Forbidden Donut

So do you want the wireless phone companies to help the country when we need it or be pissed that we opened them up to prosecution for wiretapping foreigners with links to terrorists? Seems like an effing easy choice to me. btw, there have been over 2000 complaints raised against the Patriot act and after investigation none have been found to be substantive.

No one, not any person anywhere in this country or any other, has the authority to tell any individual, group, corporation, or even arm of the government that they can directly or indirectly violate the Constitution. The president is no exception. The second you belittle the Constitution in the littlest bit is the second the Constitution's value is void, and it is _only_ the Constitution that stands between a nation run by free men and a country run by tyrants. Bush betrayed his oath and his country when he issued that executive order, and all of the telecommunication companies that listened to him broke the supreme laws that define and protect everything that is right about our great nation. He is no more than a tyrant, and they are no more than criminals, and now the congress is no more than a bunch of traitorous appeasers.

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

He had his reasons for thinking what he was doing was constitutional. I don't know exactly what they were, but I can offer a guess.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization...inst_Terrorists
has the text of the AUMF:

And how do you think the warrantless surveillance program violates the constitution? By going against FISA? Text of FISA: http://uscode.house.gov/download/pls/50C36.txt

But as indicated above, there is another law (AUMF) that can trump FISA and let the President conduct warrantless surveillance of foreigners without having to go to the FISA court to allow him to do so.

http://patdollard.com/2008/06/wire-tapping...video/#comments

Those certain circumstances would be if the person on the other line was a suspected al-Qaeda member.


Some justice!

They overhauled a law meant for spying on political enemies in order to make it work better for national security. Sounds rational to me.

Legality of the issue be damned, why isn't Congress doing its fundamental job of representing the people? Why do we have no apparent say in anything that happens?

they are representing me here lol

"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Ben Franklin

By trading in our freedoms to feel more secure, we are sacrificing what makes America so great to begin with. I say we bring back the old ways. Anyone have any tar? I think I can find a good amount of feathers.

And so it begins. At least I am older than most of you. I will not have to deal with the new Amerika for as long.

Jedd, what freedoms have you lost?

Privacy for one. The president can now order people to listen into my phone calls, whenever.

Right to proper search and seizure. It is now possible that my home could be infiltrated by authorities without a warrant.

I believe those are the two biggest, but it is quite astonishing that this can happen.

Tar and feathering is a form of terrorism.

The first is simply not true. The wireless warrantless surveillance was only done on people talking to suspected terrorists overseas. I don't think you are one of them.

I don't see how the second fits into this conversation. I don't even know where you got that from- the Patriot Act? What new law or Presidential declaration are you talking about?

Sure, it was only done by people talking to suspected terrorists. If the government could get away without a hitch, why not do it the next time they are searching for someone? Hell, why not just wiretap everyone in the country?

And I did jump the gun on the second part. They haven't searched homes without a warrant yet. They have just been obtaining financial records, phone records, internet records, and personal documents without warrants. The FBI are using National Security Letters which became easy to get under the Patriot Act. Not as bad, but still pretty bad. Since when was a right to privacy a non-issue?

edit: My point is: Crossing the line with good intentions sets up the next guy (or same guy) to do it with bad intentions. If it works this time makes next time sound like a good idea. Regardless of how things end up, sacrificing liberties brings us closer to a socialist/communist state.

First, they got away with it because they passed the AUMF. They cant just 'get away with it' again and wiretap you without a warrant.

Second, I'm not sure thats true

Third, good point.

Here's one article on how the FBI uses the Patriot Act to get around warrants. They use National Security Letters (NSLs) which used to only be allowed to be used against suspected terrorists or spies (before 9/11), but that restriction got changed via Patriot Act.

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/200...s_searches.html

There are many more articles similar to that. Just google.

thanks for the link Jedd

The first Amendment:
The right to freedom of speech, press and assembly. And the right to generally bitch at your gubmint.
- Under the patriot act it is now illegal to assemble in areas, marked or unmarked, that are arbitrarily designated as protected zones.

The Fourth Amendment:
The right to protection from unreasonable search and seizure
- The patriot act extends the powers of FISA warrants and makes them easier to obtain. With a FISA warrant, FBI agents can enter your home while you are at work, take whatever they want from the empty house, analyze and file the "evidence" they find and then let you know you're a terrorist because you bought the Big Book of Mischief when you were 13

The Fifth Amendment:
The right to due process, double jeopardy, self-incrimination and eminent domain.
- If you're arrested under suspicion of being associated with terrorism you don't get these. Sorry.

The Sixth Amendment
The right to a fair trial, jury, blah blah
- See above.

The Ninth Amendment
The right to have rights retained by the people not mentioned in the bill of rights protected.
- Privacy. Period.

The Tenth Amendment
The ensurance of the power of the states and the people
- Give californian's their pot back.

