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Federal Prosecutors, In a Policy Shift, Cite Warrantless Wiretaps As Evidence
schwit1 sends this quote from the NY Times "The Justice Department for the first time has notified a criminal defendant that evidence being used against him came from a warrantless wiretap, a move that is expected to set up a Supreme Court test of whether such eavesdropping is constitutional. The government's notice allows the defendant's lawyer to ask a court to suppress the evidence by arguing that it derived from unconstitutional surveillance, setting in motion judicial review of the eavesdropping. ... The practice contradicted what [Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr.] had told the Supreme Court last year in a case challenging the law, the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. Legalizing a form of the Bush administration’s program of warrantless surveillance, the law authorized the government to wiretap Americans’ e-mails and phone calls without an individual court order and on domestic soil so long as the surveillance is “targeted” at a foreigner abroad. A group of plaintiffs led by Amnesty International had challenged the law as unconstitutional. But Mr. Verrilli last year urged the Supreme Court to dismiss the case because those plaintiffs could not prove that they had been wiretapped. In making that argument, he said a defendant who faced evidence derived from the law would have proper legal standing and would be notified, so dismissing the lawsuit by Amnesty International would not close the door to judicial review of the 2008 law. The court accepted that logic, voting 5-to-4 to dismiss the case."
"The US is using its national intelligence agencies to obtain intelligence on terrorists trying to kill people".
Mostly BULLSHIT.
"The intelligence agencies themselves don't have police powers".
Fully BULLSHIT.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has both an intelligence function and police powers. Their primary purpose is to "secure the nation from the many threats it faces". You can be arrested and imprisoned for such things as whistle-blowing, opposing the status quo, being an unapproved immigrant, trying to enter or leave the country without permission (could get you shot on the spot), and many other possible infractions. No gap between them but the propaganda gap.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
We have very similar stories, except I am from Africa, and the bit about the swimming. I agree with you entirely.
I have noticed that people born in the USA take their liberty for granted, and are careless with it. On the other hand, those who have seen oppression (and I have seen the trajectory we are once already) understand the real and present danger we face.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
First, you say that warrantless wiretaps have been going on for a very long time. Maybe they have, but they were certainly never standard operating procedure. Good hell they're warrantlessly wiretapping EVERYBODY these days. And back then they never came out and said,"Hey, we're doing warrantless wiretaps, and if you don't like it you can fuck right off" like they do now.
Second, saying it's been going on like this for hundreds of years makes it sound like it'll always be this way, so you might as well do nothing. It also lends it an air false legitimacy: "If the founding fathers were doing it it must be okay."
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
You know, I really hate posts like yours, for a couple of reasons.
First, you say that warrantless wiretaps have been going on for a very long time. Maybe they have, but they were certainly never standard operating procedure. Good hell they're warrantlessly wiretapping EVERYBODY these days. And back then they never came out and said,"Hey, we're doing warrantless wiretaps, and if you don't like it you can fuck right off" like they do now.
Second, saying it's been going on like this for hundreds of years makes it sound like it'll always be this way, so you might as well do nothing. It also lends it an air false legitimacy: "If the founding fathers were doing it it must be okay."
The Founding Fathers were adamantly against this sort of thing and were willing to risk everything to try and create a nation that stood for something better. Their real problem is that they had to deal with the social realities of their day that were not within their power to overturn, such as the institution of slavery and the notions of class and wealth. Yet within those suffocating boundaries they instituted something more that we have failed to realize.
One of their fears about having a Bill of Rights at all, was that the mere existence of such a document may foster the notion that human rights were limited to only those which were enumerated. As it stands today, the Bill of Rights is merely a yardstick by which we measure how far our failures have progressed.
I sincerely believe that future generations will consider us a Dark Age greater than any medieval period, for never has the average person been so petty, emotionally and spiritually immature, ill-informed in the face of an Information Age, navie, and unwilling to stand up for what was right. The medieval serf at least had the excuse of being at the mercy of the information brokers and gatekeepers of their time. Our ignorant, on the other hand, can point only to their own laziness and failure of priorities.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
What really matters is how and why the average person does not wake up and realize that the America they were taught to believe in does not exist, and how their own philosophical, intellectual, moral, and character flaws prevented them from seeing this at the very beginning. There is indeed something wrong with a person who argues passionately about minutia like sports and television shows while their nation is decaying. None of that could be an accident.
A religious bigwig recently came back from Europe and commented that it is a "spiritual desert".
The problem with the average American you describe is that s/he is the product of a philosophical desert. People here literally don't know how to think, instead worshipping spirits, technology, sports, sex, money, consumerism; The consummate 'mainstream' American leading the Good Life is a confluence of all of these. I personally know people who have recoiled with revulsion when I casually described pure scientific research as an occupation (e.g. "scientists" are thought of as ensconced within for-profit corporations trying to discover things that are either convenient and/or lethal); both times there was no larger political, religious or other context to the discussion apart from talking about some of the people we know. The first time I chalked it up as a fluke misunderstanding; the second person I knew had understood and it frightened me to my core.
This country now produces strident anti-intellectuals: People who worship technology and "science" for its pure power and ability to effect a result. In some ways they're as alienated as can be from The Enlightenment that ostensibly produced our Constitution. Polls show they--most Americans--love the surveillance state.
Philosophical discussion is regarded as unforgivably weird and threatening here, even among people holding four-year degrees. If you lose the ability to probe concepts in general, you lose the ability to effectively probe/question authority (though making an ineffective, self-immolating show of it never goes out of style).