no US person
solely on first amendment
activities, such
as staging rallies,
writing critical essays,
expressing beliefs;
no US person
solely on advocacy
of the use of force;
no US lawyer
solely for representing
suspicious clients;
no US person
solely for being muslim
may be targeted,
but maybe in some
suggestive combination
of the foregoing
plus probable cause
of foreign pow'r influence
and dire immanence
alleged before the
FISA court official's sure
rubber stamp assent.
we are left, again, with questions and obfuscatory nonanswers by nominally responsible parties.
foremost in my mind, parsing the propaganda and ratiocination, are: how are "foreign power" and "immanence" defined these days? are they defined at all? i understand that the notion of immanence in the context of customary and traditional international law of war has proved somewhat pliable over the last fifteen or so years; is this the same notion of immanence? are anonymous, or wikileaks or the tor network foreign powers? are Al Haramain and CAIR foreign powers? how about The Guardian and FirstLook Media? or are foreign powers solely states, as seems to be the case in recent application of the aforementioned body of international law?
meanwhile, there's been a good deal of disturbing disclosure in the German press lately: see, e.g., spiegel, and spiegel and der erste.
and, it is interesting to note, Faisal Gill and Asim Ghafoor, two of the disclosed subjects of the disclosed surveillance, when asked whether these disclosures would lead them to sue the government, told Amy Goodman this morning that it is up to the Congress to exercise control because there are no judicial remedies available. Ghafoor would know.