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FBI Data Mining Students' Financial Aid Records
crumley writes "The U.S. Department of Education has been running a program that data mines student financial aid records for the FBI. The program, now five years old, is known as Project Strike Back. It trolls for names of suspected terrorists through the Education Department's database of information, which is derived from students who fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). The discovery of this program by Northwestern University journalism student Laura McGann has added fuel to the debate about the Education Department's proposal to start a new database tracking the academic progress of all students."
Since, as a rule, foreigners are not eligible for this program, the only ones who would be investigated are American citizens. Unless you're saying that the Timothy McVeighs and Eric Rudolphs were being tracked.
Would rather have Clinton and Saddam back in power?
Let's see. Under Clinton we had a growing economy, an increase in real wages (even accounting for inflation), a reduction in the national debt, modest fiscal control of government spending, the elimination of the 30-year bond (technically part of the debt) and one attack on american soil in which both the perpetrators and the oragnizers were caught and sentenced.
Compare that to the Bush administration where you have, at best, a marking-time economy, a reduction in real wages for everyone except the top 1%, an explosion of the national debt, rampant government spending, the reemergence of the 30-year bond (to pay for overspending), and an attack on american soil in which Bush was warned who to look out for but didn't even bother to look into the situation until 1 week before the attack. An attack in which the organizer is still at large and has been called irrelevant.
As far as Saddam was concerned, the only real thing one had to watch for was not saying bad things about Saddam and you were pretty much ok (except if you were a Kurd). There was electricity for most of the day, the schools were functioning and people could get a very acceptable level of medical care.
Now, under U.S. occupation, you have daily attacks in which hundreds of people are killed each month, 1,600 in July alone, electricity is on for only a few hours each day, and hospitals are having difficulties being supplied with basic needs, let alone more critical services like dialysis.
For as much as Saddam was a despot, polls repeatedly show that more and more Iraqis are almost wishing he was in power so they didn't have to live in fear of being blown up or shot trying to go to work.
I'm hoping you were being sarcastic because if you weren't you should definitely be marked Flamebait.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
For an outsider the US looks a lot like the USSR did ten years ago. The KGB is even surpassed in US govts intrusion into the privacy of peoples lives. Its pretty funny how the US have become exactly what it hated the most about Soviet Its likely to continue into something much worse if people living in the US keep taking it happily in the rear. Perhaps they will wake up when the economy meets reality and the huge defecits starts to take its toll.
Lets hope it will stop at the next election.
HTTP/1.1 400
Checks and balances - gotta love'em.
One of the things that the Bush administration has been doing while taking away our freedoms and privacy is to do everything it can to remove the checks against the power of the executive branch. Signing statements and the like. If the next administration is like this one, there aren't going to be any checks and balances left.