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Obama Wants Computer Privacy Ruling Overturned
schwit1 writes "The Obama administration is seeking to reverse a federal appeals court decision that dramatically narrows the government’s search-and-seizure powers in the digital age. Solicitor General Elena Kagan and Justice Department officials are asking the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider its August ruling that federal prosecutors went too far when seizing 104 professional baseball players’ drug results when they had a warrant for just 10. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."
and as such is just like pretty much all of the others. The question isn't whether he's everything the advertising billed him as, it's whether he was a better choice than the alternative.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Seriously... When will Americans realize that both parties have exactly the same goal: To control and manipulate everything that every citizen possesses or can produce - even thoughts/minds/beliefs - for their own gain alone.
Screw investing in gold - invest in lead and brass....
Same as the old boss, indeed. What amazes me is that we're still a two party system and that people continue to think that their vote matters.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
So, just because there is one are on which two administrations agree and you don't, does it mean that there are no meaningful differences between G.W.Bush and Obama at all?
There are certainly meaningful differences, but at the end of the day the top prosecutors in the United States still want those X-Ray glasses so they can watch the citizens for criminal conduct.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I would regard it as a credible difference if, when you asked Obama the reason, he gave an intelligible answer, regardless of whether the answer was one you liked or not.
What I'd like to see from Obama is saying to his insiders, "OK, I see why you want this and I'll back you on it, but you're going to have to explain yourself to the public a lot better than you used to".
That's what I hated most about Bush, how entitled he felt about operating in the shadows. From a leadership perspective, bad policy is often better than no policy. I accept mistakes. The problem was that the little cretin never stood up for his reasons. That old excuse "national security" sounds exactly the same whether you pronounce it in English, Chinese, or North Korean.
It's the surrounding discussion that makes the difference.
Some would argue that since we get the same basic results from either party, we really have a one party system and its all smoke and mirrors between the 2.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
So, because a warrant won't let them go on a fishing expedition for other crimes, they don't pursue the crimes that they do know about? That's like a kid saying: "If you don't play by my rules, I'll take my ball away".
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
The problem with trying to apply old precedents to this matter is that digital databases can be so much vaster than any real place being searched. If the cops have a warrant to search the safe in someone's house for something illegal, they aren't allowed to go search the cupboards. Only if the evidence is in plain sight as they go about their business are they allowed to use it.
This is very relevant. What if the cops bust in to your house looking for marijuana in your safe, based on an anonymous tip, and don't find anything? Maybe they find you've stored chemicals in your kitchen cabinets in violation of federal law for storage, or maybe you've got some prescription med bottles for a person who is no longer living in the house. If the cops are allowed to rifle through everything a private citizen owns, and they get creative, they can almost certainly find SOMETHING to charge you with. Their perspective is "since you were accused, you must be guilty of SOMETHING...let's find what it is because I don't want to go back to the station empty handed"
Well, now, if suppose you were a credit bureau like Equifax. If the cops had the authority to search your database to get someone's credit record in order to prove illegal activity, they could search the records of every citizen in the united states because those records are in "plain sight" within the database! Bet they could find SOMETHING if they are allowed to basically open an investigation against every citizen of the country.
And for those arguing "if we're soft on crime, we're letting teh criminals win". The U.S. has already declared and imprisoned more of its citizens for being 'criminals' than any other nation on earth as a % of population. Now, I'm not saying that a large percentage of those people are innocent, just that this extreme level of imprisonment is not an appropriate way for society to deal with those who misbehave. (I think the percentage of innocent people is probably between 3 and 10 percent)
More to the point, his slogan was "Change you can believe in," not "Change you're going to like."
Good, inexpensive web hosting
What the current government want so far:
The current government is so power-crazy that it's become suicidal in its attempts to speed through legislation over half the country opposes, regardless of how it's going to affect the 2010 elections. You'd think they'd take their foot off the pedal and slow down a bit to address the #1 issue voters have right now, unemployment.
