Slashdot Mirror
NSA Director, Congress and Monitoring
Thanks to Bruce Schneier for pointing out the testimony from NSA Director Michael Hayden, in which he talks about how the NSA worked pre-9/11 and post. And, as Bruce pointed out "...[he] tells Congress that they can best help him by going back to their constituents and finding out where the public wants to draw the line between liberty and safety."
that the average American would want the line between liberty and safety drawn right at the national borders of the USA.
Ie the rest of the world is unsafe and the USA has liberty.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
I know that violating people's civil liberties including taking away their right to speech, privacy and due process makes it easier for law enforcement, but aside from being unconstitutional, it's also bad policework.
If you racially profile your suspects, then the Timothy McVeighs slip through. If you tap everyone's phone, then you become bogged down in terabytes of data -- most of which is useless. If you suppress the speech of the hate mongers and racists, then you don't know who is a hate monger or racist.
Civil liberties aren't just respectful of constitutional and human rights, they also help law enforcement do their job right. So don't ask for a line to be drawn. Try playing by the rules instead.
CAN we draw a line distinguishing safety and liberty?
Through liberty.. there will always be safety.. in the sense that.. someone (the government) will always control our liberty.. and at the same time a government will do all it can to protect its country, even if it includes hindering our liberty.
If one were to go around chanting anti-american remarks and burning the flag, by the Constitutional law.. they have every right to do that, but our government will see it as a threat and most likely arrest the individual.
Unfortunately, freedom and safety are both two very strenuous issues when being discussed together, but as far as "the line" goes.. I personally don't think a line can be drawn..
"The ones who dont do anything are always the ones who try to pull you down" -- Henry Rollins
They crossed it about 5 minutes later when the Patriot Act passed. And don't kid yourselves, it has been said the patriot act is supposed to be somewhat limited and a temp measure....Yeah Right a Temp measure like the Federal Income Tax was supposed to be when it passed...
Honestly I scared...of all of the things going on...Homeland Security is a term that scares the hell out of me....
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
I voted. I voted for Libertarian candidates because I, like many people here, believe that the less intrusive government is, the better.
Writing letters and making phone calls only goes so far. No matter how many letters or phone calls legislators receive, it's still the same person who ignores them. The real solution is to get these people out of office and elect people who are more likely to give our concerns a voice.
So the next time you feel that our legislators truly aren't looking out for our interests, get your ass out of your chair and vote.
There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
I choose Maximum Liberty. Please draw the line there.
As a former paratrooper I thank you kindly. Many americans (military and civilian) traded their safety and even their lives for our continued freedom. The war on terrorism promotes the heroism of cowardice "I boldly tell the FBI what my neighbor says in confidence....because I am scared of the roughly couple dozen Al Qaeda reps that the President says MIGHT be in our country." That is a sad, sad statement.
"During that session I even said without exaggeration on my part or complaint on yours that if Usama bin Laden crossed the bridge from Niagara Falls, Ontario to Niagara Falls, New York, U.S. law would give him certain protections that I would have to accommodate in the conduct of my mission. And now the third open session for the Director of NSA: I am here explaining what my Agency did or did not know with regard to 19 hijackers who were in this country legally."
It seems then, that the safest place for a terrorist to hide would be in US.
> where the public wants to draw the line between liberty and safety
"Give me liberty or give me death." -Patrick Henry, 1775
It's been over a year and most of the important changes to the intelligence committees haven't taken place yet. Exactly how long do you want to wait?
While I agree with basic sentiment, the problem is that action is required now.
Is it not possible that, having already made the decision for security over liberty back in the 1970's when the tools of self defense were banned from aircraft (and post offices, and schools, I might add), these formerly free United States had become a haven for terrorists without any help from the NSA?
Didn't anybody ever watch "Red Dawn?"
The IPCC has purposely engineered a massive scientific fraud.
Sheesh, where do folks get goofy ideas like this? Travel, see the world! There are a thousand places I'd rather be than one of the scarier parts of Boston, Chicago, New York, DC (and yes I've often been to or lived in these places). It says something about how the rest of the world is mostly OK, and much of our world sadly is not.
