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Bush Demands Amnesty for Spying Telecoms
The Bush administration and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are poised to square off in front of a San Francisco federal judge Tuesday to litigate the constitutionality of legislation immunizing the nation's telecoms from lawsuits accusing them of helping the government spy on Americans without warrants. "'The legislation is an attempt to give the president the authority to terminate claims that the president has violated the people's Fourth Amendment rights,' the EFF's [Cindy] Cohn says. 'You can't do that.'"
The telecoms involved should be seriously fried for their eager collaboration with unconstitutional, Orwellian no-probable-cause surveillance. I am pleased to know that they overstepped themselves to the point of hacking Obama's old flip-phone account.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2335143,00.asp
They deserve to have an incoming President on their hands who knows how untrustworthy they can be.
Vote with your dollars: go over to Credo.
Just have Poppy buy you into office...
"Poppy" seems to have stopped talking to "junior" some time ago. He may be regretting his decision to "buy" GWB into office...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
The courts could quite literally make a judgement ruling that violation of the 4th amendment itself is not a tort and there is no harm unless specific action is taken on information obtained without cause. The effect of such a ruling would be tremendous.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
I strongly disagree. Nerds are smart people who like to solve hard problems. I have every bit of confidence that is todays nerds were given the power to create a governmental system, it would be completely awesome. If open source and shared information in the technology world are any indication, transparency and security can surely both be achieved.
023AD01("Child", "Evil");
The GP is correct. You need standing in order to bring a consitutional issue to court.
@ASP.NET's parent-teacher meeting: "Little Johnny.NET is very bright, but he doesn't play well with others."
I would love to see parent modded 'funny', as I really don't think any of Bushes decisions were ever influenced by what people might think of him when it comes to doing the right thing for the country... well at very least not this time. Also, in terms of "getting them off", I don't believe he is of the opinion that they did anything wrong, just that there is some kind of loop-hole that could be interpreted to say that what they were doing something wrong.
And how could it be wrong? It saved us from the terrorists, remember? </sarcasm>
Want Big Business out of government? Take away the incentive and start by getting government out of big business!
but you are wrong if you think the majority of their members feel this way.
The NRA is a single-issue organization. It was created to be a single-issue organization. And it concentrates (as it was designed to do) on that single issue.
You seem to be blaming them for that. Why? They are not "Republican lobbyists" or anything like that. I think you have your people mixed up.
You are making a big mistake if you confuse the NRA with the people who support the NRA. There is a vast difference.
Of course there will always be a few exceptions, but you find those anywhere.
No way, I'm certain it was my terrorist-repellent rock that has been protecting us.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
think Lincoln raped our constitution pretty hard with regard to interpretation the voluntary nature of statehood, state sovereignty, 9th & 10th amendments,
Besides the disaster your interpretation would have created, it's not born out in the Constitution, since Amendments 10 and 9 refer to powers not enumerated in the Constitution, but the power to dispose of US territory is given to Congress in Article 4.
I am not trying to justify slavery, just that had there been any other means to that end would have been preferable.
Of course the South should have pursued other options instead of open hostilities, as a democratic people should have, but a people whose economy rests on the back of slaves can't be democratic.
Also, very little of the civil war had to do with slavery, and much more to do with a federal power grab, to over-simplify the issue.
By federal power grab you mean the attempt to limit the growth of slave states, am I right?
Play Command HQ online
For starters, anyone wanna import the whole US code into a subversion repository, then commit each bill as a new revision, so that people could view the actual implications of each bill in a powerful diff tool like fisheye? Seriously, I'm going to do this, and I encourage others to seed their own attempts at it. Once something emerges, we'll have a better tool for understanding what's really in a law. (Have you ever tried reading one as-is? "Strike section 2, sentence 3, from 'the people' through 'small goats', and add the words..." There's just no way to read the big ones without seeing the change in a better tool.)
Nixon was pardoned before any crime was charged formally. They didn't even impeach him. So it doesn't look like there has to be a conviction for a pardon to happen.
Current law and the law at the time of the TSP was that if a telecom was presented with a warrant or legal document claiming the legislative authority to do the taps, that the telecoms would have an affirmative defense. Bush wouldn't have had to convince them of anything, all he would have to do is present them with the ability to make the taps and they would follow them without question because they had their defense. Now, before you or someone else jumps in claiming a warrant is the only valid document, I suggest you actually read the laws- then and now- there was many ways to get warrants in both the FISA as well as domestic law without warrants then and now. And it is up to the government to make sure it is accurate in it's requests, not the telecoms. That is what color of law means and is why there are specific punishments for it in this regard.
Obama doesn't want to convict anyone. As soon as he does, all this existing immunity and such gets released as a defense claim and all the national security secrete stuff now becomes valid as a defense in a criminal case. There is a good change that he will not be successful on any of the convictions if it goes to court.
Then there is the situation of CYA. If telecoms officials are convicted for following the law or put in that jeopardy, they will fight every order for a tap to ensure it's legitimacy. This means valuable intelligence about crimes, the safety of people, international terrorism and so on will go lost while the telecoms attempt to determine if it will put them in jail if they comply. You might be thinking, well duh.. it's the government or it's the court warrants, but that is what they had when Bush ordered the taps so that won't work. You might think well, just pass a law saying that they have to help, well, there already is a law and there already is immunity if they follow the warrants and legislative authority presented to them and your talking about putting them in jail now.
