Reauthorizing FISA and Strange Bedfellows Congress refused for a century to create the FBI out of fear that they would use their powers to spy on Congress, and then through blackmail and intimidation, illicitly take control of the Federal Government. 'We’ve got our own insidious version of lawless Big Brother here. It’s called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), but it’s got the vaguest schmear of constitutional protections supposedly wiped on top, even though they’ve proven to be no protection at all from those willing to ignore them.' 'Which Merrick’s merry men certainly qualify for considering how they’ve loosey-gooseyed, and massaged every aspect of the mechanisms meant to protect Americans from unlawful intrusions and surveillance. They’ve used lies and omissions to receive permission from courts to wander warrant-free, and snoop at will into Americans’ formerly private lives for the flimsiest of excuses.' Fourth Amendment 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. That's only one sentence. It's perfectly reasonable. It's easily understood. Yet the onslaught on it by the corrupt forces of the Federal Government have picked up steam, gathered power, and now they are trying to drive their circumvention of it through renewal. FISA stands for FOREIGN Surveillance Intelligence Act. Obama/Biden/Comey/ and so forth used these powers to spy on Trump by pretending to believe that he was installed into office by a foreign power. They were lying, they knew they were lying and yet ultimately they drove him from office and installed Bribed Joe to run Obama's unconstitutional 3rd term. These that succeeded in taking over the government in a coup, remain in power by illicitly using this tool. FISA has never had enough support in Congress to be made a permanent power, so it has to be reauthorized every 10 years by a simple majority. And every ten years it is, no matter which Party controls the House or the Senate or which party controls the WH. We get a lot of posturing from both the Left and the Right, but 'somehow' it always has enough to get reauthorized. Currently Conservatives are very vocal in their opposition, but, when push comes to shove, whether due to blackmail or not, enough of them fold that it gets reauthorized. It's up for renewal now. 'Rep Andy Biggs rattled off a laundry list of egregious FBI transgressions:' 'The FBI has used FISA as a way to skirt Americans' Fourth Amendment rights. Reauthorization of FISA in its current state would only cause further harm to our country. Our government should not be weaponized against Americans.' The FBI is weaponized against the American People. They tried to rig the 2016 election, failed, and then weaponized FISA to try to drive Trump from office because they did not agree with who The American People selected to be president, they wanted Crooked Hillary. So they worked to drive him from office, successfully rigged the 2020 election to install Bribed Joe, and now they are trying to jail Trump for protesting the election they rigged, in order to rig the 2024 election. FISA is one of their goto tools to maintain their coup. SENATOR MIKE LEE: 'The Fourth Amendment isn’t optional. FBI must be required to get a warrant when spying on Americans. Agents have been abusing FISA 702 to circumvent the Fourth Amendment. The Government Surveillance Reform Act would fix that.' We can trust them to reform it? House Republicans are demanding that FISA renewal be handled as a stand alone bill, not wrapped up in a massive bill that nobody reads or understands. 'Republicans are united in that FISA reauthorization needs to finally stand on its own – NOT be attached as a rider or tucked into a larger bill and passed along with it. The extremely serious constitutional abuses have been too many and too shocking in many cases for this abomination not to be exposed and debated on the floor of the House.' '"Reauthorization of #FISA can't be hooked to anything. The federal GOV has spied on Americans who decided to go to Church or you went to a school board meeting. This needs to end. Reauthorization needs to stand on it's own, and have significant reform." @RepScottPerry #ampFW' Yes, those rat bastards spied on folks, selected because they attended traditional Catholic Churches or spoke up at School Board meetings against oppressive government policies. '53 congressmen sent a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson opposing even an extension without the chance to openly debate FISA.' 53 isn't enough to even get a debate. 'Jayapal warned that the FBI could face a “very difficult” process to reauthorize the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) if the bureau couldn’t ensure Americans’ privacy is being protected.' Were Congress truly serving the American People it would be impossible, not difficult, for them reauthorize FISA without complete confidence that the FBI will end its abuses against Americans they disfavor. What do you think we will get out of Congress on this? Will they protect our rights? Will they end the FBI's abusive relationship with the American People? Or will we get a lot of song and dance, and a renewal with 'reforms' in name only? Andrew McCarthy once wrote that the entire FISA court system is a farce and he advocated ending it for Americans and returning to the traditional 4th amendment warrant that we traditionally use. Please share your thoughts, concerns and ideas.
