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Attorney General William Barr wants the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to be renewed pronto with no questions asked. If any reforms are needed, he promises to take care of them himself: Dont worry yourself, America.

Is Barr kidding?

First, a short history lesson. Due to the officials within the government, including Presidents Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, and no doubt many before them, using federal resources to spy on citizens and political opponents, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was passed in 1978. The law set up rules and a court designed to protect our Fourth Amendment privacy rights.

The goal was noble: FISA and its court would give the green light on going after terrorists while, ostensibly, protecting U.S. citizens from unconstitutional intrusions. Then, in the wake of 9/11, Congress passed the USA Patriot Act, which lowered FISA standards. This, too, was supposedly for the sole purpose of targeting terrorists.

But by 2003, according to the New York Times, The Bush administration, which calls the USA Patriot Act perhaps its most essential tool in fighting terrorists, has begun using the law with increasing frequency in many criminal investigations that have little or no connection to terrorism.

The newspaper reported, The government is using its expanded authority under the far-reaching law to investigate suspected drug traffickers, white-collar criminals, blackmailers, child pornographers, money launderers, spies and even corrupt foreign leaders.

Obviously, what was originally promised concerning the scope of the Patriot Act has changed significantly. This point was driven home in the 2006 movie The Departed, in which Boston police officers and the FBI are surveilling gangsters, and the police captain exclaims, The Patriot Act! I love it! I love it! I love it!

Far from just focusing on terrorists, the Patriot Act has become an extraconstitutional law enforcement tool. It has overwhelmingly been used to catch drug dealers more than terrorists. The Washington Post reported in 2011 that after a decade, the Patriot Act ha[d] been used in 1,618 drug cases and only 15 terrorism cases.

In 2013, whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed to the world that the U.S. government was spying on everyone in every way imaginable. Former President Barack Obama attacked Snowden and insisted that government agents were "not abusing [their] authorities to listen to your private phone calls or read your emails."

In fact, the government was doing all of these things. By 2019, many wondered if the U.S. government had spied on President Trumps campaign exactly the kind of Watergate-style corruption that inspired FISA in the first place.

Obviously, FISA is badly in need of reform.

With FISAs expiration looming in mid-March, Barr held a lunch briefing on Tuesday that most Republicans came out of agreeing to pass a clean extension, with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell leading the pack. Barr assured them that any changes that needed to be made to prevent Trump or citizens from being spied on illegally again are actions he would take internally.

Yeah, right. It should be noted here that Barr believes the Patriot Act doesnt go far enough.

When libertarian-leaning Republican Sens. Rand Paul and Mike Lee voiced their objections to what essentially amounts to a reformless FISA extension, Barr reportedly told them criticizing U.S. government surveillance was dangerous. Why? Because it supposedly helps terrorists. This debate is just about terrorism. Nothing else.

Sound familiar?

In a series of tweets, Lee laid out what reforms he believed needed to be made before FISA should be renewed and added in a later tweet:

Its a safe bet that most Americans would agree. Sadly, the attorney general could care less about FISA reform. After all, Barr is asking citizens to entrust him with protecting the same constitutional rights he has abused for decades.

Jack Hunter (@jackhunter74) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog. He is the former political editor of Rare.us and co-authored the 2011 book The Tea Party Goes to Washington with Sen. Rand Paul.

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Bill Barr can't be trusted to reform unconstitutional FISA surveillance - Washington Examiner

from the try-not-to-ask-what-your-country-can-do-for-you-because-as-you-can-see... dept

The telephone metadata program the NSA finally put out to pasture in 2019 was apparently well past its expiration date. Since the initial Snowden leak in 2013, critics have argued the program needed to die since it was obviously the sort of general warrant rummaging (only without the warrant!) the founding fathers headed off with the Fourth Amendment.

The program wasn't remade/remodeled until the passage of the USA Freedom Act in 2015. That took the phone records away from the NSA and left them at their place of origin -- the databases maintained by telcos and other service providers. The government was also required to put forward some sort of articulable suspicion before asking for phone records from telcos.

The NSA was uniquely unprepared to handle these sorts of transactions, having been built from the ground up to collect everything and sort through it later. Now that its searches were more confined, it frequently found itself obtaining more records than it could legally justify having. The cost of compliance managed to outweigh the benefits of the program and the NSA just kind of stopped approaching the FISA court with requests for communications metadata.

Still, proponents argued the program had value -- possibly unrealized -- and that it should not be written out of existence by the periodic surveillance powers renewal process. I have no idea what they planned to use as evidence for these claims. A new report by Charlie Savage for the New York Times makes it clear even the most obligatory cost-benefit analysis should lead Congressional oversight to question why it allowed the modified Section 215 collection to limp along for another five years.

