President Obama's Parting Shot at Personal Freedom - Reason.com - Andrew Napolitano:
January 19, 2017 - "On Jan. 3, outgoing Attorney General Loretta Lynch secretly signed an order directing the National Security Agency — America's 60,000-person-strong domestic spying apparatus — to make available raw spying data to all other federal intelligence agencies, which then can pass it on to their counterparts in foreign countries and in the 50 states.... Yet in doing this, she violated basic constitutional principles that were erected centuries ago to prevent just what she did.
"Here is the back story.
"In the aftermath of former President Richard Nixon's abusive utilization of the FBI and CIA to spy on his domestic political opponents in the 1960s and '70s ... Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which created a secret court that was charged with being the sole authority in America that can authorize domestic spying.... The standard for a FISA court authorization was that the subject of the spying needed to be a foreign person in the United States who was an agent of a foreign power....
"The Patriot Act permitted FBI agents to write their own search warrants for business records (including medical, legal, postal and banking records), and amendments to FISA itself changed the wording from probable cause 'of foreign agency' to probable cause of being 'a foreign person' to all Americans who may 'communicate with a foreign person.'
"The recent USA Freedom Act permits the NSA to ask the FISA court for a search warrant for any person — named or unnamed — based on the standard of 'governmental need.' One FISA court-issued warrant I saw authorized the surveillance of all 115 million domestic customers of Verizon.... The NSA can use data from your cellphone to learn where you are, and it can utilize your cellphone as a listening device to hear your in-person conversations, even if you have turned it off....
"Notwithstanding all of the above gross violations of personal liberty and constitutional norms, the NSA traditionally kept its data ... to itself. So if an agency such as the FBI or the DEA or the New Jersey State Police, for example, wanted any of the data acquired by the NSA for law enforcement purposes, it needed to get a search warrant from a federal judge based on the constitutional standard of 'probable cause of crime.'
"Until now. Now, because of the Lynch secret order, revealed by The New York Times late last week, the NSA may share any of its data with any other intelligence agency or law enforcement agency that has an intelligence arm based on ... the non-standard of governmental need.....
"Obama, in the death throes of his time in the White House, has delivered perhaps his harshest blow to constitutional freedom by permitting his attorney general to circumvent the Fourth Amendment, thereby enabling people in law enforcement to get whatever they want about whomever they wish without a showing of probable cause of crime as the Fourth Amendment requires. That amendment expressly forbids the use of general warrants — search where you wish and seize what you find — and they had never been a lawful tool of [American] law enforcement until Lynch's order."
Read more: http://reason.com/archives/2017/01/19/a-parting-shot-at-personal-freedom
'via Blog this'
January 19, 2017 - "On Jan. 3, outgoing Attorney General Loretta Lynch secretly signed an order directing the National Security Agency — America's 60,000-person-strong domestic spying apparatus — to make available raw spying data to all other federal intelligence agencies, which then can pass it on to their counterparts in foreign countries and in the 50 states.... Yet in doing this, she violated basic constitutional principles that were erected centuries ago to prevent just what she did.
"Here is the back story.
"In the aftermath of former President Richard Nixon's abusive utilization of the FBI and CIA to spy on his domestic political opponents in the 1960s and '70s ... Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which created a secret court that was charged with being the sole authority in America that can authorize domestic spying.... The standard for a FISA court authorization was that the subject of the spying needed to be a foreign person in the United States who was an agent of a foreign power....
"The Patriot Act permitted FBI agents to write their own search warrants for business records (including medical, legal, postal and banking records), and amendments to FISA itself changed the wording from probable cause 'of foreign agency' to probable cause of being 'a foreign person' to all Americans who may 'communicate with a foreign person.'
"The recent USA Freedom Act permits the NSA to ask the FISA court for a search warrant for any person — named or unnamed — based on the standard of 'governmental need.' One FISA court-issued warrant I saw authorized the surveillance of all 115 million domestic customers of Verizon.... The NSA can use data from your cellphone to learn where you are, and it can utilize your cellphone as a listening device to hear your in-person conversations, even if you have turned it off....
"Notwithstanding all of the above gross violations of personal liberty and constitutional norms, the NSA traditionally kept its data ... to itself. So if an agency such as the FBI or the DEA or the New Jersey State Police, for example, wanted any of the data acquired by the NSA for law enforcement purposes, it needed to get a search warrant from a federal judge based on the constitutional standard of 'probable cause of crime.'
"Until now. Now, because of the Lynch secret order, revealed by The New York Times late last week, the NSA may share any of its data with any other intelligence agency or law enforcement agency that has an intelligence arm based on ... the non-standard of governmental need.....
"Obama, in the death throes of his time in the White House, has delivered perhaps his harshest blow to constitutional freedom by permitting his attorney general to circumvent the Fourth Amendment, thereby enabling people in law enforcement to get whatever they want about whomever they wish without a showing of probable cause of crime as the Fourth Amendment requires. That amendment expressly forbids the use of general warrants — search where you wish and seize what you find — and they had never been a lawful tool of [American] law enforcement until Lynch's order."
Read more: http://reason.com/archives/2017/01/19/a-parting-shot-at-personal-freedom
'via Blog this'
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