Tag Archives: Fourth Amendment

This Is A Reminder

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This is another reminder that Section 702 needs to be unauthorized instead of approved by April 19.

On Monday, Just the News posted the following:

Conservative lawmakers are calling for an end to warrantless surveillance of Americans ahead of a House floor vote on Wednesday to reauthorize the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

The bill, titled the “Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act,” would extend section 702 of FISA, which “authorizes the targeted collection of foreign intelligence information from non-U.S. persons located abroad,” according to the FBI.

Conservative Republicans and some Democrats such as Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, have teamed up to push for a warrant requirement as a condition for reauthorizing FISA. However, the legislation up for a vote on Wednesday does not include a warrant requirement in its current form. 

“No matter how hard the deep state cries, Congress must NOT reauthorize FISA 702 without requiring a warrant to search U.S. citizens,” wrote Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, on X.

“The SAFE Act contains a warrant requirement, the Lee-Leahy reforms, language ensuring that our Fourth Amendment rights can’t be bought and sold, and a handful of other protections necessary to protect Americans’ privacy,” he also wrote.

The article concludes:

The Brennan Center for Justice and other organizations wrote a letter on April 5 urging lawmakers to vote in favor of amendments to the bill up for a vote that will require a warrant.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner, R-Ohio, a proponent of the legislation up for a vote on Wednesday, predicted the bill will pass.

“I think it will,” Turner said Sunday on CNN. “I think that those who mischaracterize this are small compared to those who understand that this goes to the heart of our ability to get intelligence. It allows us to be able to keep Americans safe. This is not a warrantless surveillance of Americans.”

Biggs argued that the bill Turner supports is “very modest, very incremental” and does not contain significant reforms to Section 702.

“Quite frankly, it’s going to be who’s watching the henhouse. It’s going to be the FBI still watching the henhouse,” he said. 

It has become obvious that the people in charge cannot be trusted with warrantless surveillance. Let’s not give them the right to do warrantless surveillance.

Regaining Our Rights Guaranteed By The Fourth Amendment

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The U.S. Constitution was not written to give Americans their rights. It was written to insure that the government respected the God-given rights of Americans. The Constitution was written to limit the rights of the government–not the rights of Americans. That concept seems to have gotten lost in recent years.

The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution states:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The government in recent years has violated that amendment by spying on Americans without cause or has invented causes (see Carter Page). Now that it has come to light that some Congressional staffers were spied on, Congress has decided to do something about it.

On Friday, Just the News reported:

House Judiciary Committee Republicans are pressing ahead with sweeping reforms to the government’s FISA surveillance powers that among other things would would prohibit the FBI from searching through Americans’ phone records without a court-approved warrant. 

The effort is on track to be wrapped up by the end of the year when several Patriot Act powers expire. Republicans and Democrats are coming together on this matter in rare bipartisan cooperation, lawmakers told Just the News.

“We’ve got, I think, strong agreement amongst members of the Intel Committee and members of the Judiciary Committee. And frankly some Democrats as well, that there needs to be stronger penalties if you abuse the system,” Judiciary Committee Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told the “Just the News, No Noise” television show in an interview aired Friday night.

Jordan said he was focused on what is known as the Section 702 system “where they can create this database” of phone communications metadata that currently can be searched by agents without a warrant. 

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court earlier this year declassified a report revealing that FBI agents had inappropriately searched Americans’ phone records more than 270,000 times over a two year period, alarming civil liberty experts and generating bipartisan condemnation.   

I hate to be cynical, but it seems that Congress is only getting around to dealing with this problem when it affected them. That’s okay. I just hope they successfully end unwarranted government spying on American citizens.

Becoming A Police State

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On Tuesday Forbes posted an article about an upcoming case in the Supreme Court.

The article reports:

The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday will hear oral argument in Caniglia v. Strom, a case that could have sweeping consequences for policing, due process, and mental health, with the Biden Administration and attorneys general from nine states urging the High Court to uphold warrantless gun confiscation. But what would ultimately become a major Fourth Amendment case began with an elderly couple’s spat over a coffee mug. 

In August 2015, 68-year-old Edward Caniglia joked to Kim, his wife of 22 years, that he didn’t use a certain coffee mug after his brother-in-law had used it because he “might catch a case of dishonesty.” That quip quickly spiraled into an hour-long argument. Growing exhausted from the bickering, Edward stormed into his bedroom, grabbed an unloaded handgun, and put it on the kitchen table in front of his wife. With a flair for the dramatic, he then asked: “Why don’t you just shoot me and get me out of my misery?”

