White House Wants Phone Records Without Oversight

An anonymous reader writes "The Obama administration's Justice Department has asserted that the FBI can obtain telephone records of international calls made from the US without any formal legal process or court oversight, according to a document obtained by McClatchy."

Comments

LOL, you got GWB again!

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL, all of your presidents and their administrations are the same.

Re:LOL, you got GWB again!

[NatasRevol]

Those of us who aren't so partisan realized this a long time ago.

Each side has a few variations, but getting more power & money is the focus of both the Dems and the Reps.

Re:LOL, you got GWB again!

[hedwards]

The thing is that the voters reward that kind of behavior. If he wasn't doing it and something did happen, do you really think he'd get any credit for adhering to the constitution? Which is really unfortunate, at this point one really has to hand it to him, while it's not easy to avoid this, it is his problem at this point.

But by the same token, no President would be able to get away with it if there weren't a significant number of voters that are scared by their own shadows and willing to throw everybody else under the bus to get a modicum of safety.

meet the new boss

[lophophore]

same as the old boss

Re:meet the new boss

[Sonny Yatsen]

It's a legitimate complaint that Obama's administration certainly haven't lived up to their promises on stuff like this - domestic information gathering and other powers. But I think we must also realize there are legitimate real-world problems that they have to contend with - for example, terrorism threats. It's always hard to give up powers and tools that may potentially make it easier to track and thwart terrorist attacks. This isn't a failure of idealism - this is pragmatism (albeit in an undesirable form).

Frankly, I think the current president realizes he's especially vulnerable to any potential terrorist attacks that may happen. When attacks on the US like The September 11 attacks and the thwarted Shoe Bomber attack during President Bush's administration, he got emergency legislation to institute all these domestic spying powers in place. When thwarted attacks like the Underwear bomber (Northwest Flight 253 incident) occurred or the Major Nadal Hassan shootings occured, the current president got blamed for failing to keep America safe. There is a lot of political pressure on the President to prevent any terrorist attacks on the US because he'll get more blame for it than for other presidents who had similar attacks.

Re:meet the new boss

[conspirator57]

the same era's supreme court also upheld slavery and later provided us with Dredd Scott. So tradition is no defense against a facial violation of the Constitution. If we want unwarranted searches in certain conditions, we ought to do this thing called "amend" the constitution to allow it and enact laws in accordance with those amendments. that is what we call the "rule of law". We certainly shouldn't want to drift further away from being a nation of laws. Look at Zimbabwe for an example of our eventual destiny should we continue down the cult of personality road.

Moreover, while the old precedent was bad, it is notably made worse by other, more recent encroachments that the supreme court is trying desperately not to hear because they clearly like having a king-like president but don't want to admit it.

We used to, as a society, value the idea of improving our country and its governance to more closely resemble our ideals. Sure there were setbacks, but Americans in 1990 were notably more free than in 1950. 1950s Americans were notably freer than 1900s Americans. 1900s Americans were notably freer than 1850s ones. I think it's pretty obvious that 2010s Americans are notably less free than we were in 1990. I want us to return to the positive trend. I don't want a president encouraging dictators (*cough* Egypt *cough*) because they're our toadies and are more predictable and require less work and upkeep. I want freedom and self determination for all.

Re:meet the new boss

[houghi]

But I think we must also realize there are legitimate real-world problems that they have to contend with - for example, terrorism threats

Yeah, it worked. You are afraid. Step one of becoming a model citizen is done.
Being afraid is good. Sorry that we had to focus from communism to drugs to terrorism. Uh, I mean, we have always been at war with terrorism.

Re:meet the new boss

[FatSean]

Clinton didn't get any special powers after the terrorist attacks occurred on his watch, but Bush did. Clinton was bashed, Bush was praised and given more power. Obama was bashed too.

Not really news

[CRCulver]

It's been a pretty publicly known for many, many years now that the US has tapped international telephone cables. Histories of submarine espionage like Blind Man's Bluff go into some detail. There was no uproar then about listening in on people's private calls -- and some of these lines had US traffic going through them. The American public is pretty forgiving as long as the administration claims that it's happening off of US soil and is for a good cause.

Re:Not really news

[rolfwind]

None of this doesn't make it right.

Don't mix up forgiveness with apathy.

You wanted "change"?

[Vinegar Joe]

You got it!

*sigh*

[bmajik]

Can we now dispense with the myth of the 2-party system?

There is one party -- the party of you're going to get fucked and you're going to like it.

The two faces of this party manufacture differences to keep Americans at each other's throats. There probably are ideological differences somewhere buried, and they certainly talk differently during campaign time.

But they are remarkably similar in how they actually behave: scratch the backs that scratched them, put the screws to the companies that don't play ball, put the screws to the vanishingly small subset of "normal Americans", who don't have some other group-identifying prefix or suffix.

Add to that, cooperate with or live in ignorance of the fact that the money printers and bankers really run the show, and don't forget: expand federal government power and run ripshod over the core principles and civil liberties that set this nation apart at its founding (who reads history, anyway?) , and finally, almost all politicians of any flavor agree that the answer to every problem is to say YES to EVERYBODY, thereby having the best shot of re-election.

I didn't and don't like Obama's professed worldview: I think he's much too redistributionist for my tastes, but then, I'm more individualist than Ayn Rand. But enough about me.

Obama was supposed to FIX at least _some_ of the shit that GWB did badly. He was supposed to draw down troop deployments, he was supposed to get rid of our "parallel" justice system where torture and kidnapping and indefinite incarceration and no trials are all fine and dandy. He was supposed to give back some of the 4th amendment.

He has done none of those things, and infact, on all fronts, has made them worse.

Nearly everything that GWB was doign wrong, Obama has continued or made worse.

I hope the Obama administration thus far has been a wake-up call for people who were looking for 180 degree turn.

Soviet Russia

[xPhoenix]

I think it's time to retire the "In Soviet Russia..." comments and replace them with "In Democratic America..." No, really...

Re:power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolut

[ErikZ]

So now what? You give up?

What you should have learned is that you can't pin your hopes on a superstar to fix a systemic problem.