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Cyber Security Enhancement Act Passes Senate
XorNand writes "The Cyber Security Enhancement Act (which was attached to the Homeland Security Act) was overwelming approved by the U.S. Senate today. According the EFF this soon-to-be-law allows "any government entity (federal, state, or local) to request email and voicemail from your ISP or telephone provider without a warrant or probable cause." The passage of the Homeland Security Bill is covered here on CNN.com. Yippee."
We should fight back and use more cryptography. Even if it is somewhat weak, they can't decrypt ALL the encrypted e-mails going over the net, can they? :]
Definitely.
There's been a lot of talk about canning our current email system and going with a semi-p2p replacement. This replacement should include cryptography.
I'm sure the parent post is intended in jest, since 16Kbit RSA keys are not subject to any known attack; but if you have enough cpu power to perform rsa operations on longer keys (remember, decryption and signing are O(n^2 log n) operations), there's no reason to accept gpg's limits.
Writing a fully functioning RSA implementation from scratch is the work of a couple months; if you're really paranoid (which you must be if you want keys longer than 16Kbits) then you should be able to spare a couple months.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
...Or is it unreasonable search and seizure if the material they obtain is not on your property or within your reach and control?
I swear Bush sounds more and more facist and like a smooth talking Hitler every day. "We're in danger. We'll protect you and preserve your freedom. All it will cost is your freedom."
There are two main things I find troubling about this: "ANY government entity" and "without a warrant or probable cause"
Think about the potential for abuse and misuse when it's put in that scope. The idea of just allowing an agency like the FBI the power to do this is daunting enough. But now were giving this power to regular cops.
This is a hollow effort. They will just imprison you - for not surrendering your keys, like in the U.K.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
This is insane. More email is delivered than first class mail in the US today. The interception of first class mail requires a federal warrant. How did this bill pass, in it's current state, with a 90-0 vote?!
This is exact the reason I gave up being a SQL DBA and went back to school to get a law degree.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
Obviously you are a terrible programmer if you look at it that way. I'm sure it took them all of an hour to "write the code", but surely much longer than that to come up with the algorithm.
I know more than you drink.
I was including the large integer arithmetic and proven strong prime generation. If you don't need to generate keys, and you already have a large integer arithmetic package, then yes, RSA can be implemented in a few minutes.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
The sort of privacy rollbacks we're seeing have been hotly desired by certain groups for years. They probably already had their ideal statutes written up, ready for a quick edit in the wordprocessor. So it is more accurate to view this sort of legislation not as a kneejerk reaction but as a kneejerk opportunity for a long-simmering reaction. Many are exploiting the country's disarray to advance their law-and-order agendas, without even a pretense of any real advance in defending the nation against terrorism.
:).
As for the near-unanimous Senate vote, you can imagine the fear of those who had qualms -- in the next election they'd have someone shaking a finger at them, accusing them of undermined the nation's security. It would be ludicrous if only it didn't work. Amazing how much political mileage a few bastards with boxcutters can provide.
Encrpyt now! And when the FBI drops by to interview you (the ones I've met have been unfailingly polite), give them the number of a lawyer (it doesn't have to be *your* lawyer
Seriously, the privacy issue demands active engagement by U.S. citizens (non-condescending foreigners are welcome to weigh in, too). Pick your favorite advocacy group as your antenna and tune in, this ain't over yet.
---here's the problem. Our system was setup for independents, not for a cabal of two almost identical private organizations to back and forth split the OWNERSHIP of the government. No place is it carved in stone that the dimwits and repugnants get the whole deal, BUT, by manipulating the system they have brainwashed people into voting for them well past any sort of usefulness right into harmful.. They control the mass media outlets, the broadcast and print media to a large extent. It's the party line, year after decade. It never ends.
The times we've had national debates that included third parties, the third parties did well in the polls and elections. Several election cycles in a row who knows what might happen. They don't do that anymore now, they realised that too many people would see that yes, there are alternatives. And that "waste your vote" nonsense both parties use to scare their brainwashed sheeps back into the herd. We have globalist_traitor_goon party A and B. They keep their little minions faked out "lookout, just you lookout now, don't you dare be wastin' your vote! If you don't vote for our goon, the other guy's goon will get in!". Well, duh. Result is we keep electing goons from the globalist_traitor_goon parties.