A National Security Agency system that analyzed logs of Americans domestic phone calls and text messages cost $100 million from 2015 to 2019, but yielded only a single significant investigation, according to a newly declassified study.

$100 million for a single investigation lead. How's that for ROI? It actually produced two leads, but the other lead was a dead end that terminated an investigation before it could get past its initial stages.

Not only was the program useless, it was also redundant.

It also disclosed that in the four years the Freedom Act system was operational, the National Security Agency produced 15 intelligence reports derived from it. The other 13, however, contained information the F.B.I. had already collected through other means, like ordinary subpoenas to telephone companies.

Killing the program just makes sense. And Congress can do it with during the renewal process for the USA Freedom Act, which expires in March of this year. With this information in the public domain, no one can seriously argue the program should continue to consume tax dollars and provide almost zero usable intel for another five years. Given the fact these agencies can still use subpoenas to target phone records, it would seem far more beneficial for everyone if the NSA and FBI did a bit more targeted snooping, rather than use the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to sweep up Americans' phone records.

Filed Under: mass surveillance, metadata, nsa, phone metadata, section 215, surveillance, usa freedom act

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NSA Blew $100 Million On Phone Records Over Five Years, Generated Exactly One Usable Lead - Techdirt

Socialist Bernie Sanders, the front runner in the race for the Democratic nomination for president, said on Tuesday night that he wants to help minorities start businesses to sell drugs.

And Ill tell you what else were going to do, were going to provide help to the African-American, Latino, Native American community to start businesses to sell legal marijuana rather than let a few corporations control the legalized marijuana market, Sanders said.

WATCH:

The Daily Wire highlighted Bernie Sanders stances on key policy issues in an in-depth profile piece last year:

On The Issues: Sanders calls himself ademocratic socialistwho, whiledisavowingwhole-hearted socialist theory with respect to government ownership of the means of production, nonetheless has consistently advocated for economic class warfare that pits the lower and middle classes against the wealthy. He has routinely supported anti-capitalistic and anti-growth economic policies, heavy-handed government regulation over the private economy, robust labor unions, and the Nordic model of a sprawling welfare state. On foreign policy, he has frequently mollycoddled communist dictatorships and has often been hostile toward Americas closest geopolitical allies. Overall, he is a far-left progressive who has long defined the leftward flank of what it means to be a progressive in America.

Constitution: Sanders supports a living Constitution interpretive methodology that effectively empowers unelected federal judges to determine large swaths of the laws that govern Americans lives. He is hostile to the First Amendments protection of free speech and has supported a constitutional amendment to overturn the political speech-affirming 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision ofCitizens United v. F.E.C.He has generally supported a more robust role for Congress and a more diminished role for the presidency in the context of foreign policy and the conduct of overseas military operations. He takes an expansive view of the Fourth Amendment and has even praised disgruntled NSA leaker Edward Snowden.

Economy: Sanders holds far-left views on economics that place him barely, if at all, to the right of an authentic European-style socialist. He supports punitive taxation and massive redistribution to mollify the purported scourge of wealth and income inequality in America. He has consistently supported substantial tax hikes on income, capital gains, and estates alike. Sanders supports substantial regulation of the financial services sector and large-scale government spending on infrastructure programs. He has generally opposed free trade due to reasons of labor protectionism. He has been critical of the Federal Reserve for allegedly empowering the wealthy. Sanders supports increasing the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15. He has taken a heavy-handed view of antitrust enforcement.

Health Care: Sanders is a longtime support of single-payer socialized medicine, and in many ways is the intellectual progenitor for the current Democratic Party candidate trend of favoring Medicare for All. He has often been critical of Obamacare for not going far enough with respect to health care coverage for all uncovered Americans. Sanders has never indicated any willingness to structurally reform fiscally ruinous health care-related entitlement programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid.

Immigration: Although Sanders once was sympathetic to restrictive immigration measures due to reasons of labor protectionism, he has emerged over the past decade as a reliable vote in favor of pro-amnesty, pro-illegal immigration policies. He supports a pathway to citizenship for large swaths of illegal aliens. He has often been very critical of the Trump administrations efforts at border security and immigration law enforcement.

Foreign Policy: Sanders has consistently opposed an aggressive overseas posture for U.S. foreign policy, and has routinely opposed large-scale U.S. military deployments overseas. He has been skeptical of or outright opposed to U.S. foreign policy missions against a wide variety of hostile actors both state and non-state actors across the Middle East. Sanders has long been deeply sympathetic toward communist Cuba including the openpraising of Fidel Castro and applauded the Obama administrations efforts at dtente with Cuba. He supported President Obamas Iran nuclear deal and has usually been more sympathetic to the Iranians and the Palestinian-Arabs than he has been to the Saudis and Israelis, respectively. He supports a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and has often been very hostile to Israels defensive measures against the radical Islamic terrorism that engulfs the Jewish state on all sides. While running for president in 2016, Sanderscited a blatantly false numberof Palestinian-Arab deaths that had allegedly resulted from the 2014 Gaza Strip war between the two sides.

