You're a terrorist if you don't think finding fewer than 10 suspisious people a year is work invading the privacy of any American.

....what? that didn't make sense.

If we stop our government from spying on us then the terrorists have already won.

i think what bothers me as much, if not moreso, than the rights violations of this adminstration, is its complete incompetence.

first off, pretty much every adminstration in the last 50 years has done things which were considered illegal by US law and/or the geneva conventions. i am willing to admit there are occasional circumstances where circumventing the law is absolutely neccesary to protect citizens both of this country and the global community from immediate harm. that these circumstances occur does not, however, mean that circumvention of established law should suddenly become a legal practice. these activities are illegal for good reason. what it means is that if our government occasionally needs to break international law in light of an immediate, pressing threat to human life, is that they need to do two things:

first, not make it institutional policy to violate international and domestic law.
second, don't fucking let me find out about it.

jesus christ, there are black funds for a reason; you don't break the law and fuck around in the global community and then talk about how you were justified in doing it. if you're going to break the law, even if justified, you plan in such a way that people don't find out about it, and if people do find out about it, then you, the elected official, are not doing your fucking job. if informants are leaking details of classified programs that involve activity in violation of the law, or, you know, the constitution, then maybe there are moral problems about the activity that go beyond breaking said law. if newspapers are finding out about your activites in other ways, then you didn't plan well enough asshole.

this adminstration can't even break the law correctly, in addition to not being able to plan an invasion and occupation correctly. while i do feel that the NSA program is both a violation of the law and of the civil rights of those eavesdropped upon, that this administration was both stupid enough to get caught and too stupid to have plausible denial/a fall guy ready (ala oliver north, etc) bothers me just as much. these are the people that are supposed to protect me when there really is a terrorist threat?

editted because i forgot an 'illegal' in there somewhere.

[Edited on Feb 06, 2006 2:02PM]

Why not, NYMatt? I understand that you're a law-abiding citizen -so am I. If the NSA ever listened to our phone conversations, they'd shrug, and probably stop the tap after a week. But what about the principle of it? What if you say something you want to keep private over the phone? Nothing illegal, but something personal. It's embarassing, like if a stranger watched you bathe and walked out of the bathroom when you were done, nothing comes of it, but it's just wrong. Does the US government need this power over us?

Besides, if I may use a cliche, it's a slippery slope. This sort of unchecked surveillance could easily be turned on Law-abiding Citizens who the government may not like. Political dissidents of all stripes, from the most rabid to the most harmless or even rival candidates (as in the Watergate scandal). Rights are easy to lose, but hell to win back.

Am I looking at this the wrong way?

I was under the impression that the US government lacked the analytical resources necessary to evaluate the intelligence they do have coming in already. Afterall, the NSA just gathers information; the analysis falls to other branches of the intelligence community (of the 15 intelligence divisions working in the US, only 3 actually analyze the incoming data).

I would be really interested to see who, exactly, they're targeting, and whether it has anything at all to do with national security. Call me paranoid, but I wouldn't be suprised if Bush was using the intelligence community for personal and corporate gain and vandettas.

I don't know... this statement just makes me really sad for you Matt.

And because some people might not mind, we should just let the government continue to intrude on our Constitutionally protected rights?

"i don't know half of you half as well as i should like, and i like less than half of you half as well as you deserve"

that's what it sounded like to me.

oh yea, i threw down the LOTR gauntlet. try me.

I was feeling that sadness too...

I'm a law abiding guy... For the mostp art... But if the canadian government was this bad I'd have had the police at my door long ago.

At least if I move to the states, my military, survivalist-esque lifystyle could be passed off as gung-ho american patriotism.

Which is exactly how bush passes off all the violations of civil rights.
He just calls it the american thing to do and all the gun toting joe-blows go with it... Who tend to be right-wing in the white, christian aspect...

This could have been worded better I'm sure but me can't brain today. I have the dumb...

I think that we need secret surveillance of or leaders, who knows what they get up behind our backs.

As far as I can see this just like the war on porn is a waste of tax payers money and a violation of civil rights and freedom of speech and that not only the entire administration who knew should be held accountable and have all assest removed and liquidated to do some good like health and education but should also do prison time for this as it is just plain wrong. And as for congress and the senate any one here who supports these actions should have the same thing done. This will make and example of those responsible and show that a persons freedom of speech and civil rights are not something that any elected official has the right to fuck with no matter how much they dislike it.

Something that often figures into cases such as this is "reasonable expectation of privacy." In the case of nonencrypted email, I would submit that an expectation of privacy is relatively unreasonable.

To use the PGP-inspired analogy, sending nonencrypted email is like sending postcards. I think most people would agree that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy for what is written on a postcard. If you desire privacy you use an envelope. As it relates to email - that envelope is strong encryption.

A similar analogy would be standing naked in front of a nonobscured window in your home. If someone stopped in the street and looked, you wouldn't exactly have a reasonable expectation of privacy. If you desire privacy, you close the blinds/shades/curtains.

Email traffic passes through many networks, servers, communications lines, etc. To have any strong expectation of privacy along that path is relatively unreasonable.


[Edited on Feb 07, 2006 2:29AM]

What, they couldn't find any neo-Nazi survivalist loons out there?
I mean, really. Those guys already perpetrated a truck bombing against a federal building. Surely there's no legal issue?

[Edited on Feb 06, 2006 11:20PM]

standard postal mail passes through several processing centers and hundred of hands over the course of delivery. there's still an expectation of privacy, and it's illegal for anyone other than the intended recipient to read it without an explicit warrant authorizing such activity. "reasonable" here would refer to the publics basic understanding of the technology and how it works, and the implication of privacy from service providers, etc. by that measure, when i send email, i expect it to be read only by the person i send it to, as they need a username and password to gain access to it.

basically what i'm getting at is that your argument is specious at best, and obfuscating bullshit at worst.