Tag Archives: Patriot Act

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.

Big Brother Doesn’t Need A Warrant

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On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported the following:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation performed potentially millions of searches of American electronic data last year without a warrant, U.S. intelligence officials said Friday, a revelation likely to stoke longstanding concerns in Congress about government surveillance and privacy.

An annual report published Friday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence disclosed that the FBI conducted as many as 3.4 million searches of U.S. data that had been previously collected by the National Security Agency.

Senior Biden administration officials said the actual number of searches is likely far lower, citing complexities in counting and sorting foreign data from U.S. data. It couldn’t be learned from the report how many Americans’ data was examined by the FBI under the program, though officials said it was also almost certainly a much smaller number.

The report doesn’t allege the FBI was routinely searching American data improperly or illegally.

The disclosure of the searches marks the first time a U.S. intelligence agency has published an accounting, however imprecise, of the FBI’s grabs of American data through a section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the 1978 law that governs some foreign intelligence gathering. The section of FISA that authorizes the FBI’s activity, known as Section 702, is due to expire next year.

I think the Republicans need to be very careful about any law they pass that involves searching records, electronic or otherwise. This section of the FISA law needs to be allowed to expire next year. The fuse that began the use of government agencies for political purposes is found in the Patriot Act.

On Thursday, The Conservative Treehouse noted:

After the Patriot Act was triggered, not coincidentally only six weeks after 9/11, a slow and dangerous fuse was lit that ends with the intelligence apparatus being granted a massive amount of power. The problem with assembled power is always what happens when a Machiavellian network takes control over that power and begins the process to weaponize the tools for their own malicious benefit. That is exactly what Barack Obama was all about.

The Obama network took pre-assembled intelligence weapons we should never have allowed to be created, and turned those weapons into tools for his radical and fundamental change. The target was the essential fabric of our nation. Ultimately, this corrupt political process gave power to create the Fourth Branch of Government, the Intelligence Branch. From that perspective the fundamental change was successful.

The Wall Street Journal article concludes:

“For anyone outside the U.S. government, the astronomical number of FBI searches of Americans’ communications is either highly alarming or entirely meaningless,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.), a privacy advocate, said. “Somewhere in all that overcounting are real numbers of FBI searches, for content and for nonconsent—numbers that Congress and the American people need before Section 702 is reauthorized.”

At a conference later Friday, Matt Olsen, the chief of the Justice Department’s national security division, said agencies were discussing what they could declassify about the use of Section 702 to demonstrate its value. He added that he expected to be able to share more information in the coming months.

The FBI has previously faced scrutiny for its oversight of how authorities plumb Section 702 data, including a rebuke from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 2018 that found some searches violated the constitutional privacy rights of Americans.

In response, the FBI has imposed new safeguards meant to better ensure compliance. Those include a requirement that all searches involving 100 or more query terms get additional approvals and that analysts actively opt in to search Section 702 data, rather than passively allowing it.

Friday’s report also revealed four instances last year in which the FBI, due to specific factual considerations about a search of data, should have sought approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court before performing a search and looking at the content of U.S. communications that were produced.

The FBI has never sought approval from the court since the requirement was adopted in 2018, officials said.

Please follow the links above to read both articles. Big brother is watching all of us.

This Is Not Surprising

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For a long time, America trusted its news sources. However, in recent years, those sources have come into question as they have become more and more biased. There are also some real questions as to what is being left out of what is being reported. The addition of alternative news has helped balance things out for those who are willing to do their own research, but a large segment of the American population still believes that everything they hear on the mainstream media is true. That is one of many reasons for the division we see among Americans. There are, however, some elements of our society who like the current lack of unbiased information and would like the division to continue. Unfortunately many of these elements are found inside of our government.

Yesterday The Conservative Treehouse posted an article titled, “Former Intel Officials Want Efforts to Break Up Big Tech Stopped–Data Control and Retention of Social Media Partnership Is A National Security Imperative.” Just for the record, controlling the media in our free republic is not only not a national security  imperative–it is totally unconstitutional.

