The Informant

George Orwell would not be surprised. . .

More Big Brother tactics of our government. We need to repeal the Patriot Act NOW! Can you say 1984?

“Conveniently, DHS’ new rules for the Terror Screening Watchlist Service
state that the agency “does not control the accuracy” of information
retained in the database.”

This just proves DHS doesn’t care about their mission.  It needs to care about the accuracy of its information in order to best fulfill its mission.  Therefore, they need to be dismantled; if not there to fulfill its mandate it is there for another agenda, which is what we critics have said all along. It is time to repeal all the incarnations of the PATRIOT Act and make sure the Privacy Act and FOIA are rigorously upheld.

The biggest problem is how the “plausible terrorist” is defined. Today, you don’t have to go buy a ton of fertilizer to be selected. W. put it very simply in his: “Either with us, or against us” speech. Under the PATRIOT act, if you express your views in a way that aligns with some anti-government, privacy protection organization, etc… bingo! That alone can land you in court. If they (they – being a term being tossed around a lot these days.) don’t have enough to charge you, they just put you on a watch list, and wait until you make a smallest slip-up (which they are looking for very persuasively.)

I think I use to be on the infamous watch list since I kept getting the dreaded SSSS on my boarding pass 9 out of 11 times. I think they stopped doing that now. Probably going with facial recognition now days? Or maybe now, everyone is on the watch list? If not, soon enough my friend… soon enough.

Don’t worry… It’ll all be on Wikkileaks within a month !!

Life is inherent with risk but CHOOSING the loss of civil liberties, living in constant fear, and dismissing the long-held, honorable premise of “innocent until PROVEN guilty” is optional!

Defending a lady’s honor goes beyond protection – it includes promising her privacy when she’s going to pee!
 
In his 1992 book, Visions of Liberty, former Executive Director of the ACLU, Ira Glasser writes:  ”The use of wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping emerged during the Prohibition era. Roy Olmstead was a suspected bootlegger whom the government wished to search. It placed taps in the basement of his office building and on wires in the streets near his home. No physical entry into his office or home took place. Olmstead was convicted entirely on the basis of evidence from the wiretaps.  ”In his appeal to the Supreme Court, Olmstead argued that the taps were a search conducted without a warrant and without probable cause, and that the evidence seized against him should have been excluded because it was illegally gathered. He also argued that his Fifth Amendment right not to be a witness against himself was violated.  ”By a 5-4 vote, the Court rejected his arguments and upheld the government’s power to wiretap without limit and without any Fourth Amendment restrictions, on the grounds that no actual physical intrusion had taken place.  ”Olmstead’s Fifth Amendment claim was also dismissed on the grounds that he had not been compelled to talk on the telephone, but had done so voluntarily.
 
“Thus the Court upheld the government’s power to do by trickery and surreptitious means what it was not permitted to do honestly and openly.
 
“It wasn’t until 1967, in a similar case involving gambling, that the Court overruled the Olmstead decision by an 8-1 margin and recognized that the Fourth Amendment applied to wiretapping and electronic surveillance.  ”Interestingly, these cases arose in the context of crimes like bootlegging and gambling. During the past twenty years, the majority of wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping by both state and federal officials has been in cases involving drug dealing and gambling.  ”Serious crimes of violence, such as homicide, assault, rape, robbery, and burglary, are rarely the target of electronic eavesdropping, which is not normally a useful tool in such cases.  ”From the beginning, when wiretapping was virtually invented to enforce laws prohibiting the sale of alcohol, to the late 1960s, when gambling was a major target, to the present, when the use and sale of drugs other than alcohol are the main target, these intrusive devices have been used mostly to enforce laws aimed at punishing and proscribing personal conduct that society deems immoral.  ”Because such conduct essentially involves private activities among consenting adults who are all likely to want to keep those activities secret, they are harder to investigate and prosecute than crimes like robbery or burglary, in which an unwilling victim will probably aid any investigation…the invasion of privacy inherent in wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping remains with us as part of the legacy of our attempts to criminalize personal conduct.  “The other major use of electronic eavesdropping has been to punish political dissent. For decades, former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover used wiretaps and other electronic devices to spy on political figures and citizens not yet suspected of having committed a crime. He built vast dossiers on their political activities and personal lives. Special units of local police called ‘Red Squads’ did the same.
 
“Nor has electronic surveillance been the only source of our loss of privacy. The widespread use of urine-testing in employment to see whether people may have been using illegal substances violates the rights of many innocent people. ”Urine-testing programs are usually not restricted to those who show evidence of impaired job performance that may be due to the use of drugs. These tests are normally administered randomly. Without any probable cause for search, this is a violation of the Fourth Amendment.  ”Many of these random tests have been struck down by the courts, where the government is the employer. But some have been upheld. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (hardly a Constitutional liberal!), denounced them as ‘an immolation of privacy and human dignity in symbolic opposition to drug use.’”
 
In January 2006, on the eve of the West Coast Walk For Life in San Francisco, CA, Carol Crossed of Democrats For Life (kind enough to write the foreword to my own book, The Liberal Case Against Abortion) spoke optimistically of Roe v. Wade being overturned.
 When I asked her if Roe could be overturned without Griswold v. Connecticut (the 1965 Supreme Court decision which guarantees a right to marital privacy regarding the practice of contraception) being overturned as well, Carol froze, and couldn’t answer the question! I would have preferred it if Carol had said:   “You’re right.  Only a pervert watches or eavesdrops when others pee, defecate, copulate, masturbate, etc.  It’s wrong to put people under surveillance without their knowledge or consent.  Democrats For Life will never resort to such draconian tactics to protect prenatal life.”
Democrats For Life of America, 601 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, South Building, Suite 900, Washington, DC 20004 (202) - 220 - 3066

fear in action. 

I don’t mind Big Brother when it is used to fix and make things better but I do mind it when it is used to destroy.

These “Terrorist Watchlists” are abusive of citizens’ rights and an incalculably enormous waste of tax payer dollars.

The lists are full of inaccurate information, the victims aren’t allowed to know if they’re on the lists, and there’s no effective means for the victims to challenge the information in their “file”.

In the meantime the DHS squanders insane amounts of money following these citizens around and spying on them.  This is waste, fraud and abuse on a scale too huge for anyone to calculate.  Worse than that, some of the DHS’s harassment tactics complicate the victims’ professional lives and damage their business opportunities.

We don’t have a terrorism problem, we have an over-sized Federal Government problem.  Abusing citizens’ rights is extremely expensive.  It’s a massive drain on the economy and runs up the national debt for absolutely no good reason.

We need to shut down the DHS kooks and repeal the “Patriot” Act.  We need to do this in order to preserve the U.S. Constitution, protect the American Way of Live and reduce the Federal Deficit.

OBTW…

Can you say McCartheism? 

When are we going to learn?  Are we a nation of morons?  Do we deserve to suffer a different brand of fascism every 50 years, or can we learn from past mistakes?

Comrades, just embrace all the loving regulations these agencies are placing on us ; it’s for our own good, to protect us, can’t you see ?