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Why DOJ Didn't Need a "Super Search Warrant" To Snoop On Fox News' E-mail
awaissoft writes "If attorney general Eric Holder wanted to perform even a momentary Internet wiretap on Fox News' e-mail accounts, he would have had to persuade a judge to approve what lawyers call a 'super search warrant.' A super search warrant's requirements are exacting: Intercepted communications must be secured and placed under seal. Real-time interception must be done only as a last resort. Only certain crimes qualify for this technique, the target must be notified, and additional restrictions apply to state and local police conducting real-time intercepts. But because of the way federal law was written nearly half a century ago, Holder was able to obtain a normal search warrant — lacking those extensive privacy protections — that allowed federal agents to secretly obtain up to six years of email correspondence between Fox News correspondent James Rosen and his alleged sources."
And although Fox is playing the indignant victim all over the news right now, they've know about this for a long time.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Right, why read slashdot at all when you can just use "The Google"...
Investigative journalism apparently. You know, the stuff that the major networks gave up on years ago.
They told me if I voted for Romney the government would engage in unconstitutional wiretapping.
Nothing is more amusing to me that watching leftists trying to pretend this is all okay because it's Fox and not what they consider real news organizations. I hope you remember this moment when the next Republican president takes office.
I know they are stupid and shouldn't be called a news show, but what did they do that requires wiretapping?
Perhaps the more relevant question should be what does anyone do to justify wiretapping, which in this police state, amounts to jack shit.
(I didn't use the word "warrant" here, because that might imply they need to follow the law and obtain one. They don't.)
But hey, keep arguing red vs. blue and vote for that two-party system. You see how much fucking good it does...
I know they are stupid and shouldn't be called a news show, but what did they do that requires wiretapping?
It's not what they did; it's what the person talking to them was allegedly doing. The Executive branch was investigating a leak from one of its own, and Fox News was on the receiving end of the information, apparently, so by wiretapping Fox News' communications, they were hoping to find the source of the leak.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Don't let the Red/Blue Faux News debate cloud this issue. It doesn't matter who did it or to whom it is not okay and this policy should be banned.
I know they are stupid and shouldn't be called a news show, but what did they do that requires wiretapping?
Journalism.
No, seriously: James Rosen asked someone at the State Department questions about North Korea.
Because that apparently could involve classified information (not that it necessarily did), Obama's Department of Justice pulled six years of Rosen's email.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
I know they are stupid and shouldn't be called a news show, but what did they do that requires wiretapping?
Rosen reported that,
"U.S. intelligence officials have warned President Obama and other senior American officials that North Korea intends to respond to the passage of a U.N. Security Council resolution this week... with another nuclear test,"
And now the "Justice" Department is telling us that they consider him an accomplice to espionage.
Essentially, the reporter in question wrote an article just to say that we had a high-level asset inside the North Korean government. There was no new factual information in the article otherwise - just the need to out a spy in an article about North Korea responding to sanctions. Similar to the AP case, where the reporter felt the need to out the fact that the British had an undercover operative inside Al Qaida who delivered them a sample bomb for analysis.
It's not what they did; it's what the person talking to them was allegedly doing. The Executive branch was investigating a leak from one of its own, and Fox News was on the receiving end of the information, apparently, so by wiretapping Fox News' communications, they were hoping to find the source of the leak.
This is exactly the kind of activity that is supposed to be prohibited by the 1st amendment; attempting to force the press (covertly or not) to reveal the identity of their sources.
They investigate what they choose to investigate for their own ends. No network has given that up. Fox News just tends to be investigating a lot more now, with a left leaning president, while during W they mostly just pandered. Now MSNBC is in pander mode, having done the "investigating" thing during W.
Pretending anything else is just exposing your personal bias. The crime here is our news outlets have such blatant bias, and very little dedication to journalism and conveying the facts to the masses. Worst, people actually think that what these organizations are doing is truth.
Doesn't matter who's fault it is...
who started privacy abuses,
what party is/was in power.
There is something going terribly wrong here.
We, as Americans,
have obviously slid quite a little way down the slippery slope,
toward something quite different than the bastion of freedom we like to think of ourselves as...
