Which is not to say that civilians getting caught in the middle between two warring sides is anything new or novel, but the least we could do is not try to dismiss it by implying they deserve to get killed.
Someone is implying that Iraqis deserve to get killed? I doubt it is the US military. They seem to be working pretty hard to help Iraq rebuild and protect Iraqis from terrorism.
Maybe it is the extremists and insurgents that you are thinking of. After all, Al Qaeda considers the Shia heretics, and most of the Sunnis in Iraq as traitors, and wants to kill them both.
How about saving lives by not using air-strikes in densely populated civilian neighbourhoods?
If you want to reduce fatalities from explosions in Iraqi neighborhoods, why not take a stand against things that really happen instead of imaginary problems? The explosions that are killing significant numbers of Iraqi civilians are from bus, truck, and car bombs and suicide bomb attacks conducted by Al Qaeda and other extremists, not imaginary US air strikes. This isn't exactly an obscure fact. Politically unpalatable to some, but not obscure.
"There are 150,000 students from China. Some of those are sent here to work their way up into the corporations," Szady said. There are about 300,000 Chinese visitors annually, and 15,000 Chinese delegations touring the United States every year, 3,500 of them in the New York area alone, he said......
He estimated that about 3,000 false-front Chinese companies operate in the United States, and urged private-sector employers to "partner up" with FBI agents to help protect national security.
Another interesting alternative to the dark matter theory is the TeVeS (Tensor Vector Scalar) theory of gravity. It is powerful enough to explain gravitational lensing, and the Bullet cluster as well.
Try this instead of money: Punishing companies for assisting the President acting within the scope of his Article II powers to protect the lives of Americans from terrorist attacks is bad policy and stupid politics.
That is the current state of the law. The federal appellate courts have unanimously held that the President has the inherent constitutional authority to order warrantless searches for purposes of gathering foreign intelligence information, which includes information about terrorist threats. Furthermore, since this power is derived from Article II of the Constitution, the FISA Review Court has specifically recognized that it cannot be taken away or limited by Congressional action.
That being the case, the NSA intercept program, which consists of warrantless electronic intercepts for purposes of foreign intelligence gathering, is legal.
It's worth noting that all of the cases cited above involved warrantless searches inside the United States. The NSA program, in contrast, involves international communications only, and the intercepts take place at least in part, and perhaps wholly, outside the United States. Thus, the NSA case is even clearer than the cases that have already upheld Presidential power. -- On the Legality of the NSA Electronic Intercept Program
The FBI keeps arresting and convicting people in this country for ties to terrorist organizations. Now, how do you suppose domestic surveillance contributes to that? Did the idea cross your mind that those arrests and convictions, not to mention the other disrupted plots, are the reason we haven't had something like the Bali bombing, or the London tube bombing, or the Madrid bombing? Of course I'm sure that you also know that the Canadian bomb plotters had connections in the US, that the US helped the Germans foil a dangerous bomb plot, and British and American surveillance helped foil a major attack? There are plenty of other cases as well.... for anyone that cares to know.
Canadian novelist James Bacque has alleged that nearly one million German prisoners of war were redesignated as "Disarmed Enemy Forces" by U.S. General Dwight Eisenhower in order to avoid having to obey the third Geneva Convention, died of starvation or exposure while held in post-war Western internment camps.
In a 1991 New York Times book review, historian and Eisenhower biographer Stephen Ambrose responded to Mr. Bacque:
Mr. Bacque is wrong on every major charge and nearly all his minor ones. Eisenhower was not a Hitler, he did not run death camps, German prisoners did not die by the hundreds of thousands, there was a severe food shortage in 1945, there was nothing sinister or secret about the "disarmed enemy forces" designation or about the column "other losses." Mr. Bacque's "missing million" were old men and young boys in the Volkssturm (People's Militia) released without formal discharge and transfers of POWs to other allies control areas.
..."extraordinary" interrogation methods could be used to obtain evidence for the upcoming war crimes trials.
Right... pay no attention to the mountains of documents, eye witnesses, and bodies. There wasn't exactly a lack of evidence of the Nazi crimes.
FBI Agent: "Damn! The first query was useless, and this is way worse than useless!!"
FBI Supervisor: "No kidding. Now knock off that nonsense and get back to work. I want you focusing on likely patterns instead of feeding the moonbats."
FBI Agent: "Yes sir."
