The truth is beyond any of your imaginations.
Let others speak for me: http://www.citypaper.net/articles/101801/news.godfrey.shtml>
Novel Security Measures
<http://www.indymedia.org:8081/front.php3?article_id=82758>
Green Party USA Coordinator Detained At Airport (english) by Louis Lingg 6:23pm Fri Nov 2 '01 (Modified on 5:54pm Sat Nov 3 '01)
The protesters were upset over a pre-existing situation, now worsened by increased zeal after 09/11/01.
"Now those bleeding heart liberals won't be able to stop the cops from doing what they have to do to protect the rest of us." (caller to Rush Limbaugh show on 09/12/01)[obviously,someone who has never been handcuffed and beaten]
<http://www.aclu.org/issues/policepractices/hmpolice.html>
> Critics: Patriot Act puts privacy at risk
By Stefanie Olsen <MAILTO:stefanieo@cnet.com <mailto:stefanieo@cnet.com>>
Special to ZDNet News
October 26, 2001 3:36 PM PT
President Bush signed legislation Friday that expands the ability to tap telephones and track Internet usage in the hunt for terrorists, new powers that drew praise from law enforcement officials and concern from civil libertarians.
The bill, known as the USA Patriot Act, gives federal authorities much wider latitude in monitoring Internet usage and expands the way such data is shared among different agencies.
"Today, we take an essential step in defeating terrorism while protecting the constitutional rights of all Americans," Bush said during a signing ceremony. The House of Representatives passed the bill by a vote of 357-66 on Wednesday, and the Senate on Thursday approved the measure 98-1.
Attorney General John Ashcroft vowed Thursday to use the new powers to track down suspected terrorists relentlessly.
"If you overstay your visas even by one day, we will arrest you. If you violate a local law--we will hope that you will, and work to make sure that you are put in jail and be kept in custody as long as possible," he said in a speech to the nation's mayors about how the law would target suspected terrorists.
Civil libertarians say the measure was passed in haste following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. They are particularly concerned that the surveillance powers give law enforcement too much leeway to collect private information on people on the periphery of investigations.
"The attorney general is making a full-court press on the Internet. They want to do a lot of data mining and investigations on the Internet, and because they are looking for a needle in the haystack, they are going to conduct investigations that take them to the outer circle," said Jerry Berman, executive director for the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT).
"The trouble with the bill is that it's very sweeping and it can apply not just to suspected terrorists but people and organizations that may be engaged in lawful actions," Berman said.
The new bill was enacted in response to terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which have sparked the largest criminal investigation in U.S. history. The investigation immediately cast a spotlight on government surveillance powers, as Ashcroft championed the need for new "tools" to track down potential terrorists after the attacks. Part of the new legislation includes the expansion of Internet eavesdropping technology once known as Carnivore.
But civil rights advocates have consistently cautioned against expanding surveillance powers unnecessarily, arguing that there is little evidence that tougher surveillance laws could have prevented the tragedy.
In response to the new legislation, the American Civil Liberties Union vowed Friday that it would work with the Bush administration and law enforcement agencies to make sure civil liberties were not compromised as a result of the new bill.
"The passage of this broad legislation is by no means the end of the story," ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero said in a statement. "We will now work with ACLU affiliates around the country to monitor its implementation."
Gregory T. Nojeim, Associate Director of the ACLU's Washington Office, added: "These new and unchecked powers could be used against American citizens who are not under criminal investigation, immigrants who are here within our borders legally and also against those whose First Amendment activities are deemed to be threats to national security by the Attorney General."
Specifically, the bill expands a "pen register" statute to include electronic communications and Internet usage. The pen register previously referred to law enforcement powers involving the tracing of telephone numbers called by suspected criminals. By including electronic communications, the statute now allows investigators to easily obtain wiretaps for activity on the Internet, which can mean the collection of information more private than IP addresses, which are roughly the Net's equivalent of phone numbers.
In addition, Internet service providers must make their services more wiretap friendly, giving law enforcement the ability to capture pen register information or allowing the installation of Carnivore technology.
Critics say there is not enough clarity about what information is collected through surveillance technology. Lawmakers maintain that Carnivore doesn't include information from the subject line of an e-mail, but it may collect data such as names and Web surfing habits. Another major concern is that such investigations are kept secret.
"We don't know the scope of what pen register information can be collected in the context of e-mail," said Mike Godwin, policy fellow at CDT. "But what we do know is that it ought to require more judicial review than it gets. Information collected is going to be more private than just e-mail."
One potential coup for civil rights advocates could be in a provision introduced by House Majority Leader Dick Armey. The provision requires a judge to oversee the Federal Bureau of Investigation's use of an e-mail wiretap, ensuring some checks and balances over the use of Carnivore. Law enforcement will be required to report back in 30 days to an authorizing judge on information that was collected online during the investigation.