We should be doing something more about it than pointing fingers and playing politics.
Yes but Gouvernments these days asks themselves the important question of "What Would Nixon Do?".
An infringement on the freedom of the press, or the confidentiality of sources, is a threat to democracy regardless of whether it targets an actual news agency or a mockery thereof.
It's a sticky balancing act between protecting national security and protecting freedom of the press. Should we try to find secret leakers even if the investigation goes through journalist?
Table-ized A.I.
Congress should pass an adjusted law and move on rather than making it a witch hunt. Trying to milk it as a "dirty conspiracy" will just pull BOTH parties (deeper) into the mud.
Computerized gerrymandering is part of the problem: politicians redraw their own districts to be slanted politically so that all they have to do is kiss up to extremists to get re-elected rather than do real work.
Table-ized A.I.
Yes but Gouvernments these days asks themselves the important question of "What Would Nixon Do?".
- yeah, and then they multiply it by about 1000 and do that instead.
Has Nixon actually bombed a bunch of Americans around the world? I hate the guy, by the way, but I don't think he has done anything even close to what the modern day politicians are doing daily.
You can't handle the truth.
To the best of my knowledge no one is trying to restrict the right to bare arms. In fact IIRC the law in New York (?) is being adjusted so that women can even bare torsos (including nipples!). I haven't heard any talk about requires people to wear sleeves.
I'm not going through the whole silly list. Let me just take the first line. The drone strikes are being criticized all over the place. In fact, one of the few places that isn't critical of them is Fox News. I'm pretty sure they feel it's one of the few things the Obama administration is doing right.
Yes but Governments these days asks themselves the important question of "What Would Nixon Do?"
Quick, get someone over to the Watergate!
So your issue isn't that all of those done were done by the Republicans as well, but that the complaints are all by impotent radio talk show hosts if the Democrats are in power, and protesters if the Republicans are in power? You've missed the issue.
Learn to love Alaska
First, Team Obama have had an effort underway since the start of their campaign in late 2007 to push the theme that Fox news is evil/bad/untrustworthy because it is the ONLY network in the US with no financial ties, employment ties, or family ties (by blood or marriage) to the Obama campaign and PR people (look it up... it's shocking how many at the other news outlets have either worked for the Obama admin, fund raised for them, or are married or biologically related to them). No other president in U.S. History has had the media in his pocket to this degree. PBS is financially dependent on him. The NBC network (via GE and including MSNBC) had its CEO in the Obama team, partly funded Obama, and GE itself was untaxed under Obama (but of course this has NOTHING to do with the relentless pro-Obama NBC and MSNBC coverage...). If you watch any news outlet other than Fox, ask yourself how often you have seen a reporter shouting tough questions at Obama and how many times you have seen stories about Obama policies or actions that did not presume he was right. This used to be the norm with ALL news outlets and all previous presidents... not with Obama... with Obama, the press is friendly to him and always assumes as the baseline of any story that he is a good guy doing good things... it's like 1936 Germany... a progressive press spoon-feeding good news about a progressive leader to a public which therefore, seeing nearly nothing negative about him approves of him getting more and more power over their lives... it's bizarre and unsettling to see AMERICANS interviewed about Obama talking about him in such messianic terms as some now do (we've seen this play before and it rarely ends well).
The Obama campaign to de-legitimize Fox has included the effort to flood You-Tube with anti-Fox bits. Obama's human drone supporters flood message boards with anti-Fox stuff all the time in an effort to keep people from getting any news that might be critical of Obama.
Second, it's the Daily Show (which, DUH, is a COMEDY show) that doctors the news clips (to help set-up comedy and satire bits). Fox has repeatedly shown entire news clips then showed Jon Stewart's take on the matters (using hacked bits of the Fox video) and debunked this stuff... Jon Stewart and his supporters either ignore it or say "so what? he's a COMEDIAN...nobody takes this SERIOUSLY!".
People who think that ANYTHING they get on a COMEDY channel from two Democrat SATIRISTS (Stewart and Colbert) is actual NEWS are fools... exactly the sort that Obama NEEDS to vote for him and support him and NEVER watch anything like Fox that might debunk anything he says/does.
