181–190 of 199 posts
If this thinking, that "we will do anything to prevent another terrorist attack, including give up our liberties", is acceptable, then why isn't giving up guns acceptable to prevent the next school massacre?
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You could take the outcome as indication that the popular will is always thwarted -- I'm not here to convince you otherwise, and your wording indicates you are up on the soapbox (Augean stables, really?). There's no outer bound to cynicism. My interpretation is that a thousand votes in Florida would have swung the election, so Florida voters and abstainers were quite powerful indeed. Often it's hard to tell for sure…
I'm not terribly much in favor of mob rule in the first place, but even if I were, it wouldn't further enamor me to see events like the result of the 2000 election. Yes, a relative few voters in Florida found themselves, by accident of history, in possession of political power far outstripping what their numbers would suggest, but given that no one can either plan for or expect such historical accidents, how can they…
OK: once he got in office, it turned out that watching everyone seemed like a good idea. But here's the thing: it's unconstitutional. It's illegal. "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the…
This has been debunked to death. The issue isn't "houses, papers, and effects" not encompassing e-mail, but the "belonging to that person" aspect. Phone metadata doesn't "belong" to you. It belongs to your phone company. They generated it, they store it--you never even see it. It's also quite questionable how much of say your Facebook data "belongs" to you. Or your GPS location data. It's about you, but much or all o…
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So, if your analysis is correct... what do we do about it?
vote third party only
`"But they said his views have been shaped to a striking degree by the reality of waking up every day in the White House responsible for heading off the myriad threats he finds in his daily intelligence briefings.
`“When you get the package every morning, it puts steel in your spine,” said David Plouffe, the president’s longtime adviser. “There are people out there every day who are plotting....'
and then:
`Mr. Obama was surprised to learn after leaks by Edward J. Snowden...[we all know what]'
Every morning the president gets a propaganda dose from the very people he needs to reign in. OF COURSE they are going to tell him the sky is falling in and that they are the only ones holding it back. And since it's exciting and secret there is no cross check or balance.
He should be seizing the example of Snowdon's releases to realize that the books are being cooked. Instead he's been completely taken in by the briefing books. It's really no different from Joe Barton being taken in by BP.
Back in the Reagan era Alan Kay told me about his very short time as a white house advisor. Reagan's briefing book wasn't even a book, it was a three minute video. I'm sure it REALLY played up the Soviet threat, yet the security apparatus was as astonished as anyone else when the USSR collapsed.
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This has been debunked to death. The issue isn't "houses, papers, and effects" not encompassing e-mail, but the "belonging to that person" aspect. Phone metadata doesn't "belong" to you. It belongs to your phone company. They generated it, they store it--you never even see it. It's also quite questionable how much of say your Facebook data "belongs" to you. Or your GPS location data. It's about you, but much or all o…
No -- the FISC has ruled that the third party doctrine makes NSA spying legal. The Supreme Court has not ruled on mass metadata collection.
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This has been debunked to death. The issue isn't "houses, papers, and effects" not encompassing e-mail, but the "belonging to that person" aspect. Phone metadata doesn't "belong" to you. It belongs to your phone company. They generated it, they store it--you never even see it. It's also quite questionable how much of say your Facebook data "belongs" to you. Or your GPS location data. It's about you, but much or all o…
This is all true, but what if the government compels Facebook to hand over it's data about you? Clearly that is a violation of the fourth amendment?
If the government hacked into Facebook's servers and took the data, that would be a violation of Facebook's 4th amendment rights, but it still wouldn't be a violation of yours.
What's interesting is that the article suggests that Obama himself did not know extent of the NSA's activities. ("At the same time, aides said Mr. Obama was surprised to learn after leaks by Edward J. Snowden... just how far the surveillance had gone.") If that's true, it seems to indicate that Obama is not an overseer at all. Have our worst fears been confirmed? Is the NSA an unstoppable organization that reports to…
Both look bad for NSA and Obama, both should compel us to demand more transparency.
P.S. Some would say Snowden should have gone the sanctioned whistleblower route to bring this to the attention of the proper parties such as Pres. Obama. Personally I am not optimistic that that would have been effective. I believe Snowden has claimed trying to start conversations with superiors, and NSA claims he never did such a thing.
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A system that relies on all of it's constituents being informed and politically active in order to be successful is structurally unsound. This in my opinion is the true problem with our representational democracy. I am wary of blaming people who have difficulty day to day making ends meet for not caring enough about spying, etc.
I'm not sure the founding fathers could have predicted what laid in store for the country or the world. We have reached the point, I believe, where it is impossible to expect the majority of the population to be knowledgeable in all the various facets of running one of the most powerful countries in the world. Economics. Cultures. Science. These are all words which could be separated into thousands of sub-topics. You…
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Imagine a presidential candidate making promises and saying a lot of things that he believed in about spying and how the agencies involved should work. Then he gets into office and finds out that things are much worse than he could have possibly known before getting into office. Would you prefer he keep to the path he laid out in campaigning or deal with reality as it is, even if it goes against his beliefs? I try to…
Naivete is an arguable excuse for Obama's statements prior to his first election. But he continued his anti-surveillance rhetoric during his second campaign, and there is simply no explanation for that other than lying.