NSA surveillance may be legal – but it’s unconstitutional
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NSA surveillance may be legal – but it’s unconstitutional
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Re: NSA surveillance may be legal – but it’s unconstitutional
#2As the Constitution is the "supreme law of the land", nothing "unconstitutional" can simultaneously be "legal."
Re: NSA surveillance may be legal – but it’s unconstitutional
#3As the Constitution is the "supreme law of the land", nothing "unconstitutional" can simultaneously be "legal."
Until the SJ rules that a law is unconstitutional, it is still a law. When they make a ruling, it stops being a law.
I'm disappointed in the number of people who care more about legal vs illegal than about right vs wrong. Laws can be constitutionally proper and yet wrong.
Re: NSA surveillance may be legal – but it’s unconstitutional
#4As the Constitution is the "supreme law of the land", nothing "unconstitutional" can simultaneously be "legal."
Until the SJ rules that a law is unconstitutional, it is still a law. When they make a ruling, it stops being a law. I'm disappointed in the number of people who care more about legal vs illegal than about right vs wrong. Laws can be constitutionally proper and yet wrong.
No, it's either unconstitutional (and illegal) or it isn't. The Supreme Court has the authority to make that judgement at a point in time, but it's judgement applies retroactively to the law or action thereof in question.
Re: NSA surveillance may be legal – but it’s unconstitutional
#5As the Constitution is the "supreme law of the land", nothing "unconstitutional" can simultaneously be "legal."
You have it wrong. Congress passes law to say, intercept all phone calls and store them. Until a court strikes it down is assumed constitutional and legal. You challenge it and then it becomes illegal and unconstitutional. (The court also changes its mind from time to time so it's not an exact science.)
Re: NSA surveillance may be legal – but it’s unconstitutional
#6As the Constitution is the "supreme law of the land", nothing "unconstitutional" can simultaneously be "legal."
Until the SJ rules that a law is unconstitutional, it is still a law. When they make a ruling, it stops being a law. I'm disappointed in the number of people who care more about legal vs illegal than about right vs wrong. Laws can be constitutionally proper and yet wrong.
"An unconstitutional law cannot operate to supersede any existing valid law. Indeed, insofar as a statute runs counter to the fundamental law of the lend, it is superseded hereby. No one Is bound to obey an unconstitutional law and no courts are bound to enforce it."
- 16 American Jurisprudence 2d, Sec 177 late 2d, Sec 256
Plus, this has already been found unconstitutional[1], but that decision was kept secret, cause, y'know... CLASSIFIED.
[1] - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/12/fisc-ruling-surveil...
Re: NSA surveillance may be legal – but it’s unconstitutional
#7As the Constitution is the "supreme law of the land", nothing "unconstitutional" can simultaneously be "legal."
You have it wrong. Congress passes law to say, intercept all phone calls and store them. Until a court strikes it down is assumed constitutional and legal. You challenge it and then it becomes illegal and unconstitutional. (The court also changes its mind from time to time so it's not an exact science.)
The only thing we have wrong is that for many years we have allowed Congress to get away with implementing laws that are clearly unconstitutional.
Re: NSA surveillance may be legal – but it’s unconstitutional
#8> As for Section 702 of FISA, the Supreme Court has held that the Fourth Amendment does not protect foreigners from searches conducted abroad.
But PRISM, as opposed to "upstream collection", isn't (necessarily) about searching foreigners abroad, or even at the border. It's about searching their stuff held on servers (sometimes) located inside the US and run by US companies as part of a business agreement with those foreigners. (However I have heard it suggested (IANAL) that sufficient legal cleverness can allow this to be characterised as a border search.)
> But it has never recognized a foreign intelligence exception to the warrant requirement when foreign-targeted searches result in the collection of vast stores of citizens’ communications.
Maybe. However the FISA appeals court certainly appears (IANAL) to have decided that a foreign-intelligence exception exists https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5917223 . Once again, from the Yahoo! case ruling http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/doj/fisa/fiscr082208.pdf :
2 . The Foreign Intelligence Exception . The recurrent theme permeating the petitioner's arguments is the notion that there is no foreign intelligence exception to the Fourth Amendment's Warrant Clause. 6 The FISC rejected this notion, positing that our decision in In re Sealed Case confirmed the existence of a foreign intelligence exception to the warrant requirement.
And again, this is a ruling on a law which allowed intentional targetting of US persons, though outside the United States.
Re: NSA surveillance may be legal – but it’s unconstitutional
#9I do find arguments based on strict legality to be just a tad strange.
Just because something is strictly legal doesn't mean that it's right, nor that it's in the spirit that the law originally intended. I mean, it was legal to exterminate Jews in Nazi Germany, send millions to death camps in Soviet Russia and starve 10s of millions to death in Communist China.
Strict legality is particularly low bar to pass. What happened to the spirit of the law? What happened to public discussions of the law? What happened to proportional use of the justice system? What happened to basic human rights?
Maybe I'm just naive, but when people hide behind the "Well it's legal! A secret court said so!" charade, even when they know that that it doesn't follow the spirit of the laws that they currently operate under, it just pisses me off.
It's kind of like when someone cheats a system using a secret loophole that was clearly not intended to be used for that purpose. The person then turns around and says that it's a perfectly legitimate move. They then move forward on the assumption that the mere existence of said loophole gives them carte blanche to just do whatever they hell they want to do.
It appears as though the NSA has hacked the legal system.
Re: NSA surveillance may be legal – but it’s unconstitutional
#10As the Constitution is the "supreme law of the land", nothing "unconstitutional" can simultaneously be "legal."
You have it wrong. Congress passes law to say, intercept all phone calls and store them. Until a court strikes it down is assumed constitutional and legal. You challenge it and then it becomes illegal and unconstitutional. (The court also changes its mind from time to time so it's not an exact science.)
It doesn't become unconstitutional when a court says so. From its inception either it is, or it isn't. The issue simply isn't decided until the court says so.