Tag Archives: Patriot Act

Litmus Test: Will Patriot Act Spying Continue? by Justin Raimondo

Posted on May 18, 2015 | 1 comment

The Patriot Act expires on June 1. Mr. Raimondo said it well: “The battle lines tell us everything we need to know about the state of the country and the prospects for liberty.” From Raimondo at antiwar.com:

With key provisions of the so-called Patriot Act set to expire on June 1, the fight to preserve the Constitution is heating up – and the battle lines tell us everything we need to know about the state of the country and the prospects for liberty.

On one side we have a grand alliance of authoritarians of the right and the left – the Know-Nothing wing of the Republican party and their neoconservative brain trust, the Obama administration, and present and former government officials with a financial interest in the Surveillance State. All these disparate elements are united around the alleged necessity of spying on innocent Americans without a warrant – a practice we once fought a revolution in order to end. Whatever their ideological differences, the Big Brother faction of the American polity can get behind the recent statement of Sen. Richard Burr (R-North Carolina), head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who gave voice to the Washington mindset on this and every other issue under the sun:

“I think it’s clear to say that the program as designed is effective. Members [of Congress] are reluctant to change things that are effective just because of public opinion. And we’ve got a program that’s never had one breach of personal privacy.”

Public opinion? Who cares? Our Washington patricians don’t even care what the courts think: a recent appellate court decision declared the entire bulk domestic surveillance program illegal. Not that this counts in Burr-World, which is right next door to Bizarro World. In that alternate universe, a provision that enables the government to collect all the communications of each and every American citizen without an individual warrant isn’t a breach of personal privacy.

Writing in 1950, Garet Garrett, conservative Cassandra and onetime editorial writer for the Saturday Evening Post, couldn’t have imagined Sen. Marco Rubio when he described the propaganda of the national security state as “a complex of vaunting and fear,” but surely his phraseology prefigured Rubio’s comments on the Senate floor the other day:

“If there were another attack, ‘the first question out of everyone’s mouth is going to be, ‘why didn’t we know about it?’ And the answer better not be, ‘because this Congress failed to authorize a program that might have helped us know about it.’”

His Senate colleague and fellow presidential aspirant Lindsey Graham chimed in, averring:

“I’m open-minded to doing reforms. I just don’t want to diminish the capacity of the program to prevent another 9/11. I believe if the program were in operation before 9/11, we probably would have prevented 9/11.”

Graham and Rubio are pretending not to know that law enforcement and counter-terrorism officials had plenty of clues pointing to the existence of the 9/11 plotters, including two messages intercepted by the National Security Agency the day before: “Tomorrow is zero hour” and “The match begins tomorrow,” both coming from known terrorist sources.

The problem isn’t that the government has too little information – it’s that they have too much, and don’t know what to do with the information they have. The problem, in short, is incompetence. I mean, how many different ways can you interpret a terrorist declaring “Tomorrow is zero hour?” But in fact these messages didn’t even get translated until months after they were received – long after the World Trade Center was turned into a smoking ruin.

The American people overwhelmingly oppose government snooping on their private communications: that’s why a phony “reform” bill was just passed by the House of Representatives, which would permit domestic surveillance to continue unhampered. Naturally they named it the “USA Freedom Act,” in an unintended tribute to George Orwell. Most of the votes against it were on the grounds that it served merely to mask the same abuses the public opposes.

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2015/05/17/litmus-test-will-patriot-act-spying-continue/

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Law, Other Views, Surveillance

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He Said That? 5/8/15

Posted on May 8, 2015 | 1 comment

Yesterday, a three judge panel of the US Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the NSA’s mass collection of all Americans’ phone metadata is not authorized by Section 215 of the Patriot Act, and is therefore illegal. The ruling has limited implications, because Section 215 is scheduled to expire at the end of this month, and it is not clear if Congress will extend, modify, or allow it expire. However, Judge Gerard Lynch’s opinion had some harsh things to say about bulk collection of metadata.

The statutes to which the government points have never been interpreted to authorize anything approaching the breadth of the sweeping surveillance at issue here. The sheer volume of information sought is staggering….

The government takes the position that the metadata collected – a vast amount of which does not contain directly “relevant” information, as the government concedes – are nevertheless “relevant” because they may allow the NSA, at some unknown time in the future, utilizing its ability to sift through the trove of irrelevant data it has collected up to that point, to identify information that is relevant. We agree with appellants that such an expansive concept of “relevance” is unprecedented and warranted….

[G}overnment repositories of formerly private records would be an unprecedented contraction of the privacy expectations of all Americans….