But don't worry, we still have the right to carry a gun (as permitted by state and federal law), to deny soldiers quarter in your house (and be labeled as unpatriotic and unsympathetic to our troops and therefore pro-terrorism and dead americans), a trial in civil cases amounting to more than 20 dollars in damages, and protection from excessive bail or cruel and unusual punishment.

edit: Oh yeah, on point.
It's H.R.6304
Jedd said it best already. It's all well and good now, but this law will stick around far beyond its intended use for any future administration to use as they see fit. It says that if the government asks the telecom companies for help or information of any sort, then there is NO LEGAL RECOURSE WHATSOEVER for the person whose information has been acquired. And this is a type of immunity that didn't exist -AT ALL- at the time when the government initially asked these companies to break the law to help them. They were put in a precarious position, but were within their legal right to deny the government permission to see this information, but were so afraid of their lobbyists being ignored they played right along and then had all their lobbyists bitch and moan to congress to get something like this in place before they had their feet held to the fire.

nsl faq: http://www.fbi.gov/pressrel/pressrel07/nsl_faqs030907.htm

You're all a bunch of whiney fucking babies. I can't wait for the election to be over so I can start checking these forums without my hardon becoming as flacid as a fish quicker than it takes a snail to cover the length of Court's body.

What differentiates an international terrorism investigation from a domestic one? I think we've pretty well blurred the line. It's easy enough to say, "If the terrorist is a citizen of the USA and the attack occurred on our soil then it's domestic." But what if that citizen is considered a Hamas sympathizer? What if he's a known anti-semite? Won't these things be cited as evidence that this is an international threat? Not to be overly dramatic, I just don't trust this qualifier without knowing more about how they are defining their terms.

As for not being able to acquire the content of communications, why do you think we did away with that pesky limitation by making acquisition of those communications available simply by asking the telecom companies and making it impossible to sue them?

They are eroding YOUR rights when they erode the rights of any other American. I'm not okay with it just because it's supposed to make me feel safer.

There is still some hope thanks to Chris Dodd...

http://dodd.senate.gov/index.php?q=node/4476

A slight democratic majority is more malleable than a big one. Of either party.

Bribery = teh horrah!

I must do it... http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/congrec2008/cr062008h.htm

In defense of this (I know) I'd like to say that if we're this pissed off at telecoms then we need to recalibrate our rage-o-meters. The only reason I'd want to be able to see some legal ass kicking of these guys is so that there would be some kind of discovery done into the methods our leaders used to obtain this shit from them. I imagine it's all fairly questionable.

Govt: Ahmoud Tali is suspected of terrorism. Please provide any information you can to help our investigation.
Telecom: I'm sorry that is against the law.
Govt: We will be launching an investigation into your corporate practices later this week. Thank you for your help.

This isn't to excuse their actions, but I think it's important to keep things in perspective. The real criminals here are our government.

With that aside, this bill (as I understand it) actually seeks to curb some of these shady practices and deals. That's why immunity needed to be left in to get enough support to pass the important part; the part which makes this crap harder to do.

The thing is, the government isn't the only criminal in this one. They broke the law, period.

If I pressured my buddy into murder, he'd still get charged for murder. If he's lucky, he'd get off a bit easier than I would, but he wouldn't simply walk. If the president asked me to murder my neighbor (a suspected terrorist), I'd tell him to suck a dick. They have some of the best lawyers on this planet, I guarantee they knew it wasn't lawful. They were playing dirty politics, and they were caught red-handed. It is an added bonus that investigations into the involvement of telecoms could yield information about the methods our leaders used to pressure them into committing this extremely severe felony.

I don't disagree with the fact that they are criminals. I'm just saying that they had to choose what kind of criminals to be. Ones the government liked, or ones they didn't. No corporation would say no. None. Plus, if they said no and were getting investigated for some random crap they'd see shareholders jumping ship.

Punishing them wouldn't teach them anything. If every single company was charged with the maximum whatever, I'd still expect them to make the same choice if this came up again next year. But if there were some sort of investigation into the administrations role in this kind of activity maybe THEY would think twice about asking in the first place.

/2c

Uh, some of the telecoms did refuse, right? So why was the idea of breaking the law so much less attractive for them?

AT&T didn't, and Verizon didn't at least. It's actually really hard to find anything about which companies did and didn't, but those two definitely did. Saying no for them carried the risk of getting their empire broken up after some anti-trust investigation. It's federal entrapment and I propose that we treat it like any other case of entrapment even though it's hard to imagine a big company like Verizon being a "victim".

If a police officer told me to jaywalk over to him on the other side of the street, what should I do?

I think a morality issue is coming in to play here. Would you care if someone jaywalks on your street? Would you care if someone spies on everyone on your street?

I understand the point that you are making. Basically the Milgram experiment. It doesn't justify it.

edit: New light on the issue -- http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/200...city/index.html

I'm not so much trying to justify the telecoms complicity in these shenanigans. They were in a shitty place mostly because of shady shit they've been doing for years. (You don't hear about Vonage getting asked to spy on people... just the giants with HUGE amounts of history) What I am trying to get across though is that I'm FAR more interested in the other side of the coin. If we were allowed to prosecute them it would rock but it would result in them losing some money. Damn. But if we still persue legal action against them all they have to do is show us the order from our government asking them to break the law; orders which would otherwise be effectively non-existent; and they get off scott free. I want this administration to get this mud smeared all over its face more than I want to see these companies punished. Punishing the real perpetrators* is more important to me.

*not that I think it will happen...

If Kucinich gets his way, it could happen.