There's no checks and balances when a combo of the crips and bloods run the show. A criminal gang is a criminal gang, those retardo labels they give themselves are the biggest scam going, there's a pittance worth of difference over all in the long haul. More big government, more taxes,more intrusiveness, more laws that aren't constitutional, on and on. It won't end until people stop voting for those people, local to federal, until enough people see you get the same thing if you keep electing the same thing. And it hasn't mattered, back and forth, this goon is a prez, these goons run the house, the other goons run the senate, both of them pick tame goons for the courts, always distills to the essence of "goonishness".
It's too far, most people won't wake up until there's tanks in the streets, armed mercenaries on the corners with full auto rifles, "camps" of the work and re education and concentration variety, and the whole nine yards then they STILL won't realise that it's mostly their fault for voting for it and putting up wityh it as they went about their daily entertainments and amusements..
Bread and circuses works, divide and conqueor works, and mass psyops and propoganda and brainwashing work. Look how theyuse popular television, theyhave people seeing police routinely breaking the law and violating rights, they have tv shows with the cia engaged in domestic work, they constantly link anyone who espouses constituional mandates as somehow being "fringe" and a 'domestic terrorist", they link gun ownership-not misuse, just plain ownership-with being a drug dealer or worse. They are breainwashing the children in public schools, demonizing home schoolers, getting the doctors to find out who owns guns by asking little billy and sally "do your parents have guns? where are they, how many do they have?". Just all sorts of little chunks of creeping fascism and snitchisms.
People just must really enjoy this sort of thing, they really put up with it. Why I don't know, but they sure do.
This is a very important distiction.
Everyone seems intent on the government reading your email. This article seems to say a lot differently.
Indeed, the rights granted seem to make a little sense, even.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
For history buffs, note the prohibition of amendments before 1808 to clauses concerning _______.
Article V
Veeeeeery clever! ;-)
President Bush is not mentally capable of being a leader of a country. He only participates in selling parts of the government to the highest bidder. As Senator John McCain says, the U.S. government has been corrupted by money disguised as campaign contributions.
This is not meant to be excessively negative about George W. Bush. There are many people who are not mentally capable of being a leader of a country.
George Bush's performance is typical for someone who has been an alcoholic: 1) Many alcoholics are extemely likeable. 2) Alcoholics don't like conflict; they resolve conflict in crude ways. 3) Alcoholics don't like to be expected to think.
President Bush delivers the statements that are written for him. Have you noticed that the coherence of his statements has improved now that he has a staff of more than 5,000 in the White House? He didn't suddenly develop ways of thinking more clearly.
The U.S. is experiencing a social breakdown. Few good leaders are available. For example, President Clinton was the child of two alcoholics. His crude adjustment to sexuality is typical for a child of alcoholics. It must be said, however, that President Clinton was mentally capable of understanding the issues of running a government, and he also had spent many years teaching himself government policy.
Other aspects of the social breakdown in the United States are: 1) The U.S. has the highest percentage of obese people in the world. People in the U.S. eat when they are not hungry, a sign of unhappiness and social disfunctionality. 2) The U.S. has the highest percentage of its citizens in prison of any country in the history of the world. European countries have one-sixth the percentage of their citizens in prison. 3) The U.S. government lacks social skills. The government's answer to conflict is often violence. The U.S. government has bombed 14 countries in 33 years, killing more than 3,000,000 people directly. The number killed indirectly is credibly estimated to be more than 3,000,000 additional people. 4) The U.S. government has at least two world-wide police forces that are authorized to kill anyone anywhere -- the FBI and the CIA. This also shows poor social skills. 5) The U.S. government is the biggest manufacturer of weapons of mass destruction. The U.S. government is also the government that talks most about using its weapons.
This is the text of the part (d) of the "Cyber Security Enhancement Act of 2002", which is section 225 of the
(House of Representatives version) of H. R. 5710, the Bill in question.
