The Trouble with Legislating from the Bench. Not to mention the Oval Office...
Don't be Paranoid, or anything...

In the midst of tinfoil-surfing, in order to avoid doing something productive, like apply for jobs, I came across this interesting bit from the American Federation of Scientists Project on Government Secrecy,

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) can be used to monitor U.S. persons who engage in unlawful collection of classified or controlled information even if they are not acting on behalf of a foreign power. That is the upshot of an August 14 ruling (pdf) disclosed last week in the case of two former officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). The defendants had argued that they were improperly subjected to FISA surveillance since FISA requires that the target be "an agent of a foreign power" and, they insist, they were never acting on behalf of a foreign power.

Judge T.S. Ellis, III, rejected that defense argument.

But in doing so, he redefined and significantly expanded the meaning of "agent of a foreign power" to include non-foreign agents who may be involved in unlawful information gathering.

Couple that, with the fact that we've begun reclassifying long declassified crap, and you begin to see a slippery slope.

Tenuous, you say?

Well, is that any more tenuous than the fact your leaders in the Potomac Playpen tried to invoke the States Secret Privilige... from English Common Law? It's only been acknowledge in the canon of American precidence once. Which is far less than Supreme Court Rulings that would seem to blatantly proscribe the activites of the IRS.

Still, more troubling than this to me is the bullshit of "signing statements". It's the main reason why President Bush has nearly set a record for lack of vetos. He doesn't need to veto because he just tacs on an addendum that says, "subject to signatory's discretion". I find it assinine that the Supreme Court struck down the line-item veto which would have made de jure what this constitutional non sequitor does de facto.

"The Constitution isn't a Suicide Pact!" The Alan Dershowitzes of the world scream. Strangely enough, the bete noir of the left, Henry Kissinger, had the most eloquent rebuttal that,

"The illegal we do immediately, the unconstitutional takes a little bit longer."