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Please watch this free 30-minute film about black box voting machines.

We have all been scared about Diebold and other black box voting machines, and for good reason. Apparently one of the central machines from Election Systems & Software Inc. tallied 115 votes for Bush in a certain county, while another machine tallied 365 votes for that same county. Which one was right? There is no way to tell, because "it is too hard" to add a printer to a counting machine. It is not like they have been doing that for 30 years. But who needs to do a recount when the machines are infallible, right?

Most infuriating of all is that Republican Senator Hagel, the former Senate Ethics Director, resigned after admitting that he owned Election Systems & Software! That's right, the same voting machine maker that 60% of ALL VOTES in the U.S. are counted on, the same one that provably miscounted votes in Ohio and other states, and the same one that refuses to print receipts to recount these votes. No wonder legislation trying to require printers on voting machines is taking so long to get through congress when congressmen can vote themselves into office without a paper trail.

Are you actually alleging that ALL THREE e-voting vendors have found some way to add votes only to the Republican candidates, undetected.

I'm sorry to say that there was no widespread fraud in all e-voting states.

It's just not possible. There are thousands of people involved, thousands of pieces of equipment, many, many, many election and other government officials at all levels in extremely disparate jurisdictions with different ways of doing things, with no way for any central entity to reach these machines after the fact.

I'll agree that your argument could be used to claim that they would have a hard time going unnoticed, but the very fact that we're all discussing it here already proves that it didn't go unnoticed, so no argument is needed on that count.

-- MarkusQ

"They were able to check the machine and determine that Bush got 115 votes on that machine, not 4008 votes on that machine." --- They were able to check the machine that had malfunctioned... so how do we know it was accurate? My point was that we need printouts for recounts and that printouts are not hard to do.

Second, please read the article I cite which says "ES&S counts approximately 60 percent of all votes cast in the United States.".

Please watch this free 30-minute film about black box voting machines.

We have all been scared about Diebold and other black box voting machines, and for good reason. Apparently one of the central machines from Election Systems & Software Inc. tallied 115 votes for Bush in a certain county, while another machine tallied 365 votes for that same county. Which one was right? There is no way to tell, because "it is too hard" to add a printer to a counting machine. It is not like they have been doing that for 30 years. But who needs to do a recount when the machines are infallible, right?

Most infuriating of all is that Republican Senator Hagel, the former Senate Ethics Director, resigned after admitting that he owned Election Systems & Software! That's right, the same voting machine maker that 60% of ALL VOTES in the U.S. are counted on, the same one that provably miscounted votes in Ohio and other states, and the same one that refuses to print receipts to recount these votes. No wonder legislation trying to require printers on voting machines is taking so long to get through congress when congressmen can vote themselves into office without a paper trail.

The deeper you dig the more dirt piles up.

Mandate
this
lying
cheating
sinners.

--I see a "press release" like this, it makes me wonder. I'm an old timey government corruption rabble rouser, been a hobby of mine for decades. I will fully admit I am a cynic and a skeptic by default on this sort of thing. Call it busted too much FUD in the past to take these things at face value. The expression is "smell a rat" and over and over and over and over again it always seems to be pointing to the same rat herd... onward, see if I am correct....

So I run a whois on itaa.org, right off the bat I get a personal DINGDINGDING BS BS CHECK FOR FUD AND LINKAGES TO THE SUSPICIOUS RATHERD alert because it's arlington virgina. Now that is just a city in the US, "so what?" sez anyone, well, it's "so what?" to me because so many times in the past I see this area come up, over and over again with various shenaningans with the ratherd, it's because it's retired and now consulting or still active or sheepdipped spook central, that's why "so what?" to me. Them boys got nothing better to do then to get their fingers in every smelly rotten and extremely lucrative pie out there where they can make a black market buck, it's their primary reason for existence now and has been for quite a loooong time. any sort of national security they play act at to keep the sheeps buffaloed. Oh ya, they got a long running congressional and judge blackmail operation going, that's another story for another time.... continue looking... this is fun for me, BTW....

That is my OPINION, and it's not relevant other than it got me to get looking at this....and itaa. I've obviously seen references to them in the past, but now I want to see if there's anything else. Freekin acronym overdose lately...grumble...

