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Comment by new_realist | Hacker News Reader

He is helping himself, by removing oversight on his activities with respect to covert contacts with Russian agents.

Are you saying that pretty much Nixon should have been okay to have his intelligence organs spy on his opponents?

The fact that some intelligence apparatuses were spying on congress people[1] is something that should not have happened; it did but there have been no repercussions for that. How did Brennan get away with that?

[1]https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/a-brief...

You don’t need unconstitutional mass surveillance to investigate any of those things. I’m sick of people using terrorists, foreign agents, child exploiters, bigtech, or whatever else they come up with to justify government abuses.

Isn't anyone who opposes secret surveillance with minimal oversight "helping themselves"?

Warrants are required for FISA activities, and the surveillance is limited to non-citizens.

> the surveillance is limited to non-citizens

How many times have we heard that one before?

The FBI and local law enforcement can already investigate citizens in accordance with due process. Are you saying the FBI shouldn’t also have the power to investigate foreign governments or agents?

> Warrants are required for FISA activities

A general warrant is not what most people would consider a valid warrant. It’s more like a rubber stamp.

> surveillance is limited to non-citizens

Being a non-citizen doesn’t somehow make you a lesser being unworthy of basic human rights.

So Carter Page is a non-citizen? Because the FBI was granted a FISA warrant to surveil him, and the Trump though the two hop rule? Not to mention it's been stated publicly by the OIG that the FBI used falsified evidence to receive those warrants

isn't it communications with non-citizens?

I imagine the government can twist that to mean that if a non-citizens could see it, then the government can access it legally.

But he’s the President so even without the flawed premise what you’re saying makes no sense.

Admitting to not being an expert in American politics; but the FISA court was obviously going to be a disaster when it was established. It has been discovered that in recent times it was used to investigate an incoming presidential candidate (!) and set up years of harassment that seem to have eventually sorta died down to a general background murmuring based on it not being a major component of his impeachment.

The worst-case path forward is for Trump to organise for Bernie Sanders, or whoever the next Democratic candidate is, to be secretly investigated via the FISA court for potential Russia links. Any move towards limiting (or ideally disbanding) the FISA court really should transcend politics. The worst case of the FISA court is horrific, and the expected case (which is really where we are now) is bad.

I think the FISA court was originally introduced because the State was abusing its power by illegally spying on citizens and the FISA court was meant to replace this unregulated illegal spying with legal spying regulated by a court. I guess the better solution may have been to stop the spying all together but FISA court was probably an improvement on the existing practices.

Right wingers used to post a low effort meme along the lines of, “WTF I love ____ now” or “WTF I hate ____ now”.

Now for whatever reason, people in this thread have decided to prove them right, by acting out the meme in real time.

How so?

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