{"id":11622,"date":"2018-02-05T11:40:14","date_gmt":"2018-02-05T16:40:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=11622"},"modified":"2018-02-06T17:18:54","modified_gmt":"2018-02-06T22:18:54","slug":"hill-will-fisa-secrecy-doom-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2018\/02\/05\/hill-will-fisa-secrecy-doom-democracy\/","title":{"rendered":"The Hill: Will FISA Secrecy Doom Democracy?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Hill, February 5, 2018<\/h3>\n

Will FISA Secrecy Doom Democracy?<\/a><\/h2>\n

by James Bovard<\/p>\n

\u201cDemocracy Dies in the Darkness\u201d is the proud motto of the Washington Post. But, considering the past week\u2019s frenzy, the new motto for much of the media and many Democrats is, \u201cDisclosure is the Death of Democracy.\u201d Unfortunately, the uproar around the release of the Nunes memo <\/a>totally missed the deadly political peril posed by pervasive federal secrecy.<\/p>\n

Shortly before the memo became public, President Trump<\/a><\/span> tweeted that \u201cthe top Leadership and Investigators of the FBI and the Justice Department<\/a> have politicized the sacred investigative process.\u201d But any \u201csacred investigative process\u201d exists only in the imaginations of pro-government pundits and high school civics textbooks. The FBI and Justice Department have a century-long history of skewering targets<\/a> to gratify their political masters, while the FISA court routinely heaves buckets of <\/a>judicial hogwash to countenance the wholesale destruction of Americans\u2019 constitutional rights.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Former FBI agent Asha Rangappa, writing in the New York Times, labeled the Nunes memo a \u201cshame\u201d and urged Americans to presume that \u201cmost government servants are ultimately acting in good faith and within the constraints of the law<\/a>.\u201d But blindly relying on positive thinking is a recipe for political servitude. The FISA court has been a fount of outrages because it is an American Star Chamber: the court meets in secret, only hears the government\u2019s side,<\/a> and approves 99 percent+<\/a> of all the search warrants requested.<\/p>\n

Much of the backlash against the memo\u2019s release portrayed the FBI as a FISA Vestal Virgin. The FBI issued with a grim statement: \u201cWe are committed to working with the appropriate oversight entities to ensure the continuing integrity of the FISA process<\/a>.” Former FBI chief James Comey<\/a><\/span> tweeted that the Nunes memo \u201cwrecked the House intel committee, destroyed trust with Intelligence Community, damaged relationship with FISA<\/a> court.\u201d<\/p>\n

But for more than a decade, the FISA court has repeatedly complained about deceptive FBI agents seeking turbo-charged secret FISA warrants. In 2002, the court revealed that FBI agents had false or misleading claims in 75<\/a> cases. In 2005, FISA chief judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly proposed requiring FBI agents to swear to the accuracy of the information they presented; that never happened because it could have \u201cslowed such investigations drastically,\u201d the Washington Post reported<\/a>. So FBI agents continued to have a license to exploit FISA secrecy to lie to the judges.<\/p>\n

Last year, a FISA court decision included a 10-page litany of FBI violations, which \u201cranged from illegally sharing raw intelligence with unauthorized third parties<\/a> to accessing intercepted attorney-client privileged communications without proper oversight.\u201d How many times did FBI agents make false claims to FISA judges while Comey was boss? It\u2019s a secret. The FISA court also complained that the National Security Agency was guilty of \u201can institutional lack of candor\u201d connected to \u201ca very serious Fourth Amendment issue<\/a>\u201d \u2014 i.e, ravaging Americans\u2019 constitutional right to privacy.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Syracuse University law school professor William Banks asserted, \u201cI can’t recall any instance in 40 years when there’s been a partisan leaning of a FISA court judge<\/a> when their opinions have been released.” \u00a0But this is only because, inside the Beltway, being pro-Leviathan is pragmatic, not partisan. The FISA court has repeatedly presumed that if the feds violate everyone\u2019s privacy, they violate no one\u2019s privacy -\u2014 so there is no constitutional problem.<\/p>\n

