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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.'"
Sure you can!
Just have Poppy buy you into office so that the people that have the strings attached to important parts of your body can pull what they want, when the want.
Seriously, we have just witnessed the greatest bald-faced rape of the Constitution since ... forever. The thing (or the most recent thing) that turns my stomach is that there is a very good chance they will get away with it.
... why doesn't [Bush] just issue a blanket pardon?
Perhaps because pardons apply to criminal cases (government vs. person-to-be-punished-for-wrongdoing) while these are civil cases (wronged people demanding damages be paid by those who wronged them). I think the pardon power only applies to the former.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I dunno, I mean I guess we can ...
ahhh...
fuck dude, I've got a raid tonight, can this wait?
He'd catch the terrorists first, worry about paperwork and suspensions afterwards.
I think that's a lesson for all you Fourth Amendment Nazis.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Obama voted for it too you know.
If he were really against it as some of the more delusion supporters claim, then he would issue a statement at this time supporting making it unconstitutional. Expect no statement.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The administration also says the immunity is warranted because the lawsuits threaten to expose government secrets.
This was why immunity should NOT be warranted! And before you start screaming national security, exactly what kind of information that could be brought out in a civil case which would damage national security? Methods? Competent terrorists aren't going to be caught by dragnet style filtering anyway unless its technical prowess is far beyond what most experts agree is currently possible.
This is either protecting corporate cronies, protecting themselves, or most likely both.
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");
has nothing to do with whether he can -- legally.
And this is exactly that kind of case in point... this last Presidential administration -- and Congress, too -- have done quite a few things lately that they probably can't do... legally. The fact that they did do them has no bearing on the law.
If he did it, he didn't do it by himself. He did it with the aid of a Democratic Congress in passing the requested retroactive immunity legislation and IIRC our president-elect voted for that law as well. Democrat or Republican, big money from big telcos talks very loud. Meet the new boss; same as the old boss.
Agents fighting terrorism will tell you they are not always available for those situations. People have died because no warrant was available in time.
Those agents would be lying. FISA allowed for retroactive warrants to be issued 72 hours after the fact.
FreeSpeech.org
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is the most overturned Federal jurisdiction.
Please stop listening to the propaganda of televangelists. Seriously. The 9th circuit court is overturned less often than the average if you base it on the number of cases they hear... they just hear a lot more cases than most courts.
I understand that there are all kinds of open source projects out there, and some better than others. But based on my personal experience with some of the more prominent ones, I seriously believe a government run by open source types would be as terrible as what we have now. The following thoughts are based just on those projects.
It would respond to complaints about the government with comments like "Go build your own government! Ours is done right! Anybody who is not a constitutional lawyer is an idiot who just doesn't know enough about government!"
People who want to report potholes, or suggest an amendment to the constitution, would have to check their clocks. Everybody whose name starts with A through K has to file their complaint in the morning, K through P in the afternoon, and the rest have to file their complaint in the evening. Because good user experience is second to efficiency and having the complaints partially sorted as they're filed will make the database sorting algorithm run faster.
It would have a stupid name. Probably something like UNITED, which is an acronym in which the U stands for "united".
NASA would get more than 70% of all federal funding. The N would stand for NASA. Eventually it would be replaced with another organization that is exactly the same, except it's called GNASA. And even though it's NASA, the N stands for "Not NASA". Nobody really knows what the ASA stands for. Probably the same thing the NITED stands for.
The national anthem would be forked into two songs because we'd never agree on whether it should say "O'er the land of the free (as in speech)" or "O'er the land of the free (as in beer)". The pledge of allegience would be the most forked project in the history of the earth.
Boundary lines would be drawn so that every state has exactly the same number of citizens, so they make a nice Beowulf cluster.
The military would be the drones from Star Wars. The guy who set them up insists we should not complain about their horrible inaccuracy because they're still in beta.
The drones would be running android, which is actually working pretty well but none of the drones have bluetooth capability.
Some guy will come up with the best amendment to the constitution in years but he'll get locked up for killing his wife, so we won't use it.
The Chewbacca defense will actually work.
And if it were run by Slashdotters, censorship would be guaranteed by the constitution. Because censorship is basically what moderation is. You take the comments you like and make them more prominent, while taking comments you don't like and making them disappear. So whoever was in power in the beginning will crush anybody who introduces new ideas, resulting in old-boy network groupthink. I'm pretty sure that 24 hours from the time of this post, either it will be at +5 Funny, or only people browsing at -1 will see it.