And that warrants immediate and aggressive investigation.
Face it. If the government wants to know how much porn is on the internet, they can type "porn" into google and get the results in roughly 0.06 seconds, just like everyone else.
The real reason behind this attempt to strongarm private institutions warrants immediate and aggressive investigation.
there are similarities but you can't say they are one in the same.
These days, the vast majority of adware is spyware, in that it reports back to the adserver what you're reading in your browser so it can popup (or with the ones that operate as a local web proxy, insert inline into the webpages as you're reading them) ads that are appropriate to that page.
It's actually working really well, when you consider the fact that this certificate wasn't "illegitimately" obtained. It's not like some random guy registered www.majorbank.com and got away with it. It was some little credit union with a name that had nothing at all to do with banking ("Mountain America"). So the guy registered the name and bought an SSL certificate for it, fully legitimately.
Now, maybe Geotrust should have looked harder at their domains. Maybe punched them into google to see what comes up. I'm not convinced though that any level of rigorous authentication would have caught this. The person could have created a Mountain America, Inc. for a few bucks in most states (sure, the paper trail might lead back to him, but if you're going to buy an SSL cert, either you don't care or you've already got someone else's credit card number). But of course, people and companies register domains all the time that have nothing to do with their actual given name. What would Geotrust have done to figure out that he was going to use the cert for phishing? Called him and interrogated him?
I'd go with "written" though there might be a few that exist that can break through the concept of having a single pointer, which is what this kind of touchscreen amounts to. Someone might make a mouse driver that uses the multiple points of contact to emulate a mouse (might even be able to make some operations easier than a normal touchpad, like drag and drop) but that wouldn't really use the full power of something like this.
It might be interesting to try and get some OS/windowing system to accept multiple pointers, and then write a driver for this that emulated N mice at once, where N = number of fingers currently on the screen. Moving a finger would attempt to figure out which mouse was released, and moving that mouse to the new location.
I can see plenty of uses for something like this in games or 3D visualization/manipulation software, but less use for it in word processors or the like (hmm... maybe hold down bold with one finger, while tapping the words you want bold with another?)
But he can still be an "anti-spam crusader"!
on
Circumventing CAN-SPAM
·
· Score: 0, Troll
Because after all, spam is now defined to exclude the political mailings this guy uses, so he's not "spamming" at all.
Now that Bill Clinton has opened the door to questionable definitions of existing words, both the Democrats and the Republicans have embraced his ideas firmly and run with them as far and as fast as they can.
A series of cartoons graphically and gleefully depicting the 9/11 disaster victims meeting their deaths in various amusing ways
I guess then, that after all these years, the "final answer" for the billions-dollar question of "what the Hell are we doing in the middle east?" is "because they were dancing in the street when the towers fell"?
Many of these fundie Muslims who are stirring up trouble now are convinced that the entire West is some kind of Zionist plot against them personally (several of the louder ones use those words, specifically). When you put it that way, lets look at this in context:
- Iranian leader claims Holocaust never happened... hm, embassies are still there, nobody killed. - Palestines elect party that wants to wipe the Jewish faith from the face of the earth... hm, embassies are still there, nobody killed.
And that's just in the past couple of months. Fundamentalist Muslim behavior in this vein has gone back decades, if not longer.
You can bet that if these kept getting reprinted in the prominent Arab press, protests here would rise to violence, to riots, and to a general call by the citizenry to GO TO WAR WITH THE ENTIRE REGION, NOW.
Guess what, people already make cartoons of major Western figures diddling little kids. The Pope is pretty popular on t-shirts, yet somehow the Vatican's never hit the Big Red Button on the Popemobile that turns it into an awesome cartoonist-smashing mecha. The KKK probably distributes all sorts of fliers with black people hanging from trees, but somehow they manage to survive all of the suicide bombers we've sent at them.
Repeated attempts by the Muslims to incite the kind of anger and wrath that they are exhibiting sound kind of hollow when the best they can do is talk about publishing cartoons about the holocaust and racism in their newspapers, when the same paper runs their leaders' calls for extermination of Israel on the front page.
The next game should be "GTA: Minding your own business".
