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Senate To Reconsider Wiretap Immunity
bughunter passes on a report from Wired Threat Level about the effort by Democratic lawmakers to roll back some provisions of the Patriot Act. Three of its provisions expire at the end of this year, and the reform attempt is expected to be attached to legislation to renew them. "Lawmakers are considering key changes to the Patriot Act and other spy laws — proposals that could give new life to lawsuits accusing the nation's telecommunications companies of turning over Americans' electronic communications to the government without warrants. On Oct. 1, the Senate Judiciary Committee likely will consider revoking that immunity legislation as it works to revise the Patriot Act and other spy laws with radical changes that provide for more government transparency and more privacy protections." Among the other likely goals of reform efforts, according to Wired, are limiting the government's power to issue National Security Letters, and limiting "black bag" searches to cases of spying or terrorism — 65% of past searches were authorized in drug cases.
Out of curiosity, what were the other 32% of the NSLs used for?
Espionage investigations? Non-drug-related money-laundering? Smuggling?
Copyright violations?
OK, I'm kidding about the last one. Kind of.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
> The worst part is, these laws cause the very problems they allegedly were written to combat. For example, "marijuana
> leads to harder drugs". Well DUH, of course it does; the same people who sell pot sell the other drugs. "Got any weed,
> man?" "No, dude, it's dry. I have lots of coke, though, good shit, too." Then there's "think of the children!" Odd how
> it's easier for a teenager to buy pot than beer or cigarettes, and easier for a teenager to get than for an adult.
Actually, thats kind of BS anyway. Most "dealers" specialize in the one or two things that they do themselves. Somewhere around 80% of "drug dealers" are just users selling to support their own habit. Many of them are a lot closer to the person who gets a few friends together to go in on getting a large quantity of something at the local wholesale club than any sort of organized business.
The simple fact is that, if you take away all the pot smokers, thats more people than ALL the other illegal drugs combined. So if there is a "gateway effect" it seems to me like its just an artifact of there being so many potheads and so much variability and that users of other drugs tend to just want to "get fucked up" and tend to be indiscriminate about what they use.
That is, people who will shoot heroin and snort coke tend to be less picky about what drugs they use than people who smoke pot. Hell, some pot smokers dont even drink much alcohol, and you need go no further than junkie author William S Borroughs' book Nake Lunch to find a description of how pot smokers look down on and disdain junkies. An attitude that I can personally say I have witnessed.
The gateway drug theory has been fairly debunked. However, it has been shown that graduates of the DARE program are more likely to use drugs as teenagers than kids who didn't go through the program.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Qwest did exactly that! They refused without a specific court order.
And in return Qwest was shut out of hundreds of millions of previously locked-in government contracts leading the CEO to go to prison on insider trading charges for making statements based on the expected revenues from those previously locked-in contracts.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.