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Patriot Act to be Expanded
m4dm4n writes "It seems that the patriot act is being expanded rather than scaled back after a vote late Tuesday by the Senate Intelligence committee. The FBI has gained new powers to demand documents from companies without a judge's approval, as well as the ability to designate subpoenas as secret and punish disclosure of their existence with up to one year in prison."
How do...
Why is it...
Well, it might be some sort of plan. See "The 14 Defining Characteristics Of Fascism here. Interesting note:
"As of January 2004, the United States fulfills all fourteen points of fascism and all seven warning signs are present. But we're not alone. Israel also fulfills all fourteen points and all seven warning signs as well. Welcome to the new republic, redefined, revised and spun. It is not too late to reverse this in either country, but it will be soon. The first step is realizing it. The second step is getting involved. As the propaganda slogan disguising our current war goes, "Freedom isn't free." But our war for freedom isn't abroad; it's here at home."
I hope I didn't brain my damage.
The committee that proposed expansion of the Patriot Act was the Senate Intelligence Committee - their job (among others) is to facilitate intelligence gathering.
This is a pretty far cry from getting something all the way through Congress.
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
Well, then things are going to happen sooner rather than later, as it was on the news today (well, at least here in Belgium) that 36 million americans live in a family where there is not enough food.
Yes. A little perspective here, please. Whatever you think of this proposal to expand the Patriot Act, recognize that it is only a proposal. The original article states:
/.:
The FBI has gained new powers to demand documents from companies without a judge's approval...
The FBI has gained nothing. No laws have been changed. There is no new secret, Judge-free subpoena power. It is possible that there will be such a power in the future, but this is just one of the very first steps needed to get it done.
Other commenters in this thread have bemoaned that poor state of education in the US, that so many citizens don't know what rights they have. Well, it's not quite as grand as all that, but here's a little civics lesson for those of you whose main political information comes from
Laws in this country must be passed in both the Senate and the House. The process is often very messy and cantankerous. Even a very popular bill can get stalled using different parlementary techniques, and it is not uncommon that a bill that looked unbeatable in January will end up dying in some comittee and not passing by the end of the year. More controversial bills are even harder to get through, and there is a very complicated chess game that goes on in which bills are ammended and revised as they move through the process.
This particular bill apparently passed the Senate Intelligence Commite, 11-4, a couple of days ago. If you look in more serious news accounts, they make it a lot more clear that no new powers have been granted, and this is but merely the opening salvo in a long Congressional negotiation on this topic.
From here, the bill travels to the Senate Judiciary Committe, where "Feinstein and other Democrats planned to again offer amendments." Even if it makes it through there as-is, it would need to be considered by the whole Senate. Even if it passes there, a parallel bill will have been going through an analogous process in the House. Those two bills probably won't be the same by the time they pass both houses of Congress, so from there it's off to the joint committee to come up with a "compromise version" that everyone expects will pass both houses. Finally, the House of Representatives and Senate both vote on the final version, and, if it passes, it goes to the President for his signature.
It is quite impossible to say at this point if some provision voted into a bill in an early Senate committee is going to make it into law.
I believe concerns about this particular provision of the bill to be a bit misplaced. As best as I can determine, this takes the existing system for issuing subpoenas to companies for relevant documentation that exists in "foreign intelligence" cases and applies the same standard in domestive "terrorism" cases. So, for example, if the CIA turned up evidence that someone trained in Pakistan and is a member of Al Qaeda, as it stands right now, they could issue a subpoena without a Judge's prior approval to gather information from (i.e.) the phone company to try to build a case against him. However, if the FBI determined that a purely domestic terrorist was planning on blowing something up, they would not be able to use the same power.
I would like to see a frank and open debate in this country about the privacy and expectation of privacy of records owned by companies. Under the existing US Constitution and laws, if I make a phone call, the record of that phone call belongs to the phone company, not me. The phone company has no fourth amendment protection against "unreasonable searches and seziures," and it is therefore much easier, from a constitutional basis, to get a warrent to request some documents. As well, the phone company has no particular interest in fighting such requests, so it complies with the
Most historical revolutions have occured when things were getting better, but not fast enough. When things are really bad people are too busy surviving, but when things start to get better they get the idea that perhaps they deserve more and the system isn't giving it to them fast enough.
That isn't to say some revolutions aren't sparked at the depths, but people tend to become animal like in those conditions and while animals are sometimes violent they are usually only violent in the protection of their little bit of survival rather than any grand ideas.
Of course the US has never really had a revolution, at least not a successful one(the civil war could almost count, though I don't agree with most of what they were fighting for), and has not progressed anywhere near as far as either the UK or most of the other Anglo nations. Though some of them are moving backward rather quickly.
Just a bit of history
Thomas Jefferson pushed the bill of rights ever more forcefully as his french friends began to meet the french razor for their accused state in Paris etc. To be blunt, the bill of rights is not something to prevent us from handling terrorism. It is something to prevent the worst kind of terrorism. STATE TERRORISM by a government who arrests without warrant... Jails on evidence obtained by rash seizures and private secret searches... and which keeps anyone who opposes it marked as enemies of the state.
