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The cynic in me is this morning thinking that 22 Democrats voted to confirm John Roberts as Chief Justice, and 4 Democrats (enough to kill Kerry's filibuster) voted to confirm Samuel Alito as Associate Justice, mainly so that they'd be able to argue now, in 2008, that "ZOMG we need to elect a Democrat as President or there will soon be another judge just like these two on the Supreme Court! (And no we totally didn't help them get there.) You know what will happen then - women, kiss your right to choose goodbye!"

I can't help thinking this while wondering how the vote essentially legalizing the President's illegal wiretapping program from 2002-2006 is going in Congress right now, as i type.

Like i said to [livejournal.com profile] cowgrrl the other night, history is not going to look kindly on this period of American history. All along there have been people documenting the wrongs - the lies, the maneuvering, the approval of torture, the violation of civil liberties, the secret prisons, the gulag, the media's collusion, the congressional coverups, the profiteering. Unless there are going to be a lot of bookburnings in the near future, historians will have a clear and solid record of just how aware the American people were and are of what was going on. This means it won't just be Bush and his cronies whose legacy will be sullied; it won't just be the Democratic collaborators; it won't just be NewsMax and Fox and Halliburton and KBR; it will be the entire American society.

ETA: HR 6304 to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 passed with more Democrats voting YEA than NAY. You can see the roll call here. If it passes the Senate, it will grant the President the ability to basically write his own rules for wiretapping, and will instruct judges to dismiss any lawsuit brought against any telecommunications company for participating in an illegal wiretap if they can prove the President asked them to do it claiming he was looking for terrorists.
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In the "cartoonishly fascistic proclamations" department, we have this from Treasury Secretary John Snow, about a new program, reported about in several newspapers yesterday, to monitor millions of electronic financial transactions:

Snow told a news conference the program, run by the CIA and overseen by the Treasury Department, was "responsible government, it's effective government, it's government that works."

"It's entirely consistent with democratic values, with our best legal traditions," Snow said.
Snow said Congress had been briefed on the program. I feel safer knowing that, don't you?

holy crap!

May. 15th, 2006 02:13 pm
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A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we call in an effort to root out confidential sources.

"It's time for you to get some new cell phones, quick," the source told us in an in-person conversation.

ABC News does not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.

Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.

from the ABC News blog post Federal Source to ABC News: We Know Who You're Calling (thanks to [livejournal.com profile] pamscoffee for the link
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Our illustrious leader has been caught in another lie. After the Washington Post reported in December last year that the National Security Agency has been conducting warrantless surveillance on phone calls, he insisted that this only involved international calls. But it has now been revealed that the NSA is watching domestic phone calls too.

His defense is to argue that domestic calls are not being listened to. But still, it's not immediately obvious why the NSA would need to keep a database of this information, when phone companies are able to produce this information on demand.

Yesterday it was revealed that the NSA has a massive database logging the details of many millions of domestic calls made within the US, with information provided to them (again, without warrants or court supervision) by major phone companies. [livejournal.com profile] zarq has an excellent rundown of the situation here, including some good information on how the Department of Justice has been blocked from investigating the legality of warrantless wiretaps.
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I've been waiting for the moment when President Bush, in front of a national television audience, pulls off his mask to reveal red skin and horns underneath. He will then crown himself emperor. In solidarity with this, other Republicans will reveal their demonic visages as well, and their Democratic acolytes will don dark robes and conduct sacrifice and black mass to their Satanic Majesty. No longer will we have to put up with lies and innuendos and spin, and the pretense of nominal 'opposition'; there will finally be no way anyone could say our republic has not been hijacked.

This may actually be more or less what is happening right now. It started with the "signing statement" Bush added when he signed the 2005 Defense Appropriations bill plus the McCain Detainee Amendment. The signing statement said, more or less, that Bush is going to authorize torture whenever he wants, no matter what the law says.

