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Senate Rejects FBI Bid For Warrantless Access To Internet Browsing Histories (zdnet.com)
Zack Whittaker, reporting for ZDNet:An amendment designed to allow the government warrantless access to internet browsing histories has been narrowly defeated in the Senate. The amendment fell two votes short of the required 60 votes to advance. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) switched his vote at the last minute. He submitted a motion to reconsider the vote following the defeat. A new vote may be set for later on Wednesday. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) introduced the amendment as an add-on to the commerce, justice, and science appropriations bill earlier this week. McCain said in a statement on Monday that the amendment would "track lone wolves" in the wake of the Orlando massacre, in which Omar Mateen, who authorities say radicalized himself online, killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in the Florida city. The amendment, which may be reconsidered in the near future, aims to broaden the rules governing national security letters, which don't require court approval. These letters allow the FBI to demand records associated with Americans' online communications -- so-called electronic communications transactional records.
The Orlando shooters father ran for President of Afghanistan and owns a corporation called Provisional government of Afghanistan, I'll give you two guesses who he is in bed with.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2016/06/15/orlando-shooters-father-corporations/85958842/
The picture worth a thousand words (Omar Sateens father):
http://21stcenturywire.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/orlando-seddique-Mateen.jpg
Sam Harris had a podcast which contains an audio clip of an imam teaching that it's OK to kill gays, that it was the compassionate thing to do. I got the impression from the 'cast that the clip was from an imam in the Orlando area, and that it was taken a week or so before the shooting.
(I can't link the specific podcast at the moment because the site that I read it at is temporarily offline.)
We have often thought that the right to practice religion is absolute, but I'm wondering now if it should be.
Does being a religion give you a license to say anything you like? We have laws against hate speech even though we have free speech in general, and we have laws against speech that encourage a specific crime.
We guarantee freedom of religion, but we also guarantee freedom of life.
Which one has priority?
Maybe it's time to prioritize freedom of life over the freedom of religion. Maybe we should say categorically that you *can't* preach that it's OK to kill people of a certain class, whatever the class might be.
This would apply to any religion, even Christian ones ("thou shall not suffer a witch to live"), and it would apply to all cases: people who leave the religion are free to go unmolested (Islam, Scientology), people that the religion dislikes would be free to go unmolested (Christianity, Islam, Hinduism), and so on.
So for example, I would cite The Westboro Baptist church claiming that gays should be put to death, or evangelists calling on their flock to assasinate abortion providers.
As a country, I think we might legitimately say "not in this country" to these extreme views, and in these specific cases maybe intervene and say "no, you can't preach that even if your religion believes it".
Personal safety should be absolute, and the right to religion isn't more important.
In the aftermath of the Orlando shooting, imams haven't stopped teaching that gays should be killed.
Perhaps they should.
Perhaps they should focus on the factors causing society's violence rather than specifically how it is violent. If society has a violence problem (historically, we're as peaceful as we've ever been), then it must deal with those problems. Infantilizing the environment in order to bury the violent acts themselves without addressing the conflicts that cause them solves nothing and creates its own problems. Politicians have long histories of blaming specific things for the ills of society (music, movies, video games, guns) rather than doing some self-reflection on their ideological convictions. It's like arguing with westboro baptist church over gay rights. If liberal society is to survive, it must force politicians to do their jobs rather than let them use fear to knee jerk us until we have no liberty left.