You, sir, have been manipulated by the nation's court jester on behalf of his king... and you do not even know it. Very sad indeed
They investigate what they choose to investigate for their own ends. No network has given that up. Fox News just tends to be investigating a lot more now, with a left leaning president, while during W they mostly just pandered. Now MSNBC is in pander mode, having done the "investigating" thing during W.
So between the two of them at least somebody is doing some investigation regardless of who is president. Ideally news outfits would be less biased and more willing to hang any president, but the way this works now is pretty much how the press has worked for most of our history. It's a lot better than having no one investigating.
BTW, when did Obama become a "left leaning president" as you put it? He's a Democrat, which means CNN loves him and Fox hates him, but on most issues he doesn't lean left at all. You must be imagining some opposition party that no longer exists.
Very good point, no news source has ever been in existence that didn't have an ulterior motive. Weather it was for profit, pander or ideals. The news has always been spoon fed to us.
Well, the bias has manifested itself in different ways and severity. I'm sure that there have been some egregious cases of bias in the past. In past decades though, many news stations took their job seriously and strove for objective news, with biases creeping in mostly as a result of subconscious slips when putting together stories.
Today, because echo chamber news has shown to be more profitable than real news, the bias is mostly mandated by company policy. Fox started first by pandering to the right, MSNBC came next by pandering to the left, and CNN... well, I think CNN just has a gas leak somewhere in their office.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Yes but Gouvernments these days asks themselves the important question of "What Would Nixon Do?".
- yeah, and then they multiply it by about 1000 and do that instead.
Has Nixon actually bombed a bunch of Americans around the world? I hate the guy, by the way, but I don't think he has done anything even close to what the modern day politicians are doing daily.
Everything Nixon did is legal in current day USA.
Think about that.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Except Nixon was a saint compared to Obama.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
It's not wrong because someone is doing it. It's wrong because they are doing it.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
I know you're an idiot but try to think anyway. Anti-war protestors are still around and by definition they are anti drone strikes. Just because the protesters aren't front page news like they were during the Bush administration they still exist whether or not they make the lead story on the news or not. As far as putting on a show for "rubes" like me I think not. I'm not terribly impressed by people carrying signs and yelling for the cameras. Don't think the left isn't upset by the drone strikes just because you don't hear them talking about it much. I think the fact that President Obama isn't the guy they thought he was is still sinking in.
The studies you cite, done by a democrat professor from a less-than-stellar university over-sampled Fox news viewers and then asked them a bunch of "current events" questions which ALL Americans generally do poorly at.
Want the TRUTH? try this page which is not a Fox-related site.
Try getting some news from a place not tied to the Democrats or to Progressives (i.e. stop soaking your head in the MSNBC/HuffPo/Kos KoolAid). Some lefty academics have done studies specifically designed to trash non-lefties and then pushed them through the progressive-run media (all of whom hyped those studies and in a circular fashion passed them around) and because most of their target audience never seems to come up to the surface for air, this scheme works fairly well.... it just does not convince anybody whose not already in the tank.
Progressivism is toxic and Dangerous and always leads to bad things... Progressives count on the public being dumb enough to confuse "Progressivism" with "progress"... the two are only related if you are a hard-core evolutionist who wants to give mother nature a bit of a hand... The last time Progressivism rose in America (Early 1900's) it lead to extreme evil and it spread some nasty ideas (like genetic purity/superiority/cleanliness, supermen, euthenasia, the individual as only a cog in the great machine of society, assigning a dollar value to a human being, etc) around the world... so much so that the left abandoned the "progressive" title they'd previously been proud of and they hid behind the moniker: "liberal". Now, having soiled the term "liberal" they are hoping that everybody forgot about the bad side of progressivism and, like cattle, they are all following Hillary Clinton's call to go back to that term. There's a very good reason why nearly all the Progressive webites and think tanks have been partly funded by the world's richest and most famous NAZI collaborator.... young people need to WAKE UP and study some of that history stuff your progressive/unionized teachers did not teach you... you are being setup for a VERY DARK future just as a previous generation of young people were similarly setup.... only now the world has far better technology to oppress and kill...
That has always been the case, the various news outlets' claims to the contrary notwithstanding. It doesn't bother me as much as the obvious willingness of people to abandon the First Amendment protections for a news source they don't agree with.
