Government Avoids 4th Amendment Requirement of Probable Cause
By: Houston Criminal Lawyer John Floyd and Paralegal Billy Sinclair
In 1970 it was discovered by a gentleman named Christopher H. Pyle that the U.S. Army Intelligence Command had 1500 commissioned officers whose duty it was to spy on any known protest or demonstration in this country involving 20 or more people. While Pyle’s eventual revelations about this stunning information captured the attention of the Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, Sen. Sam Ervin, the great Watergate truth-seeking champion, had little authority to do anything about the “spying on Americans” scandal.
But in 1975 a younger, and lesser known, Democratic senator from Idaho named Frank Church put the Pyle information to good use. In the wake of President Richard Nixon’s resignation for the massive criminal corruption associated with Watergate, Senator Church used a December 1974 report by New York Times columnist Seymour Hersh concerning widespread CIA warrantless surveillance to bring Pyle’s information before the senator’s U.S. Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities.
Thanks to courageous Americans like Pyle, Hersh, and Sens. Church and Ervin, the people of this country learned that its executive branch of government had been violating their civil and constitutional rights at such a mind-numbing scale that many lost their faith in “honest government.” It was out of the ashes of this governmental lawlessness that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA”) was signed into law by former President Jimmy Carter in 1978. A central feature of the Act was the creation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court(“FISA Court”) which allows the executive branch to secretly obtain warrants for electronic surveillance but only with strict judicial review (18 USC 36 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance)
The eleven members (originally the number was seven) of the FISA Court are designated by the Chief Justice of the United States. These judges have the authority to entertain ex parteapplications for electronic surveillance “for the purpose of obtaining foreign intelligence information.” FISA defines “foreign intelligence information” as:
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