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To: weegee; stocksthatgoup
Jimmy Carter Assumed Same Spy Power As Bush

Also, I found this little piece moments ago. Seems to apply .....

From:

http://www.slate.com/id/117041/

(snip) --

In time, Congress grew concerned about the FBI's power, and after Prohibition's repeal it outlawed all non-consensual wiretapping (but not bugging) as part of the 1934 Communications Act. In 1939, the Supreme Court upheld that law, ruling that since taps were illegal, evidence obtained from using them was inadmissible in court.

Even so, executive officials kept using wiretaps. In particular, Franklin Roosevelt sought to carve out a large exception to the statutory ban. In 1940, he wrote his attorney general, Robert Jackson, that while he accepted the court rulings that upheld the 1934 law, he didn't think those prohibitions applied to "grave matters involving the defense of the nation"—an increasingly high priority as world war loomed. On the contrary, Roosevelt ordered Jackson to proceed with the secret use of "listening devices" (taps or bugs) to monitor "persons suspected of subversive activities … including suspected spies."

Concerned about a German "fifth column" in the United States, Roosevelt specified that his order applied to espionage by foreign agents. But when Harry Truman succeeded FDR in 1945, America's enemies list was changing fast. The next year, as the Iron Curtain fell and the Red Scare flared, Truman's attorney general, Tom Clark, expanded FDR's national security order to permit the surveillance of "domestic subversives." Clark and Truman endorsed wiretapping whenever matters of "domestic security" were at stake, allowing taps to be placed on someone simply because he held radical views.

****

George Bush did the right thing.

16 posted on 12/19/2005 6:55:43 PM PST by beyond the sea (Murtha: Redeployment - What .......Surrender? --- Victory is not a strategy.)
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To: beyond the sea

Hey don't forget Hoover tapped everybody!


218 posted on 12/19/2005 8:07:17 PM PST by mad_as_he$$ (Never corner anything meaner than you. NSDQ)
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