A wall we can live with

In response to my post about the “wall” between intelligence agents and law enforcement agents, reader Dafydd ab Hugh offers the following:
“I have said many times, a ‘wall’ is an excellent idea… but the wall
should not be to stop the gathering and analysis of private information, nor the sharing of it among other agencies, but rather in the ‘use’ of intelligence information in cases of ordinary domestic criminality. That is, if you think Mohammed Jamal might be a terrorist, by all means, go ahead and surveil him. But if your surveillance cameras capture nothing worse than the fact that he is fencing stolen jewelry, you shouldn’t be able to use the CIA surveillance tapes against him on that charge in court, since it has nothing to do with terrorism.
“The Fourth Amendment clearly exists in the context of judicial action, not military surveillance for the purpose of protecting the county… which is easily seen by the fact that the for decades now, the standard remedy for its violation is suppression at trial of any evidence gained from unlawful surveillance. So as long as the feds aren’t using such unwarranted intelligence to convict people of ordinary crimes, it’s hard to see how some generic right to ‘privacy’ should trump national security.”

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