So now I go to google...simple query, really a broad cast look-see here,just for grins and giggles, I used itaa, cia as the search string

hmm, these guys sure busy, like back in 2000 when they had a meeting

first paragraph there :

"Former CIA Chief Gates to Headline Global Information Security Summit

September 20, 2000

For More Information Contact:
Tinabeth Burton (703) 284-5305 tburton@itaa.org

Washington, D.C. - Dr. Robert Gates, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 1991-1993, and intelligence analyst serving six U.S. Presidents, will address the inaugural Global InfoSec Summit on October 16 in Washington, DC. Gates' keynote speech will address the growing challenge of information security in the global arena. Produced by the Information Technology Association of America and the World Information Technology and Services Alliance, the two-day Summit brings together government and business leaders to forge the type of cross-industry cooperation necessary to build and secure a strong global economy. "

Well, cool, just a buncha good ole boys getting together deciding how they gonna run things and stuff. Funny though, government and corporate cooperation has a name as in a political system of ill repute, but we know not to say it out loud on a forum so as not to invoke goodwin's law.....

anyway, I am juiced now, these folks are interesting... lemme look some more...yes, I know, I should have previously known more about them, mea culpa and so what... I am learning more now..

--ok, s'more, didn't take long, now HERE is an interesting story Also a link there to interesting pdf with more links...

synopsis

Fatcat corporate industry group hires lobbying firm,err, "Independent IT association" whatevers... fatcat group with the cashola contains voting machine companies and defense contractors and "auditors" for electronic voting. They have this meeting,in which were outlined efforts to smooth over voter 'fears" and whatnot. It is allegedly not going to be called lobbying. "Prestigious" IT industry org gets paid nice sum of cash

I have yet to see any evidence from any of the critics showing that even voting machines with no paper trail are any less secure than paper ballots in real world scenarios.

Geez. Let's try something easier than a whole site. http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0310/S00211 .htm The 2000 election in Florida was a real-world situation. It's pretty hard to get 16,000 negative votes with paper ballots. Diebold did it.

just like the government can't stop a private citizen from throwing a rubber raft into the ocean and row from California to Sydney. The Australian government may complain about an entry without visa or passport, but that would be about it.

Actually, we tend to lock those people up. Even indefinitely, if the person has the misfortune to be stateless.

Parts of this story are best told in Black Box Voting and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. The evidence is everywhere - this is not an real secret, just a media blind spot. Some specific details about the cocaine and embezzlement are packaged in a (foreign) news story. A blogger's May 22, 2004 entry recaps the central role of Hank Asher, the cocaine pilot and Bush family voting database entrepreneur. There's lots of connections among a few players in this empire. Plug some of the names into Google and you'll see their interwoven trails. But you won't be seeing any of this treason on the front page of your newspapers. Funny.

I submitted this in April, crack mods rejected it.

Two brothers will count 80% of the vote.

In a country where no-bid contracts and the VP's corporate relationships aren't questioned, this is worrying.

Actually, the Diebold machines were partly responsible for the 2000 election fiasco.

vbs script running in the background, well, they don't say it but it seems obvious that GEMS is running in Windows, the most breakable OS in the world.

It's worse than that. From this link:

She has no way of knowing that her GEMS program is using multiple sets of books, because the GEMS interface draws its data from an Access database, which is hidden.

Getting a warm and fuzzy feeling yet?

You'd think a company who's been making ATMs since their inception, would have a good understanding of cryptographic security and the "gotchas" inherent in such systems. Yet it seems that this multi-billion dollar company is utilizing nothing more than junior level Microsoft programmers. I mean, who in their right mind would write a national voting system in Microsoft Access?!?

Maybe they should claim that all their security experts were hired by Google after they took the GLAT. ;-) Then they could get Congress to sanction Google instead! *rolls eyes*

(BTW, I love the "Politics" section color scheme. Can we do something similar for IT?)

"This sort of thing is of little use to anyone but criminals."

I agree, only for criminals and America doesn't need it since it's free enough as it is. It's not like lawyers are suing people left and right for calling them shyster! It's not like the government employees were silenced and faced retaliation for trying to warn of 9/11! Who would use such a system except for these, and these, and these people who needed to publish incriminating memos that went against the public good.

P.S. if there isn't a +1 sarcastic option for me, you can give parent a -1 for being an idiot.

This article is over a year old, but...

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S00065 .htm

Shows some of the security problems with the voting machines. Even if the article is over a year old, it's still troubling: storing results in MS Access databases, introducing the ability to "correct" vote tallies and erase the trail. If voting machines are going to be computer systems, they need to be designed from the ground up for security, not just "secure enough right now". And not having any backup as in this story? Sounds like these machines were made by amateurs.

