The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, Court obliterates the Fourth Amendment. From Andrew Napolitano at antiwar.com:
“We may even cheer on those who ask us to … forfeit our personal freedoms. Of course, this is no new story. Even the ancients warned that democracies can degenerate toward autocracy in the face of fear. … And rule by indefinite emergency edict risks leaving all of us with a shell of a democracy and civil liberties just as hollow.” ~ Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, May 18, 2023
In response to President Richard Nixon’s unlawful use of the FBI and the CIA to spy on his domestic political opponents in the early 1970s, Congress enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It limits all domestic surveillance not for law enforcement purposes to the procedures set forth in the act.
Thus, if federal agents suspect you are a drug dealer and have probable cause of crime to present to a judge, the judge may sign a search warrant enabling the feds to listen to your conversations and monitor your text messages and emails. That’s ordinary law enforcement, and that’s pursuant to the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.
But if the feds don’t know who you are, but know that you live in a community that has folks who think differently than they do about national security, they can go to the FISA Court and present probable cause – not of crime but of a likelihood of someone communicating with foreign persons – and that court, which grants 99.96% of all requested search warrants, will issue the same search warrant authorizing the same level of government scrutiny as if the feds were looking for evidence of a crime.
