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ESSAY Thomas Drake @Thomas_Drake1
United States of Surveillance
The US government prefers the self-licensed primacy of warrantless mass surveillance under the exception blanket of national security without the ‘inconvenience’ of seeking a judicial warrant as required by the probable cause standard under the 4th Amendment of the Constitution — a bedrock amendment that is central to what it means to live as a person in America and as We the People with fundamental rights.
The 4th Amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures of US Persons by the government — in order to meet the very high bar when the government wants to conduct surveillance against a US Person suspected of engaging in or about to engage in criminal activities — or suspicious criminal actions that compromise the security of the United States on behalf of or in material support of a foreign actor or entity under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) — related or linked to foreign intelligence as in spy-type behavior.
However, Section 702 of FISA creates a huge carve out and bypass exception that allows for secret warrantless interception and seizure of US Person communications and electronic data — effectively a blanket ‘backdoor’ writ of assistance.
And Section 702 of FISA also permits warrantless search of vast secret collection databases that include US Person information — treated as pre-crime data.
I blew the whistle on the epigenesis of the willfully warrantless domestic mass surveillance implemented under the umbrella STELLAR WIND program that violated the 4th Amendment — a key Amendment along with the rest of the 10 Amendments in the Bill of Rights that fundamentally define who we are as Americans (with the 1st Amendment as the cornerstone) granting protections against the preemptive annexation of rights of We the People by the central government.
The STELLAR WIND program not only criminally violated the 4th Amendment shortly after 9/11, it also violated FISA.
I later ended up indicted in 2010 under the Espionage Act facing and then facing down 35 years in prison.
Why? Because I would not violate the fidelity of the oath I took to support and defend the Constitution on behalf of We the People — even against my own government violating the Constitution.
Almost 25 years later the government wants to continue with their obsessive compulsive addiction to unfettered ‘backdoor’ warrantless access to any and all US Person persona data and their privacy in abject violation of the Constitution — no matter how they twist and redefine plain language.
Lawlessness and lawfare under reign of rule instead of Rule of Law under the Constitution is now the default normalcy ‘protected’ (err, licensed) by the primacy of national security.
Government has always had the ability to conduct warrantless surveillance on non-US Persons outside the US.
It is now way past time to follow the Constitution as the law of the land and seek a 4th Amendment compliant judicial or FISA warrant to surveil Americans/US Persons and restrain the predations and pathologies of government in their abuse of power against We the People — given the base human condition.
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