Tuesday, 28 February 2006 - 8:16 PM CST

"Maybe we can let some stuff slide a while, eh?"

What you freedom-haters call "some stuff," some of us still refer to as "the Bill of Rights." The NSA deal is the tip of an iceberg called the unitary executive. If this goes down, you can kiss the Bill of Rights good-bye.

Sure. Use all the means of surveillance at your disposal. But get a court order. There's still no reason it can be done better without a warrant.

Wednesday, 1 March 2006 - 12:16 AM CST

So, surveillance is not, in itself, a bad thing; it's just the lack of a warrant that makes it so. Okay.

Wednesday, 1 March 2006 - 6:20 AM CST

Duh. Uh...FISA? That's what it's all about. The Fourth and Fifth Amendments.

Thursday, 2 March 2006 - 9:42 PM CST

Any American citizen who embraces a Big Brother world with 24/7 surveillance, a so called 'surveillance society, should also keep in mind that our 'ENDGAME' administration is ready to call ANY crime 'terrorism', perhaps even 'thought crime'.

With Halliburton's K.B.R. getting multi-billion-dollar contracts to build detention facilities for Americans during a state of 'emergency' or Martial Law, you'd better hope you're not somehow on Santa's 'naughty list'one day.

Privacy is an American right, as much as any other. Without it, we are all just actors. The self is lost when one gets the constant feeling of having an audience present; people need access to invisibility and anonymity to some degree in order to express their genuine feelings. As a reaction to infringement on privacy rights, it only makes sense that people will come to view their 'watchers' as an enemy to be cautiously dishonest with rather than treating the goverment as a representative and an ally.

By empowering our government to freely spy on us and intercept our communications, you are openly supporting fascism, at least at some level. It is like saying you will trust our leaders implicitly (no matter who ends up in control), and will allow them total control over your every move. Our forefathers, the good ones, warned of allowing such control to pass into the hands of the few.

Instead of supporting an all-powerful government, support a government that governs wisely and spends its resources constructively. It would be un-American to allow the Constitution to be nullified in an 'emergency' scenario that Americans are grown up enough to handle themselves. Are you going to trust your Wackenhut/DHS/FEMA Camp guard to respect your privacy when the wrong email gets you detained in a camp?

THIS IS REAL. YOU SHOULD BE CONCERNED.

Friday, 3 March 2006 - 6:38 PM CST

Arkady:

By empowering our government to freely spy on us and intercept our communications, you are openly supporting fascism, at least at some level. It is like saying you will trust our leaders implicitly (no matter who ends up in control), and will allow them total control over your every move.

I would not want to be spied on by our Government or by any other entity that has some part of that power. But I realize that it goes on, whether I like it or not. I also realize that there are actors in this country who mean to destroy it in one place or another, and I do fully welcome my representatives in the G to do what needs doing to interdict and destroy these people. I have no problem with that at all.

You are arguing against data mining and intercepts and all the other kinds of surveillance in absolute terms. But that is all hypothetical. These siftings and eavesdroppings simply haven't undone our civil liberties. It does violence to the truth to assert otherwise.

The kids are crawling all over MySpace.com and people are swapping this and that at the speed of the Internet and every single commercial, charitable, and governmental entity on Earth that wants it can put its fingers on all your numbers and buttons. Random criminals can, too. We don't have privacy; we have an expectation that the law of averages and the limitations on their resources will keep the cops from spending time on our sorry, lower middle-class, dirty white-collared asses when there are others ---The Other--- whose activities are a hell of a lot more interesting.

Saturday, 4 March 2006 - 12:24 AM CST

Funny. Most recent "Other" target of domestic spying are the VEGANS who protested a honeybaked ham store in North Carolina. Add them to the Quakers in Florida who were having a tea party to organize against recruiters in their local high school (their communications were monitered and they were infiltrated by the DIA). In the immortal words of Eazy E...nigga please.