Posted on 06/09/2013 7:34:22 AM PDT by Kaslin
Some years ago, when tax simplification was being discussed, a cartoonist came up with the most likely way the IRS would achieve it: a postcard-sized 1040 form consisting of two lines: 1) How much did you make? 2) Send it in.
That's comparable to where Americans are headed when it comes to keeping private information away from the eyes of law enforcement, intelligence agencies and other government bodies. "Are there things you would prefer to keep secret?" the official inquiry will read. "Please provide a full list."
Actually, you already did. At least it's a fair possibility, considering that the National Security Agency has been requiring Verizon and other phone companies to turn over records of pretty much every call, domestic or overseas, going back to 2006.
If you've made a phone call in the past seven years, the NSA almost certainly is aware of it. It knows whom you called, how long you talked and maybe where you were. Seven years -- a period of serene, unbroken continuity between George W. Bush, who was correctly seen as an enemy of civil liberties, and Barack Obama, who was mistakenly taken (by me, among others) to be their friend.
Nor does the invasion necessarily end there. George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr noted that if NSA personnel "have an order for phone calls, they could also have it for emails and other electronic records." From all appearances, this may be the most far-reaching surveillance program ever conducted under our anti-terrorism laws.
But there's more. The Washington Post reported, "The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, emails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person's movements and contacts over time."
Though the program legally may target only foreigners abroad, U.S. citizens may become collateral damage. Unlike the phone records sweep, though, it reveals not only who is communicating but what they say.
Remind me why we have a Constitution? Because of its ban on unreasonable searches and seizures, the government normally can get a warrant to invade someone's home and papers only if it has tangible grounds to think the person did something illegal and only if it specifies what it's looking for. Searches require what lawyers refer to as individualized suspicion.
In dissenting from a recent Supreme Court decision allowing police to take DNA swabs from felony arrestees, Justice Antonin Scalia noted some relevant history. "At the time of the Founding, Americans despised the British use of so-called 'general warrants' -- warrants not grounded upon a sworn oath of a specific infraction by a particular individual, and thus not limited in scope and application." The Fourth Amendment was intended to prevent such warrants.
The logic of Scalia's conclusion applies as well here: "Solving unsolved crimes is a noble objective, but it occupies a lower place in the American pantheon of noble objectives than the protection of our people from suspicionless law-enforcement searches."
Even experts who normally side with the government in anti-terrorism measures were taken aback by this voluminous dragnet. Brookings Institution scholar Benjamin Wittes noted that the law is supposed to allow the government to get only "foreign intelligence information" that is "relevant to an authorized investigation."
How, he wondered, is it "possible to regard metadata about all calls to and from a Domino's Pizza in Peoria, Ill., or all calls over a three-month period between two small businesses in Juneau, Alaska, as 'relevant' to an investigation to protect against terrorism"?
The obvious answer is that everything and everyone are relevant to everything, because anything could yield some clue that could conceivably solve some crime. But that view is the same one that justified those general warrants from King George III.
The problem with indiscriminate ransacking of homes and effects is not that it's ineffective in finding wrongdoing. It's that the innocent people should not be punished in the pursuit of the guilty. It's that the need to protect the safety of the public has to be balanced against preserving the privacy of the individual.
Obama thinks you really shouldn't worry about all this. A presidential spokesman offered the soothing assurance that the phone surveillance program "has been a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats."
That leaves just two nagging questions: Why should we believe you? And what have we lost?
Two simple questions to ask oneself.
1. Do I feel more endangered by a terrorist or by my Government?
2. What is the difference between a terrorist and my Government?
Answer to question one...the government.
Answer to question two....how the words are spelled.
The problem here is that it gives the President close to absolute power (an end to checks and balances).
A Supreme Justice doesn't agree, get the dirt on him.
The Director of the CIA has been a little independent...check him out for an affair or some other little secret.
Everyone in the country can be intimidated with something...if it's only something a family member might have done (or even have given the appearance of having done).
Under a decent president like Bush, no worries. But under Obama, who has shown a penchant for using dirt on his competitors, we are in deep trouble.
We should be discussing legal challenges to take down Prism and related programs. There are other, more direct ways to fight terrorism.
Our founders would have been shooting by now.
The battle against terrorism has morphed into a tool to be used by atheists and plutocrats against all that oppose them. Instilling fear and using it to control a population is a mark of a totalitarian regime. Perhaps there is time to rid ourselves of this menace before it is too late.
Our founder would have been shooting by now
And so should we ... And sooner than later it WILL be forced on us IMO
Do you see ANY outrage that would result in that actual overt acts against government employee or represenative?
I am referring to a series of actions such as referred to in Unintended Consequences.
Legal challenges. Support the whistleblowers. Demand disclosure. For once, I hope the media is infuriated and rises to the challenge.
Linda IS a terrorist.
Shooting my phone is unlikely to help.
They'd be hanging public officials by now.
And the Good Germans who work at these places.
Remember, Hitler never operated a single train. Never fired up a single oven.
All that was done by Good Germans.
If our ancestors had faced this kind of scrutiny, those “troublemakers” at Lexington and Concord would have all been rounded up the night before.
Paul weighs Supreme Court challenge to NSA surveillance programs http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3029196/posts
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