The glaring missing piece of this entire travesty is the role of the FISA courts. Were the judges actively involved in reviewing the “evidence” presented to them or do they serve as passive rubber stamps?
Secret courts are antithetical to every principle on which this nation was founded and are an extreme violation of our liberty. Did electronic surveillance of every American citizen keep the events at Pensacola last week from happening? Exactly how are secret FISA courts protecting the American people?
Horowitz called the abuses of the FISA processes “errors”. These were “errors” by senior, experience, long term federal employees, not fresh college graduates. Most of those making errors were attorneys or members of law enforcement who should have known what was morally, ethically and legally proper. If these were intentional actions the FISA courts were weaponized are the tyranny the Founding Fathers feared. If the actions were truly a coincidental series of errors, they demonstrate the danger of having an unaccountable secret process not subject to public scrutiny. Since the inept and incompetent cannot detect their errors, outside oversight is clearly needed.
Secrecy, as practiced by modern governments, has very little to do with protecting the people or the nation. It has everything to do with hiding incompetence, protecting the corrupt, and avoiding public scrutiny. Given the sophistication of electronic surveillance today, we can safely assume every government “secret” is known by the Russians, the Chinese, the Israeli’s, western European governments, and the Iranians. Certainly members of the news media are also in the know as well as tens of thousands of government employees.
FISA courts are protecting no one except corrupt and inept government officials. Instead of renewing the Patriot Act, Congress should let it lapse.
The case of the FBI attorney who edited an email that had been received from the CIA to say that Page was not an informant for the CIA when in fact the CIA said he was seems like more than an "error".