Goblin King wrote:
The President having the NSA monitor phone calls is in no way unconstitutional. Why? Because it is neither a SEARCH or a SEIZURE.
Actually, congress has already ruled (multiple times) that wiretapping qualifies for 4th amendment protection as a search. The administration's ability to monitor communications is spelled out pretty clearly in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
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Anyways, the NSA has got a pretty advanced system for who to monitor, based off of where the calls coming from, where it's going, who it's going to, keywords, that kind of thing. They aren't listening to you having phone sex, unless your having phone sex to somebody in Saudi Arabia and keep yelling "al-Qaeda".
No. No, they don't. So far, the most plausable suggestion anyone has evolved for WHY the NSA would need to circumvent the FISC courts is that the system involved an automated ECHELON-type system that was vacuuming up calls like mad. In any case, it is a documented fact that some Intra-American calls were tapped by mistake, because the NSA could not reliably determine the call origin.
nick012000 wrote:
Michael Moore == TRAITOR
Speech cannot be treason. Also, this thread is not about Michael Moore. I suggest you go start one so I can demonstrate how much I care by not posting in it.
Anyway, Bruce Schneier has an <a href="http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/12/the_security_th_1.html">interesting discussion of the FISA and the War Powers Act</a> that the administration's legal theory rests on.
One interesting quote is the comparison to Truman's attempt to use the president's war powers to seize US steel mills:
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Attorney General Alberto Gonzales argues that the president's authority rests on two foundations: Congress's authorization to use military force against al-Qaida, and the Constitution's vesting of power in the president as commander-in-chief, which necessarily includes gathering “signals intelligence” on the enemy. But that argument cannot be squared with Supreme Court precedent. In 1952, the Supreme Court considered a remarkably similar argument during the Korean War. Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, widely considered the most important separation-of-powers case ever decided by the court, flatly rejected the president's assertion of unilateral domestic authority during wartime. President Truman had invoked the commander-in-chief clause to justify seizing most of the nation's steel mills. A nationwide strike threatened to undermine the war, Truman contended, because the mills were critical to manufacturing munitions.
The Supreme Court's rationale for rejecting Truman's claims applies with full force to Bush's policy. In what proved to be the most influential opinion in the case, Justice Robert Jackson identified three possible scenarios in which a president's actions may be challenged. Where the president acts with explicit or implicit authorization from Congress, his authority "is at its maximum," and will generally be upheld. Where Congress has been silent, the president acts in a "zone of twilight" in which legality "is likely to depend on the imperatives of events and contemporary imponderables rather than on abstract theories of law." But where the president acts in defiance of "the expressed or implied will of Congress," Justice Jackson maintained, his power is "at its lowest ebb," and his actions can be sustained only if Congress has no authority to regulate the subject at all.
In the steel seizure case, Congress had considered and rejected giving the president the authority to seize businesses in the face of threatened strikes, thereby placing President Truman's action in the third of Justice Jackson's categories. As to the war power, Justice Jackson noted, "The Constitution did not contemplate that the Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy will constitute him also Commander in Chief of the country, its industries, and its inhabitants."
Like Truman, President Bush acted in the face of contrary congressional authority. In FISA, Congress expressly addressed the subject of warrantless wiretaps during wartime, and limited them to the first 15 days after war is declared. Congress then went further and made it a crime, punishable by up to five years in jail, to conduct a wiretap without statutory authorization.
It is also important to note that Bush's war powers as authorized by congress were specifically linked to tracking and punishing those related to the 9/11 attacks. However, leaked administration legal opinions hold that the president's war powers derive from the "War on Terror" -- which congress did not authorize war powers for because ... it's not a real war. This is why congressmen are upset. The administration has written itself a blank check because "the president can do what must be done in times of war".