FISA & EPCA the facts & nothing more [View all]

[giftedgirl77]

I have been watching the madness unfold regarding Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and the allegations that US Citizens are being illegally monitored & investigated by these Intel agencies yet so far nothing has been provided to substantiate these allegations. Both FISA and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) both clearly outline what the legal parameters are as well as the procedures.

As to the allegations that the US Government is illegally data-mining our call logs. The Supreme Court has ruled in States v. Miller, 442 U.S. 735, 741-46 (1979), that customers do not have a 4th Amendment right to protected expectation to privacy and that no warrant was required for these documents if it was merely identified the number the call originated from and the destination number. Furthermore the court held the customer had no justifiable expectation of privacy in information which he knew or should have known the telephone company might ordinarily capture for billing or service purposes. As such, claiming your constitutional rights have been violated because of this action alone is a moot point and was decided by SCOTUS 34 years ago.

Conducting surveillance on US Citizens: FISA subsection 702(b) specifically outlines the intelligence gathering on everyone not just people outside the US. This section has several limitations on the acquisitions on these targets and are as follows: 1) may not intentionally target any person known at the time of acquisition to be located in the United States; 2) may not intentionally target a person reasonably believed to be located outside the United States if the purpose of such acquisition is to target a particular,
known person reasonably believed to be in the United States; 3) may not intentionally target a U.S. person reasonably believed to be located outside the United States; 4 ) may not intentionally acquire any communication as to which the sender and all intended recipients are known at the time of the acquisition to be located in the United States; and 5) must be conducted in a manner consistent with the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

Finally, the EPCA also protects everyone's emails, voice-mails, and another electronic communications, the gov can't obtain/maintain or read, without a real warrant, FISA only used for Foreign Intel. I know this is a hot topic but there really are laws in place that prevent any violations of our 4th Amendment rights when it comes to intelligence gathering. These laws govern all entities that gather Intel for us & it is all prosecutable & people do get prosecuted for misusing the access they are given.

Re-authorization of FISA http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/intel/R42725.pdf
Privacy: An Overview of Federal Statutes Governing Wiretapping and Electronic Eavesdropping http://assets.opencrs.com/rpts/98-326_20121009.pdf