RETURN PERSON ID where gender is a male AND between 19-40 AND shops at Islamic stores AND has expired visa AND received large cash transfers from an Islamic country with Jihadi organizations.
The government are depriving the EFF of their potential property (court damages) retroactively after their case has been filed by declaring the defendant immune from suit. I don't call that "due process of law".
You're confused. The EFF doesn't have any right to damages until they both win the case and are awarded damages. There is no ownership right to "potential" property.
Second, this is exactly how due process of law works. The EFF filed a court case and it was responded to with an assertion of immunity. If the court accepts the claim of immunity the matter is settled unless EFF can show why the immunity doesn't apply.
they just duplicate The Bush Maneuver..."its for National Security".
I've noticed that many people on Slashdot are too "sophisticated" to be "taken in" by the idea that monitoring communications with known terrorists* has anything to do with national security.
* That is terrorists of the "blow up people with bombs" variety.
try declaring yourself a member of Al-Qaeda in the USA and see how long it takes before you are detained (or carted off to Guantanamo Bay).
Sort of like disclosing yourself as a Gestapo agent during WW2? Who would have thought that might be a problem? I see what you mean though, look at what happened to this Hezbollah supporter just a couple of weeks ago, just before anniversary of 9/11. It does seem so unfair, doesn't it? (Wait a second... that Hezbollah supporter was studying to be a doctor. Weren't there some other doctors recently involved in a terrorist attack at the Glasgow airport? Or am I confusing that with the terrorist Scot convicted in Glasgow who was going to attack Canada? As if the Canadians needed help with growing terrorists.) It is almost unbelievable that some people think that we should be trying to prevent terrorist attacks instead of cleaning up the bodies afterwards! I mean, the very idea of monitoring communications to known terrorists (known for blowing up people, not for voting for Democrats)!
Keep up. Your head of state declared two years ago that "[the U.S. Constitution]'s just a goddamned piece of paper!"
Isn't the source for that supposed quote the partisan organ Capital Hill Blue in the section labeled "The Rant"? In "The Rant" that supposedly exposes that "quote", it opines:
And, to the Bush Administration, the Constitution of the United States is little more than toilet paper stained from all the shit that this group of power-mad despots have dumped on the freedoms that "goddamned piece of paper" used to guarantee.
Hmmmm. Call me skeptical, but I'm not going to rely upon Capital Hill Blue's "Rant" section to be an impartial reporter on the matter. For all we really know, President Bush may have been quoting Judge Bryant who had passed away just weeks before and Capital Hill Blue may have left out the bits that didn't fit with its political agenda.
On Friday, President Bush signed legislation that will name a new $110 million, nine-courtroom addition to the federal courthouse in Bryant's honor.
Bryant was known for his dedication to Constitutional law and believed that lawyers could stop injustice.
"Without lawyers, this is just a piece of paper," Bryant said of the Constitution in an interview with The Washington Post last year. "If it weren't for lawyers, I'd still be three-fifths of a man. If it weren't for lawyers, we'd still have signs directing people this way and that, based on the color of their skin."
If it got out that President Bush was quoting and honoring a distinguished African American Judge who had a well known devotion to Constitutional law, well.... the damage to the racist Bushitler fascist line would be considerable. Can't have that.
Inglesis refused to speed up an investigation to indict a Dem before the election. He refused to be influenced. If you saw the movie "A Few Good Men" Tom Cruise played the part of Inglesis. Yes, that story was about him......
The USA's that remain are to a man, people who enforced caging lists, voter roll purges, and brought politically motivated cases timed for greatest effect at the polls. The calls of voter fraud was just a cover for their own illegal acts.....
In this dramatic courtroom thriller, Lt. Daniel Kaffee (Tom Cruise), a Navy lawyer who has never seen the inside of the courtroom, defends two stubborn Marines (Wolfgang Bodison and James Marshall) who have been accused of murdering a colleague. He (Cruise) is known as being lazy and had arranged for a plea bargain. Downey's (Marshall) Aunt Ginny appoints Cmdr. Galloway (Demi Moore) to represent him. Also on the legal staff is Lt. Sam Weinberg (Kevin Pollak). The team rounds up many facts and Kaffee is discovering that he is really cut out for trial work. The defense is originally based upon the fact that PFC Santiago, the victim, was given a "CODE RED". Santiago was basically a screw-up. At Gitmo, screw-ups aren't tolerated. Especially by Col. Nathan Jessup (Jack Nicholson). In Cuba, Jessup and two senior officers (J.T. Walsh and Kiefer Sutherland) try to give all the help they can, but Kaffee knows something's fishy. In the conclusion of the film, the fireworks are set off by a confrontation between Jessup and Kaffee.
