Figaro
VIP Member
- Jul 23, 2014
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This should be required reading for anyone still suffering from the delusion that either wing of the Donkephant is good for you.
While the political commentators in the nation’s capital are wrapped up in the debate over what to do about ISIS, and as one third of the Senate and nearly all members of the House campaign for re-election, the president’s spies continue to capture massive amounts of personal information about hundreds of millions of us and lie about it.
The president continues to dispatch his National Security Agency spies as if he were a law unto himself, and Congress – which is also being spied upon – has done nothing to protect the right to privacy that the Fourth Amendment was written to ensure. Congress has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution, yet it has failed miserably to do so. But the spying is now so entrenched in government that a sinister and largely unnoticed problem lurks beneath the surface.
NSA documents released by Edward Snowden show that the feds seriously deceived Congress and the courts in an effort to spy upon all of us and to use the gathered materials in criminal prosecutions, even though they told federal judges they would not. Among the more nefarious procedures the feds have engaged in is something called “parallel reconstruction.” This procedure seeks to hide the true and original source of information about a criminal defendant when it was obtained unlawfully...
The language of the Fourth Amendment is so broad and sweeping (“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated” except by a search warrant issued by a judge upon probable cause.) that for 230 years it has been held to restrain and regulate all government efforts to gather private information – no matter their purposes.
Nevertheless, the NSA’s agents and lawyers felt it necessary to concoct this groundless, disingenuous and fictional legal distinction in order to persuade the FISA court that it is legally acceptable to permit untethered spying so long as the fruits of that spying are not used in criminal prosecutions. Curiously and naively, judges of the FISA court bought that argument....
So, what happens when the spying uncovers ordinary criminal behavior unrelated to national security? In order to keep its hands clean, so to speak, the NSA sends that evidence to the DOJ, whose lawyers and agents in cahoots with the NSA then concoct an explanation as to how the DOJ came upon the evidence. Of course, that explanation curiously and carefully omits the mention of domestic spying. DOJ lawyers know that if the beginning of the process of obtaining evidence is found to be unconstitutional, then the evidence itself can be useless in court.
This is what lawyers and judges call the “fruit of the poisonous tree.” Were this not so – that is, if the government could spread any net as broad and as wide as it wished and use whatever the net caught as evidence in criminal prosecutions – then the Fourth Amendment’s search warrant requirement would be meaningless because it would not protect the right to privacy as its authors intended.
Is this the government the Framers gave us? Is this the government anyone voted for? Is this a faithful and moral commitment to the Constitution, the rule of law and personal liberty? The answers are obvious. Shame. Shame on the government at all.
While the political commentators in the nation’s capital are wrapped up in the debate over what to do about ISIS, and as one third of the Senate and nearly all members of the House campaign for re-election, the president’s spies continue to capture massive amounts of personal information about hundreds of millions of us and lie about it.
The president continues to dispatch his National Security Agency spies as if he were a law unto himself, and Congress – which is also being spied upon – has done nothing to protect the right to privacy that the Fourth Amendment was written to ensure. Congress has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution, yet it has failed miserably to do so. But the spying is now so entrenched in government that a sinister and largely unnoticed problem lurks beneath the surface.
NSA documents released by Edward Snowden show that the feds seriously deceived Congress and the courts in an effort to spy upon all of us and to use the gathered materials in criminal prosecutions, even though they told federal judges they would not. Among the more nefarious procedures the feds have engaged in is something called “parallel reconstruction.” This procedure seeks to hide the true and original source of information about a criminal defendant when it was obtained unlawfully...
The language of the Fourth Amendment is so broad and sweeping (“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated” except by a search warrant issued by a judge upon probable cause.) that for 230 years it has been held to restrain and regulate all government efforts to gather private information – no matter their purposes.
Nevertheless, the NSA’s agents and lawyers felt it necessary to concoct this groundless, disingenuous and fictional legal distinction in order to persuade the FISA court that it is legally acceptable to permit untethered spying so long as the fruits of that spying are not used in criminal prosecutions. Curiously and naively, judges of the FISA court bought that argument....
So, what happens when the spying uncovers ordinary criminal behavior unrelated to national security? In order to keep its hands clean, so to speak, the NSA sends that evidence to the DOJ, whose lawyers and agents in cahoots with the NSA then concoct an explanation as to how the DOJ came upon the evidence. Of course, that explanation curiously and carefully omits the mention of domestic spying. DOJ lawyers know that if the beginning of the process of obtaining evidence is found to be unconstitutional, then the evidence itself can be useless in court.
This is what lawyers and judges call the “fruit of the poisonous tree.” Were this not so – that is, if the government could spread any net as broad and as wide as it wished and use whatever the net caught as evidence in criminal prosecutions – then the Fourth Amendment’s search warrant requirement would be meaningless because it would not protect the right to privacy as its authors intended.
Is this the government the Framers gave us? Is this the government anyone voted for? Is this a faithful and moral commitment to the Constitution, the rule of law and personal liberty? The answers are obvious. Shame. Shame on the government at all.
"Keeping ya busy I hope? Anything neat happen yet? Well I gotta get going, I'm sure I'll see ya later, or you know, you'll see me." 