You'd think Slashdotters would be intelligent enough to separate the principle from the actors. Oh, wait. This is Slashdot. My bad.
That has always been the case, the various news outlets' claims to the contrary notwithstanding. It doesn't bother me as much as the obvious willingness of people to abandon the First Amendment protections for a news source they don't agree with.
You'd think Slashdotters would be intelligent enough to separate the principle from the actors. Oh, wait. This is Slashdot. My bad.
That has not always been the case. Early on, network news was a public service and paid for by the profits from other programming. Then some bright MBA got the idea that if they made it controversial and sensational then more people would tune in and they could charge more for commercials, just like regular programming. Thus was born the modern news outlet and journalism, where it is no longer about presenting the news, but attracting viewers for advertising revenue. Sex sells, so we had weeks of the Jodi Arias trial. Politics, abortion, gay rights are all hot button issues, so instead of news we have op-ed pieces masquerading as news to inflame the public, but to get them to tune in. Why? Because people respond to that shit and in doing so, the news outlets make a fortune in advertising revenues.
The BBC reports the news because they are government funded. They just report the news good or bad. In the US, however, if profits don't exceed last year, then shareholders are angry which means the board of directors is angry which means CEOs are in trouble, so the "news" has to get viewers to watch however they can. That is why there is a bias in the news. It is basic Marketing 101. Controversy gets viewers ==>Viewers gets advertisers ==> advertisers improve the bottom line ==> improved bottom line make shareholders happy ==>happy shareholders leads to happy Boards ==> happy Boards leads to bonuses for execs and the pattern repeats over and over.
Can you point to us where the other networks were investigating things...unless fox was investigating it first? You know, sometimes a month or more beforehand. Besides, it wasn't just MSNBC in pander mode, but NBC, CBS, CNN, and NPR. So, really now we've got a 5:1 ratio. Then again, Fox was hardly silent during the days of W, and broke several stories that the other part of news media then caught onto. And really the media hasn't only done this with the current administration, but other important news stories...like the Gosnell trial. And the only reason why they refused to do any news on that is because they were carrying even more water.
Even though I'm up in Canada, Fox was the only one that carried pundits on both sides of the issue on that one. The other 5 did nothing on it, for nearly a month. In fact the reserved press section in the courtroom was uniformly empty of them, AP, Reuters, AFP among others and only Fox and bloggers were the ones covering it.
Om, nomnomnom...
No, MSNBC and all the other networks but Fox are in pander mode. Once you get past idiot partisan biases, you realize a simple fact:
If you vote in a Democrat, one shitty network, Fox, and a handful of conservative rags will investigate the administration.
If you vote for a Republican, all the good networks (and the ridiculously shitty MSNBC) and the vast majority of the press will investigate the administration.
Vote Republican just so the fourth estate will do their fucking job.
That might actually convince some of my friends. If they actually believed that the big news players were playing softball. They think they're playing hardball, and that Fox is making up fake documents Dan Rather style.
"The news has always been spoon fed to us."
Never heard of Edward Murrow, I guess. There have always been some papers that played along, and always some papers that never did; most of the good ones - and damn few are left - did what they always did, dug into stuff, looking for dirt to write about to gain subscribers and advertisers. Along the way some very good reporting got done.
It takes some effort today to find those papers, those which can afford to pay reporters to do their jobs, rather than re-phrasing press handouts and blogs, but they are there, you simply have to spend some time casting about and doing some reading.
And seriously, "weather"?
FTFY. Obama is solidly liberal on health care, immigration, environment, gay rights (well, now at least), abortion, race, political speech (e.g. Citizen's United decision), spending, taxes, macroeconomics (stimulus, son of stimulus, QE 2 and 3, etc.), scope of government, gun rights, and most foreign affairs (his views on Israel and UN, and his entire "foreign policy reset" was based on liberal conventional wisdom).
Obama is solidly leftish-authoritarian on these issues. Or perhaps you could say Liberal. But he is almost exactly the opposite of liberal on these issues.
The warrant application also said Rosen was a co-conspirator in, "the bombings". I think this was a recycled application that was not actually read by Holder, or the Judge. Both should be disbarred for malpractice.
