Dubya took away my privacy

Might I point out that the Wiretapping laws were enacted to protect private citizens from other private citizens.

Saying that 'google' is a private entity, thus in some way saying that's 'different' is indeed a stretch. The only qualification that could be applied to make it not stand in the discussion is that we make the choice to use google or not... that is, if we actually HAD the choice. For instance what you post here is forever a part of Google.. so, SAY AGAIN?!!!!

If I want to be churlish... I would just say to all of you, you made the choice of who you call and why you call them. And now without complete expectation of privacy.
You will call people anyway. You will say what you think anyway. Why? Because you know that whatever you say or whoever you call is of no interest to the listeners.. with the possible exception of them getting their rocks off.

As to warrants, they have been adequately addressed in previous discussions. The original federal argument was the ease of shifting called and caller addresses {numbers} A warrant had to be obtained for ONE of the numbers... failing THAT, the agencies had to find actionable cause and submit in legalistic writing that within hours in order to have any of the subject conversation be used as evidence for further action.

This doesnt just mean that everything they heard would be thrown out as evidence it ALSO mean that anything they did SUBSEQUENTLY is unusable, as well.

In other words, A could call B and say to use number C from that point on. If none of that information {A & B} exists in the evidence trail -covered by warrant, the agency is prohibited from THEN listening to calls to C. For the reason that they cannot show CAUSE!

 

pettyfog. I don't want "after-the-fact", I'm not worried about "but they can't use it in court"; if they want to listen to my phone conversations they should present sufficient evidence BEFORE HAND, to a judge, and get a warrant.

I'd be ok with a judge being assigned to every major FBI building in the country with the sole purpose of being able to quickly respond to these requests for warrants. BUT I WANT THAT CHECK AND BALANCE.

 

US Wiretap Laws
Wiretaps have had a long and complex history in US jurisprudence. Their first use was in the mid 19th century, in response to the invention of the telegraph. Shortly afterward, they appeared in war: Confederate General Jeb Stuart traveled with his own wiretapper to tap Union army lines.5 Wiretaps came into their own during Prohibition, the period between 1920 and 1933 in which the manufacture and sale of alcohol was illegal. Federal law-enforcement agents discovered the value of wiretaps in both investigating and prosecuting bootlegging cases. The Olmstead case set the stage for the next 40 years of US wiretap law.6

A Form of Search
In the 1920s, Roy Olmstead had a major bootlegging operation in Seattle. Federal agents wiretapped Olmstead and his co-conspirators, placing taps in the basement of his office building and on telephone poles outside private houses. Olmstead’s lawyers argued their case on the basis of the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, house, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.6

The US Supreme Court held that wiretaps were not a form of search, and thus didn’t require search warrants. But the most well-known opinion in the Olmstead case isn’t that of the majority, but of Justice Louis Brandeis’s dissent. He said that wiretaps were a special type of search:

The evil incident to invasion of privacy of the telephone is far greater than that involved in tampering with the mails. Whenever a telephone line is tapped, the privacy of persons at both ends of the line is invaded, and all conversations between them upon any subject, and although proper, confidential, and privileged, may be overheard. Moreover, the tapping of one man’s telephone line involves the tapping of the telephone of every other person whom he may know or who may call him. As a means of espionage, writs of assistance and general warrants are but puny instruments of tyranny and oppression when compared with wiretapping.

—Olmstead v. United States6

A decade later, citing the 1934 US Federal Communications Act, which prohibited the “interception and divulgence” of wired communications, the US Supreme Court overturned the Olmstead decision in the Nardone cases.7 In a series of cases over the next 30 years, the Supreme Court also slowly narrowed the circumstances under which law enforcement could perform electronic bugging without a warrant, until 1967, in Charles Katz v. United States when the Court concluded that an electronic bug in even so public a place as a phone booth was indeed a search and therefore should be protected under the Fourth Amendment.8

The Court’s rulings of the 1930s did not end law enforcement wiretapping; instead, tapping went underground figuratively as well as literally. After the Nardone rulings, law enforcement didn’t publicly divulge wiretapped information (or, it did, but not the fact that the information came from wiretaps). This legal never-never land led to abuses by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s agents, including the wiretapping (and bugging) of political dissidents, Congressional staffers, and US Supreme Court Justices.9–11 The FBI’s extensive records on political figures was well known, and this information, some of which was salacious, ensured that Congress conducted little oversight of the FBI. When, in reaction to the Katz decision, Congress decided to pass a wiretapping law, the national legislature was quite concerned about preventing Hoover-era abuses.

