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Tag Archives: Justin Amash

How did your Representative vote? Issue: YOUR Constitutional Rights

25 Thursday Jul 2013

Posted by HattieBelle in Bill of Rights, Bills, Congress, Constitution, House of Representatives, Indiana, Jackie Walorski, Justin Amash, NSA, U.S. House, U.S. House Vote

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4th Amendment, Constitution, Dragnet Surveillance, Freedom, Jackie Walorski, Justin Amash, Liberty, Marlin Stutzman, NSA, Peeping Tom Authorization Act

The House of Representatives' Dome at night.

The House of Representatives’ Dome at night.

Amash Amendment #100: Stop NSA’s Blanket Surveillance of Americans

H R 2397, Stop Dragnet Surveillance of U.S. citizens. Justin Amash: “We came close (205-217). If just seven Representatives had switched their votes, we would have succeeded. Thank YOU for making a difference. We fight on to defend liberty.” CLICK HERE TO SEE HOW YOUR REPRESENTATIVE VOTED

2014 NDAA

H R 1960, National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2014. The bill authorizes $55 billion *more* in military spending than the amount authorized by law under sequestration and provides $5 billion *more* than the President’s request for Overseas Contingency Operations (i.e., war funding). It also contains a misguided and dangerous policy statement on Syria that encourages greater military intervention and implies congressional support for arming the Syrian rebels. And yet again, the House rejected an amendment (Smith-Amash-Gibson) that would have repealed unconstitutional sec. 1021 of the 2012 NDAA, which gives the President sweeping new power to indefinitely detain anyone, including American citizens inside the United States, without charge or trial. Eighteen Republicans opposed their own party’s NDAA, which is the high mark for opposition in modern history. It passed 315-108.
CLICK HERE TO SEE HOW YOUR REPRESENTATIVE VOTED

The Smith-Gibson Amendment to the NDAA Amendment to protect American citizen’s rights to Due Process.
CLICK HERE TO SEE HOW YOUR REPRESENTATIVE VOTED

Amash Responds to White House Concerns

24 Wednesday Jul 2013

Posted by HattieBelle in 4th Amendment, Amash Amendment H.R. 2387, Bill of Rights, Freedom, Indiana, Jackie Walorski, Justin Amash, Liberty, Patriot, Wiretapping

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4th Amendment, Concerns, FACTS, Freedoms, Government Overreach, Intrusion, Invasive, Justin Amash, Stand Up, TRUTH

Myth v. Fact: Amash-Conyers Amendment

and NSA Surveillance

  • MYTH 1: The Amash-Conyers amendment is a “blunt approach [and] is not the product of an informed, open, or deliberative process.”—Jay Carney, White House Press Secretary
  • Fact: The Amash-Conyers amendment is a modest proposal to rein in among the most troubling NSA surveillance that has been disclosed so far.

The Amash-Conyers amendment ends NSA’s blanket collection of Americans’ telephone records. It does this by requiring the FISA court under Sec. 215 to order the production of records that pertain only to a person under investigation.

The amendment does not defund NSA. It does not defund all NSA surveillance under the Patriot Act’s Sec. 215. It does not require a warrant for NSA to get Americans’ car reservations, hotel receipts, or telephone records. NSA does not even have to suspect that a crime has occurred. The amendment simply requires that there be a reasonable connection between the documents sought and the person under investigation. Far from blunt, the Amash-Conyers amendment is narrow and modest and is only a first step towards protecting Americans’ records from NSA surveillance.

There’s some irony in being criticized for not having an “informed, open, or deliberative” debate by the very people and groups who have obscured how NSA’s surveillance programs work. Over the last two months, the public and especially Congress have been given significant information about the activity at issue here: the suspicionless, blanket surveillance of ordinary Americans’ telephone records. NSA and the intelligence committees have hosted numerous classified and unclassified hearings, including an extraordinary four-hour seminar with NSA director Keith Alexander yesterday. Congress has been given ample opportunity to consider the question: Does Congress oppose the suspicionless collection of every American’s phone records?

  • MYTH 2: The Amash-Conyers amendment prevents the bulk collection of data on foreigners.
  • Fact: The Amash-Conyers amendment does not restrict the surveillance of foreign-to-foreign communications in any way.

