I do not believe anything that has been revealed has broken the law or violated the constitution. You're belief is wrong. Here is the text of the Fourth Amendment: The right of the people to be ...

1. What are the arguments for/against keeping legal
interpretations of laws secret?
I do not believe anything that has been revealed has broken the law or violated the constitution.
You're belief is wrong. Here is the text of the Fourth Amendment: The right of the people to be ...
I do not believe anything that has been revealed has broken the law or violated the constitution. You're
belief is wrong. Here is the text of the Fourth Amendment:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable
searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause,
supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons
or things to be seized. The Fourth Amendment has always required particular (individualized) suspicion
of wrongdoing before a government search becomes reasonable. Basically what the FISA court has done
is concluded that individualized suspicion—a tenant of jurisprudence that is centuries old—is no longer
required. They've made this determination in secret. When people tried to appeal this termination, they
said that it could not be appealed because its existence was secret. This brings us to the second
Constitutional violation, the circumvention of the Supreme Court's exclusive province on ultimate
questions of constitutional law. Neither federal courts established by Congress nor Congress itself has
the power to take this jurisdiction away from the Supreme Court. But that is precisely what they did.
After these two violations it is a bit of a gray area to me. Perhaps a constitutional lawyer will come in and
clarify but I see several other problems. Congress tried to limit the jurisdiction of lower federal courts

2. from hearing constitutional questions related to FISA rulings. The FISA court issued gag orders which
operated as prior restraints on free speech. A prior restraint is presumed invalid and only a compelling
government interest of the highest order can be used to justify a prior restraint and the restraint needs to
be the least restrictive possible means of achieving that government interest. National security is the
proffered compelling interest. But even with if that is a valid compelling interest, the means used to
further that interest must be the least restrictive possible means. Congress permitted the FISA court to
issue blanket gag orders on the mere existence of massive government programs. That's not least
restrictive. It would be least restrictive for the court to block disclosure of particular state secrets about
specific investigations. Even in such specific cases, for example, in a normal criminal law setting,
complete details of an active wiretap a suspected drug trafficker, for example, cannot be the subject of a
gag order. That wouldn't be narrowly tailored. The gag order would have to be tightly drawn in such a
way that it only applied to the details of the kind the compelling interest is justified to limit. That's a
mouthful. In other words, the government would have to disclose the general details of the warrant, but
could obtain a gag order to restrict disclosure of things like names of the suspects, details of the phone
numbers, conversation logs, and probably even names of law enforcement officers. The language of the
Constitution, as much as I personally hate to admit it, is open to some interpretation. That interpretation
falls to the Supreme Court and only the Supreme Court. To date, the Supreme Court has never
interpreted the Constitution to in such a way that would allow the things our government has been doing.
Therefore, the things our government has been doing are unconstitutional/illegal. Normally, a challenge
would be brought in a lower court, which may or may issue an injunction to temporarily stop the practice,
and the challenge would make its way up to the Supreme Court within a couple years. When people have
tried to challenge it, Congress forced them to bring the challenge in the FISA court with no means of
further appeal. On occasions where challenges were brought in regular federal court, the executive
branch has come in and said that the case must be dismissed because in order to try the case it would
require the executive branch to disclose state secrets. That's normally a valid excuse for dismissal, but
the secrets have normally been about individuals or specific investigations, never about the mere
existence of a widespread programs of systematic government intrusions into personal privacy. Luckily,
since the Snowden disclosures, a few federal judges have rejected the executive's arguments and have
allowed some challenges to proceed. So I suspect within two years at the most the issue will be before
the Supreme Court. Edit: Yes, thank you, I am aware that there are exceptions to the warrant
requirement. The concept of individualized suspicion is embodied in this exception. Whether it is hot
pursuit, Terry, wingspan, checkpoints, whatever, they are applicable on an individual basis only. There is
no exception that allows a Terry frisk of an entire city, for example; there isn't even one for all occupants
of a house. There definitely is not an exception to the warrant requirement that allows surveillance on an
entire nation, unless the government contends that the American people are part of an organized
criminal enterprise and we're all about to be indicted as RICO co-conspiratoes. Thank you, again, for
pointing out that there are exceptions. However, what the NSA is doing, and the way FISA is handing out
gag orders, does not have an exception because what the NSA and FISA are doing is unprecedented. Edit
2: Also, no, the 1979 case about the phone metadata on that one guy's rotary phone does not apply, really,
stop trolling. There is no way you seriously believe Smith is a controlling case on point.

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