Ping
Any idea of the roll call vote?
If Dems disenfranchised the Trial Lawyer lobby, there must have been a reason other than economic...my guess is they were privy to intell that said...something is in the pipe.
Can’t have Obama looking weak on national security.
Too late..
Bill Requires All Credit Card Companies to Report ALL Transactions to the GovernmentHidden deep in Senator Christopher Dodd's 630-page Senate housing legislation is a sweeping provision that affects the privacy and operation of nearly all of America's small businesses. The provision, which was added by the bill's managers without debate this week, would require the nation's payment systems to track, aggregate, and report information on nearly every electronic transaction to the federal government.
As a guy who knows something about electronic communications and the law, I have to say this has been a great kabuki that the Rats and ACLU have been running for the lamestream (lazy, ignorant, low-IQ) press not to mention the impossibly thickheaded, near Neanderthal DUmmies.
Since it’s a top secret program, one has to infer certain practices and methods from what very little IS known. That’s not speculation, it’s just logical deduction.
First, there never was any “wiretapping”. Wiretapping is legally the interception of VOICE communications, which this program was never alleged to be.
Second, the program by ALL descriptions most closely resembles a “trap and trace” or “pen register” program, both of which have been used in America for many decades and traditionally ***receive the lowest level of judicial warrant scrutiny or review***!!!! Both programs collect only the numbers calling and being called, which most closely resembles the methods employed by the NSA in this case.
In point of fact, T&T and PR programs are generally taken by the courts to be de facto approvable because (a) they’re innocuous, (b) because SCOTUS ruled decades ago that **you don’t own your phone number**, and (c) by the mere act of making a telephone call you reveal that information to at least one and probably several third parties.
Bottomn line is that the NSA program was collecting sets of **phone numbers** not conversations, and mapping connections, frequency, locations of those numbers. If Achmed in Illinois has 200 phone calls from Afghanistan something is curious. If this guy in Munich get 5 calls daily from Pakistan, and sudddenly starts calling a number in Chicago (which had previously received calls from Iraq), the something might be up there.
The ACLU and the Rats have done a great job of muddying the waters and inflating the legal improprieties of the NSA programs, which are minimal to nonexistent. We can only assume that’s due to the simplicity and effectiveness of th program.
Didn’t a majority of the democrats, including the leadership, vote against this bill? Or was that the war funding?