Happy now? This is what you all wanted... For the past decade I've read post after post after post about Bush spending too much or having too tight an iron fist on privacy issues.
Well, you all voted for change...
Now you have the highest spending EVER. Now you can see the beginning of security corruption as well. At least Bush had a war to justify his need to breach privacy. Obama has no legitimate reason and yet he's going to do it.
When are you all going to learn that government is inherently bad; that it is inherently corrupt. And while there are a couple of functions it should provide to maintain civilization, the smaller we keep it the better... for all of us.
I will never live for sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
... but only for a while until the money-changers sneak back into the temple. That's why you have to have them periodically, like defragging and virus-scanning your hard drive. We seem to have fallen behind on the schedule... we haven't had a decent game-changing revolution in a while, have we? Now we have a bunch of people muttering "let them eat cake" again. Does anyone still know how to make guillotines? We'll need quite a few this time.
They all know their jobs and the limits of their office and mission. For various reasons, both good and bad, they seek more power and expansion of current power. I hold that there was great wisdom in the limiting of those powers from the very beginning. That wisdom was established by previous abuses of such overreaching powers of the previous government the founding fathers were living under. They knew where all the government power abuses lead to because they had lived with those abuses until they could tolerate it no longer. This is how the U.S. Revolution began!
The people in various offices seek to repeat those same abuses by seeking to go beyond the limits that were artfully and successfully crafted by the authors of the U.S. Constitution. They may have good intentions, but the evils that can result from it outweighs the benefit of prosecuting one or two more child rapists. And yes, I said it. Protecting the constitution is FAR more important than protecting children from rapists.
Sigh! Obama is the President, not a freaking Emperor. The President's power is limited - as it should be. Somehow U.S. citizens don't understand how their government works. Laws and money are handled by Congress. The President can propose things (including budgets) but Congress is free to ignore him.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
The title of the story is, "Obama Wants Computer Privacy Ruling Overturned" except that the story has nothing to do with Obama and calling this the 'Obama Administration' is a bit of a stretch as well.
It is Elena Kagan, not Obama. Her job is the United States Solicitor General. She is represents the US as a prosecutor for the Supreme Court. Isn't she just doing her job?
I don't understand how one person doing what they are suppose to be doing means Obama is against our rights. The connection just isn't there for me.
I suppose, just for completeness, somebody ought to point out that the headline says "Obama" wants the ruling overturned, whereas the actual text states, correctly, that it is Elena Kagan, the solicitor general, who wants the ruling overturned. While it is true that Kagan was appointed by Obama, nevertheless I expect that Obama himself probably has never actually given an opinion on the subject.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
That depends on what you call "meaningful". Barack Obama has done precisely squat to reverse Bush's mistakes. He put a different script on the teleprompter, but he still claims that he can violate the right of habeus corpus, commit acts of war against a US ally, send troops into harm's way without a declaration of war, imprison innocent people on the pretext of the unconstitutional "war on drugs"... You get the idea.
I'll never be disappointed by him, though. It was clear to me long before he was elected that he's basically Mitt Romney with a better speechwriter.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Which is pretty much the opposite of what the founders of the country had in mind. They wanted the people to have the x-ray glasses. You know Jefferson's saying about who fears whom and how the difference is that between liberty and tyranny...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Does it really matter WHO a slave's master is?
There are obvious ways in which Bush and Obama differ. But I think the difference is only substantial if you think the reason you're being stripped of your rights is more important than the fact that you are being stripped of your rights.
In the ways that matter, Obama is no change for the better.
I'm not so optimistic. I lost faith in people and especially their interest in politics long ago. An increasing number of people see voting as their "duty", much like some sort of other chore that must be done, so they simply let others decide for them. Or they simply vote the same way they always voted because it was good then and has to be good now.
