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Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments of 2008 (FAA) authorizes the government to seize and search the international communications of American citizens without probable cause or warrants in violation of the Fourth Amendment. Section 702 should not be extended beyond its current expiration date of December 31, 2017 unless Congress cures its constitutional infirmity.

Members of Congress are bound by oath or affirmation to uphold and defend the Constitution period, with no commas, semicolons, or question marks. The 9/11 murderous abominations changed nothing on that score. The Supreme Court admonished in Ex Parte Milligan:

The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times and under all circumstances. No doctrine involving more pernicious consequences was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism

As a cornerstone of our liberty-centered constitutional universe, the Fourth Amendment makes citizen privacy the rule and government encroachments the exception. Warrants issued by neutral magistrates based upon probable cause with particularized evidence that crime is afoot are ordinarily required to justify government invasions of privacy. In the narrow circumstances that excuse warrants, a government search or seizure must still satisfy a standard of reasonableness. Justice Louis D. Brandeis elaborated in Olmstead v. United States (dissenting):

The makers of our Constitutionsought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone -- the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by civilized men. To protect that right, every unjustifiable intrusion by the Government upon the privacy of the individual, whatever the means employed, must be deemed a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

The American Revolution was ignited by opposition to hated British Writs of Assistance or general search warrants that empowered every petty colonial official to rummage through homes or businesses in search of smuggled goods. An address by William Pitt the Elder to the British Parliament thundered throughout the colonies, and epitomized the spirit of the Amendment:

The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail, its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storms may enter, the rain may enter,but the King of England cannot enter; all his forces dare not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement.

Speaking through Justice Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court decreed in Kyllo v. United States that the Fourth Amendment today should be interpreted should be adapted to secure that degree of privacy against government that existed when the Fourth Amendment was adopted notwithstanding staggering advances in technology. At that time, government encroachments on privacy were minimal. Federal criminal laws were few. Investigations were minimal. And no intelligence community existed to snoop on Americans to gather foreign intelligence.

Section 702 authorizes invasions of citizen privacy orders of magnitude beyond the degree of privacy that existed when the Fourth Amendment was ratified in 1791. It empowers the National Security Agency singly or in conjunction with sister intelligence agencies to intercept, store, and search the international communications of U.S. persons with a targeted communicant reasonably thought to be located outside the United States and in possession of foreign intelligence information.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) does not review each discrete NSA interception to insure the target is a foreigner outside the United States or that the communications intercepted relate to foreign intelligence, including international terrorism. Instead, the FISC simply approves annually surveillance procedures that the Attorney General and Director of National Intelligence certify are calculated to target only foreigners located abroad for foreign intelligence purposes. The latter is broadly defined to include any information that relates to the foreign affairs of the United States.

The government has employed section 702 to collect more than 250 million Internet transactions annually as of 2011, which includes communications between two foreigners as well as those involving a U.S. person. According to an affidavit of Bill Binney, former high level NSA official and perhaps the foremost expert in the world on electronic surveillance:

When I was at the NSA, each analyst was theoretically required to review 40,000 to 50,000 questionable records each day. The analyst gets overwhelmed, and the actual known targets -- from the metadata analysis -- get ignoredThe NSA cannot identify future terrorism because 99.9999% of what it collects and analyzes is foreseeably irrelevant.

The intelligence community is clueless as to how many of the 250 million annual Internet warrantless interceptions under section 702 involve the international communications of U.S. persons. But the Fourth Amendment vice does not cease after the seizures. The communications are typically stored for at least five years and searched without warrants or probable cause for either to discover foreign intelligence or evidence of crimea second Fourth Amendment transgression.

Supreme Court decisions establish that the government must obtain a warrant that satisfies the Fourth Amendment to intercept or search the contents of communications of U.S. persons for either criminal justice or domestic security purposes. The High Court has not approved an exception when the communications are seized and searched pursuant to section 702 for law enforcement or foreign intelligence purposes.

Title III wiretap orders under the Omnibus Crime Control Act is vastly less intrusive on privacy. They require a warrant that satisfies the Fourth Amendment by specifying the phone line to be tapped, the conversations to be seized, and the crime under investigation. Moreover, reasonable measures must be taken by the government to avoid recording innocent conversations. And the targets of the warrants and their communicants are typically notified of the wiretap within 90 days of its termination to enable them to challenge its legality.

In contrast, surveillance under section 702 does not require a warrant. It does not require probable cause. It does not require suspicion of criminality. It is not confined to communications involving only foreign powers or their agents. There is no mechanism for monitoring the seizure of the communications to exclude those portions irrelevant to foreign intelligence. And the communicants whose conversations are intercepted, stored, and searched are not notified of the invasions of privacy unless they are lead to a criminal prosecution. In the vast majority of cases, U.S. persons will never learn that the privacy of their international communications had been compromised.

Even if no warrant were required under the Fourth Amendment for the seizure, storage, and search of the international communications of U.S. persons under section 702, it would still fail the reasonableness test. While the government interest in national security is of the highest order, section 702 sweeps far more broadly to include anything relevant to the foreign policy of the United States, for example, the emission of greenhouse gases or free trade agreements. It also authorizes searches of citizen communications for crimes unrelated to national security and not based on probable cause. And as Bill Binneys affidavit underscored, the stupendous volume of communications capture by section 702 cripples the NSAs ability to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Proponents of extending section 702 argue that government officials have refrained from using its alarming powers to oppress U.S. persons. But as Thomas Jefferson advised, In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution. Moreover, Justice Brandeis correctly taught that, every unjustifiable intrusion by the Government upon the privacy of the individual, whatever the means employed, must be deemed a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

In sum, section 702 should not be extended unless it requires a warrant to seize or search international communications of U.S. persons based upon probable cause to believe they contain evidence of international terrorism and with particularity describe the means of seizing or searching the communications. Further, U.S. persons should be notified within 90 days of any interception or search.

The Fourth Amendment is too important to be left to the intelligence community.

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Original post:
Section 702 Surveillance Authority: No Extension Unless Fourth ... - HuffPost