This movie also happens to be the source of the often heard line uttered by Jack Nicholson: "You can't handle the truth!"
How fitting.
I think the rest of your post is of equal quality to your description of "A Few Good Men".
In fact, the admission that they have to spend an additional 200 hours gathering evidence is a clear admission of wrongdoing on their part.
No, it is a clear statement of the overhead of dealing with lawyers, procedures and documentation, courts, classified data, and multiple layers of review.
It took less than 14 hours for the FBI investigators persuing Zacarias Moussaoui to apply for his FISA warrant.
Really?
But after 9/11, the criticisms came from a different direction. It was revealed that FBI agents failed to get a FISA warrant to search the computer of al Qaeda suspect Zacarias Moussaoui before 9/11, because they felt the FISA process was too difficult. Inside America's secret court
Do you care to read up on the hoops you actually have to jump through to get a FISA warrant? Search for "928" and start reading at line 14.
The judge might be able to "easily" approve the warrant, but the data collection, procedural safeguards, and general administrative overhead is a considerable burden. Compounding the problem is that people keep trying to expand the requirement for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to get a warrant when it isn't Constitutionally required.
It is 200 man hours. If you just stop and think for a minute, and include the terms law enforcement, legal procedure, paperwork and documentation, lawyers (lots of them), courts, and federal government in your thought process, it will start to make sense.
Q. Could you tell us what the -- would you describe for us what the process was then for you to go about procuring a FISA warrant back in August of 2001?
A. Once my investigation had convinced myself and supervisors, other agents working the case with me, that probable cause existed to believe that the subject of that warrant -- of that search was acting as an agent of a foreign power, then I would prepare an electronic communication, an EC, and supporting documentation that would go to the Radical Fundamentalist Unit, or the FBI headquarters unit that was overseeing that investigation. They would, they would take that information, they would add whatever type -- whatever information they could to amplify their request, and then they would take it to a headquarters unit, FBI headquarters unit called the National Security Law Unit, comprised of lawyers whose expertise is in the area of national security law.
They would review it to ensure that probable cause did, in fact, exist to establish that that person was acting as an agent of a foreign power. When that was in agreement and the FBI agreed that the application had merit, it would then go to the Department of Justice, OIPR, Office of Intelligence Policy Review, where it would again be reviewed by attorneys, this time in the Department of Justice outside the FBI, and again, when all parties agreed that probable cause existed, it would go forward to the FISA court in the form of a declaration.
Q. And, and even when the application goes to the FISA judge, the FISA judge still has the decision whether to approve it or disapprove it; is that right?
A. That's correct. There's many points along the way where it can be forwarded and not forwarded. The ultimate person who decides is a FISA court judge......
Q. All right. And can you explain why it is that, you know, based upon your knowledge and your training, that there is this difference between all the different layers that are necessary for the FISA warrant as opposed for the lesser scrutiny on a criminal search warrant?
A. Because of the -- it just precludes any even illusion that there's a possibility that the FBI could abuse the intelligence investigation process.
Q. And when you talk about abuse, what do you mean by that?
A. I mean if there's not enough information to, to establish a criminal case, the Department of Justice and the Attorney General have set up guidelines to prevent the FBI from applying for intelligence techniques to circumvent that lack of evidence.
Q. The idea being if you don't have enough for a criminal warrant, you don't use the ruse of going to get a FISA warrant when you couldn't have gotten a criminal warrant?
A. Yes.
So 200 hours could mean that someone entered something onto a screen in a computer system in five minutes and it was done.
I doubt that there is much of anything useful involving either classified data or the courts that you could do in 5 minutes. Combine the two and guess what happens?
Either way, I think this is a number used to create an impression rather than to convey any meaningful information.
The number is both meaningful and it should create an impression: there is tremendous overhead to the classified warrant system. From that you might conclude that forcing the use of warrants when they aren't legally required is a bad thing that wastes resources, eats up precious time, reduces the effectiveness of surveillance, and generally makes it harder to deal with terrorists trying to kill us.
Yes, in Utopia. Back in the real world, scientists are human beings, and are vulnerable to fads, group-think, and politics.
