Big brother can eat my ass

[Jack Chiefton]

Decide for youself I guess. Sounds....alarming.

The New York Times William Safire Piece:

You Are a Suspect
By WILLIAM SAFIRE

WASHINGTON - If the Homeland Security Act is not amended before
passage, here is what will happen to you:

Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription
you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you
visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you
receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and
every event you attend - all these transactions and communications
will go into what the Defense Department describes as "a virtual,
centralized grand database."

To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial
sources, add every piece of information that government has about
you - passport application, driver's license and bridge toll records,
judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to
the F.B.I., your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera
surveillance - and you have the supersnoop's dream: a "Total Information
Awareness" about every U.S. citizen.

This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario. It is what will
happen to your personal freedom in the next few weeks if John
Poindexter gets the unprecedented power he seeks.

Remember Poindexter? Brilliant man, first in his class at the
Naval Academy, later earned a doctorate in physics, rose to national
security adviser under President Ronald Reagan. He had this brilliant
idea of secretly selling missiles to Iran to pay ransom for hostages,
and with the illicit proceeds to illegally support contras in
Nicaragua.

A jury convicted Poindexter in 1990 on five felony counts of
misleading Congress and making false statements, but an appeals
court overturned the verdict because Congress had given him immunity
for his testimony. He famously asserted, "The buck stops here,"
arguing that the White House staff, and not the president, was
responsible for fateful decisions that might prove embarrassing.

This ring-knocking master of deceit is back again with a plan
even more scandalous than Iran-contra. He heads the "Information
Awareness Office" in the otherwise excellent Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency, which spawned the Internet and stealth
aircraft technology. Poindexter is now realizing his 20-year dream:
getting the "data-mining" power to snoop on every public and private
act of every American.

Even the hastily passed U.S.A. Patriot Act, which widened the
scope of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and weakened
15 privacy laws, raised requirements for the government to report
secret eavesdropping to Congress and the courts. But Poindexter's
assault on individual privacy rides roughshod over such oversight.

He is determined to break down the wall between commercial snooping
and secret government intrusion. The disgraced admiral dismisses
such necessary differentiation as bureaucratic "stovepiping."
And he has been given a $200 million budget to create computer
dossiers on 300 million Americans.

When George W. Bush was running for president, he stood foursquare
in defense of each person's medical, financial and communications
privacy. But Poindexter, whose contempt for the restraints of
oversight drew the Reagan administration into its most serious
blunder, is still operating on the presumption that on such a
sweeping theft of privacy rights, the buck ends with him and not
with the president.

This time, however, he has been seizing power in the open. In
the past week John Markoff of The Times, followed by Robert O'Harrow
of The Washington Post, have revealed the extent of Poindexter's
operation, but editorialists have not grasped its undermining
of the Freedom of Information Act.

Political awareness can overcome "Total Information Awareness,"
the combined force of commercial and government snooping. In a
similar overreach, Attorney General Ashcroft tried his Terrorism
Information and Prevention System (TIPS), but public outrage at
>the use of gossips and postal workers as snoops caused the House
to shoot it down. The Senate should now do the same to this other
exploitation of fear.

The Latin motto over Poindexter's new Pentagon office reads
"Scientia Est Potentia" - "knowledge is power." Exactly: the government's
infinite knowledge about you is its power over you. "We're just
as concerned as the next person with protecting privacy," this
brilliant mind blandly assured The Post. A jury found he spoke
falsely before.

[mccutcheon]

civil liberties?

For five years, Oliverio Martinez has been blind and paralyzed as the result of a police shooting. Now he is at the center of a U.S. Supreme Court case that could determine whether decades of restraints on police interrogations should be discarded. The blanket requirement for a Miranda warning to all suspects that they have the right to remain silent could end up in the rubbish bin of legal history if the court concludes police were justified in aggressively questioning the gravely wounded Martinez while he screamed in agony

[mccutcheon]

American citizens working for al-Qaida overseas can legally be targeted and killed by the CIA under President Bush's rules for the war on terrorism, U.S. officials say. The authority to kill U.S. citizens is granted under a secret finding signed by the president after the Sept. 11 attacks that directs the CIA to covertly attack al-Qaida anywhere in the world. The authority makes no exception for Americans, so permission to strike them is understood rather than specifically described, officials said.

What scares the shit out of me is "granted under a secret finding" what the hell does that mean?

And what is working for al-Qaida. I hope it isn't questioning US policies, making fun of Bush or posting posts like this on the greatest web site in the world Pax Acidus. I have enough paranoia from the drugs I do. I don't need the CIA on my ass too.

[marky]

Oh yeah that whole Miranda thing REALLY gets me.
The ACLU is all we have left, you know. Do you know even prominent Republicans are joining the ACLU now? There are two senators that are going to be consultants for the ACLU when they leave the Senate.

Get rid of Miranda and you give police free reign to torture the innocent to extract information. Is this America? What in the hell is living in this country going to be like if they get rid of Miranda? I just don't want to think about it.

I think you've got it right, McC, the definition of terrorism is not clearly defined enough. I read an article about a fire set by some drug dealers in a neighborhood in (I think) Baltimore and the term used was "urban terrorism". What??? I don't think of that as terrorism. It doesn't involve Al-Qaida, it doesn't involve foreigners, it doesn't involve Islam.
What will happen is eventually everything criminal will be terrorism. It's like McCarthyism all over again.

[blueimac540c]

ummm... timmy here might be in deep shit if anyone decided to check his computer and writings and emails and whatnot. i mean... yeah... my computer has nothing out of the ordinary on it... nothing at all... I'm not acting suspicious am I?

[mccutcheon]

You know what's scary/funny? The ESPN Page 2 (historically rather conservative reporting) http://espn.go.com/page2/index.html web site has great sports columnists like Gregg Easterback and Hunter S. Thomson and many others. And they are all sounding off, not only on the great plays of our super athletes, but also the sorry state of our union. When it’s left up to the sports writers to stick up for our societies ills we are in trouble. I mean they should have their hands on the keyboard and their binoculars pointed down at the sideline checking out the cheerleaders, not wasting precious inches to inform the modest sports fan that he lives in a police state.