All of this, of course, ignores the fact that when the President of the United States decides to embrace the doctrine of preemptive war, claiming that there is an imminent threat to his own nation, the burdern of proof is on him to support those claims. Let's see the evidence of WMDs in Iraq. How about those aerial drones that could be used against the US? An Iraq-Al Qaeda link? Some uranium from Africa? Anything?

In a conference call with electronic voting industry officials, Harris says:

I just don't like to put it in writing because if this thing winds up in the press somewhere inadvertently, I don't want the story saying the e[lectronic] voting industry is in trouble and decided to hire a lobbying firm to take care of their problem for them,"

If it comes out in the press, then his organization will not be able to act like they are the only organization that can speak with authority on any issue that affects the IT space.

Instead, Miller falls back on the tried and true tactic of discrediting experts and critics of the companies that he is paid to represent. I would bet all I have that if you took the 1,000 people they used for this very scientific survey and let them know how insecure these electronic voting machines are, they may answer the survey questions very differently.

www.displacedtechies.com

It is interesting to have a look at what these guys want back... So far the Tribune has only touched the surface of these documents.

Included in the set of links at the Bev Harris story linked in the original post is a particularly damning memo

This One

Unfortunately you can't cut and paste the content out of these memos - it turns to garbage... but this one deals with advice to Diebold on how to deal with the State of California's request to produce documents.

It is more than clear from this document that Diebold's lawyers were doing all they could to obstruct this discovery process. The memo states among other things that they want to figure out what the state already has via the original FTP site screw up so as not to get caught out.

They also talk about the "smoking gun" request, opining that their client "may need to obtain emails, if possible, regarding state certification of uncertified software. We need to devise a plan to locate responsive documents to this request."

What do you reckon this means...

It is interesting to have a look at what these guys want back... So far the Tribune has only touched the surface of these documents.

Included in the set of links at the Bev Harris story linked in the original post is a particularly damning memo

This One

Unfortunately you can't cut and paste the content out of these memos - it turns to garbage... but this one deals with advice to Diebold on how to deal with the State of California's request to produce documents.

It is more than clear from this document that Diebold's lawyers were doing all they could to obstruct this discovery process. The memo states among other things that they want to figure out what the state already has via the original FTP site screw up so as not to get caught out.

They also talk about the "smoking gun" request, opining that their client "may need to obtain emails, if possible, regarding state certification of uncertified software. We need to devise a plan to locate responsive documents to this request."

What do you reckon this means...

It is interesting to have a look at what these guys want back... So far the Tribune has only touched the surface of these documents.

Included in the set of links at the Bev Harris story linked in the original post is a particularly damning memo

This One

Unfortunately you can't cut and paste the content out of these memos - it turns to garbage... but this one deals with advice to Diebold on how to deal with the State of California's request to produce documents.

It is more than clear from this document that Diebold's lawyers were doing all they could to obstruct this discovery process. The memo states among other things that they want to figure out what the state already has via the original FTP site screw up so as not to get caught out.

They also talk about the "smoking gun" request, opining that their client "may need to obtain emails, if possible, regarding state certification of uncertified software. We need to devise a plan to locate responsive documents to this request."

What do you reckon this means...

They messed up in 2000, they made the fraud too obvious. Of course, people still didn't pay attention to it -- they paid attention to hanging chads and that bullshit, but not to the disenfranchisement of black voters which was far worse.

A while ago, some internal Diebold memos were leaked showing that their practices were (to put it mildly) very shoddy. At least one generation of machines were horribly insecure, making it trivial to untracably stuff the ballot box.

They should never have been allowed to sell their machines after this came out.

You should be! The Diebold systems are designed in a way that makes vote fraud simple and easy.

The security holes were already being used, when they were exposed on the Internet (publication of internal Diebold memos). This made them available to everyone, and put pressure on Diebold to fix the problems....

It wasn't code, it was bad design. One that allowed the vote totals to be fudged in untraceable ways. Vote totals kept in MS Access databases without a password; audit logs that could be edited without leaving a trace; three sets of the vote totals, with different uses, so that one could edit the set that reported totals, without changing the set that gets shown for the detailed precinct report. Inside A U.S. Election Vote Counting Program

Human error we're going to get no matter what, so we want a system that will minimize it. Not one that makes it difficult to spot.