The press covers up for Repulbiacan lawlessness as well. Now that the presidency is on the other foot, it's funny to see all the Republicans suddenly want the press involved, when they wanted the press to stay our of it when Bush was doing the same thing.
And no, the press isn't staying out of it. I hear about all sorts of things in the mainstream press. So not only is your conclusion wrong, but your premise as well.
Learn to love Alaska
"They" are always doing it. "They" just change the pin on the lapel from elephant for an ass every few years to give the impression of a choice.
Learn to love Alaska
Nixon resigned though :)
Yes but Gouvernments these days asks themselves the important question of "What Would Nixon Do?".
- yeah, and then they multiply it by about 1000 and do that instead.
Has Nixon actually bombed a bunch of Americans around the world? I hate the guy, by the way, but I don't think he has done anything even close to what the modern day politicians are doing daily.
Nixon ended Vietnam, ended the draft, started the EPA, modernized our currency, integrated the officer corps, and a few other things. Nixon was on a path to being a great President before he abused the power of his office.
That's why the parallel is so eery. Obama started off very well, except his foreign policy promises didn't survive meeting with the Joint Chiefs, but his domestic policies all basically went through. But since the Republicans took the house, he hasn't been able to negotiate with them (unlike Clinton who was adept at finding a compromise), and he has been trying to destroy his enemies using essentially the same tactics as Nixon did.
The press covers up for Repulbiacan lawlessness as well.
Except you can't come up with a single example from the last 50 years.
And even if you could, what's your point? Covering up for lawlessness is ok? Lawlessness is ok if the right people do it? Lawlessness is ok if the cover-up fails? Lawlessness is ok because they did it too?
Obama is a centrist, not a leftist, especially with regard to civil liberties.
Sorry buddy, where civil liberties are concerned he's practically a fascist. This shit - IRS, AP, Fox News, drone kills, etc, etc, etc - is so far over the line that Bush II established, it isn't even funny. In either the sardonic or the ha-ha sense. Obama, on the topic of openness and liberty, is worse than Bush II in every way.
And if the media were as motivated to take Obama down as they were to take Nixon down, I expect this would be a lot bigger than it is now. As it is, he gets the kid gloves treatment, and somehow his excuses about not knowing about this shit get swallowed.
The more I see from this president, the more disgusted I become. Mostly because he has become exactly the sort of person he claimed to be against during his first "hopey changey" campaign. Every politician becomes a hypocrite upon gaining office, but this one wins the prize.
Essentially, the reporter in question wrote an article just to say that we had a high-level asset inside the North Korean government. There was no new factual information in the article otherwise - just the need to out a spy in an article about North Korea responding to sanctions.
So, what is the spy's name?
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Yup, that's the way it's supposed to work.
Heaven forbid that reasonable people can actually reach different conclusions.
And whose "the facts" would that be exactly? Yours? Obama's? The Pope's? Do tell!
an undercover operative inside Al Qaida who delivered them a sample bomb for analysis.
Wow, it must have been tremendously difficult to get that bomb out......
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Your lovely government is trying ot crack down on investigative journalism as we know it. They want you to see only government sanctioned news in the media. It will make them easier to lie you into yet another war (Iran, anyone?) or pursue whatever dirty deal they want with impunity. I don't care who is the victim: Fox News, Wikileaks, AP, CNN or some lefty outlet - this is BAD, period. In all such cases your government uses easy to vilify targets first to set precedent and then extend opressions to everyone - this so called "war on terror" is prime example on this. You should stand up against it, whoever their target is because it is guaranteed you'll be next. It happened in almost every case of free country descending into oppresive regime and I don't see things to come out in a different way in USofA unless citizery stands up and stops this process in its tracks.
By passing the Heritage Foundation health care plan?
By deporting far more people than his Republican predecessor?
He's continued Dick Cheney's energy policy, only with more drilling.
How. I'll stop there because your bullshit little list is entirely based around Obama's party affiliation and not his actual polices. Which are to the right of Reagan on many, many fronts, from Social Security to torture to prosecuting bankers to declaring amnesty to even the right of unions to bargain collectively.
