NSA "domestic spying" non-scandal
In the comments on another post, a Buttle's World reader asked about "Bush spying on us", and referred to this when I mentioned that the NSA is not spying on "us".
The real scandal is that the New York Times has decided to compromise national security in the interest of selling some books. As for the non-scandal, it's best summed up here.
Every court of appeals that has considered the issue has upheld an inherent presidential power to conduct warrantless foreign intelligence searches; and in 2002 the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, created by the FISA statute, accepted that "the president does have that authority" and noted "FISA could not encroach on the president's constitutional power."
posted by Craig at 07:41
4 Comments:
So, that article basically says that the president has the power to spy on suspected terrorists, without a warrant. Assuming this is correct, I would then say that America is not as free as I thought it was. Where is all that due process and assumption of innocence stuff that I was promised? Without due process (a warrant,) who is to decide whether I am a suspect or not? What recourse do I have? I find this quite sad.
Read it carefully. It is about signals intelligence on an enemy. There has never been a requirement for due process, nor the assumption of innocence, in the case of an enemy at war. It's absurd to try to apply it merely because they may be communicating with someone inside our borders.
This goes all the way back to Lincoln intercepting Confederate telegrams.
But how is a terrorist identified? Who are "they"? How is it possible to know who they are until after they have commited a terrorist act? What if you happen to have friends or family in, say, Syria, and talk on the phone with them every day? What does it take to make you suspect?
Who is the enemy? And, how do we know when we have won or lost this war? Given how fuzzy the government has been in determining all this, it's hard for me to imagine what the signals of having won the war would be. It's easier to imagine what would happen if we lost the war, as defined by the administration: we'd lose our civil liberties, for example.
At least we won the war on christmas... :)
Thinking that the NSA has an interest in ordinary phone calls is just silly. The program is, as it properly should be, directed at communications between and to already identified targets. This isn't a fishing expedition where they care about your uncle in Syria - unless your uncle is known to be a part of some terrorist organization, in which case they darn well better listen in.
Who is the enemy? I can't blame you for asking, since Washington is reticent to say it. The enemy is Jihadistan, a borderless entity of violent Islam. Modern Americans are oddly reluctant to realize and admit that we're in the middle of a religious war.
The war will be won and over when they are all either dead or (more likely) disinterested and/or impotent to mount attacks. You've very much misstated the administrations definition of losing, though. If we lose the war we don't just lose some civil liberties. We all get killed.
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