Damaged punch cards are easy to see, bad optical scanners will get noticed. Problems with voting software in black-box voting systems are much harder to spot, if there's no paper trail to audit.

But the problems with Diebold systems are much worse than this. The vote counts are stored in a MS Access database, which can easily be edited by anyone who knows how. They are not necessarily protected with a password. Even worse, the audit log is also editable, so that it's possible to go into the system, alter the votes, and then edit the log to hide all traces.

Perhaps Diebold was keeping this backdoor in so that they could edit vote counts when their systems malfunctioned. However, others can also use the backdoor, and perhaps they have. There were some very squirrely results out of Georgia last election, where the pre-election polls were at wide variance with the results.

Human error we're going to get no matter what, so we want a system that will minimize it. Not one that makes it difficult to spot.

Damaged punch cards are easy to see, bad optical scanners will get noticed. Problems with voting software in black-box voting systems are much harder to spot, if there's no paper trail to audit.

But the problems with Diebold systems are much worse than this. The vote counts are stored in a MS Access database, which can easily be edited by anyone who knows how. They are not necessarily protected with a password. Even worse, the audit log is also editable, so that it's possible to go into the system, alter the votes, and then edit the log to hide all traces.

Perhaps Diebold was keeping this backdoor in so that they could edit vote counts when their systems malfunctioned. However, others can also use the backdoor, and perhaps they have. There were some very squirrely results out of Georgia last election, where the pre-election polls were at wide variance with the results.

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0404/S00199 .htm

As related by Bev Harris and purveyed to you today by Scoop.co.nz (Via DU) who broke the original Diebold story.

Because these machines don't produce a paper trail, it will be almost impossible to catch someone rigging an election. Whatever numbers the computer spits out are the final numbers, that's it. Even when the number of votes is 10 times the number of voters (as in Evansville, IN) there is no way to recount.

There is circumstantial evidence showing election fraud here in Georgia in 2002. Our incumbent Democratic Governor and a Dem incumbent Senator both had 10% leads in the polls the week of the election. Both lost. Warehouse employees have reported that Diebold patched thier systems after the elections board had certified the software on them. Diebold certainly isn't doing the rigging themselves, but their incompetence may be letting someone else do it.

I recently read a great quote from that champion of Democracy, Joseph Stalin - "The people who cast the votes don't decide an election, the people who count the votes do."

News of the GA 2002 election:
wired.com
scoop.co.nz

-B

staffed at the top almost completely with ruthless thugs who would do anything to maintain high profits, including propaganda tactics using government officials as mouthpieces, cutthroat 'acquire and discard'-style patent terrorism and other miscellaneous sabotage.

No shit. And it's not just nuclear power ....

Enron, for example. One gets the impression that it was:

(a) a CIA front company
(b) a criminal syndicate front company
(c) both.

Energy market manipulation, massive and sophisticated theft ... the, ah, questionable activities of Herbert 'Pug' Winokur and DynCorp ... the quote/unquote suicide of Clifford Baxter ... some hard core shit going down.

-kgj

From this article...

- Sampling Error. The results of the exit poll normally vary from the actual tabulated vote by a small amount ("sampling error"). A large difference between the exit-poll results and the tabulated vote for that precinct would suggest the possibility of interviewing problems. The amount of this error in Florida fell within the normal range for an exit poll, although it was at the high end.

So you see, inaccurate exit polls can be explained away fairly easily for those in the television audience. Those who argue otherwise will be labeled tin foil hat wearing conspiracy theorists.

The 2000 Election was also the first presidential election in which Diebold machines were used. Florida's Velousa (sp?) County. When the initial results came in they were devastating -16,022 (yes that's a negative number) votes were cast for Al Gore. This massive deficit caused Gore to appear diasterously behind Bush in the polls. It was at this point in the night that Gore gave his first resignation speech.

Later on the "official" counts were reset and a (more belivable) set of (nonnegative) numbers came in from the county in question. Gore then retracted his resignation. However that resignation came back to haunt him during the court case because Kathrine Harris used it to argue that he had already qut the reace and wasn't entitled to a recount.

Notreably, the recounts took place in other counties as Velousa county's machines did not produce paper records and could not be verified.

See Bev Harris's Site Blackboxvoting.org for details. See here for data on Volusia county. See here for internal Diebold memos discussing the -16,022 problem, and see here for more general info on the 2000 election.

