Tag: warrantless surveillance

Down with Big Brother: Warrantless Surveillance Makes a Mockery of the Constitution

“Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference … The Thought Police would get him just the same … the arrests invariably happened at night … In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.”—George Orwell, 1984

The government long ago sold us out to the highest bidder.

The highest bidder, by the way, has always been the Deep State.

What’s playing out now with the highly politicized tug-of-war over whether Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act gets reauthorized by Congress doesn’t just sell us out, it makes us slaves of the Deep State.

Read the fine print: it’s a doozy.

Just as the USA Patriot was perverted from its stated intent to fight terrorism abroad and was instead used to covertly crack down on the American people (allowing government agencies to secretly track Americans’ financial activities, monitor their communications, and carry out wide-ranging surveillance on them), Section 702 has been used as an end-run around the Constitution to allow the government to collect the actual content of your conversations (phone calls, text messages, video chats, emails and other electronic communication) without a warrant.

Now intelligence officials are pushing to dramatically expand the government’s spying powers, effectively giving the government unbridled authority to force millions of Americans to spy on its behalf.

Basically, the Deep State wants to turn the American people into extensions of Big Brother.

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House Votes To Extend Warrantless Spying Powers

US lawmakers have passed a bill reauthorizing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a law which allows the government to surveil American citizens without a warrant. A small group of Republicans previously blocked the vote, but allowed it to proceed following a minor amendment to the law.

The two-year extension passed the House on Friday in a bipartisan vote of 273-147, with 126 Republicans and 147 Democrats supporting the bill, which will now proceed to the Senate. Though lawmakers also debated an amendment that would have forced federal agencies to obtain warrants before spying on Americans, it failed in a tie vote.

“This is how the Constitution dies… This is a sad day for America,” Republican Rep. Thomas Massie said after the amendment went “down in flames.” He noted that House Speaker Mike Johnson provided the tie-breaking vote to kill the warrant requirement.

Though Johnson was once a vocal critic of FISA’s Section 702 – which handed US intelligence agencies sweeping powers to spy on Americans in the wake of the 9/11 attacks – he quickly reversed course after his promotion to House speaker.

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Speaker Mike Johnson Claims Classified Briefing Made Him Flip-Flop on Spy Powers Reform

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) on Wednesday explained his apparent flip-flop on a controversial surveillance law, saying that he now favors limited reforms after receiving a classified briefing.

Speaker Johnson was asked by reporters why he changed his opinion on reforming Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a controversial surveillance law that is meant to target foreign adversaries, but often surveils Americans’ communications without a warrant.

Johnson this week came out against a warrant requirement for Section 702 and moved not to allow an amendment that would have barred intelligence and law enforcement agencies from purchasing Americans’ private information through third-party data brokers. This is considered a run around the Fourth Amendment protection against warrantless searches.

This amounts to a dramatic reversal, since Johnson supported legislation to close the data broker loophole in July 2023, and the Louisiana congressman supported the USA RIGHTS act, which FreedomWorks described as one of the “strongest possible reforms” of FISA.

Johnson said his reversal came after receiving classified briefings on Section 702. He explained:

When I was a member of Judiciary I saw the abuses of the FBI, the terrible abuses over and over and over… and then when I became Speaker I went to the SCIF and got the confidential briefing on sort of the other perspective on that to understand the necessity of section 702 of FISA and how important it is for national security. And it gave me a different perspective.

“That’s part of the process, you have to be fully informed,” he added.

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House blocks FISA reauthorization bill after Trump says ‘kill FISA’

The GOP-led House voted to block the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act reauthorization bill on the House floor Wednesday after it passed out of the Rules Committee on Tuesday.

The vote to block the rule providing for House floor consideration of the bill was 228 to 193. The latest vote reportedly marks the seventh time a rule that has failed on the House floor under House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La. 

The “Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act” would have extended Section 702 of FISA for 5 years. A group of amendments to the bill including a warrant requirement had cleared the Rules Committee on Tuesday night.

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Republicans Split on Whether FBI Should Be Able To Snoop Without a Warrant

Section 702, the controversial Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) authority used to justify snooping on Americans’ digital communications without a warrant, is set to sunset on April 19 if lawmakers don’t act. Many in Congress—including Republicans and Democrats—want Section 702 reauthorization that includes reforms to shield innocent Americans from warrantless surveillance and to hold federal agents accountable for misuse.