Section 225 is found on page 51 of H. R. 5710
I've removed the line numbers, but kept the original lines breaks. The quoted text begins after the three dashes, and ends before the four dashes
---
(d) EMERGENCY DISCLOSURE EXCEPTION.--
(1) IN GENERAL.--Section 2702(b) of title 18,
United States Code, is amended--
(A) in paragraph (5), by striking ''or'' at
the end;
(B) in paragraph (6)(A), by inserting ''or''
at the end;
(C) by striking paragraph (6)(C); and
(D) by adding at the end the following:
''(7) to a Federal, State, or local governmental
entity, if the provider, in good faith, believes that an
emergency involving danger of death or serious phys-
ical injury to any person requires disclosure without
delay of communications relating to the emer-
gency.''.
(2) REPORTING OF DISCLOSURES.--A govern-
ment entity that receives a disclosure under section
2702(b) of title 18, United States Code, shall file,
not later than 90 days after such disclosure, a report
to the Attorney General stating the paragraph of
that section under which the disclosure was made,
the date of the disclosure, the entity to which the
disclosure was made, the number of customers or
subscribers to whom the information disclosed per-
tained, and the number of communications, if any,
that were disclosed. The Attorney General shall pub-
lish all such reports into a single report to be sub-
mitted to Congress 1 year after the date of enact-
ment of this Act.
----
Below is the text of Section 2702(b) of title 18, United States Code, as provided by findlaw.com. As I note below, the version found through findlaw differs slightly from the version to which H.R. 5710 appears to refer. Please unsderstand that nothing in this post should be construed as legal advice, and do not rely on the below as neccesarily accurate.
Italics indicate text removed from 18 United States Code 2702(b) by H.R. 5710, Section 225, part (d)
Boldface indicates text added to 18 United States Code 2702(b) by H.R. 5710, Section 225, part (d)
* United States Code
o TITLE 18 - CRIMES AND CRIMINAL PROCEDURE
+ PART I - CRIMES
# CHAPTER 121 - STORED WIRE AND ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATIONS AND TRANSACTIONAL RECORDS ACCESS
U.S. Code as of: 01/02/01
Section 2702. Disclosure of contents
(a) Prohibitions. - Except as provided in subsection (b) -
(1) a person or entity providing an electronic communication
service to the public shall not knowingly divulge to any person
or entity the contents of a communication while in electronic
storage by that service; and
(2) a person or entity providing remote computing service to
the public shall not knowingly divulge to any person or entity
the contents of any communication which is carried or maintained
on that service -
(A) on behalf of, and received by means of electronic
transmission from (or created by means of computer processing
of communications received by means of electronic transmission
from), a subscriber or customer of such service; and
(B) solely for the purpose of providing storage or computer
processing services to such subscriber or customer, if the
provider is not authorized to access the contents of any such
communications for purposes of providing any services other
than storage or computer processing.
(b) Exceptions. - A person or entity may divulge the contents of
a communication -
(1) to an addressee or intended recipient of such communication
or an agent of such addressee or intended recipient;
(2) as otherwise authorized in section 2517, 2511(2)(a), or
2703 of this title;
(3) with the lawful consent of the originator or an addressee
or intended recipient of such communication, or the subscriber in
the case of remote computing service;
(4) to a person employed or authorized or whose facilities are
used to forward such communication to its destination;
(5) as may be necessarily incident to the rendition of the
service or to the protection of the rights or property of the
provider of that service; or
(6) to a law enforcement agency -
(A) if the contents -
(i) were inadvertently obtained by the service provider;
and
(ii) appear to pertain to the commission of a crime; or or
(B) if required by section 227 of the Crime Control Act of
1990.
The copy of 18 US 2702(b) available through findlaw.com has no paragraph (6)(C)
''(7) to a Federal, State, or local governmental
entity, if the provider, in good faith, believes that an
emergency involving danger of death or serious phys-
ical injury to any person requires disclosure without
delay of communications relating to the emer-
gency.''
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
does anyone else find the fact that "Fritz" Hollings voted against this bill kind of ironic given is track record so far?
:P
I would have figured that he would've loved to have more power to chase after pirates, especially in the name of "Homeland Defence"
Oh well, I guess he just didn't get his asking price this time round.