Changing Views
The complications of investigating organized crime—including victims’ reluctance to testify, so-called victimless crimes (such as prostitution), and the corruption of local law enforcement—make electronic surveillance a particularly valuable tool. In 1967, a presidential commission investigating organized crime concluded, “legislation should be enacted granting carefully circumscribed authority for electronic surveillance to law enforcement officers ....”12 In response, US President Lyndon Johnson signed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, of which Title III legalized law enforcement wiretaps in criminal investigations. Because of wiretaps’ invasive nature, the act listed only 26 crimes that could warrant wiretap investigations, including murder, kidnapping, extortion, gambling, counterfeiting, and the sale of marijuana. The US Judiciary Committee’s report explained that “each offense was chosen because it was intrinsically serious or because it is characteristic of the operations of organized crime.”13

Congress decided that stringent oversight of wiretapping should require a federal district court judge to review each federal wiretap warrant application. Although President Johnson had used wiretaps on civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. during the 1964 Democratic Party convention and on US Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1968, publicly, the president was ambivalent about wiretaps. Even as he described the Title III provisions for wiretapping as undesirable,14 he signed the wiretapping provisions into law.

Title III
For criminal investigations (the only kind Title III addresses), wiretap warrants are more difficult to obtain than normal search warrants. The judge must determine that there’s probable cause to believe an individual is committing, has committed, or is about to commit an indictable offense;
communications about the offense will be obtained through the interception; normal investigative procedures have been tried and either have failed, appear unlikely to succeed, or are too dangerous; and the facilities subject to surveillance are being used or will be used in the commission of the crime.15
Title III covers procedures for obtaining wiretaps for law enforcement investigations. In 1972, in a court case involving “domestic national security issues,” the US Supreme Court ordered an end to warrantless wiretapping, even for national security purposes.16 “Domestic national security” cases had fueled a large number of inappropriate investigations of Americans, including the US Central Intelligence Agency opening and photographing nearly a quarter of a million first-class letters without search warrants between 1953 and 1973; 300,000 individuals indexed on CIA computers and CIA files on 7,200 individuals; the US National Security Agency obtaining copies of millions of private telegrams sent to and from the US from 1947 to 1975 without search warrants through an arrangement with three US telegraph companies; and US Army Intelligence keeping files on 100,000 Americans.10
Because of the public outcry over the discovery of numerous Nixon administration “national security” wiretaps that had been conducted for political purposes,10 it took until 1978 for Congress to craft the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which authorizes procedures for national security wiretapping. Congress considered it extremely important that safeguards be in place to prevent such illegal surveillance in the future.

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
In contrast to Title III’s requirements that a judge determine whether there’s probable cause to believe that an individual is involved in committing an indictable offense, in FISA cases, the judge, a member of an FISA court, must determine whether there’s probable cause that the target is a foreign power or agent of a foreign power. The purpose of the surveillance is to obtain intelligence information. The law provides that “[N]o United States person may be considered a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power solely upon the basis of activities protected by the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States.”17

The requirements for foreign intelligence wiretaps are less stringent than those for law enforcement. United States v. United States District Court held that domestic national security wiretapping must be conducted under a search warrant, and the US Supreme Court stated that, “Different standards [for gathering intelligence] may be compatible with the Fourth Amendment if they are reasonable both in relation to the legitimate need of Government for intelligence information and the protected rights of our citizens.”16 National security investigations are more typically concerned with preventing future crimes rather than prosecuting previous ones, and the ability to present a case in court is often orthogonal to the real concerns of national security cases.

Title III and FISA form the basis for US wiretap law. State statutes also exist, with approximately half of all wiretaps for criminal investigations in the US performed using state wiretap warrants. The rules governing state wiretaps must be at least as restrictive as those governing Title III. There have been several updates and modifications to the federal wiretap statutes, including the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, CALEA, and the PATRIOT Act.
---------------------------------------------
Not saying privacy should not be applied to the internet, but that it is rather difficult and needs a different set of rules than telephony.

Whoops: ; Here is the link
-ed by pf

 

I dont think you get it at all. There are people here that want to kill your mother.

But everyone who thinks about it knows that already. The reason this was originally part of the other active thread is that anyone who seeks to get redress for a mistake made can apply through the courts. Defending AGAINST that, no matter how trivial the complaint, COSTS MONEY.

So the choice is to follow fast developments, and possibly gain intelligence on what is happening in order to forestall an attack... or to play it legally safe and cover everyone's ass.

So, lets assume YOU are one of those analysts.. you find a plot in progress, the bad guys are moving and shifting their communications terminals fast.