So no, Obama doesn't want any conviction, he just wants it to end unless he is willing to accept a major pain in the ass in his own administration's ability to do the work it needs to do in regards to law enforcement and national security. Or at least I would hope he isn't that stupid. If he is, then get ready for the telecoms to resist every tap request and get ready for a lot of charges to be dropped.
I'm sorry, but your a fucking moron.
Do you realize what "the terrorists win" means? It means your either dead or subject to their will. Your fucking individual rights and standards you believe in will be gone anyways. The only difference is that you will have no change of getting it back if they win.
I guess you just haven't been paying attention, it's the individual rights and standards we believe in that they don't like about us. It's why they don't want us on their "holey lands". You should really check into genital mutilation, Sharia law, the Afgani student who was facing a death sentence for converting to Christianity (and if your atheist, your even worse off because you need to be Muslim) or how about the stoning to death of women who have affairs? Or what about the kid who downloaded an article talking about the role of women in islam?
Check into those things and tell me how you will have your individual rights and standards that you believe in if they win. Have you even thought about that? MAn your a fucking idiot! "Oh, I would rather things be much worse then lose something I care about even though I will lose it anyways".
The point is completely useless. Even if you did have to give up the things you love and hold dear, without the terrorist winning, you can get them back. If the terrorist win, the only way you can get them back is by fighting and wining against the terrorist (gee, why give up and let them win in the first place?). Do you see, in the end, it will be you fighting the terrorist if the things mean anything to you at all. So why is it that something is so valuable that someone is willing to give up now over something they or their children will have to fight to regain later anyways? At least with the American government (European governments too but this is US centric) you have elections every so often and the longest you will have a sitting president is 8 years. You can easily regain all that you think you lost peacefully by choosing the right candidates. Instead, he wants to loose all that and set up a situation where he will have to fight personally to get them back.
But that isn't what he said. He said my way or I'll just give up. He said if I'm going to lose it, I might as well loose it to the people we are fighting. And no, it hasn't come to what you mentioned, why? Because very brave people are not only fighting the terrorist, but there are some keeping the government in check. Sure, it isn't a perfect job, but those bastards aren't giving up.
And you do realize that you are 100% contrary to what the guy said. Here is a refresher on it, He said "But then again I'd rather the terrorists "win" than compromise any individual rights, or any standard we profess to believe in." Look at that. He didn't say give up on individual rights, he didn't says lose individual rights, he said compromise them. Se he thinks it would be better to lose them all then to have a few threatened.
This isn't a statement of him fighting to keep the country straight or to correct what the country has strayed from, this is him saying if I can have it, I hope we all die. If he would have said "even though we are fighting the terrorist, we mustn't let the government take away our right and liberties", I would have said Hell YEA, preach it again brother pig. That is more or less what your saying. But it isn't what he said. He wants to lose to the terrorist who will take away anything he claims to hold dear just because the go
who was able to control leaks so tightly that no one outside the circle knew who was being talked about for appointments You haven't been looking hard enough. There was far more control over information when they were a campaign and not a proto-administration. There hasn't been a single appointment that we haven't known about weeks ahead of time.
Just so we are on the same pages here. FISA already allow the government to issue papers prescribing and allowing wire taps. So that in and of itself is not in violation of any laws. Who it applied to and how the administration was attempting to wrangle the term terrorist into the definitions is most likely where the laws were broken if any. That is why the patriot act included terrorist and terrorist groups within the definitions of foreign agent and so on. And yes, Bush is claiming those records are national security risks to which he had classified. If they weren't classified, then under the law, then and now, they would be the telecoms get out of any lawsuit or criminal charge cards.
I don't think this is on any level close to Watergate. The fear with Watergate was that the snooping was used to gain a political advantage in the elections. There has been no accusations of that in this at all. But your tight in that is can be an abuse of power which some people could be charged and convicted of crimes they commited under the color of law. Both FISA and title III laws have provisions in them for public official acting under the color of law.
In case your wondering, color of law is where someone presents an authority or does something that appeared to be legal and authorized by law but is actually illegal or outside the scope of the law and authority. Wiretaps on American citizen while hiding their identity and claiming they are foreign agents is an example of this.
Someone else already addressed this but I want to add some clarification to it. Signing statements and Executive Orders are not law. They have the effect of law though. This is brought about when they either have legislative authority or statutory authority. Legislative authority is when the process of making laws gives you the right. An example of this is the constitution gives congress the power to make laws concerning interstate commerce. Another might be the constitution give the president the power to direct the cabinets and offices under him so an Executive Order requiring the justice department to crack down on illegal immigrants or to focus law enforcement efforts on the drug problems would be legal and have the effects of law.
A statutory authorization is where a law gives him some sort of power. Take the original FISA laws, it allowed the president to allocate or appoint people who could enact the surveillance and such instead of the president himself. One of President Carters first moves after signing it into