Instead of starting off as a smalltime thug trying to make it big, you're an upper-middle class guy driving home from work to his nice house, wife, dog, and 2.5 kids when suddenly some smalltime thug yanks you out of your Lexus at a stoplight and speeds off. You aren't going to take this lying down, are you? After all, you're 40, underappreciated, and the guy in the next cubicle over keeps smacking his gum all day long. You're overdue for your midlife crisis, and it's time to snap.
You're going to take on that gang single handedly. Your PDA's got a lock on the lojack signal, and no smalltime thug is a match for your fearsome arsenal of staplers, tps reports, and the powerful LAW(yer) rocket. You're getting that car back, if it's the last thing you do.
Besides, you've still got $15k of payments to go on that baby.
But if you have nothing to hide, you won't mind if we tagged you now. It's far more convenient to do so now than after you've committed a crime. Since you haven't done anything yet, we'll simply assume the worst, so pedophile child rapist/murderer it is. Please report to the probation officer on christmas and halloween so we know that you're not snagging little witches or carolers off the streets.
Of course, this article isn't even about a police state, it's about the company you work for. And unless you work in some fairytale happy fun place, your cellphone tracking information isn't bound by laws, it's bound by office politics, and if you're really unlucky, the BOFH. You'd better start practicing your kissing up maneuver now, you'll never know when the BOFH decides to let your boss know you've been hanging out at all these gay bars late at night, in the company car.
Oh shut up, we're not even talking about the government here, where employees are perfect and never corrupt, we're talking about your office, where your boss is pissed off because you're not kissing his ass deep enough, and the guy who's actually monitoring your cell traffic wants your job.
Probably not as many as those who own just one or the other, with the understanding that they won't get all the exclusive goodies. Do you miss all the goodies you can only get to using an AOL keyword?
They had cause to believe these imagrants, who weren't even US Citizens, had ties to terrorism. Isn't that enough?
What immigrants? You have a list of them?
Anytime Bush wanted to make this legal, all he had to do is hand over this list of "non-citizens" he had already tapped to the super-secret FISA court he filled with his best buddies after the USA PATRIOT act and tell them to issue warrants. Why didn't he? Can you come up with any reason other than it was not a "list of non-citizens"? Did the voice in his head tell him his best friends were Iranian moles? Did he just set the paperwork down on Jose Padilla's criminal indictment and misplace it for three years? Did he think Cheney would do it, while Cheney thought Bush was going to? If you have a reason for Bush refusing to get warrants for the wiretaps, please, the entire world wants to know.
If Ford infringes on a patent with a part in their car it doesn't mean that they then have to replace all of those parts in every car sold. If you still feel otherwise please cite case law to support your assertion.
Funny you should mention Ford:
Nearly every car company fell into line to pay royalties to the Association for the privilege of making and selling cars.
Except Henry Ford. The association did not want another competitor in Detroit and it did not like his idea of driving prices down to where average people could afford a car. So it refused to license him. For Ford, it was either exit the industry or fight the Selden Patent in court. He decided to raise a legal war chest and fight the incumbents. The litigation lasted from 1903 until 1911 and along the way, the association launched hundreds of lawsuits against Ford's customers to scare them away from his showrooms for buying "unlicensed vehicles."
(from here)While in Ford's case he eventually proved that his vehicles don't infringe on the patent in question (his cars had more cylinders, iirc), Microsoft has already lost that battle.
In more modern times, it appears that Microsoft has had its customers sued over IP before: "Kremen could recall only one case where a plaintiff brought an intellectual property action against Microsoft's customers rather than the multi-billion dollar company."
What rock have you been sitting under? It doesn't matter who promised you what or sold you which widget, if it infringed on the patent before you owned it, it still infringes on the patent. While the patent holder probably won't bother hunting you down, you'd best keep an eye open for the subpoena of microsoft's product registration database, just in case.
Don't think just because you bought it from somewhere else that you're in the clear (think stolen property. Now think stolen intellectual property). Suing the customers has been tried before back when Ford broke into the automobile scene. It only backfired because it made the other automobile makers unpopular. What does this inventor sell that can be boycotted?
Personally, I'd rather have a written guide of some form to refer to when I implement IPv6, though I'm going to listen to this just to see how it turns out. It'll probably be just like class where I scribble furiously to write down everything the professor says.
