RNC Calls For Halt To Unconstitutional Surveillance

Bob9113 writes "According to an article on Ars Technica, the Republican National Committee (RNC) has passed a resolution that "encourages Republican lawmakers to immediately take action to halt current unconstitutional surveillance programs and provide a full public accounting of the NSA's data collection programs." The resolution, according to Time, was approved by an overwhelming majority voice vote at the Republican National Committee's Winter Meeting General Session, going on this week in Washington, DC."

Comments

even a broken clock...

[TheNastyInThePasty]

Hey, when you oppose everything the president does, it's gotta work in our favor sometimes!

Re:even a broken clock...

[Anonymous Coward]

And of course when a Republican gets back in the White House, they'll be repealing this and get back to passing oppressive laws like nobody's business. It astounds me how people keep voting for Kang or Kodos.

Re:even a broken clock...

[ganjadude]

What a lot of people seem to be missing is that the GOP is in the middle of a transformation. I will not get into whether or not it is good or bad for the country or the party but the establishment republicans, those like romney or mccain are being pushed aside by more libertarian bent candidates. The These new republicans, at least from what I can see, are the ones who are against the NSA and big government, something bush 2 and mccain are for.

In another 10 years as more of the traditional GOP retires or is voted out, hopefully they get repaced by more libertarian leaning candidates, or even better the libertarian party will become one of the big 2.... (i can dream)

Re:even a broken clock...

[icebike]

And of course when a Republican gets back in the White House, they'll be repealing this and get back to passing oppressive laws like nobody's business. It astounds me how people keep voting for Kang or Kodos.

By extension, Democrats are only for wholesale violation of constitutional rights as long as it can be used to keep them in office.

Re:even a broken clock...

[causality]

Cue the highly emotional, belligerent, ignorant people who think anarcho-capitalism and libertarianism are exactly the same thing.

On the other hand, if you have to make shit up in order to find fault with something, anyone with sense will recognize that you're paying a high compliment to it.

The other problem with libertarian thought is that small-minded people are terrified of that degree of freedom, because it means others might do things they disapprove of, and the small-minded just love using government to tell people how to live.

Re:even a broken clock...

[ganjadude]

I fit squarely in the middle as a 28 year old, college educated person. I would say that while i was in college (bush years) EVERYONE hated bush and thought they were democrats because they hated bush. As we got older and saw that the obama democrats were no better than the bush republicans my unscientific poll of 3 colleges in NY/NJ show the majority of people our age dont align with any of the main parties. Quite a few of us are 1 issue voters (gay marriage, marijuana , etc.) but the thing that is resounding is that we all want a smaller government by a large margin. Over 75% of the people I spoke with out of over 3000 said the number one thing they want is to cut spending, cut taxes, and reduce the reach of the federal government. I would say we are leaning libertarian more than we are progressive. But again, it was an unscientific study, and I have a libertarian bias as such my results may be biased as well.

Re:even a broken clock...

[causality]

It also means that they actually have to live with being free, which carries with it some risks. Unacceptable! I demand the government violate everyone's rights and privacy to stop the terrorists!

Considering that I'm more likely to be struck by lightning than die in a terrorist attack, I think I'm willing to take my chances. I also believe that we're less likely to encounter people so desperate to hurt us if we stop manipulating other nations and attacking them for such flimsy reasons. A return to loving freedom would mean no longer trying to tell each other how to live -- this is also the way we should respect the sovereignty of other nations.

I'll tell you what else is much more likely than dying in a terrorist attack: being killed by your own government.

Re:even a broken clock...

[rogoshen1]

It would be nice if the GOP returned to something more like Goldwater Republicanism. A couple quotes:

"Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them."

Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed. Their mistaken course stems from false notions of equality, ladies and gentlemen. Equality, rightly understood, as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences. Wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.

Re:even a broken clock...

[strstr]

You know that all elections are rigged by the military and they vote in and advertise the canidates that they choose for election, and the public is manipulated into electing them, so nobody is actually representing us?

The issue is not specific to republican or democrat. I want to see us vote out every democrat, republican, and vote in all new people regardless of party, but who have no association with the current system. The problem is not democrat or republican, its the people we have elected and who are in power.

