The fourth amendments has been chipped away for a number of years. Supreme court rulings that any passenger in a vehicle can be searched without probable cause for example. Probable cause simply means that there is some indication that a person has violated some law. It shouldn’t mean that just because a passenger is occupying a vehicle of someone who is being investigated means that they lose their rights. Click the link for more detail in the issue.
Tomorrow, July 8th, Congress is about to vote on a FISA bill, which essentially upturns the very fundamental requirement that requires a warrant according to our constitution.
The fourth amendment:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
The bill before Congress essentially retroactively grants immunity to telecoms for the illegal wiretaps that have already occurred under direction of the executive branch. Further it enables any intelligence agency to legally bulk-wiretap American citizens without a warrant, using data-mining to listen in on millions of Internet and phone connections. The video clip below is an interview about the topic worth watching.
What Every American Needs to Know (and Do) About FISA Before Tuesday, July 8th from Tim Ferriss on Vimeo.
Congressman Chris Shays:
By Telephone:
Bridgeport 203/579-5870
Norwalk 203/866-6469
Stamford 203/357-8277
Ridgefield 203/438-5953
Shelton 203/402-0426
Washington, DC 202/225-5541
By Fax:
Bridgeport 203/579-0771
Stamford: 203/357-1050
Washington 202/225-9629
Senator Joe Lieberman
Washington, DC Office
706 Hart Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
(202) 224-4041 Voice
(202) 224-9750 Fax
Connecticut Office
One Constitution Plaza
7th Floor
Hartford, CT 06103
(860) 549-8463 Voice
(800) 225-5605 In CT
(860) 549-8478 Fax
Senator Chris Dodd
U.S. Senator Chris Dodd
448 Russell Building | Washington D.C., 20510
Tel: (202) 224-2823 | Fax: (202) 224-1083
30 Lewis St Suite 101 | Hartford, CT 06103
Tel: (860) 258-6940/(800) 334-5341 —CT only
Fax: (860) 258-6958
h/t boingboing
{ 13 comments }
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.
July 8, 2008
VIA FAX: 1-203-579-0771
1-202-224-9750
1-202-224-1083
Dear Senators Lieberman and Dodd, and Congressman Shays:
Please vote NO on H.R. 6304 and limit the ability of government agencies to obtain information about Americans without the appropriate judicial constraints. While the intelligence community needs the authority to track terrorists abroad, this can and should be done without threatening our civil liberties.
Warrantless wiretapping of Americans is unacceptable in a democracy and retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies is wrong.
Keep protecting civil liberties by opposing legislation that authorizes warrantless wiretapping of American citizens without judicial protections and grants immunity to telecommunications companies for possible illegal eavesdropping!
Thank you.
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
If the FBI wants to listen to me tell my friends about the great shoe sale at Bloomingdales, I really dont care.
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?
YES I WOULD CARE of one of my friends is a suspected terrorist!!!!!! And I would expect to be questioned (even at my inconvenience) by people who are doing their jobs to protect the public from terrorist attacks!
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.
The Bush administration has had a pretty cavalier attitude about human rights all along, so why should they feel any different about the Constitution?
I don’t consider myself overly paranoid, but the many layers of protection Americans have enjoyed for decades have decomposed faster than the porch at 93 East Ave.
Thanks for listing the phone numbers TG…..hopefully folks will use them.
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.
If you go back and look at Nixon’s Watergate, one of the reasons for his near impeachment/resignation was illegal wiretapping. That’s why the Bush administration had to make it legal to wiretap when they got caught. If the American Congress had been smart, they would have gone for impeachment years ago – the precedent had already been set back in the 1970’s. You can’t violate the constitutional rights of the American people – especially when you are the President of the United States, sworn to protect those rights.
So if you don’t want to trash the Bush administration, I guess you thank Mr. Nixon, since he may have started it – or at least publicly given Bush the idea, or in some way made it more acceptable since we’ve heard it all before and everyone does it.
update
The bill would shield these firms from potentially billions of dollars in damages from privacy lawsuits and implement the biggest overhaul of U.S. spy laws in three decades.
On a vote of 69-28, the Senate approved the measure, previously passed by the House of Representatives, and prepared to send the legislation to Bush to sign into law.
With Bush’s term set to end in January, the vote marked perhaps one his final major triumphs on Capitol Hill and drew a firestorm of criticism from civil liberties groups.
The measure would replace a temporary spy law that expired in February and modernize the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, to keep pace with changing technology.
It would also bolster judicial and congressional oversight of U.S. surveillance of foreign targets and increase protection of civil liberties of law-abiding Americans swept up in such spy efforts — but not as much as critics charge is needed.
The bill authorizes U.S. intelligence agencies to eavesdrop, without court approval, on foreign targets believed to be outside the United States.
Critics complain this allows warrantless surveillance of the phone calls and e-mails of Americans who communicate with them. The bill seeks to minimize such eavesdropping on Americans, but foes say the safeguards are inadequate.
“The bill will keep us safe and protect our liberties,” said U.S. Sen. Christopher Bond, a Missouri Republican and a lead sponsor of the bipartisan compromise measure.
“This bill is not a compromise. It is a capitulation,” complained Sen. Russ Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat.
Again, behold the source, Russ Feingold, paragon of First Amendment protection by dint of the infamous McCain-Feingold travesty on campaign financing. No political speech for common citizens within the specified time frame preceding an election. It’s the “Incumbency Protection Act”.
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.
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