FISA Everything You Need To Know

Call me stupid, but I fail to see the link between telecoms being excused for helping the feds spy and being searched as the passenger of a vehicle driven by a “suspect.”

The feds have had this access to the telecom records for a few years. I suppose they are also covering up all the prosecutions for littering, loitering, possession, etc., that have resulted from it?

Chill out: they don’t have the manpower to infringe on the privacy of your average law-bending citizen.

If you don’t believe that they are only using this process to crack terrorist sleeper cells, you might as well shower with a raincoat, because they probably have cameras dans la toilette.

The reasoning that if you give them A they will take B is typical mass hysteria false reasoning. I call it the transitive property of BS.

Something looks fundamentally wrong here. I don’t think telecomms require immunity. Are telecomms spying on us now too? I know AT&T wants me to buy UVerse but this is ridiculous

Lindsay, if one of your friends is the friend of a suspected terrorist, do you really want to find yourself on a list that gets you detained at the airport for questioning? For what you have no idea while your family waits outside for you to come out of customs, and for hours you don’t come? And they don’t get any answers? Then would you care?

There is nothing in that article,or the court decisions, or the FISA bill, justifying searches without probable cause, or, in most cases, warrants based on probable cause. It is now a technological fact of life that communications systems are vulnerable to eavesdropping, without wiretapping, by people who are not intended parties to the conversation, including, but not limited to our government agencies. As long as that is possible, anybody who has any real expectation of privacy is naive. Where there is no real expectation of privacy, like in your home, there is no constitutional guarantee of privacy. A search of your home, or your person, except in certain very limited circumstances, still requires a warrant or, at least, probable cause. Being a passenger in a MV does not change that. Searches are done based soley on suspicion and the results get tossed out of court (ruled inadmissable). Probable cause arises from the sum total known to an officer and can develop after a car is stopped for some very minor infraction. It can include information not admissable as evidence, such as reputation and past criminal history. Any defense lawyer who does not question the legality of a search that led to a client’s arrest is incompetent, lazy, or both. Getting young police officer to understand the difference between suspicion and probable cause is very difficult.

Ex-Cop you’re right. Conversation on the phone today is not what it once was. The single line, hard-wired phone is a relic. Now, most communications are traversing the public airwaves via cell phones and even hand-held cordless phones. Would there be a reasonable expectation of privacy if authorities intercepted radio transmissions? What if a police officer overheard criminal activity being planned on a CB radio band and those making the transmission were located? Probable cause should not be a consideration on phone communications.

As for this post being “everything” one needs to know about FISA, I think not. One can assess the argument partially by the character of those making it. It does not bolster the objective discussion of Fourth Amendment rights to trot out Daniel Ellsberg as exemplar. Mr. Ellsberg is a radical snitch who not only betrayed his own liberal political allies, broke laws concerning national security, and continues today encouraging others to violate the law by revealing classified information to the NY Times, but he is an unabashed icon of the radical left. His views of the U.S. Constitution would interest me more if he put as much faith in the average cop about the Fourth Amendment as he does in the likes of Howell Raines and Jason Blair at the Times regarding the First Amendment.

Further, let’s not be so callow as to believe opponents of this overhaul are entirely pure in their motives. The immunity from lawsuits granted to telecom companies that acted in good faith under governmental direction is a central point of contention. The currently pending lawsuits in that regard would make a large number of trial lawyers very rich.

It is tempting to trash the Bush administration for FISA, but one must pragmatically look at the compromise hammered out in the House by Liberals, not Conservatives. We simply cannot afford to live smugly in a world of hypothetical ideals. We must survive in the world that is. The real world is one of well-considered trade offs and tough decisions. It’s a world where shadowy surrogates of a radical state might plan a nuclear attack and carry out tactical operations on disposable cell phones. This bill is going to pass.

Bush signed the bill today and it became law. It does not endorse illegal (warrantless) wiretapping, which is specific to one telephone number and allows the wiretapper to hear both sides of a conversation. Back in the day, wiretapping required making an actual metal to metal contact with your telephone line. For many years now any calls that go much outside your local area are broadcast, with hundreds of others, on radio-type transmitters, digitally encripted. At the recieving end, they are decoded and put on hard wire lines to the place you are calling. What this bill authorizes, without fear of privacy lawsuits, is the reception of thousands of digitally encoded telephone calls for computer analysis. When the computer discovers patterns, such as numerous calls from a particluar local phone exchange in the US to a phone number of interest outside the US, especially to numbers know to be used by terrorist groups, that activity is brought to the attention of investigators who then may apply for warrants to actually listen to the conversations. It is an excellent use of modern technology that does not result in FBI agents listening to conversations about sales at Bloomingdales, or other protected private conversation. Local hard wire calls are not broadcast or monitored in any way without court ordered warrants. Cell phones & cordless home phones are, in fact radio tranmitter/recievers and are easily monitored by anyone with the right equipment.