There exists a way they can control society, a system called TAMI, or "Thought Amplifying and Mind Interface" which the military deployed in 1976 in all radar systems. It lets them long range spy on people, spying on their thoughts and memories so the government could control and manipulate people. The military and higher ups has used this system to screen out moles, and people who are against the militaries interests. Everyone chosen for election (Senate, Congressman, President, etc) is passed through their screens and given power only if the military lets them, and people who try to get in who aren't approved get sabotaged in the public eye and/or financially. Nobody is seriously going to fight the government amongst their ranks, and nearly everyone who's elected is benefiting from this and maintaining power through it. It is all rigged. Look up Dr. Robert Duncan's books, .. he's a DOD /CIA /US DOJ scientist who helped develop most of this. His free book is The Matrix Deciphered. Details on their system also found here:

http://www.oregonstatehospital...

Democracy was officially ended in 1976, in the name of national security (anything that could expose the governments misconduct is a violation of national security, because it threatens to end their control over us, and it may result in mass crimimal convictions if they were subject to the laws everyone else were subject to.).

Re: even a broken clock...

[whoever57]

They want something new. Libertarians are the new popular party to belong to. They believe in gay rights and legalizing pot and lower taxes and small govt and no surveillance or drone attacks. What's not to love?

The problem is that most of the people who claim to want small government really mean: spend less on everything except the things that benefit me.

Re:even a broken clock...

[LynnwoodRooster]

Social Security is running cash-flow negative, meaning it is spending reserves rather than living on current cash flow. And whilst, on paper, that looks like it doesn't add to the overall Federal deficit, those reserves are simply bonds from the Federal Government which must be redeemed out of current Federal revenues. And those Federal revenues are from a deficit plan.

Saying SS isn't adding to the deficit is like saying your department in a company that is losing money isn't adding to the loss because you're still under budget - even if the products your department builds don't cover your budgeted costs.

Re:even a broken clock...

[Goody]

I've always been puzzled when people say what the "Founders intended". The Founders lived in a time when it took days to get from one populated area to another, on horseback. They were wealthy land owners upset with being pushed around by a monarchy thousands of miles away. They did a fine job in creating a new country, but they created it for the times they were in and the technology they had. There's nothing sacred about the laws or structure they enacted. Undoubtedly some of the motivation behind a structure with states having power was due to the realities of a sparsely populated country and frontier, and recent bad experiences with a monarchy. There's certainly nothing magical about state and local government. Both can be just as wasteful and abusive as federal government, especially, as we've seen, when it comes to personal liberties and civil rights.

Re: even a broken clock...

[Goody]

They believe in gay rights and legalizing pot and lower taxes and small govt and no surveillance or drone attacks. What's not to love?

If they would stop there, it would be great. It's when they get into the libertarian utopia stuff where there are no regulations and corporations can do no wrong is that things go off the rails rather quickly.

Re:even a broken clock...

[dkleinsc]

What a lot of people seem to be missing is that the GOP is in the middle of a transformation. I will not get into whether or not it is good or bad for the country or the party but the establishment republicans, those like romney or mccain are being pushed aside by more libertarian bent candidates.

Then how come McCain and then Romney were the presidential nominees? How come the rising stars that were supposed to be the next great Republican president were all fairly old school folks? How come the "more libertarian bent" rising star Paul Ryan is advocating what amount to the exact same policies Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich were pushing decades ago?

There are some people in the Republican Party who would really like it to not be the party who's primary demographic is old white people from the southeast. There are some people in the Republican Party who would really like it to not be as corrupt as it is (I'm not suggesting the Democrats are even close to saints in this regard). There are some people in the Republican Party who would like it to no longer be the party of bigotry. But right now, the core of the organization as a whole is a corrupt bunch of old white bigots from the southeast.

As far as the Republican's connection with libertarianism, they're libertarian whenever they're talking about tax rates, social welfare programs, or guns, but definitely not libertarian when it comes to military spending, personal freedoms, corporate subsidies (and subsidies disguised as tax loopholes), and religion.

Re:even a broken clock...

[dkleinsc]

because it means others might do things they disapprove of

Well, yes. I disapprove of people and organizations who murder, rob, rape, beat up, poison, cheat, and steal. Government is a check on all that by having an organized way of penalizing people who do those things. And it turns out that this is generally successful: There are a lot fewer murders, robberies, rapes, beatings, poisonings, and thefts in places where there is effective government than when there isn't (and yes, I'm considering people murdered by the government in unjustified shootings).

There are 2 points of real disagreement I have with libertarians:
1. They oppose government efforts to intervene when one person's activities are demonstrably harming somebody else. For example, most libertarians I've encountered believe environmental regulations are unnecessary and intrusive, but countries without environmental regulations have people dying of various water-borne and air-borne poisons every day. Most libertarians I've encountered disapprove of government efforts to ensure that products available in stores are what they say they are, but historically and in modern times private industry has demonstrated that it cannot regulate itself, nor can consumers organize lawsuits well enough to correct the market.

