Star Chamber indeed.
The courts have wrecked the 4th Amendment. While cops generally can’t search your car without your permission, the government has open access, a cutout in the 4A, to search your financials and medical records.
FISA, as in FOREIGN, is another cutout in the 4th Amendment. Instead of obtaining a warrant in open court to search for a particular item in a particular place, it is secret and designed to surveil Americans in the employ of foreign governments, i.e. traitors to America.
Instead of framing this as a self-serving separation of powers issue, the FISA judge should be outraged that officers of the court lied to her. She should begin with tossing every signatory to the FISA applications in jail for contempt of court.
We are at the precipice of a surveillance/police state.
Star Chamber indeed.
An interesting passage from SCOTUS
Faretta v. California, 422 U.S. 806 (1975)
“In the long history of British criminal jurisprudence, there was only one tribunal that ever adopted a practice of forcing counsel upon an unwilling defendant in a criminal proceeding. The tribunal was the Star Chamber. That curious institution, which flourished in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, was of mixed executive and judicial character, and characteristically departed from common-law traditions. For those reasons, and because it specialized in trying “political” offenses, the Star Chamber has for centuries symbolized disregard of basic individual rights.”
http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/422/806.html