And the need for funding, published articles, reputation, tenure, peer-pressure, research assistants / graduate students,....
It is harder to get most of the above if you are swimming against the tide of current thinking, especially for politically charged subjects, or ones tainted by association with cranks, or ones that require a major paradigm shift.
A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. -- Max Planck
Umm.....I just got back from my deployment in Jan. I was all over the Middle East as part fo my job (only a handful of us for the whole of CENTAF). I am one of those troops you speak of.
Thank you for your service.
There is no war. War is a legal term, with a defined enemy, defined conditions for a win/loss, recognizable leadership structure for the enemy, etc. War has to be decalred against a nation-stare War can olny be declared by Congress.
You don't know what you are talking about on this one. We are at war, no, it doesn't have to be a nation-state, and who are all those Al Qaeda leaders we keep killing in the "Al Qaeda in Iraq" organization?
For constitutional purposes, the joint resolution passed with but a single dissenting vote by Congress on Sept. 14, 2001, was the equivalent of a formal declaration of war. The Supreme Court held in 1800 (Bas v. Tingy), and again in 1801 (Talbot v. Seamen), that Congress could formally authorize war by joint resolution without passing a formal declaration of war; and in the post-U.N. Charter era no state has issued a formal declaration of war. Such declarations, in fact, have become as much an anachronism as the power of Congress to issue letters of marque and reprisal (outlawed by treaty in 1856). Formal declarations were historically only required when a state was initiating an aggressive war, which today is unlawful. -- FISA vs. the Constitution by ROBERT F. TURNER, co-founder of the Center for National Security Law at the University of Virginia School of Law, served as counsel to the President's Intelligence Oversight Board, 1982-84
There is no defined conditions for winning or losing (or even a "screw you, I am going home!" situation).
Victory in Iraq will come only when the country "can sustain itself, govern itself and defend itself,".... -- President Bush
The war on terror is like the "war on drugs"....
No, it's not. The "war on drugs" is a metaphor, not a literal war. The "war on terror", or more accurately the war against the Islamist extremist terrorists is a real war. The secret to telling the difference is that tank main gun rounds, 2,000 pound bombs, 155mm artillery rounds, Marine regiments and Army brigades are being used to fight the war on terror. You don't see that in the war on drugs where the main weapons are snappy slogans, the occasional shotgun, and a couple of squad cars of police. As a freebie... aircraft carriers are not used in the "war" on poverty either, just the war on terror.
Could you include: The act of vandalising ships cargos by throwing them into the harbour?
Nope. Civil disobedience.
The idea that it is the right & duty of every citizen to throw off an oppressive government?
Nope. Depending on your circumstances, that is either voting or revolution. (Revolution is still considered illegal by government, but it is not the same thing as terrorism.)
Or perhaps the idea that kharma can take a long time to resolve...
Nope. Hinduism.
You don't really seem to have a firm grasp about this terrorism thing at all. Why not try to keep on firm ground and start with thinking about the basics, like truck bombs in shopping malls, and kidnappings followed by beheading, and then branch out from there? That will prevent you from going down dead ends (so to speak) of thinking that terrorism is involved in finding too much fat in canned food, or offensive lyrics in music, or a politician voting to raise the VAT, or voting to decrease funds for college aid, or cutting the tags off from pillows, or even... joining and voting for the "wrong" party in elections.
First, "terrorist" means radical Islam. Next, "terrorist" means minority party.
So what you are telling us is that you are unable to distinguish in a meaningful way between:
Voting to ban littering versus kidnapping someone and cutting off their head Voting to raise sales tax 0.3% versus exploding a chlorine bomb in a shopping mall Voting to change automobile safety standards versus using a sniper rifle to kill an MP Voting to regulate off-shore oil wells versus using an electric drill on someone's head before shooting them Voting to limit the national debt versus blowing up an airliner in flight Voting for trade sanctions versus stabbing someone to death for renouncing your religion
How does the government treat your car on the highway? Can they read the license plate? Can they stop it? Can they inspect it? Can they look through the windows? Can they open it up and search it? Can disassemble it to search it?
What about your bags when you travel by air? Can they look at those? Can they open them? Can they search them? Can they open things in the bag and search them? Can they turn on your laptop? Can they search you?
But it will certainly stop all those fat old geezers looking at their hand-drawn child-porn cartoons, otherwise they would go right out and abduct all of our children. Think of the children!!!