How is a president to the right of Reagan "left leaning", exactly?
Clicking on all the scores on the comments. The moderator fights on this thread are epic.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
You didn't ask for an example. And there are hundreds. They aren't any better, but it's good irony that those who defended the Republicans and helped cover up to have their unethical practices be used by the other side. Go ahead. When the next Republican gets elected, push for more authoritarianism like under Reagan and the Bushes. Then, when the Democrat gets elected, keep whining for the problem you caused.
Learn to love Alaska
Treason isn't on the list of charges now (if it ever was).
Since it isn't even treason for a serving US officer to sell US made weapons to a listed terrorist group that had killed over a hundred US Marines a year previously then I don't see how a leak of information that was available to over a million people could be.
Sorry, but how does mocking a news organisation renowned for its quality gaps in any way relate to peoples views on the government that's doing bad stuff?
It's possible to hate Fox News and condemn the way they've been treated. It's possible to want to drown George W Bush in liquid shit and still hate Obama. It's possible to hold multiple conflicting views at once, let alone multiple views that aren't even fucking related like "fox sucks" and "reading journalists' emails is bad".
I am yet again fucking bewildered by the utter inability of so many Americans to be anything other than hopelessly slavishly partisan in their thinking.
and this is why I read BBC. All the "news" media does here is attack their opponents. This country is becoming so divided (in the media anyway) that it's disgusting. Everyone's goal is to outdo the guy before them and make sure their party keeps control.
/. is one of the few places left that values privacy for private citizens.
And yes, this is "news for nerds" because
I agree with all of what you said. But the poster I replied to, did none of that, hence, my comment.
Sorry, you kind of got the flak from the accumulation of multiple "stop taunting Fox instead of attacking Obama" posts.
It probably doesn't help that I have no allegiance to Bush, Obama or any other American politician, and in my own country I call out politicians on what they say and do, not on which party they represent.
Step back a second. Where does it say that the News Media has an obligation to the 'truth'? Their only concern is simple.... sell ads. Everything else is in a distraction. NPR? They 'sell' for contributions, lobby for taxpayer money. Fox? MSNBC? Two sides of the same coin. OK, the news media is simply entertainment. At least Fox had decent looking entertainers. MSNBC is so depression, looking at all those old, burnt out 60s liberals spitting and sputtering at the camera.
It is astounding to me that anyone in their right mind would:
Defend any of this under any circumstances
Blame it on the victim - Fox News and the A/P
Pretend this happened as an isolated incident. Pretend that the DHS never went after political enemies, the EPA didn't grant waivers to friends and aggressively prosecute political enemies, the IRS didn't grant 501(c)(4) to thousands and thousands of liberal groups, and deny thousands and thousands of conservative groups the same treatment, the DOJ didn't selectively enforce all kinds of laws based on politics.
Invoke the "Well the other guy committed a crime that maybe was kind of sort of the same as this, so that justifies all the crimes my guy committed" defense.
The plain truth is that we have an administration that wants to persecute people for incorrect thoughts and speech. This should fill any intelligent thinking person with sheer terror. Especially those who talk about "fairness" and the need to defend "individual liberties"
Murphy was an optimist
Snooping on Fox News, Associated Press, conservative and Jewish groups are only one part of what the Obama regime is going (yes, I can provide citations, or you could just head over to Breitbart to get the facts yourself). The Feds also are running "Operation Vigilant Eagle" which is snooping on veterans returning from serving overseas. You might think such a programme would look to see whether such veterans were influenced by the jihadist enemy and pose a danger to US society - but this is not the purpose of the programme. The purpose is to look for disgruntled vets that oppose the current Obama regime. In fact, a Marine was thrown in jail for comments and poems pasted on Facebook (no First Amendment rights for Marines under the Obama Administration). Fortunately a circuit court judge found out about it and freed him.
Stop listening to what the Obama regime is saying (because it is clear they continually lie), and actually what the facts of what they do. The Obama Administration is prepared to snoop illegally on the press, jail returned servicemen for poems, abandon allies all over the world, promise to give Russia the performance characteristics of the US anti-ballistic missile defenses, run Fast n Furious giving guns to Mexican drug cartels, refuse to secure the southern border, invite the Muslim Brotherhood into positions of policy decision making in the Administration, abandon their own Ambassador in Benghazi when the State Department gave Stinger missiles to Al Qaeda in Libya (despite the CIA telling them not to - which is why Petraeus' affair was used against him), etc etc.
