but we begin tonight, we begin tonight with actually something shocking. this is a huge story. and i mean it when i say a story every american needs to know about and be thinking about. it is a story about a secret court. one that is operating inside the united states. it only hears one side of any argument. a secret court that is honestly, it is rewriting our surveillance laws. it is deciding what we meant as a society, as a country, when we said the government can t indiscriminately spy on us. to understand what this court is doing, though, we need to get into a corner of the law making process. a part of how we really do it. that most in the country don t think that much about. the way that most of us think about the process of lawmaking is kind of simple. congress passes a bill, and then the president signs a bill and maybe he s got a lot of pens when he does it and gives the pens away. when that is done, when that ceremony comes to a close, that bill is is now a low. in president
tonight after the long holiday weekend. and as chris mentioned, for the interview tonight, you might have heard of former new york governor elliot sfipitzer, mayb running for office again. he s not running for governor or senator or even mayor. he s running for local comptroller. we will ask him why. but we begin tonight, we begin tonight with actually something shocking. this is a huge story. and i mean it when i say a story every american needs to know about and be thinking about. it is a story about a secret court. one that is operating inside the united states. it only hears one side of any argument. a secret court that is honestly, it is rewriting our surveillance laws. it is deciding what we meant as a society, as a country, when we said the government can t indiscriminately spy on us. to understand what this court is doing, though, we need to get into a corner of the law making process. a part of how we really do it. that most in the country don t think that much about. the
the great firewall of china. some of the comments that have been posted on social media here about the data mining in the united states, some people were saying the same thing is happening in china. another is saying there s no privacy on the internet and others are saying you can t trust what google and apple are saying that they don t provide information to governments. people are not so surprised. reporter: israelis and palestinians weren t that shocked because there s no expectation of privacy. israel has broad surveillance laws allowing monitoring of phone, internet and even your gps location. authorities have monitored activities of activists and protesters and even the tax and park authorities can request data for routine investigations. palestinians are concerned about how they data is used. israelis don t seem to care.
or somewhere like that they want to see if it is having any communications with people inside the united states? and they re limiting their searches to things like that. i think we have to learn a lot more before we really go nuts on this. martha: when you look back, congress reinitiated the patriot act in 2011. it is good from 2011 to 2015, during that period. certainly this is allowed under the surveillance laws. the big issue here is the broadness of it. that it is such a large scope. in these rules when you read them, and you read the patriot act, it details when you re going after a specific terrorist, a specific group, you re allowed to get this sort of information. here once again the charges that it is overbroad such as we saw in ap. that is exactly what it was in ap because they didn t limit it. here looks like the same thing just on steroids. it is just this enormous number of records they have gone through. but you do point out the patriot act made the government go to a j
is change our american way of life. trying to take the constitution and rip it up and throw it out the window. we have to make sure they don t succeed in doing that. this is a perfect example they didn t. we did things the right way we had a person of interest. the judge said okay you have probable cause to do that. they did it and he s safe. done deal, moving on. in other countries that guy would have had hot rods in his eyeballs here he is a victim it turns out after the investigation. he would have been subjected to harsh treatment. we have had a lot of changes in our surveillance laws since 9-11. how about this help the investigation? under the patriot act which is 11 years old there s a lot that the government can t do. like the eavesdropping, listening devices getting into our lives. we covered that story about the irs being able to read our e-mails without even knowing about it. those types of things.