In fact, the guys are arrested. But then because there was a hiccup in the procedure, they walk and you are taken into court.
Knowing that... will that affect your future judgement?

Remember we had info on the muslims who were in flight school and didnt care about learning how to land a 747. It was known and it was sent up the FBI chain. And stopped on a regional managers desk.
Not JUST because the guy was an idiot but to a great extent because of the Clinton Administration's 'Intelligence Wall'

Hey... I dont think ANY of us like it.. but there has been far worse government abuses and I've been like some guy crying in the wind on them.

1. Seizure of private property on SUSPICION Has been done for decades. NO REDRESS if you are found innocent or charges dropped. In other words, if a cop stops you in your car and searches then 'finds' a few pot leaves, your car is seized and sold.
- Suppose you beat the rap. Or prove it was planted. Think you get your car back? Dream ON!

Of course the department involved MAY let you have it back, but it is entirely at their discretion.

That happened to my brother in the early eighties. He tracked the title and it ended up being owned by a relative of the cop. Go figure!

And of course there is the famous 'KELO' eminent domain decision in which the Supreme Court upheld the right of the governemnt to condemn property at whim, buy it under market value and hand it off to a developer. This happens all the time, it wasnt the first instance nor was it the last.

And of course, SOME of a particular political view assumed this was the doings of a Conservative Court, but they were wrong. That's why those now only howl when a town does the same to bring in Walmart or some evil corporation. Only THEN does the 'Seizure to increase tax base' cause a ruckus.

Yeah, i know, this 'isnt the same' but YES IT IS! You HAVE TO TRUST YOUR GOVERNMENT.

You HAVE the right to howl. you have the right to protest... you DO NOT have the right to assume that each issue stands on its own.
And you have to look at what a candidate is REALLY saying before you vote for them.

Actions.. even those which seem good at the time.. have consequences. Because 'the Law is an Ass' {look it up} and doesnt look at 'Common Sense' ...it looks at Precedent and the constitutional interpretation of previous similar cases.

 

In light of PCB's brilliant writing above { }I think I need to put up my OWN opinion.
Above I state that the courts are NOT allowed to use 'Common Sense' as a part of the consideration of evidence. Ask any lawyer!
Thus the 'Common Sense' factor must be established at the BEGINNING.

I am perfectly comfortable with an establishment of precept, that is 'Find out what terrorists are up to' and freedom to pursue and hold.
THEN have the FISA court, in this example review the trail of pursuit and rule on it. If there is no original probable cause... in essence the agent is simply surfing the lines and comes across a conspiracy, then rule all subsequent actions moot and inadmissable. Not to mention that none of it may be divulged to the public in any way.
And that is the key. Do a browser search on 'divulge' in this page. the harm is in the release of information.


However the 'wall' must be removed because the bad guys ARE in custody and they MAY be prosecuted or deported for non-related offenses such as illegal entry or even overstaying visas.

At present they simply walk because they were apprehended for an illegal reason.

 

pettyfog. Um..that was a long read, but really didn't add anything to the discussion (i.e., no new arguments - giving other examples of our 4th Amendment Rights being infringed weakens your argument, it doesn't strengthen it.)

No, I don't trust my government, no matter which party is in power. I do trust the Checks and Balances our forefathers built into the Constitution - they didn't trust the government either, even when they WERE the government.

Can we save lives by giving up our right to privacy? Certainly. Is it worth it? Not to me.

 

Don, the more you write that the dumber it sounds!

RIGHTS ARE NOT RIGHTS IF THEY PUT AN ENTIRE NATION AT RISK!!!

YOU HAVE NO RIGHTS IF YOU ARE DEAD!

You can repeat that meme all you want. It will not affect me or my judgement.
AndyPalmer.. this is to you, too!
I'll say again... you did NOT have those rights in the fifties, your PARENTS certainly did NOT HAVE THOSE RIGHTS IN THE FORTIES.

What YOU suggest is that we MAY END UP DEAD by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but we WILL BE MORALLY SUPERIOR.
How many times do I have to say that...

All you do by writing that crap is evoke a visceral emotional response which I then have to fight to suppress..

So EVEN THOUGH I TRY TO POINT OUT that EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED, the moonbats among us bury their heads in the sand.

THE RIGHTS CLAIMED here are constructs of Courts' interpretations. And RECENT ONES AT THAT!

When a court extends meaning or 'applies them to the society of the moment' it gives UP elements of personal and national security.

Such as the expectation that if your son is in a pond and is drowning or goes under.. that SOME public officer MIGHT attempt to save him.

