Penthouse
June, 1999
America's Secret Court
By PAUL DERIENZO and JOAN MOOSSY,
5118 words
Second North American and all other rights available.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court deliberates in a vault-like
room in the Dept. of Justice in DC. It issues no written opinions,
and since 1978 has yet to turn down even one of some 10,000 requests
for wiretaps and search warrants.
First appeared in Penthouse. Updated September 23, 2001
Preface
The tragedy that struck the World Trade Center in New York City
and the Pentagon, on the banks of the Potomac on September 11th
happened without warning--and except for the brave passengers on
United Airlines flight 93--without resistance. How could the mightiest
power on earth, the only global superpower, fall victim to a relatively
small group of conspirators? The answer may lie in the penchant
for our counter intelligence folks to use racial, ethnic and cultural
profiling to target their suspects. Incidents of agents barking
down a wrong tree while bad guys operate freely, plotting unspeakable
acts of violence directly on US shores are all to common. The false
prosecution of nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee, the failure to detect
FBI counterintelligence Agent and traitor Robert Hanssen, and now
the failure of intelligence agencies to discover and stop the World
Trade Center and Pentagon attackers. Although many pundits and officials
have asked the public not to play the "blame game" this article
clearly demands that Americans demand immediate accountability over
the lapses by the intelligence community that allowed these horrendous
attacks. This article is the story of one of the most important
legal counterspy tools, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
(FISA) and how although it was designed to limit governmental abuses
of power this law may be helping to create a police state. It's
the story of how personal ambition and a lack of clear moral and
ethical guidelines can put our most cherished freedoms in peril.
--Paul DeRienzo and Joan Moossy NYC, September 23, 2001
Imagine a secret court made up of anonymous judges chosen by the
Chief Justice of the United States and empowered to grant wiretaps,
approve break-ins, bug psychiatrists' offices and people's homes-all
without probable cause that a crime has been or is being committed.
Its hearings are conducted in secret, without notification of the
proposed targets and under a novel definition of due process that
allows suspension of long-held civil rights in the name of national
security. Once the subject of an investigation is judged a "foreign
power or agent of. a foreign power," a much lower standard than
"probable cause," surveillance can begin and the targets cannot
challenge the evidence, answer the charges brought against them,
or in many cases even know the surveillance has taken place. Such
a secret court does in fact exist. It was created in 1978 under
a law known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which
was designed to limit the sort of abuses of authority committed
by the administration of President Richard M. Nixon and FBI Director
J. Edgar Hoover. But according to many legal experts, FISA may in
fact facilitate the creation of a police state. Even staunch conservatives
are troubled by this legislation. Yale Law School professor and
former Supreme Court candidate Robert Bork has said that FISA would
"not be the first regulatory scheme that turned out to benefit the
regulated rather than the public."

Spy Museum exhibit on Stand-Squillacote
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The roots of FISA lie in the social upheavals that convulsed the
country in the 1960s and 70s. During that time, countless citizens
were drawn into a plethora of political-activist groups, from the
civil-rights movement to anti-war organizations. Demonstrations
and riots rocked cities and college campuses as Americans began
to question seriously the government's war in Vietnam. The federal
government moved quickly to stanch the tide of opposition and social
change through a program of dirty tricks and unprecedented violations
of personal rights and privacy, often justified as necessary for
national security.
The government's abuse of the Constitution eventually reached its
height with the Watergate break-in and subsequent scandal that resulted
in the near-impeachment and consequent resignation of President
Nixon, who had ordered break-ins, known as black-bag jobs, against
his Democratic opponents in the 1972 election. To defend his actions,
Nixon argued that the president has an "inherent authority" as chief
executive to suspend the Constitution in an emergency. Abraham Lincoln
had limited habeas-corpus rights during the Civil War, and Franklin
Roosevelt had interned thousands of Japanese-Americans in camps
after Pearl Harbor.
Public outrage over Nixon's abuses led to a 1976 investigation by
the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Testimony before the
committee, which was headed by Senator Frank Church of Idaho, revealed
that the nation's intelligence agencies had consistently ignored
and violated the Constitution for more than a quarter century. Among
other abuses, the FBI was held responsible for the infamous COINTELPRO
counterintelligence program that targeted those whom Hoover and
Nixon perceived as political enemies: the Black Panther party, the
American Indian Movement, and a host of popular leaders, including
the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. To Senator
Church, all this was "one of the sordid episodes in the history
of American law enforcement."