And, anyway, "security" here includes security from one's own gov't -- one of the fundsmental concepts the Revolutionary War was fought over, and the Bill of Right designed to address.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The current educational system is specifically designed to ingest impressionable children and excrete pliable, gullible, "citizens."
Our only hope is that the current system of government indoctrination centers either implodes like the USSR did (and for the same reasons!) or is defunded by the people so that our children don't get any more dumbed down than they already have been.
The number one goal of the current "education" system is to promote the religion of Goverment-is-the-solution-to-all-problems.
The IPCC has purposely engineered a massive scientific fraud.
Freedom -does- come in variable quantities... for instance, you can have true freedom of speech, where nothing is regulated and you can say whatever you want... including posting pornography in Time Square for kids to see and [enter other thngs like that here]. Or you could have complete restriction of speech as in Communist Russia before the collapse of the USSR. We obviously don't have either total freedom or total restriction of speech here in the good 'ole U.S. of A.; therefore, freedom does come in variable quantities.
QED
--Justin Mitchell
"2nd Place is a fancy word for losing" --Bender (Futurama)
First we should start by questioning the assumption that loss of liberty even will buy us safety.
This needs to be done, on a point-by-point basis for each and every liberty that is being compromised. In engineering decisions there's always 'nice to have' and 'must have'. There are also times when the customer is asking for the wrong thing, and you can give a different solution that satisifes him even better than what he'd asked for. As far as I can see, current liberty/security tradeoffs appear to be a shopping list, without effectiveness review or modifications.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
THATS NOT THE POINT. The point is that our American legal system is based upon the idea that people are free to do what they like as long as they don't harm anyone else, they are innocent until proven guilty, and that you dont search/seize/surveill or anything else to a person if you don't have a very very strong body of evidence to suggest that they were doing something illegal. When you start tracking the whole population because 2% of them are doing something seriously harmful then you are using punitivie punishment. Lets set aside the fact that the majority of terrorist are not us citizens, and we don't need any new or special laws to eavesdrop on them. I am all for snooping on foreign nationals because our constitution technically only protects citizens, but to carry this over to everyday US citizens is treading on dangerous ground. You can make a herd of panicked cows run off a cliff if your timing is right and people are the same way. You can make them sign away their life if you tell them it will save them from the eye of the storm. Add to this that in an average day, the average person breaks over 50 laws. If you want to live in a place where big brother is there to enforce every last nitpicky law then I feel for you. On top of this, many of our laws have been railroaded through by special interests, and 90% of the people don't support them, never voted for them, and don't want them. The result is they arent enforced for long (see prohibition). If you start cracking down on all laws and using big brother tactics then we may as well just reanimate josef stalin right now and make pol pot our vp. We can keep ashcroft though because hes already a fascist. I'll never know how a man who lost his senate race to a dead man, can then be sucessfully appointed to such a powerful position just my 2 bits anyhow.
No flame taken. My comment was merely a tongue in cheek reply to the notion of securing the borders to terrorists. Parallel thought to throwing out the baby with the bathwater, the freedoms for security, along those lines.
I too was raised in an area where a simpler way of life was possible. The oil thing: US has enough to look after everything if you take out transportation. So medical, plastics etc. would continue quite comfortably for a long long time.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.
The level of freedom a society can handle is directly proportional to the level of self-discipline they maintain. If there is no self-discipline, the society will impose third-party discipline, whether that be the state or the neighbors, thereby eliminating the freedom of the undisciplined, and, frequently at the expense of the rights of the disciplined.
The government and media recently have turned this debate into a balance between security and freedom, but the reality is that a society can very well have both as long as the members are willing to discipline themselves without the need of an intervening society that is attempting to protect itself from a genuine or supposed threat.
The other part of this equation, then, is that the society consists of self-disciplined individuals who want to ensure that the line between security and freedom is not being redrawn in the face of conjectured threats or threats that do not affect the disciplined. If an undisciplined segment of the society wants to attempt a powergrab, then it will be by manufacturing and exaggerating threats so that the disciplined are willing to redraw the line needlessly.
The undisciplined fraction in society is like a flea on a dog's tail, and the disciplined class is more often than not, chewing its own tail to the bone in an effort to rid itself of the menace.