oceangoing traffic that catalyzed US public opinion into ending 3 years of American neutrality and joining the fight in WWI. Thus even when intel is most damning, the role of intel will always be subservient to publicly motivating events like lost lives, as in the much ballyhooed sinking of the Lusitania 2 years before (1915).
Wikipedia has a couple of outstanding articles on the topic:
We also had drug trafficking when the US constitution was originally written[0], and the founders of the US still gave us a constitutional right to warrants for searches relating to it. I don't understand why sealed warrants aren't "good enough" for this purpose, perhaps you could open my mind a bit. Why do we need "warrantless" surveillance for drug trafficking now? Specifically, what's wrong with getting a sealed (secret for a period of time) warrant for surveillance from a normal court?
> In 1800, the British Levant Company purchases nearly half of all of the opium coming out of Smyrna, Turkey strictly for importation to Europe and the United States.
I can't down vote you harder. FISA hurts Americans by short circuiting any kind of protections citizens once had for due process.
We were fine before, and arguably it would've done little to change the events that caused the reaction that allowed it to be established in the first place.
Once enough votes are there to secure the bill, there's no reason for either party to "waste" any more votes of their members on something that can be so politically unpopular with large parts of their electorate.
People generally vote for the incumbent if they happen to claim the same party affiliation. They complain for 4-6 years, then when it comes to what box they tick on the ballot, all of that is out the window. The lure of an incumbent is that they might have acquired enough markers and enough seats on various committees to help the state, when it often seems the reality is that they've probably just acquired more lobbyist friends and more incentive to stay in office no matter what. Sure, they may be corrupt and incompetent, but they've got so much influence!
The joys of the "first past the post" election system. Take your choice of a shit sandwich, or a shit sandwich with pickles. Heaven forbid we actually update our voting system to break up the inevitable 2-party outcome.
Heaven might not forbid, but the two ruling parties certainly do. Breaking out of the status quo would crush their cartel, end their monopoly. They don't want to do that. The cycle continues.