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Congress to Revisit the Patriot Act
BlakeCaldwell writes "CNet is reporting that both the House and Senate are planning to review the 16 portions of the Patriot Act that are set to expire at the end of the year, several dealing with computer and Internet surveillance. They're trying to avoid the criticism they received after rushing this bill through in 2001 by holding hearings to review the bill's worth. FTA: 'One hearing disclosed police invoked the Patriot Act 108 times in a 22-month period when surreptitiously entering and searching a home or office without notifying the owner.'"
~Z
.. this is all due to be replace with the more concise:
Section 1.0 -- Government good, citizen bad.
Starsucks
Who are they trying to kid here? They pushed that Reael ID thing though last night and it was headlines on CNN and Fox News this morning. I'm not sure who said this, but I saw a saying that I think fits right in here:
"Only a Government afraid of its citizens tries to control them."
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
Max Cleland.
The Republicans destroyed that dude because he only went so far as to delay the passage of the Patriot Act originally. Cleland, due to losing 3 limbs in Vietnam(not due to heroics, but from dropping a grenade and trying to pick it up instead of kick it away, like you are trained to do) was considered untouchable and a lock for re-election to the Senate.
No one in Congress is going to become the next Max Cleland, just for your precious Civil Rights, so get used to it. Congress is made up of people who do nothing but protect themselves for their next election, and nothing, I repeat, NOTHING for you.
It all depends on if you consider most laws that Congress makes to be good. I think they're mostly lousy, and I'd like to see them expire. Yeah there are good ones like the FOIA, but most of them suck.
Do you think pot would be illegal still if Congress had to manually renew the ban every few years? I don't.
Basically, making all laws have a mandatory sunset would make our legislators much more accountable, and that's definitely a good thing. The way things are now, if a bad law gets on the books, it's almost impossible to get rid of.
All movements for social change begin as missions, evolve into businesses, and end up as rackets.
One big thing that they always forget about patriotism is that you(we) are supposed to hold our leadership accountable, demand fair and equitable treatment and preserve our freedoms.
That is what it meant to be called a patriot back in the days that the US was a colony of Britain. That's what it should still mean today.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
A lot of arguments about the PATRIOT Act (which I do think desperately needs radical revision) are very light on facts.
A good example is the article here. "One hearing disclosed police invoked the Patriot Act 108 times in a 22-month period" would be a much more useful piece of information if we got a chance to see whether the cases in question did, in fact, involve terrorism.
I mean, if nearly all 108 of them regarded rifling through the files of nut-jobs planning on poisoning the NYC water supply or shutting down nuclear plant cooling systems in California, I would take that as compelling evidence that something very much like the PATRIOT Act (with a little tweaking to improve safeguards of personal rights) is probably a Good Thing to have in place.
On the other hand, if many of the cases were simply run-of-the-mill crime suspects, and law enforcement officers used PATRIOT clauses as a work-around to unconstitutionally search their premises, I would say it's time to riot in the streets.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Agreed, but the question is how?
You can demand anything you want. That doesn't mean you'll get it. You'll get it only if you can somehow coerce your "representatives" (who are no such thing anymore) to see things your way.
The problem is that they no longer answer to you, or to any of their "constituents". The people they answer to are the people that made their election possible: the people who run large corporations, and especially the people who run the corporations that own the media. Because you can't even begin to get elected unless you get media exposure, and the corporations that own the media can suddenly decide to bury you, to make you look ridiculous. Like they did to Howard Dean (remember that the "Dean Scream" was a media fabrication, and [correct me if I'm wrong] support for Dean was quite strong until that media trick).
The problem today is that people don't recognize who the real leadership is: the people who own and run the large corporations in this country. And those people only answer to themselves. So how, then, are we to demand anything at all, much less fair and equitable treatment?
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.