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| A Police State You'd Better Believe In | | Print | |
| Written by Jack Kenny | |||||||||||||
| Thursday, 29 July 2010 13:27 | |||||||||||||
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Thus it is that in the "war on terrorism" our government is building, brick by brick, a new police state, called "Security." Consider, for example, this item from The Washington Post: The Obama administration is seeking to make it easier for the FBI to compel companies to turn over records of an individual's Internet activity without a court order if agents deem the information relevant to a terrorism or intelligence investigation. The administration wants to add just four words — 'electronic communication transactional records' — to a list of items that the law says the FBI may demand without a judge's approval. Government lawyers say this category of information includes the addresses to which an Internet user sends e-mail; the times and dates e-mail was sent and received; and possibly a user's browser history. It does not include, the lawyers hasten to point out, the 'content' of e-mail or other Internet communication. But what officials portray as a technical clarification designed to remedy a legal ambiguity strikes industry lawyers and privacy advocates as an expansion of the power the government wields through so-called national security letters. These missives, which can be issued by an FBI field office on its own authority, require the recipient to provide the requested information and to keep the request secret. They are the mechanism the government would use to obtain the electronic records. We should not let a smooth talking political leader like our current President talk us out of the civil liberties he seemed zealous to protect.There now. Don't you feel safer and more secure already? Or do you have that creepy feeling that somebody is looking over your shoulder? Friends of freedom, from the Founding Fathers, who put their lives on the line for it, to President Eisenhower, who commanded great armies in its defense, have always known that the requirements of safety and security must always be balanced against those of liberty and justice. Otherwise, the government could simply put us all in prison, where we would enjoy security and three square meals a day and the products of our labors would be much less expensive. Think how it would increase our exports and improved our balance of trade. Writing in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Jay Bookman observed: "If the federal government has a good reason to need such information, it can explain those reasons to a judge. 'National security letters' are already widely overused as a means of acquiring personal information without a judicial order. As the Post story points out, 'The Justice Department issued 192,500 national security letters from 2003 to 2006, according to a 2008 inspector general report, which did not indicate how many were demands for Internet records. A 2007 IG report found numerous possible violations of FBI regulations, including the issuance of NSLs without having an approved investigation to justify the request.' "The type of authority sought by the Obama administration would allow it to conduct warrantless searches that are forbidden under the Fourth Amendment, and our Founding Fathers would clearly recognize it as an unacceptable encroachment of government power on the individual," Bookman wrote. "That is, once you explained to them about what a browser is, and what emails are." Bookman has cleverly made a point. Technological innovations, unknown and probably unimagined by the Founders, have made many of the tools of the 18th Century obsolete. The principles they set forth with pen on parchment are not, however. And they will not become obsolete unless an apathetic citizenry, lulled into a false sense of security, continues to allow an overbearing government to erase our liberties, bit by bit, until one day we wonder where they have gone. In the meantime, we should not let a smooth talking political leader like our current President talk us out of the civil liberties he seemed zealous to protect when the perpetrators of the coming police state were Republicans in the White House and the cabinet. We had a changing of the guard on January 20, 2009, but the goals of our national jailers remain the same. The bars and the barbed wire are still being put in place, but the names and the faces of the wardens have changed. That's the only real "change" we have gotten from the Obama administration. The rest is merely verbal sleight of hand and rhetorical windsong. It is "change" they can deceive with.
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Comments (8)
JFBN
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When our nation is waging "war on" so many things (drugs, crime, poverty, terrorism), it's hard to know where to enlist and when to defect. Or put another way, when should a patriot oppose his government? One answer, which we may hope is obvious, is when his government is waging war on liberty. The trick, of course, is to recognize it as such, since the government will always claim to be defending liberty when waging war against it.
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Eisebhower? It was a well written summary, but I think you could have come up with a better example of modern patriotism than Eisenhower... |
Robert Charron
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... No question we are becoming a police state, all the better to keep us safe you understand. I am 80 years old and the country has mades some alarming changes in my time. I heard Col. Jacobs say on MSNBC today that the release of documents by Wikileaks was very damaging and that those involved will definitely face trial over this. And then he added that the trials would undoubtedly be held in secret! What have we become? |
Big M
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... OK as far as it goes, but when, oh when is this idiotic myth going to die that we were involved in WWII to protect this country's freedom? My guess is never, at least in this clown kingdom. The winners get to write history. Rinse and repeat. |
Pete
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When to push back? As a gelded population we will take whatever oppression the government sees fit to dish out. What would happen if one week we were to read about assassination of Lloyd Blanfein, Tony Hayward, George Soros, Rupert Murdoch, Ted Turner, Bill Gates, Rahm Emanuel, Henry Paulson, Jacob Rothschild, David Rockefeller, Grant Hughs? Would the push toward a new world order be set back after 50/100/1000 globalists are incapacitated? Why has no Colonel assembled a mission to remove persons wrecking the USA? Why hasn't Bill Gates hired Xe to arrest members of Congress that have voted to fund illegal wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? Perhaps we will need to study the mind of the suicide bomber? Honor to those men and women that have sacrificed. |
Winghunter
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Bush Was Simply An Arrogant Fool But, Obama is a Communist and their incremental theft of control is by calculating design. The Marketing of Evil: How Radicals, Elitists, and Pseudo-Experts Sell Us Corruption Disguised as Freedom By David Kupelian http://www.newsweekly.com.au/articles/2006aug05_b1.html "Republics are created by the virtue, public spirit, and intelligence of the citizens. They fall, when the wise are banished from the public councils, because they dare to be honest, and the profligate are rewarded, because they flatter the people, in order to betray them." -- Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution, 1833 |
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