The findings of the Church Committee clearly established that there
needed to be strict separation of federal law enforcement from the
government's counterintelligence activities. Ever since passage
of the Omnibus Crime Control Act of 1968, electronic surveillance
in criminal investigations has required a warrant signed by a judge.
But the '68 law had left open an exception in cases of national
security - a loophole exploited by Nixon and his cronies. As designed
ten years later, the primary purpose of FISA was to gather counterintelligence
information, not to make criminal prosecutions. Surveillance would
be conducted under the guidance of the Justice Department, employing
a team of lawyers to work with the attorney general and the FBI
An innovation proposed by then Attorney General Griffin Bell created
a special court of sitting federal judges who would approve FISA
wiretaps the same way judges approve criminal wiretaps.
The main targets of FISA were supposed to be foreign intelligence
agents working as part of their country's diplomatic missions in
the United States. Although the U.S. Supreme Court has yet to hear
a FISA case, lower courts have ruled that "once surveillance becomes
primarily a criminal investigation ... individual privacy interests
come to the fore and government foreign-policy concerns recede."
Yet the fact that evidence acquired from a FISA surveillance can
be used to make a criminal prosecution has led some critics to charge
that the FBI is taking advantage of the law to make arrests. Asserts
American University law professor and Nation magazine commentator
Herman Schwartz, "FISA has not eliminated the incentive to use intelligence-gathering
authority improperly to obtain evidence for criminal prosecutions."
A famous example of this impropriety is the case of former high-level
CIA official Aldrich Ames, who was sentenced to life imprisonment
in April 1994 for spying for the Soviet Union. Although Ames eventually
pled guilty to espionage, his lawyers say the government undermined
the rights of all Americans, loyal or otherwise, in the way they
went after him. Prior to 1995, FISA specifically allowed national-security
wiretaps but not searches without probable cause. The 17B.I., lacking
enough evidence to prove Ames had committed a crime but eager to
catch him, went to then-Attorney General Janet Reno in October 1993
and convinced her to allow a search of Ames's home without a warrant
from a judge. It boils down to a sticky issue, since the most important
right protected by the Fourth Amendment and enshrined in a thou
sand years of legal precedent is the right to be safe from a search
in one's own home. Is it wrong for the government, even in the name
of a legitimate national security investigation, to violate the
Constitution?
Ames's lawyer, Preston Burton shrugs off the disappointment of not
having had the opportunity to argue the constitutionality of the
search. "It would have presented some very interesting legal issues
that the courts have not clearly grappled with-and now they don't
have to," he says, "because [Congress has] remedied the problem."
Indeed, within a year of Reno's action, Congress had amended FISA,
permitting the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to grant
search warrants without probable cause. President Bill Clinton broadened
that power in February 1995 with an executive order allowing the
attorney general and other top-level officials to approve physical
searches without a court order if the purpose is "to acquire foreign
intelligence information." According to Burton, despite the real
threat of spies and terrorists targeting the U.S., "the argument
that there is a national-security exception [to the Constitution]
is a dangerous animal, because what that is hard to define."
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court deliberates behind heavy,
spyproof doors in a windowless, vault-like room in the headquarters
of the Department of Justice. It issues no written opinions, and
since 1978 has yet to turn down even one of some 10,000 requests
for wiretaps and search warrants. It's a frightening record, even
to dedicated Justice Department lawyers like Richard Scruggs, who
examined FISA surveillance applications in 1995 and found that "there
were so many FISAs being conducted with so few attorneys that the
review process to prevent factual and legal errors was virtually
nonexistent."
Suspicions that COINTELPRO may not have been put out of business
with the Church Committee hearings grew in the mid-1980s, after
the FBI admitted it had paid informants to spy on domestic political
and religious groups associated with the Committee in Support of
the People of El Salvador. Although the bureau was never directly
implicated in the campaign of dirty tricks launched against C.I.S.P.E.S.,
many began to see a familiar pattern of abuse. "Under the Clinton
administration," Scruggs wrote in his 1995 report to the Justice
Department, "the nation's two systems for wiretapping-[Title 111]
for criminal cases and [FISA] for intelligence gathering[have] become
freight trains running at full throttle down parallel tracks." Despite
the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc, FISA wiretap
and search authorizations increased dramatically, from 484 in 1992
to 839 in 1996, before leveling off at 749 in 1997 (Domestic criminal
wiretaps increased from 340 to 569 in the same period.)
