Tag Archives: foreign policy

Limit FISA Surveillance?

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Certainly, the process is beset with vast, and serious, problems.

Mr [DoJ Inspector General] Horowitz’s staff reviewed a sample from a recent five-year period, October 2014 to September 2019, during which the eight FBI field offices applied for more than 700 surveillance warrants on US persons. Each of the reviewed files contained errors, inconsistencies and omissions. After reviewing the report, the FISA court’s Chief Judge James E Boasberg issued a rare public order. He told the government to undertake steps to ensure the accuracy of FISA applications. Yet inaccuracy isn’t the only problem. The use of FISA against a US citizen presents a fundamental threat to civil liberties. It essentially suspends the Constitution.

The problems, though, aren’t limited to FBI misbehaviors, the FBI being the proximate target of Boasberg’s order. The existence of these errors and the long-time existence of this sort of error each and together demonstrate that men of government, when able to exercise their power in the darkness of secrecy, cannot be trusted to stay true to the straight and narrow, to the strictures of integrity.

After FISA was enacted in 1978, FBI Director William Webster set the standards for its use.

And those standards have been violated.

Over the years FISA has been amended to allow for the surveillance of Americans. But there were safeguards.

Even with that legislative drift, the evolving safeguards have been violated.

It’s enough.

Limiting FISA surveillance must begin with eliminating the Star Chamber that is the FISA Court. That court is lawless enough already, as its ready and unquestioning acceptance of false warrant applications demonstrates. Its secret proceedings, along with that history, lend no credibility to the premise that, were its approvals limited by statute to foreign nationals, that it would honor those limits any more than have the men coming before it with applications to spy on American citizens foreign nationals who happen to be corresponding with American citizens.

Nor has that secret court ever been necessary, even did it behave properly. It exists to facilitate secret surveillances supported by secret warrants. Our Article III courts, and our State courts, have long been checked out on sealing—keeping secret—warrants, and subpoenas, until it comes time actually to serve them. Our courts, and our States’ state-level and local police departments, have long been checked out on conducting quiet surveillance—while under the careful eye of our public courts and of us citizens of the United States and of the State wherein [we] reside.

The existence of this Star Chamber is at the heart of the suspension of our Constitution about which Baker wrote at the link.

An Expansionist Germany

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Not military expansion, but a more insidious one: legal expansion.

The German government must come up with a new law regulating its secret services, after the country’s highest court [Federal Constitutional Court] ruled that the current practice of monitoring telecommunications of foreign citizens at will violates constitutionally-enshrined press freedoms and the privacy of communications.

And:

The key legal question was whether foreign nationals in other countries were covered by Germany’s constitution….

Why, yes, yes they are. Because German sovereignty reaches deep inside other nations’ borders, other nations’ legal and political jurisdictions, overrides those nations’ own sovereignty. Germany’s laws not only apply outside German borders, they apply inside other nations’ borders.

The Court’s judges’ hearts may have been in the right place, but this sets an ugly precedent regarding the allegedly inherent superiority of German sovereignty.

“The US Doesn’t Need a New Cold War”

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So says Robert Zoellick in his Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed.

We truly do not need another Cold War. But this one is being forced on us, anyway, by the People’s Republic of China and the economic war it’s prosecuting against us. The environment for this one also was facilitated by the multi-polar world so enthusiastically built by ex-President Barack Obama (D).

Baker also is operating from a defeatist proposition.

The New Cold Warriors can’t contain China given its ties throughout the world; other countries won’t join us. Nor can the US break the regime, though the Communist Party’s flaws could open cracks within its own society. The US can impose costs on China, but to what end, and at what price to Americans?

So were the Soviet Union’s ties throughout the world, yet we, in turning Nikita Khrushchev’s words back on his nation, buried them.

Other nations are joining us in the struggle against the PRC, as the PRC’s military acquisitiveness has grown more blatant and the bloody deadliness of its transgressions along with its utter lack of concern for the lives of other nations’ citizens (much less those of its own citizens) made more obvious by its performance with its Wuhan Virus and its behavior in the aftermath of the international spread of the virus.

Nor is regime breakage a goal of our government—as our government has repeatedly and openly said. Only behavioral change. And that is our overall, clearly and repeatedly stated, end.

I have to wonder, too, in what world Zoellick thinks he lives that conflict is always bloodless and costless for either side—or is Zoellick back-door suggesting we should just be quietly accepting lest our enemy become perturbed with us?

