I'm curious, Senator: Would this also be called "protecting America"? Or is it somehow different when it happens to you?
> And she said that the CIA appears to have violated the Fourth Amendment, which bars unreasonable searches and seizures, as well as various federal laws and a presidential executive order that prevents the agency from conducting domestic searches and surveillance.
Both are bad but they're in a different league.
Based on what Director Brennan has informed us, I have grave concerns that the CIA's search may well have violated the separation of powers principle embodied in the United States Constitution, including the speech and debate clause. It may have undermined the constitutional framework essential to effective congressional oversight of intelligence activities or any other government function.
Jesus, this thing is like a hypocrisy onion, you peel back unreasonable search and seizure only to find, separation of powers, what more could this hold? I have a feeling by the end of this Feinstein is going to sound like a libertarian for a week before the constitution interferes with some power she wants and tosses it aside again.
IT looks like this genuine misconduct on the part of a paranoid intelligence agency trying to cover themselves from an investigation. This is what many allege the NSA was doing w/ bulk collection- individual people actively snooping around.
W/ the NSA program, you're just a row in a database, if you're not a terrorist* and do not associate with terrorists nobody has time to give rat's ass about what you're doing unless one can relate you to another suspicious character. That's national security stuff, sorry if ya don't like it, but tough.
THIS is different. This is real domestic spying by spies.
*"But how do we define terrorism, isn't one man's terrorist another man's freedom fighter wahhhh" -Tsarnaevs & people like them? Those are terrorists. Bad guys, got it?
This "if you are not a terrorist don't worry" reasoning is flawed. GCHQ was capturing all Yahoo! webcams. That's not anti-terrorism, that's fodder for blackmail. You also don't surveil WoW to find terrorists. The Snowden leaks have shown many projects that have nothing to do with "national security", but if you say those magic words nobody can oversee what you're doing.
The CIA, NSA should be disbanded and replaced with new institutions. Those institutions should have limited scope and much tighter oversight.
That doesn't make it different. An important reason for (ignored) prohibitions against what the NSA is doing is because of the possibility of misconduct. We must expect that, because it's humans running these programs, they will behave as humans.
So it's incorrect to say that we should view the violations as separate from the programs themselves. It's all part of the same discussion, which must include weighing what might go wrong, and the damage that it might do.
W/ the NSA program, you're just a row in a database,...
Which vastly multiplies both the opportunity for malfeasance, and the potential scope of damage that would result from it.
UPDATE: to whoever downvoted the parent, I don't think that's correct. Although I strongly disagree with its message, it is a common feeling that needs to be addressed. Even if it's wrong, having the comment as part of the discussion is valuable, as it allows us to explore why it's wrong. I have compensated with an upvote of my own.
Not exactly. FISA wasn't adopted because of the abstract possibility of abuse of domestic surveillance, it was adopted because of actual and substantial abuse of domestic surveillance, including for political purposes.