If you want something that's patented, you go and buy it at the store.
The problem is that you can't buy everything in the store, even if you ignore the current fad of patent holding companies who produce nothing but lawsuits.
Let's say you're researching a new way of making rope and you want to compare it to existing rope-making practices to see if your way is better. Now let's say someone patented a particular method of making rope but doesn't actually sell any. You contact them and ask them if you can make some rope using their method to test its strength compared to yours and they say "No".
The fact is that patent holders are in a monopoly position and can use that to kill research. This is in direct contradiction to the Constitution's order to promote the sciences, so this change in law makes it so that the patent holders will be in a monopoly position but will be unable to kill research.
Most people opposed to this idea of "outsourcing" would rather have companies (McDonald's, Coke, or their IT counterparts) profit from selling their goods to other countries, but not have them benefit through creation of local jobs or improvements in economy.
The best way to explain this would be to ask how many burgers McDonald's would sell in other countries if they all had to be made in the US and delivered overseas.
This is completely different from "outsourcing" where jobs that were done in the US are moved somewhere else. This is expanding into new markets and creating local facilities to serve them.
How did we get so off track? What does blowing Iran off the face of the Earth have to do with the NSA following the rule of law? The only reason Bush comes up is because he's the leader of the Republican Party. You know, the majority ruling party that could have changed the FISA rules at any time to make what the NSA is doing perfectly legal? The administration can do whatever it wants for all I care, all I ask is that they obey the laws they are in charge of.
I'm pissed that we're not building a 50 foot wall along the mexican border and we have rats moving drugs and terrorists into the US.
Yeah, sucks that the neocons are too busy on their pointless crusade to replace the last secular middle eastern country with yet another hardline Muslim theocracy. Just think of the size of the wall we could have built with the billions we pissed away, if we had just left Saddam there to terrorize the Muslim terrorists with his torture chambers. Iran already got its way, we took out the only real enemy they had in the region.
but he wasn't because that would have been unlawful.
OK, look. For some reason you seem to believe that despite years of lies about WMDs and being conservative, Bush is some kind of divine savior who would never do any wrong, and thats where we diverge. He offers no proof that the NSA is obeying the law, and by refusing to require the NSA to follow through with the warrant process, he is refusing to execute the part of the law that would prove that the NSA is not doing anything unlawful. He has done nothing his entire career to engender in me the kind of trust that you have placed in him.
Ask the RIAA what they're encouraged to do when people download their music.
Aside from that, I have to wonder how much child porn is just sitting out there on p2p networks and such where whoever made it has no clue if anyone's downloading it and will probably continue to abuse children either way.
Terrorist? What terrorist? The Bush administration held him for 3 years and the best they could trump up on him was "conspiracy to kidnap, maim, and murder in a foreign country". A far cry from what the administration told the press about his plans to set off nuclear bombs in US cities. Terrorism is a bullshit excuse for what the administration has done to a citizen. McVeigh actually set off a bomb and killed people and he got his day in court as called for by the fifth amendment.
the constitution talks about freedoms
It talks about both freedoms of and freedoms from. It specifically mentions that I have the freedom from the government doing what it did to Padilla. If Bush doesn't like it, he can put his party's balls on the line, step up, and announce that he's officially suspending Habeus Corpus (for once, an actually recognized war power). Even Abraham Lincoln had the balls to do that.
It also specifically says that any power not mentioned in the Constitution is specifically denied to the federal government. That includes the power of congress to grant new powers to the President without following the amendment process. In the case of the wiretaps, Bush specifically has the power to defend us, except for the limits placed on him by the fourth amendment: that the government specifically obtains warrants when wiretapping a citizen of the united states. FISA made it easier by allowing them to wiretap first, warrant later, however Bush has decided that the FISA court that he packed with his best buddies after the USA PATRIOT act expanded it is just in the way. Nowhere in the constitution does it give the president the power to ignore the rules placed by Congress, and he has no power to ignore the fourth amendment.
now all lines are probably dead.
