Remember the FISA court, the one that rules on surveillance warrants for people suspected of being foreign agents? Back in 2005, there was a major controversy over this court because the Bush Administration decided that getting a warrant was too onerous, so they went ahead and did domestic wiretapping without warrants. Well, it turns out that, last year, the FISA court approved all of the 1,506 warrants brought before it. In 2009, they were far more stringent — they rejected 2 of the 1,329 warrants they reviewed.
And, do you remember National Security Letters? Those are the subpoenas that the FBI can issue without court oversight, to get phone records and email addresses. They used to come with a gag order so anyone getting one couldn’t even speak about it. Well, the gag order was ruled unconstitutional, but the Letters are still with us. The FBI issued 24,287 of them last year, affecting 14,212 people. Thats more than twice the number of people affected than in 2009.
I would love to find out how many of the wiretaps and National Security Letters issued last year targeted legitimate espionage or terrorism subjects, and how many were just regular old criminal suspects. Barring some sort of Wikileak, I doubt we’ll ever know the answer to that question.
Ash Can
Or people that law enforcement folks just didn’t like.
Aye, there’s the rub. Without wiretapping, Raj Rajaratnam and his 25-or-so cohorts don’t get caught or convicted. And if mine is the first black family to occupy the White House, I gotta think I’m pretty well down with ways to monitor threats against them more thoroughly. But a system is only as morally clean as the people who run it, and we all know how much we can trust politician types, especially those of the nefarious/batshit-crazy coalition known as the GOP.
This is one time I’m sympathetic to one of the points the resident purity trolls are always screaming as they run through here with their hair on fire: As much as I may trust Barack Obama to do the right thing by the system he’s working within, our fellow citizens have that distressing tendency to, ahem, vote against their own self-interest on occasion. It’s not pretty to have any of today’s Republicans calling the shots in this FISA Etc. era.
PeakVT
Somewhat related: Bin Laden was more involved in recent al-Qaeda operations than previously suspected.
sphouch
With regard to the FISA courts, it’s not exactly a surprise that they rubber stamp the warrant requests – by law, the Court may not make a decision with regard to the substance of the warrant request; only whether or not there were any procedural regularities. In other words, so long as there are no typos, the Court is obliged to grant the warrant.
rea
It is very rare even in the ordinary criminal law context for a judge to deny a warrant request, because a competent prosecutor doesn’t make a warrant request until he can meet the legal standard for getting a warrant.
The FISA figures are what you would expect from the system functioning properly. What would be a matter of concern is if a whole bunch of warrant requests were being rejected–that would tend to show that the prosecutors are trying to get the court to let them circumvent the law.
Chris
The bullshit part of that was that FISA warrants were issued retroactively – that is, the NSA could wiretap anyone they wanted to for 72 hours before a warrant was required.
The idea that this crap was “onerous” is a joke.
cleek
@Ash Can:
sure, but i doubt there were any FISA warrants or NSL’s used on Rajaratnam. he is neither a foreign person nor a terrorism suspect, AFAIK.
Chris
@Ash Can:
Funny: I used the exact same argument a couple years ago on a Republican friend that I was trying to persuade that unchecked authority of this kind was bad. “You may think Bush was an honorable man who wouldn’t abuse his authority, but now Obama’s going to have the same power at his fingertips and there’s no one to stop him. How do you feel about that?”
Corner Stone
@PeakVT:
Those journals are like me writing in My Little Pony Diary, “Tomorrow I’m going to ask Salma Hayek out for dinner!”
They are anonymously leaking little drabs to draw this out a bit further. IMO, analysis a few months or so from now will show how isolated OBL really was.
Geeno
@Chris: I had the same argument with my brother back in 2005. “Do you really want a President Hilary Clinton to have these powers?” But that was back in the day of the permanent GOP majority, so he just laughed it off.
Chris
@Geeno:
Gooper ethic in a nutshell. Yes, we think we’re entitled to absolute power, and the reason that’s okay is because no one else is ever going to have it. What? They do? No! It’s not fair!
sparky
interesting that the only remarks here concern which party has control of the State apparatus, not whether such National Security State geegaws are substantively a good idea or even “constitutional” in what purport(ed) to be a free quasi-republic.
and while i agree with MM it would be a good idea to see these documents, based on his performance Obama is even less likely to release them than Bush was.
conceding these powers to anyone destroys any right to be free in the name of “safety”. if you complain about the drug laws/tactics, look in the mirror for the face of the police state.