There are seven judges on the FISA court, appointed to staggered
seven-year terms by the Chief Justice. Cases are brought by the
attorney general acting for the FBI or any other agency of the executive
branch, including the super secret National Security Agency Hearings
are held every two weeks, and in the event a warrant application
is turned down, the government can take its case to what has become
known as the "Maytag repairmen" of the judicial system, the Foreign
Intelligence Board of Review, a court that Chief Justice William
Rhenquist once remarked was "the easiest job you can have," because
it never gets any appeals.
FISA judges have rarely discussed their work, but in recent years
U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth, the FISA court's presiding
judge, has been offering his opinions on that body's operations.
A former prosecutor with a reputation for toughness and independence,
Judge Lamberth was appointed to the federal district court by President
Ronald Reagan and to the FISA court by Rhenquist. Lamberth says
the government's lawyers are doing a good job, and that the reason
the government has never lost a case before the court is that the
Department of Justice has had a "superb internal review process
... through several different administrations."
According to Lamberth, each FISA application comes with the personal
approval of the attorney general, "so we know there is political
accountability for what is being presented to us." In response to
charges that the court has become a rubber stamp for prosecutors,
Lamberth declares, "We could probably, if we wanted to play some
games, create denials and then re-applications and grant those and,
you know, play numbers games. I don't think judges care about numbers
games."
We will have to take Judge Lamberth at his word, because the public
will never see the most recent congressional oversight probe into
the workings of FISA. During the 104th Congress, the Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence reviewed the government's policy on electronic
surveillance and physical searches for national security purposes.
The committee traveled to key FBI field sites to study FISA in action,
and tracked the FISA budget. Its review, the committee said, focused
on issues of "fundamental fairness toward targets of FISA." But
the results of that report remain classified themselves, and its
criticisms and recommendations will probably never be made public.
According to Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security
Studies in Washington, D.C., the government "interprets the requirements
under the law in a way that leads to unconstitutional searches and
seizures." Martin says that the FBI and Justice Department have
"come to use FISA in situations where they intended from the beginning
to bring criminal charges against the target of a search." The problem,
she says, is illustrated by the case of seven Palestinians and a
Kenyan, the so-called Los Angeles Eight. whom the government has
been trying to deport for a decade because of their work with the
radical Marxist organization the Popular Front for the Liberation
of Palestine. Martin says the basis for the FISA wiretap was solely
"the First Amendment protected political activities, of the LA Eight."
She notes that FISA "states explicitly that the government cannot
rely solely on First Amendment activities in initiating FISA wiretaps."
David Pugh, spokesperson for the National Coalition to Protect Political
Freedom, says there have been 50 cases in the past six years in
which the Immigration and Naturalization Service has used secret
evidence to arrest and deport non-citizens; all those cases, Pugh
adds, involve Arabs and other Muslims. "The government is trying
to set both political and legal precedents in using secret evidence,"
says Pugh, "applying it to those they perceive as the most vulnerable
sections of the population."
Following the terrorist bombings at the World Trade Center and in
Oklahoma City, Congress passed the Anti-Terrorism and Effective
Death Penalty Act of 1996. This measure originally gave the federal
government broad new powers to investigate and prosecute acts of
domestic terrorism, but opposition from conservatives and, civil
libertarians alike resulted in the removal of most of its provisions
dealing with American citizens. The act now targets non-citizens,
borrowing features from FISA, including provisions for secret evidence
to be used in deportations and a secret Alien Terrorist Removal
Court modeled after the FISA court.
That this law could serve as means of racial profiling by the government
has always been a fear. A target of the anti-terrorism act is Nasser
Ahmed, an Egyptian living in Brooklyn for more then a decade. A
husband and father who worked as an electrical engineer, he was
arrested by the INS on the basis of secret evidence that neither
he nor his lawyers were allowed to see. Ahmed was held without
being charged for three and a half years, mostly in solitary confinement,
in a federal prison in New York City until late 1999, when the government
was ordered to release him by an immigration judge. Soon after more
than two dozen others held in immigration jails on secret evidence
were also released. Ahmed maintained that the FBI was desperate
to use him as an informant in the Muslim community where Agents
admits they have few assets. Abdeen Jabara, a lawyer who is on Ahmed's
defense team contends that the anti-terrorism statute is "politically
motivated and will be selectively enforced" against whatever political
movement the executive branch decides is the enemy at any given
time.
Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists'
Project on Government Secrecy, believes that FISA does have a role
in protecting the country. "Do I feel more threatened by the World
Trade Center bombers and the Unabomber, or do I feel more threatened
by Janet Reno?" he asks. "It's still the former, not the latter."
But Aftergood is also worried that the secrecy surrounding FISA
may be endangering the rights of some of its targets.
Among those targets was a married couple sentenced earlier this
year to long federal prison terms for conspiracy to commit espionage.
Their case has raised concerns that FISA might become a tool in
the hands of zealots in law enforcement, as well as the troubling
possibility that a law designed to prevent abuses of power may in
fact constitute an increasing threat to the rights of all Americans.
In February 1998, following a lengthy FISA-authorized investigation,
Kurt Stand, Theresa Squillacote, and James Clark were indicted for
conspiring to commit espionage for the former German Democratic
Republic, the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation, and the Republic
of South Africa. The three had known one another since the early
1970s, when they were members of left-wing student organizations
at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.
Stand, was North American representative of the International Union
of Food Workers, and Squillacote, his wife of more then 20 years
and a former procurement lawyer for the Pentagon, were charged with
attempted espionage and obtaining national-defense information to
be used to the injury of the United States. Squillacote was also
charged with violating an oath regarding the handling of classified
material, taken upon her January 1997 resignation from the Pentagon.
Clark, who was originally charged with passing a top-secret CIA
document to the Russians, pled guilty last spring, and in return
for cooperating with the FBI received a relatively lenient sentence
of 12 years and seven months. Stand and Squillacote went to trial
in October 1998, and were convicted on all charges. This past January
they were sentenced: Stand to 17 and a half years, Squillacote to
nearly 22 years. Under federal sentencing guidelines, all three
must serve at least 85 percent of their terms before release. The
sentences were actually considered relatively lenient, the shortest
possible under sentencing guidelines. Defense lawyers had argued
that since no actual damage had been done to the United States,
the judge should depart from the guidelines, but the prosecutors
argued against more lenient sentences, citing the alleged duration
of the conspiracy and the defendants' lack of cooperation with authorities.
The government's indictment charged that Stand had been recruited
as a spy in 1972 by an East German intelligence officer who was
a friend of Stand's family, and that several years later Stand brought
Clark, at the time a graduate Student in Slavic languages, into
the alleged conspiracy. Squillacote, the indictment claims, was
recruited by Stand around the time of their marriage in 1980. Their
supporters scoff at the allegations, pointing out that if the government
is right, Stand would have been 17 years old when he began his alleged
career as a spy in 1972.
The case against Stand, Squillacote, and Clark began when their
names were discovered in files turned over to the CIA by high-ranking
East German officials shortly before the fall of East Germany in
1989. The documents contained the names of the citizens of the United
States, Britain, and West Germany who had worked for the Orwellian
East German security agency known as the Stasi. For six years the
CIA jealously fended off FBI agents hungry to make espionage cases
in the United States, but in 1995 the spooks were pressured into
turning over to bureau agents some of the Stasi files. According
to the FBI, it was "old-fashioned" detective work by a young German-speaking
agent named Katherine Alleman, formerly with Army Intelligence,
that led to the discovery of cross-indexed "true name" cards identifying
Stand, Squillacote, and Clark in a Stasi file marked "Junior." Interestingly,
Special Agent Alleman noted in her affidavit in support of search
and arrest warrants that names in the files and the testimony of
former Stasi employees could be unreliable: "While these statements
concern matters relevant to this investigation ... affiant cautions
that she cannot vouch for the truthfulness or accuracy of their
contents."
Alleman brought her findings to the FISA court, and in 1996 the
judges authorized the FBI to begin a 24-hour surveillance of Stand,
Squillacote, and Clark, which lasted for nearly two years, with
renewals of the warrants approved every 90 days. The surveillance
intruded into all aspects of their lives, including family, health,
relationships, finances, and professional work. Most seriously,
the surveillance targeted conversations with Squillacote's psychiatrist,
and a hidden microphone was placed in the couple's bedroom to record
their intimate conversations. With information acquired through
the FISA surveillance, the FB.I. prepared a psychological portrait
called a behavioral analysis profile of Squillacote, identifying
what they perceived to be her vulnerabilities.
