Rubber Stamp Justice: FISA approved 99.97% of Warrants

Rubber Stamp Justice

The "Independent" FISA Court Approves 99.97% of Government Requests for Warrants

The terms "Liberal" or "Conservative" have no meaning.  You either believe in Constitutional Freedom or you worship the centralized All-Powerful Big Brother State.

The Washington Post reports there have been 34,000 FISA Court warrant applications, only 11 were denied. What’s the point of having a court if they’re going to rubber stamp nearly every request by Big Government?

Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU’s deputy legal director, said the revelations that the government secured telephone records from Verizon and Internet data from some of the largest providers proved the case for a 1984 surveillance state.

Jaffer represented a group of lawyers and journalists challenging a 2008 expansion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows the interception of electronic communications between foreign targets and people in the United States. It allows national security officials to obtain authorization from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to track suspects for up to one year.

 

The Supreme Court split along ideological grounds. The "Conservative" majority threw out the Bill of Rights in a 5 to 4 ruling that because the group could not prove that its communications had been intercepted, its lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the law could not go forward.

The Court dismissed their suit on the grounds that they lack "standing" to sue because they can't prove that their conversations with sources and clients abroad actually have been monitored.

Writing for the court, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said that the individuals who filed suit "merely speculate and make assumptions about whether their communications with their foreign contacts will be acquired" under the law. Alito was supported by Conservatives John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas.
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Of course, in a Catch-22, the plaintiffs can't prove they have "standing"  because the surveillance program is top secret. 

See our article "The Supreme Court just abolished the 4th Amendment."
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Justice Stephen G. Breyer, writing for the liberal dissenters, said the majority was wrong to accept the government’s view that the challengers’ belief that their communications were intercepted was “speculative.”

“We need only assume that the government is doing its job (to find out about, and combat, terrorism) in order to conclude that there is a high probability that the government will intercept at least some electronic communication to which at least some of the plaintiffs are parties,” he wrote.

In an interview Friday, Jaffer said: “It turns out the kind of things the government said were only speculative were in fact going on at the same time.”


Judge Napolitano on the NSA spying

See the full article at The Washington Post.com