FISA simply does not apply to the surveillance of purely foreign communications. See 50 U.S.C. § 1802. FISA court orders under Sec. 215 cover local telephone calls (wholly within the U.S.) and calls between the U.S. and abroad. In other words, NSA’s Sec. 215 phone surveillance program covers only calls in which at least one side of the conversation is in the U.S. Because foreign-to-foreign communications are beyond the scope of the Sec. 215 surveillance program, those communications are not addressed by the Amash-Conyers amendment.

  • MYTH 3: The Amash-Conyers amendment raises constitutional concerns.
  • Fact: The Amash-Conyers amendment is entirely constitutional, and despite allegations of “concerns,” no one really believes the amendment is unconstitutional. In fact, the Amash-Conyers amendment helps restore Fourth Amendment protections of Americans’ phone records.

The Amash-Conyers amendment allows NSA to execute FISA court orders only if the orders limit the collection of documents to those documents that pertain to a person under a Patriot Act investigation. The amendment does not place a mandate on the FISA court; the amendment couldn’t even if that was Mr. Amash’s intention because the FISA court is not funded through the Department of Defense appropriations bill.

Although the Amash-Conyers amendment does not require the FISA court to include specific language in its order, it is important to note that Sec. 215 already requires the FISA court to include at least five sets of specific limitations in its court orders. See 50 U.S.C. § 1861(c). Reading the current language in Sec. 215 reveals that this “constitutional concern” is wholly without merit.

  • MYTH 4: Americans don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their telephone records.
  • Fact: Americans do have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their telephone records, and the Supreme Court appears poised to rule definitively on that issue.

Proponents of NSA’s suspicionless surveillance like to say that Americans have no reasonable expectation of privacy in their telephone records. The Fourth Amendment reads, in part: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated . . . .” The collection of every American’s telephone records certainly is a “seizure” of those records. And ordinary Americans believe the intimate details of their phone calls are private.

Smith v. Maryland, a case the Supreme Court decided more than three decades ago, is not clearly applicable to NSA’s suspicionless surveillance. The person whose data was collected in that case was suspected of wrongdoing before the data collection, and the technology of that era did not allow for the type of mass record surveillance and retention that we have today. In United States v. Jones, a case from last year that held certain government GPS tracking unconstitutional, Supreme Court justices began to rethink privacy in the age of digital technology.
If proponents of NSA blanket surveillance are right, if Americans lose constitutional protections when they make a call or send an e-mail, then any data stored in “the cloud” is fair game for the government without a warrant. Do we think it’s good policy to have every iPhone picture stored in iCloud subject to warrantless government confiscation? Is that reasonable?

  • MYTH 5: The Amash-Conyers amendment would take away a tool that has proved effective in fighting terrorism.
  • Fact: Proponents of NSA’s blanket collection of Americans’ telephone records have not put forward publicly a single, solid example of a “success” under the program.

The amendment does not take away a tool that has proved effective in the fight against terrorism. The administration claims that surveillance conducted under FISA Sec. 702, including the PRISM program, has disrupted terrorist plots, including the New York subway plot. The Amash-Conyers amendment does not address FISA Sec. 702 in any way. The amendment concerns Patriot Act Sec. 215 alone, not Sec. 702. The administration’s one and only public example of a Sec. 215 “success” is the conviction of a taxi driver for sending money to a Somali group. Reports suggest that the Somali group posed no direct threat to the U.S., the investigation did not uncover an imminent threat, and the data could have been obtained without Sec. 215. For that “success,” the government has collected billions of Americans’ records.

TO SUPPORT AMASH-CONYERS AMENDMENT CLICK HERE FOR YOUR HOUSE REPRESENTATIVE’S PHONE NUMBER.

White House Moves to Quash Amash

24 Wednesday Jul 2013

Posted by HattieBelle in 4th Amendment, Amish, Barack Obama, Bill of Rights, HYPOCRISY, White House

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Tags

4th Amendment, Barack Obama, HYPOCRISY, Justin Amash, NSA

THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 23, 2013

Statement by the Press Secretary on the Amash Amendment

WH::" We're against Amash/Conyers amendment because it's not an "OPEN" process/".

WH:”We’re against Amash/Conyers amendment because it’s not an “OPEN” process”(unlike what the FISA court & NSA do in total secrecy.)