In 2006, the FISA court signed off on effectively treating all Americans as terrorist suspects. The court swallowed the Bush administration\u2019s lawyers\u2019 bizarre interpretation of the Patriot Act, claiming that the telephone records of all Americans were \u201crelevant\u201d to a terrorist investigation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In 2009, the FISA court upheld surveillance based on a 2007 law that effectively decreed that any American who exchanged emails or phone calls with foreigners forfeited their right to privacy. \u00a0A FISA Appeals Court decision dismissed concerns because the government had \u201cinstituted several layers of serviceable safeguards<\/a> to protect individuals against unwarranted harms\u201d \u2014 so anyone whose privacy was zapped had no right to complain.<\/p>\n

The FISA court is only the tip of the iceberg of the omnipresent secrecy now shrouding government action. The federal government made almost 80 million decisions to classify documents in 2014<\/a>. James Madison, the father of the Constitution, declared in 1798 that \u201cthe right of freely examining public characters and measures \u2026 has ever been justly deemed<\/a>, the only effectual guardian of every other right.\u201d But Americans have less of that right with each passing decade.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The more secretive government becomes, the less trust it deserves. Secrecy empowers politicians to manipulate public opinion with self-serving disclosures. The same 2002 federal appeals court which provided the Washington Post\u2019s motto<\/a> also warned: \u201cWhen government begins closing doors, it selectively controls information<\/a> rightfully belonging to the people. Selective information is misinformation.\u201d This is what Democrats assert that Republicans did with the Nunes memo<\/a> \u2014 and this is what Judicial Watch claims a federal judge is doing<\/a> by refusing to release James Comey\u2019s memos on his conversations with President Trump (even though Comey already leaked some of them to the press).<\/p>\n

Excessive secrecy could have swung three of the last four presidential elections. The New York Times learned of the Bush administration\u2019s massive illegal wiretapping program prior to the 2004 election<\/a> but refrained from disclosing it until late 2005; John Kerry<\/a><\/span> might have won in 2004 if voters had known of Bush\u2019s constitutional demolition. If Edward Snowden had released his bombshells about Orwellian illegal spying and data seizures by the Obama administration in October 2012 (instead of 2013), Mitt Romney<\/a><\/span> might have won that November. The 2016 election could have been swung in Hillary Clinton<\/a><\/span>\u2019s favor thanks to the State Department\u2019s illegal refusal to release her emails; State Dept. bureaucrats claimed they would need 75 years to fulfill a request for Clinton\u2019s aides emails<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There is no such thing as retroactive self-government. Both parties must partner to drain the secrecy swamp, especially regarding information on allegations about the Trump 2016 campaign. If the Democrats are savvy, they will do everything possible to assure that excessive secrecy does not swing the 2020 election in Trump\u2019s favor.<\/p>\n

James Bovard is\u00a0<\/em>a USA Today columnist<\/em><\/a>\u00a0and the author of 10 books, including \u201c<\/em>Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty<\/em><\/a>\u201d (St. Martin\u2019s Press, 1994).<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Hill, February 5, 2018 Will FISA Secrecy Doom Democracy? by James Bovard \u201cDemocracy Dies in the Darkness\u201d is the proud motto of the Washington Post. But, considering the past week\u2019s frenzy, the new motto for much of the media and many Democrats is, \u201cDisclosure is the Death of Democracy.\u201d Unfortunately, the uproar around the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11628,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[451,52,47,270,1353,771,1073,1189,27,249,55,972],"class_list":["post-11622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-constitution","tag-democracy","tag-fbi","tag-fisa","tag-foriegn-intelligence-surveillance-court","tag-fourth-amendment","tag-james-comey","tag-james-madison","tag-lying","tag-national-security-agency","tag-secrecy","tag-trust"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Hill: Will FISA Secrecy Doom Democracy? - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2018\/02\/05\/hill-will-fisa-secrecy-doom-democracy\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Hill: Will FISA Secrecy Doom Democracy? - James Bovard\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Hill, February 5, 2018 Will FISA Secrecy Doom Democracy? by James Bovard \u201cDemocracy Dies in the Darkness\u201d is the proud motto of the Washington Post. 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. Bovard\u2019s writings have been publicly denounced by FBI director Louis Freeh, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.jimbovard.com","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jim.bovard","https:\/\/x.com\/jimbovard"],"url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/author\/admin\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11622","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11622"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11622\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11640,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11622\/revisions\/11640"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}