Most can't even imagine a third party, let alone vote for it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
They also warned us against foreign entanglements but we stopped listening to that particular piece of advice a long time ago. Now we have a standing army and military-industrial complex that sucks up a large portion of our GDP while giving a large percentage of the world ample reason to hate us.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Because good common sense about Government and it's role doesn't change with the times. You have to realize that they wrote with a sense of history that had seen a lot of nations rise and fall for many of the reasons they rail against. We seem to have forgotten those lessons of history all of a sudden.
It was much easier, relatively speaking, for the United States to conceive of avoiding foreign entanglements at the end of the 18th century than it was to become even by the time of the Civil War. By WWI, the US's economic interests were so broad that the notion of avoiding entanglements became practically meaningless (the US entered WWI because of unrestricted submarine warfare by the Germans, which was a direct threat to US interests). By WWII, the notion that the US could hold itself above the ever-growing fray become utterly untenable. Does anybody for a moment believe that the US national interest would have been served by a fascist alliance of powers that covered much of the Old World? How long would the US as it stood have survived such a thing? Then came the Soviets, which were a direct threat in every possible way to the United States.
To be honest, I'm not even really all that sure that Washington's warning meant all that much in the 18th century. I understand where he was coming from, to be sure, and I think everyone sort of had this vision of the United States as a peaceful trading power, a sort of politically liberalized version of Great Britain. But it was simply an untenable notion in a world rapidly shrinking and with empires falling and being formed and the old order collapsing.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
When Al Quada starts fighting in uniforms under a flag and taking steps to prevent civilian casualties (rather then setting out to cause them) then we can start treating them as POWs.
Careful with that - next you'll be asking for all those thousands of US mercernaries in Afghanistan (who outnumber actually US troops) to wear military uniforms too and prevent civilian casualties. IT would be funny if it didn't make me cry. Or maybe some of those mercernaries in Iraq too, but then, that's apparently not Obama's war, that's no one's war any more ,so let's all pretend it isn't there any more, eh?.
Blackwater USA, go go go , ra ra ra
Sorry, P, you're not at fault, but the hypocrisy of the US nitpicking who or who does not merit POW treatment falls on deaf ears after X years of Guantanamo and who knows how many other secret rendition and torture bases across the world.
http://counterpunch.org/roberts11232009.html is for you all, as you watch your precious "democracy" get its head flushed down the toilet for the final time as it gags on the shit your charming Attorneys General dumped whilst shredding your Constitution for the essentially meaningless trash that they've made it. USA - RIP. Good luck building your new republics, people, it's going to be a rough road, but I think you'll mostly all pull through.
Like it or not there's multiple precedents for doing exactly that. Enemy combatants are only accorded POW status if they obey the laws of war.
The first link is about the execution of the conspirators in the Abraham Lincoln assassination.
The second link is about German saboteurs from WWII who were executed as spies.
1. What the fuck does that have to do with enemy combatants?
2. Those were the first two times military tribunals had ever been convened and they were controversial then.
Yes, 144 years ago, it was controversial to try non-POWs by the military.
The lengths people go to justify the Bush definition of "enemy combatants" never fails to surprise me.
When Al Quada starts fighting in uniforms under a flag and taking steps to prevent civilian casualties (rather then setting out to cause them) then we can start treating them as POWs.
This was written in 1949
Read the last paragraph.
If they aren't POWs (3rd Geneva Convention), then they are civilians (4th Convention).
International law is crystal clear that there is no intermediate status.
How hard is it to comprehend that you cannot throw people down a legal black hole and torture them?
How hard is it for you to understand that spies are fucking spies and we're not going to sit by and have them use our own laws to fuck us in the ass?
I think a strong argument can be made that by not using our own laws, legal traditions, and the like, we are doing much more self-damage than could ever have been accomplished by those external malevolent forces. I have seen no evidence that this type of behavior has increased our security in any way at all.
We seem to be fucking ourselves quite fine without any help from others.