by Clarice Feldman, American Thinker:
If we learned anything this week, we’ve learned that the continued life of this Constitutional Republic is in grave danger from the cabal of sociopaths in critical positions of power, and that it is because scaremongers and a supine press and judiciary have permitted enactment of dangerous legislation and illegal conduct to go on and on unpunished. Worse, the perpetrators are being richly rewarded for their violation of law and public trust.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
FISA
Friday the FISC (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ) released a report that was written and kept under seal since last year.
It found that:
The FBI continued to abuse a powerful digital surveillance tool even after the Bureau promised reforms following its Trump-era abuses, according to a newly-unsealed Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court document.
The FBI misused Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) more than 278,000 times, the Washington Post reported, “including against crime victims, January 6 riot suspects, and people arrested at protests in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in 2020.” In one particularly egregious case, they reportedly relied on Section 702 to spy on 19,000 donors to a congressional candidate.
Section 702 is a provision of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 that “permits the government to conduct targeted surveillance of foreign persons located outside the United States, with the compelled assistance of electronic communication service providers, to acquire foreign intelligence information.”
The law, created in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, allows National Security Agency and FBI employees a to search a vast database of electronic communications and other information. The FBI is authorized to search the Section 702 database “only when agents have reason to believe such a search will produce information relevant to foreign intelligence purposes, or evidence of crimes,” according to the Post.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees Section 702, stated in the memorandum opinion that the FBI has shown “a pattern of conducting broad, suspicionless queries that violate the requirement that its queries of unminimized Section 702 information be reasonably likely to retrieve foreign intelligence information.
The FBI had earlier promised to fix the problems. It clearly did not. The Act which the FBI has continually violated comes up for reauthorization in the next congressional session and should be allowed to expire.
In another context — the COVID-19 responses of the government and judiciary — Justice Neil Gorsuch makes a compelling case on how fearmongering has led to great intrusions on civil liberties:
The FISA is another example, in my opinion.
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