[mtgx]

> "It can begin surveillance a week before making the request to the secret court, and the surveillance can continue during the appeals process if, in a rare case, the spy court rejects the surveillance application."

How can this be constitutional? Doesn't the 4th amendment say you need probable cause before spying/searching on someone? I've also read that the NSA is spying on some, and then gives the info to the FBI, "which now has probable cause". It seems to me they are doing nothing more and nothing less than fishing expeditions, which are illegal/unconstitutional. I really hope someone manages to bring the Patriot Act and FISA to the Supreme Court this time around.

Also, I seriously believe US needs a Constitutional Court to look at all passed bills by Congress, before they become laws. Congress doesn't seem to care about the Constitution anymore and just passes stuff to make all sorts of things "legal", and could be a decade or two before they even arrive at the Supreme Court, especially with the president trying to fight them at every turn, and with all sorts of gag orders and whatnot - rules they are making to prevent you from even suing them over it. This is becoming increasingly more common with the worst of the worst laws.

I know there are some arguments against Constitutional Courts, but they are working quite well in Europe, and if they have a secret FISA Court that rubber stamps all the spying anyway, how much more damage could a Constitutional Court (that would be public, obviously) do? And of course, the laws could still arrive at the Supreme Court later, and judges would still have to verify their constitutionality in trials, just like today.

At least Americans would have an extra check on their governments from passing all sorts of crazy laws, thinking they get away with it, and might even leave office by the time it arrives at the Supreme Court, and passing these laws days before Christmas. At least it would stop the majority of crazy laws being passed by Congress.

The system you have now is simply not good enough anymore. Not when Congress and the president are breaking their oath to the Constitution on a daily basis.

[asperous]

One of the biggest criticisms of democracy is that it would be too slow of a process, when, for example someone runs a plain into a business building and kills lots of people.

So the founders of America created something called setting the country into a "state of emergency" which grants certain rights and privileges not normally legal. They didn't think that the government would be so power hungry that they'd just leave this feature permanently on.

They were wrong.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/09/11/messag...

[mpyne]

The founders of America did no such thing. You should go read the Constitution yourself to verify, but I only know of the state of insurrection/rebellion or domestic attack as being mentioned explicitly by the Framers, and that was only in the context of suspension of habeus corpus.

If you look at the link you posted you'll see that the verbiage about "national emergency" was designed and implemented by Congress as law, not as part of the Constitution itself.

[saraid216]

> which grants certain rights and privileges not normally legal

Please enumerate the actual rights and privileges not normally legal.

[saraid216]

> Doesn't the 4th amendment say you need probable cause before spying/searching on someone?

Nope.

That's a valid interpretation, but that's not what it says. To directly quote Wikipedia (yeah, I know; IANAL): "the Court ruled in Dumbra v. United States, 268 U.S. 435 (1925), that the term probable cause means "less than evidence that would justify condemnation," reiterating Carroll's assertion that it merely requires that the facts available to the officer would "warrant a man of reasonable caution" in the belief that specific items may be contraband or stolen property or useful as evidence of a crime".

Your problem, really, is that you disagree with the government on what a "man of reasonable caution" would do.

[pja]

You only need probable cause for US citizens IIRC. Anyone else is fair game as far as the NSA is concerned.

The twist here is that the NSA gets to trawl through the data looking for interesting stuff (to them) on a pinky promise to a judge (in a court that has never said no) that they won't target US citizens. Given that the US government has stated that a 51% chance that the target is not a US citizen is sufficient to meet this requirement (!), it sounds to me as if the NSA gets to target whoever they like (because taking a huge pile of data and processing it with automated algorithms is not 'collecting' it according to the State doublespeak) and if they happen to wind up targeting some US citizens, well they can always claim in court (should it ever come to that, which it won't) that they thought there was a 51%+ chance that they were dealing with non-US individuals. How would you ever challenge that?

[jfoutz]

The other part of that is context. The NSA can't come into your house and read your mail for a week. On the other hand, people let google read all of their email to sell ads.

I think there's the idea of a spectrum of intrusion. Looking in windows of a car is a search, but that stuff is already in plain view. Is that unreasonable? We all know email is plain text and the sender does not control routing. It's more like a postcard than a letter to begin with.

That said, I'm a weeks worth of surveillance without a warrant is horrifying.

[aceofspades19]

Just curious, is there anywhere in the constitution that it says it only applies to US citizens?