This is a political opinion. I don't like abuse of power and FISA is ripe for abuse. The right exploits fear and we are getting worse than we bargained for. We think we're safe, but security vs. privacy isn't the zero sum game our government paints it to be. Trading liberty for security is a false choice. We can have both privacy and security at the same time. This attitude of using ubiquitous video and audio surveillance seemingly everywhere as a crime prophylactic is suffocating.
Ever since high school when FISA was first introduced to Congress, I thought FISA could be perverted into Orwellian surveillance. I was young when I first heard about FISA. Debating was still done with shoe boxes full of 3 x 5 index cards. We got our news via newspapers and the network evening news with Walter Cronkite. The original FISA law had bi-partisan support. Ted Kennedy sponsored it and nine additional Senators ranging from Strom Thurmond to Daniel Inouye cosponsoring it.
I wasn't able to organize or voice my arguments against FISA in an articulate manner back then. Generally, people who thought they were older and wiser were "for" FISA under this general premise:
You have nothing to hide. Why are you worried about this? This law doesn't target you. These people [terrorists] are out to kill us and have to be stopped!
It was a lie then and it still is today. Constant surveillance is our version of
Minority Report. The various agencies collect everything, then when the frame arrives, investigators go through the collection looking for the picture to fill it. We might be innocent, but once targeted; chances are you won't beat the frame.
1978 is a long time ago in terms of our daily lives. At the time, no one thought that the government could create anything like PRISM, PINWALE, Upstream, Stellar Wind, ShellTrumpet, and Nucleon snooping programs. The Patty Hearst trial featuring grainy still photos concluded about a year before Senator Ted Kennedy introduced the original FISA law. Protests against the Shah of Iran were beginning to get noticed. People still talked about the Munich Massacre where 9 members of the Israeli Olympic team were killed in 1972. The U.S. economy was falling into a deep recession.
People still used typewriters, white out and snail mail. Computers were slow, some 100 megabyte hard drives were the size of a coffee table, 64 bytes of RAM was "huge" and NO ONE had a color monitor. A "Cell phone" was a small suit case/large car battery. Maybe 20% of homes had a microwave oven. Pop culture still featured the Original Hawaii Five-O and The Streets of San Francisco. Star Wars was new and Saturday Night Live was a 2 year old toddler.
People were living and not paying attention to their civil liberties.
I always paid attention to politics. I was the nerd who took the time to learn about FISA and I was against it because I saw it as an assault on the 4th amendment. The secret FISA court with secret judges that had sealed records and could issue retrospective warrants against an unrepresented "target" of surveillance. That is against everything I was taught about the rights of Americans. FISA was just wrong to me. I said as much. When challenged to justify my opinion I sited The Pentagon Papers which is a study that showed the Vietnam war was conducted under secret, contrived false pretenses for dubious purposes that had to be withheld from public knowledge because, if known, the public would object to U.S. Indochina policies.
The Pentagon Papers showed America they were duped. The public record of the Vietnam war was quite different from reality. The fall out embarrassed the U.S. government. Those papers revealed that 70% of the reason we were involved in the Vietnam war was to avoid humiliation and 20% to keep China out of Vietnam. Nixon (who originally was unconcerned with the leak) was persuaded to go after Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo under the Espionage Act of 1917 to send a message to future leakers.
The case collapsed against Ellsberg largely due to the prosecution being caught trying to hide/deny the illegal wire tapping of Ellsberg. The country was torn over wondering if Danial Ellsberg and Anthony Russo were whistle blowers or traitors. The information leaked in The Pentagon Papers made it clear that the U.S. wasn't trying to help the Vietnamese to remain free, they were in it to primarily save face and keep China from gaining more territory. 55,000 Americans died, nearly 500,000 were wounded and countless Vietnamese were killed and wounded in this conflict for what?... to avoid humiliation?
As Senator Mike Gravel (Alaska-D) wrote in August 1971:
... the public has not had access to this study. Newspapers in possession of the documents have published excerpts from them and have prepared their own summary of the study’s findings. In doing this, they have performed a valuable public service. But every American is entitled to examine the study in full and to digest for himself the lessons it contains. The people must know the full story of their government’s actions over the past twenty years, to ensure that never again will this great nation be led into waging a war through ignorance and deception.
snip,
No one who reads this study can fail to conclude that, had the true facts been made known earlier, the war would long ago have ended, and the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans and Vietnamese would have been averted. This is the great lesson of the Pentagon Papers. No greater argument against unchecked secrecy in government can be found in the annals of American history.
FISA was proposed five years after Ellsberg's and Russo's case was dismissed.
The "Official" pretense about FISA was that it was to focus on "foreign" threats, but we know now the firewall between "foreign" and domestic threats is composed of tissue paper. Back then, I was convinced FISA would give our government the sanctioned ability to lie to us while making secret policy that might not be in our best interest; but we'd never know, because the whole thing is classified.
Hindsight tells us that FISA could and would be twisted to whatever the current administration wanted. We know that FISA approves 99.97% of the warrants requested and that is directly due to the fact that the plaintiff in these cases have no lawyer to represent their interests. There was no voter backlash because it's illegal for the voter to know the details of what the FISC does.
Twenty-three years later the 9-11-2001 attack on the United States created a perfect opportunity for the intelligence types to get more of what they wanted - less fettered access to more information about more people. The Patriot Act was passed and it changed FISA (pdf) to make it easier for our government to wiretap and gather any digital data about anyone they target. Despite Mike Gravel's efforts, George Bush's Administration knowingly used bad intelligence to deceive the American people into going to war with Iraq.
George W. Bush also authorized an executive order in 2002 providing for warrantless wiretapping. In 2001-2002 people were afraid and were willing to trade their liberty for security. Anyone who objected to the Patriot Act was shouted down. I remember. I was shouted down when ever I voiced my misgivings about The Patriot Act the last quarter of 2001. I was a Democrat who was "soft on National Security". Bullshit. We had good, time-targeted, actionable intelligence that people were planning an attack on U.S. soil. We knew that people were learning to fly airplanes, but were uninterested in learning how to land the planes. The answer isn't to collect more information, it was how to make sense of the information we have. Post 911, the U.S. chose to both collect more information on more people and develop better data mining techniques. We have better algorithms that run faster through more data, so more data can be collected and sifted. It's a never ending cycle. Target more, collect more, sift more.
Since that horrid day The Patriot Act has been enacted, renewed and further enhanced several times. We've been on a downward slide when it comes to privacy for years. We now have the Department of Homeland Security which to me, sounds like something that belongs to the former Soviet Union. We have secret no fly lists with no appeal and the TSA. The NSA has huge data repositories and collection points all over the world. Local police have access to the these data bases and abuse them. We have warrantless wiretapping and memos telling DHS personnel that reading the Washington Post can make them "subject to any administrative or legal action from the Government". The NSA created talking points denying the validity of the surveillance leaks while another agency threatens their employees for reading about them.
This is ridiculous.
My argument against FISA was and still is that the FISA court is a secret apparatus that operates in secret with inadequate, secret oversight and it produces secret benefits that no one is allowed to read. Our civil rights are shredded for the secret benefits of secret government agencies that somehow is supposed to make me more safe. I'm not convinced. I don't have enough information to make that judgement. My government is afraid that if I know the details of what they collect, I'll not agree with the collection. This isn't about tin foil hats. This is about my government respecting the Bill of Rights amended to our Constitution. My questions then and my questions now are the same. Who's watching the watchers?
11:39 AM PT: Thanks for listing me on the Rec list. I have to step out for a short errand, but when I get back I'll check on this diary. BRB soon.