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Archive.org Defeats FBI's Demand For User Information
eldavojohn writes "Although we don't know what they were after due to the settlement, a gag order was just released that kept Internet Archive member Brewster Kahle quiet. The FBI had issued a national security letter to them under the Patriot Act. Kahle fought it. Hard. The EFF came to the aid of his lawyers and what resulted was one of the only three times an NSL has been challenged: all three have been rescinded. The FBI agreed to open some of the court files now for it to be public. The ACLU added, 'That makes you wonder about the the hundreds of thousands of NSLs that haven't been challenged.'"
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
The problem is all the "ifs" in that. "If" the Supreme Court grants certiorari.... That's such a big "if" that it's not even funny.... They've proven remarkably resistant to any attempts to strike down challenges to the "Patriot" Act in the past, up to and including the refusal to grant standing for a challenge to anyone who could not prove that their privacy had been violated in the wire tapping case.
There are just too many Bush nominees on the court for this to get struck down as unconstitutional. Bush could probably wipe his backside with the Constitution, then declare martial law and postpone the election and they probably wouldn't overrule him....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Vote for anyone but Republicans in 2008 and vote out everyone who had anything to do with the poorly named Patriot act.
Personally, the voting record is more important to me than whether they have an R or D beside their name. If that means that I'm voting in Republicans then so be it. I'd rather have a Republican who refused to vote for the Patriot Act than a Democrat who dropped to his knees and pucked up to the Bush administration. Not that there are many Republicans who fit that description...
Ron Paul is a republican who refused to vote for the Patriot Act.Posting anonymously because I moderated your post down.
I just wanted to explain why. I am sick of people acting persecuted and then hoping to get modded up for it. In actuality, ron paul has a lot of supporters, not that it mattered, your post was truthful and would probably have got +1 insightful from a few moderators.
But because you put in that whiny last line, you get modded down. But I guess you're ok with that since you "expected" it and all.
Here is the URL of March 2007 " A Review of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Use of National Security Letters" published by the Office of the Inspector General. Note section IV, "Improper or Illegal Use of National Security Letter Authorities." http://cryptome.org/fbi-nsl/fbi-nsl.htm A link to the pdf is available there as well.
According to Wikipedia, semi-annual reports need to be made to congress, including a non-classified count of National Security Letters issued.
The US Department of Justice also performed an audit in 2007 that contains some more statistics.
Nobody read it. The Senate received the bill at 6 AM for a 9 AM vote. The bill ran to hundreds of pages. Not one member of Congress could have read it and understood the consequences of the bill in less than 3 hours.
:)
Russ Feingold said at the time he wasn't necessarily opposed to the bill but couldn't vote for something with such sweeping changes without having time to read or research it. He has said since then that after reviewing it he supports about 95% of the things in the bill. He strongly opposes that other 5% that is total crap.
Man I love having him as my Senator
I'm not sure what kind of crack you're smoking, but Barack Obama voted to renew the PATRIOT act.
Grandparent's point was that Feingold was the only Senator to vote against it. There were also 66 Representatives who opposed it (mostly Democrats, but yes, including Ron Paul.)
The court documents are available as well as other information.
We hope this helps de-spook some of these demands and encourages other libraries and recipients to consult lawyers and consider their alternatives.
http://www.archive.org/iathreads/post-view.php?id=192021
Obama didn't vote for either Patriot Act or the Iraq War ... because he wasn't in office at the time. He did, however, vote *against* reauthorizing the Patriot Act. He's also on the record opposing the Iraq War, though I don't have handy the details of his war appropriations voting record.
Interesting factoid about the Patriot Act: it was passed in a hurry (we all know), and it was presented as legal tools for fighting terrorists. Now, I'd be fine with that, on the face of it - however, DOJ has been heavily promoting it as set of laws (and amendments to existing laws) for fighting crime. Yes, they are promoting to district attorneys etc. using all those bypass-the-constitution-anti-terrorism goodies to inspect the accounts and lives of people who aren't suspected of terrorism.
In other words, the Patriot Act doubles as an end-run around the Constitution for ordinary criminal cases. When I mention this in conversation to folks, many of them say they think this is fine! I don't.
O lord, bless this thy holy hand grenade, that with it thou mayest blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.
Yes, the Senate approved the reauthorization unanimously.
However, Congress is two parts, the Senate, and the House of Representatives.
In the House of Representatives, Republicans voted 214 for, 14 against, Democrats 43 for, 156 against.
Code or be coded.
The Patriot Act wasn't passed unanimously. Russ Feingold (D-WI) voted against it.
Russ Feingold makes me proud to be from Wisconsin.
Obama voted *FOR* reauthorizing the Patriot Act, and has consistently voted for funding the war. Funny how he claims to represent change but is really more of the same.
Yup, I got it wrong - it was Kucinich who voted against both. I misread a blog post summarizing Obama's floor speech on Patriot Act.