2. They oppose government doing what government can and has done more efficiently than private industry. That is in large part because their philosophy is predicated on the idea that government is always less efficient than private industry, so when some egghead quotes statistics that say that (for example) government-run health care gives better health care for less money than privately-run health care, the assumption is that the egghead is just making it up.

Re: even a broken clock...

[Grey Geezer]

libertarian

You keep using that word. I do not think you know what it means. Nor do I think people who call themselves libertarians really are libertarians. Many of them, for instance, are down with the small gov thing, but have no hesitation to stick their noses into a woman's health care decisions. Also do you guys really want to liquidate our National Parks, Federal Interstate system, etc, etc? Cause true libertarians believe that private business should own and run just about everything. As an unashamed Progressive I believe that there are some things that only big government can do well. History shows us what happened when free enterprise took care of (or, all to often, did not) everything, and it wasn't pretty. I for one do not want to go back.

Re:even a broken clock...

[fche]

"There's certainly nothing magical about state and local government. Both can be just as wasteful and abusive as federal government, especially, as we've seen, when it comes to personal liberties and civil rights."

One difference is that one can vote with one's feet much easier in leaving a backward town or state, than leaving one's nation. The other is scale: the closer to the voters the representatives work/live, the more likely mutual respect.

Both factors make feedback cycles more rapid & precise. I wouldn't be surprised at all, if evidence existed that those poor backward horse-riding founders could conceive of this.

Re: even a broken clock...

[cmdr_tofu]

I for one feel like the Federal Government benefit me by me being able to vote and eat in formerly "whites only" restaurants without being beaten due to Jim Crow. Also I went to public schools received financial aid, have driven on and received goods that travelled along interstate highways, did not get assaulted and robbed by old people because they have social security to keep them out of desperate poverty. O yeah I didn't get poisoned from food I bought at the grocery store because FDA said it was illegal to sell. I didn't get cancer because my drinking water was poisoned thanks to EPA regulations.
I've taken trains, realized the moon was not impossible, used the Internet, benefitted from countless federally funded research projects.

Honestly saying that very little of the money the federal government spends benefits most people (presumably citizens of the US) is utterly ludicrous.

Re:even a broken clock...

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

You think of government as an animal that you can reward and punish and that will learn and improve over time, but that's ridiculously naive.

That's funny ... I think you are the one being ridiculously naive. You think government is a monolithic entity defined by a single parameter -- incompetence. You make your perception reality by giving up any expectation of competence and leaving it all in the hands of those who wish to use it for the worst purposes. When you abdicate your role in a participatory democracy, of course you are going to get worst possible version of governance.

Oh, the irony

[Anonymous Coward]

From the party that brought us the PATRIOT act.

Re:Oh, the irony

[ganjadude]

Actually, The vote passed the senate 98-1-1 and only 64 members of the house voted no. The patriot act was bipartisian.

Re:Oh, the irony

[causality]

From the party that brought us the PATRIOT act.

You actually think there are two parties? They are two factions of the same party. It's your basic duopoly. If it were a marketplace, the average person would understand why that's bad. This is power, something even worse than money in terms of the damage it can do.

The best analogy is the way all US wireless phone carriers overcharged for text messaging. None of their prices were related to the actual cost of delivering the service (zero for GSM-based phones). None of them wanted to try undercutting the competition because they all made more money that way. They each recognized it was in their interests not to rock the boat.

That's what a two-party system is like. That's why the Founders warned against allowing one to develop. At the state level, it's the same two parties who write the election rules and neither has any incentive to make it easy for third parties to get on the ballot. Effectively, the two parties serve the same function as the trade guilds of old: to lock out competition.

It's to be expected that they take turns being the bad guy. It's called good cop, bad cop, and it's a method of manipulating the voters by playing them in the middle.

Re:Oh, the irony

[Anonymous Coward]

Sort of. The Patriot Act is simply too large to have been drafted in the timeframe allotted, so we can start with the obvious truth that whoever really wrote it had it on the shelf awaiting an opportunity. That is chilling, and under-reported, enough.

It's also worth noting that the two people in Congress who were capable of stopping it were exactly the ones targeted by the anthrax attacks--attacks which have never been solved. Isn't that convenient? Well, it certainly was if you were the Bush Administration anyway...

