Karen Greenberg was quoted in a Newsweek story about Keith Gartenlaub, a former Boeing engineer accused of spying for the Chinese and then convicted on child pornography charges.
[Gartenlaub]’s effectively lost his security clearance and any chance of working in the defense industry again. His nightmarish experience should worry any American, says Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University’s School of Law — especially the 4.5 million citizens who hold security clearances. “The most upsetting thing” about the case, she says, “is the question: ‘Did evidence get planted?’” With so much of the case wrapped in secrecy, she adds, it’s “a disturbing possibility.”
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The lack of an indictment suggests the bureau couldn’t make a spy case. But it did have the pornography files, which it was able to view in secret with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court’s authorization for an espionage investigation and then obtain with a criminal warrant.
This maneuver, permissible under post-9/11 legislation, disturbs civil liberties advocates. Greenberg, whose latest book, Rogue Justice: The Making of the National Security State, was published in May, reports that “using a FISA warrant in an espionage or terrorism case and then finding another crime” is “not unusual.” And it gives the government tremendous power over defendants: Because the FISA warrant in Gartenlaub’s case remains classified, he cannot examine whether the FBI had probable cause to hunt for the pornography seized from his computer—or whether anyone tampered with those files.
The government’s attitude is “trust us,” Werksman tells Newsweek. “Trust us that we had a legitimate reason to go there on the FISA warrant, and once we saw the kiddie porn, now you have to take our word for it that [the warrant] was lawful in the first place.”
“Everyone in this country should be pissed off about this,” Greenberg says. “It can happen to you. It can happen to anyone.”