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  • Posted by edweaver 8 years, 3 months ago
    Well, if you feel safe now wait until they solve global warming. [major sarcasm]

    Does anyone think for a second that surveillance was not happening prior to the patriot act? They passed that law to make it legal and so companies that would not turn over information could be forced to more easily. To our government, the Freedom Act are only words on paper. Just look the other way if they don't fit the objective. No one will do anything about it.
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    • Posted by 8 years, 3 months ago
      Regarding your first sentence: oh I know, I'm more excited about that than I've ever been for Christmas! (sarcasm overdose?)

      For the second sentence & on: check out the link on the legalization of using propaganda against the American people: http://www.businessinsider.com/ndaa-l...

      Yep, it's been around for some time now. The hard part for most people is to discern between what's real and what is propaganda. Oh, by the way, it was legal in Nazi Germany to use propaganda on the German citizens too. Just sayin...the Holocaust was also legal too, in accordance to German law of the late 1930's.

      My point is everyone should be keeping a close eye on the laws that are being passed here. Watch for familiar patterns.
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      • Posted by edweaver 8 years, 3 months ago
        Nothing surprises me anymore. It is scary that they want to legalize propaganda but the more I learn about our school systems and think back to my years in school, (35 years ago) the more I realize they have been using propaganda all along. They don't need the law.

        The progressive movement has made a mess of our country. What is even more scary is there are people that participate on this site that will vote to elect more progressives. I just don't get it. :(
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    • Posted by DrZarkov99 8 years, 3 months ago
      From my crypt of hidden files: in the 1970s, most long distance telephone traffic traveled at least part of the way by microwave transmission. It was common practice to intercept those transmissions and select the ones of interest. Voice recognition was in the earliest stages then, but fairly reliable. The NSA attitude then was "Warrants? We don't need no stinkin' warrants!"

      With the arrival of the internet, and cell phones, the opportunity for intercept became seductively irresistible for government agencies. Invasion of what we think of as our privacy was well underway long before the Patriot Act.
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      • Posted by blackswan 8 years, 3 months ago
        Ever since communications have been available to anyone able to see them, privacy has been a farce. One defense was to send messages in code. Now, we have computers that can crack most of them in no time. Privacy is a convenient fiction, and nothing more.
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        • Posted by $ MichaelAarethun 8 years, 3 months ago
          It's not listed in the Constitution either, just like education, and travel and 47 or 50 other urban myths..
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          • Posted by edweaver 8 years, 3 months ago
            I don't believe it needs to be listed in the Constitution but IMHO it is covered by the 4th Amendment. A private conversation is the property of the parties involved. It makes no difference if it is in person, on paper or over a wire. Until it is published publicly it is private property.
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            • Posted by $ MichaelAarethun 8 years, 3 months ago
              Depends if you are in charge or not. the beauty of 10,000 plus gun laws is a despot can always pick and choose which one to use and which one to abuse. Same as the tax system. Sign the bottom or transmit electronically and you just committed an on call felony.
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    • Posted by $ jdg 8 years, 3 months ago
      The Patriot Act had nothing to do with terrorism. It was a DEA "wish list" dating back to the Nixon administration, and that's what it's been used for.

      The best reason to simplify the tax system is to put an end to the excuse for government to snoop in people's personal financial affairs. Then the drug war will collapse all the faster, and we can become a free country again.
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      • Posted by $ MichaelAarethun 8 years, 3 months ago
        Nothing to do with terrorism except the DEA wish list became the Directorate of Internal State Security, and the government using the cycle of economic repression became the terrorists, domestic.
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      • Posted by edweaver 8 years, 3 months ago
        Pipe dream but a good one just the same.

        I've been thinking lately that maybe all money going to the federal government should be paid by each state. How states gets money is up to each state. It would also put the states & people back in the drivers seat, the way it was intended. 50 states would have more power to withhold payments if the federal government was not upholding the Constitution. I know, another pipe dream.
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  • Posted by $ MichaelAarethun 8 years, 3 months ago
    One of my favorite you did it to yourselves comments. Back in the early to mid nineties the idea of implants for ID and tracking 'lost' people was floated. It was a rebellion of the masses.

    Then cell radio phones came out with low prices and a system that spread faster than the flu.

    Everyone decided to pay for and carry their own implants without questioning or asking about the implications.

