Is That Legal?

One of my co-workers, an admitted conspiracy theorist, speculates that the reason the administration doesn't want to use FISA, under which virtually all warrants are approved, is because they are spying on journalists and political adversaries. While I hate to think even this administration would do such a thing, I really can't think of any other reason they wouldn't use FISA. Can anyone else??

this post is pretty chilling. a japanese-american family we know well could easily flunk, even now, and it seems very possible my friend's older relatives were branded as disloyal during the war. my friend is 3d generation and her family was interned. her husband was born in japan and naturalized; he is extremely fluent, she is less fluent. they have family in japan, and have visited many times; they are buddhist and active in their church; their children all played in a japanese-american sports league; they receive some publications in japanese.

no one considers this family a threat now, but her older relatives have only recently started talking about the camps. they do so rarely, amongst other survivors of the experience, and in terms that make clear that the horror and shame of losing their homes and family businesses and being incarcerated for years have had effects spanning their whole lives.

mackenzie -- for whatever reason, the administration obviously does not want to have oversight or leave a paper trail. i can't think of a reason that makes me comfortable. with no oversight at all, they could be spying on anyone -- but their tendancy to hammer political opponents, brand dissenting views as anti-american, and use the press as a means of disseminating propaganda and avoiding public scrutiny suggest that the targets you mention are likely ones. random citizens could also be targeted for whatever reasons they come up with -- perhaps the "links to al quaida" qualifier can be met by having the wrong name, or having friends or family in middle-eastern countries, or following closely the news accounts on the war on terror. there is no way to know.

there are things we all were taught about our system of government, and that i think most people agree on in principle:

"life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

"we have a system of checks and balances, using the three branches of government: executive, legislative, and judicial."

"where there is a wrong, there is a remedy."

"due process of law." "the rule of law."

it is deeply disconcerting to hear that all bets are off because there's a war on -- an elective war against an ill-defined enemy, with no definition of what might constitute "victory" and no end in sight; a war that has drained our coffers, killed thousands of our own and at least tens of thousands of others; a war that has alienated even our friends around the world, painfully divided our country, and distracted the nation from real and pressing domestic problems, and from addressing other real international concerns.

Leaving to Bush the determination of whether someone has "links to Al Qaeda" has one obvious problem. He thinks Saddam had such links, took us to war on that basis, and is impervious to contrary evidence. That's why FISC has the power of review, however limited.

As to question 17: Are you sure "K of C" wasn't a misprint for "KFC?" No true follower of the Colonel would betray this country and risk cutting off their supply.

Nothing about brie? My, how times change.

I'm afraid the system has matured quite extensively. It probably includes "How many late payments on credit cards?" or "Has attended a Phish concert?" or "Buys organic produce?"

Sounds silly but since the primary sub-contractors for the surveillance systems - your Acxioms for instance - also work for the marketters of deodorant and cat litter. "Scientific" marketting studies use hundreds or thousands of statistical variables to characterize a demographic. The profiles obtained are used to trawl their massive internal data warehouses for likely consumers (or terrorist).

Of course, to hear Bush yesterday, the process might be as "immature" as six-degrees of Bin Laden separation.

I answered the selected questions you extracted, substituting German references for Japanese due to my ancestry, and scored minus twelve! (Even counting the automatic REJECT on question fourteen as just minus three.) Ironically, many of my "ties" to Germany are a direct result of my US military service.

Everyone is responding to this posting as if the Bush Administration is using questionaires to determine links to Al Qaeda, which distracts people from the real issue: is Bush doing something wrong?

It appears that Bush has done nothing wrong and this is essentially an attempted political lynching (see the mob mentality). There are three pieces of research posted below and I would encourage anyone to challenge. Only through real challenges (not idealogical rantings) can we possibly get to the truth.

1st: Check out President Carter's executive order at http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/eo12139.htm

In pertinent part: "... the Attorney General
is authorized to approve electronic surveillance to acquire foreign
intelligence information without a court order..."