Andrew McCarthy's case for repealing FISA and reforming the FBI and CIA. IT STARTED WITH THE RISE OF THE WAR STATE IN DC 'Like most of what ails us today, the seeds of the current crisis in republican governance, the severance of Washington’s omnipotent law enforcement and intelligence apparatus from democratic accountability, were sown in the 1960s and ’70s. We began to erase the salient distinction between law and politics. Under the guise of “national security,” we insulated governmental actions and policies from the reckoning of our citizens, whose safety and self-determination hang in the balance.' The process of criminalizing political disagreement was begun. Fast forward to now. 'The sprawling “community” of intelligence agencies (led by the FBI and CIA) covertly used dubious foreign sources to justify monitoring an American political campaign and, later, a U.S. presidential administration. To do so, it invoked daunting foreign-counterintelligence surveillance powers, based on a fever dream that its bête noire, Donald Trump, was an agent of the Kremlin. And the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court recently chastised the FBI for feeding it false and unverified information — the secret court apparently calculating that this extraordinary public expression of wrath will divert attention from its own shoddy performance in approving highly intrusive spy warrants based on sensational, blatantly uncorroborated rumor and innuendo.' The toothless FISA court essentially gave the FBI a dirty look and went right back to approving their spy requests. 'As usual, Washington is reacting with high-decibel inertia. In an era of hyperpartisanship, Democrats defend the politicization of the law enforcement and intelligence that resulted in the Trump-Russia investigation. Few are willing to confront the crisis. Even acknowledging it seems politically impossible. Not only are Democrats invested in defending the Russia investigation and its excesses, but their post-Watergate surveillance reforms forged the modern law enforcement and intelligence apparatus, which tends to be politically like-minded, at least in the supervisory ranks. For their part, Republicans pay lip service to limited government and political accountability while continuing to see national security and law-and-order hawkishness as key to political success.' 'Yet there are indications we’ve reached an inflection point: The public is growing weary and not a little bit angry. The politicization of law enforcement and intelligence-gathering threatens everyone, regardless of political persuasion. And officials seem always to escape accountability.' They don't 'seem to' escape accountability, they do escape accountability. Read the whole thing.
Codevilla: 'The Claremont Institute’s Angelo Codevilla, an insightful and provocative intelligence expert, argues the CIA is obsolete, politicized, and counterproductive. He would assign foreign intelligence responsibilities to the departments that carry out national defense and foreign relations missions — mainly, the Defense and State Departments — tailoring the gathering of intelligence to the practical needs of these missions. This would strip down the so-called “deep state,” a leviathan that warehouses mountains of intelligence to the detriment of our liberties and with dubious benefits to our security. Codevilla would also repeal FISA.' https://americanmind.org/memo/abolish-the-cia/
I wished that the government had been responsible and judicious enough to use FISA powers justly, but since they couldn't, it shouldn't be reauthorized.