Here's an interesting recent example:

British Press Gagged on Reporting MI6's 100,000 bin Laden

More here, here and here.

From the article:
Jerry Bussell, Gov. Kenny Guinn's adviser on homeland security, ruled out terrorism

It's amazing how, since 9/11, for every little problem in this country terrorism has to be ruled out...

[sarcasm]
We are talking about people that are unable to go in their cars, it's obviously a terrorist act...
[/sarcasm]

I just want to add a little something that IMHO makes sense here:
"Why of course the people don't want war... That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, a parliament or a communist dictatorship... the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders... All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.

--Hermann Goering, Nazi Reichsmarshal and Luftwaffe chief at Nuremberg trials, 1945

Mod me down because I'm really off-topic.

Read this.

I hope the participants realize that their technology is going to be used to blow the limbs off of children in the third world. I guess that's OK -- they are savages after all.

"In Georgia, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll shows Democratic Sen. Max Cleland with a 49%-to-44% lead over Republican Rep. Saxby Chambliss."

Final Result
53 to 46 percent Chambliss

HOW ACCURATE?
Polls had Cleland winning by 2 and 5 points, he lost by 7

POST POLL SWING:
9 to 12 points towards Republican Party

ThHis is from an article on Scoop.

Are there any Trekkas that are still running in New Zealand? I was there back in October, and didn't see any, unsurprisingly. Are these things just legend, or do they still exist? Now, mind you, I'm not suggesting anything like whether the Trekka would qualify for a "Worst Car" sort of award, I'm just curious since they're a bit of an oddball. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, the Trekka was a New Zealand-assembled all-terrain vehicle (not 4-wheel drive, but with some sort of "all-terrain" differential) built off of Skoda parts in the early 1970s. There's a neat book on it too called "This is the Trekka".

Andy

Some believe Diebold threw the Georgia Senate election. This article suggests how it might have been done:

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S00065 .htm

Don't know exactly. I couldn't read the article because the server was slashdotted to another dimension. But here is another page with some info.

My personal opinion is that the producers decided that two of the books are not good material for movies. I don't think there is a much in the last book that could be turned into a movie (and I don't think I could bear to watch it - I really really disliked the last book...)

I hope this is not too particularly off-topic...

I just wanted to ask why we hear recently so much about New Zaeland on the news?

(perhaps someone is silently planning to overthrow the government? Hah, I knew it C.S.Levis will do this ;)

that, but really isn't the problem that their software was riddled with design and security problems?

That's a pretty common problem with Diebold systems though - they give a very good impression of having no understanding at all of any computer security concepts... pop quiz, would you rather trust them with your votes or your money?

Yep.

Weather couldn't be nicer for those of us here in Welly. I'm gonna go get me a good seat now, somewhere near the fell beast on top of the Embassy Theatre.

You've got to be kidding me!

We've got evidence that Diebold tampered with results, we've got evidence that blacks were denied the opportunity to vote, we've got Katherine Harris and we've got the supreme Court and oh yeah we've got the Governor of Florida who just happens to be the First Retard's brother.

We could go on with how the war on drugs disenfranchised some hundreds of thousands of blacks thus preventing them from voting, in violation of the Constitution, or we could talk about how recounts were illegally obstructed and in some cases denied.

Talk about losing credibility! Damn body, where have you been these last few years?

They aren't conspiracy theories. There is plenty of evidence about the Bush-Diebold connection. The theories are based on solid, classical campaign finance skulduggery and not on the technical merits of the system at all. There was a good SecurityFocus article on the register about it as well, focusing on the technical aspects. I propose the establishment of independent technical federal commissions to review all voting technologies.

You are way off target.Coke giving away free samples is in no way the same thing as what the MS anti-trust suit was about. The rub came in when MS was, in their own words, "cutting off the air supply" of Netscape by giving away a product with their OS that made it impossible for Netscape to sell its browser.

There were many other facets. Resellers (PC manufacturers) faced all kinds of pricing hijinks if they installed competing products (Netscape, Linux, etc.) on their hardware. Since these hardware vendors are hugely dependent on the pricing whims of MS for the OS installed on the majority of the computers they sold, they were disinclined to sell boxes with other OS because they would receive pricing retribution from Microsoft. If you were / are a company trying to create an alternative OS, it was very difficult finding hardware vendors to partner with.