I'm sorry, but I really find it concerning that someone so vocal in his support of other laws that are just as draconian, would then turn around and vote against this one. It just doesn't seem to add up.
When I turned to the editorial page of the Chicago Tribune this morning, I was greeted by this column by Kathleen Parker of the Orlando Sentinel. Always a voice of measured rationality, she sums up the whole thing quite tidily.
Brak: What's THAT?
Thundercleese: A light switch.. of TOTAL DEVASTATION!
The Lameness Filter Is Requiring Me To Have _More_ Characters Per Line; Interesting... I Thought It Was Supposed To _Fight_ Page Widening. Lalalalla--MEEPT-- CmdrTaco Can'T Handle Losing Control, Doo Dah Doo Dah, CmdrTaco Can'T Hack Perl, Doo Dah Doo Dah, How Are We Supposed To Post Meaningful Comments When Lists And Blockquotes And Indentation Are All Considered "Trolling", E-I-E-I-O
/~r1077h0c6g
_ HitlerandtheReichstagFire.asp
... dramatic domestic happenings.
= 4641043
z /qkVBIsY/TgwY=
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Subject: The Reichstag BURNS
From: vsync <vsync@quadium.net>
Organization: quadium.net
Date: 20 Nov 2002 06:11:19 -0700
Message-ID: <87u1ic2xoo.fsf@piro.quadium.net>
Content-Type : text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Lines: 105
Well, they just got done raping the 4th amendment, among other things.
The Senate just approved the "Homeland Security" bill, granting the
government the right to read mail without warrants, as well as
stuffing INS, Customs, and others into one giant department. The bill
(law now) also includes such provisions apparently unrelated to
security as refusing government contracts to US-traded companies based
in the Cayman Islands, with no justification given.
They were forced to back down from some of the most explicit corporate
pork (but only as a promise to rescind these provisions later; they're
law now):
* Shield Eli Lilly only from future lawsuits based on claims that
thimerosal, a vaccine preservative, caused autism in children; as
passed, the bill makes moot a number of pending suits.
* Restore a provision from the late Sen. Paul Wellstone that would
ban companies from getting federal homeland-security contracts if
they reincorporated abroad to avoid U.S. taxes, unless an
administration finds national security is at stake. The GOP language
now in the bill broadens the waiver power.
* Drop an earmark that would have put a new homeland-security
research center at Texas A&M.
-- WSJ, "Bush Wins Senate Passage Of Homeland-Security Bill",
2002-11-20
Last night I found this speech by Senator Thomas rushing the bill to a
vote without further debate or discussion:
Mr. THOMAS. Mr. President, I just listened to the two Senators who
are probably most involved with the details of this homeland
security bill--very interesting comments. I have been, frankly,
disappointed that it has taken us as long as it has. We have been
on this measure, I understand, now for about 7 weeks, and we are
still not finished--a bill that needs to be finished. It needs to
be there for security. Yet we continue to debate and worry over
issues that are not as significant as the passage of this bill.
-- [Page: S11243],
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/C?r107:./temp
And here I thought people were concerned about the unconstitutional
aspects of this bill and worried about the amount of power being
placed into the hands of the Executive Branch. Now I know that
getting a bad law passed is more important than fixing the issues it
has first, passing a better law instead, or even determining if a new
law is needed.
I'd like to quote from an article about 1930s Germany:
In Jan., 1933, when Adolf Hitler became chancellor without an
absolute majority, the Reichstag was dissolved and new elections
were set for Mar. 5; a violent election campaign ensued. On Feb. 27,
1933, a fire destroyed part of the Reichstag building. Hitler
immediately accused the Communists of having set the fire. President
von Hindenburg proclaimed a state of emergency[...]
Sound eerily familiar? I pray that the second half of that last
sentence never comes to pass in the United States of America:
[...]and issued decrees suspending freedom of speech and assembly.
Now, look at how Hitler got all his power. Did he seize it in a
military coup? No:
On Mar. 23 the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act, which gave the
government, i.e., Hitler, dictatorial powers.
-- http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/section/Reichstg
I say that the World Trade Center is our Reichstag. Yes, the United
States was attacked. Yes, there are those who wish our doom. But
shifting power between the branches of government and giving the FBI
power to read our mail without warrants and browse our library reading
lists freely does nothing to stop someone flying another plane into a
building, shooting random people as they go about their business, or
sailing a ship with a nuclear weapon aboard into a harbor. No, it
merely clears the way for more
I'm surprised that this wasn't passed by secret voice vote, the way
the DMCA was. At least we know the names of those who sold us out,
abrogating the constitutional rights which define the freedom they
are so eager to protect. Whether the Supreme Court will intervene is
an open question.
As citizens of the United States, we share a solemn responsibility in
that we allowed this to happen, the same responsibility we place upon
those who gave Hitler his power. And should we see our government
take further steps along the road to establishing a tyrant, and do
nothing, we are not merely careless and apathetic, but fools. For we
have seen this happen before, and we know the potential results.
God bless America.
[This email may be reproduced and redistributed verbatim and in its
entirety.]
- --
vsync
http://quadium.net/
Save man-years by not saying things like "mature software process
concepts" when you mean things like "good plan."
-- http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=44717&cid
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The Lameness Filter Is Requiring Me To Have _More_ Characters Per Line; Interesting... I Thought It Was Supposed To _Fight_ Page Widening. Lalalalla--MEEPT-- CmdrTaco Can'T Handle Losing Control, Doo Dah Doo Dah, CmdrTaco Can'T Hack Perl, Doo Dah Doo Dah, How Are We Supposed To Post Meaningful Comments When Lists And Blockquotes And Indentation Are All Considered "Trolling", E-I-E-I-O
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
I was wondering what would be the chances that the federal government would commandeer the supercomputers at the national laboratories in order to break an encrypted message they thought was crucial to their antiterrorism crusade. Anyone?
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
Once this step works, then outgoing emails could search for a public keys of recients, and if possible encrypt before sending. This would incrementally move the encryption closer to the sender, as adoption permitted.
I suggest using this along with features for verification of the sender as an anti-spam feature, to enhance adoption of the new protocols. An incremental approach is the only feasable one, IMHO.
--Mike--
I'm announcing my candidate for the Wisconsin seat in the Senate, against Herb Kohl, election in 2006. We need 2 Senators who'll defend the Constitution.
I don't have to pick a Party til 2005.
Ben Masel: 51,282 votes for US Senate in the Wisconsin Democratic Primary
My impulse is, of course, to be greatly concerned about my privacy with this. Not a bad thing, altogether. But I've done some looking around at what other people have to say on the matter.
On the one hand, I've heard a lot of folks on the radio and read no few columns by smart people saying we need to be paranoid. Rational paranoia's not a bad thing, I think. Just because you're not paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
On the other hand, another writer I like to read has pointed out that, as far as political, legal, and material freedoms goes, we're a lot more free than we have ever been in history, and the very fact that we have a number of people who are incredibly sensitive to violations of civil liberty means that civil servants have to keep on their toes about it. And the Heritage Foundation has published a memo explaining that DARPA's Total Information Awareness isn't quite what Safire of the NYT said it is, and it's not quite what everyone (rightly) fears.
Still, I won't budge from my first point. A little rational paranoia is a healthy thing to have. I've been doing my best to be 'safe', and to teach good habits to my not-so-tech-savvy friends. Now that I've got most of my family Back Home using PGP-friendly e-mail clients, I'm going to take some time to show them just how easy it is to use these nigh-impossible-to-forge signatures when I visit for the holidays.
Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
That's the most rediculous thing I've heard in a long time. (I'll leave it to you to decide wether I'm talking about your conspiracy theory, or your use of "60 Minutes" as evidence.)
Better look out. Now that you're on to their conspiracy they're coming to get you.
Could someone list the 9? I want to thank them...
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
It was meant to be like the old usenet practice of adding "spook fodder" to the end of posts. Also, like type II anonymous remailers, it was designed to help thwart traffic analysis.
There'd be a set of scripts (or easy to compile programs) that would sit on a client machine. These scripts would have a list of email recipients (either static, or snarfed periodically from a current source), and it would send out an encrypted "message" to each address according to a set of rules defined coupled to that address.
Messges could be sent at random intervals or with a specific frequency.
The payload could either be encrypted, plaintext, or crypto-grade random garbage.
The encryption could be symetric, asymetric, or even with a throw-away one-time-pad (generated on the fly and then discarded).
The payload of encrypted messages could be plain text, garbage, or another encrypted message.
Of course, this could be done with the current anonymous remailers. But I've found the remailers to be already overloaded and unreliable. Because the project's goal is primarily to add noise to existing email traffic, it would lend itself to be served by clients with sporadic connections.
There's the possibility of propogating real messages in this system, but running SMTP servers on sporadic clients seems like a bad idea (even discounting the potential for abuse by spammers, etc.). I was thinking of a store-and-forward type of system, using P2P networks. The software could be a P2P client. It would queue a "real" message by sharing it out. Other clients would search for a designated string to find these messgaes and download them (there'd obviously need to be some sanity checking to prevent garbage inputs). Once the originating client knows that the message has been downloaded "x" number of times (some redundancy would be desireable, I would think), it would remove the message from the queue so the recipient doesn't get thousands of copies of the message.
I know, this idea is really rough around the edges. I had a really nice write-up a while back, but I lost it. The fact that my coding skills don't extend beyond half-page sed/awk/perl/bash scripts (don't laugh, I'm just a sysadmin) hasn't helped in my realization of this idea. :)
If anyone knows of a project that even remotely comes close to what I have described, please post links!
Method of processing duck feet
September 11th -- Bush's Reichstag fire. An attack on a national symbol that prompts the single-party control of the government, followed by the strengthening of the executive portion of the government and the establishment of unrestricted government powers. Sound familiar? Yup, same as the rise of the Third Reich. And Bush doesn't even need to dissolve the legislative branch as the Nazi party did, because his party managed to just seize control of it.
/me is very frusterated, but doesn't see any remedy...
I'm not even going to mention the fact that he's using national upset over a terrorist act against a national symbol to fuel lust for a totally fucking unrelated foreign war (Iraq). Same as Hitler.
Of course, the people being detained and having their civil rights as regards imprisonment ignored so far are Islamic, rather than Jewish. But it also took Hitler a while while in unopposed control of the government to gain complete control over the country.
If Islamic people start getting deported, then I'm going to start worrying. (And it's not like we haven't put a race in camps before -- we grabbed Japanese-Americans out of their homes and dumped them in big guarded, barbed-wire-fence-surrounded camps during WWII.) We hover a lot closer to serious nastiness than most people would like to admit.
I mean, for chrissake, we've a father and a son on the "throne" of the Presidency at the minute! Who buys into the "meritocracy" claims any more?
And we just established a massive domestic monitoring organization specifically built to bypass the restrictions placed on the FBI after decades of abuse of powers. Of course, this one can grab wiretaps w/o needing warrants, has the powers of the CIA, FBI, and INS, and is extremely well-funded.
Don't be so glad you don't live in the United States of America. France, Poland, and friends felt the brunt of radical German political changes as much as Germany. You get a shift towards a empire-building dictatorship (except this time bigger, with nukes and the most powerful military in the world) and you can be damn sure that it will impact you.
May we never see th
KGB - "Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti" -- State Security Committee
:-(
OHS - "Office of Homeland Security"
I'm starting to agree with you, disturbing as it sounds to say aloud. Political solutions can do little at this point, with complete Republican control of the legislative, executive and judicial branch, and popular support fully behind the anti-terrorist propaganda that's been so useful to the government in gaining unprescedented powers.
A 90-9 vote shows massive support for the thing. Remember how long the Vietnam protests took to do anything (*And* the FBI surveillance of protesters and attempts to break up the antiwar movement...and that wasn't with the help of the Office of Homeland Security).
What's a guy to do?
May we never see th
On the 60 Minutes show, there were several prominent fundamentalist "Christians" who said that was right, their goal was that Jews must convert or die.
Oh, and I'd like to add that there is no longer any reasonable quick fix. Legislative solutions are not feasible. Bush's party now controls the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of the government. No one is going to move against him.
Violent solutions will not work (like shooting politicians involved in this). At this point, most Americans are swept up in anti-terrorist nationalistic propaganda, and martyrs would make matters worse.
Protests? Useless. There have already been people speaking out against the use of anti-terrorist resources to start a war in Iraq, talking about the disturbing power grabs over the last twelve months. Nothing. In Vietnam, you had untold numbers of students being drafted for war, vast numbers of parents with dead children, and still it took years for protests to be paid attention to. And in the process there was FBI intervention (thanks to the strengthening of federal powers, it would be worse in a case like this), abuse of local police powers, federal influence over the press...and this is not a situation that can be tolerated for nearly as long.
Remember Pastor Martin Niemoller, convicted of treason by the Nazis:
In Germany they first came for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me -
and by that time no one was left to speak up.
Sage advice, from a man who has seen this before -- and yet who are we to speak out to? Who is to hear what we have to say with the power to do anything?
There are no countries, no one on earth that can do anything if this goes wrong.
May we never see th
The "silly minority" did elect Bush. He was elected by only a very small percentage of the votes. Without support from "Christian" fundamentalists, he could not have been elected.
You are right, the amount of money donated by the U.S. government to Israel to support buying from U.S. weapons manufacturers has been quite stable.
--wellstone got assassinated. It's reality. The remaining senators took this as a clue on playing ball. They went along with the "opposition" amendments that they knew wouldn't stand a chance anyway, then most of them lined up to grant dictatorial powers to the executive branch.
They not only are cowards, but they abrogated their responsibilites and turned over constitutional duties that aren't their's to give away. But it doesn't matter, the bulk of the US code is unconstitutional anyway. It's a joke. they took the commerce clause and the duty to promote the general welfare to heights not even imagined by the founders. And even with the delineated bill of rights, it hasn't mattered, they just do what they want to do. We have a government comprised of bribe takers, blackmail reciepients, and blackmailers. Murders and assination happen, and nothing is ever done about it. From waco to chandra levy to a president to senators to "friends of bill" to "friends of the bushes", people get whacked. It's a dictatorship with window dressing teevee melodrama "politics". In some nation that has "one" party, people can see this easily, but for some reason, when you have "two" parties, but the results are constantly the same as those "one" party nations we all like to point at, the residents of the "two party" nation keep insisting they have choice and freedom, more from fervently wishing it than actually enjoying it.
Expect the roadblocks, the military troops all over in the streets and patrolling schools and factories and other businesses, and the camps soon,too, because it's coming. Oh ya, and the "disappeards". First it will be only partly disappeard, we are seeing that now, to "military tribunals", but eventually the numbers will get high enough they'll just vanish and not even bother with any niceties like that.
There is just an overwhelming parallelism with past tyrannical regimes, it's impossible to ignore it now unless you go way out of your way and apply blinders, which most people are doing.
Use OTP for the emails (say you share a 100GB HD with keys with your fellows). When the goverment comes and ask for the unencripted messages you could just tell _whatever_ you like :)
Impractical, but should be really funny. And if we can do this so could Saddam. There's no possible way to know the message. Thee know this, but spying on people has a lot other advantages to US. Imagine, spying on what everyone that is not a terrorist (99,999%), all the information you can gather for whatever. That is power.
unfinished: (adj.)
--sure, here ya go it's called google. Look up anything ya want, start with the "friends of bill list". On the bushes side start with prescott if ya want, how he got convicted of trading with the enemy-the nazis. It's just data. Get the data, make up your own mind. Learn how george the elder allowed in thousands of iraqis, of whom many settled in oklahoma, and the now starting to creep out linkages with the murragh building and the explosion there. Interesting stuff there. Learn how immediately after the 9-11 attacks of how after ALL civilian aircraft was ordered grounded, that shrubya allowed-ordered- the bin laden family to load up and flee in their private jet. Learn about the dumbya's ties with the bin ladens, how they used to even vacation together. Look up anything ya want to. Have fun. It's not theory if there's data to look at, but I'm not your paid search engine, the data is out there if you are really interested. Try "government prior knowledge, 9-11" in google. Try looking up uzbeikstan and taliban and oil, then check the dates and names involved. Try unocal and haliburton and carlisle group. Try "opium, cia, KLA, taliban, northern alliance". Any and all of it, have big fun. Try running "bush, drug smuggling, clinton, mena", that's another goodie. There's tons really.
And oh ya, oswald wasn't the only dude involved in kennedy's whack, "so there". Take your warren commission "report" to the outhouse with ya, it's the appropriate place to use that paper it's printed on.
neener neener
%^)
So I should troll the web for conspiracy theorists to prove the existence of conspiracies? Ingenious.
Every one of the allegations you throw out has been debunked, including the hilarious ones about the bin Ladens. Start at any urban legend site (e.g., snopes) and go from there.
Fundamentalist "Christians" are not a tiny minority in the United States. If you put them together with people who work in the HUGE U.S. weapons industry and the people who work in the huge oil industry, that's a lot of people. The first two groups think that violence is "justified" as long as they themselves are not at risk.
Bush is the president solely because Al Gore is so clueless when it comes to what he should say and he should not say. Al Gore said that he supported "a woman's right to choose". That killed his chances with a lot of Christians and a lot of "Christians".
Someone with some understanding of the issues, for example Bill Clinton, would not make such strong statements about something over which he has no control. (Abortion rights in the U.S. are determined by the Supreme Court. A president has little immediate influence.)
See my comment above:
(#4718671)
I agree, he should never have been elected.
Yeah, politics is how about summing net votes. If you say something to get a minority to vote you, and that bother other people, you're just lowering your votes :)
Many politicians don't know to play that game, it's very demanding and need a lot of intuition. Some parties don't have an option, they need to piss of a vast mayority securing the votes of a minority. It's better than nothing at all.
unfinished: (adj.)
---umm, nice try, but no they haven't been all "debunked". What has happened in a lot of cases has been half assed spin efforts. Like that ridiculous cia cartoon video of twa 800 and the magical sploding center fuel tank and a plane that can zoom almost straight up all busted in chubks, that was hysterical. And the fat guy don't look nuthin like him "osama" cia video, again, hilarious. You guys never quit, the "attack" by gunboats on US destroyers in the tonkin gulf. too bad the head navy guy in theater there never heard of it. On and on, same scam, yep, it usually works because people are easily lead when they can't get to any data, but the net is sorta making that harder to pull off now, ain't it?
Just remember, the "nuhremberg defense" is not a valid excuse. Tell your boss that too.
Fundamentalist "Christians" are not a tiny minority in the United States.
Yeah, but the ones that think jews should convert or die are. I'd bet there's less than 100,000 of them in the US, and they're spread out, so they don't really have a giant influence on very many electoral votes.
Bush is the president solely because Al Gore is so clueless when it comes to what he should say and he should not say. Al Gore said that he supported "a woman's right to choose". That killed his chances with a lot of Christians and a lot of "Christians".
There are way more things Al Gore said to loose votes than that. Ever read his book? Do you really want to live in a world like the one he wants? I think it's scarry.
Personally I think Bush is doing a fairly good job overall. There are a few things that piss me off, but nobody's completely perfect. The only thing that really bothers me is that he's ignoring some importand domestic issues because he's too preocupied with Iraq. He should be pushing his energy plan and overcoming all the undue negative press it was given.
Someone with some understanding of the issues, for example Bill Clinton, would not make such strong statements about something over which he has no control.
There's something to be said for conviction, which is something President Clinton was lacking. Fortunatly for him, a president that didn't really do anything was exactly what the country was looking for at the time; Otherwise we may have elected Perot!
Abortion rights in the U.S. are determined by the Supreme Court. A president has little immediate influence.
People who say "I vote pro-(life|choice)" annoy the hell out of me. A narrow minded view doesn't do anybody any good. Someday a mentailty like that really may get us elected leaders who will want the jews to convert or die. That should be something people pay attention to instead of blindly voting pro-(choice|life).
> so you actually believe they are going to ouright suspend the constitution
They ALREADY HAVE suspended large portions of it, in the Patriot Act, and the Fatherland Security Act, which is why people are outraged.