The argument escalated and eventually Kim decided to spend the night in a motel. When she called home the next day, there was no answer. She called the local police and asked them to do a ‘wellness check’ on her husband. The police did the check and reported that all was well.

The article continues:

Still, police were convinced that Edward could hurt himself and insisted he head to a local hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. After refusing and insisting that his mental health wasn’t their business, Edward agreed only after police (falsely) promised they wouldn’t seize his guns while he was gone.

Compounding the dishonesty, police then told Kim that Edward had consented to the confiscation. Believing the seizures were approved by her husband, Kim led the officers to the two handguns the couple owned, which were promptly seized. Even though Edward was immediately discharged from the hospital, police only returned the firearms after he filed a civil rights lawsuit against them.

Critically, when police seized the guns, they didn’t claim it was an emergency or to prevent imminent danger. Instead, the officers argued their actions were a form of “community caretaking,” a narrow exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement.

Please follow the link above to read the entire article. It includes the arguments against warrantless gun confiscation and arguments for. The Biden administration

The article notes the two arguments:

In jurisdictions that have extended the community caretaking exception to homes, “everything from loud music to leaky pipes have been used to justify warrantless invasion of the home,” a joint amicus brief by the ACLU, the Cato Institute, and the American Conservative Union revealed.

…But in its first amicus brief before the High Court, the Biden Administration glossed over these concerns and called on the justices to uphold the First Circuit’s ruling. Noting that “the ultimate touchstone of the Fourth Amendment is ‘reasonableness,’” the Justice Department argued that warrants should not be “presumptively required when a government official’s action is objectively grounded in a non-investigatory public interest, such as health or safety.”

We are in danger of becoming a police state.

This Needs To Be Dealt With

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The Gateway Pundit posted an article today with the following headline:

Three Years Ago a FISA Report Confirmed Obama Admin Was Sending FISA Obtained Information on Americans to Non Government Entities We Still Don’t Know Whose Data Was Sent to What Companies

This is a serious violation of the Fourth Amendment rights of Americans.

The article states:

The FISA Court Ruling showed widespread abuse of the FISA mandate. According to the report, Obama’s FBI, NSA and DOJ performed searches on Americans that were against their 4th Amendment rights. This went on for years. One paragraph in the report states that 85% of the Section 704 and 705(b) FISA searches made during the time of the audit (a few months in 2015) were non-compliant with applicable laws and therefore criminal.

In addition, Obama’s DOJ and FBI were illegally searching Americans against their rights. Unbeknownst to most Americans, Obama’s FBI was providing this information to outside contractors who had no business or legal cause or claim for the information.

A review of the report showed on page 19 that the Court stated that Obama’s NSA had an institutional “lack of candor”.

The article includes the report.

The article concludes:

The level of corruption within Obama’s NSA, FBI and DOJ is shocking.

To date no one has been charged with crimes or is serving time as a result of the many crimes committed by this group of government hoodlums.  We still don’t know what companies were receiving personal information on which Americans during the Obama years.

It’s been more than four years!!!

It is high time that those responsible for violating the constitutional rights of American citizens be brought to justice.

Some Perspective From A Former FBI Agent

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Sometimes the people who have done a job are the most qualified to analyze how a job was done. Frank Watt, a former FBI Agent, posted an article at The American Thinker today about the surveillance of Carter Page. The title of the article is, “Two Possibilities in Trump Wiretapping, and Neither Is Good.”

Mr. Watt reminds us that because the surveillance of an American citizen violates that citizen’s Fourth Amendment rights, there has to be proven justification for that surveillance. We know that was not the case with Carter Page, in fact, some things were left out of the application for surveillance that would have immediately called into question the need for surveillance.

The article notes:

Based on what we are told by the I.G., there are only two possible conclusions that can be reached regarding the official conduct of those responsible for infringing on Carter Pages Constitutional freedoms: 

The first is that the hand selected team of investigators, attorneys, and Senior Executive Service officials with decades of law enforcement, administrative, and judicial experience were abject failures at a task that they were hired to perform. Speaking from personal experience, in FBI, DEA, and state and local wire tap investigations, the slightest omissions, misstatements, and clerical errors are routinely identified and corrected by the street agents and line prosecutors who do these investigations for a living. To believe that a “varsity level” team, with unlimited time, support, and resources, somehow inadvertently overlooked seventeen major omissions, misstatements, and/or outright falsehoods, is simply not believable. 