Abortion: Sanders is fully pro-abortion, has never voted in favor of any piece of legislation that would restrict abortion, and has recently refused to identify any piece of legislation that he might support that would restrict abortion in any conceivable way. He supportsending the Hyde Amendment, which has historically banned taxpayer funding of abortion, and has vowed to never nominate anyone to the U.S. Supreme Court who is not adamantly in favor ofRoe v. Wade.

Guns: Although Sanders tenure in the House was marked by his opposition to various gun control measures, his tenure in the Senate has been marked by consistent support for gun control policies. Sanders supports a federal ban on assault weapons, supports universal background checks (i.e., background checks even for private firearms transfers), and has often criticized Republicans purported fealty to the National Rifle Association. Sanders supports a ban on the undefinable sub-class of firearms referred to as so-called assault weapons a line of thought that, if taken to its logical conclusion, couldlead to the banning of all semi-automatic firearms in America.

Continued here:
Bernie: We're Going To Help Minorities Start Businesses To Sell Drugs - The Daily Wire

Many Democrats are still acquiescing to a George W. Bush-era policy that has been in place for nearly 20 years.

There is still broad bipartisan support for the CDR program, bringing significant risk that Democrats could cut a deal for reforms with significantly less teethand more loopholesthan SAPRA.

Three key provisions of the USA Patriot Act, which give the Trump administration broad surveillance powers, are set to expire on March 15 unless Congress votes to reauthorize them. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is the only leading democratic presidential candidate in Congress who is publicly opposing them.

I voted against the Patriot Act in 2001, 2006, 2011 and 2015. I strongly oppose its reauthorization next month, he tweeted on February 11. I believe that in a democratic and constitutional form of government, we cannot sacrifice the civil liberties that make us a free country.

One provision is section 215, the bulk metadata collection program exposed by Edward Snowden. This provision underwent modest post-Snowden reforms in 2015, but its essence remains largely intact in the call detail records (CDR) program. The program authorizes the NSA to seize call records of people deemed a targetand the people those targets communicate with. In 2017 and 2018, this provision allowed the government to collect more than 968 million records. The government recently shut down the CDR program, admitting to its overreach, but the legal authority to reinstate it at any time remains.

This CDR program was shuttered by the government because of massive over-collection of millions of Americans records, Sandra Fulton, government relations director for Free Press, tellsIn These Times. At this point, eliminating the CDR program is low-hanging fruit for any reform that is at all acceptable. According to Fulton, even if the CDR program is currently shuttered, keeping it on the books is a problem, because the government could reactivate it at any time. If we find a program that's being an abuse, the government doesn't just get to keep it, she says.

The other two senators among the leading Demoratic candidates, Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), have not made similar statements publicly opposing the reauthorization, and neither returned In These Times request for comment.

Sen. Klobuchar voted to reauthorize the Patriot Act in 2011, while Sanders did not (Warren was not yet in the Senate). Both Klobuchar and Warren voted in favor of the USA Freedom Act in 2015, which imposed limited reforms on the Patriot Act; Sanders voted no, citing the inadequacy of the reforms. Warren did, however, vote no on2018 on a bill to extend the NSAs powers to carry out warrantless surveillance for another six years, as did Sanders. Klobuchar voted yes.

Speaking publicly against the Patriot Act could have a significant impact at a time Democrats are still acquiescing to a George W. Bush-era policy that has been in place for nearly 20 years. Last November, Democrats voted overwhelmingly for a measure granting a three-month extension of the three Patriot Act provisions, included in a House resolution to prevent a government shutdown, infuriating civil rights activists. Only 10 Democrats in the House voted against the reauthorization, among them Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), known as the squad. But Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) co-chairs Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Mark Pocan (D-Wisc.), and vice chairs, Reps. Ro Khanna (Calif.) and Barbara Lee (Calif.),all voted for it. (Neither Sanders, Warren nor Klobuchar were present for the Senate vote.)

As Sam Adler-Bell previously reported, the CPC said the extension was necessary to negotiate for better reforms, butthose progressives who voted yes caught considerable heat from activists. While we would oppose these authorities under any administration, history demonstrates that mass surveillance disproportionately impacts communities of color, immigrants, and other marginalized groups that Donald Trump is actively targeting, the activist organization Demand Progress said in a statement.

Likely in response to criticism, the CPC now says it doesnt plan to acquiesce to Bush-era spy powers so easily in mid-March.