One of those charged -- an Edmonton, Alberta, man who used the screen name "Big_Daddy619" -- allegedly distributed live videos of himself molesting the four children younger than 12. 27 charged in child porn sting
While I agree that the sick-in-the-head "Sociopathic Authoritarian" syndrome is by no means confined to the Conservative Party, there is no such thing as a "balanced solution" when an ability to conduct automated mass surveilance of citizens is concerned. And let's not kid ourselves here, this is precisely the Holy Grail of both police forces and the "intelligence" communities.
No, you care if YOU or a loved one dies in a terrorist bombing, and you care if YOUR kid gets raped and photographed by some perv. Spare me the bleeding heart.
And the number one sign that you just might be a narcissist is....
Slashdot Mirror
Oooh, are you into BBW too?
BBW? B.. B.... W.....? Barbeque Bean Wrestling? Ewwwww! I'll stick with Jell-O, thank you. (So to speak.)
Which is not to say that civilians getting caught in the middle between two warring sides is anything new or novel, but the least we could do is not try to dismiss it by implying they deserve to get killed.
Someone is implying that Iraqis deserve to get killed? I doubt it is the US military. They seem to be working pretty hard to help Iraq rebuild and protect Iraqis from terrorism.
Focus On Projects That Put Iraqis Back to Work
Market Fair Helps Baghdad Residents Plan for Economic Future
Soldiers Provide Aid to Orphanage
Coalition, Iraqi Army Bring the Heat, Fuel Iraqi Fires
Work Resumes at Water Treatment Plant for Al-Zeirji Town
Police transition teams help Iraqi police take back streets
506th RCT Soldiers Distribute School Supplies to Iraqi Children
Streams of water bring progress, hope to village
More Electricity Projects Improving Lives in Dhi Qar Province
Marines Launch Rescue Effort to Save 3-year-old Hadithah Girl
Soldiers Work With Poultry Growers to Revitalize Chicken Industry
Maybe it is the extremists and insurgents that you are thinking of. After all, Al Qaeda considers the Shia heretics, and most of the Sunnis in Iraq as traitors, and wants to kill them both.
Tribal force in Iraq target of attacks
Bus bomb kills five in bustling market
Teenage Bomber Strikes In Anbar - Suicide Attack Targets Meeting Of Tribal Leaders
Female suicide bombers shatter Baghdad calm
Bin Laden's trained children of death
US Says Iraq Car Bomb Kills 23 Civilians
How about saving lives by not using air-strikes in densely populated civilian neighbourhoods?
If you want to reduce fatalities from explosions in Iraqi neighborhoods, why not take a stand against things that really happen instead of imaginary problems? The explosions that are killing significant numbers of Iraqi civilians are from bus, truck, and car bombs and suicide bomb attacks conducted by Al Qaeda and other extremists, not imaginary US air strikes. This isn't exactly an obscure fact. Politically unpalatable to some, but not obscure.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. (Including the doubters.)
FBI spy chief asks private sector for help
FBI goes on offensive against China's tech spies
Clinton braced for spy fallout
Another interesting alternative to the dark matter theory is the TeVeS (Tensor Vector Scalar) theory of gravity. It is powerful enough to explain gravitational lensing, and the Bullet cluster as well.
Try this instead of money: Punishing companies for assisting the President acting within the scope of his Article II powers to protect the lives of Americans from terrorist attacks is bad policy and stupid politics.
Just one little problem with your scenario...
The FBI keeps arresting and convicting people in this country for ties to terrorist organizations. Now, how do you suppose domestic surveillance contributes to that? Did the idea cross your mind that those arrests and convictions, not to mention the other disrupted plots, are the reason we haven't had something like the Bali bombing, or the London tube bombing, or the Madrid bombing? Of course I'm sure that you also know that the Canadian bomb plotters had connections in the US, that the US helped the Germans foil a dangerous bomb plot, and British and American surveillance helped foil a major attack? There are plenty of other cases as well.... for anyone that cares to know.
On the Legality of the NSA Electronic Intercept Program
Right... pay no attention to the mountains of documents, eye witnesses, and bodies. There wasn't exactly a lack of evidence of the Nazi crimes.
10,000,000 rows returned
FBI Agent: "Damn! The first query was useless, and this is way worse than useless!!"
FBI Supervisor: "No kidding. Now knock off that nonsense and get back to work. I want you focusing on likely patterns instead of feeding the moonbats."
