A US court of appeals ruled on Wednesday that the US government may collect information about a US citizen without first obtaining a surveillance warrant, as long as it was done so inadvertently while legally monitoring a non-national abroad, according to Reuters.
The appeal in question was brought by Agron Hasbajrami, a US resident arrested in 2011 who later pleaded guilty to attempting to providing material support to a terrorist organization. He was arrested at JFK International Airport in New York as he was attempting to board a flight to Turkey, after communicating with a non-American overseas believed to be associated with a terrorist organization.
Hasbajrami asked the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals in New York to toss out the charges after claiming the National Security Agency (NSA) had illegally surveilled him without a warrant, a practice known as ‘unmasking.’
The “incidental collection” of Americans’ communications by NSA electronic dragnet that explicitly targets people abroad and without U.S. ties was permissible under the U.S. Constitution, the court ruled. It also said, however, that examining the content of databases of stored NSA information could violate the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.
The court said the “vast majority” of evidence prosecutors had used against Hasbajrami was “lawfully collected,” but prosecutors did not provide information to the trial court about whether investigators had “queried” NSA databases. –Reuters
Brought to light by whistleblower Edward Snowden, the NSA’s surveillance program known as PRISM gathers data from tech and telecom companies governed by section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which does not require individual warrants.
“We are gratified by the Court’s remand to resolve a critical factual and constitutional question in this case, as well as its recognition of the important constitutional issues that FISA section 702 raises for everyone. We look forward to the next stage of the litigation,” Hasbajrami’s lawyer Joshua Dratel said in a statement.
Following his guilty plea, he asked the appeals court to consider whether the evidence gathered against him was lawfully collected and admissible under the Fourth Amendment – a question the ACLU felt compelled to weigh in on.
“While we disagree with the court’s ruling that the NSA can collect Americans’ international communications without a warrant … the court rightly finds that the Fourth Amendment applies when the government searches for that sensitive information in intelligence databases,” wrote ACLU lawyer Patrick Toomey, who filed a brief in the case.
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If the court ruled the practice unconstitutional–as any reasoned reading of the Bill of Rights would conclude–that would hardly stop the NSA from doing it anyway. The only way to stop the security state is to take away the funding, and the only conceivable way that would happen is the collapse of the economy and the government’s ability to print money from thin air.
The court is only agreeing with Trump and as such is carrying out Trump’s New World Order totalitarian police state agenda. The new boss is the same as all the previous bosses. It’s called an ‘agenda’!
http://thoughtcrimeradio.net/2019/08/alarm-as-trump-requests-permanent-reauthorization-of-nsa-mass-spying-program-exposed-by-snowden/
Here’s some good fiction reading about Supreme Court doctrine on Free Speech.
https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/encyclopedia/topic/18/legal-terms-and-concepts-related-to-speech-press-assembly-or-petition
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes defined the clear and present danger test in 1919 in Schenck v. United States, offering more latitude to Congress for restricting speech in times of war, saying that when words are “of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent….no court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right.” (Photo of Holmes circa 1924 via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
There’s a whole Slew our slough of them…
Anonymous Speech
The Supreme Court has protected anonymity under the First Amendment, but it has balanced this protection against competing interests, notably in the area of…
Appropriation
Appropriation is the unauthorized use of a person’s name, photograph, likeness, voice, or endorsement, for financial gain and is related to the right of…
Captive Audience
The captive audience doctrine protects people in certain places and circumstances from unwanted speech. It is an exception to the First Amendment rule…
Chilling Effect
Chilling effect is the concept of deterring First Amendment free speech and association rights through laws or regulations that appear to target expression…
Clear and Present Danger Test
In the 20th century, the Supreme Court established the clear and present danger test as the predominate standard for determining when speech is protected by the…
Commercial Speech
Commercial speech is a form of protected communication under the First Amendment, but it does not receive as much free speech protection as forms of…
Community Standards
In 1973, the Supreme Court said that community standards must be taken into account in determining whether something was obscene or could be protected by the…
Contempt of Court
Civil contempt of court can be fixed by obeying court orders. Criminal contempt involves violating the dignity of the court and is more likely to raise First…
Content Based
A content-based law discriminates against speech based on the substance of what is communicated. In contrast, a content-neutral law applies without regard to…
Content Neutral
In First Amendment free speech cases, laws that are content neutral apply to all expression without regard to any particular message or substance…
Corporate Speech
Corporate speech refers to the rights of corporations to advertise their products and to speak to matters of public concern, including by spending money in…
Counterspeech Doctrine
The counterspeech doctrine, first articulated by Louis Brandeis in First Amendment jurisprudence in 1927, posits that the remedy for false speech is more speech…
Criminal Libel
In the United States, courts have based decisions regarding slanderous or libelous statements on the First Amendment rights of free speech and freedom of the…
Express Advocacy
Express advocacy is the use of words like “vote for” in political communications. It’s protected by the First Amendment, but the spending of money on such…
Expressive Conduct
Expressive conduct is behavior designed to convey a message; its function as speech means that it has increasingly been protected by the First Amendment…
Fair Use
Fair use allows copyrighted works to be used in ways that would infringe on the copyright. Fair use is a way of preventing copyright from violating of the First…
False Light
False light invasion of privacy, portraying an individual unflatteringly in words or pictures as someone that person is not, is not protected by the First…
False Speech
Because the First Amendment is designed to further the truth, it may not protect individuals who engage in libel. Generally, the government does not stand as…
Fighting Words
The fighting words doctrine, an exception to First Amendment-protected speech, lets government limit speech when it is likely to incite immediate retaliation by…
Government Speech Doctrine
Under the government speech doctrine, the government has its own rights as speaker that can assert its own messages, immune from challenges of viewpoint…
Gravity of the Evil Test
The gravity of the evil test is a refinement of the clear and present danger test to determine when First Amendment free speech may be subject to criminal…
Group Libel
Group libel, the defamation of an entire group of people, has coexisted uneasily with the First Amendment’s emphasis on individual speech rights…
There’s LOTS more doctrine which means NOTHING to the SupremeCunts. (Not a typo. No respect for cunts appointed because of their cunts.)
I know we have a couple of lawyers here, but hopefully they are not “practicing.” (waves at rg and a couple others… I see you) Nothing stinks up a free speech platform like a bottom feeding lawyer who thinks his service is worth what he charges.