I have been at some length of effort to determine if the Patriot Act as now constituted has any functionality useful for Anti-terrorism. Bluntly it has none. It hasn't even been used for that purpose effectively. The few arrests under it resulted in charges which were so blithly messed up by the Federal agents that they were useless. If you are inclined to believe some of these arrestees were guilty, the US Attorney General and et al were practically enemy agents sabotaging the cases. If you believe the charged were innocent the Attorney General and his minions were playing Gestapo. Even more scary is the reality that both conditions are probably true!
The bottom line is that no additional powers were needed after 911. The USA was not some phlebe in the world without laws or well practiced experience handling such events. Contrary to the claims that we were, terrorism was noted in the US Declaration of Independence. It has ruled US History until about 1940. The Indian Wars and much more were halmarked by such events. The USA does not need to suspend its legal/constitutional protections in order to deal with Al Qaeda. This act and its extension are just plain wrong. The few effective enforcements we know about are even more scary when we find that they were applied to affairs having nothing to do with any acts of terrorism.
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts If you don't like what I say, get a life, or comment yourself.
What would you notice? Well, let's see, we directly helped kill a Red Light Camera bill (spy camera issues tickets), and we've got people doing a variety of both political and civil disobedience issues... it's still early, so we don't have tons of " 'We' did this", but we've got a voice and some momentum.
No specific towns. Manchester is the _largest_ city (100K), and one activist there told me that if he had a dozen people working together, he could work miracles there. We don't need a 'Free Town' specifically... or a Free County. NH's setup is such that we can do a lot with just a vocal activist minority.
Job prospects? NH has no income or sales tax, much of it is less than 1 hour from Boston, and it has the lowest unemployment rate around.
Help achieve Liberty in your lifetime - join the Free State Project - http://www.freestateproject.org
The British, for example, have a much lower threashold to search and sieze, as well as detain without trial. England is not alone however.
I guess what I'm saying, with about 5 minutes worth of research, is, it's not wise to throw stones if you live in a glass house.
Well, it has to be challenged and make it into the courts before the courts could do anything about it.
This is an extremely important point. It is not unusual for the Congress to pass unconstitutional laws. But the courts can't do anything about them until until they hear a case concerned with them. Some of this has already ocurred.
So this is why Supreme Court nominations are even more important than these individual Acts in the long run.
A point...
Although it can be said that the Nazi's borrowed some ideas from mainstream socialist thought such as the expansion of social benifits in the form of programs such as old age pensions, they did not follow many of the core principles of socialism. They opposed the concept of class conflict that is key to most socialist thought. Moreover, their embrace of nationalism, a idealist philosophy, is in direct conflict with the materialist beliefs of most developed forms of socialism. Additionally, most of the more socialist oriented members of the nazi party were killed in the "The Night of the Long Knifes" which was a purge of the left-wing of the Nazi party that Hitler used to consolidate his power. The Nazi government should not be viewed as socialist, but rather corporatist in that Hitler utilized powerful corporations (VW, BMW, MB, etc...) in order to acheive his production goals rather than acheive them directly though the state.
There are a great many who do care, and we have been fighting for quite some time now. I used to read stuff like this on Slashdot, get all worked up, post, then do nothing and wonder why I felt so dissatisfied. Then I realized that no one else was doing anything about it, dammit, so I had to. I started a grassroots political organization here in New York that has swelled to 15,000 people.
Last election cycle we took back three state senate seats from the neo-cons, and fought really hard on two others, getting the one to within 8% of victory and the other to within a mere 18 votes! That puts us 4 seats out from regaining a majority in state senate, and in turning back the neo-con tide here in New York. We also fought really hard to remove a Bush rubber stamp Congressman called Vito Fossella from the district in Staten Island. Got our guy to within 8% again, but because of our efforts the party is now going to focus money and support on that race in 2006.
Right now we're working on NYC races for mayor, etc., but really planning for the mid-term elections in 2006. We're 15 seats out from recapturing the House of Representatives, people. What does that mean? The ability to launch congressional investigations into Cheney's deals with Big Oil, who leaked Valery Plame's name to the press, the Downing Street memo that confirmed that Bush lied to the American public to get them to invade Iraq, etc., etc. It means we can impeach, imprison (at Guantanamo!), and expunge this blight from our country and world.
So get out there and help! The neo-cons are petrified of the idea that Americans will wake up and start fighting back. It doesn't matter where you are in the country, fight back. We vastly outnumber them.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Bush is not a patriot. He is killing everything that America once stood for.
Arlen Specter
711 Hart Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
(202) 224-4254
Dianne Feinstein
331 Hart Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
(202) 224-3841
Mike DeWine
140 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
(202) 224-231
Joe Biden
201 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
(202) 224-5042