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

Star Wars VII - So very, very tired

 

For the Love of God No!

Does Anybody Really Want an Old Han Solo?

By Gary;

The announcement has been made.  Star Wars Episode VII will begin filming in January 2014, producer-director J.J. Abrams and Disney have announced.  Back are the ancient Harrison Ford, a very used Carrie Fisher, a butt ugly Mark Hamill and a not too bad looking Billy Dee Williams.

Rumors are that the studio is laying in a good supply of prunes, walkers and oxygen tanks for the geriatric cast.

This is a fucking joke!  I mean, what more can you say?  This crap needs to be shipped off to a galaxy far, far away.

Who in their right mind would cast old used up actors far past their prime in an attempt to re-boot a film franchise?

The James Bond series would have died off years ago if newer and younger actors has not been cast.

I know it’s painful, but try and remember back to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Yes, the movie was bad, for any number of reasons, but for me, a 65-year-old Indiana Jones simply wasn’t the one I wanted.

I wanted the one who told Marion Ravenwood, “It’s not the years, honey; it’s the mileage,” not the one who so obviously looked like it was, actually, the years.  And now Harrison Ford looks all the 70 years he has lived.

Pop culture’s great characters achieve immortality through reinterpretation. The ones who last, truly last, are the ones that have been processed and refashioned for each generation that encounters them.

Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes, Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, James Bond, James Kirk -- they will outlive us all because they are bigger than any one actor. I want the same thing for the Star Wars characters. I want immortality for them.

So for the love of God, I want Disney and the director to recast this movie.

DOJ covers up Secret Court's ruling on unconstitutional spying

Justice Department Fights Release of Secret Court Opinion Finding Unconstitutional Surveillance

• Government lawyers are trying to keep buried a classified court finding that a domestic spying program went too far.

The Republic is Dead.  Long Live the Police State

George Washington, John Adams and Ben Franklin are turning over in their graves.  We have fallen from a free Republic to a semi-Fascist government of secret courts, attacks on the 2nd Amendment and a bi-partisan Big Brother Surveillance Police State.

In the midst of revelations that the government has conducted extensive top-secret surveillance operations to collect domestic phone records and internet communications, the Justice Department was due to file a court motion Friday in its effort to keep secret an 86-page court opinion that determined that the government had violated the spirit of federal surveillance laws and engaged in unconstitutional spying.

This important case—all the more relevant in the wake of this week's disclosures—was triggered after Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the Senate intelligence committee, started crying foul in 2011 about US government snooping. As a member of the intelligence committee, he had learned about domestic surveillance activity affecting American citizens that he believed was improper reports Mother Jones.

He and Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.), another intelligence committee member, raised only vague warnings about this data collection, because they could not reveal the details of the classified program that concerned them. But in July 2012, Wyden was able to get the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to declassify two statements that he wanted to issue publicly. They were:

* On at least one occasion the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court held that some collection carried out pursuant to the Section 702 minimization procedures used by the government was unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment.
* I believe that the government's implementation of Section 702 of FISA [the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] has sometimes circumvented the spirit of the law, and on at least one occasion the FISA Court has reached this same conclusion.

Wyden's statements led to an obvious conclusion: He had seen a secret FISA court opinion that ruled that one surveillance program was unconstitutional and violated the spirit of the law. But, yet again, Wyden could not publicly identify this program.

Enter the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a public interest group focused on digital rights. It quickly filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Justice Department for any written opinion or order of the FISA court that held government surveillance was improper or unconstitutional. The Justice Department did not respond, and EFF was forced to file a lawsuit a month later.
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It took the Justice Department four months to reply. The government's lawyers noted that they had located records responsive to the request, including a FISA court opinion. But the department was withholding the opinion because it was classified.

"Stand your ground. Don't fire unless fired upon,
but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here."
Captain John Parker
at Lexington 

EFF pushed ahead with its lawsuit, and in a filing in April, the Justice Department acknowledged that the document in question was an 86-page opinion the FISA court had issued on October 3, 2011. Again, there was no reference to the specific surveillance activity that the court had found improper or unconstitutional.

And now the department argued that the opinion was controlled by the FISA court and could only be released by that body, not by the Justice Department or through an order of a federal district court. In other words, leave us alone and take this case to the secret FISA court itself.

