Posted on 11/22/2002 9:53:46 AM PST by dts32041
Attorney General John Ashcroft is getting what he wants ? a totalitarian government free to spy on its citizens, destroy the first and fourth amendments of the Constitution and undermine the very foundations of the Republic.
Armed with ominous tools like the USA Patriot Act and the Pentagon?s Total Information Awareness System, Ashcroft and his legions are turning this country into a police state where every American is a file number, every citizen is a suspect and every action a reason for suspicion.
Even worse, a lot of supposedly-smart people down at 1600 Pennsylvania are letting this airhead get away this rampant destruction of the Constitution and individual rights.
Ashcroft became attorney general because he couldn?t hold on to a job on his own. Elected to the Senate in 1994, he lost to the very dead Mel Carnahan in 2000, leaving the Senate with a 50-50 tie before Jim Jeffords bolted and put Tom Daschle in charge. Instead of a 51-49 margin that could have survived Jeffords? decision to split, we got Carnahan?s wife in a Senate version of affirmative action. Two years later, Jim Talent did what Ashcroft couldn?t do ? win the seat at the ballot box.
So Dubya caved in to conservatives who wanted Ashcroft in Washington, even if the voters of Missouri did not, and named him attorney general, a move that had most legal scholars shaking their head. Everybody knew Ashcroft as a bad senator, but the legal community also knew he was a lousy lawyer with Draconian views on long-standing American traditions of individual rights, privacy and due process.
Most expected Ashcroft to be a short timer but most didn?t expect Osama bin Laden to send his goons to the U.S. to hijack American airliners and crash them into buildings. In the wake of 9-11, anger has replaced reason, the need for revenge overshadows judgment and the John Ashcrofts of the world now have carte blanche to ride roughshod over the very freedoms that bin Laden and his thugs wanted to destroy all along.
Ashcroft has emerged as a power in the Bush Administration because he is willing to do what others find both unthinkable and unacceptable ? tear up the Constitution and unleash the massive information gathering capability of the federal government on average American citizens.
The attorney general is a zealot and zealots are always dangerous ? even if they are supposed to play on your side of the fence.
Since 9-11, Ashcroft has expanded the ability of the U.S. Department of Justice to spy on ordinary Americans, authorizing more wiretaps and surveillance than any attorney general in modern times.
He has authorized the creation of massive databases to track American gun owners, American travel and the day-to-day financial transactions of all Americans. The new databases will allow Uncle Sam to know how much money you have in the bank, how you spend it, where you go on any given day of the week, what guns you own, what cars you drive and when and where you buy gas, groceries or condoms.
?This brings back the old days of Hoover and his personal hit lists,? says retired FBI agent Alan Matthews. ?Most of us had hoped those days were long gone.?
Terrorism succeeds when the victims of terrorists change their way of life, when fear dictates policy and hatred replaces reason. Terrorism wins when freedom becomes secondary to the cause.
Welcome to John Ashcroft?s America. It ain?t the America envisioned by the founding fathers in the past but, sadly, it is the America of the future.
Since you are the one telling folks to read the law, perhaps you can point out in the law where this is authorized.
Fortunately, there is doubt. First of all, the DOJ proposed a problematic database with TIPS, but the public rose up against it, and the HSA finally killed off that program once and for all - so public pressure is quite effective in killing off these measures (hint, hint). And second, I simply cannot see how this database would be effective - just way too much data, it'll be like trying to take a drink of water from an open fire hydrant, and that, when coupled with the general incompetence of the feds, would keep any such database from achieving its goals.
By the way a while back we were discussing Atta's meeting in Prague. Since then I've been corresponding with the editor of one of the papers in Prague about the truth or lack of in that report.
Basically what he told me was, it's fifty fifty and if that changes he'll get back to me.
I have never understood why many conservatives and Constitutionalists have no problem with a GOP government gathering data on private citizens and potentially violating their Fourth Amendment. However, if a Democrat were to demand the same governmental powers the same people would be outraged. Perhaps, it just feels better when a Republican is trampling your Constitutional Rights!
Dang. You must live near me, I saw the same thing :o)
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c107:h.r.2975:
http://www.ccr-ny.org/whatsnew/usa_patriot_act.asp
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=11854
...Even Internet Service Providers, universities and network administrators are authorized under the new law to conduct surveillance of "computer trespassers" without a court order. The new law compels any Internet provider or telephone company to turn over customer information, including phone numbers called, without a court order, if the FBI claims that the records are relevant to a terrorism investigation. The company is forbidden to disclose that the FBI is conducting an investigation, has immunity to provide any sensitive data and is not bound by statutory rights to suppress the information. "There is no incentive for anyone to know about it, or challenge it or rein it in," says Dempsey. ...
http://www.cdt.org/security/010911response.shtml
Just to lay out a few....
As an official hostess at the Koolaid Bistro, let me just say that writing and posting such over-the-top, alarmist propaganda about an agency, an AG and a President will buy you the credibility of a post when a real threat to our liberties comes along.
The TIA doesn't exist and when/if it does it will belong to the Pentagon. The other nonsense you've toggled together in the Joe Conason-like hit piece, I'll let others correct...the smell on this thread is making me queasy.
His main attitude was that these new authorities given to Ashcroft are necessary given our war against Al Quaida, and if history is any guide, will not become a permanent fixture. All in all he was pretty sanguine about the whole thing.
That is not a cite of a section from H.R. 5710, so I have no way of verifying that claim. William Safire made similar claims that the HSA would gather every credit card transaction and medical record in the country and place it into a central database. He was full of it - DARPA is not part of this bill, and the bill does not provide the financial, logistical or legal mechanisms for such an endeavor, and no such provisions have been passed in other bills.
I am in the process of reading this entire bill. Some of the provisions that were mentioned above could well be part of the Patriot Act instead of HSA, and I intend to start researching that next to see what sections folks should work against for eventual modification or elimination.
First of all, at this point TIA is just a glimmer in Poindexter's eye. Second, it is just as vulnerable as TIPS was to public pressure for Congress to kill it - as Congress killed TIPS with Section 880 of HSA. And third, in my professional opinion it won't work as intended - the main danger of such a database is that the data modeling aspects will be abandonded, but it could be abused as a lookup database.
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