The records demanded are not those of suspects under investigation, or of people or businesses that have contact with such subjects, or of people or businesses that have contact with others who are in contact with the subjects – they extend to every record that exists, and indeed to records that do not yet exist, as they impose a continuing obligation on the recipient of the subpoena to provide such records on an ongoing basis as they are created…

It permits demands for documents “relevant to an authorized investigation.” The government has not attempted to identify to what particular “authorized investigation” the bulk metadata of virtually all Americans’ phone calls are relevant….

A call to a single-purpose telephone number such as a “hotline” might reveal that an individual is: a victim of domestic violence or rape; a veteran; suffering from an addiction of one type or another; contemplating suicide; or reporting a crime. Metadata can reveal civil, political, or religious affiliations; they can also reveal an individual’s social status, or whether and when she is involved in intimate relationships.

Full Ruling (97 pages, pdf)

Congress is currently tussling over what to do about Section 215. They are considering another bill, the USA Freedom Act,which would renew some expiring sections of the Patriot Act, but end the NSA’s bulk collection of phone records. Stay tuned.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Law, Surveillance

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USA FREEDOM Act: Just Another Word for Lost Liberty, by Ron Paul

Posted on May 4, 2015 | 1 comment

The Patriot Act expires at the end of this month, and its supporters are pushing the USA Freedom Act, which extends existing surveillance laws and leaves the government’s mass surveillance powers intact. From Ron Paul, on a guest post from theburningplatform.com:

Apologists for the National Security Agency (NSA) point to the arrest of David Coleman Headley as an example of how warrantless mass surveillance is necessary to catch terrorists. Headley played a major role in the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack that killed 166 people.

While few would argue that bringing someone like Headley to justice is not a good thing, Headley’s case in no way justifies mass surveillance. For one thing, there is no “terrorist” exception in the Fourth Amendment. Saying a good end (capturing terrorists) justifies a bad means (mass surveillance) gives the government a blank check to violate our liberties.

Even if the Headley case somehow justified overturning the Fourth Amendment, it still would not justify mass surveillance and bulk data collection. This is because, according to an investigation by ProPublica, NSA surveillance played an insignificant role in catching Headley. One former counter-terrorism official said when he heard that NSA surveillance was responsible for Headley’s capture he “was trying to figure out how NSA played a role.”

The Headley case is not the only evidence that the PATRIOT Act and other post-9/11 sacrifices of our liberty have not increased our security. For example, the NSA’s claim that its surveillance programs thwarted 54 terrorist attacks has been widely discredited. Even the president’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies found that mass surveillance and bulk data collection was “not essential to preventing attacks.”

According to the congressional Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001 and the 9/11 Commission, the powers granted the NSA by the PATRIOT Act would not have prevented the 9/11 attacks. Many intelligence experts have pointed out that, by increasing the size of the haystack government agencies must look through, mass surveillance makes it harder to find the needle of legitimate threats.

Even though mass surveillance threatens our liberty, violates the Constitution, and does nothing to protect us from terrorism, many in Congress still cling to the fiction that the only way to ensure security is to give the government virtually unlimited spying powers. These supporters of the surveillance state are desperate to extend the provisions of the PATRIOT Act that are set to expire at the end of the month. They are particularly eager to preserve Section 215, which authorizes many of the most egregious violations of our liberties, including the NSA’s “metadata” program.

However, Edward Snowden’s revelations have galvanized opposition to the NSA’s ongoing violations of our liberties. This is why Congress will soon vote on the USA FREEDOM Act. This bill extends the expiring surveillance laws. It also contains some “reforms” that supposedly address all the legitimate concerns regarding mass surveillance.

However, a look at the USA FREEDOM Act’s details, as opposed to the press releases of its supporters, shows that the act leaves the government’s mass surveillance powers virtually untouched.

The USA FREEDOM Act has about as much to do with freedom as the PATRIOT Act had to do with patriotism. If Congress truly wanted to protect our liberties it would pass the Surveillance State Repeal Act, which repeals the PATRIOT Act. Congress should also reverse the interventionist foreign policy that increases the risk of terrorism by fostering resentment and hatred of Americans.

Fourteen years after the PATRIOT Act was rushed into law, it is clear that sacrificing liberty does little or nothing to preserve security. Instead of trying to fool the American people with phony reforms, Congress should repeal all laws that violate the Fourth Amendment, starting with the PATRIOT Act.

http://www.theburningplatform.com/2015/05/03/usa-freedom-act-just-another-word-for-lost-liberty/

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Government, Other Views

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