This was puzzling to EFF, according to David Sobel, a lawyer for the group. In 2007, the American Civil Liberties Union had asked the FISA court to release an opinion, and the court had informed the ACLU to take the matter up with the Justice Department and work through a district court, if necessary.

Before EFF could get a ruling on whether this opinion can be declassified and released, it had to first sort out this Alice in Wonderland situation. Consequently, last month, it filed a motion with the FISA court to resolve this aspect of the case.

"We want the FISA court to say that if the district court says the opinion should be released, there is noting in its rules that prevents that," Sobel says. Then EFF can resume its battle with the Justice Department in federal district court for the release of the opinion. The Justice Department was ordered by the FISA court to respond by June 7 to the motion EFF submitted to the FISA court.

Currently, given the conflicting positions of the Justice Department and the FISA court, Sobel notes, "there is no court you can go to to challenge the secrecy" protecting an opinion noting that the government acted unconstitutionally.

Blowing the whistle on Big Brother

"I don't want to live in a world where there's no privacy and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity."

Edward Snowden

Edward Snowden took a stand for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, but will the American Sheeple give a shit?  or will the mouth-breathing Sheeple simply change the channel back to the "Slut Housewives of New Jersey"?

Except for a few sane voices like Senators Rand Paul and Ron Wyden, most Democrats and Republicans are circling the wagons to defend the unconstitutional 1984 Police State that they have been busy creating.

Our whistleblower Snowden left the CIA in 2009 in order to take his first job working for a private contractor that assigned him to a functioning NSA facility, stationed on a military base in Japan. It was then, he said, that he "watched as Obama advanced the very policies that I thought would be reined in", and as a result, "I got hardened."

The primary lesson from this experience was that "you can't wait around for someone else to act. I had been looking for leaders, but I realised that leadership is about being the first to act."

Over the next three years, he learned just how all-consuming the NSA's surveillance activities were, claiming "they are intent on making every conversation and every form of behaviour in the world known to them".

Once he reached the conclusion that the NSA's surveillance net would soon be irrevocable, he said it was just a matter of time before he chose to act. "What they're doing" poses "an existential threat to democracy", he said.

Having watched the Obama administration prosecute whistleblowers at a historically unprecedented rate, he fully expects the US government to attempt to use all its weight to punish him. "I am not afraid," he said calmly, "because this is the choice I've made."

He predicts the government will launch an investigation and "say I have broken the Espionage Act and helped our enemies, but that can be used against anyone who points out how massive and invasive the system has become".

(UK Guardian)

Sunday Comics

Could Plastic Surgery Be Your Ticket To Employment? - Dr. Good - Ep. 2 

The Onion's Future News From The Year 2137

Dr. Michael Savage: "ACLU turns on Obama"

A must listen to broadcast
The ACLU rips into Obama while most Republican and Democrat politicians support the all-powerful Big Brother Surveillance State


“Even the ACLU is shocked” by the Obama administration’s secret grab of phone records of millions of Americans, says talk-radio host Michael Savage.

He noted on his nationally syndicated show Friday night that while Obama has characterized the government’s access to the data as a “modest encroachment” on privacy, an ACLU senior policy analyst called it a “gross privacy invasion.”

Recalling the warnings in his “Beware the Government-Media Complex” speech to the Commonwealth Club of California in 2000, Savage told his listeners the NSA’s snooping is “the biggest scandal of your entire life.”

“I’ve always run my life as if I’m listened in on,” he said.


Dr. Michael Savage
A must listen You Tube broadcast.  Exposes and Destroys Tyrant Barack Obama Over Massive Spying.

Savage cited an op-ed for Reuters by the ACLU’s Ben Wizner that pointed out the disturbing privacy implications of the Obama administration’s surveillance program.

A Massachusetts Institute of Technology study, Wizner wrote, concluded that “reviewing people’s social networking contacts alone was sufficient to determine their sexual orientation.”

He noted that “metadata from email communications was sufficient to identify the mistress of then-CIA Director David Petraeus and then drive him out of office.”

The ACLU analyst said “repeated calls to Alcoholics Anonymous, hotlines for gay teens, abortion clinics or a gambling bookie may tell you all you need to know about a person’s problems.”