The second possibility is that nearly everyone who significantly participated in obtaining FISA coverage on Page knowingly and deliberately operated outside the law to one degree or another. The reasons behind the decision to do so are irrelevant. The particulars regarding the seventeen I.G. findings are startling, taken individually. It’s difficult to see how any of the individual omissions or misstatements could have happened accidentally. Viewed collectively, the apparent intentionality is nearly impossible to reconcile as anything but corruption. 

In light of the I.G findings, the presiding FISA court judge seems to have come down on the side of intentional abuse. In a recent court order, Judge Rosemary Collyer gave the FBI until January 10 to explain to the court why the FBI should be allowed to continue to utilize FISA. The statement that the FBI “withheld material information” and that “FBI personnel misled NSD” suggests that the judge isn’t buying the “series of unfortunate events” excuse peddled by prominent figures in defense of the indefensible. 

The article concludes:

Whichever explanation seems more likely, the end result should be infuriating to every American. Either your nations premiere law enforcement agency was breathtakingly incompetent when the stakes were the highest, or select officials in that organization made deliberate decisions to break the law, undermine the Constitution, and illegally spy on a fellow American. Either possibility has deeply damaged the reputation of the FBI and DOJ in addition to the reputations of thousands of honest FBI Agents and DOJ attorneys. Despite the legitimate concerns of civil libertarians, the FISA process has indisputably proved an invaluable resource in safeguarding the country from terrorism. If the heinous abuses documented in the I.G.s report result in a weakening or loss of FISA, we will all be the worse for it. If those responsible are not held to account, this will happen again. There is no happy face to put on this episode. 

It is time for those guilty of corruption to be tried and held accountable for their actions.

Don’t Hold Your Breath Waiting For Consequences

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On October 9, One America News reported the following:

The United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has ruled that the FBI previously violated Americans’ privacy rights by conducting unreasonable searches. The FISA Court opinion disclosed Tuesday revealed that the FBI violated constitutional rights and federal law through their warrant-less internet surveillance program.

A 2018 review revealed the bureau used their raw intelligence database in 2017 and 2018 to administer tens of thousands of searches on private U.S. citizens. The searches were conducted on some occasions to screen FBI personnel and sources, involving emails and phone numbers. In one instance, the court stated that an FBI contractor searched his family, staff members and himself on the database.

Federal law requires the database only be used to gather evidence of a crime or foreign intelligence information. According to the ruling, the FBI violated the law authorizing the program as well as the Fourth Amendment, which bars the government from conducting unreasonable searches.

Following the court’s decision, the FBI said it would apply new procedures as to how the database is used in order to better protect personal privacy.

The Foreign Intelligence Service Act has been under scrutiny for some time. Former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page has argued the Obama-era FBI may have used its FISA authority unlawfully against him.

Years ago I took a critical thinking course taught by a former NSA employee. At the beginning of the course, he assured us that guidelines that protected Americans from illegal surveillance were being followed. He stated that in his experience anyone who violated those guidelines was escorted out immediately. About a year later, I talked to him and he apologized for misleading the class. He commented that upon further research he found violations tolerated and sometimes encouraged. Unfortunately there were a lot of things that went on during the Obama administration regarding the politicization of government agencies that we are just now beginning to uncover. It is my hope that the people who chose to violate the civil rights of American citizens will be held accountable. If they are not, the abuses of power will continue.

There Is A Reason The House Of Representatives Has Had To Do All Of The Work On The Illegal Surveillance Of The Trump Campaign And Transition Team

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Have you wondered why all the information and investigation of the illegal surveillance of the Trump campaign and transition team has come out of the House of Representatives rather than out of the Senate? Well, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has the reputation for being one of the leakiest, most politicized, and most corrupt committees in Washington. The current chairman of the committee is Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina; the current vice-chairman is Senator Mark Warner of Virginia. Both are seriously entrenched creatures of the Washington swamp. That fact explains the following report.

Yesterday The Gateway Pundit posted the following:

Chairman of the Senate Intel Committee Richard Burr (R-NC) said on Tuesday there were “sound reasons” why the judges issued FISA warrants on Carter Page.