But as a “compromise” reauthorization measure comes before Congress this week, House Republicans are split on what sort of reform is really needed—and the side dismissive of civil liberties seems to be winning out.

“The House appears ready to reauthorize FISA 702—which has been abused literally hundreds of thousands of times to spy on Americans without a warrant—without requiring the government to get a warrant,” complained Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah) on X (formerly Twitter) this week. A proposal put forth by Lee and Illinois Republican Sen. Dick Durbin would substantially limit warrantless access to communications obtained under Section 702. But House Speaker Mike Johnson (R–La.) “has declined to bring that bill to the floor, opting instead to have members vote on a ‘compromise’ measure—one that would compromise the rights of Americans if passed without amendments,” as Lee put it.

Johnson’s measure—H.R. 7888, the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act (RISAA)—was adopted 9 to 2 by the House Committee on the Rules yesterday.

RISAA and several amendments to it are now expected to get a full House vote tomorrow. And “the Senate is anticipated to pass whatever bill the House sends its way,” notes Axios.

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Amendment to end warrantless surveillance up for vote as FISA renewal bill moves to House floor

Abill to reauthorize the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is moving to the House floor for a final vote, likely to take place by Thursday, and an amendment to end warrantless surveillance will be considered by the full House of Representatives.

The “Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act” would extend Section 702 of FISA for 5 years, which “permits the government to conduct targeted surveillance of foreign persons located outside the United States,” according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Progressive Democrats and conservative Republicans have teamed up in an effort to include a warrant requirement in the FISA renewal bill. Some members have said they would oppose a bill to reauthorize FISA without a provision to end warrantless surveillance. 

The Brennan Center for Justice and other organizations wrote a letter on April 5 urging lawmakers to vote in favor of amendments to the bill that will require a warrant.

Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., former chairman of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, and Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, are part of a bipartisan group of lawmakers who sponsored amendments to the FISA reauthorization bill related to the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits the federal government from conducting “unreasonable searches and seizures.” One of those amendments to the bill includes requiring law enforcement to obtain a warrant before executing a “U.S. person query” for foreign intelligence collection under Section 702 of FISA. The current law has no such requirement.

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Feds Can Film Your Front Porch for 68 Days Without a Warrant, Says Court

Law enforcement in Kansas recorded the front of a man’s home for 68 days straight, 15 hours a day, and obtained evidence to prove him guilty on 16 charges. The officers did not have a search warrant, using a camera on a pole positioned across the street to capture Bruce Hay’s home. A federal court ruled on Tuesday that it was fine for law enforcement to do so, in what’s potentially a major reduction in privacy law.

“Mr. Hay had no reasonable expectation of privacy in a view of the front of his house,” said the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in its decision on U.S. vs Hay. “As video cameras proliferate throughout society, regrettably, the reasonable expectation of privacy from filming is diminished.”

Hay, an Army veteran, was found guilty of lying about his disability status to collect benefits from the Department of Veteran Affairs (VA). However, the concerning part of this case stems from how VA officers collected evidence against Hay. The veteran appealed his case, arguing that the months-long surveillance of his home crossed a line. However, the federal court ruled that law enforcement can videotape the outside of your home, partially because of how prominent video cameras have become in society.

The federal court’s decision says that video cameras have become “ubiquitous,” and have therefore diminished our expectations of privacy. Police officers wear body cameras now, cellphones have cameras, and many doorbells record your porch. The court isn’t wrong that cameras are everywhere.

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Proposition E Would Make It Easier for Police To Surveil San Francisco

On March 5, San Franciscans will have the opportunity to vote on a ballot measure that would decide whether or not to make them into guinea pigs for surveillance experiments by the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD).

Proposition E purports to streamline the SFPD, with sections on community engagement, recordkeeping, and the department’s vehicle pursuit and use of force policies. But its portion on department use of surveillance technology is troubling.

Under an existing ordinance passed in 2019, the SFPD may only use “surveillance technologies”—like surveillance cameras, automatic license plate readers, or cell site simulators—that have been approved by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the city and county legislative body. The process requires that the SFPD, like any other city or county agency, submit a policy to the board for approval before using any new technology. The 2019 ordinance also banned the use of facial recognition technology.