Then, there came the "wiretap scandal," in which it was revealed that over the last four years, President Bush signed off 30 times on an NSA program whereby the NSA listened in on an unknown number of conversations without seeking a warrant to do so. The FISA law, which went into effect in 1978, has a provision that allows warrantless wiretapping for a short period of time (less than 72 hours). 72 hours is plenty of time to send someone down to the FISA court, where a warrant for wiretapping is quick (it can be obtained within minutes) and virtually guaranteed. So, the excuse offered by the White House (that, gasp!, we may need to *immediately* listen to a terrorist's phone call) falls apart completely. There is literally no excuse for warrantless wiretapping beyond 72 hours... unless... unless there's a good chance that these are situations where even the notoriously rubber-stamping FISA court would refuse to sign off. Combine this with the revelation that the technology exists for computers to "data mine" for calls to 'suspicious' locations, or to scan large numbers of phone conversations for key words, and you have a pretty dark scenario indeed.

Now, Attorney General Gonzales is putting forth the argument that renewal of the USAPATRIOT Act may not be necessary for certain kinds of domestic spying to proceed anyway. Frankly, they don't care what the law says; can they put it any more bluntly than they have?

Lastly, and this is the one that prompted this journal entry (and thanks to [livejournal.com profile] merlot_waters for bringing this to my attention): the USAPATRIOT Act "Improvement and Reauthorization Act" proposes the creation of a new branch of the Secret Service empowered to arrest people for "offenses against the United States" or misbehaving at "special events of national significance." Could they be any more vague? How safe do you feel knowing that the Supreme Court will very soon be stacked with at least five people willing to let Bush & company define those vague terms however they damn well please?

Do you think the mask is starting to come off? I'm going to look for hints of horns or reddish skin at the State of the Union address.
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Argh, i don't trust 'em as far as i can throw 'em, neither Democrats nor Republicans. On matters of domestic spying and privacy and governmental war powers, there's barely any difference between them at all.

When President Bush last week signed the bill outlawing the torture of detainees, he quietly reserved the right to bypass the law under his powers as commander in chief.

After approving the bill last Friday, Bush issued a "signing statement" -- an official document in which a president lays out his interpretation of a new law -- declaring that he will view the interrogation limits in the context of his broader powers to protect national security. This means Bush believes he can waive the restrictions, the White House and legal specialists said.

"The executive branch shall construe [the law] in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President . . . as Commander in Chief," Bush wrote, adding that this approach "will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President . . . of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks."

... David Golove, a New York University law professor who specializes in executive power issues, said that the signing statement means that Bush believes he can still authorize harsh interrogation tactics when he sees fit.

"The signing statement is saying 'I will only comply with this law when I want to, and if something arises in the war on terrorism where I think it's important to torture or engage in cruel, inhuman, and degrading conduct, I have the authority to do so and nothing in this law is going to stop me,'" he said. "They don't want to come out and say it directly because it doesn't sound very nice, but it's unmistakable to anyone who has been following what's going on."

from Bush Could Bypass New Torture Ban
Two Republicans and a Democrat are responsible for this piece of work:

The Bush administration notified federal trial judges in Washington that it would soon ask them to dismiss all lawsuits brought by prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, challenging their detentions, Justice Department officials said Tuesday.

The action means that the administration is moving swiftly to take advantage of an amendment to the military bill that President Bush signed into law last Friday. The amendment strips federal courts from hearing habeas corpus petitions from Guantánamo detainees.

... Although the courts and Congress are co-equal branches of government, the Constitution allows Congress to define the scope of jurisdiction for all federal courts below the Supreme Court.

from U.S. to Seek Dismissal of Guantánamo Suits
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Of course we need extraordinary renditions, torture, secret prisions, suspension of habeas corpus, roving wiretaps, monitoring of library book activity, repeal of posse comitatus, cameras everywhere, infiltration of dissident or protest organizations, "sneak and peek", monitoring of email and web usage, domestic spying by the FBI and NSA (without warrants or judicial oversight, which 'takes too long'), the no-fly list, intrusive airline security, walls at the US borders with Mexico and Canada, racial profiling, and continuous encouragement of citizens to spy on their suspicious neighbors.

We need those things to PROTECT OUR FREEDOM!!
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How did we wind up with a Congress stocked with people of unusually dim wit? "Duh, NO ONE could have foreseen that the FBI would misuse the USAPATRIOT Act!"
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Yesterday I started thinking that it's about time we start talking nationally about having an amendment to the US Constitution protecting individual privacy. It would buy us a few decades, perhaps.

I decided to poke around to see if other people are thinking similarly, and it turns out that some people are.