For far too long, Congress has permitted blatant, unconstitutional violations of Americans Fourth Amendment rights under the PATRIOT Act, co-chairs Jayapal and Pocan told In These Times via email. Any long-term reauthorization of this legislation must contain meaningful and substantial reforms to these legal authorities, as proposed in the Safeguarding Americans Private Records Act (SAPRA), in order to secure our support.

Introduced by Sens. Ron Wyden (DOre.) and Steve Daines (RMont.) and Reps. Zoe Lofgren (DCalif.), Warren Davidson (ROhio), and Pramila Jayapal (DWash.),SAPRA, introduced in the House by on January 24 by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), would rescind authority for the CDR program. It has attracted support from a coalition of civil rights and privacy organizations, among them Color Of Change, Committee of Concerned Scientists and Indivisible.

However, the organizations note that the reform has shortcomings. In a letter, the coalition said that SAPRA does not, for instance, prohibit backdoor searches under Section 702, a loophole that poses a dangerous threat to Americans privacy by allowing the government to search through communications collected under Section 702 of FISA seeking information about Americans without a warrant. Further, it reauthorizes the so-called lone wolf authority, which has never been used and should be repealed just like the Section 215 CDR program. This lone wolf authority allowsthe government to wiretap someone who is not a U.S. personand not a part of a terrorist organizationbut deemed by the United States to be helping international terrorism (it is believedthat this provision has never been used).

Nonetheless, David Segal, the executive director of Demand Progress, tells In These Timesthat SAPRA is the only genuine reform bill in play.

Whatever this bills shortcomings, its almost certain to face opposition not only from the Trump administration, but from the Democratic Party leadership. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) played a significant role in November in pushing Democrats to endorse a reauthorization of the Patriot Actwith no reformsby slipping it into the funding bill. And impeachment manager Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who boosted his public profile by emphatically declaring that President Trump is dangerous to this country, was among the yes votes for full reauthorization of that presidents spy powers.

There is still significantbipartisan support for the CDR program, bringing significant risk that Democrats could cut a deal for reforms with less teethand more loopholesthan SAPRA.

A Sanders spokesperson noted to In These Times that the senator has been a supporter of Wyden's efforts to reform the Patriot Act and cosponsored his bipartisan USA RIGHTS Act. The spokespersonindicated that Sanders opposes the current iteration of the Patriot Act but would likely support Wyden's SAPRA legislation in the Senate, as it goes much further to protect privacy and civil liberties than a sunset of Section 215.

By coming out now against the mass surveillance powers, Sanders appears to besignaling to the CPC that it should find its backbone on this issue. And those who stay silent are implicitly encouraging the opposite.

This piece has beenupdated to include remarks from a spokesperson for Sanders that was sent following publication.

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Bernie Sanders Is the Only Leading Presidential Candidate Publicly Opposing the Patriot Act - In These Times

The U.S. Supreme Court has long recognized that the Fourth Amendment right to be free from "unreasonableseizure" includes the right to be free from unreasonable "seizure of the person," meaning detainment or arrest. What is more, as the Court held in California v. Hodari D. (1991), "the mere grasping or application of physical force with lawful authority, whether or not it succeeded in subduing the arrestee," qualifies as a seizure for Fourth Amendment purposes.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, however, apparently never got the memo. In Torres v. Madrid (2019), that court held that no seizure occurred when officers with the New Mexico State Police shot Roxanne Torres twice in the back, because their bullets did not actually stop her from getting away. According to the 10th Circuit, "an officer's intentional shooting of a suspect does not effect a seizure unless the 'gunshotterminate[s] [the suspect's] movement or otherwise cause[s] the government to have physical control over him.'"

It gets worse. The police shot Torres while she was in her car in the parking lot of her apartment building. The officers were there to arrest somebody else but claimed that they saw Torres acting in a suspicious manner. Torres thought she was being carjacked, later testifying that the officers, who were wearing tactical vests, never identified themselves when they approached her. What she saw were threatening figures standing at her car windows. So she drove away and was shot twice while fleeing for her life. Torres only learned that she had been shot by the cops when she was arrested a day later at the hospital. The excessive force complaint that Torres filed against those officers was killed off by the 10th Circuit's ruling.

The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments in Torres's case on March 30. She deserves to prevail. There is no question that the officers engaged in the "application of physical forcewhether or not it succeeded in subduing the arrestee." As Torres and her lawyers point out in their brief, when the officers "shot at Ms. Torres with the intent to stop her from leaving and two of the bullets struck her body, she was in that moment seized within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, regardless of what happened next."

Precisely. The 10th Circuit's decision should be overruled.

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The Supreme Court Tackles Police Shootings, Excessive Force, and the Fourth Amendment - Reason