In one of three FISA-authorized searches of the Stand-Squillacote
residence, the FBI found a 1995 letter from Squillacote to South
African Deputy Defense Minister and Communist party leader Ronnie
Kasrils. That stolen letter, which read like a philosophy major's
term paper, became the basis of a government sting operation. The
FBI forged Kasrils's name on a letter delivered to Squillacote's
post-office box-a letter purporting to be an invitation to meet
a "special component" in order to "assist in our struggle."
The first of four meetings between Squillacote and FBI Special Agent
Douglas Gregory took place on October 12, 1996, at the Oak Bar in
New York's Plaza Hotel, a rendezvous featured in the Alfred Hitchcock
spy movie North by Northwest. The behavioral profile had urged agents
to "capitalize on her fantasies and intrigue, and the initial meeting
should ... leave his subject beguiled and craving more attention."
Over drinks, Squillacote told Gregory that "I was kind of hoping
he [Kasrils] would read between the lines, and he did read between
the lines. And that's why we're here." These were reckless, self-aggrandizing
statements of hers that didn't even reflect the facts of the case
presented by prosecutors. Prepared by the behavioral profile, the
FBI. agent continued to feed her curiosity, telling Squillacote
that the unclassified political reports she offered were inadequate
and that South Africa wanted "scoops" and had "needs to be filled
on a practical basis."
Squillacote was hooked, and during the next meeting, on January
5, 1997, she handed Gregory four documents. Three of them were planning
guides from the Defense Department, the fourth was a CIA International
Arms Trade Report. The DOD documents included plans dealing with
potential threats from currently friendly countries; the CIA paper
contained a report on bribery in the international arms market.
Squillacote wasn't arrested at the time, and Gregory, still posing
as a South African, met again with her. This time she was accompanied
by Stand and their two children. The rendezvous was at a popular
tourist restaurant in Atlanta, where the kids ate ice cream while
the adults had drinks.
A few weeks later a separate "false flag" FBI operation targeted
Clark with an agent posing as a Russian spy. The sudden meeting
with the phony Russian set off Clark's internal alarms, and he got
in touch with Squillacote. The two discussed the possibility of
an FBI setup, but Squillacote continued to believe Gregory was a
South African, and even broached the subject of a phony passport
so she could make a clandestine visit to South Africa.
The government ended its surveillance of Squillacote and Stand in
May 1997, but she continued to write to Gregory. On October 4, 1997,
a meeting was set up at the Hyatt Hotel in Roslyn, Virginia, across
the Potomac from Washington. While Stand drove around looking for
a parking space, Squillacote entered the hotel, where she was quickly
arrested. When Stand went into the hotel after parking the car,
FBI agents were waiting for him. Clark was arrested the same day,
and two weeks later the three were denied bail.
The arrests of "the last three Communists in America" made headlines
in South Africa after The Washington Post reported that the "false
flag" operation had been carried out with the cooperation of the
South African government. A few days later Kasrils demanded and
received from then FBI Director Louis Freeh an apology from the
United States government for implying Kasrils had cooperated with
the sting.
During the trial, defense lawyers argued that much of the information
in the various documents was in the public domain and had been released
at congressional hearings, in Janes Defense Weekly, and leaked to
newspapers. The prosecutors, not to be outdone, gave jurors edited
copies of the purloined documents in binders emblazoned with the
word "secret" in bright red on the front and back. The government
bolstered its contention that the documents were indeed secret with
testimony from two security officers, William H. McNair of the CIA
and, from the Pentagon, Admiral Dennis Blair, former associate director
of Central Intelligence for Military Support. McNair forced a halt
to the proceeding when he refused to read a passage from Janes Defense
Weekly, claiming national security.
Although some observers snickered as McNair struggled to avoid admitting
that the so-called classified information was publicly available,
Steven Aftergood observes that officials have wide powers to classify
information and "the fact that certain information appears in the
public media does not automatically render it unclassified in the
eyes of the government." This in turn creates a dangerous paradox,
the secrecy watchdog says, because "the government's national-security
system has expanded beyond all reasonable bounds." Harvard University
law professor Alan Dershowitz, who represented Jonathan Pollard,
an American sentenced to life imprisonment for spying for Israel,
angrily insists that the government "can't use classification as
a shield and a sword."
Stand and Squillacote's case was set for trial before Federal District
Court Judge Claude M. Hilton in the Eastern District of Virginia,
the so-called rocket docket, where conservative judges and juries
are famous for making short work of defendants in speedy trials.