"This would require the FBI to show what was collected, by whom, and who had access to it," said Armey spokesman Richard Diamond. "That information would be transferred under seal to the judge authorizing the use of Carnivore."
While some provisions in the bill will expire in 2006, powers governing Internet surveillance are not included in the "sunset clause."
"We will be watching, and Congress will be watching," Diamond said. "And in four years, when the DOJ asks for reauthorization of their powers, Congress will make sure (that) if any of those new powers were misused...they will be taken away."<
<http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0%2C4586%2C5098862%2C00.html?chkpt=zdnn_nbs_hl>
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> With Powers Like These, Can Repression Be Far Behind?
By ROBERT SCHEER
Swept away by the fury of their impotence, huddled in temporary congressional offices, unable to capture anyone responsible for the terrorist assault on the United States, Congress and the president struck blindly to destroy the civil liberties of innocent people by passing the Patriot Act of 2001.
That was, of course, not the stated intent. It never is. They just want to get the bad guys and, looking more and more like Keystone Kops, law enforcement and intelligence officials found an excuse for their incompetence in our exercise of freedom.
So, heeding the request of Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft--who has arrested 1,000 purportedly potential terrorists but found hard evidence on none--a sweeping new federal law was passed that allows the feds to explore the Internet, e-mail, computer hard-drives, and personal financial and medical records of people against whom there is insufficient or zero evidence, and allows their arrest without due process protections.
Ashcroft conceded that he needed the new sweeping powers not to catch criminals in the act but to arrest anyone who seemed the slightest bit suspicious.
"Let the terrorists among us be warned," Ashcroft thundered to a conference of U.S. mayors. "If you overstay your visas even by one day, we will arrest you."
Huh? If the highest law enforcement official has spotted terrorists among us, why hasn't he charged them with that crime? If it turns out that the anthrax mail terrorists are, as intelligence services now suspect, home-grown nuts of the sort who blew up the federal building in Oklahoma, will Ashcroft seek to hold all American citizens without bail for having an expired driver's license? That is the problem with the vast powers granted Ashcroft: They are both absurdly ineffective and dangerous to our civil liberties.
It took a true patriot, Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), to cast the lone vote in the Senate against the Patriot Act of 2001. In the House, 66 representatives dissented, but a leadership that did not permit hearings or debate on this landmark legislation muffled their concerns. Because of the pressure to pass something--anything!--and the fact that congressional staffs were locked out of their offices because of an anthrax scare, few in Congress had even read summaries, let alone the fine print, of the document they so hastily passed, "without deliberation or debate," as Feingold noted.
Nothing in this bill would have prevented the disaster of Sept. 11, and yet the president and the House's GOP leadership still balk at one measure that could have: federalizing the security of U.S. air travel.
Why? Because it offends their alleged ideological opposition to "Big Government"--a stance that doesn't seem to apply when it comes to Big Brother-type spying on us.
Hiring and training 18,000 professional airline security personnel--men and women who actually know what they are doing and are paid an honest wage--is apparently a mark of socialism, while throwing $15 billion at the airlines to shore up their profits is an act of national fiscal prudence.
Clearly, neither Congress nor the president is yet ready to think seriously about what went wrong Sept. 11. If they were, they would begin with the ill-considered decision a decade ago to gut the armed air marshal program from commercial flights. Had marshals been present on the hijacked planes, the box-cutter-wielding terrorists wouldn't have stood a chance.
And is there anybody who has flown in the past 10 years who doesn't believe that the security teams at the hijackers' airports of departure couldn't have been better trained, motivated and supported?
Finally, if our ally Saudi Arabia, which owes its continued existence in part to the last Bush war, had screened the passports of the 15 hijackers who were traveling with Saudi approval, the entire plot likely would have been foiled.
Obviously, however, it is easier for U.S. political leaders to strike out at law-abiding Americans then to hold the Saudi monarchy to a standard of responsible behavior.
To stop future acts of terrorism we need to ask tough questions about the workings of authority and not be intimidated by those charged with our security. Snooping through our e-mails and other means of communications is an unlikely way to catch terrorists, but it will almost certainly have a chilling effect on the free speech of Americans, who need to speak out boldly as never before.
It is our coun try at risk, our lives, and this is no time for intimidated silence. We are desperate for more profiles in courage, more Feingolds, among our political leaders, and fewer patriotic cheerleaders playing the game of the demagogue."<
<http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-scheer30oct30.story>
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I'll let these two articles speak for themselves.
"If you're not paranoid, you're not paying attention." unknown (not willing to be identified)<
tom, do you have any idea what freedom of speech really is? [I doubt it!]
Quit censoring my posts and let the truth speak for itself!
Some of us are for real. Very few of us! Only a few. 
You cannot lock me out entirely. I was here on the DARPANET when you were in diapers.
All that matters is whether you care about truth or survival. I care about truth.
You are trying to stop the tide. |
