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EFF Case Against AT&T To Go Forward
Tyler Too writes "The NSA wiretap lawsuit filed by the EFF will apparently be moving forward. A federal judge has denied the government's request that the EFF's lawsuit against AT&T be dismissed. Among other things, the judge ruled that 'if the government has been truthful in its disclosures, divulging information on AT&T's role in the scandal should not cause any harm to national security.' The case will now move forward, pending a government appeal."
Hmm. Which one of Rushdie's freedoms were threatened? His right to speech? Nope, he published several worldwide best selling books.
The radical islamists threatened his safety.
Think about what you are actually saying. You are saying that to have freedom, you must be alive. Therefore, you argue, a threat to life is a threat to freedom.
This is an amazingly aweful argument.
One way to analyze an argument is to change some of the objects around, but so that the logic of the argument stands. If you do this and the argument says something absurd, the implication of the argument is false (not the conclusion, the implication. That is to say that the result of the argument might still be true, but it might be false, and your argument doesn't help us to figure out which one at all because it is bogus.)
So, your argument is that if terrorists threaten your safety, they are threatening your freedom, since you have to be alive to excersize your freedom.
Food poisoning kills many more people per year than terrorism, no matter how you measure it. It is actually orders of magnatude more dangerous, and by dangerous I mean you are more likely to die of food poisoning than terrorist attacks.
Now, food poisioning is very different from terrorism, however, it is simmilar in that it is fairly random whether or not you are affected, and you can't do very much to avoid it, and it tends to affect groups of people all at once.
Now, using your argument, food poisoning is a threat to our freedoms. In fact, food poisong is more than ten times more of a threat to our freedoms than terrorists.
The idea that food poisoning is a threat to our freedoms is clearly absurd, therefore you have failed to show that terrorism is a threat to freedoms.
Now, it is doubly absurd that the government, to protect our 'freedoms' is violating federal law as well as the constitution.
The president has actually tried to hold a US CITIZEN who was arrested on US SOIL without access to a lawyer or a trial, and the president wanted to hold him in a military brig for an indefinite period of time. If you don't consider that a violation of the trust placed in the president, as well as a violation of his oath of office (to defend the constitution and faithfully uphold the laws of the US) then there is something wrong with you. What is wrong with you is that you think that there is some boogyman out there waiting to get you. There isn't.
America has enemies, but this is nothing new and shouldn't suprise you. There are people who want to kill you, and me. This isn't new. Frankly, there isn't any threat to our Nation. The terrorists might be able to kill Americans, but this is not new.
9/11 was not a moment when reality changed suddenly. The terrorists have been trying to get at us for years. On 9/11 they got lucky. Thanks to a combination of inept police work by the FBI and a refusal of the CIA to let anyone know about the terrorists they knew to be in the country, combined with a president who did not hold a single meeting on Al Qaeda at all until AFTER 9/11, even though he was recieving memos like the one titled 'Al Qaeda Determined to Strike Inside US' we didn't catch the terrorists before they attacked. If there were a 9/11 every single year you would still be more likely to die of Food Poisoning.
The terrorists can't 'win', they want to disrupt us and make it uncomfortable for us to continue with the policies they dislike. Even without any response by the US at all the terrorists can't win. They are very few, and they mostly pretty far away from us. All the terrorists in the world could not defeat a single brigade of US infantry. So they certainly aren't a threat like Hitler or the USSR were threats, in that they could destroy us if we didn't meet them with everything we had. The terrorists, if they were allowed to operate completely free and clear, would kill a few thousand Americans a year. This is a tragedy, but not as much of