Comment by AnimalMuppet
1 day ago
Then, not completely relevant. The US government was not *hiding secret court rulings about how it spies on Americans" since the day the FBI was founded.
Spying on Americans? You could say that, perhaps, but you would have to say it about every law enforcement organization (including the local police) since 1776.
What the actual article is talking about is a massive extension, not covered by the regular "get a warrant in court" mechanism. Saying "just like the FBI" ignores how different this is, and how alien to the Constitution.
All the big federal law enforcement agencies engage in various degrees of unconstitutional surveillance. The fact that the FBI also gets a lot of warrants as part of its job doesn't change that. The FBI also did it first and has been doing it since it's inception. Heck they named their HQ after the guy who really took it to the next level.
Every non-trivial organization everywhere has some level of law breaking. We should try to avoid it, but we will never get to zero.
Secret courts on the other hand undermine the entire concept of rule of law and we should have absolutely zero tolerance for them.
I'll give incidental law breaking a pass but dubiously legal if not illegal surveillance has been a core activity of the FBI from day 1-ish.
To clarify, I'm not promoting the previous comment, I'm just clarifying what the date was
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