“If a politician were revealed to have repeatedly called a phone sex hotline after 2:00 a.m., no one would need to know what was said on the call before drawing conclusions,” said Wizner. “In addition sophisticated data-mining technologies have compounded the privacy implications by allowing the government to analyze terabytes of metadata and reveal far more details about a person’s life than ever before.”

ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer, who argued the case before the Supreme Court, said the new revelations “make clear that the NSA – part of the military – now has direct access to every corner of Americans’ digital lives.”

“Unchecked government surveillance presents a grave threat to democratic freedoms,” he said.


Read more at World Net Daily.

Rand Paul's acts to save the Bill of Rights from our own Congress

 

 

“Fourth Amendment Restoration Act”

Rand Paul stands almost alone and introduces a bill to prevent government seizure of phone records

• Meanwhile both Democrats and Republicans in Congress (who voted to create & fund a Police State) either pretend to be "outraged" at unconstitutional spying or they defend it.

Senator Rand Paul (Constitutional Federalist - Kentucky) introduced legislation Friday that would prevent the government from obtaining the phone records of Americans without "a warrant based on probable cause," following reports that the National Security Agency has secretly been collecting the records of millions of Americans.

It appeared to be the moment Paul, a vocal defender of civil liberties, was waiting for. He announced his bill, "The Fourth Amendment Restoration Act of 2013," in a statement Thursday, as his colleagues on Capitol Hill were busy defending the NSA program.

The “Fourth Amendment Restoration Act,” which can be read in full here, is designed “to stop the National Security Agency from spying on citizens of the United States and for other purposes” and would require a warrant with probable cause before government investigators could proceed with a search.

"The revelation that the NSA has secretly seized the call records of millions of Americans, without probable cause, represents an outrageous abuse of power and a violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution," Paul said. "The bill restores our Constitutional rights and declares that the Fourth Amendment shall not be construed to allow any agency of the United States government to search the phone records of Americans without a warrant based on probable cause."

Paul strongly condemned the surveillance, calling it an "astounding assault on the Constitution." He accused President Barack Obama of being more "bent towards authoritarianism" than former President George W. Bush.

On Wednesday the Guardian newspaper reported the Verizon company had shared daily records of all its customers’ phone calls with the US government between April and July, after a secret US court approved the program. But the Washington Post reports the classified records may go back to 2006 and involve other companies.

The Post followed with a new report today that several leading Internet companies had contributed to a separate program that allowed intelligence agencies to tap into “audio, video, photographs, e-mails and other documents” of their users.

(Huffington Post)


Video - England Experiences Alex Jones 1776 Style
I don't agree with Alex Jones on every issue.  But Jones supports Constitutional Liberty while our own Congress is spying on Americans. 

In a freshly trimmed corner of the grounds of the Grove Hotel, half a mile from the secret Bilderberg Conference, the most important international policy conference in the world, something remarkable happened: the mainstream press showed up. In droves.

Reuters, AP, Channel 4 News, the Times, the Telegraph, the Press Association, London Tonight. The BBC had at least three radio reporters here.

While they talked and reported, on the first day of the four-day event, politicians and businessmen sped past behind blacked-out windows: the guest list, published for the first time, includes George Osborne, Ed Balls, the founder of Amazon, chairman of Google and the chief executives of both BP and Shell.

The Bi-partisan Data-Mining Utah Compound - 1984 is Here

"I'm shocked, shocked to find that data-mining is going on in here."

1984 is Here  -  Democrats & GOP are building a 1,000,000 sq. foot data-mining facility in Utah to spy on everyone

• Labels such as "Liberal" or "Conservative" have no meaning.  Both parties in Congress eagerly work together to build, grow and fund the unconstitutional Big Brother Police State.

Bottom line  -  The lying sacks of shit in Congress go on TV, look you in the eye, and claim they are SHOCKED that the programs they vote for are creating a Big Brother Police State.  You can smell that line of Bullshit 500 miles away.

The personal data and private online conversations that the National Security Administration is accused of mining could be stashed in a one million square-foot, $1.9 billion facility in the Utah Valley.

Concerns over what the government will store at the Utah Data Center have been reinvigorated by the revelation that U.S. intelligence agencies have been extracting audio, video, photos, e-mails, documents and other information to track people's movements and contacts.

Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Skype, AOL and the lesser known Internet company PalTalk are all involved with the PRISM program, which the government insists is for national security reports the UK Daily Mail.
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TOP SECRET
The bi-partisan Utah Data-Mining center opens in October.

Welcome to the Utah Data Center
Hmmm . . . Could it be that the military is gathering Internet
data on civilians?  Say it ain't so.

The Utah Data Center which is being constructed on Camp Williams on the Salt Lake-Utah County line will be completed in October - but officials have been tight-lipped about what will be stored there.
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Plans released by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is handling the construction, show the center will have four 'data halls' to store information and two substations to power the facility.
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The spy center is being built at an estimated cost of $1.9 billion, and is expected to employ 100 to 200 permanent employees after its completion. The plans note they must all be U.S. citizens.

Despite the boom for the local economy, the American Civil Liberties Union of Utah has expressed their fears over what will be stored at the center.
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'We're mining data, we're gathering data and it's all done secretly,' ACLU of Utah director Karen McCreary told Fox13. 'We don't even know what's going on.'

'When the NSA facility in Utah was announced, local officials praised it for the jobs it would bring,' Libertas director Connor Boyack added.
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'As Americans are now learning, those jobs entail harvesting the data generated by innocent Americans not suspected of any crime, in contradiction to the Fourth Amendment.'
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The fears come as The Washington Post reported that for the past six years, U.S. intelligence agencies have been extracting personal information from across the country.

The PRISM program was launched in 2007 with the blessing of special federal judges under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The Post said that several members of the U.S. Congress were made aware of the classified data-gathering program, but were sworn to secrecy.

PRISM has been described by NSA officials 'as the most prolific contributor to the president's Daily Brief' and the 'leading source of raw material', the Post reported. The Post noted that the tech companies are knowingly taking part in PRISM, but The Guardian, which also received a leaked NSA report, reported than all nine pleaded ignorance of the program.


Casablanca gambling? I'm shocked! 
The lying sacks of shit in Congress go on TV, look you in the eye, and claim the are SHOCKED that they programs they vote for are creating a Big Brother Police State.

We are watching you in Utah.

Obama: "Why am I here again?"

'Uhhh…Uh…Uhhh….People!' Obama at Total Loss for Words When Staff Forgets His Speech

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Comrade Obama strolled out to the podium today in San Jose, CA and was immediately at a loss for words. Not only did the President not have his teleprompter, his aides forgot his speech.

“My remarks are not sitting here,” the President declared awkwardly. “I’m uhhh….people….oh goodness….uhhhh...folks are sweating back there right now.”

President Obama, who’s often mocked for an over-reliance on scripts, shifted uncomfortably smiling for several moments buying time. An aide sprinted out with a hard copy of the speech, tripping at one point, adding to the drama.


Read more: Fox New.

Obama's EPA gives private farmer info to environmentalists

Obama's EPA leaked personal data of more than 80,000 farms and livestock facilities to Left-Wing Environmental Groups

• Obama Socialists target family farms.

A bipartisan group of 24 senators demanded answers Thursday from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on why it leaked the personal data of more than 80,000 farms and livestock facilities to environmental groups.

“We are writing today to express concern regarding the sensitivity of the data that was released,” the senators wrote in a letter to EPA acting administrator Bob Perciasepe. “Unlike most regulated facilities, farms and ranches are also homes and information regarding these facilities should be treated and released with that understanding.”

The letter follows an April report by Fox News revealing the agency had released the personal information on thousands of farmers, many of whom had only a few animals reports the Washington Free Beacon.

The information was obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by Earth Justice, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Pew Charitable Trust.

According to a document obtained by FOX the EPA said “some of the personal information that could have been protected … was released.”

Senators asked the EPA in the letter why some of the information was collected in the first place and under whose authority it was released.

Sen. Roy Blunt (R., Mo.) said the EPA intentionally targeted farmers when it released the information.

“Whether they’re spying on farmers or leaking their personal information, the EPA is clearly targeting farm families, and this has to stop,” Blunt, said in a statement Thursday. “Americans deserve answers immediately on what the Obama administration is doing to stop this clear invasion of privacy.”

The EPA said it has asked the organizations to which it released the data return the original forms with the personal information.