Update on the Section 702 reauthorization: The Trojan Horse That Would Force Your Barista To Spy on You First, the bill’s marquee “reform” is the prohibition of only a handful of searches or “queries” of information about Americans under Section 702, the authority enacted by Congress to enable foreign surveillance but often used by the government for domestic spying. The type of search the bill would prohibit is “evidence-of-a-crime only” queries. But in 2022, out of over 200,000 queries of Americans’ data, there were only two instances of the FBI accessing Section 702 data under this rubric. And even if that prohibition were in place, the FBI could easily evade it simply by claiming in every instance that agents were looking for some (hypothetical) terror threat in addition to possible crimes. The bill’s non-reform “reform” would thus do nothing to stop the routine snooping on Americans, from 19,000 donors to a congressional campaign, to a House member and a senator, a judge, and numerous protesters of the left and right. Nor would this “reform” prevent known abuses, such as the NSA agents who used this powerful search program to check out online dating prospects and potential tenants. But wait, there's more... Even more outrageous is a problematic provision tucked away in this “reform” bill but not so much as mentioned in the committee’s report. Section 504 of the House Intelligence bill requires that those who have access to the “equipment that is being or may be used to transmit or store such communications” shall be treated as “electronic communication service providers” and thus subject to Section 702’s general requirement to (secretly) disclose our data to the government. Let us unpack this: Under current law, electronic communication service providers include Internet service providers such as Google, Facebook/Meta, and Microsoft. It also includes telecom providers such as AT&T and Verizon. Under the law, these big companies are routinely compelled to hand over billions of foreign communications in addition to vast amounts of Americans’ communications that are “incidentally” caught up in this surveillance net. But the House Intelligence bill’s expansion to include “equipment” would cover, for example, any small or medium-sized business that simply provides Wi-Fi or stores data. This means that your business landlord, Airbnb host, hotel manager, or coffee shop barista will have a legal obligation to give the government any of your emails, texts, or phone metadata that ran through their equipment. Larger entities, such as data centers, would also be enlisted in spying on Americans. So this "reform" is going to enable even more spying on the American People! The good news, to quote the poet again, is that “every moment is a fresh beginning.” Now that these tricks have been spotted in the House Intelligence bill, House members will have a chance to toss out that bill and vote instead for the Protect Liberty and End Warrantless Surveillance Act, which passed the House Judiciary Committee with overwhelming support. That bill likewise reauthorizes Section 702, but also imposes real reforms that will better protect Americans’ privacy from our nation’s overgrown and (sometimes) deceptive intelligence apparatus. After this, I'm not sure I would trust the other bill, but it's troubling that a GOP led House committee tried to slip this past us.
https://reason.com › 2023 › 12 › 08 › congress-prepares-to-reauthorize-a-warrantless-domestic-spying-program-the-fbi-abused Congress Prepares To Reauthorize FISA Despite FBI's Misuse - Reason.com 'The Senate voted Thursday to advance the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), and the 3,000-page bill contains a "clean" reauthorization of Section 702, according to Sen. Mike Lee' Mike Lee is against renewal without reform. He wants warrants required to spy on Americans. 'The House Judiciary Committee approved a bill on Wednesday to reauthorize Section 702 with the added requirement that the FBI and other intelligence agencies obtain a warrant before using the program to obtain information about Americans.' "The overwhelming, bipartisan vote in favor of this legislation confirms a mutual interest in protecting our Fourth Amendment privacy rights from rogue intelligence actors," Rep. Andy Biggs (R–Ariz.), chairman of the House subcommittee on federal surveillance issues, said in a statement. "Any effort to stall consideration or pass a clean extension of the current FISA authorities is a punishment of the American people." 'However, the House Intelligence Committee passed its own version of a Section 702 reauthorization on Thursday. That bill would only require that the FBI establish probable cause before searching the Section 702 database for information about Americans, Roll Call '. So, spying on Americans without warrants. 'When Section 702 was approved in 2008, it removed older provisions of the FISA law that required the government to obtain a warrant from the special FISA court before wiretapping communications between Americans and foreigners. Agencies must obtain permission from the FISA court before conducting any surveillance, but the court effectively rubber-stamps all requests and does not review specific targets.' FISA is absolutely worthless. The FBI lies and submits forgeries without consequence, even in an effort to drive the elected President from office. Go back to Bill of Rights warrants. 'the FBI improperly used its warrantless search powers more than 278,000 times during 2021 alone.' We need 10 year prison terms and loss of pension when the FBI misuses its granted powers to abuse Americans.
