NP: I, too, wanted a different vote on THAT bill ...but

[Mark Kohut]

Here is one main problem (first para below) as I see it and why this
question is so hard to answer:
"Can you point to a single example of when the obtaining of a warrant aided
a terrorist action?"

This question might need answered too: Can we point to one--more than one--
terrorist action that was stopped because the info was gathered this way?

"Much of the debate leading up to Thursday’s vote had been shrouded in
secrecy. The intelligence community has largely refused
<https://www.wired.com/story/section-702-warrantless-surveillance-debate/> to
provide lawmakers and the public with detailed information about how
Section 702's programs operate and, crucially, how effective they are.
“There’s a lot of inaccuracies that are put out about it. These enormous
mischaracterizations are put out,” says Neema Singh Guliani, legislative
council at the ACLU."

There are some 'put out' there including the stopping of a bomb plot on the
New York subway. (See below again). But the secrecy as Neema Guliani knows
[love the irony of the same name] presents a verification problem--and the
question of what should we be able to verify and what keep secret?

Mary Graham, who directs the Transparency Policy Project(!) at the Harvard
School of Government, more "left", more "liberal", than some Plisters,
probably, shows in her *President's Secrets* how some government secrets
were ALWAYS constitutionally allowed and kept---even from before Geo
Washington was the first President. The Constitutional Convention itself
was 'secret' until Congress made the minutes and deliberations unsecret in
1818.  Geo Washington was the first President to set down guidelines
for governmental secrecy. Everyone since has too.

The congresspeople who get national secrets must get more than are made
public, as we know.


"For example, in September 2009, the National Security Agency (NSA),
through Section 702 surveillance of an email address belonging to an
Al-Qaeda courier based in Pakistan, discovered that he was corresponding
about making explosives with an unknown individual located in the United
States. The NSA passed along the intelligence to the FBI, which used a
national security letter to identify the unknown individual as Najibullah
Zazi, who was living near Denver, Colorado. Through subsequent intense
monitoring, the FBI discovered that Zazi and a group of al-Qaeda-trained
terrorists were planning to bomb the New York City subway system. The FBI
arrested Zazi and his co-conspirators before they were able to carry out
their attack. Zazi and his co-conspirators were all convicted in federal
district court. Zazi himself pleaded guilty and cooperated with the
government, providing incredibly important intelligence information about
al-Qaeda and its current operations."


[pure opinion below--MK]

In addition, Section 702 provides extraordinary value to the U.S.
government on a daily basis by allowing agencies to monitor terrorist
organizations. This monitoring allows the government to identify
individuals previously unknown to be involved in terrorism, and allows the
government to more fully understand the structure and hierarchy of
international terrorist networks. Indeed, according to the independent
report prepared by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB)
in 2014, over one-quarter of all NSA reports on international terrorism
include information derived from Section 702 collection
Greenwald:
 "his" FBI could spy on the conversations of American citizens."

And "As to who is helping and who is not I do not see how  giving greater
spying powers to a Trump controlled Justice department is a good idea."


The mistake here is to use words like "his" [Trump's] FBI and "a
Trump-controlled Justice department" to mean that the authoritarian control
that
the Donald wants already exists.

It does not-- because The Justice Department and the FBI also exist within
an extensive body of law already--that famous "rule of law"
which means so much in the US and international law--that no President
'controls'. We have countless examples in recent history and in our
lifetimes
when that 'rule of law' kept 'full control' out of the hands of incipient
tyrants---most recently shown in Speilberg's otherwise lousy THE POST which
is only moving as
it touches on real history (and in certain performances)  As we all know,
the press won in its Supremes' confrontation with an administration that
did not control the law--but did control the Justice department down to the
level at which they no longer did--as Watergate came to show. [Reminder:
Deep Throat was the # 2 guy in the FBI] There are many later but too
controversial for me examples tobother with here and I'm sure we all know
some. Choose your own adventure.

We all have been following in our way, no? how the largely incompetent tyro
authoritarian US President has expressed his full hatred of the FBI and
Justice Departments?
(Does this reality itself refute the two lines above?...At all levels,
firing the former Head of the FBI, lying about its morale, their efforts,
their worth--a massive disinformation campaign and people are asking why?--
as the Pres is always saying; also firing Sally Yates, and others, within
Justice; publicly dissing
his own AG over and over and internally dissing even worse; a man who did
recuse himself from a major investigation AGAINST the president's expressed
command and
a man whom the Pres thinks he cannot now fire because of all of the above
(and because any AG who could now get confirmed would be far worse [for
him], it is reported to him.) A man, Beuregaard Sessions, who so wants the
job to enact, enforce, as he can, his return of Southern white
supremacy--the base of that Southern Strategy alluded to in ATD ; his pure
heartless Republican ways of hurting pitilessly, self-justifyingly, the
poor huddled masses yearning to breathe a bit freer that he will accept as
much abject humiliation as General Pudding and not resign. So far.

I have a number more M & D posts already banked, so keep the ball bouncing.
I'll show mine if you show yours.
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