Church Committee Report on NSA Surveillance Affecting Americans (1975) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Church Committee Report on NSA Surveillance Affecting Americans (1975) [pdf]

aarclibrary.org

75 pointscinquemb12 comments

Thank you for posting this, OP. I've run across references to it but never took the time to read it.

This part blows my mind. The NSA has no legal oversight and it claims that the 4th Amendment doesn't apply to it:

NSA does not have a statutory charter; its operational responsibilities are set forth exclusively in executive directives first issued in the 1950s. One of the questions which the Senate asked the Committee to consider was the "need for specific legislative authority to govern the operations of...the National Security Agency."

According to NSA's General Counsel, no existing statutes control, limit, or define the signals intelligence activities of NSA. Further, the General Counsel asserts that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to NSA's interception of Americans' international communications for foreign intelligence purposes.

>...international communications for foreign intelligence purposes.

It's because it's international communications. You fourth amendment rights only extend within the borders of the entity that protects those rights.

"Next in importance to personal freedom is immunity from suspicions, and jealous observation. Men may be without restraints upon their liberty: they may pass to and fro at pleasure: but if their steps are tracked by spies and informers, their words noted down for crimination, their associates watched as conspirators, who shall say that they are free?

Nothing is more revolting to Englishmen than the espionage which forms part of the administrative system of continental despotisms. It haunts men like an evil genius, chills their gaiety, restrains their wit, casts a shadow over their friendships, and blights their domestic hearth.

The freedom of a country may be measured by its immunity from this baleful agency. Rulers who distrust their own people, must govern in a spirit of absolutism; and suspected subjects will be ever sensible of their bondage."

The Constitutional History Of England Vol II (1863), pg. 288

by T. E. May

It really saddens me as someone born in the US, that the ideals that are embodied by our constitution are never abstracted (at least by our supposed leaders) to possibly being able to be applied to people outside of the lines drawn by men in our maps.

And while it may be true that under current legal statutes x amendment does not apply to y citizens of z countries, hearing it used in arguments to justify the treatment of fellow human beings contrary to the ideals we seek to reinforce throughout the world and of ourselves is pretty repulsive.

Another perspective is that the rules of war are different from the rules of Main Street, USA. The NSA is on a continual war footing. Its job is to help defend the United States from its enemies. Until war (and terrorism) is abolished, there will always be behaviors which are allowed in war but not in peacetime. For example, warrants are not needed to kill a soldier on the battlefield, nor to search them.

> The NSA is on a continual war footing. Its job is to help defend the United States from its enemies.

The NSA appears to perceive the people it's tasked with the defending - American citizens - as an enemy. It's the natural result of all centralized surveillance states.

That's why they outsource it in part to wonderful p̶r̶o̶f̶i̶t̶e̶e̶r̶i̶n̶g̶ patriotic corporations like Booz Allen Hamilton and their private equity owners :D

Keep in mind that 1975 was before FISA, which wouldn't be passed until 1978. Believe it or not, despite its current reputation (thanks to modifications made in the last 12 years), the original FISA was actually a huge step forward as it actually created judicial and congressional oversight of intelligence operations where there was none before. It was passed in response to the abuses of the Watergate era.

Not really sure what the Church committee is. Am I missing something from history? Or is it an actual Church committee.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Church+committee

Special committees or commissions in the US Congress are often named after the congressman chairing that committee.

The Church Committee was chaired by Senator Frank Church.

Yeah, you're missing a very important historical event in the fight against government surveillance in the USA.

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