FBI Agent: "Yes sir."
RETURN PERSON ID where gender is a male AND between 19-40 AND shops at Islamic stores AND has expired visa AND received large cash transfers from an Islamic country with Jihadi organizations.
15,000 rows returned.
FBI Supervisor: "Now that is more like it."
The government are depriving the EFF of their potential property (court damages) retroactively after their case has been filed by declaring the defendant immune from suit. I don't call that "due process of law".
You're confused. The EFF doesn't have any right to damages until they both win the case and are awarded damages. There is no ownership right to "potential" property.
Second, this is exactly how due process of law works. The EFF filed a court case and it was responded to with an assertion of immunity. If the court accepts the claim of immunity the matter is settled unless EFF can show why the immunity doesn't apply.
they just duplicate The Bush Maneuver..."its for National Security".
I've noticed that many people on Slashdot are too "sophisticated" to be "taken in" by the idea that monitoring communications with known terrorists* has anything to do with national security.
* That is terrorists of the "blow up people with bombs" variety.
Not quite.
try declaring yourself a member of Al-Qaeda in the USA and see how long it takes before you are detained (or carted off to Guantanamo Bay).
Sort of like disclosing yourself as a Gestapo agent during WW2? Who would have thought that might be a problem? I see what you mean though, look at what happened to this Hezbollah supporter just a couple of weeks ago, just before anniversary of 9/11. It does seem so unfair, doesn't it? (Wait a second... that Hezbollah supporter was studying to be a doctor. Weren't there some other doctors recently involved in a terrorist attack at the Glasgow airport? Or am I confusing that with the terrorist Scot convicted in Glasgow who was going to attack Canada? As if the Canadians needed help with growing terrorists.) It is almost unbelievable that some people think that we should be trying to prevent terrorist attacks instead of cleaning up the bodies afterwards! I mean, the very idea of monitoring communications to known terrorists (known for blowing up people, not for voting for Democrats)!
Keep up. Your head of state declared two years ago that "[the U.S. Constitution]'s just a goddamned piece of paper!"
Isn't the source for that supposed quote the partisan organ Capital Hill Blue in the section labeled "The Rant"? In "The Rant" that supposedly exposes that "quote", it opines:
Hmmmm. Call me skeptical, but I'm not going to rely upon Capital Hill Blue's "Rant" section to be an impartial reporter on the matter. For all we really know, President Bush may have been quoting Judge Bryant who had passed away just weeks before and Capital Hill Blue may have left out the bits that didn't fit with its political agenda.
If it got out that President Bush was quoting and honoring a distinguished African American Judge who had a well known devotion to Constitutional law, well.... the damage to the racist Bushitler fascist line would be considerable. Can't have that.
And whatever you do... don't mention the war.
The USA's that remain are to a man, people who enforced caging lists, voter roll purges, and brought politically motivated cases timed for greatest effect at the polls. The calls of voter fraud was just a cover for their own illegal acts.....
From IMDB entry for "A Few Good Men":
This movie also happens to be the source of the often heard line uttered by Jack Nicholson: "You can't handle the truth!"
How fitting.
I think the rest of your post is of equal quality to your description of "A Few Good Men".
I wouldn't stand by and acquiesce to illegal activities, why should they be allowed to, irrespective of who asked?
Maybe because it isn't illegal? A warrant isn't required for everything done by law enforcement.
In fact, the admission that they have to spend an additional 200 hours gathering evidence is a clear admission of wrongdoing on their part.
No, it is a clear statement of the overhead of dealing with lawyers, procedures and documentation, courts, classified data, and multiple layers of review.
Really?
Do you care to read up on the hoops you actually have to jump through to get a FISA warrant? Search for "928" and start reading at line 14.
Testimony of F.B.I. Agent Harry Samit in the Zacarias Moussaoui Trial
The judge might be able to "easily" approve the warrant, but the data collection, procedural safeguards, and general administrative overhead is a considerable burden. Compounding the problem is that people keep trying to expand the requirement for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to get a warrant when it isn't Constitutionally required.
Testimony of F.B.I. Agent Harry Samit in the Zacarias Moussaoui Trial
So 200 hours could mean that someone entered something onto a screen in a computer system in five minutes and it was done.
I doubt that there is much of anything useful involving either classified data or the courts that you could do in 5 minutes. Combine the two and guess what happens?