    No objectivist thinking there none at all.Just mass hysteria
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  • Posted by $ MichaelAarethun 8 years, 3 months ago
    Surveillance of anything transmitted without wires has been legal from the get go. Though some court rulings modified that for any thing originating and terminating in country.

    Wire transmissions required a warrant for some decades.

    However the courts held that anything originating in or terminating in be it wired or wireless did not require a warrant.

    Question how much of the traffic in the US does not use wireless?

    All radiotelephone or cell traffic uses wireless.

    All traffic using satellites even if it's from topeka to poughkeepsie

    Only those that are telephones not radio phones AND use hard wire or fiber optics and all in country start to finish....

    Not very many

    Fiver Optics typically inside bundles of seven or eight tubes the center tube invariably is reserved for the government.

    Somewhere in one of the town hall or other blogs I read the courts were shutting down the big NSA operation and going back in the direction of signed warrants using probable cause and not mere suspicion of ....

    Maybe the judges figured out they too could be secretly tapped and apprehended under the Patriot Act..
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  • Posted by $ DriveTrain 8 years, 3 months ago
    I've been floating the idea on the prospective Presidential candidates' Facebook pages of enacting a comprehensive defense of personal privacy in the electronic age, if necessary via Constitutional Amendment.

    Let none of us forget that in addition to such things as the antics of the voyeurs at the NSA, the FCC enacted the Government Takeover version of Net Neutrality, Title II, nine months ago - which means we must insist that Net Neutrality Title II be abolished in favor of Title I as soon as the adults regain control of the Executive branch, Title I being the non-Orwell version. ['Net entrepreneur Michael Glenn gave an excellent discussion of the distinction, in a presentation to the LA/Santa Monica Tea Party in January 2015, viewable here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIbBg... ]

    The examples are endless: In the aftermath of the George Zimmerman fiasco, where "Spike" Lee publicized the street address of the Zimmerman family and - D'OH! - it was a different George Zimmermann (not that such a thing could ever be ethical in any case); with reports of union thugs doing the same thing with the addresses of basically anybody who opposes them; with the epidemic of "Identity Theft" and the avalanche of "data breaches," there should be a new, codified deterrent against the use of electronic means to attack others.

    To date, what we've seen is the legal equivalent of "Can't we all just be nice to one another?" That just does not cut it, and needs significant strengthening. The specifics will need to be hashed out, certainly, but at the very least any publication of any citizen's home address without their prior consent should be a major criminal offense; if such action results in injury, mandatory prison time; conviction of identity theft should carry a massive prison sentence, etc.

    The electronic revolution, like the industrial revolution, has been a vast benefit to humanity. and promises similarly-vast advances in the future. But like every technology, it can be used for as great an evil as it can for good - and in a civilization that's embraced the same kind of non-absolutism and moral greyness that plagued late Weimar Germany, the power conferred via electronic means has become a profoundly destructive thing - a fact largely unaddressed, to date. This must change, dramatically.
    .
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  • Posted by Herb7734 8 years, 3 months ago
    Privacy?
    If they want to spy on me, I hope they get a load of my 81 year old gravity distorted, unmuscular, wrinkled body. They'll never get that image out of their minds. I know I can't.
    But if I have to sacrifice my privacy for security, F...it! I don't need security that badly. I don't need ANYTHING that badly. However, I don't think a single candidate gets it or would agree with me.
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  • Posted by LibertyBelle 8 years, 3 months ago
    We can demand that the Fourth Amendment be
    enforced. Also, if they send some equipment or
    something out of the country to do unConstitutional
    things, those acts remain unConstitutional as long
    as they are done by the the government. I know
    that many in the government are hostile to the
    Constitution, and that it will be a hard fight.
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    • Posted by $ MichaelAarethun 8 years, 3 months ago
      Who you going to demand to? The Government Party? What Constitution? You belong to the Patriot Act now. The rest is just a cover story. 95% plus of the vote will vote for the sixth time to support what I just predicted.
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  • Posted by $ Olduglycarl 8 years, 3 months ago
    Does one really expect anything differently from the Kakistocracy?
    It's not survival of the fittest, it's the weakest among us, the great unwashed, the rule(lessers) that are in fear of extinction. We've been through this battle before; in fact, it has never ended.

    Question is: How to we End It for good?
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