Word: warrantless
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Many politicians and legal scholars have questioned the legality of the warrantless domestic spying program run by the National Security Agency (NSA), asserting that it may violate the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which places strict limits on domestic eavesdropping without a warrant...
...Ironically, even as the NSA was launching its warrantless wiretap program in 2002, the Justice Department was rejecting a Republican senator's efforts to make it easier for the NSA to spy legally on persons in the U.S. In the summer of 2002, Ohio Republican Sen. Mike DeWine introduced a bill to lower the level of proof the Justice Department and spy agencies would need to get a FISA warrant to wiretap foreigners, or non-U.S. citizens, who were in the United States. For these "non-U.S. persons" only, the threshold would drop from "probable cause" to "reasonable...
...that in cases where the NSA does not first go to the courts, "the trigger is quicker and a bit softer than it is for a FISA warrant." Putting it more bluntly, Philip B. Heymann, a former Clinton Administration deputy attorney general, says, "The only reason they are doing warrantless searches is because they want to do them on considerably less basis than probable cause-and I would guess on less than reasonable suspicion...
...Probable cause? Reasonable suspicion? Those kinds of semantic battles virtually guarantee that writing any new FISA law will tie Congress up in knots for quite a while. But Heymann, like many other critics of the warrantless wiretapping program, believes that the first sentence for any new FISA law, regardless of how else it is amended, should make one thing absolutely clear: "That the president shouldn't be doing things that the statute prohibits him from doing...
...eavesdropping controversy turned out to offer a foothold. "If somebody from al-Qaeda is calling you, we'd like to know why," Bush declared, while polls showed Americans weren't particularly concerned about warrantless wiretapping if authorities were using it to try to fight terrorism. When a new threat on tape from Osama bin Laden emerged, Bush was set up to return to the stage as Protector in Chief, the Republicans' award-winning role in the past two elections...