Either way, I think this is a number used to create an impression rather than to convey any meaningful information.
The number is both meaningful and it should create an impression: there is tremendous overhead to the classified warrant system. From that you might conclude that forcing the use of warrants when they aren't legally required is a bad thing that wastes resources, eats up precious time, reduces the effectiveness of surveillance, and generally makes it harder to deal with terrorists trying to kill us.
And the need for funding, published articles, reputation, tenure, peer-pressure, research assistants / graduate students,
It is harder to get most of the above if you are swimming against the tide of current thinking, especially for politically charged subjects, or ones tainted by association with cranks, or ones that require a major paradigm shift.
Thank you for your service.
There is no war. War is a legal term, with a defined enemy, defined conditions for a win/loss, recognizable leadership structure for the enemy, etc. War has to be decalred against a nation-stare War can olny be declared by Congress.
You don't know what you are talking about on this one. We are at war, no, it doesn't have to be a nation-state, and who are all those Al Qaeda leaders we keep killing in the "Al Qaeda in Iraq" organization?
There is no defined conditions for winning or losing (or even a "screw you, I am going home!" situation).
The war on terror is like the "war on drugs"....
No, it's not. The "war on drugs" is a metaphor, not a literal war. The "war on terror", or more accurately the war against the Islamist extremist terrorists is a real war. The secret to telling the difference is that tank main gun rounds, 2,000 pound bombs, 155mm artillery rounds, Marine regiments and Army brigades are being used to fight the war on terror. You don't see that in the war on drugs where the main weapons are snappy slogans, the occasional shotgun, and a couple of squad cars of police. As a freebie... aircraft carriers are not used in the "war" on poverty either, just the war on terror.
Could you include: The act of vandalising ships cargos by throwing them into the harbour?
... joining and voting for the "wrong" party in elections.
Nope. Civil disobedience.
The idea that it is the right & duty of every citizen to throw off an oppressive government?
Nope. Depending on your circumstances, that is either voting or revolution. (Revolution is still considered illegal by government, but it is not the same thing as terrorism.)
Or perhaps the idea that kharma can take a long time to resolve...
Nope. Hinduism.
You don't really seem to have a firm grasp about this terrorism thing at all. Why not try to keep on firm ground and start with thinking about the basics, like truck bombs in shopping malls, and kidnappings followed by beheading, and then branch out from there? That will prevent you from going down dead ends (so to speak) of thinking that terrorism is involved in finding too much fat in canned food, or offensive lyrics in music, or a politician voting to raise the VAT, or voting to decrease funds for college aid, or cutting the tags off from pillows, or even
First, "terrorist" means radical Islam.
Next, "terrorist" means minority party.
So what you are telling us is that you are unable to distinguish in a meaningful way between:
Voting to ban littering versus kidnapping someone and cutting off their head
Voting to raise sales tax 0.3% versus exploding a chlorine bomb in a shopping mall
Voting to change automobile safety standards versus using a sniper rifle to kill an MP
Voting to regulate off-shore oil wells versus using an electric drill on someone's head before shooting them
Voting to limit the national debt versus blowing up an airliner in flight
Voting for trade sanctions versus stabbing someone to death for renouncing your religion
Words fail me.
How does the government treat your car on the highway? Can they read the license plate? Can they stop it? Can they inspect it? Can they look through the windows? Can they open it up and search it? Can disassemble it to search it?
What about your bags when you travel by air? Can they look at those? Can they open them? Can they search them? Can they open things in the bag and search them? Can they turn on your laptop? Can they search you?
Just curious.
INDEPTH: TORONTO BOMB PLOT
Canada faces 'jihad generation'
But it will certainly stop all those fat old geezers looking at their hand-drawn child-porn cartoons, otherwise they would go right out and abduct all of our children. Think of the children!!!
Child porn ring busted - At least 10 of 40 arrested in Canada
While I agree that the sick-in-the-head "Sociopathic Authoritarian" syndrome is by no means confined to the Conservative Party, there is no such thing as a "balanced solution" when an ability to conduct automated mass surveilance of citizens is concerned. And let's not kid ourselves here, this is precisely the Holy Grail of both police forces and the "intelligence" communities.
Equally spot on.
No, you care if YOU or a loved one dies in a terrorist bombing, and you care if YOUR kid gets raped and photographed by some perv. Spare me the bleeding heart.
And the number one sign that you just might be a narcissist is....