WHAT HAPPENED TO US?
I am asking because I am probably just to the left of center, politically, but I am aware that I am extremely more left leaning than some of the others who post here.
The abuses of our constitutional rights have been so extreme in this era, and the response to it by our representatives in congress, so accomodating, the existing provisions of FISA law, first passed in 1978, and "modernized" at least 50 times in the last 30 years, have started to look reasonable to me.
Keeping the terms of the present FISA laws, sans the revisions of last summer which have expired, and without the addition of the president's push for telecom immunity, seemed to be the most we could hope for.
Supporting this, 30 years ago, was a right leaning postion. Since I am just as resolute in defending my rights against elected leaders' attempts to infringe and reduce them, reading the following gave me pause.
We have sunk very low, and conceded very much. What was "to the right", in 1978, advocacy for the FISA laws, as they were passed then, is considered "extreme left" today.
Is your advocacy for even more transfer of unchecked/unbalanced power to the president (the state) than what the FISA law already cedes to him, symptomatic of your neo-fascist bent, politically?
Why wouldn't it be considered that? Why would many of us, and our congress move so alarmingly far to the right, in just 30 years? Is it due to fear and manipulation?
One senator, Russ Feingold, voted agains the Patriot Acts in Sept., 2001? Is he the sole "left" representation in the senate?
What does this all say about the attraction for Obama's "unity" message? "United" to do what....descend into neo-fascism? Wouldn't "unity" consist of bringing together the "near" left and "near" right? It appears we are already "unified", very, very, far to the right.....
.....or, do the right and left principles actually move? If say, we devolved to a point where only one right of the bill of rights remained, would an unwavering position in favor of restoring just one other right to the list, be an "extreme left" position? Why wouldn't supporting the idea that preservation of all the rights in the bill, unaltered, is the only acceptable status quo, be now and always a moderate, neither right nor left leaning position to hold?
Quote:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwa...isa/index.html
Glenn Greenwald
Sunday March 2, 2008 08:10 EST
The "liberal" position on the Surveillance State
....The FISA court was long the symbol of how severe are the incursions we've allowed into basic civil liberties and open government.
The FISC is a classically Kafka-esque court that operates in total secrecy. Only the Government, and nobody else, is permitted to attend, participate, and make arguments. Only the Government is permitted to access or know about the decisions issued by that court. Rather than the judges being assigned randomly and therefore fairly, they are hand-picked by the Chief Justice (who has been a GOP-appointee since FISA was enacted) and are uniformly the types of judges who evince great deference to the Government. As a result, the FISA court has been notorious for decades for mindlessly rubber-stamping every single Government request to eavesdrop on whomever they want. Just look at this chart (h/t Arthur Silber) for the full, absurd picture.
Yet now, embracing this secret, one-sided, slavishly pro-government court defines the outermost liberal or "pro-civil-liberty" view permitted in our public discourse. And indeed, as reports of imminent (and entirely predictable) House Democratic capitulation on the FISA bill emerge, the FISA court is now actually deemed by the establishment to be too far to the Left -- too much of a restraint on our increasingly omnipotent surveillance state. Anyone who believes that we should at the very least have those extremely minimal -- really just symbolic -- limitations on our Government's ability to spy on us in secret is now a far Leftist.....
...Back then, the premise that unchecked presidential spying would lead to massive abuses -- as it did for decades -- was just a given, something beyond the realm of what could be reasonably debated. Now, only far Left partisans worry about such silly things.
Even back then, of course, there were the hysterical fear-mongerers who argued that we would all be subjugated and slaughtered by (The Terrorists)The Communists if we imposed oversight on presidential spying, but -- unlike today, when that mentality dominates our political establishment -- it was, back then, a small and irrelevant fringe. From an April 17, 1978 Associated Press report:
...
....Back then -- with a relentless, ideologically extreme Evil Empire threatening our very existence and our freedoms -- GOP fear-mongering was brushed aside. The political establishment overwhelmingly concluded that warrantless eavesdropping presented intolerable dangers, and many believed that FISA's "safeguards" were actually woefully inadequate. Telecoms lobbied on behalf of their customers' privacy rights and against being drawn into government surveillance. Editorial boards were almost unanimously on the side of greater oversight on presidential spying.
That all seems so quaint. The mindset which back then defined the radical, pro-surveillance right-wing fringe has now become the sweet spot of our political establishment. The GOP fear-mongering that back then was laughed away today dominates our discourse and shapes our laws. The secret FISA court which back then was viewed even by some conservatives as an extreme threat to civil liberties is now the outermost liberal viewpoint, one that is about to be ejected altogether by the Democratic Congress from the mainstream spectrum. The political establishment today knows only one viewpoint: literally no limits are tolerable on the power of the loving, protective Surveillance State.
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Quote:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/...,3760112.story
The invasion of America
Creeping intrusions against our privacy rights are an assault on the Constitution.
By Andrew P. Napolitano
February 18, 2008
.....The FISA statute itself significantly -- and, in my opinion, unconstitutionally -- lowered the 4th Amendment bar from probable cause of "crime"to probable cause of "status." However, in order to protect the 4th Amendment rights of the targets of spying, the statute erected a so-called wall between gathering evidence and using evidence. The government cannot constitutionally prosecute someone unless it has evidence against him that was obtained pursuant to probable cause of a crime, a standard not met by a FISA warrant.
Congress changed all that. The Patriot Act passed after 9/11 and its later version not only destroyed the wall between investigation and prosecution,they mandated that investigators who obtained evidence of criminal activity pursuant to FISA warrants share that evidence with prosecutors. They also instructed federal judges that the evidence thus shared is admissible under the Constitution against a defendant in a criminal case. Congress forgot that it cannot tell federal judges what evidence is admissible because judges, not politicians, decide what a jury hears.
Then the Bush administration and Congress went even further. The administration wanted, and Congress has begrudgingly given it, the authority to conduct electronic surveillance of foreigners and Americans without even a FISA warrant -- without any warrant whatsoever. The so-called Protect America Act of 2007, which expired at the end of last week, gave the government carte blanche to spy on foreign persons outside the U.S., even if Americans in the United States with whom they may be communicating are spied on -- illegally -- in the process. Director of National Intelligence J. Michael McConnell told the House Judiciary Committee last year that hundreds of unsuspecting Americans' conversations and e-mails are spied on annually as a consequence of the warrantless surveillance of foreigners outside the United States.
So where does all this leave us? Even though, since 1978, the government has gotten more than 99% of its FISA applications approved, the administration wants to do away with FISA altogether if at least one of the people whose conversations or e-mails it wishes to monitor is not in the U.S. and is not an American.
Those who believe the Constitution means what it says should tremble at every effort to weaken any of its protections. The Constitution protects all "persons" and all "people" implicated by government behavior. So the government should be required, as it was until FISA, to obtain a 4th Amendment warrant to conduct surveillance of anyone, American or not, in the U.S. or not.
If we lower constitutional protections for foreigners and their American correspondents, for whom will we lower them next?
--Andrew P. Napolitano (former New Jersey Superior Court judge), FOX News
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