But Prop E adds a clause stipulating that the SFPD “may acquire and/or use a Surveillance Technology so long as it submits a Surveillance Technology Policy to the Board of Supervisors for approval by ordinance within one year of the use or acquisition, and may continue to use that Surveillance Technology after the end of that year unless the Board adopts an ordinance that disapproves the Policy.”

In other words, the SFPD could roll out an unapproved method of surveillance, and it would have free rein to operate within the city for up to a year before ever having to ask city officials for permission. And until the city passes a statute that specifically forbids it—that is, forbidding a technology that is by that point already in use—then the SFPD can keep using it indefinitely.

“Let’s say the SFPD decides they want to buy a bunch of data on people’s geolocation from data brokers—they could do that,” says Saira Hussain, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). “They could use drones that are flying at all times above the city. They could use the robot dogs that were piloted at the border. These are all surveillance technologies that the police doesn’t necessarily have right now, and they could acquire it and use it, effectively without any sort of accountability, under this proposition.”

If those scenarios sound implausible, it’s worth noting that they’ve already happened: As Hussain notes, the Department of Homeland Security recently tested robot dogs to help patrol the U.S./Mexico border. And in 2012, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department enlisted civilian aircraft to fly over Compton and surveil the entire area.

Not to mention, federal agencies already routinely purchase people’s cell phone geolocation information and internet metadata without a warrant.

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Did the Leak of Alleged Russia National Security Threat Kill The Bill To Reform Warrantless Surveillance?

The contentious US surveillance program’s reauthorization faced a major setback over the last week. The United States House Intelligence Committee (HPSCI) played a pivotal role in derailing the process, leading to a stalemate that hindered any progress before Congress’s focus shifts to the impending government shutdown in March.

Negotiations between opposing House committees unraveled on Wednesday when HPSCI members, instead of participating in a key meeting, chose to derail a pre-agreed plan for a “compromise” bill. This development came as a blow to months of efforts aimed at renewing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a controversial intelligence tool that has, despite promises not to, has allowed the warrantless surveillance of US citizens.

This deadlock in Congress has left the intelligence community in disarray and pushed security advocates to defend surveillance practices, despite their acknowledged susceptibility to misuse.

Key insiders reveal that HPSCI leaders reneged on a privately negotiated deal after lengthy discussions. As reported by Wired, these sources, who requested anonymity, indicated that the collapse of the deal was due to an amendment proposal. This amendment aimed to stop the government from buying information from US companies without a warrant, focusing particularly on cell phone location data often used for tracking individuals.

HPSCI Chair Mike Turner was at the center of this upheaval. He skipped a critical hearing that took place on Wednesday, where lawmakers were to set the voting rules. His absence, coupled with HPSCI’s failure to file necessary amendments, signaled a lack of commitment to the process. Concurrently, Turner was reportedly involved in private discussions with House Speaker Mike Johnson, threatening to torpedo the bill he had previously endorsed.

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Are The Feds Buying Gun Data On Private Citizens Without A Warrant? 

The Biden Administration has shown time and time again how they weaponize federal law enforcement agencies against gun owners.

A recent report by the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security highlighted how several DHS component agencies, including the Secret Service, bought Americans’ phone location data without a court order.

Several other agencies, including the IRS, FBI, and the Defense Intelligence Agency, also admitted to using data brokers to sidestep American’s Fourth Amendment rights.

Under normal circumstances, a Judge would need to issue a warrant to collect this kind of data, but in this case, private companies act as a middleman between your data and the government by scraping anywhere that personal data is publicly available. Government lawyers have decided that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to Americans’ personal data — if the government buys it from data brokers.

Using the same quasi-legal methods used to obtain phone location data, federal law enforcement agencies may have already targeted gun owners by purchasing email lists and data sets that contain location, name, and other personal information from data brokers.

Several sites promote their extensive list of “Shooting Fanatics,” “Concealed carry licensed gun owners,” and even “New York City Gun Owners”! These lists are perfect targets for an administration focused on attacking the individual right to keep and bear arms.

With these lists, the Biden Administration’s law enforcement agencies could purchase and misuse the personal information of millions of gun owners without a single warrant or court order.

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