WASHINGTON, July 31 — Under pressure from President Bush, Democratic leaders in Congress are scrambling to pass legislation this week to expand the government’s electronic wiretapping powers.
Democratic leaders have expressed a new willingness to work with the White House to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to make it easier for the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on some purely foreign telephone calls and e-mail. Such a step now requires court approval.
It would be the first change in the law since the Bush administration’s program of wiretapping without warrants became public in December 2005.
In the past few days, Mr. Bush and Mike McConnell, director of national intelligence, have publicly called on Congress to make the change before its August recess, which could begin this weekend. Democrats appear to be worried that if they block such legislation, the White House will depict them as being weak on terrorism.
“We hope our Republican counterparts will work together with us to fix the problem, rather than try again to gain partisan political advantage at the expense of our national security,” Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, said in a statement Monday night...
Again, this begs the question of how information is handled in the 21st century. If you want to email your friend on the other side of town, or IM or ichat your brother in Tennessee, your message is routed through Canada. Or India. Or Mexico. Whereever the tubes are the clearest at the moment.
Making it, you know, indistinguishible from a furrin' message. From Terra'ists.
A real terrorist suspects they are being watched all the time, so it does no good to hide the fact you're watching them from government oversight.
What scares a mugger away? A cop in a uniform on the corner, or a perfectly blended undercover narc who most likely won't interfere with a mugging anyway because he's, you know, 'pozed to be watching.
If the DINOcrats wanted to fix the problem they'd be fighting Bu$hCo-Cheneyburton, instead of just trying to Chair their own Company takeover.
That statement earns me the ire of many of my progressive cohorts, who think we should all get behind the DINOcrats and just sign our Constitutional rights over to them to shred just like the Rethuglicans would do except nicer because, you know, we are...
Some how it's better when your gang does the banging, right?
... One obstacle to a deal this week is a disagreement between Democrats and the White House over how to audit the wiretapping of the foreign-to-foreign calls going through switches in the United States.
The Democrats have proposed that the eavesdropping be reviewed by the secret FISA court to make sure that it has not ensnared any Americans.
The administration has proposed that the attorney general perform the review, but Democrats are unwilling to give that kind of authority to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, who is under fire for what some lawmakers describe as his misleading testimony about the dismissals of federal prosecutors and the wiretapping program.
Mr. Gonzalez has insisted that a 2004 dispute between the White House and Justice Department officials that erupted in the hospital room of then Attorney General John Ashcroft related to other intelligence activities. On Sunday, The New York Times reported that the dispute centered on the data mining elements of the N.S.A.’s program, rather than on the eavesdropping, leaving open the possibility that Mr. Gonzalez had been legalistic in his testimony, but had technically not lied.
In a letter Tuesday to Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who is the ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Mr. McConnell seemed to confirm the Times account though the letter did not mention Mr. Gonzalez or his testimony.
The letter said that “shortly after 9/11, the president authorized the National Security Agency to undertake various intelligence activities designed to protect the United States from further terrorist attack. A number of these intelligence activities were authorized in one order.”
The letter adds that “one particular aspect of these activities, and nothing more, was publicly acknowledged by the president and described in December 2005, following an unauthorized disclosure.”
Abu Gonzo needs to go down and should not be in charge of this operation, which is more likely to track Dear Leader's political oppostition than real terrorists (you know, the real terrorists, the people operating out of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, only some of which are actually Arabs or Arabian or even Islamic).
But administered by secret court? Lack of open oversight is a really bad idea, an excuse for abuse seriously veiled by the criminal justice system. Not that HHHillary would ever do that. She's all on the side of goodness and sweetness and liteness.
1 comment:
The two party system is garbage. We just trade good cop and bad cop until the roles reverse and the game begins again. I also agree, I think the democrats don’t care about what the republicans are doing, they just care because they want to do it their way instead. But in the end it will be more of the same.
Two party’s, one agenda.
Ever notice they disagree on things just to disagree? They don't actually care about liberty or society, it's just a game to these elites.
Ever hear of the law of large numbers? Our democracy has so many voters now I believe it will always tend towards 50% in votes. A two party system where the Orwellian Party chooses who will run for office instead of the people. We the citizens don't live in a democracy anymore but actually live in a corpocracy which is upheld by the loyal boomer generation and lucky who got ahead.
Peace protests don't work. You could march 10 million people onto the White House lawn and might get a reaction short term but when the crowd is gone they will try again and just wear the populace out. It looks to be that only violence and or a massive economic depression could change things. Even so in the long run it will turn ugly because we have aristocratic hereditary rule in government and such tyranny leads to destruction of society as they begin to view the populace as cattle.
We have vampires for leadership and it’s feeding time. Liberty does not exist in our country anymore. We are a failed country with an ever growing mass of poor that will explode in population as the boomers retire and fade. The wealthy will mock and hurl insults from their media and attempt to keep things under control through the upper middle class that remains.
Every day we remain in this situation we move closer to violence being the only solution to removing the corporate aristocracy. The only problem is socialism promotes corporatism and so does capitalism. To bad we simply can’t trade and create with small business instead of having large corporate pyramid schemes that undermine individual liberty.
I remember growing up and believing that in America the strong protected the weak. I have not heard those words in a long time and in fact over the entire Bush administration it has been pushed that the strong, especially the wealthy, have the right to do whatever they want to anyone because they are wealthy. And whatever the wealthy do is good for society. How will this not end in violence? This contempt for liberty and labor will end up causing massive rifts in society.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers
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