Please follow the link to read the entire article. It is long and complicated, but worth the read. I will post a few important points here.

The article reports:

Former Obama era intelligence officials, those who helped construct, organize and assemble the public-private partnership between intelligence data networks and supported social media companies, have written a letter to congress warning that any effort to break up Big Tech (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google, Microsoft, etc.) would be catastrophic for the national security system they have created.

[READ LETTER HERE]

Citing the information control mechanisms they assembled, vis-a-vis the ability of social media networks to control and approve what is available for the public to read and review, the intelligence officials declare that any effort to break up the private side of the intel/tech partnership will only result in less ability of the intelligence apparatus to control public opinion.

They willfully admit that open and uncensored information is adverse to the interests of the intelligence state and therefore too dangerous to permit. They specifically argue, if the modern system created by the partnership between the U.S. government and Big Tech is not retained, the national security of the United States is compromised. Let that sink in for a moment.

The article concludes:

The influence of the Intelligence Branch now reaches into our lives, our personal lives through their efforts in social media.

In the decades before 9/11/01 the intelligence apparatus intersected with government, influenced government, and undoubtedly controlled many institutions with it. Back then, the legislative oversight function was weak and growing weaker, but it still existed and could have been used to keep the IC in check. However, after the events of 9/11/01, the short-sighted legislative reactions opened the door to allow the surveillance state to weaponize.

After the Patriot Act was triggered, not coincidentally only six weeks after 9/11, a slow and dangerous fuse was lit that ends with the intelligence apparatus being granted a massive amount of power. The problem with assembled power is always what happens when a Machiavellian network takes control over that power and begins the process to weaponize the tools for their own malicious benefit. That is exactly what the installation of Barack Obama was all about.

The Obama era intelligence team took pre-assembled intelligence weapons we should never have allowed to be created and turned those weapons into tools for radical, political and fundamental change. The target was the essential fabric of our nation. Ultimately, this corrupt political process gave power to create the Fourth Branch of Government, the Intelligence Branch. From that perspective, the fundamental change was successful.

…It’s all Connected Folks, SEE HERE

[…] “The vision was first outlined in the Intelligence Community Information Technology Enterprise plan championed by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and IC Chief Information Officer Al Tarasiuk almost three years ago.” … “It is difficult to underestimate the cloud contract’s importance. In a recent public appearance, CIA Chief Information Officer Douglas Wolfe called it “one of the most important technology procurements in recent history,” with ramifications far outside the realm of technology.” (READ MORE)

One job…. “take the preexisting system and retool it so the weapons of government only targeted one side of the political continuum.”

Welcome to 1984.

We Are In Danger Of Losing Our Right To Free Speech

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Yesterday NewsMax reported that a group representing local school boards is asking the Biden administration to go after parents who protest the school board’s policies.

The article reports:

A group representing local public school boards is asking the Biden administration to invoke the Patriot Act and federal hate crimes legislation, among other measures, to go after parents who have aggressively opposed board policies and members who have adopted measures such as mask mandates and the teaching of critical race theory curricula.

In the open letter addressed to President Joe Biden, the National School Boards Association asserts that ”education leaders are under an immediate threat.”

The request ”to deal with the growing number of threats of violence and acts of intimidation occurring across the nation” comes as reports of angry parents expressing opposition to COVID-19 policies and curriculum changes — particularly those tied to critical race theory — have become more frequent.

There is a problem with hate crime laws. You are making a judgement on a person’s thoughts–not solely on his actions. Unless you are a mind reader, your chances of being absolutely accurate in judging someone else’s actions is slim. The concept of hate crimes is simply a step toward embracing the idea of thought crimes–not a place we want to be.

