Grab'em by the balls, and their hearts and minds will follow.
-Vietnam era slogan
FISA is restricted only to targeting by American agencies, leaving the British liaison officer with a major loophole. The restrictive language added to FISA left unchanged the arrangement under which the British wiretapped American suspects and then passed on the information to the NSA.
[...]
To this day Congress does not realize that the British liaison officers at the NSA are still free to use American equipment to spy on American citizens. And, in fact, they are doing just that. Congress has been kept in the dark deliberately. This is a fact, not a matter of conjecture or a conclusion based on anonymous sources.
See Loftus, Secret War Against The Jews, Pg 192. Loftus' source again is Bamford, Puzzle Palace, Pg 372.
(As a former Justice Department prosecutor, John Loftus once held some of the highest security clearances in the world, with special access to NATO Cosmic, CIA codeword, and Top Secret Nuclear files. As a private attorney, he works without charge to help hundreds of intelligence agents obtain lawful permission to declassify and publish the hidden secrets of our times. He is the author of four history books, three of which have been made into films, two were international best sellers, and one was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.)
FISA does not apply to British agencies.
A few questions from a comments poster on Daily Kos:
So what you are saying is if each official then GIVES, as quid pro quo, their reports to the other side, that's legal?
According to James Bamford (a NSA and intelligence expert) [Update: Dec24.2005. It has yet to be conclusively determined whether or not Bamford actually comes out and clearly exposes the UKUSA agreement in regards to reciprocal domestic espionage as Loftus explicitly does in Secret War. It appears Bamford is merely hinting at and dancing around the issue in Body of Secrets due to access agreements with NSA ?] and John Loftus (a former Justice Department prosecutor and intelligence expert), it is legal. The reports could also, for example, be anonymously mailed to a US liaison officer by the Britsh ? Who's to know where they came from if they appeared in a mail box or drop box somewhere ?
I assume that we would not use the Brits to spy on someone domestically when time is of the essence...
Why not ? They're sitting right there in the same office, using the same equipment.
...if one can't even wait for a judge's decision.
No judge's decision is needed. Since it is technically a British operation, FISA does not apply to foreign intelligence agencies. And besides, what are friends for ? All of the Presidents have been allowing this since at least the 1960's. Even Clinton. For Hegel to say, "Every president, that we know of, has complied with the law (FISA), is technically correct. The operative phrase in this case is "...that we know of..." The cover story is that Congress does not know about the British officers working at NSA as a result of the UKUSA surveillance agreement.
A previous question:
Indeed, it couldn't be any clearer that the FISA provisions are not to be used against US citizens, and if they ever were, then the information gathered could not be retained or used.
Sections 215 and 218 of the USAPATRIOT Act supersede this FISA provision:
Section 215: The government can use these warrants for the "production of any tangible things."
Section 218: With section 218 Ashcroft picked another lock restraining the dragon of central government power, in this case superintrusive bugs, taps and black bag jobs. He changed FISA's provision that the operation's "primary purpose" be to fight foreign intelligence or terrorism to require that one of these be merely "a purpose." Similarly, as Loftus also writes (Pg 191, Secret War) ...the information was acquired only "incidentally" [...] as part of the collection program.
See Pgs 90-92. Charles Tiefer,Veering Right: How the Bush Administration Subverts the Law for Conservative Causes. Univ of California Press. 2004
The New York Times is reporting the espionage program monitored communications that were entirely domestic -- despite recent assurances from top administration officials that one end of the intercepted communications came from abroad. Government officials told the Times the intercepts were “accidental.”
Or..."incidental..." rather than "accidental" (see Loftus above) "incidental" intercepts are legal under Section 218 of the USAPATRIOT Act and FISA as they are "a purpose" of a foreign intelligence or terrorism surveillance and collections program. Once Pandora's cookie jar is opened, all the cookies in the jar are fair game.
Earlier this week, former NSA director Gen. Michael V. Hayden, currently the second-ranking intelligence official in the country, told reporters: "I can assure you, by the physics of the intercept, by how we actually conduct our activities, that one end of these communications are always outside the United States."
Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales made the same claim: "People are running around saying that the United States is somehow spying on American citizens calling their neighbors. [Its] very, very important
to understand that one party to the communication has to be outside the United States."
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/21/1447222
Maybe Alberto is trying to tell us something in his own sordid little way ? Is his "one party to the communication...be outside the United States..."referring to the British ?
A society whose citizens refuse to see and investigate the facts, who refuse to believe that their government and their media will routinely lie to them and fabricate a reality contrary to verifiable facts, is a society that chooses and deserves the Police State Dictatorship it's going to get.
--Ian Williams Goddard
All circuits are busy...Your service has been restricted...The last call was traced...911 is not a working number...You have been called by a party on your own line...
Phone Recording Archive:
http://www.payphone-directory.org/sounds.html
also see:
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