The couple's supporters maintain that the government went "venue
shopping," and that the arrests were made in Virginia in order to
avoid a liberal jury in the District of Columbia. In fact several
of the Virginia jury members had ties to national-security interests,
which is unavoidable in that jurisdiction.
Judge Hilton refused to suppress evidence collected during a six-day
search of the couple's residence conducted after the arrests and
after three secret searches authorized by the FISA court. Hilton
also ruled the extensive taps of their conversations were legally
authorized, and rejected a bid for a "taint hearing" sought by defense
lawyers, who argued that the FBI wiretaps collected information
protected by psychotherapy and marital privileges.
The trial began on October 9, 1998 Clark, who had pled guilty months
earlier, testified for the prosecution as to Stand's and Squillacote's
relationship with their East German handler. Clark said he had passed
secret documents to the same man in the 1970s and eighties, but
that neither Stand nor Squillacote had ever told him they gave the
East German classified information.
Defense attorneys pointed out that prior to the FBI's 1996 sting
operation against Stand and Squillacote, 200 agents had uncovered
nothing of a criminal nature in Stand and Squillacote's behavior
despite taping their every phone call, bugging their home and searching
through their home and trash. Aside from what Squillacote had given
to FBI Special Agent Gregory during the sting, there was no evidence
of any classified documents having been passed to foreign agents.
Defense lawyers further maintained that the feds had launched a
sting operation against Squillacote because they deemed her to be
vulnerable as a result of their behavioral -analysis-profile report,
and played on her vulnerabilities, leading her into breaking the
law. Squillacote's attorney, Lawrence Robbins, questioned Special
Agent Gregory, who revealed that the FBI had researched Squillacote's
family history of depression and suicide and her dependence on psychiatric
drugs. Gregory admitted that he had carefully cultivated the spy
relationship, timing the moves on the basis of Squillacote's mood
swings. Although the possibility that the sting operation might
result in Squillacote's suicide had been discussed by the FBI agents,
they decided to proceed with the operation.
Attorneys for Stand and Squillacote are particularly bitter about
the secrecy shrouding the affidavit filed by the FBI in support
of its request for wiretap and search warrants. A routine request
for disclosure in most criminal cases, seeing and directly challenging
a governmental request for surveillance, has never been allowed
in a FISA case. This secrecy, claims Squillacote's co-counsel Lee
Rubin, is an "overreaction, to the detriment of the accused," that
leaves defense lawyers in the position of "litigating in the dark"
and having to "assume what's in the government's affidavit." Rubin
says his client's appeal will be "based on the facts that in 1996,"
when the surveillance of Stand and Squillacote began, "there wasn't
sufficient evidence to obtain a FISA authorization" because East
Germany had ceased to exist.
There remains the matter of the alleged spying on behalf of South
Africa, a country that does exist and maintains friendly relations
with the United States. In his closing argument before the jury,
prosecutor Randy Bellows noted that it is not just foreign enemies
that have an interest in the vicissitudes of United States foreign
policy. Alluding to South African President 'Nelson Mandela, Bellows
declared, "It doesn't matter whether a country is run by a saint,
it's still espionage. It does not matter if a country is friend
or foe." For his part, Squillacote lawyer Robbins argued that the
couple's case "cannot possibly be compared" to the case of Jonathan
Pollard, who spied for a friendly nation, Israel, and was sentenced
to life in prison. Stand's lawyer, Richard Sauber, said his client's
actions were "hardly real espionage activity."
Unwittingly, Bellows had touched upon the frightening potential
for increasing FISA abuses. In a post Cold War world, where the
rapid integration of a global economy is proceeding apace and tensions
between former great powers have been replaced by a multiplicity
of struggles throughout the developing world, the distinction between
friend and foe is becoming harder to make. As more Americans become
involved in the business and affairs of nations from time to time
seemingly at odds with U.S. foreign and economic policy, they may
find themselves targets of surveillance. The alarm has been sounded
before. In 1978, when FISA passed into law, an editorial in The
New Republic warned, "The vagueness of the requirement under FISA
that the target of surveillance be a foreign power or agent of a
foreign power invites abuses.... Conceivably, it could include any
American with a commercial, educational, or personal relationship
with a foreign person or organization."
In other words, the next target could be you.
In the days following the September 11th, 2001 attack on the WTC
and Pentagon the United States Congress began debating a new law
legalizing so-called "roving wiretaps."