The newly released Carter Page FISA docs, although heavily redacted, reveal the FBI and DOJ relied on Hillary’s phony dossier and liberal media reports as ‘evidence’ presented to the court in order to wiretap Page.

The FBI omitted the fact that the dossier was paid for by Hillary and the DNC.

This is not only criminal, but unconstitutional, says investigative reporter, Paul Sperry.

So spying on an American citizen based on information bought and paid for by a political opponent is now justified? Under what constitution? Has this man read the Fourth Amendment? Donald Trump’s constitutional rights were violated. If this is allowed to stand, we can expect it to happen again to anyone who disagrees with the party in power. That is not a good thing.

The article continues:

Even the argument the FBI thought Carter Page was an agent of the Russians doesn’t hold water. Carter Page was never charged or arrested for being a Russian spy, furthermore, not too long ago Page was actually helping the FBI take down Russians.

So now the FBI expects us to believe Carter Page flipped and became an agent for the Russians…yet they never arrested him?

Comey, Rosenstein, McCabe and Sally Yates all signed the FISA applications even though Hillary’s fraudulent Russia dossier was used as a pretext to obtain the warrants.

According to Senator Burr, these are “sound reasons.”

“I don’t think I ever expressed that I thought the FISA application came up short. There (were) sound reasons as to why judges issued the FISA,” Burr said to CNN.

Hopefully my fellow voters in North Carolina will remove this man from office during the next election. I don’t care if a Democrat replaces him–he has not lived up to his Oath of Office to defend the Constitution.

UPDATE: It should be noted that a copy of the unredacted FISA application was delivered to the committee on March 17, 2017. This was then leaked to the media by a staffer on the committee. That is one of many questionable actions by the committee regarding the illegal surveillance of the Trump campaign.

 

I Suspect There Are Some People In The FBI And DOJ Who Wish Mueller Had Shut Down His Investigation Before This Information Came Out

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Sundance at The Conservative Treehouse posted an article today about some of the information discovered regarding the government spy inside the Trump presidential campaign. It is a long article, but worth reading. Please follow the link above to read the entire article.

To me, this is the highlight of the article:

The article details some of the contradictions in the story the media and the FBI and DOJ are currently trying to sell us.

For instance:

Remember, in May 2016 Mr. Page was the key witness working on behalf of the FBI in a case against Russians. [ Evgeny Buryakov Case] Now in September 2016, the same FBI is fixing to put Carter Page under a Title-1 surveillance warrant and label him an agent of a hostile foreign government….

… funny, that.

The two last exchanged emails in September 2017, about a month before a secret warrant to surveil Mr. Page expired after being repeatedly renewed by a federal judge.

This whole thing stinks. I can totally understand the opposition party infiltrating a political campaign–that has been going on for years. But when the government not only takes sides during an election, but puts a spy in one political campaign, we have entered into a new realm of dishonesty. This makes Watergate look like a job done by amateurs (which it actually was). The people involved in this need to go to jail–regardless of their status in our government–they used the government’s power against the people. They violated the Fourth Amendment. They violated the Oath of Office they took to defend the U.S. Constitution. They not only didn’t defend the Constitution–they walked all over it and would have killed it had they won the election. If Hillary Clinton had won, the corruption would have gone unchecked and probably gotten worse. It is long past time to hold the people involved in this scheme accountable.

Does This Man Not Remember Watergate?

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The Daily Caller posted an article today about a recent comment by James Clapper.

The article states:

Former Director of Intelligence James Clapper said Thursday night on CNN that it was “a good thing” there was an FBI informant spying on the Trump campaign.

Clapper admitted the FBI “may have had someone who was talking to them in the campaign,” referring to President Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. He explained away the possibility of an FBI informant spying on the campaign as the bureau was trying to find out “what the Russians were doing to try to substantiate themselves in the campaign or influence or leverage it.”

James Clapper was President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence. At one point didn’t James Clapper take an oath to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution. Did he read the Fourth Amendment?

The Fourth Amendment states:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

This is frightening.

