Napolitano: Our Secretive, Witch-Hunting Government
Photo Credit: infomatique
The Obama administration is of the view that the NSA can spy on anyone anywhere. The president believes that federal statutes enable the secret FISA Court to authorize the NSA to capture any information it desires about any persons without identifying the persons and without a showing of probable cause of criminal behavior on the part of the persons to be spied upon. This is the same mindset the British government had with respect to the colonists. It, too, believed that British law permitted a judge in secret in Britain to issue general warrants to be executed in the colonies at the whim of British agents.
General warrants do not state the name of the place to be searched or the person or thing to be seized, and they do not have the necessity of individualized probable cause as their linchpin. They simply authorize the bearer to search wherever he wishes for whatever he wants. General warrants were universally condemned by colonial leaders across the ideological spectrum – from those as radical as Sam Adams to those as establishment as George Washington, and from those as individualistic as Thomas Jefferson to those as big-government as Alexander Hamilton. We know from the literature of the times that the whole purpose of the Fourth Amendment – with its requirements of individualized probable cause and specifically identifying the target – is to prohibit general warrants.
And yet, the FISA Court has been issuing general warrants and the NSA executing them since at least 2004.
Last week we learned in a curious colloquy between members of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee and Gen. Keith Alexander and Deputy Attorney General James Cole that it is more likely than not that the FISA Court has permitted the NSA to seize not only telephone, Internet and texting records, but also utility bills, credit card bills, banking records, social media records and digital images of mail, and that there is no upper limit on the number of Americans’ records seized or the nature of those records.
Read more from this story HERE.
After a group of veterans “stormed” the barricaded World War II memorial in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday, other WWII veterans groups are planning to visit the same site on Wednesday — which only exists because of their service. Meanwhile, another Honor Flight group in Ohio is claiming that the Park Service threatened to arrest its members if they entered the closed memorial during their planned visit on Oct. 9 (assuming the government is still “shut down”).