Then we won. We successfully shattered the communication lines for all the terrorist cells in the US, they will no longer be able to coordinate attacks and have a serious damper put on their fundraising and recruiting capabilities. Oh wait, there's a billion other ways to communicate, and guess what, the NSA knows about them too. Most likely, any terrorists assumed that they were already being tapped, otherwise their stupidity would have taken themselves out years ago.
uphold the constitution
So would you say that what the Bush administration is doing is like fucking for virginity or fighting for peace?
So you're saying these things will never happen, right? Let's ignore various cases over the years of FBI agents getting busted for insider trading using illegal wiretaps. Let's also ignore Jose Padilla and possibly other cases where the US government has infringed on an American citizen's liberties, and ask for a moment if this will never happen, why does the president fight so bitterly for the power to make it happen? Bush claims that what we do isn't torture, yet fights tooth and nail to make sure we can torture people. Bush claims we don't wiretap domestic phone calls, yet fights tooth and nail to make sure that he'll never have a trail that can prove it.
The po-po could bust down your door for any old reason, throw your underwear drawer out on the front lawn for the world to see.
And I could bust down your door for any old reason, too. What's your point? Might makes right? That the police are above the law like Bush thinks he is?
And there you have the manipulation of statistics to prove a point. Had they ask the question "Do you approve of Mr. Bush's authorizing eavesdropping on terrorists without prior court approval" the numbers would have been even higher in favor of Bush.
That sounds even more manipulative. How about:
"Do you approve of President Bush authorizing eavesdropping on people with only his word to guarantee these people are terrorism suspects?"
Which is what it boils down to. With no judicial oversight or review of evidence, the only reason to believe he isn't spying on random citizens, the friendly neighborhood mosque, greenpeace, the democrats, Strayhorn, or his mother is because he says so. And he's said an awful lot of things since he took office (starting with "Hi, I'm Bush and I'm a conservative Republican").
The 9/11 commission confirmed that both Clinton and Bush administrations had the information that would have allowed them to take down al Qaeda at any time for years before 9/11.
"They" is the not so recent trend of presidents, each shittier than the last, pointing at the sins of their predecessors to defend their own.
The Bush administration held Jose Padilla for three years without charge, suggesting that he was a dangerous terrorist and would kill everyone should he be put on trial for his crimes. When he finally was charged, he was charged with "conspiracy to kidnap and torture", which was considerably underwhelming compared to what amounts to be the apparent repeated slandering of his name by the administration.
proof that specifally YOUR rights have been violated.
It happened to Padilla, it could happen to you or me. I don't have to sit here and wait for it to happen to me.
Slashdot Mirror
And that warrants immediate and aggressive investigation.
Face it. If the government wants to know how much porn is on the internet, they can type "porn" into google and get the results in roughly 0.06 seconds, just like everyone else.
The real reason behind this attempt to strongarm private institutions warrants immediate and aggressive investigation.
there are similarities but you can't say they are one in the same.
These days, the vast majority of adware is spyware, in that it reports back to the adserver what you're reading in your browser so it can popup (or with the ones that operate as a local web proxy, insert inline into the webpages as you're reading them) ads that are appropriate to that page.
It's actually working really well, when you consider the fact that this certificate wasn't "illegitimately" obtained. It's not like some random guy registered www.majorbank.com and got away with it. It was some little credit union with a name that had nothing at all to do with banking ("Mountain America"). So the guy registered the name and bought an SSL certificate for it, fully legitimately.
Now, maybe Geotrust should have looked harder at their domains. Maybe punched them into google to see what comes up. I'm not convinced though that any level of rigorous authentication would have caught this. The person could have created a Mountain America, Inc. for a few bucks in most states (sure, the paper trail might lead back to him, but if you're going to buy an SSL cert, either you don't care or you've already got someone else's credit card number). But of course, people and companies register domains all the time that have nothing to do with their actual given name. What would Geotrust have done to figure out that he was going to use the cert for phishing? Called him and interrogated him?
Forza is not a cruddy racing game, but actually pretty darn good.
Maybe so, but he actually wanted to get his "son" DOA volleyball and GTA.
I'd go with "written" though there might be a few that exist that can break through the concept of having a single pointer, which is what this kind of touchscreen amounts to. Someone might make a mouse driver that uses the multiple points of contact to emulate a mouse (might even be able to make some operations easier than a normal touchpad, like drag and drop) but that wouldn't really use the full power of something like this.