There have been a few examples of parents acting inappropriately at school board meetings, but there are more examples of parents simply questioning the material that is being taught in our public schools. Education leaders are not under “an immediate threat” unless you consider anyone who disagrees with them a threat. The Virginia school board did not like it when a parent read some of the pornography found in the middle school library. The National School Boards Association representing the school boards is simply a group of people who would like to shut down the speech and/or activities of anyone who interferes with the tyranny that has appeared in some of our local school boards. School boards are elected officials and are supposed to answer to the voters. If is unfortunate if some of those voters have behaved inappropriately and they should be dealt with as individuals, but that is no excuse to accuse them of hate crimes or invoke the Patriot Act. Any elected official has to deal with a certain number of idiots, but that is no excuse to call down the power of the government on anyone who disagrees with them.

The Ever-Changing Story

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There are some serious problems with the actions of the Obama Administration in terms of unmasking American citizens making phone calls. It is not an incredible coincidence that the unmasked citizens were people closely connected to the Trump presidential campaign. One name that has continually been mentioned as part of this unmasking is Susan Rice. She appeared on the Sunday News Shows (hasn’t she done that before?) today to explain her innocence.

The details are posted at Hot Air today.

Ms. Rice stated this morning:

Former National Security Adviser Susan Rice denied President Donald Trump’s claim that she tried to unmask Americans in an attempt to implicate Trump campaign officials, adding that she never did anything “untoward with respect to the intelligence” she received.

During an interview with CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS” airing Sunday morning, Rice said Trump’s accusation is “absolutely false” and that members of Congress have not found anything inappropriate in the situation.

“I think now we’ve had subsequently members of Congress on the intelligence committees on both sides of the aisle take a look at the information that apparently was the basis for Chairman [Devin] Nunes’ concern, and say publicly that they didn’t see anything that was unusual or untoward,” Rice said, referring to the California Republican.

But what has she said before? The article reports:

You may recall that when the story first broke Rice spoke to Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC and at least heavily implied that Trump’s initial accusations were all some sort of fever swamp fantasies. (What she actually said was that she never leaked anything.) But before very long the details which emerged told a very different story. Within days it was revealed that she had, in fact, actively sought to have names revealed to her even if they had originally been picked up “incidentally.” Eventually we reached the point where the best they could say was that it appeared that she hadn’t done anything that was technically illegal.

Now, in the fashion so typical of politicians (as opposed to national security experts), she’s answering an entirely different question. Yes, she did get that information but she never did anything “unusual or untoward” with it. And why would we be so suspicious as to think she might have seen some value in data collected on people associated with the guy who was then in a heated battle to defeat the candidate who was promising to carry on her boss’s legacy? Perish the thought.

If the Justice Department has actually become the Justice Department rather than a political arm of the Democrat party, someone will be charged with a crime in this matter. The leaking of the names and information to the media was illegal. The leaking of the information was exactly what some members of Congress warned about when the Patriot Act was passed–that there would be eavesdropping on Americans that would be used for political purposes. What happened during the 2016 presidential campaign is an example of this. If no one is held accountable, it will continue to happen. That is not good news.

 

The Nightmare The Opponents Of The Patriot Act Saw Coming

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It would be nice to believe that we are a nation led by honorable men. In the past that has occasionally been true and I am sure that it will occasionally be true in the future. I am hoping it is true in the present. However, our Founding Fathers understood that we would not always be led by honorable men and set up the U.S. Constitution accordingly. The power was supposed to rest with the people–not with the government. The government was supposed to be responsive to the wishes of the people and accountable to the people. The framework was beautiful. Had we paid closer attention to following it, we would be in a very different place. I am particularly concerned about recent violations of 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.

The Patriot Act allowed for the collection of electronic data unprecedented in American history. The idea behind it was to prevent terrorist attacks. Some Congressmen warned that the act could be used to violate the rights of average Americans. Evidently they were right.

Yesterday The Gateway Pundit posted a story about electronic surveillance under the Obama Administration. Evidently that surveillance went far beyond what was necessary or legitimate.

