Cite.It’s not like they are running around slapping a tap on your phone just because they feel like it.
Essentially what is happening is that they are already tapping known or suspected foreign terrorists. This is legal, and has been going on since 1978, under Carter. With this bill, if a US citizen calls some foreign terrorist on the phone, and the spooks are already listening in, they don’t have to get a warrant right away before they can continue listening. They do have to submit it to a court, but they don’t have to drop the tap instantly.
On preview, this probably won’t do any good. Have fun.
Well, I don’t know about you guys, but I live in terror of what Mustafa the goat farmer in west bubble fuck is up to today. I’m glad we routinely bomb those dangerous goat farmers - holding the outdated but incredibly dangerous to me and my family 10,000 miles away - rifles into paste (as well as their families and neighbors, and on occasion the first responders cause we gotta double tap that shit) using our mighty and courageous drones.
As for our civil liberties? You can have them all as long as they keep Mustafa off my porch.
Yes, the threat is essentially non-existent. No, I am not fucking kidding you. I am not even pretty serious snuggling kidding you. No, lots of people hate us, a great many of them because of our irrational and paranoid responses to 9/11. No, pretty much nobody except large nation-states like China or the USA has the means to destroy the USA.
The most “terrorists” will ever be able to do is kill a few of us from time to time, which is hardly worth worrying about to any extent greater than its actual statistical impact on our life expectancy, which is as close to zero as makes no odds.
3000 or so people died on 9/11, ten years ago, following the actions of a dozen desperate, suicidal madmen. You’ve actually lost more soldiers than that just fighting the stupid, unending, one sided War on a Hazy Concept - almost double that, in fact. To say nothing of the wounded and the psychologically fucked.
Meanwhile, anywhere between 300 thousand and a million Iraqis have lost their lives (the overwhelming majority being civilians caught in the crossfire or otherwise winding up in the “collateral damage” column), about 50 thousand more in Afghanistan & Pakistan, and the death toll keeps mounting up. There’s no way to know how many more have been summarily abducted (I’m sorry, “renditioned”) by the CIA, or been blown up in covert drone strikes.
All with your tacit blessing. Possibly your active cheering on, even. You’ve plowed over 5000 billion dollars into doing all of this. That’s billions with a b.
Who has the means of destroying whom, and who oughta be existentially afraid ? And when you’re perfectly fine with slaughtering that many people so long as you can tell yourselves it could/will/has saved just one American life which makes it all worth it, why shouldn’t they hate your criminally insane guts ?
Y’know, for once, I actually (mostly) agree with Shodan. I still think that warrantless wiretapping, even of foreign nationals, is a bad idea in principle: the Fourth Amendment applies to “the People”, not just to citizens. But as long as it’s only foreign communications, it really doesn’t seem like such a big deal. Why does that not seem to usually be brought up in discussions of this issue?
Since they’re just continuing something that already happened, I think we’ve already been pretty thoroughly encroached.
My personal take on this stuff, having grown up on The Man from Uncle, James Bond and comic books, is that any governmental or private agency with the ability to do whatever it takes to catch the crooks is doing just that, whether it’s legal or not, and they’re sweeping it all under the rug as best they can and when somebody finds out they’re doing it, they throw a sacrificial goat onto the fire to cover their asses and soldier on. So, this whole deal is kinda redundant.
Conflating Afghanistan and Iraq weakens your case. We got snookered into Iraq, we HAD to invade Afghanistan, because their non-existant government left the entire world vulnerable to madmen, I also understand it’s fashionable to see the US as ebil, but we’re the ones who get killed on your behalf. I also vehemently oppose nationals having Constitutional rights, but that’s just me.
Considering that our current government has been known to define “all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants” in drone attacks, I think that the idea that it’s ok because they’re just going after them furriner terrorists is a dangerous precedent.
I also believe that our rights are being incrementally eroded, and nobody notices because they think it’s okay if the guy on their side is doing it even if they would loudly protest when the opposition does it.
I’m sure we would all be safer if the government could just have 24/7 video surveillance in all of our homes, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the day comes when something that invasive is justified by those who will sacrifice anything for the sake of a scrap of safety or think that privacy doesn’t matter if you have nothing to hide.
I’m not a Muslim, or anything like it. The FBI learned their lesson after the Oklahoma City bombing and the Waco and Ruby Ridge shootouts. They don’t fuck around with redneck boys any more.
And no, it’s not hard to sue people from Gitmo. I have plenty of family members who could pay a lawyer and handle all the legwork from outside. And no, no one is going to be throwing my 70-year-old retired parents and and in-laws in Gitmo. Seriously, dude. This is crazy talk. REALLY crazy. This is America, and I’m not Muslim, and that’s that. Local cops could conceivably do some BS to me, but Timothy McVeigh put a STOP to the FEDERAL harrassment of rednecks, permanently.
Just the other day I got a fund raising call from the ACLU asking me to up my monthly donation. The caller’s pitch was all about how even though Obama got re-elected, his opponents are still spreading lies about him and trying to undermine his progressive agenda. I’m not sure what Obama they were talking about… (and don’t get me wrong, I voted for him, but not because of his stance on civil liberties).
Yeah, but they’ll be listening to me (a US citizen living in Germany) talking to my sisters and mother (all US citizens in the US.) For what? Nothing more than the chance that some eavesdropper will mistake an innocent comment for something sinister and get us all a closer look and more scrutiny.
FFS. There are people who need to be watched, for whom you get the appropriate court order for wiretapping.
When the citizens begin to approve of having their liberties and privacy taken away, the terrorists have won and paved the way for the dictators.
Somehow I doubt every word of your conversation is being listened to carefully. There’s probably a computer listening for “trigger” words, Arabic words, etc..
I couldn’t care less what happens to the Aryan Brotherhood. A lot of those groups are terrorists. Rednecks are people who leave others alone. Terrorists DON’T leave other people alone.
Randy Weaver was a redneck, because he was living in the woods, not bothering anyone. Arguably David Koresh wasn’t bothering anyone either, and certainly his followers didn’t deserve a fiery death.
Snookered, schmookered. I’m sure it means a lot to the people who got their relatives blown to bits. It’s certainly germane to the case of you going to insane lengths out of paranoia and fear, isn’t it ? And your own government is the one conflating the two, since the two were and are considered part and parcel of the GWOT.
As for getting killed on my behalf, considering the actions of your country quite understandably leads to an increase in Us vs. Them sentiment all over the Muslim world and to indiscriminate terrorist retaliation against others than you, forgive me if I’m not tripping over myself to offer my thanks and praise.
You have my heartfelt permission to stop that altruistic sacrifice, though. Stop helping us, please ;).