As for your claim about the IBM/Oracle/Sun "co-opting the political / legal system", you are full of crap. As with anyone who has been wronged, they are free to file lawsuits against criminals. Microsoft was found GUILTY in a US court of abusing its monopoly. Sounds like Netscape, Sun, et. al. weren't completely talking out of their asses. Unfortunately, Bush got elected and the Republican party is now owned by the mega-corporations. MS, in case you haven't noticed, is more 'mega' than the others.

Uhhhh... I'm guessing you get your news from a "fair and unbiased" source like Roger Ailes, Media Director for George HW Bush's campaigns and creator and producer of Rush Limbaugh's TV show.
There are some FACTS that get in the way of your straight-from-the-GOP arguments. I figure it's probably a lost cause to try to convince you, but here they are...
(First, for the record, I am neither a Democrat nor a Republican, and am horrified at the increasing narrowness of the American political "spectrum" after having lived for 3 years in a thriving Democracy (Brazil), where there are more parties than anyone can name, and virtually all points of view are represented, with no one or two or even three parties able to dominate)
That said, on to the uncomfortable facts...
Yes, there was some serious rigging in the 2000 Florida election, but it looks like most of it was done by the Republicans. Besides the funny business that went on before the election (ordered by Jeb Bush) to remove tens of thousands of Democratic voters from the lists of registered Florida voters, and besides the numerous African-American (likely Democratic) Florida voters who were denied their right to vote, there is the matter of the leaked Diebold memos, which show that there was some election night hanky-panky with the 2000 Florida presidential vote totals (made possible by Diebold, a company whose top man has declared that it is his mission to deliver Ohio's electoral votes to George W Bush). Best of all, Diebold does not deny that these things happened; it is trying to use the DMCA to shut down any site hosting copies of the incriminating memos, alleging that these company memos are copyrighted material. IANAL, but that looks to me like a direct admission of ownership and verification of the authenticity of those shocking memos. If I had a site hosting those memos and I were to get a Cease and Desist from Diebold, I'd simply tell them "no way" and hope hope hope to get the chance to discuss the contents of those memos in front of a judge.
Bad as all this is, as they say on infomercials, "that's not all!" Recounts were stopped because the Supreme Court, loaded 6-3 with Republicans, including one major political activist (Scalia) and his apprentice (Thomas) basically said that if the recounts weren't stopped, George W Bush might not be President. Worse, they basically recognized the ridiculousness of their own arguments and said that this case could never be used as a precedent for a future case. Funny that... (in a distinctly non-humorous way, of course)

I'm guessing Ann Coulter didn't mention these things. I wouldn't be surprised if the presenters at Fox News forgot to mention them either...
Don't even get me started about the fact that exit polls unanimously showed Gore winning Florida... or on the recent election in Georgia, where every poll (exit polls, third-party pre-election polls, Democratic AND Republican internal tracking polls) showed the Democrat winning handily, but the Republican ended up winning with relative ease. Small but possibly important detail: an unverified patch was applied to the Diebold (that name again!) voting machines after they'd been certified by Georgia election officials.

What? Brit Hume didn't mention that? Color me shocked!

As for your comments about people engaged in shady activity loudly bla

Try this for a full transcript.

It was edited after the speech was delievered. He said "see" not "seek"

see
see

There are numerous precedents for things such as the Patriot Act. They have usually been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, but they have always stuck around until they reached the point of being struck down. For example the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 were blatantly unconstitutional and designed to give the government the power to crack down on their opponents. Of course it wasn't taken out until 1840, not exactly a quick response.

Then of course we had the Espionage Act and Sedition Acts during WW1. Similar things in WW2, the relocation of Japanese-Americans... all sorts of precedents have been set in this regard.

Reflections of Unconstitutional Precedence

TImeline of American Hegemony

The goverment does not care if the laws that they pass or the actions that they take are unconstitutional. That is the one thing history has taught us again and again. It doesn't matter at all unless the Supreme Court is going to rule against them. These sorts of unconstitutional practices will be allowed almost without fail. Perhaps years later public opinion will shift and people will add another chapter to the history books on unconsitutional precedents.

Hopefully the SCOTUS gets the balls to do something about it. Although I highly doubt that our current court will become involved. We already know how they rule on major issues that affect our country. The precedent is to allow the govt to do whatever the hell they want, worry about the Constitution later. Especially when the ideologies of the different branches of govt meet.