One reply to that post argues that the Fourth Amendment protection against "unreasonable searches and seizures" is sufficient. I disagree: that coverage does not deal at all with data-gathering by the government, the sharing of data between government and contractors, and so on. It does not deal with casual surveilance of city streets -- which, hey, may or may not be a bad thing, but let's discuss it before more cameras and satellites go up.

I'm disconcerted about the ways Americans (and our friends in Europe are even farther along than we are) are being step-by-step aclimatized to the idea of sharing information with anyone who asks, and allowing our habits and activities to be tracked by any business or government who seems to care. By ceding our privacy we are taking it on faith that no one will ever abuse what they have on us; human history suggests this is a poor risk to take.
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The death of checks presages a cashless society in which employers wire salaries to workers' bank accounts via direct deposit, who in turn pay bills online and use debit cards--which account for over 20 percent of all non-credit transactions--at shops and restaurants. The next obvious step, some future politician will reason, will be to eliminate cash.

Once legitimate money flows digitally, after all, all cash will be used the way most $100 bills are today--for drug sales and other illegal activities. Economists Friedrich Schneider and Dominik Enste estimate that between 6.7 and 13.9 percent of our gross domestic product was generated by the American "underground economy"--transactions conducted in cash--in 1990, the last year for which such data was available. Whether you're selling your futon on Craigslist or moving ten kilos of Afghan heroin, the I.R.S. wants its piece of the action.

Going after tax cheats seems reasonable. But the cure would be worse than the current "lost" government revenue. You have ample cause to fear a cashless America even if you're strictly legit. As Islamic charities learned after 9/11, bank accounts can be frozen by a government acting against its political opponents. Credit and debit cards can be deactivated at a keystroke. Politicians of the future will find the power to instantly impoverish anyone, anywhere, for any reason, irresistible. And consolidation makes an online banking account ultimately vulnerable to such attacks. Your cellular provider, landlord and travel agent are scattered across the country, currently known only to you. Now it would take time and effort for a government agency to find them to cut you off. Not so if you pay your bills online.

Of course, there's no reason to worry if you trust all politicians and government agencies, including those not yet conceived, appointed or elected, to do the right thing. Oh, sure, the Social Security guys just admitted giving away "secret" information to HomeSec goons, no warrant requested. But that was just a fluke. Go on, do whatever they tell you. Keep pointing and clicking--and save those 37-cent stamps.

from CHECKING OUT
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Its supporters say that the Real ID Act is necessary to hinder terrorists, and to follow the ID card recommendations that the 9/11 Commission made last year.

It will "hamper the ability of terrorist and criminal aliens to move freely throughout our society by requiring that all states require proof of lawful presence in the U.S. for their drivers' licenses to be accepted as identification for federal purposes such as boarding a commercial airplane, entering a federal building, or a nuclear power plant," Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican, said during the debate Thursday.


Considering that most of the terrorist attacks in US history have been done by American citizens (for example, Oklahoma City and the Atlanta Olympic Games bombing), exactly how is a national ID card going to protect us against terrorists?

Thanks to [livejournal.com profile] dandycat for the link above.
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Six times over the last several months, Nat Heatwole smuggled box cutters, bleach, knives, and clay (to simulate plastic explosive) onto airliners. Upon his arrest he described his actions as 'an act of civil disobedience with the aim of improving public safety for the air-traveling public.'

What he demonstrated more than anything else, is that civil liberties cannot be traded for security.

I particularly liked Ted Rall's commentary on the matter. He wrote,

I flew from Ohio to New York the day after Nat Heatwole's perp walk. At Dayton International Airport, where three TSA screeners were recently fired for harassing an AirTrans pilot for FWS (flying while swarthy), America's first line of defense against terrorism was furiously wanding a terrified three-year-old in a pink dress who'd been pulled from the line for a random check. "That's funny," the guy behind me smiled as they made the girl stretch her little arms out to the side.

Osama thinks so too.
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To be honest, I'm not terribly worried about Matrix.

I've worked in the IT industry and can make a reasonable guess that officials were sold on the system by a team using a highly-scripted, very limited, barely functional "mock-up" of what the system "will" do once it is "complete."

A product of this scope must surely suffer from massive amounts of mission creep as well. The mission for even a simple product like the management system for a small office creeps so much it often takes years to develop something that should take a month or so.

Still, something like Matrix is probably an inevitability.

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