And this:

The New Cold Warriors expunge the successes of past US cooperation with China. Beijing was once a wartime enemy, a supplier of proxy foes in North Korea and North Vietnam, and the world’s leading proliferator of missiles and nuclear weapons technology. Beginning in the 1990s, China reversed course and worked with the US to control dangerous weapons. It turned from proliferation partnerships with Iran and North Korea to helping the US thwart their development of nuclear arms. From 2000 to 2018, US diplomacy prodded Beijing to support 182 of the 190 United Nations Security Council resolutions that imposed sanctions on states.

There never has been cooperation of the PRC with us, merely an occasional alignment of interests. Beijing has made itself an overt enemy of Vietnam, beginning with its attempted invasion of Vietnam shortly after the close of the Vietnam War.

It continues to supply northern Korea with needed supplies and technologies, even as the PRC pays lip service to the empty resolutions of the UN.

It continues to supply Iran with needed supplies and technologies, even as the PRC pays lip service to similar empty resolutions of the UN.

It continues to develop its own nuclear weapons, in secret and in underground low-yield test sites.

And those costs to us of defending ourselves in the PRC’s Cold War? Those costs surely will accrue, but the tariffs imposed, to date, have imposed little cost on American producers or consumers, the chatter of the nattering class notwithstanding: the PRC has been devaluing its currency in pace with our tariffs in order to keep their export prices—what Americans and other importers actually pay—relatively unchanged.

No, we don’t need this Cold War—but that’s merely to state the obvious: no nation needs war. But sometimes a war must be fought in defense—the survival of our nation as a free and independent polity, rather than one subservient to our enemy, depends on it and on winning this one.

Solidarity with Whom?

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President Donald Trump has threatened to permanently cut off US funding for the World Health Organization unless it enacts—not just chit-chats about—real reforms about the way it does business and the degree of independence from particular nations it chooses to exercise in the conduct of that business.

The European Union demurred from Trump’s position. EU’s foreign affairs spokeswoman Virginie Battu-Henriksson:

This is the time for solidarity, not the time for finger-pointing or for undermining multilateral cooperation[.]

If not now, while the data are reasonably current, then when? The WHO, after all, has been actively complicit in the People’s Republic of China’s original suppression of data regarding the Wuhan Virus, the PRC’s subsequent misleading about its nature and severity, and its current lies about its origin within the PRC. The WHO actively refused to share data with the Republic of China, and it refused to accept data from the RoC in the virus’ early cycles of spreading.

How is it possible to have international cooperation with an agency that so routinely undermines it?

Maybe Willie Sutton should have demanded solidarity rather than finger-pointing. Or perhaps more aptly, maybe David Berkowitz should have demanded solidarity rather than opprobrium and interference.

Trade Needs

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In an article about, among other things, the People’s Republic of China’s attempt to extort Australia into sitting down and shutting up about the PRC’s role in the Wuhan Virus’ spread across Earth, David Thomas, a consultant who for several decades has advised Australian businesses on investing in the PRC, said this:

The world is going to need China’s capital, manufacturing, and consumption power when this is all over.

That’s so wrong it’s foolish. We’re discovering that now, and after the Wuhan Virus situation has been dealt with from medical and economic perspectives, that we can’t afford to be very economically involved in the PRC.

The size of the PRC’s consumer population would be nice to access, but it’s unaffordable from economic and national security perspectives. The barriers erected to entry into that market are excessively high. The intellectual property and technology transfer demands exacted as a condition of doing business there and the outright theft of those things done not only from the foreign companies extant inside the PRC but from those foreign companies’ home nations are overt threats to security.

The world does not need the PRC’s manufacturing power at all. There are lots of other nations scattered around Asia, Europe, North America, and South America that are fully capable of filling the manufacturing role in place of the PRC, and there are many nations in Africa that are fully capable of developing into viable manufacturing sources.

Nor does the world need the PRC’s capital. Like its consumer market, it would be nice to access some of it, but it will be accessed adequately to the extent the world’s nations sell their goods and services to consumers in the PRC. However, we can’t afford that part of PRC capital that would be used to buy technology-oriented businesses in order to acquire those technologies.

Kerry Stokes, a billionaire mining-equipment and media magnate is just as foolish.

If we’re going to go into the biggest debt we’ve had in our life and then simultaneously poke our biggest provider of income in the eye it’s not necessarily the smartest thing you can do. We are a trading nation. We have nothing else to do but trade[.]

Australia does, indeed, need to trade. But it doesn’t need to trade with an enemy. It does need to change trading partners, and there are a planet-ful of nations that can substitute, individually or in groups, for that enemy.

It’s time for the free nations, the free market nations, of the globe to stop letting themselves be cowed by where their next trade dollar is going to come from and start thinking, instead, about the material and security cost of that dollar and to start thinking about where the trade dollar after the next will come from.