Comments Posted By Gabriel Chapman
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You know the first few seasons of 24 were fun, but I've come to be dismayed by how much suspension of disbelief I have to bring into the show. The only covert intelligence operation as inept as CTU is our own CIA.
Comment Posted By Gabriel Chapman On 16.01.2006 @ 10:29
FISA is an old tool that needs to be reworked to be relevant and workable for todays fight, not the fight of the 70's. Nothing in a beauracracy is efficent.
I would add further from NRO today:
the April 14, 2004 meeting of the September 11 Commission, in which a commission staffer read some the panel's preliminary findings. Among those findings was the conclusion that, even after the reforms of the Patriot Act, the FISA application process was "long and slow":
Many agents in the field told us that although there is now less hesitancy in seeking approval for electronic surveillance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, the application process nonetheless continues to be long and slow. Requests for such approvals are overwhelming the ability of the system to process them and to conduct the surveillance. The Department of Justice and FBI are attempting to address bottlenecks in the process
Comment Posted By Gabriel Chapman On 20.12.2005 @ 14:34
Time is always a factor. One need only look at the time issues involved with the pre-9/11 work of Coleen Rowley to see this. FISA allows for 72 hour retroactive warrants if memory serves me right. Regardless, FISA may not apply here, given that such things as email and cellular phones were not around in 1978. FISA deals almost exclusively with wired transmissions (ie phones, fax).
Still as the facts have not yet been released we do not know if those involved were US Citizens or not.
Given that the prior administrations record on warantless wiretaps, etc was far more expansive than this instance, I can't recall any front page NYTimes articles about Clinton needing to be impeached for performing warrantless searches.
Still its debatable whether Bush had the authority to circumvent FISA entirely. The bipartisan resolution authorizing the use of force against al Qaeda in mine and others view is tantamount to a formal declaration of war. This gives the President the war time powers that allow him to circumvent certain FISA requirements and thus the whole issue ends up being just another media tactic to smear the President and or sell books.
Comment Posted By Gabriel Chapman On 20.12.2005 @ 13:59
Jason M:
You may have read the 4th Amendment, yet you did not comprehend it. Unless of course you find it UNREASONABLE to eavesdrop on the phone calls of foreign terrorists calling into and out of the United States.
Protip: it's the NSA's job to eavesdrop on electronic communications. Oddly enough the Clinton administration setup Echelon and utilized it much in the same way that the Bush administration has.
Comment Posted By Gabriel Chapman On 20.12.2005 @ 12:27
