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Invoking Orlando, Senate Republicans Set Up Vote To Expand FBI Spying (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell set up a vote late on Monday to expand the FBI's authority to use a secretive surveillance order without a warrant to include email metadata and some browsing history information. The move, made via an amendment to a criminal justice appropriations bill, is an effort by Senate Republicans to respond to last week's mass shooting in an Orlando nightclub after a series of measures to restrict guns offered by both parties failed on Monday. Privacy advocates denounced the effort, saying it seeks to exploit a mass shooting in order to expand the government's digital spying powers. The amendment would broaden the FBI's authority to use so-called National Security Letters to include electronic communications transaction records such as time stamps of emails and the emails' senders and recipients. NSLs do not require a warrant and are almost always accompanied by a gag order preventing the service provider from sharing the request with a targeted user. The amendment filed Monday would also make permanent a provision of the USA Patriot Act that allows the intelligence community to conduct surveillance on "lone wolf" suspects who do not have confirmed ties to a foreign terrorist group. A vote is expected no later than Wednesday, McConnell's office said. Last week, FBI Director James Comey said he is "highly confident that [the Orlando shooter] was radicalized at least in part through the internet."
CNN article: http://money.cnn.com/2016/06/1...
For what it's worth, this has been down-played in media (haven't seen it blasting twitter and stuff much)
So basically NONE OF THE PROPOSALS would have prevented him from getting a gun.
As a voter, I'm sick of intelligent and informed voters being sidelined by media and legal cowboy politicians.
He was denied a sale at a gun shop who also reported him to the FBI as they had a really bad feeling about the guy, they felt really uncomfortable with some of the questions he was asking and his general behavior. It wasn't the first time he had been report either but look what good that ended up doing.
So is (or should be) privacy....
Remember, the US Constitution does not "grant" rights....its purpose is to enumerate the supposedly LIMITED powers and responsibilities of the Federal Govt.
The bill of rights is an odd duck...in that it does actually list some rights...there was a lot of argument on that at the time, as that the founding fathers didn't want there to be the misconception that it granted rights.
But I would argue that privacy, is a right, not for any one purpose and that for privacy, you also "don't need a reason"....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I am sick and tired of our elected representatives passing laws like this and the USA PATRIOT ACT, claiming they "make us safer".
It's easy to pass these, hard to repeal them. We as a country are going to be living with this erosion of our rights for years to come.
The USA Patriot Act had provisions that had "sunset provisions." That is, they were to expire after a certain number of years, variously. In subsequent years, Congress has renewed most of them when they were about to go out-of-force.
You are right about "easy to pass; hard to repeal," but that isn't even the case for the USA Patriot Act. It's worse.
Oh, yeah. The people who passed it initially were smart enough to put the sunset provision in. Regardless of whether I think they should have passed it initially, the sunset provision was a very intelligent move. REMOVING it...not so much. I sometimes wonder if there shouldn't be an intelligence test for our elected representatives. Or, at least, a basic Civics class, with emphasis on governments and how they can, with the best of intentions, become Bad.
CSB: A friend of my daughter's works in the Sgt-at-Arms office on Capitol Hill. She has to explain, repeatedly, to Senators and Representatives, why her office can't arrest the President (for alleged crimes against America, but really, because he's black and they don't like him). Seriously.
The Second Amendment does not affirm our right to own guns for "personal defense;" it affirms our right to own guns for defense against tyranny.
Read the Second Amendment again and spot the word "tyranny" for me. Don't find it? Because the SA says that "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." It's easy to ignore the first half of the sentence and just pay attention to the second, but that's disingenuous.
Furthermore, you have to take it in the context of the times in which it was written. The United States at this point had no standing army. (Historical aside: the US was very averse to keeping a standing army until after World War II. On the eve of the Civil War, the whole strength of the US Army was 15,000 men; just before World War II, in 1940, the US Army's size was smaller than that of Belgium.) Much of this aversion was due to the fact that it was Britain's desire to keep a standing professional army in the colonies that necessitated the Intolerable Acts which taxed the colonists to pay for said army.
At any rate, the presumption of the framers in 1791 would likely have been that the US needed to call on a citizen militia if it was invaded (or if it had to put down internal rebellions, such as the Whiskey Rebellion or Shays' Rebellion). Therefore, the citizens of the US should be prepared to take up arms as needed under the direction of the government (i.e. a well regulated militia), not against it. I know it's easy to have a romantic view of the Founding Fathers that they somehow encoded into the Constitution the seeds of the government's demise if it became too "tyrannical," but it's just not there in the text of the Second Amendment.
Personally, I like guns. I don't think there's anything wrong with responsible gun ownership. But please don't try to use the Second Amendment as a source for saying Americans should be armed and prepared to fight their own government with military-grade firearms.
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