MORE GOVERNMENT-SPREAD MISINFORMATION: This FBI Tweet Just Got Nuked by Community Notes. “Do we need reminding that the FBI is staffed with bad people, the worst in committing acts of government overreach? Agents visit people’s homes because they posted anti-Biden material on social media. Illegal FISA warrants are atrocious, but now they’re targeting Americans exercising free speech rights. Why? Are they compiling an enemies list? Would you be shocked? Not me.” FBI Agent Says He Hassles People ‘Every Day, All Day Long’ Over Facebook Posts. “It’s just an effort to keep everybody safe and make sure nobody has any ill will,” he claimed. The lying scum of the FBI 'Last week, the FBI probably didn’t expect to be fact-checked this brutally on social media. The agency’s director, Christopher Wray, testified before Congress that the agency had always complied with the rules and regulations concerning the process required in obtaining FISA spy warrants against American citizens. We know that’s a total lie. The bureau doctored evidence to secure FISA warrants against former Trump campaign officials, Carter Page being the top target.' Actually, the lying scum of the FBI 'violated the Fourth Amendment rights of American citizens over 250,000 times with illegal FISA spy warrants:' Christopher Wray should be facing prison for lying to Congress.
JUST LET IT DIE: House GOP considers backup FISA plan to sunset spy tool after stunning floor defeat. The FBI has proven, thousands of times, that it illegally uses FISA against Americans, political opponents, congressmen, and likely, judges. They cannot be trusted. 'the Intelligence Committee opposes warrant requirements for searching data of a U.S. citizen and Davidson’s Not For Sale Act, which would prohibit the third-party sale of U.S. citizens’ data and information without a court order.' I want both the warrants and the prohibition. 'The “no” votes of 19 House Republicans and all Democrats sent House GOP leadership back to the drawing board to find consensus on how to go about renewing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which sunsets every five years.'
Weird how the FBI loves to use FISA to spy on Republicans without article III court warrants, but not the Dem militias of Antifa. 'Kyle Benjamin Douglas Calvert, the Antifa member suspect arrested over a nail bombing of the Alabama Attorney General's office, is trans nonbinary. Federal prosecutors have requested the court detain Calvert without bond because he is extremely violent and dangerous.' https://ngo.locals.com/post/5500398/breaking-suspected-antifa-member-arrested-over-bombing-of-alabama-attorney-general-office They might want to confine their lawlessness to jurisdictions with Soros prosecutors and blue state juries. Which might not be what they find themselves facing in Alabama.
I think they view Bribed Joe as manageable. I don't think they fear him in the least. I suspect that they hold him in the same contempt that most of the rest of us do.
Biden's critics tend to dismiss him as a demented old man forgetting that the "demented" are often unpredictable and unmanageable. The secret police, as opposed to idle scribblers like us, never feel secure. They know that they will always a primary target of a political purge because they are inevitably a threat to "members of the government". "Closely connected with this transformation of the suspect into the objective enemy is the change of position of the secret police in the totalitarian state. The secret services have rightly been called a state within the state, and this not only in despotisms but also under constitutional or semi-constitutional governments. The mere possession of secret information has always given this branch a decisive superiority over all other branches of the civil services and constituted an open threat to members of the government." THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM, By Hannah Arendt, Meridian Books, Cleveland, New York, 1958. https://archive.org/stream/TheOriginsOfTotalitarianism/The-Origins-of-Totalitarianism_djvu.txt
That's how authoritarian regimes generally end, with the smaller authoritarian group slaughtered by the much larger group they unjustly control. We are one of the longest enduring governments in existence today because our Framers/Founders had the insight that the key to stability is a Well Armed Free People and their consent. And you're right. The weirdness, freakiness, illegitimate attempts and disarming us, suppressing our speech, rigging elections, selective prosecution, all betray the status insecurity of the illegitimate Deep State and the Privileged Gentry.