The article reports:

Barack Obama‘s CIA Director John O. Brennan targeted Trump supporters for enhanced surveillance, intelligence sources confirm to GotNews’ Charles C. Johnson.

The surveillance took place between Trump’s election on November 8 and the inauguration in January, according to White House and House intelligence sources.

The focus was on General Mike Flynn, billionaire Erik Prince, and Fox News host Sean Hannity — all of whom had close ties to Trump before and after the November election and had helped the future president with managing his new diplomatic responsibilities.

Hannity was targeted because of his perceived ties to Julian Assange, say our intelligence sources. Hannity was reportedly unmasked by Susan Rice at Brennan’s behest thanks to his close relationship with Trump and Julian Assange.

Blackwater founder Erik Prince, a former CIA covert asset, has long criticized the CIA’s bloat and incompetence, including the Brennan-run CIA drone program’s failure to properly target terrorists rather than Afghan civilians. Prince has repeatedly called for restructuring the CIA and argued against Brennan’s tenure.

This is a violation of the Fourth Amendment rights of these citizens. At the very least, lawsuits are in order. More appropriately, people who authorized or participated in this need to lose their jobs and possible go to prison. In the Watergate Scandal, which is peanuts compared to this, people went to prison. That would also be appropriate here.

 

 

Unfortunately We Don’t Live In A Vacuum

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This is an article about the eavesdropping scandal currently dominating press reporting on the Obama Administration. I will say offhand that I have very mixed emotions about the intelligence gathering going on. First of all, if the intelligence gathering is so universal and has been going on since 2007, why did it miss the Fort Hood shooting, the 2009 recruiting office shooting in Little Rock, Arkansas, and the Boston Marathon bombings? Of these three the Boston Marathon bombing should have been the easiest to foresee simply by looking at the travel records of the older brother involved.To add to my mixed emotions is the fact that Andrew McCarthy, someone I totally trust on matters of terrorism and the role of government, has stated that he is not bothered by the National Security Agency’s intelligence gathering. I have also heard a recent interview of John Bolton, someone whose opinion I also respect, in which he stated that he was not overly concerned about the information gathering.

I am adding to the discussion an article posted in the Guardian by Representative Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin. Representative Sensenbrenner released the following statement last Thursday:

Washington, Jun 6 – Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI) today sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder regarding the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s application for a top secret court order to collect the phone records of essentially every call made by millions of Verizon customers. 

Congressman Sensenbrenner: “As the author of the Patriot Act, I am extremely troubled by the FBI’s interpretation of this legislation. While I believe the Patriot Act appropriately balanced national security concerns and civil rights, I have always worried about potential abuses. The Bureau’s broad application for phone records was made under the so-called business records provision of the Act.  I do not believe the broadly drafted FISA order is consistent with the requirements of the Patriot Act. Seizing phone records of millions of innocent people is excessive and un-American.”

Since Representative Sensenbrenner was one of the authors of the Patriot Act, I believe he needs to be listened to on this matter.

In his article for the Guardian, Representative Sensenbrenner states:

Technically, the administration’s actions were lawful insofar as they were done pursuant to an order from the Fisa court. But based on the scope of the released order, both the administration and the Fisa court are relying on an unbounded interpretation of the act that Congress never intended.

The released Fisa order requires daily productions of the details of every call that every American makes, as well as calls made by foreigners to or from the United States. Congress intended to allow the intelligence communities to access targeted information for specific investigations. How can every call that every American makes or receives be relevant to a specific investigation?

This is well beyond what the Patriot Act allows.

As I said at the beginning of this article, I have very mixed emotions on this. Because someone in the Obama Administration used the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to target conservatives, how do we know that the NSA information will not also be used to target specific groups? We don’t live in a vacuum. Without the IRS scandal, I might be willing to ignore the NSA snooping, but with the IRS scandal, it has a much more sinister look. I have reached no conclusion except to conclude that I need more information.

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