Posted on 12/03/2001 10:00:13 PM PST by Mercuria
Even in the worst of times, there's always something to be grateful for, a silver lining in the darkest cloud. For my part, I'm grateful the attacks and the events after it didn't happen while Bill Clinton was in office. Clinton was fundamentally in love with power. As he did after the bombing in Oklahoma City, and school shootings, he would have taken advantage of the deaths of other Americans for his own political advancement. In an example of extreme hypocrisy, his backers would call his grubby exploitation honoring the dead, and would accuse anyone who disagrees of having no concern for the loss of life. I've never understood the attitude that the way to memorialize the dead is by giving up freedom, the thing that makes us Americans. All I can say is, I'm glad Republicans don't have that attitude.
Picture what Clinton might have done, through crass political manipulation of the crisis. It would have been an excuse for a federal power grab. I'd imagine that he would get laws passed making it legal for his jack-booted thugs to search homes without even telling the person whose property is searched. He's the kind of dangerous politician to have done that, and more. He might have gone further, letting federal law enforcement track what content a person accesses over the internet, and, in his boundless desire to have unlimited authority over ordinary people, he might have required a lower standard of proof than probable cause. Maybe the only requirement would be that it's relevant to an investigation. I'm glad Bush is in office instead.
In 1998, the Clinton administration released plans to implement a set of regulations called "Know Your Customer", which would have required banks to determine the sources of customers' funds, track their transactions, and report anything considered unusual. The reports would be investigated by something called FinCEN, which would keep the records around for the feds to snoop through, regardless of whether there was any evidence of a crime. The whole idea was abandoned after a public outcry. Bill Clinton thus showed himself to be an enemy of financial privacy, and given what we know about his unscrupulousness he wouldn't have hesitated to exploit the situation to resume his attack. Maybe he would have revived Know Your Customer, or maybe he would have attacked privacy some other way. Maybe he would have made all retailers follow the rules banks already follow under the misnamed Bank Secrecy Act.
On that subject, that Democrats give their bills gimmicky, misleading names has always annoyed me. It's as if they know that political truth in advertising would undo them. If the Bank Secrecy Act had been called the Spy Bank Accounts Act, nobody would have voted for it. Clinton probably would've bundled all of it together in a single bill with a gimmick name like the "Patriot Act". I'm glad the honorable man in the White House now would never do something like that.
Beyond Clinton himself, there was his authoritarian Attorney General, Janet Reno. The Butcher of Waco would have plunged headlong into whatever tyranny she thought she could get away with. That was her nature, seeing no reason not to have a police state and every reason to have one, and thus subjugating ordinary people to official thuggery every time she could. By now she might have hundreds of people held incommunicado in jail, without charges, and in secret. The worst fears of the black helicopter crowd would be coming true. That woman, I tell you, had no respect whatsoever for our basic legal traditions. She might even have gotten the FBI to spy on political and religious organizations, creating the opportunity for purely political investigations like J. Edgar Hoover used to have.
But maybe I've taken it too far. Even if she wanted to, the public would never stand for that. War or not, there would be enough public complaint to stop that. And even if the public is too complacent, at least we now have good men in office, who would never take advantage of that kind of complacency.
So since Carnivore isn't a person, you have no issue with the public messages being read by it. Good. Progress.
You think the government has a big system set up to read everyone's e-mails, but no actual person ever sees it? Sheesh.
The government has had a system set up to read every packet of data traffic on the Internet since the FIRST day DARPANET's interconnection project went live. This is due to the technical need to recieve every packet, read every packet, decode the IP address in the header of every packet, process the IP address and then transmit the packet. People are very peripheral to this entire technical-level equation. Sure, some people see some raw packets every day, but most do not. Nonetheless, for all practical purposes every message is read in its entirity by government machines and never seen by humans.
Early Carnivore software might have just flashed a message that IP XXX had transmitted a message with the keyword "bomb" in it. The human might just see the IP address and the keyword, for all that you know.
And hey, you admitted that it doesn't bother you for machines to read and process public messages (this is actually MANDATORY for the Internet to even work in the first place, after all), so it really isn't an issue what those machines do with those messages, right?!
Yes, it is an issue.
- Don't hold your breath waiting
Especially if you're in a secret jail cell unable to speak to a lawyer.
"Yes, and doesn't matter. The issue is having them read by people."
"Yes, it is an issue."
I sense a contradiction coming along soon...
Which is why we must always be on our guard.
Clinton was an evil man. A man that raped both a defenseless woman and a trusting Nation. I'm sure you know that, so I can only assume that this piece was intended to place President Bush in the same light...how sad.
The point is to put the domestic legislation Bush pushed through on in the same light it would be in if Clinton pushed it through. Bush himself doesn't have to be evil to have extremely bad policies. Be honest: if Clinton had done this, would you be against it?
You just can't admit when you're wrong, much less when you contradict yourself.
Who has been denied an attorney?
Please excuse, but I have a REALLY TOUGH TIME believing that.
REALLY tough.
Considering you lost a family member in the atrocity of 9/11, I can understand your feelings about our security and your rather acerbic feelings towards someone who does not look upon such a move as the "Patriot" Act as a legitimate security measure.
I am indeed very sorry that you lost loved ones to the actions of the terrorists, and apologize if I seemed insensitive to that, but your primary dialogue with me on this board was to question the veracity of contributors to my site re: their OPINIONS on issues, as well as my "truth in advertising" as it were.
That doesn't make you any less deserving of condolences for your loss, but it might bring into better light that, with your reaction to Mr. Armitage's opinions on certain actions by our Administration and my reaction to your backhanded implication that those columnists on my site (who love America and ARE patriots) are something more sinister, emotions are getting rubbed pretty raw around here.
I don't blame Mr. Armitage for being cynical about the implementation of the "Patriot" Act. This idea was lying around for MONTHS (like from January!), with those supporting it just waiting for something like 9/11 to happen so that those who are looking to increase the power (and let's be frank, the possible ABUSE) of Federal Government could play upon the fears of someone exactly in your situation to cram it through without comment from the public, without hindrance from the President...and hell, without even READING it themselves.
And considering the Feds admitted they knew the 9/11 attack was being planned for quite some time, it's rather tough for me and others NOT to be cynical about This Magic Solution suddenly popping up as The Answer To All Our Problems. "We're from the government and we're here to help you", as the old joke goes.
I'm POSITIVE if President Clinton signed something like this under such circumstances, the red warning lights would have been flashing like Rudolf's nose on Christmas Eve 'round these parts.
As to the current conflict (or war, whatever you want to call it)...I say find the bastards who did this and who assisted them, put them down, and then bring our troops home. No "nation-building" aftermath, if you please.
I think we've discovered over the past few years that too many of these people we've assisted in the past usually wind up NOT appreciating it.
And we've got more important things to do at home than set up future, dangerous foreign ingrates into positions of power.
- Who has been denied an attorney?
Aside from a the few with lawyers complaining about no ability to see their clients, it is hard to say since they won't tell us who is being secretly held.
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