Some Thoughts On The FISA Court

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The following video from One America News was posted at YouTube on Friday:

What happened during the end of the Obama Administration was a violation of the Fourth Amendment rights of American citizens by the abuse of a secret court. It is the obligation of the government to insure that never happens again. The surveillance of the Trump campaign and transition team makes the wiretapping engaged in by the Watergate burglars look like child’s play. The use of government agencies for political purposes was something that happened more than once in the Obama Administration–the IRS was eventually forced to pay fines to the conservative organizations it refused to grant tax-exempt status to. The purpose of not granting the tax-exempt status was to silence organizations engaging in conservative speech during the 2012 elections. Regardless of where you stand on the political spectrum, that is a dangerous thing. Remember, it is always possible that someday the shoe will be on the other foot. If we don’t end the practice of using the government against people who disagree with us now, it will not end.

Losing Due Process And The Second Amendment

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The Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution states:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution states:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Someone needs to explain this to the people writing laws in California. Yesterday Breitbart.com reported:

According to KPCC (Member of National Public Radio, operated by Pasadena City College), GVROs (gun violence restraining orders) “could be issued without prior knowledge of the person. In other words, a judge could issue the order without ever hearing from the person in question, if there are reasonable grounds to believe the person is a threat based on accounts from the family and police.” And since the order can be issued without the gun owner even being present to defend him or herself, confiscation can commence without any notice to the gun owner once the order is issued.

To be fair, Los Angeles Police Department Assistant Chief Michael Moore does not use the word “confiscate” when talking about confiscating firearms. Rather, Moore says, “The law gives us a vehicle to cause the person to surrender their weapons, to have a time out, if you will.”

California laws already ban people from owning guns if they have committed a violent crime or were involuntarily committed to a mental health facility. It seems odd than an additional law would be required. The potential for mischief under this new law is endless–a neighborhood spat, a divorce, a lover’s quarrel could all result in someone losing their guns without due process and also without any real reason. Hopefully, the first time anyone attempts to take away a legally owned gun without due process, there will be a massive lawsuit filed that will result in the law being declared unconstitutional, which I believe it is.

Protecting The Rights Of American Businesses

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The problem with having a President and a cabinet that lack hands on business experience is that they lack hands on business experience. The quote “A government big enough to give you everything you want, is a government big enough to take away everything that you have.” is attributed to Thomas Jefferson although it is not found in any of his papers. Regardless of who said it, the quote is accurate.

In its Saturday/Sunday edition, the Wall Street Journal posted an editorial about the nomination of Loretta Lynch as U.S. Attorney General. Ms. Lynch is currently in charge of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York. She has been busy there.

The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states:

Amendment IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Evidently Ms. Lynch didn’t read that part of the Constitution, and unfortunately, she is not the only government official who did not read that part. As of late, prosecutors have been using civil forfeiture laws to confiscate private property and use the money gained to shore up state and municipal budgets. One example of this in Ms. Lynch’s district is the case of Jeffrey, Richard and Mitch Hirsch. In 2012 the federal government drained their bank account of $446,651.11. The bank account was used for deposits from Bi-County Distributors, a company the brothers have run for 27 years. The company stocks convenience stores in the region with candy and snack food.

The editorial explains:

According to the federal government, the brothers came under suspicion because of the frequent small deposits they made in the bank. Under federal law, banks are required to report cash deposits of more than $10,000 at a time to the Internal Revenue Service. Frequent deposits beneath the $10,000 threshold can also trigger federal scrutiny on suspicion the depositors are seeking to evade federal oversight for crimes like money laundering or drug trafficking.

The Hirsch brothers run a small business that deals in small amounts of cash, a fact that the government surely noticed, since they were never charged with a crime. But more than two years after the government grabbed the hundreds of thousands of dollars, none of it has been returned. According to the Institute for Justice, which is representing the family in a lawsuit, the government has also denied the Hirsches a prompt hearing on the forfeiture, putting it in violation of the 2000 Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act.

Ms. Lynch’s office brought in more than $113 million in civil actions between 2011 and 2013. Unfortunately, these cases have spread across the country. Between 2003 and 2011, annual payments from forfeiture went from $218 million to $450 million.

Many small businesses deposit small amounts of cash at various times of the day. Some do it out of fear of theft, others because that is the way their computer bookkeeping systems work, and others because that is how the timing of their office staff works. A small company I worked for at one point made one deposit a day, but since their computer program could only handle twelve checks on one deposit slip, it appeared to be multiple small deposits.

The editorial in the Wall Street Journal suggests that when Ms. Lunch gets her nomination hearing, someone should ask her about the Hirsches.