JimBowie1958
Old Fogey
- Sep 25, 2011
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- #41
And the only way to do this is through a totally secretive fake "court", more suited to East Germany than the USA that you and I grew up in.A cancerous tumor can be removed from the body, but we have to have some kind of control over who gets surveilled and for what reason. If you can't see that then I don't know what to tell you. To think that the FISA Court system can be done away with without anything else to takeover their function is nonsense.
Fuck my life....The republic is dead.
So make it less secretive. Change the process, obviously we cannot trust the FBI, DOJ, or any of the other federal agencies to protect our civil rights, so we could create a separate and distinct group to do that; whose job it would be present the reasons why a FISA application should not be granted or at least investigated/reviewed. Or granted but with stipulations or restrictions as appropriate. That separate group would report to Congress on a regular basis but with immediate access to the appropriate committees. And toughen up the laws, if you lie or misrepresent information to the Court then your happy ass goes to prison, minimum 5 years. And no requirement to prove intent either.
No question, the current process has been abused, and apparently quite often too. But there are times when a US citizen becomes involved in nefarious activities related to national security, and they should be surveilled if the circumstances warrant it. Does anyone want to suggest that such surveillance should be completed eliminated? In this day and age, doesn't that leave us even more vulnerable to attacks? I do not have numbers available, but there have been numerous cases where a terrorist attack was prevented because the FBI got a FISA warrant and obtained enough information to arrest the bad guys before anyone got hurt or killed.
Example: You don’t hear about typical FISA operations such as the one that nabbed Najibullah Zazi. According to the NSA, an email address used by an al Qaeda courier in Pakistan was targeted for interception. One intercepted message indicated that a person in the U.S. was seeking advice on how to make explosives. The FBI identified that person as Mr. Zazi and their investigation led to a terror cell of which he was a member that was planning bomb attacks on New York subways. Mr. Zazi and other members of the terrorist cell were arrested and convicted of planning the attacks.
That’s only one of the hundreds of successes under FISA that have made the law probably the most valuable tool our intelligence agencies have in the war against Islamic terrorism.
For such warrants, we need a specialized court that understands the specific laws and associated civil rights and can make the best informed decisions. This is a necessary function of gov't IMHO, either change the current FISA system so it works better or create a new system. But don't eliminate the FISA process; fix it so it isn't so easily abused AND isn't as secretive. Do they ever report to Congress? They certainly should. It won't be perfect, no system that has people involved ever is.
At the BARE MINIMUM the FISA courts need to have an internal dedicated IG who will respond to public complaints primarily, but also randomly review FISA warrants and their supporting evidence.
But how can you review for omitted exculpatory evidence or manufactured evidence?
Some people had better damned well go to jail or FISA has to be irrevocably dismantled and never recreated....lol, hah.