(H/T L'Enfant de la Haute Mer.)
Sunday, June 23, 2013
Five Years
(H/T L'Enfant de la Haute Mer.)
4 comments:
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But they had warrants. The FISA law was amended in 2007 to permit the FISA court to issue blanket warrants (that is, orders to get access to a wide swath of data without requiring a different warrant per individual). So the FISA court apparently authorized the NSA to do just that, as the leaked Verizon order says.
ReplyDelete'noz, IMHO (and I know I'm not a lawyer, let alone a constitutional scholar), that amendment of the FISA law is a willful breach of at least the spirit of the Fourth Amendment. When the latter was framed, there was no ambiguity about what "no warrants shall issue..." meant... and the FISA law is not compliant with it. The question then becomes this: on what basis does the FISC have the authority to override effectively original text from the Constitution? were any of the well-defined procedures for amending the Constitution followed in implementing the FISA law? and if not, how does FISA prevail over the Fourth Amendment?
DeleteBack-door amendments to the Constitution are not merely not on solid legal ground... one could argue that many precedents over the decades and centuries had the effect of amending the Constitution... they are, in this case more than most, a bad idea on their face. The age-old question, "who gets the cream?" has been answered by the cat, and the answer is "the cat." Anyone who cohabits with cats knows that simply doesn't work.
on what basis does the FISC have the authority to override effectively original text from the Constitution?
Deleteit doesn't have any official authority to do that. In fact, on paper, it can't. But because of the Supreme Court ruling earlier this year, there is no practical measure for holding the FISC to the constitution. If it authorizes blatantly unconstitutional surveillance, no one has the power to bring the lawsuit to stop it.
Actually, what I'm hoping is that the FISC rules that it can take away the firearms from some non-middle easterner. I bet if that happens, Scalia and Alito will suddenly discover an avenue for citizens to get constitutional review of their actions.
The sad thing is how the O-bots have all gathered ranks 'round Obama and defended the indefensible. On Twitter probably half the liberal Twittersphere is carrying the O-water. Sigh... if Obama sacrificed babies in the Rose Garden and ate their still-beating hearts, the O-bots would defend it as necessary to prevent the coming of the Apocalypse. Or somethin'. Sigh.
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