The Congressional Push for Secrecy
At a time when congress has created even greater demands to make our private lives more public, via data collection, warantless wiretapping, library book reading histories; they want to make more private their public jobs...
"I have believed from the get-go that this surveillance was being used for political purposes. The FISA court is a rubber stamp court that will allow virtually anything that could remotely be construed as necessary for national security. After 9/11 they would have been even more lenient. And if they weren't, the administration could easily have gone to the Republican congress and requested changes to the law and they would have gotten it.
How over-the-top must this have been for staunch Republican John Ashcroft to have risen from his ICU bed to argue against it and the entire top echel on of the DOJ were preparing to resign?These are not ordinary times and the law enforcement community has not been particularly squeamish about stretching the Bill of Rights. None of those people are bleeding heart liberals or candidates for the presidency of the ACLU. For them to be this adamant, it must have been something completely beyond the pale.
My suspicion has always been that there was some part of this program --- or an entirely different program --- that included spying on political opponents. Even spying on peace marchers and Greenpeace types wouldn't seem to me to be of such a substantial departure from the agreed upon post 9/11 framework that it would cause such a reaction from the top brass, nor would it be so important to the president that he would send Gonzales and Card into the ICU to get Ashcroft to sign off on it while he was high on drugs."
http://www.democrats.com/ultrawatergate-is-warrantless-wiretapping-spying-on-democrats
Lawmakers have recently made bulk declassification impossible; sought to repeal rules that enable the public to estimate the size of the national security bureaucracy; and struck down proposals to require disclosures of the slightest details of the government’s intelligence gathering methods.
“Overall,” Aftergood writes, “the strange congressional propensity for executive branch secrecy presents a conundrum and a challenge to advocates of greater openness and accountability. It is probably unrealistic to expect executive agency officials to take significant steps to provide greater public disclosure of national security information if a majority in Congress is on record opposing such steps.”
Read about a few blocked provisions to the FISA Amendments Act—the law governing the warrantless surveillance of American citizens—below.
—Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly. Follow him on Twitter: @areedkelly.
Steven Aftergood at Secrecy News:
It is a simple fact that under the FISA Amendments Act “the government can and does intercept the communications of U.S. citizens, even in the absence of any particularized warrant or showing of probable cause,” stated the dissenting members of the Committee in the new report.
http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/the_congressional_push_for_secrecy_20120808/
