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Patriot act author, Jim Sensenbrenner, claims the NSA has violated the law and exceeded its mandate. http://www.businessinsider.com/patriot-a... They have clearly violated our fourth amendment. It is one thing for a private phone company which lacks the power of force, like government has, to keep records of metadata. It is entirely something else for the government to do it. The Constitution is not a limit on your voluntary contracts with a private entity. It is a limit on the abilities and authority of government. The phone company cannot put you in jail or raid your house in the middle of the night with a swat team while violating due process. If the government can do proper investigating and show probable cause then they can subpoena those records from the phone company. That is legal. A blanket collection is unconstitutional. Even if the data does not have "content" it still violates your rights and yields much information about your life that is none of their business and off limits without probable cause. There is no reason why the NSA can't get a judge to authorize collection from a phone company for specific records of connections made by a known terrorist to other numbers during a legitimate investigation. That is constitutional and will yield a volume of manageable intelligence and I dare say better results. Wading through a mountain of hay/data looking for a needle is a waste of time. The constitution was not written to make law enforcement's job easy. It was written to protect the rights of the innocent. If the NSA must work smarter and harder so be it. Frankly, with this government's record I do not trust them when they say they are not storing or examining content either. To that I say bollocks!
Respectfully,
O.A.
Being able to lobby her, though, is worth less than someone who is already publically saying he will reduce gov't.
Even making an incremental change to her policies will be of benefit in such a case. Hillary as pres would still, in my opinion, be a total disaster but 'damage control' may be all that we can do.
If you do not think you can change anything, then stay home and read a good book instead.
Jan
It seems like almost everyone I know but me favors her.
Is not lobbying the same as mooching...off the politicians??
One more time I am confused by your statements CG.
Wait a minute, simple premises, I am not the one confused here.
Must be lonely though, surrounded with Hillaryites.
I did not follow the Benghazi attack closely, but it the reaction seemed political. I didn't see how any US politicians stood to benefit from lying about the motivations of the attack. The claims of a coverup seemed to be politicians doing their thing to take advantage of a horrible crime.
"Is not lobbying the same as mooching...off the politicians?? "
It's mooching if you get gov't money out of it. Lobbying for good policies, though, is very important.
in Benghazi, and she was its head. . there could be
fault there. -- j
.
Why would they do that?
raw incompetence -- they couldn't believe the danger
to them, or
pretense -- pretending that BHO's statement that
al qaeda was on its heels was true, and behaving
accordingly
either is horrible when it comes to people's lives,
I believe. . we should not have people who are
responsible for this tragic event ... in elective office. . imho. -- j
.
So convince me otherwise. Please give me an example of a policy that does not have this effect.
The other side is the Republicans, who I think are worse, unless you count talk with no action. If talk counts, President Clinton gave some anti-big-gov't talk, but clearly Republicans are better at the talk. Unfortunately their actions are worse when it comes to making gov't larger and more intrusive.
All that aside, let's just think about this for a minute. Galt's Gulch did not have a state of any kind. The best it had was the Triumvirs, whom I would call a Committee of Safety. And that Committee was able, in a trice, to assemble an Air and Land Militia to pull off a rescue operation.
I think it's time somebody tested that idea. We have had some small-scale tests. The attackers of the Curtis Culwell Center (Garland, Texas) fell to an off-duty police officer with nothing but his service weapon--one shot each. Who knows what a fully armed and drilled militia can do?
Jan
decided not to collect this metadata. . they are not
compelled to do so, as I understand it. -- j
.
Jan
report that one declined the opportunity. . and now
that the new act has been signed into law, this is
quite pertinent. -- j
.
From an Objectivist perspective, what is a “right to be left alone” and how far does it extend? Is privacy actually a right? Ayn Rand said little about the subject, and I haven’t yet found a comprehensive treatment of the issue by any other writer in the Objectivist movement.
It’s easy to demonstrate that mass surveillance of its citizens by a government is not acceptable in a free society, since such widespread snooping is not a proper function of government and can easily lead to massive violations of individual rights.
In the area of private actions, however, the issue becomes murkier, especially if one accepts the premise that rights can be violated only by the initiation of force (or fraud). What are the rights of an individual in regard to true information that he or she does not wish to be publicly disclosed? Does truthful gossip constitute an initiation of force and a violation of rights? What about blackmail? I would consider the latter activity to be clearly unethical, but I can’t find anything in the Objectivist ethics that addresses this issue.
Do we need to expand the definition of rights to include characteristics other than freedom from the initiation of force or fraud?
unreasonable search and seizure plus States' rights?
what is not given to the feds is reserved for US?! -- j
.
further. . we do need to renegotiate it, and Dr. Paul's
efforts are valuable for this. . but the metadata is not
listening in to our calls. . it's close, though, and scary. -- j
.
Pandora's box has been opened. There is no putting what has escaped back into the box.
We can't expect those who are part of the problem to fix the problem. I have difficulty with trusting the motives of a representative who has been known to publicly denounce a program (the ACA) while supporting the absurd certification that Congress is a small business and therefore eligible for tax-payer supported subsidies. It's odd that a libertarian would support the redistribution of income.
Cognitive dissonance is now a constant state of being.