It might be interesting to try and get some OS/windowing system to accept multiple pointers, and then write a driver for this that emulated N mice at once, where N = number of fingers currently on the screen. Moving a finger would attempt to figure out which mouse was released, and moving that mouse to the new location.
I can see plenty of uses for something like this in games or 3D visualization/manipulation software, but less use for it in word processors or the like (hmm... maybe hold down bold with one finger, while tapping the words you want bold with another?)
Because after all, spam is now defined to exclude the political mailings this guy uses, so he's not "spamming" at all.
Now that Bill Clinton has opened the door to questionable definitions of existing words, both the Democrats and the Republicans have embraced his ideas firmly and run with them as far and as fast as they can.
A series of cartoons graphically and gleefully depicting the 9/11 disaster victims meeting their deaths in various amusing ways
I guess then, that after all these years, the "final answer" for the billions-dollar question of "what the Hell are we doing in the middle east?" is "because they were dancing in the street when the towers fell"?
Many of these fundie Muslims who are stirring up trouble now are convinced that the entire West is some kind of Zionist plot against them personally (several of the louder ones use those words, specifically). When you put it that way, lets look at this in context:
- Iranian leader claims Holocaust never happened... hm, embassies are still there, nobody killed.
- Palestines elect party that wants to wipe the Jewish faith from the face of the earth... hm, embassies are still there, nobody killed.
And that's just in the past couple of months. Fundamentalist Muslim behavior in this vein has gone back decades, if not longer.
You can bet that if these kept getting reprinted in the prominent Arab press, protests here would rise to violence, to riots, and to a general call by the citizenry to GO TO WAR WITH THE ENTIRE REGION, NOW.
Guess what, people already make cartoons of major Western figures diddling little kids. The Pope is pretty popular on t-shirts, yet somehow the Vatican's never hit the Big Red Button on the Popemobile that turns it into an awesome cartoonist-smashing mecha. The KKK probably distributes all sorts of fliers with black people hanging from trees, but somehow they manage to survive all of the suicide bombers we've sent at them.
Repeated attempts by the Muslims to incite the kind of anger and wrath that they are exhibiting sound kind of hollow when the best they can do is talk about publishing cartoons about the holocaust and racism in their newspapers, when the same paper runs their leaders' calls for extermination of Israel on the front page.
The next game should be "GTA: Minding your own business".
Instead of starting off as a smalltime thug trying to make it big, you're an upper-middle class guy driving home from work to his nice house, wife, dog, and 2.5 kids when suddenly some smalltime thug yanks you out of your Lexus at a stoplight and speeds off. You aren't going to take this lying down, are you? After all, you're 40, underappreciated, and the guy in the next cubicle over keeps smacking his gum all day long. You're overdue for your midlife crisis, and it's time to snap.
You're going to take on that gang single handedly. Your PDA's got a lock on the lojack signal, and no smalltime thug is a match for your fearsome arsenal of staplers, tps reports, and the powerful LAW(yer) rocket. You're getting that car back, if it's the last thing you do.
Besides, you've still got $15k of payments to go on that baby.
But if you have nothing to hide, you won't mind if we tagged you now. It's far more convenient to do so now than after you've committed a crime. Since you haven't done anything yet, we'll simply assume the worst, so pedophile child rapist/murderer it is. Please report to the probation officer on christmas and halloween so we know that you're not snagging little witches or carolers off the streets.
Of course, this article isn't even about a police state, it's about the company you work for. And unless you work in some fairytale happy fun place, your cellphone tracking information isn't bound by laws, it's bound by office politics, and if you're really unlucky, the BOFH. You'd better start practicing your kissing up maneuver now, you'll never know when the BOFH decides to let your boss know you've been hanging out at all these gay bars late at night, in the company car.
I've got nothing to hide
Oh shut up, we're not even talking about the government here, where employees are perfect and never corrupt, we're talking about your office, where your boss is pissed off because you're not kissing his ass deep enough, and the guy who's actually monitoring your cell traffic wants your job.
Probably not as many as those who own just one or the other, with the understanding that they won't get all the exclusive goodies. Do you miss all the goodies you can only get to using an AOL keyword?
They had cause to believe these imagrants, who weren't even US Citizens, had ties to terrorism. Isn't that enough?
