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Posted on 05/20/2015 10:15:08 AM PDT by Jack Black
S. 356, the Electronic Communications Act Privacy Act Amendments Act of 2015, starts out well but ends badly. S. 356 is purportedly written to cure a defect in existing law that government may access our e-mails that are 18 months or older without a warrant from a judge. That's a little bit of bait and switch, though, since the bill authorizes government agencies to skip the requirement of going to a judge by unilaterally issuing judge-less warrants.
The bill claims that it protects privacy, which is all well and good. E-mails, though, are private property even if held in the cloud. The Fourth Amendment expressly protects private property and requires government to show probable cause under oath and affirmation to a neutral judge before it may search or seize private property. Our privacy is protected when government may not search or seize our private property without a judge-issued warrant, which may be issued only upon solid grounds that a law may have been broken.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Kind of an odd group of Senators supporting this. Mike Lee, normally a very reliable conservative, is the author. It's an odd mix of supporters: some of the biggest libs in the Senate: Leahy, Wyden, Durbin, Merkley, Blumentahl, Al Franken ... then your typical RINOs: Roberts and Cornyn, but then also Ted Cruz and Mike Lee. Ted singed up only recently. Rubio and Paul are not supporters at this time.
The bill has been referred to the Judiciary Committee.
The full bill is available here.
The list of cosponsors, from the above link:
Sen. Leahy, Patrick J. [D-VT]*
Sen. Cornyn, John [R-TX]*
Sen. Moran, Jerry [R-KS]*
Sen. Gardner, Cory [R-CO]*
Sen. Shaheen, Jeanne [D-NH]*
Sen. Merkley, Jeff [D-OR]*
Sen. Blumenthal, Richard [D-CT]*
Sen. Coons, Christopher A. [D-DE]
Sen. Roberts, Pat [R-KS]
Sen. Booker, Cory A. [D-NJ]
Sen. Wyden, Ron [D-OR]
Sen. Franken, Al [D-MN] 02/23/2015
Sen. Heinrich, Martin [D-NM] 02/25/2015
Sen. Vitter, David [R-LA]
Sen. Markey, Edward J. [D-MA]
Sen. Durbin, Richard [D-IL]
Sen. Daines, Steve [R-MT]
Sen. Cruz, Ted [R-TX]
Ted Cruz sighting.
Terrorists apparently save messages in the “Drafts” folder of their webmail accounts, and other terrorists log-in and read them using the same password.
So this legislation will be effective in combatting terrorism WHY exactly??
A legislation passed by idiots,
Full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Many draft folders are stored on cloud servers. Nothing much these days on computers can escape viewing. Even disconnecting from the internet is not what it seems as many routers and wifi wireless connections can be turned on secretly without anyone noticing. Even old computers with ethernet only connections are not immune from viewing because to communicate over the internet, they must first come online and connect.
The terrorism threat is real and is a result of our awful immigration and visa system which stem all the way back to the 1965 Immigration Act.
Immigration failures have led to encroachments on our constitutional rights and many of these encroachments are warranted in some cases if we are to combat terrorism effectively. It’s a Catch-22.
But long term encroachment of our rights lead to erosion of those rights to the point that in the future such rights will be considered as not really rights at all, and therein lies the danger.
Therefore, we need to profile, locate and deport every illegal and terrorist suspect as a part of a larger war on terror to preserve not only our security but also our rights. Preservation of rights is tantamount as without them the idea that is America becomes a fable rather than a reality.
I’m reading a book right now called “American Terrorist” and they do the thing with posting a video of somebody’s family in their drafts folder and then open it up and show it to them on a laptop. It never actually gets sent.
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