How To Write A Justification Memo: Fill & Download for Free

No president, including Obama, can write a search warrant. The FBI could not and can not write a search warrant. Only a judge or judges can write a warrant to allow law enforcement to wiretap. If they don’t find justification for the warrant, they can deny it.So the FBI’s wiretap that caught people in the Trump campaign speaking with Russians was authorized by a judge.Then, despite what they discovered, neither the FBI or anyone in the executive branch used it to thwart Trump during the campaign.So how does it make any sense that Obama did anything. That’s just trying to make so much noise that we forget that the Trump campaign was involved with our enemy Putin!

I think the best way to answer it is to write it yourself, not to get Quora to do it for you. Downvoted.

At a high level, spying is quite easy to justify since everyone spies on other countries' citizens. The OP of this question is French. The whole function of the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure is to spy on people outside of France. Here is Wikipedia's list of Intelligence Agencies by country: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_intelligence_agenciesAt the more specific level of PRISM and other comprehensive information dragnet programs, the justification is that the American people as a collective whole demand comprehensive security (or at least a comprehensive sense of it). See also Ian McCullough's answer to What's the point of American surveillance, from the point of view of those surveilling? The justification is understandable and human. There are threats "out there" and we want those whom we elect to stop "bad people" from doing "bad things" to us. (We Americans, of course, are "good people" who are simply out to promote freedom.) In order to figure out who the "bad people" are, we want to watch and observe as much of the world as we can. As you're mulling over the implications of PRISM, don't forget that we have lots of spy satellites that are monitoring the physical world too.What is truly at issue is the cost of such all encompassing activity, not the rationale. (I personally stand against such all encompassing information dragnets.) That is where our internal civic debate lies -- and, to echo Dan Holliday's point, it is almost exclusively a domestic policy debate. We don't actually care about the rest of the world's opinion on this, but any concerned citizens of other nations are certainly entitled to lobby their respective foreign minister to lodge a complaint with their country's respective American ambassador, and I'm certain that some consulate staff member will be tasked with writing a memo about it.Although... I won't be surprised when governments of American allies come to us with requests for data dumps on their citizens so that they can do their own analysis and find their own persons of interest. The thing that makes it even possible for us to do is because the physical infrastructure and traffic flows of the Internet is built around us. Other nations don't have the traffic patterns to even attempt what our government is actually doing.No one should ever lose sight of the fact that it was the U.S. Department of Defense that built the Internet in the first place.One more thing: we have not been spying on everyone for six years. That is completely false. Although Rob Weir's point about Paul Revere is well taken, we've been conducting modern surveillance and espionage aggressively for 65 years since the passage of the National Security Act of 1947.See also:What's the point of American surveillance, from the point of view of those surveilling?Is Edward Snowden an American hero or a traitor?How exactly does the NSA get its mirror of the data from internet backbones? What is the technical infrastructure? Who cooperates to let them do this? Is there any official documentation acknowledging the program?