The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has chastised federal agents operating during the Bush and Clinton administrations for deceptive handling of wiretap requests.

The May 17 ruling has just been made public. It said that FBI agents submitted 75 misleading applications under the Clinton administration and an unspecified number between September 2000 and March 2001. One request was signed by Louis Freeh, director of the FBI at the time. The court has barred one FBI agent from ever appearing before it again because of repeated inaccuracies in wiretap application forms.

In the 24 years since it was founded the court has approved 10,000 wiretaps for federal snoops. It has not turned down a single request. The secret court was established so that neither the FBI nor the National Security Agency--a spy outfit that controls extensive eavesdropping operations overseas, as well as in the United States--had to go to a regular court to get a warrant. The government also set up a FISA appeals court that, until this latest case, has never been convened for lack of any cases.

FBI agents have been obtaining wiretaps by painting criminal investigations as matters of national security. "They use FISA because the procedures are so much looser," said James Dempsey of the Center for Democracy and Technology.

Writing in the August 27 New York Times, author James Bamford stated that Attorney General John Ashcroft’s push to "increase his department’s surveillance powers and subject citizens to investigative methods normally restricted to the tracking of spies has forced the court to publicize its worries." Ashcroft had requested broad authority to allow official and unrestricted collaboration between criminal prosecutors and counterintelligence investigators.

While such collaboration and exchange are not new, what is at issue is the open legitimizing of it under law.

The court said the Justice Department was guilty of "misinterpreting its new powers under the U.S.A. Patriot Act," reported CNN.com. Passed in October, that act broadened police powers of search, surveillance, and eavesdropping, and rewrote FISA’s standards for issuing wiretaps to focus less exclusively on foreign intelligence gathering.

The ruling brought the ultrasecret FISA to public attention. The court, wrote Bamford, is "a modern Star Chamber" that "meets behind a cipher-locked door in a windowless bug-proof vault-like room guarded 24 hours a day on the top floor of the Justice Department building."  
 
Cincinnati ruling opposes closed hearing
The government’s offensive against workers’ rights also came in for criticism in an August 26 ruling by the Cincinnati federal appeals court. This decision opposed the closed hearings through which immigrants who have been caught up in the post-September 11 "terrorism" investigation have been deported.

Last month the Labor Department reported that 752 people had been detained on immigration violations "in connection with" post-September 11 sweeps. As of late June, 81 remained in jail, and the rest had been deported or released.

Writing 10 days after September 11, chief immigration judge Michael Creppy issued a directive saying that the hearings would be conducted "separately from all other cases. The courtroom must be closed...no visitors, no family, and no press."

Supporters of Rabih Haddad, a native of Lebanon who is accused of overstaying his visa, brought the case to the Cincinnati court after they were denied entry to his deportation hearings under these guidelines. Haddad, who lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, is the founder of the Global Relief Foundation, a Muslim charity whose funds have been frozen under a federal investigation.

The Cincinnati appeals court panel of three judges supported the demand to open up Haddad’s hearings, and described Creppy’s blanket directive as unconstitutional. The Bush administration, it said, had sought to place its actions "beyond public scrutiny."

Barbara Comstock, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, responded by saying that the government has "an obligation to exercise all available options to disrupt and prevent terrorism within the bounds of the Constitution." She said she approved of another aspect of the ruling, which stated that prosecutors should argue for closed hearings on a case-by-case basis. The government, said the judges, should be able to muster "compelling interests sufficient to justify closure."

The government is holding open its options of appeal while several similar cases proceed through the court system.

Meanwhile, police in Wilmington, Delaware, have set up a "pre-crime" database of people they categorize as likely future lawbreakers, many of whom have no criminal record. Most of the 200 people placed on the file since it was set up in June are working people who are Black or Latino.

The database is compiled from information gathered by two drug units known as "jump-out squads" because of their "quick-arrest" procedures. Many of those who have ended up on the database were stopped briefly for "loitering."

"I don’t care what anyone but a court of law thinks," said Mayor James Baker in response to criticism. "Until a court says otherwise, if I say it’s constitutional, it’s constitutional."  
 
 
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