O lord, bless this thy holy hand grenade, that with it thou mayest blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.
For example: In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan got lots of bad press for wanting to get rid of the federal Department of Education. Since then, the Republicans have given up on that cause, and in fact, George W. Bush launched a (bipartisan) effort to massively expand its funding with "No Child Left Behind".
But is a Department of Education even permitted by the Constitution? In 1792, James Madison argued before Congress that financing public education (among other things) was not a power of the federal government: "If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of religion into their own hands; they may appoint teachers in every state, county, and parish, and pay them out of their public treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children, establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union; they may assume the provision for the poor; they may undertake the regulation of all roads other than post-roads; in short, every thing, from the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of Congress; for every object I have mentioned would admit of the application of money, and might be called, if Congress pleased, provisions for the general welfare."
"The language held in various discussions of this house is a proof that the doctrine in question was never entertained by this body. Arguments, wherever the subject would permit, have constantly been drawn from the peculiar nature of this government, as limited to certain enumerated powers, instead of extending, like other governments, to all cases not particularly excepted."
"In short, sir, without going farther into the subject. Which I should not have here touched at all but for the reasons already mentioned, I venture to declare it as my opinion, that, were the power of Congress to be established in the latitude contended for, it would subvert the very foundations, and transmute the very nature of the limited government established by the people of America; and what inferences might be drawn, or what consequences ensue, from such a step, it is incumbent on us all to consider."
[source] (James Madison was the principal author of the Constitution, so he did have some idea of what he was talking about.)
Now, if getting rid of the Department of Education was so unpopular, how easy do you think it would be to eliminate Social Security? Medicare and Medicaid? Housing and Urban Development?
Enforcing the Constitution as it's written is not so easy.
My understanding is that it wasn't rushed through - the original draft was debated for about three weeks, and had very strong bipartisan support. Enter Bush & Co stage left. They took the bill, modified it quite substantially, and then after having had the presses run overtime printing it through the night, made it available the morning of the vote. Nobody had a chance to read it, much less understand its implications.
What puzzles me is why Congress even voted on this version rather than tossing every copy into a bonfire, and then re-scheduling a vote for the original version. Then, they blew it a second time when they voted to re-authorize it.
Suffice it to say that the Bush regime is largely to blame for the PATRI0T act, but the fact that it's still here means there more than enough blame to go around.
Looks like a Markov bot to me. I think it reads Slashdot posts, cuts them into pieces and glues those pieces back together in order to generate a more or less convincing post.
Note how it wrote "(Score:-)" once. To me it looks like the bot read the score from a post and mistook it for actual content; the colon is the end of the fragment and since colons don't occur too often in Slashdot posts the most likely token to begin with a colon is a smiley.
There definitely is some kind of supervision going on, though; the bot clearly expresses some opinions, mostly anti-Bush and pro-conspiracy theory. Of course it might be possible that this comes from Slashdot having an anti-Bush bias, but I don't think that it's that extreme; also, conspiracy theorists usually end up flamed and ridiculed, so a truly random bot would rather toss around random flames instead of chemtrail theories.
I think the most likely explanations are both related to the bot being trained selectively - either on posts with certain views (so the bot ends up emulating them) or on very long posts (so the bot builds up a useful set of sentence fragments quickly). The latter would explain the bias towardy kookery*; kooks tend to write very long posts, even though not all long posts are kooky.
* Note that I don't think that anti-Bush sentiments are kooky; chemtrail theories are, however. That and only few people still insist that Gore is/was the US president.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Do these graphs have the same shape? Do they look at all alike? No. All of the gold cost increase has come in the last 5 years, whereas the health care cost is a nice linear line extending all the way back to the 60s.
How about oil, then? Here's a graph showing historic oil prices. Unlike health care, the graph has a very similar shape to the rise in gold prices. However, the magnitude of the price increase is more than 3 times greater than the price increase of gold. In other words, oil still would be expensive.
Food. That is your next point of contention. Go here and run some searches on the same time period for different food prices. The only one that I could find with a correlation to gold prices was "eggs". Cue "golden egg" joke. So what lessons from economics or history suggest that it's a bad idea to keep the cost of basic necessities relatively constant? That's a grand idea... cheap necessities for all. The problem is that it doesn't jibe with history. Food and fuel prices have never been stable, not even when we were on the gold standard.
Putting us on a gold standard would make gold expensive again, and pretty much wipe out its use as an industrial commodity. It's completely arbitrary as a standard, too. Why not pick something else?
Most importantly, why not just legislate the monetary policy instead of basing the currency on an arbitrary element? Gold was picked because it is shiny and pretty and fairly rare - a very strange criteria for a currency standard, and one that should have your geek-senses tingling for a more scientific reason. Of course, the environmental consequences of digging for the now artificially-inflated price of gold are pretty horrendous as well.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
However, note this entry in the American Library Association's policy manual:
Unfortunately, you have to give a member ID to read the ALA policy manual (WTF?).
I just read