This is kind of like asking, "How do you know who in a town of 10,000 people will murder their spouse?" When did America become a country where people who might commit a crime tomorrow are targeted for surveillance or other investigation?
Are you seriously saying if you where caught in a third country (and expelled) trying to cross to a failed state with an Islamic insurgency that the FBI should not be able to tap their phones which is what you are implying.
The abuses of power are already evident. The FBI has not limited themselves to surveillance of militants or their leaders. Peaceful anti-war protesters have been targeted. Leftist professors have been targeted. Programmers writing cryptography software have been targeted. There should be no surprise that the FBI has abused its power, because no conclusions can be drawn about the criteria used to select surveillance targets. The criteria, like the list of suspects, is a secret.
"Are you seriously saying if you where caught in a third country (and expelled) trying to cross to a failed state with an Islamic insurgency that the FBI should not be able to tap their phones which is what you are implying."
This is a hard sentence to parse. What are you saying? That I am claiming foreign terrorists should not be the targets of FBI surveillance? Well, this may be news to you, but the FBI is not supposed to investigate crimes committed outside US borders, with the exception of crimes committed within our embassies (and certain crimes committed on military bases). Yes, I am saying that the FBI should not be investigating foreign terrorists. Yes, I am saying that the only reason the FBI should be investigating a foreign terrorist is if they come to this country and commit terrorist acts or organize a conspiracy to do so.
To summarize it for you: Yes, civil rights and democracy trump the war on terror.
How do you stop another oklahoma city other than by monitoring far right extremists/ How much info woudl you require to track members of a group?
I agree the standard cops should need a warrent for all access and NSL letters should only be for serious crimes and by that i mean only terrorism or national security ones.
Personally I think the FBI should have been split two one to do the day to day cop stuff and the other to do what in other countries is handled by there security service.
I think this is really the key flaw in what you're arguing for. You're asking the wrong question. The assumption you're making is that there is a group of people wanting to commit an act of terrorism the consequences be damned, and we have to stop them. But you're closing the barn door after the horse has escaped. You're fighting terrorism in the wrong place.
Apply your logic to any other crime. Murder is a good example. How can we stop spouses from killing each other unless we bug everyone's home in real time? The answer is, we can't. Anyone can pick up a knife in a fit of rage and commit murder. Anyone can mix common substances to make a bomb and kill a dozen people. You can't stop them. Stopping them after they've already committed to doing the deed is too little too late.
What you have to do is to not allow anyone to get to that point. The normal law enforcement method of doing this is to deter with punishment: If you murder someone you will be convicted, so you fear the punishment and refrain from committing murder, and then we don't have to stop you because you stop yourself. Notwithstanding the occasional zealot, this works just fine for most types of terrorism: If the terrorist expects to be executed, most people don't want to be executed, so they're deterred from committing any acts of terrorism.
This is the part where people's heads explode. Some terrorists don't care if they die, so you can't deter them. The normal law enforcement method doesn't work, so people assume we have to come up with some new draconian method of actually physically preventing crazy people from blowing stuff up, as if that's ever going to work. But here's the thing: In order to martyr yourself like that, you have to either be batshit insane or extraordinarily dedicated to your cause, if not both. And the first one is a mental health issue having nothing to do with law enforcement. The way you fix that one is to get the mentally ill into treatment before they decide that God is talking to them through a dog and wants them to steal an oil tanker and crash it into a fertilizer plant.
The second one is the one that makes people angry because the solution looks too much like allowing terrorism to be effective. But the fact is that going into foreign countries and killing mothers and fathers causes children to become radicalized. Nobody sane is ever going to be willing to die in order to punish Americans for eating pork. People may be willing to die because you killed their family.
But doing the right thing is not "letting the terrorists win." Completely regardless of its effects on terrorism, we should not be killing innocent people in foreign countries (or anywhere else). Stop doing that and soon enough you discover a dearth of terrorists to have to stop.
The idea is that a judge will act on behalf of those who appointed him/her, who are in turn acting on behalf of those who elected him/her. If you want something to happen differently, elect someone different. That's your only mechanism for change in this current system.
Unfortunately you have to be able to monitor suspects and having some judicial oversight is the best solution we have come up with.
The problem is I think in the US that you have the FBI which have mostly a traditional policing role as well as CT and security so you get procedures meant only for serious cases available to you average copper.
Might have been better to split the FBI in two and have a federal police force and a separate version of MI5 - you have so many intelligence services whats one more :-)