🚀 go-pugleaf

another dagger shredding the U.S. Constitution.

:   The Washington Post Magazine, June 23 1996
:   "Government surveillance, terrorism and the U.S. Constitution"
:   from Main Justice, by Jim McGee and Brian Duffy, 1996, ISBN 0-684-81135-9
:
:   The internal Justice Department FISA watchdog was Mary Lawton: it took
:   her two years before saying the investigations into CISPES & Co should
:   be shut down.
:
:   On the day after Thanksgiving in 1993, not quite a month after Mary Lawton
:   died, Richard Scruggs decided it was time to go through her office on the
:   sixth floor of Main Justice.
:
:   The deeper Scruggs got into the FISA files, the more uneasy he grew.
:
:   Reading the FISA applications in Lawton's files, Scruggs began finding
:   errors. The volume of FISA cases was so heavy that the lawyers could spend
:   only so much time on each one.
:
:   "The review process to prevent factual and legal errors was virtually
:   nonexistent," Scruggs recalled.
:
:   In high school, Mary Lawton had won a debate about the meaning of the
:   U.S. Constitution.

Nor was it an aberration: the 1980s joined the 1960s and 1970s with yet
another massive use of this Orwellian technology for political purposes.

And these are when they were caught.

It's currently used for the "Drug War", a highly political endeavor.

Of course, once CISPES was designated as a terrorist organization...

: The Washington Post Magazine, June 23 1996
:
* The CISPES investigation expanded. The FBI conducted a MASSIVE NATIONWIDE
* investigation that put under surveillance ONE THOUSAND THREE HUNDRED THIRTY
* liberal groups, many of them religious or political organizations.

By definition, ECHELON surveillance of 1,330 groups is NOT an "aberration".

The state of Congressional oversight (and punishment of FISA violations)
is horrifying.

Not only did the NSA/FBI