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.
Seeing a difference between humans and computers is a contradiction in terms? LOL
I don't doubt you'll continue to act as if no one had ever thought of such a distinction.
What else am I supposed to make of #98?
One word to you:
Manzanar
Your smugness does you no good in the process. It makes you appear like an average politician tap-dancing around specific questions rather than answering them.
BTTT
Probably, but that wasn't what I was trying to convey. I was trying to show that it is a contradiction in philosophy to be OK with some government machines/software reading your specific internet data traffic (as they must do to determine where to correctly route your data packets or to even diagnose technical problems which are unrelated to you or your data), but not OK with other government software/machines reading your internet data traffic (say, with software like Carnivore).
Having a problem with government software examining open, unencrypted data traffic on the information super-hiway is akin to having a problem with police offices watching your car travel a public interstate hiway. You seem to be OK with one but not the other.
Precisely. That was my point. It matters which person is in there, not the generic principle that the kid either can or can't be allowed into that place.
So now you're telling me the purpose of the software doesn't matter. LOL, again.
I've noticed a pattern. You come up with a point you think is clever, and then it has to be painfully spoonfed to you past a wall of non-comprehension why it isn't. And then you ask the other guy why he doesn't admit he was wrong, usually just before the exact point you ought to admit that.
On the above, that's NOT what I said. Now PAY ATTENTION.
What I said was, if you have a choice of letting whoever lives next door be alone with the little girl or not, without regard for who it is, and you know the guy next door is frequently replaced, and the last guy was a child molester, and there's a good chance that the next guy will be too, you decide not to let her be alone with the next door neighbor.
I that know with actual next door neighbors, you can let one be alone with the kids and not the next one. I also know that we don't have the option of letting one president have a particular power, but not the next one. If you let Bush have a particular power, and Hillery gets elected in 2004, she's going to have that power.
You see, in our system power doesn't go to particular persons, it goes to offices. We don't know who the next president will be, but we do know there will be a democrat in there eventually.
Now do you get, or should I use bolded all-caps?
"You're a lunatic."
And just why would I be a lunatic? I'd back off of the name calling, partner.
Because you think being this guy means winning. It doesn't, it mean being jaw-droppingly obtuse.
Means.
Yes, and I think that's a good example of why your blind adherence to principles over the person is wrongheaded. If Tiger Woods or Mr. Rogers moves in next door, you're going to throw out your former, generic "principled" policy of not letting your child go next door to see your neighbor; the policy that you had in place when your next door neighbor was a convicted child rapist, previously. You see, the person in question really does make a difference.
"I also know that we don't have the option of letting one president have a particular power, but not the next one. "
You mean like letting one President have the line item veto, briefly, but then no other President got it? Or like initiating a prohibition on alcohol during one or two administrations and then repealing that power for other administrations? Or like reigning in Presidential powers with something like the War Powers Act so that other Presidents didn't have the power that one President in particular had?
"Now do you get, or should I use bolded all-caps?"
Goodness, not the bolded CAPS treatment! No, anything but that! Logic, facts, and reason would actually be preferred, if you can find it in you for once.
Well, that's too generic of a statement for me to really want to get too far into, but no, the purpose of the software doesn't matter in regards to the question of whether or not the data traffic is in the public domain in the first place.
Either sniffers have a right to view your (and everyone else's) coincidental data packets while they are diagnosing technical problems AND other software on other machines have a similar right to examine data packets OR only the intended reciever of the data has the right to read packets (which would shut down the Internet because reading packets is REQUIRED for routing and technical diagnostics).
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