In light of the recent unauthorized disclosures, the President has said that he welcomes a debate about how best to simultaneously safeguard both our national security and the privacy of our citizens.  The Administration has taken various proactive steps to advance this debate including the President’s meeting with the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, his public statements on the disclosed programs, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s release of its own public statements, ODNI General Counsel Bob Litt’s speech at Brookings, and ODNI’s decision to declassify and disclose publicly that the Administration filed an application with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.  We look forward to continuing to discuss these critical issues with the American people and the Congress.

However, we oppose the current effort in the House to hastily dismantle one of our Intelligence Community’s counter terrorism tools.  This blunt approach is not the product of an informed, open, or deliberative process.  We urge the House to reject the Amash Amendment, and instead move forward with an approach that appropriately takes into account the need for a reasoned review of what tools can best secure the nation.

(Presented without comment. Bold emphasis is mine.)

TO SUPPORT AMASH-CONYERS AMENDMENT CLICK HERE FOR YOUR HOUSE REPRESENTATIVE’S PHONE NUMBER.

A Junior Republican in the House of Representatives’ uphill battle to defend OUR Constitutional liberties

24 Wednesday Jul 2013

Posted by HattieBelle in 4th Amendment, Amash Amendment H.R. 2387, Bill of Rights, CISPA, Indiana, Justin Amash, Keith Alexander, NSA, U.S. House Vote

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

4th Amendment, Amash Amendment H.R. 2397, Justin Amash, Keith Alexander, Liberty, NSA, NSA Secret Meeting to Stop Amash, Snooping

Justin Amash, House Representative, Michigan (R)

Justin Amash, House Representative, Michigan (R)

While he may not be close to becoming Speaker of the House, Justin Amash has slowly but surely become one of the more prominent Republicans in the rebellious wing of the House conference, as evidenced Monday when he effectively forced the actual Speaker of the House, John Boehner, to allow a vote on his amendment to partially defund the National Security Agency as part of the Department of Defense appropriations process. The revelations that the NSA had been collecting the phone and Internet data of millions of Americans en masse has given Amash a prime opportunity to move forward with some of his most important priorities.

Tomorrow the the house will vote on Amash’s HR 2397 amendment which will remove funding for NSA programs using the Patriot Act for blanket collection of phone records and metadata from phone service providers.

The summary of the amendment on the House of Representatives website reads:

Ends authority for the blanket collection of records under the Patriot Act. Bars the NSA and other agencies from using Section 215 of the Patriot Act to collect records, including telephone call records, that pertain to persons who are not subject to an investigation under Section 215.

NSA defenders in the Senate, especially Diane Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss, are flipping out. Today the National Security Head, Keith Alexander, scheduled a last-minute, members-only ‘top secret’ briefing. The invitation warned members that they could not share what they learned with their constituents or others. “The briefing will be held at the Top Secret/SCI level and will be strictly Members-Only,” reads the invite.

Keith Alexander, National Security Head

Keith Alexander, National Security Head

No matter what the results of tomorrows vote, the Amash amendment will put the House Representatives on record when it comes to NSA ‘snooping’. Voters will easily be able to find out WHICH REPRESENTATIVES favor tossing our 4th and 5th Amendments down “the toilet”.

As SOON as I have the information I will publish the ROLL CALL here so everyone knows how their representatives voted on limiting NSA mass surveillance. I will also include how U.S. House Representatives voted on the 2014 NDAA, which provides for arming and militarily aiding Al-Qaeda Syrian Rebels (yes, the ones that are massacring Christians, among others) and takes away American citizen’s rights to due process. I will also include the Roll Call for CISPA which aids dragnet surveillance by destroying private corporation’s “freedom of contract”, actually PROHIBITING companies from making legally binding commitment to users not to share personal data/e-mails. (Click here to find out how CISPA aids NSA ‘Dragnet Surveillance’.)

~It is STILL NOT TO LATE TO E-MAIL YOUR REPRESENTATIVE TONIGHT OR TO CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVE TOMORROW MORNING TO VOICE YOUR OPINION ABOUT
JUSTIN AMASH’S AMENDMENT.~

CLICK HERE FOR YOUR HOUSE REPRESENTATIVE’S PHONE NUMBER.
CLICK HERE TO E-MAIL YOUR HOUSE REPRESENTATIVE.

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