TOM HENEGHAN EXPLOSIVE
INTELLIGENCE BRIEFINGS
ALL Patriot Americans
MUST know,
with sources inside American/European intelligence agencies and INTERPOL
reporting what is really going on behind the scenes of the
corporate-controlled,
fascist, extortion-friendly propaganda U.S. media's massive deceptions
Sunday September 7, 2014
NAZI Treason Escalates
by Tom Heneghan, International
Intelligence Expert
UNITED States of America - It can now be reported that
Congressman Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan, and Senator Dianne Feinstein,
Democrat of California, have conspired with the U.S. NSA and the U.S.
Department of Justice to hide relevant evidence that proves abuse of the
American People's Constitutional rights aka Section 215 of the totally
UN-Constitutional BrushFRAUD era neo-Nazi Patriot Act.
In fact, Rogers co-sponsored legislation
which covered up the phone dragnet against the American People in which members
of Congress voted for FISA legislation that re-authorized the Patriot Act
without certain members of Congress not realizing what they had just voted for.
ISIS remains a total U.S.-British
Intelligence and NAZI Paperclip NSA creation funded by the Saudi Royal Family
and crooked worldwide banks as to continue UN-Constitutional NAZI Paperclip
occupation of the United States and allow algorithms and other NSA-type
technology to manipulate world financial markets.
Related
[color highlights added]
Patriot Act's absurd new spawn: Just when
you thought it couldn't get any worse
Creative legal interpretations may now
enable the government to sign off on things that will blow your mind
Congress may be preparing to reinforce two horrible FISA
Court decisions and an abusive government search with no debate in the coming
weeks: a decision to give national security orders unlimited breadth, one
making it legal for the government to investigate Americans for activities
protected under the First Amendment, and the FBI’s “back door” searches of
Americans’ communication content collected under the FISA Amendment Act Section
702 authority.
On
Tuesday, the ACLU and the Department of Justice argued about the legality of the NSA’s phone dragnet
program before the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in New York. Much of the discussion focused on the implications of the
government’s theories that it can collect all phone records in the United
States based on a claim they are “relevant” to standing terrorism
investigations. “You can collect everything there is to know about everybody
and have it all in one big government cloud,” said Judge Gerard Lynch,
describing the implications of the government’s theories to Assistant Attorney
General Stuart Delery.
But
the ACLU and the government also engaged in an equally important debate — on
whether the FISA Court’s interpretation of the word “relevant” overstepped
Congress’ intent – focused on whether Congress had backed FISC’s definition of
“relevant” by reauthorizing the Patriot Act twice.
The executive branch and the FISA Court have spent the last 15 months
arguing that Congress “ratified” the expansive interpretations on which the
phone dragnet program relies when it reauthorized the Patriot Act in 2010 and
2011 because, having been informed of the program, Congress extended the
Patriot Act without changing that language. “When Congress reenacts a statute
without change,” the administration said in a white paper on the phone dragnet in August 2013, ”it
is presumed to have adopted the administrative or judicial interpretation of
the statute if it is aware of the interpretation.” Three federal judges
have bought that claim, relying on it to rule the program is legal.
The
government’s claim with regards to past authorizations is terribly weak. There
were at least six known instances where Congress did not get notice
it should have; in several cases, those obligations were imposed by law. Perhaps the most important – in which House Intelligence
Committee chairman Mike Rogers did not invite most congressmen to read notice
of the dragnet provided to Congress in 2011 — means that 65 of the people who
voted to reauthorize the Patriot Act in 2011 probably had had no way of
learning about the phone dragnet. And, as the ACLU’s Alexander Abdo
pointed out in Tuesday’s hearing, Congress couldn’t
have been briefed on the legal analysis underlying the phone dragnet
because the FISA Court never got around to writing an opinion on it until 2013,
in response to the Snowden leaks.
The
executive’s claim that Congress “ratified” the phone dragnet before the Snowden
leaks — and therefore that the program currently complies with the intent of
Congress — is farcical. And the judges on the panel — in addition to Lynch,
fellow Democratic appointees Robert Sack and Vernon Broderick — seem skeptical of
the government’s claim that secret briefings offered about an unannounced
program can support a claim that Congress knowingly ratified the program.
So
the government’s argument that the program is legal because Congress
reauthorized the Patriot Act after the government started secretly using it to
collect most phone records in the U.S. may fail to persuade the 2nd Circuit.
But
that won’t be true going forward.
The government’s public release of numerous court
opinions and other intelligence information over the last 15 months means no
one in Congress can make a credible claim to be uninformed of the decisions
underlying these parts of the government’s spying. In 2011, most members of
Congress probably didn’t know the FISC had redefined the word “relevant” in a
key Patriot Act definition to mean “everything,” but they should know that now.
Yet none of the current proposals to reform the dragnet do anything about the
definition of “relevant.” They limit collection of phone records in other ways,
but would permit bulky collection under that “relevance” standard in a number
of ways and by association using a number of statutes.
Thus, while the 2nd Circuit might rule the current
dragnet illegal in part because the legal logic of it would permit the
government to “collect everything there is to know about everybody,” if
Congress passes the USA Freedom Act without changing that definition of
“relevant,” it will be easier for the government to win this argument in the
future.
Congressional
passage of the USA Freedom Act with the existing language intact would also
probably “ratify” two other intelligence community programs: first, a more
recently released decision, a February 2013 opinion in which Judge John Bates ruled
that prohibitions on using the Patriot Act to investigate Americans based
solely on First Amendment-protected activities – such as political speech or
religion — do not apply if associates of the targeted person are engaged in
unprotected activities. Bates took language from Congress prohibiting the
government from using Patriot authorities against Americans for nothing more
than their speech and created a loophole allowing the government to do just that.
As
Stanford law professor Jennifer Granick said in a post on this opinion, “Most people, when they
cite [the] statutory language [from the Patriot Act], believe it means that
Americans won’t be subjects of terrorism investigations for the First Amendment
protected things they say or do.” But based on what we can see of Bates’
opinion, Granick continued, “They would be wrong.”
And
while the language of the opinion pertains to a terrorism investigation, the
novel interpretation of the phrase might now apply in other uses of Patriot
authorities, such as counterintelligence investigations, which sometimes
includes hacking or leak investigations. Behind a veil of secrecy, Bates and
the government appear to have made it OK to investigate Americans for their
free speech again.
In
addition, the government has revealed the FBI conducts “back door” searches —
warrantless searches on U.S. persons’ data collected under FISA Section 702 –
even for “assessments” of counterterrorism investigations. The FBI keeps no records of such searches, presumably because it
dictated for itself in 2011 it need not keep any records of assessments. As a
result, it refuses to tell Congress how many Americans have been subjected to
such warrantless searches.
In
a letter released Wednesday, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper seemed to point to back door searches. He hailed Sen.
Leahy’s version of the USA Freedom Act because it ”recognize[s] the technical
limitations on our ability to report certain types of information.” The big
topic the bill limited was FBI searches of 702 information.
That suggests Clapper is pointing to Leahy’s exemption for FBI’s back door
searches.
That would be particularly troubling given that back door
searches are one area of particularly acute constitutional concern.
And
if Congress doesn’t do anything about these issues, in the future the
government will argue — more credibly, this time — that Congress signed off on
these expansions of Executive authority.
Whether
by passing USA Freedom Act this fall or by reauthorizing the Patriot Act next
June, Congress is likely to extend the life of the Patriot Act. Given the
absurd implications of some of the recently released FISC opinions, Congress
would do well to redefine this language to reclaim the plain English meaning,
contrary to FISC’s reinterpretations of it.
Thus
far, however, they show no sign of doing so.
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