Senator Rand Paul Explains the Danger of Secret FISA Courts and Proposes Reform
In October 2018 Representative Mark Meadows sent a letter to to U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer. She is chief judge of FISA Court. Over a year ago Mark Meadows encouraged Collyer to investigate the FISA abuses that took place under President Obama’s FBI. In particular Meadows asked Judge Collyer to act on the abuses by love birds Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.
Readers of The Gateway Pundit for the past three years knew about this abuse of power by the FBI and the Obama DOJ to spy on the Trump campaign and administration.
last week DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz finally released his report documenting Obama administration abuse of the FISA Court.
On Tuesday Rosemary Collyer, presiding judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) court, rebuked the FBI under Director Chris Wray for the abuse of the FISA Court.
NBC News reported:
The secret court that approves orders to conduct surveillance on suspected foreign terrorists or spies issued a highly unusual public rebuke to the FBI on Tuesday, ordering the agency to say how it intends to correct the errors revealed last week by the Justice Department inspector general.
Rosemary Collyer, presiding judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) court, said the inspector general’s report “calls into question whether information contained in other FBI applications is reliable.” She ordered the FBI to file a report by Jan. 10 on how it intends to remedy those mistakes.
In his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, Inspector General Michael Horowitz expressed misgivings about the FBI’s errors and omissions in its requests for judicial approval to conduct surveillance on Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
“We are deeply concerned that so many basic and fundamental errors were made by three separate, hand-picked investigative teams on one of the most sensitive FBI investigations after the matter had been briefed to the highest levels within the FBI,” Horowitz said.
If you’re a law abiding US citizen, a team of armed undercover US Air Marshals could be following you on your next flight, taking minute-by-minute notes whether or not you engage in such threatening behavior as sleeping on the plane, using a phone, going to the bathroom or talking to other passengers.
The Boston Globe has revealed a new federal program that profiles and surveils ordinary US citizen travelers who otherwise have no legitimate reason for being profiled. The secret program, called “Quiet Skies”, was set up to monitor US citizens with no prior record and who don’t result in red flags being raised at the airport. The people surveiled and followed in this program are, according to a TSA memo cited by the Globe article, “not under investigation by any agency and are not in the Terrorist Screening Data Base”.
In essence, the program gives the TSA the option to monitor and track whoever it likes for any reason whatsoever, effectively granting TSA agents a green light to violate anyone’s personal privacy even as the legal and constitutional implications of such profiling remain unknown. And, understandably, internal pushback against the relatively new program has emerged as some Federal Air Marshals have noted that it is a drain on resources and is way too time consuming and costly.
Further, concerns have been raised by legal experts, like Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor, who said that “if this was about foreign citizens, the government would have considerable power. But if it’s US citizens — US citizens don’t lose their rights simply because they are in an airplane at 30,000 feet.”
Predictably, the TSA defended the program to the Boston Globe when asked and declined to note for the article whether or not the program has been successful in stopping any threats. In fact, it wouldn’t even confirm that the program existed. But documents provided to the Boston Globe by FSA sources confirm that this highly controversial program does, in fact, exist.
So if you’re not on any terrorist watch list and you are not under investigation by the Federal Government, what exactly do armed Air Marshals look for when a “small team of them” watches you as you fly or home to visit relatives for the holidays?
Amazingly, the red flag “triggers” for in depth surveillance involve behaviors that essentially all passengers are susceptible to, such as:
The full “behavior checklist”, uploaded on the Boston Globe website, is both astonishing and frightening.
Fox News legal analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano claimed that House members delayed the release of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) memo because they wanted to expand FISA powers and were afraid the political fallout from the memo would have killed the bill.
“Ignorant of the hot potato on which the House Intelligence Committee had been sitting, Congress recently passed and President Donald Trump signed a vast expansion of spying authorities,” Napolitano wrote in a Wednesday op-ed. “The FISA expansion would never have passed the Senate had the House Intelligence Committee memo and the data on which it is based come to light seven days sooner than it did.”
“Why should 22 members of a House committee keep their 500-plus congressional colleagues in the dark about domestic spying abuses while those colleagues were debating the very subject matter of domestic spying and voting to expand the power of those who have abused it?” Napolitano added.
Napolitano thinks the culture of the intelligence community has taken a dark turn and has exerted its authority over America’s elected officials.
“The NSA shows its might to the legislators who supposedly regulate it. In reality, the NSA regulates them,” Napolitano wrote. “This is but one facet of the deep state — the unseen parts of the government that are not authorized by the Constitution and that never change, no matter which party controls the legislative or executive branch. This time, they almost blew it. If just one conscientious senator had changed her or his vote on the FISA expansion — had that senator known of the NSA and FBI abuses of FISA concealed by the House Intelligence Committee — the expansion would have failed.”
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