What immigrants? You have a list of them?
Anytime Bush wanted to make this legal, all he had to do is hand over this list of "non-citizens" he had already tapped to the super-secret FISA court he filled with his best buddies after the USA PATRIOT act and tell them to issue warrants. Why didn't he? Can you come up with any reason other than it was not a "list of non-citizens"? Did the voice in his head tell him his best friends were Iranian moles? Did he just set the paperwork down on Jose Padilla's criminal indictment and misplace it for three years? Did he think Cheney would do it, while Cheney thought Bush was going to? If you have a reason for Bush refusing to get warrants for the wiretaps, please, the entire world wants to know.
Funny you should mention Ford:(from here)While in Ford's case he eventually proved that his vehicles don't infringe on the patent in question (his cars had more cylinders, iirc), Microsoft has already lost that battle.
In more modern times, it appears that Microsoft has had its customers sued over IP before: "Kremen could recall only one case where a plaintiff brought an intellectual property action against Microsoft's customers rather than the multi-billion dollar company."
What rock have you been sitting under? It doesn't matter who promised you what or sold you which widget, if it infringed on the patent before you owned it, it still infringes on the patent. While the patent holder probably won't bother hunting you down, you'd best keep an eye open for the subpoena of microsoft's product registration database, just in case.
Don't think just because you bought it from somewhere else that you're in the clear (think stolen property. Now think stolen intellectual property). Suing the customers has been tried before back when Ford broke into the automobile scene. It only backfired because it made the other automobile makers unpopular. What does this inventor sell that can be boycotted?
Personally, I'd rather have a written guide of some form to refer to when I implement IPv6, though I'm going to listen to this just to see how it turns out. It'll probably be just like class where I scribble furiously to write down everything the professor says.
If you want something that's patented, you go and buy it at the store.
The problem is that you can't buy everything in the store, even if you ignore the current fad of patent holding companies who produce nothing but lawsuits.
Let's say you're researching a new way of making rope and you want to compare it to existing rope-making practices to see if your way is better. Now let's say someone patented a particular method of making rope but doesn't actually sell any. You contact them and ask them if you can make some rope using their method to test its strength compared to yours and they say "No".
The fact is that patent holders are in a monopoly position and can use that to kill research. This is in direct contradiction to the Constitution's order to promote the sciences, so this change in law makes it so that the patent holders will be in a monopoly position but will be unable to kill research.
Most people opposed to this idea of "outsourcing" would rather have companies (McDonald's, Coke, or their IT counterparts) profit from selling their goods to other countries, but not have them benefit through creation of local jobs or improvements in economy.
The best way to explain this would be to ask how many burgers McDonald's would sell in other countries if they all had to be made in the US and delivered overseas.
This is completely different from "outsourcing" where jobs that were done in the US are moved somewhere else. This is expanding into new markets and creating local facilities to serve them.
How did we get so off track? What does blowing Iran off the face of the Earth have to do with the NSA following the rule of law? The only reason Bush comes up is because he's the leader of the Republican Party. You know, the majority ruling party that could have changed the FISA rules at any time to make what the NSA is doing perfectly legal? The administration can do whatever it wants for all I care, all I ask is that they obey the laws they are in charge of.
I'm pissed that we're not building a 50 foot wall along the mexican border and we have rats moving drugs and terrorists into the US.
Yeah, sucks that the neocons are too busy on their pointless crusade to replace the last secular middle eastern country with yet another hardline Muslim theocracy. Just think of the size of the wall we could have built with the billions we pissed away, if we had just left Saddam there to terrorize the Muslim terrorists with his torture chambers. Iran already got its way, we took out the only real enemy they had in the region.
but he wasn't because that would have been unlawful.
OK, look. For some reason you seem to believe that despite years of lies about WMDs and being conservative, Bush is some kind of divine savior who would never do any wrong, and thats where we diverge. He offers no proof that the NSA is obeying the law, and by refusing to require the NSA to follow through with the warrant process, he is refusing to execute the part of the law that would prove that the NSA is not doing anything unlawful. He has done nothing his entire career to engender in me the kind of trust that you have placed in him.
Does encouraging an act count?
Ask the RIAA what they're encouraged to do when people download their music.
