The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is supposed to provide a measure of oversight and due process for secret law enforcement agency requests for surveillance warrants against foreign spies and other suspects in the U.S. But information on the requests contained in a recent Justice Department memo suggests that the court is serving as little more than a rubber stamp for federal agencies.
Of the nearly 3,000 requests made by the National Security Agency and the FBI to intercept communications such as emails and phone calls over the past two years – 1,379 in 2014 and 1,457 in 2015 – not a single one has been rejected by the FISA court.
The memo also noted that last year the FBI requested 48,642 national security letters, which require Internet and telecommunications companies to turn over information on their customers, and are typically accompanied by a gag order that prevents the companies from disclosing that the FBI has requested the data, oftentimes without any time limits. This includes requests covering information for thousands of American citizens.
The times and the technology may have changed since the drafting of the Fourth Amendment, but our unalienable rights have not. Based on what little we have been able to glimpse of our government’s secret surveillance activities, it is clear that the government has far exceeded its authority and violated citizens’ rights.
It is time to put an end to police state tactics such as dragnet surveillance and return to the legal principles of due process and the issuance of specific search warrants based only on probable cause, not fishing expeditions.
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