If Obama, Clinton and their Administration were prepared to do all these things to important people they should be defending, just how much effort will they spend to defend a US or foreign citizen? [Answer: less than none - they'll sell you out and then lie their face off about it]
Start reading folks:
The US Government and most of the mainstream media are lying to you (Fox is targeted because it tells the truth more often than the others - and the Obama Administration cannot have the truth known - the free people would revolt if they became aware of what is going on).
You mean the Fox News that is banned up here in Canada because it is too biased and inaccurate for it to be allowed to be called a news program?
You know, if you're going to lie. Make it believable, it's available in Canada as a specialty channel. I should know, I was one of the key people who got it carried here, being an ardent charter believer that S2 of the Charter means what it says.
Om, nomnomnom...
There were lots of newspapers that were called the XYZ Republican or the ABC Democrat. The entire concept of "unbiased journalism" was started by the agencies like AP because... they wanted to get both sides to subscribe to their wire feeds. We're just returning to an older pattern as people are once again able to select information sources that match their ideology.
He's on the left in the US. American politics are not like other countries' politics. The US does not really have a history of nobles and peasants, so it's hardly surprising that Communism has never really had much appeal here. We have no Left because there is no real Right for it to form as a reaction to.
(Possible exception: the plantation aristocracy of the South is really the only population that could be a conservative in the European fashion, but they were mostly smashed 150 years ago.)
The Beeb has its biases too. They're not exactly the same as corporate news' biases, of course, but they are still there.
being used as the basis of a "news" article.
What I have a problem with is the assumption that just because a "source" is "anonymous", it's assumed credible. We should be more concerned with proper disclosure, not with treating the continued circumvention of disclosure as some sort of worthy goal...
Exactly right. I prefer someone tell me where they stand when they report something, rather than falsely make some high-handed claims to "objectivity."
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
The police every were belive they are above the law and therfor don't have to worry wether their actions are legal who cares and who can do any thing about it .the police have commited numerouse crimes against me and all I could potentialy do is ask the police to investigate .well that would be volunteering for more punishment .I can prove these crimes with thelir records but to whom.
... it's been legal to tap anyone's phone, read their email, or seize and hold them for an unlimited amount of time, all without warrents, and with no obligation to inform ANYONE of what you are doing. You just have to say the magic word, "Terrorism", and all rights dissappear.
But the media hasn't even wispered any outrage. Not until it was used against them.
And in this situation the terrorism isn't immaginary, it dealt with a documented terrorist attack, and details that the Pentigon felt could assist future terrorist attacks.
I value MY privicy AND yours, but why should a corporation or business have MORE rights than a citizen and human-being?
Don't get on the wrong side of this, it's just another fight to give fictional entities more rights than real-people. And I don't care what Romney says, I say, "Corporations are NOT people, my friend."
THINK! It's patriotic
I don't want to read political stuff from technical people.......This is how you lose readership.
You are not the target audience for /then, because almost ALL /.ers are techies of one stripe or another. Did you miss the motto? "News for Nerds"? If you want political experts, go to some political website, not slashdot. The denisens of /. are not going to stop posting their opinions just because you can't seem to NOT click on stories you are NOT interested in reading.
So I've got a better idea for you, Troll, how about YOU stop reading the political postings on a TECH FOCUSED website? Political postings make up between 80 to 95% of /. anyway since most everything nowadays is somehow connected to or affected by politics.
But then you'd have nothing to complain and troll about, would you?
THINK! It's patriotic
Except Nixon was a saint compared to Obama.
Can you please elaborate?
I see some of this sentiment on the conservative side of my family, and honestly, I don't see how he's much different than any other president. And in terms of comparing him to Nixon, everything Obama is doing is currently legal. Nixon intentionally used the office of the president to commit crimes. The most I can say about Obama, is that some of his foreign policy tactics are untested fully in a court of law (and are largely carried over from his predecessor anyway).