Will Donald Trump stop domestic spying? | News, Sports, Jobs

WASHINGTON — In the course of a written FBI response to a Freedom of Information Act request asking about the trade names and vendors of surveillance software the FBI has purchased, the government once again quietly acknowledged its antipathy to constitutional provisions that all his employees have. vowed to uphold.

Since we are dealing with software used to spy on Americans in the US and abroad, the constitutional right violated is the right to privacy.

This is the old natural right to be left alone, which the Supreme Court took 175 years to recognize as protected by the Fourth Amendment. Since that recognition in 1965, however, despite near-universal judicial acceptance of the right’s constitutional protection, the executive branch of government has persistently denied it.

Here’s the backstory.

The Fourth Amendment, which requires judicially issued search warrants based on probable cause to commit a crime for all searches and seizures, protects the contents of devices that store data. Thus, owners of mobile devices and desktop computers have a right to privacy over the data they have stored there. Even a narrow interpretation of the amendment, which guarantees privacy in “persons, houses, papers and effects”, must recognize that a computer chip is a “effect” and thus its owner enjoys this protection.

It is a submission to the plain language, common understanding, and definitive judicial interpretations of the Fourth Amendment that everyone in government has sworn to.

During the first Trump administration, and probably behind the president’s back, but with the knowledge of high-ranking people he appointed, the FBI acquired the Israeli-made software known as zero-click. Zero-click refers to the software user’s ability to target and download content on a computer without having to trick an unwary target into clicking a link. The producer of this diabolical software is known as NSO and the trade name of the software is Pegasus.

When President Joe Biden learned of the FBI’s use of Pegasus without search warrants, he banned its government use, and his Commerce Department banned all American purchases from NSO. The FBI now stores this software in a warehouse in New Jersey.

Why didn’t Biden do his job and ban all warrantless domestic spying?

When Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, revealed that the Drug Enforcement Administration had purchased a Pegasus-like product, called Graphite, from another Israeli manufacturer, called Paragon, Congress included in the an amount of $1.65. trillion omnibus legislative provisions that give the director of national intelligence the power to prohibit all parts of the intelligence community from buying or using foreign spyware.

Why didn’t Congress just do its duty and ban all warrantless domestic spying?

The answers to these questions reflect that the intelligence community knows too much about American presidents and too many members of Congress for Congress to defy it. Thus, Representative Schiff’s proposal, which became law, was based on an alleged fear in Congress that Israeli-produced spy software, when used by the FBI or DEA, could serve as a mechanism for the Israeli government to spy on the US government.

How strange; spies spy on each other! Taxpayers pay for it. The constitution was trashed again. Congress is concerned with itself and not with the people it represents.

When Schiff’s civil liberties colleague, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., asked the DEA about this, it refused to give him a straight answer. Senator Wyden was concerned that the DEA was spying on Americans outside the US. Yes, outside. For years, presidential administrations of both parties have argued that the Fourth Amendment only limits law enforcement, not intelligence, and argued that the Constitution only limits the U.S. government.

This discredited argument has been rejected by the Supreme Court since the 1940s, and as recently as 2008, when the court held that wherever the government goes to do its job, the Constitution goes with it. This exploitation is by no means new. Rather, it relies on 400 years of British law that prohibited kings and sheriffs from removing their defendants to places outside Britain for torture and interrogation, only to be returned for trial.

If this rule—wherever the government goes, so goes the Constitution—were not so, then there would be nothing to stop the FBI and DEA from doing what British officials tried to get away with.

Now, back to the feds spying on us. Joe Biden’s DEA, and Donald Trump’s before him, believes that when it operates outside the US — such as the drug war against Mexico and Mexican civilians — it also operates outside the Constitution. In order to prevent judicial prohibition of its extra-constitutional illegality, DEA lawyers must work to prevent its well-discredited behavior and arguments from airing in an American courtroom.

They do this in two ways. The first, as addressed above, is to use quiet threats to coerce government officials into refusing to expressly prohibit these practices. And second, if necessary, to deceive federal judges and defense attorneys by creating a fictitious version of his evidence acquisition. The fiction usually involves a foreign intermediary turning over the evidence to the feds, who turn it over to other feds who are unaware of his criminal origins.

Criminal? Yes, criminal. Hacking a computer without consent or a search warrant is a crime, regardless of where the computer is located or by whom.

Rep. Schiff and Sen. Wyden mean well. Each has a consistent record of defending civil liberties from government attacks. But the culture in Congress today prevents Congress from fully protecting privacy, regardless of which party is in control.

We elected a government and hired its employees to protect our liberties and property. Today he does none. Rather, it attacks them.

Will the new Donald Trump put an end to this?

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To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit