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How The Government Spies On Your Internet Use
intnsred writes "In explaining the recent PATRIOT act ACLU lawsuit, a D.C. civil rights lawyer writes, "I am sure that many of you reading this (and I, likely) have the government in our computers....Until now, we did not know much about how the government goes about this procedure. Now we do." Fascinating details of the case and how easy it is for the gov't to get warrantless access to you through your ISP. This clarifies and expands a previous /. article."
Hey, jackass, why do you disparage the military by using the term "Colonel" as a form of personal aggrandizement?
My guess is that you have never served, honorably or otherwise, in the military.
A hearty "fuck you, loser" for you.
"Never has the ACLU needed your financial support more. Clearly, it is the only thing standing between us and our fascist government." My Gosh, my dictionary defines fascist as 'extreme right-wing totalitarian nationalist movement in Italy' (or similar) and totalitarian as 'one-party government requiring complete subservience to the state'. These are hardly descriptions of our America... shame to apply them , especially on Memorial Day!!! If we are in any danger of becoming a one-party government it is only because the democratic party has fallen into disarray because of it's continuing pursuit of lack of credability. And don't forget there are other smaller parties still! And the ACLU, if they did not do some good from time to time, we probably would have recognized there basic intellectual corruption ( read marxist beginnings and aims).
Because he, unlike you, has taken an interest in the news the past decade. It's common knowledge. Please go do some research into the basics before you ask the equivalent of 'and how do you know that US prison guards did things like that to Iraqi prisoners?'.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
People are gonna wish Saddam was still in power. He was the only force keeping those millions of fanatical Muslim a-holes in check in Iraq. So Bush got his revenge (and Saddam's pistol)...and only 800 troops have had to die for it so far. Huzah!. Hey Ashcroft, if you or any of your SS are reading this...F*** YOU!
I don't know about the rest of you, but I still remember the attacks of 9/11/2001. It seems that the absence of more attacks on the U.S. soil have allowed us to return to our very comfortable lives and resume writing our theories on life and government. NEWS FLASH : WE ARE AT WAR. The Islamo-fascists are all at war with US, but it seems that over half of the country has forgotten and chose NOT to be at war with these terrorists. You want definition of a terrorist? If you need a definition, then it's painfully obvious that you have forgotten about 9/11, and that says a lot about how GOOD life is in the USA, where the country could be AT WAR, but most of the population doesn't know or care, or has the freedom to speak out and demonstrate against our actions in this war which we did not seek.
How many years did it take US to transform Japan? How many years did it take US to transform Germany post WWII? And now we as a people expect Iraq to be transformed in less than a year? People, we still have troops in Japan and Germany. Again, it is a commentary on how good life is in the US, that we expect all our conflicts be resolved in either a half hour or an hour, or else it is regarded as a 'quagmire' and 'another Vietnam'. Americans lack patience, whereas our enemies are willing to wait for their chance to strike, so our government and the rest of us have to be ever vigilant, or suffer the consequences.
So to all of you who criticise the Bush administration for their policies, by all means please enlighen us with your plans to defeat terrorism. Perhaps you want to negotiate? How about converting to Islam/Wahabbism? Close our borders? National ID cards? Repeal Patriot Act so gov't agents can't effectively investigate suspects? Then when another attack happens, you will say, "somebody should have known, why did it have to happen?" The 9/11 commission has already concluded that the attacks could have been prevented - with what we learned after the attacks have taken place. Sounds like a serious case of tuesday and wednesday-afternoon quarterbacking. We should all realize that the terrorists only have to succeed one time, and they are patient. The US gov't/people have to succeed all the time, and we are very impatient.
Just imagine if we had the press of today covering the events of WWII, D-Day would have been a disaster and unnecessary bloodbath, and the battle of the Bulge would have been reported as a defeat. So try to have a sense of historical context here folks. The history of the world has always been periods of war followed by periods of relative calm and peace, and we are at war, and I pray that this period of war will be short, so we can all go back to our very comfy lives.
The real issue isn't the snooping. The sheer size of the US population means that the FBI only has the resources to snoop on those it has reason to suspect. My Internet activity would bore the socks off any agent forced to monitor it and yield them nothing they could prosecute. Remember, when you are talking about civil liberties prosecution (or violent arrest) is the key. My rights aren't being violated when a cop points a radar gun at my car.
Terrorism isn't like burglary. The crimes are far greater and the purpose is to kill as many people as violent as possible. You can't simply wait until it happens to investigate and prosecute. On 9/11 about two dozen terrorists no one had noticed killed three thousand people and, had the attack come two hours later when the Twin Towers would have been full, the death toll would have been perhaps 20,000.
We simply must catch such crimes before they happen. To catch a terrorist act in the planning, you have to set a wide net and screen carefully. You can't just investigate those who've already done something illegal or those who're standing up in a mosque shouting "Death to America." The really dangerous will be careful to do nothing that draws attention to themselves. But they have to communicate. That's where this monitoring comes in.
We should always keep in mind the political bias that animates the ACLU. We saw that most clearly it in the violent arrests or attempted arrests during the Clinton adminstration--all directed at people who had done little or nothing and certainly nothing deserving of death. Being killed by government is the worst possible violation of civil liberties--at least for those who aren't proud bearers of an ACLU card.
At Ruby Ridge, an FBI sniper acting under orders tried to kill an unarmed boy in his early teens and instead his high-powered rifle blew the face off a mother holding a baby. Under the Clinton administration, neither he nor those who gave that order received adequate punishment.
Why wasn't the ACLU alarmed then? Why didn't they try to demonize Reno? She and the on-scene FBI officials at Ruby Ridge certainly deserved it. And remember that in that case the "crime" of the father was, after much nagging, to supply an FBI informer with a shotgun that was 1/8 inch under the legal limit. That's all.
Similarly, Clinton's Attorney General Reno gave the orders that directly lead to the deaths of over 100 people outside Waco, Texas, many of them children. Yes, the cult leader was a sex addict who, like Clinton, liked to exploit young women from a position of power. But that hardly justified taking actions that, quite predictablity, resulted in the deaths of those women. (The FBI knew that smashing holes in the wall with tanks to inject the tear gas would knock over the kerosene latterns being used for lighting.)
Never forget that the tear gas Clinton/Reno used is banned in warfare and that in a fire it turns into deadly cynaide gas--the same chemical the Nazis used at Aschwitz. One teenage girl died from that gas due to convulsions so severe her bones were broken. That is the Reno who never set off strident civil liberty rhetoric from the ACLU.
I could go on, pointing, for instance, to the armed INS raid on the family home in Miami to send a small boy back to the worst dictatorship in the Western hemisphere. In the photo that shows one of the raiders pointing an automatic rifle at the frightened boy, the gun's safety was off. One slip in that crowed home, and innocent people would have died.
To see the ACLU's bias, we don't need to go back to 1927 when ACLU founder Roger Baldwin visited Stalin's police state and returned to praise it in his book Liberty Under the Soviets. We can look at cur