the authoritarian police state is irreversible. America is ed and un able.
btw, the Repug/VRWC hero Robert Bork, now wonderfully deceased, believed, among many other totally ed beliefs, that the Cons ution guaranteed NO PRIVACY to citizens. He fully deserved to be BORKED.
Sen. Wyden: FISA’s ‘general warrants’ are like the ‘Writs of Assistance’ the founding fathers despised
Wyden began his remarks with a history lesson of the nation’s early days, when British authorities issued “Writs of Assistance” to allow constables and customs officers to search any house or building in an effort to eliminate colonists’ tax-avoiding smuggling. “The problem, of course, is if you let government officials search any house that they want, they’re going to search through the houses of a lot of people who haven’t broken any laws,” Wyden said. But, he noted, “The colonists said it’s just not okay to go around invading people’s privacy unless you’ve got some specific evidence that they’d done something wrong,” and “The fact that English officials went around invading people’s privacy without any evidence against them was one of the fundamental complaints the American colonists had against the British government” prior to the Revolutionary War.
“So naturally,” he said, “our founding fathers with the wisdom they showed on so many matters made it clear that they wanted to address this particular complaint when they wrote the bill of rights.” In fact, Wyden offered, “[The Fourth Amendment] was a direct rejection of the authority that the British had claimed to have when they ruled the American colonies: the founding fathers said that our government does not have the right to search any house that government officials want to search, even if it helps them to do their job.”
“For more than 200 years,” Wyden added, “this fundamental principle has protected Americans’ privacy while still allowing our government to enforce the law and protect public safety.”
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/12/2...e+Raw+Story%29
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...l-intact.shtmlWith all these changes rejected, the renewal means another five-year virtual carte blanche for the NSA to collect data on US citizens under a secret interpretation of the law that the public is not allowed to see, without even providing an estimate on how many Americans have had their privacy violated.
No one really needs privacy. It's a luxury. What, are you afraid they are going to catch you picking your nose?
equality under law, even for those who govern and protect? another frivolity, no doubt.
http://www.theamericanconservative.c...ow-about-fisa/Nancy Pelosi once said that we had to pass Obamacare to see what’s in it. Last week, Congress said we shouldn’t ask what’s in the federal surveillance law even after we’ve passed it.
That’s the most charitable way to interpret the Senate’s votes reauthorizing expiring provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) without any major changes or new checks and balances. The FISA amendments package of 2008 allows the kind of general warrants the Fourth Amendment was intended to prevent, giving the government a blank check for snooping on Americans.
It’s not so much that senators voted by lopsided margins to continue Bush-era warrantless wiretapping nearly five years into the age of hope and change (with the Obama administration’s blessing, of course). More surprising is their lack of interest in how many people are being spied on and how likely irrelevant data belonging to innocent citizens is to be ensnared in terrorism investigations.
lol sorry ass democrats and repubs
True, nor freedom of speech nor right to vote (almost pointless anyhow). 300 some odd years ago, maybe they did but those guys had no idea there would be 300 million people today including a bunch of foreigners, so in reality all those things are outdated.
nope. it's not outdated. when it happens to you, you sure won't think so.
LOL...
I wonder what else people can come up with...
I started a "caption this" thread here
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