Aside from that, I have to wonder how much child porn is just sitting out there on p2p networks and such where whoever made it has no clue if anyone's downloading it and will probably continue to abuse children either way.
Jose Padilla the terrorist?
Terrorist? What terrorist? The Bush administration held him for 3 years and the best they could trump up on him was "conspiracy to kidnap, maim, and murder in a foreign country". A far cry from what the administration told the press about his plans to set off nuclear bombs in US cities. Terrorism is a bullshit excuse for what the administration has done to a citizen. McVeigh actually set off a bomb and killed people and he got his day in court as called for by the fifth amendment.
the constitution talks about freedoms
It talks about both freedoms of and freedoms from. It specifically mentions that I have the freedom from the government doing what it did to Padilla. If Bush doesn't like it, he can put his party's balls on the line, step up, and announce that he's officially suspending Habeus Corpus (for once, an actually recognized war power). Even Abraham Lincoln had the balls to do that.
It also specifically says that any power not mentioned in the Constitution is specifically denied to the federal government. That includes the power of congress to grant new powers to the President without following the amendment process. In the case of the wiretaps, Bush specifically has the power to defend us, except for the limits placed on him by the fourth amendment: that the government specifically obtains warrants when wiretapping a citizen of the united states. FISA made it easier by allowing them to wiretap first, warrant later, however Bush has decided that the FISA court that he packed with his best buddies after the USA PATRIOT act expanded it is just in the way. Nowhere in the constitution does it give the president the power to ignore the rules placed by Congress, and he has no power to ignore the fourth amendment.
now all lines are probably dead.
Then we won. We successfully shattered the communication lines for all the terrorist cells in the US, they will no longer be able to coordinate attacks and have a serious damper put on their fundraising and recruiting capabilities. Oh wait, there's a billion other ways to communicate, and guess what, the NSA knows about them too. Most likely, any terrorists assumed that they were already being tapped, otherwise their stupidity would have taken themselves out years ago.
uphold the constitution
So would you say that what the Bush administration is doing is like fucking for virginity or fighting for peace?
fantastic scenarios
So you're saying these things will never happen, right? Let's ignore various cases over the years of FBI agents getting busted for insider trading using illegal wiretaps. Let's also ignore Jose Padilla and possibly other cases where the US government has infringed on an American citizen's liberties, and ask for a moment if this will never happen, why does the president fight so bitterly for the power to make it happen? Bush claims that what we do isn't torture, yet fights tooth and nail to make sure we can torture people. Bush claims we don't wiretap domestic phone calls, yet fights tooth and nail to make sure that he'll never have a trail that can prove it.
The po-po could bust down your door for any old reason, throw your underwear drawer out on the front lawn for the world to see.
And I could bust down your door for any old reason, too. What's your point? Might makes right? That the police are above the law like Bush thinks he is?
And there you have the manipulation of statistics to prove a point. Had they ask the question "Do you approve of Mr. Bush's authorizing eavesdropping on terrorists without prior court approval" the numbers would have been even higher in favor of Bush.
That sounds even more manipulative. How about:
"Do you approve of President Bush authorizing eavesdropping on people with only his word to guarantee these people are terrorism suspects?"
Which is what it boils down to. With no judicial oversight or review of evidence, the only reason to believe he isn't spying on random citizens, the friendly neighborhood mosque, greenpeace, the democrats, Strayhorn, or his mother is because he says so. And he's said an awful lot of things since he took office (starting with "Hi, I'm Bush and I'm a conservative Republican").
The 9/11 commission confirmed that both Clinton and Bush administrations had the information that would have allowed them to take down al Qaeda at any time for years before 9/11.
"They" is the not so recent trend of presidents, each shittier than the last, pointing at the sins of their predecessors to defend their own.
The Bush administration held Jose Padilla for three years without charge, suggesting that he was a dangerous terrorist and would kill everyone should he be put on trial for his crimes. When he finally was charged, he was charged with "conspiracy to kidnap and torture", which was considerably underwhelming compared to what amounts to be the apparent repeated slandering of his name by the administration.
proof that specifally YOUR rights have been violated.
It happened to Padilla, it could happen to you or me. I don't have to sit here and wait for it to happen to me.