Congress voted overwhelmingly in favor of this unconstitutional law because the far right corporate media drumbeat was going to brand them as unpatriotic or worse if they even wanted to figure out what they were voting on. But hey, it was OK, because they were only going to violate the Constitution for a little while, right? Except that it keeps getting renewed, and renewed, and renewed even though it is very highly obvious that terrorism as an actual threat to the US is completely overblown.

Time to end this idiotic war on the American people, end the TSA, end the wholesale harassment of absolutely everybody at the borders, and stop spying on everybody's Internet and banking activities.

Re:Considering they're fighting so hard against Ob

[sideslash]

Obama who is working very hard to end this

[citation needed]

Realization Dawns

[IonOtter]

Back in 2002 or so, when people were really starting to rally against the PATRIOT act, the usual faces were all over the media, calling detractors "terrorist sympathizers" and worse. More than a few openly called for such people to be labeled traitors.

Manifestly, there is no civil-liberties crisis in this country. Consequently, people who claim there is must have a different goal in mind. What else can you say of such people but that they are traitors? (source)

And here's Paul Krugman with regards to Rush Limbaugh back in 2002...

As far back as 2002, Rush Limbaugh, in words very close to those used by The Wall Street Journal last week, accused Tom Daschle, then the Senate majority leader, of a partisan "attempt to sabotage the war on terrorism." (source.)

I can't remember where it happened, or who exactly said it, but someone confronted Rush Limbaugh about his words and said, "Imagine if Hillary Clinton were to become president, and she has the power that you want to give President Bush."

Well.

It would appear that has a very good chance of happening. And what was laughed off back in 2002, is now staining underwear in 2014.

Re:Nobody....

[rmdingler]

Governor Perry of Texas was in the news this week backing the State's Rights side of Colorado's marijuana legalization,

but I suspect the homosexual angle will be solely Democrat for some time to come because of the religious objections.

The anti-surveillance stance reminds me of the rally against deficit spending by whichever Party is presently out of power.

The roles in our two-trick pony show are amusingly interchangeable.

The law of unintended consequences

[XxtraLarGe]

These guys never take into consideration that you should never grant yourself any powers you wouldn't want your enemies to have...

Re:The law of unintended consequences

[HiThere]

What you miss is that the Republicans and the Democrats are only pretend enemies. They are actually allies. So their "enemy" getting the power they asked for isn't something that bothers them.

Put your money where your mouth is

[MikeRT]

Pass a resolution calling for the prosecution of all federal agents who engaged in the practice of "parallel constructions" and in particular try the entire clandestine side of the DEA as a criminal conspiracy operating under color of authority for its major role in that.

Re:They now have proof that it can be abused

[causality]

It's all about the targets.

Republicans never thought the targets would be other American citizens.

Obama has proven them wrong.

Yes, for some reason there are still large numbers of people who need proof that something which happened every single other time (power being abused) is, in fact, going to happen again this time if you start with the same conditions.

I generally call these people "idiots", but you may prefer such terms as "numbnuts", "morons", "imbeciles", etc.

Re:Nobody....

[Captain Splendid]

Their platform requires that the county be racist, misogynist, homophobic, and poor.

Good point. Probably why the GOP won't be seeing the inside of the White House anytime during the next 6 years.

Re:Oh, the data!

[anagama]

Greens are interesting too ... essentially libertarians with a greater willingness to ensure a social safety net and protect the commons (environment) from being abused by a few who profit at everyone else's expense.

Honestly though, I'd vote for either. The DNC and GOP are so corrupted by and enslaved to their donors, I'd be happy to see anyone kick their collective elephantine asses.

Re:That's not what I see.

[causality]

The Christian Right still has a HUGE stranglehold on the party and that's why unless the Liberian leaning candidate is also for government control of sex, marriage, and reproduction (especially abortion), they will have no chance.

Which is really hilarious considering that I've read the Bible, and I couldn't find "tell thy neighbors how they shall live" anywhere in it. I did, however, find a great deal about not judging.

The religious right's only real interest seems to be using force and threat of force (police power of gov't) to demand that others live only in ways they approve of. They obviously have no real belief in the power of their Biblical message to convince, nor in their own ability to set a good example which works so well that others want to follow it voluntarily. It's just the name of Christ used as an excuse to control people. If they were true to their belief and had the love and forgiveness it demands, and attained the joy it promises, I believe the urge to control others is one of the first character flaws they'd overcome.

The modern political arm of "Christianity" reminds me of what Gandhi (a Hindu) said. He said, "I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians; they are nothing like your Christ."