2nd: Check out President Clinton's executive order at http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/eo/eo-12949.htm

In pertinent part: "...the
Attorney General is authorized to approve physical searches, without a
court order, to acquire foreign intelligence information for periods of
up to one year..."

3rd: Check out the only reported case to come out of the Foreign Intelligence Surviellance Court (In re. Sealed Case, 310 F.3d 717 (2002)). This is not mandatory authority but it is persuasive.

"...The Truong court, as did all the other courts to have decided the issue, held that the President did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information. FN26 It was incumbent upon the court, therefore, to determine the boundaries of that constitutional authority in the case before it. We take for granted that the President does have that authority and, assuming that is so, FISA could not encroach on the President's constitutional power..."

The Truong case is: United States v. Truong Dinh Hung, 629 F.2d 908 (4th Cir.1980).

Good lord, I scored -1/Refer, and I'm a white male born in the country well after WWII who has never lived in Japan.

I can imagine in the near future getting a letter from the State Department like this:

Dear Sir,

During our "legal" surveillance of your phone calls over the last six months we noted the follow problems:

You said:
Bin Laden – 5 times
Sadam Hussein - 6 times
Terrorist - 12 times
Bombings- 12 times
Threat - 10 times
F**% George Bush - 50 times

Continued use of this kind of language will get you arrested and sent to our interrogation offices located in Guantanamo, Cuba. You have been warned. Merry Christmas.

Actually, I think the questions are a bit more "intelligent" than you give them credit. They are pretty much _exactly_ what a modern researcher would put into an artificially intelligent/expert system/data mining program designed to measure assimilation vs. non-assimilation from a database of Japanese Americans in the 1940s. Some of the commenters are missing this due to a historical anachronism: judo, Buddhism, and foreign travel were all much rarer and thus more statistically linked to being a nonassimilated immigrant in the 1940's than they are today, while today all are common among young WASPS.

Note to the irony-challenged: I am not saying the questionaires or their purpose are morally right, just, suprisingly close to what state-of-the-art modern computer data mining techniques might do.

In fact, as a computer scientist, I would wager that the DoD's Total Information Awareness project (and other recent projects) was _exactly_ this, with Muslim/Wahabi terms substituted for Japanese ones. How many times have you been to Pakistan?

The commenters who quote cases supporting presidential powers for foreign intelligence are failing to distinguish between foreign and domestic surveillance. The president does not need a warrant to listen to the Russians speak to the Chinese. He does, however, need a warrant to listen in on American's communications. (see http://www.blackprof.com/archives/2005/12/judge_damon_j_keith_no_warrant.html)
Bush admits he needs a warrant for communications totally within the US; the area in dispute is over calls between the US and other countries. Bush apparently considers these foreign, but they are still the communications of Americans. Congress agreed when it enacted FISA. The Supreme Court has not decided the question of whether Americans' international communications are protected by the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirements, but there is no rational reason to distinguish between my call to Boston and my call to Baghdad. It is still my privacy being protected by the Constitution's warrant requirement. FISA provides a secret and easy way to get the warrant, but Bush has chosen not to do so, which means he is in violation of the FISA statute and of the Fourth Amendment, regardless of any inherent power over foreign intelligence.

I find it always amusing that everyone points to Japanese internment during world war II but fails to note the same was done with Germans and Italians.

Perhaps the criteria varied but the internment into camps was similar.

This is mirrored to some extent in the quotation of the number of individuals murdered by the "nazi" party during world war II; the oft quoted number of six million represents those of jewish descent but twelve million were killed including catholics, ukrainians and a variety of others deemed untermensch.

Greg,
Oh easily led by the nose one,
You point to these documents,
and pretend you make a point,
which was debunked before you arrived here.

See point 4, here, scourge of intelligence (again, that's Greg, who said Carter and Clinton did the same thing)