Government Evades The Constitution

Section 702 of FISA should be renewed.

by Andrew Napolitano

Six months ago, FBI officials boasted that in 2022, their agents had spied on only 120,000 Americans without search warrants!

Under the Constitution, that number should be zero.

This revelation is supposed to give members of Congress comfort that the people we have hired to protect the Constitution are in fact doing so. In reality, the feds continue to assault and violate a core freedom protected by the Constitution — the right to be left alone.

The reason for the FBI revelation is the pending expiration of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the bipartisan animosity to its extension.

Section 702 is unconstitutional on its face as it directly contradicts the core language of the Fourth Amendment. It permits the feds to conduct warrantless surveillance on foreigners who are either physically or digitally present in the United States and anyone with whom they communicate — American or foreign — who are here.

For example, if you call or text or email an art dealer in Florence, Italy, from your home in New Jersey, or your cousin in Switzerland calls or texts or emails you at your home in California, the FBI can monitor those communications without a search warrant. And then the feds can monitor the future calls you make and texts and emails you send and receive.

The reason for the search warrant requirement is to prevent a repeat of what British agents did to the American colonists before the Revolutionary War. Then, secret British courts in London issued general warrants to British agents in the Colonies, which authorized the bearer to search wherever he wished and seize whatever he found.

When British agents used their general warrants to search Colonial homes ostensibly looking for tax stamps in compliance with the Stamp Act, they were really attempting to find colonists who entertained revolutionary ideas that might lead to a revolt against the king.

The existence and enforcement of the Stamp Act proved so unpopular that Parliament rescinded it after just one year of British agents roughing up colonists in their homes. But the former bond between the colonists and the king had been irreparably breached, and a sea change in Colonial thinking pervaded the land. The core of that sea change was not taxation without representation; it was freedom.

To the Colonial mindset, freedom had one universal meaning. It meant freedom from the government — from king and Parliament.

This change in thinking resulted in an ideological welcome mat for the Declaration of Independence. When Thomas Jefferson was holed up in a Philadelphia rooming house for five days in June 1776 writing and revising the Declaration, he thought he was crafting the ideological fountainhead of a minority of landowners who despised the king’s authority. Yet within a year, farmers and artisans and laborers joined the popular and bloody revolt that ended in 1783 with freedom from England.

What about freedom from the new government here?

Click here to read the rest of this article

…and then proceed to the afterword below…

Afterword

How to cure the affliction.

HEAR, HEAR, Andrew Napolitano!! Or, if you like, Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho! 702 has got to go!!

As Napolitano observes, Section 702 of FISA is flatly illegal under the Constitution and as I will add, anyone implementing it should be prosecuted. Such perps might skate on the fact that Congress passed the law, and the courts have allowed it to persist (so far), but they should not. Obedience to Constitutional prescriptions and proscriptions is the responsibility of each actor who has taken the oath of office, and such responsibilities cannot be waived or forgiven due to the corruption of others.

Those interested (and all should be) can find the real details of the purpose and mandates of the Fourth Amendment here (and will find that those details are quite different from what corrupt and co-opted courts have allowed in that regard over recent decades). Those interested (and all should be) will find details of how returning America to an honest and respectful implementation of the income tax laws will also mitigate all manner of problems akin to the FBI’s admitted abuse of Section 702 here.

Read those docs, and then become an agent of change. Urge everyone you know to let their congresscritter know that 702 must end.

Likewise, urge everyone you know to read CtC (online and free!), and stand up to save themselves and the country from the widespread corruption to which we have all fallen prey over the last 80 years.

Share this link as widely as you can.

If you have access to any pundits, share this link.

Further, independent commentaries, comments to these newsletter articles, and especially videos should be flying out from this community all the time! Remember, people, those defending the evil status quo are legion, and relentless. Those wanting them defeated, and their evil scheme and its evil progeny wiped away, need to be just as much so.

At a minimum, everyone in this community should be diligently sharing, with suitable exhortations and persuasions to the recipient, the special materials I have written for this purpose. For instance, clicking on the image of Dorothy and Glinda, below, will yield a short .pdf by which anyone not welded to a government teat will quickly be inspired and equipped to lend their strength to climbing out of our suicidal dive, if shared around with at least a subject line encouraging its perusal.

Others can be found here and here and here.

Seriously, people. It’s time to stop whistling past the graveyard and to start curing the cancer, instead.