Such as if you write a book and point out the money being given to support terror from abroad, you may reasonably expect to NOT be hauled in absentia before a foreign court have a monetary judgement levied against you and thus be unable or inhabited from traveling to the country in which the fine was levied.

But YOU GUYS WILL NOT SEE THE CONNECTION and nothing more I write will convince you because if you admit I'm right it's YOUR belief system that is threatened.
Instead you take a post I try to use to illuminate and say there's nothing new there.

So I will just have to say I'm on the moral high ground here. You guys are only concerned with your own mental and emotional well being and that you are politically correct.

I'll leave this thread with the parting thought. Thoguh, of course you may say it has nothing to do with the subject.

It's the extremists' aim to provoke antipathy between ourselves and Muslims. Everything of controversy involving their actions is pointed to that agenda.

At some time in the future, everyone will have had enough. The hotter heads, including a GREAT NUMBER of those deceived by the unholy alliance between leftists and islamists, will scream for muslim blood. And many will take innocent lives.

This is not just my fanciful extension of thought... this has been written by the Islamists themselves. They think it is inevitable in the subjugation of all non-believers. That's why they call it jihad and their proponents 'martyrs'.

They will cast themselves as victims... isnt that what they always do?

It happens now.. it's in the news all the time. Bin Laden in his fatwas said westerners have no stomach for blood and prefer our 'rights and creature comforts' and that is why jihad will prevail.

 

Petty is actually famous for that... he tends to sandwich a fact with several references to sources he claims are more solid than your own... ie his opinion vs. yours... I don't mind tho, I like the man, and he incites me into further political discussion... and although he never teachs me anything, he makes Don respond, who then argues the counter... mostly and FINALLY pushing me to read on... forever read on.

Can we save lives giving up this right? Well, MAYBE? Thats all we know. "MAYBE", is a resounding UN-"NO"... so politicians play on that uncertainty. Case peretually open.

Now, I have a problem with this statement... "someone wants to kill my mother"....

Why? What did she do? Any explanation here would be Neocon justification for such a harsh term, or a blantant lie.

No one wants to kill my mother... if they do, they probably live in the APT next door and hate her shower singing.

Terrorists have a reason for attacking us... it maybe be a good one, or a bad one... but its a reason. "Blowback" comes to mind... I know your all sick of that one... but I have proof that my mother wasnt involved in Cou'de'tats or regime change of any kind in any muslim country.

Back to the right to privacy... So if a listener heard a local asset of some sort... lets say Petty owns a corn farm and is about to double his harvests and mulitiply his profits... he calls Don, his partner, tells him all about his intentions... and they devise a business plan for such... if Petty has a publicly traded company and the listener accumulates the information. Now, although my example doesnt address the civil liberties directly... its does show that there exists a wider open opportunity for corruption... afterall we are enabling the govt in this position.

Oh... its IS a crime... you can take a guess who has it on the brain...

check this out... its from a lefty blog that you might have heard of, the sources might be discredited... you tell me.

http://www.youtube.com/v/wBUkxvfL_eE

 

Flippancy is the answer... it always works on the 'Daily Show' and you can tell where some folks get their nnews.

added.. oh it just NEVER ENDS!!!!!

The Geneva Conventions were ratified to cover treatment of armed uniformed combatants in cases of war, even undeclared war. They didnt even apply to Military in mufti.. eg wearing civilian clothes.

It was NEVER MEANT to cover insurrection or terror groups. EVEN civilian partisans such as the French Underground.
But OUR supreme court by applying 'Progressive Sensibilites' decided differently.

Just makes my case. If only to me.

 

Good work, Smokin'.

Very true about the Petty-Don pendulum. By the time I get around to it, Don has beat me to the punch.

Many times, it's a knock-out. But the Fog hangs around well until later rounds many a time. Of course, he's a Palooka by then, but........

 

'Scaring' is shorthand for BUSHitler fascist agenda....means the writer reserves the right to beleive this is all a gigantic hoax, unless an attack REALLY does happen then he will scream bloody murder that it wasnt found out and stopped.

Just like last time when the AUGUST 2001 PDB said "Bin Laden may use hijacked Aircraft" and everyone knows Dubya should have had agents at every gate at every airport. Doing what... we dont know. Or maybe he should have grounded all flights..
Of COURSE we DID have info on that. Sitting on the desk of some FBI manager in the midwest.

All you have to do to get in line with those who think we are being 'scared into submission' is suspend disbelief and accept that every one of the young idiots apprehended in recent years were just misguided pranksters and really meant no harm.
Yeah, that's the ticket!

 

This is a 'pub conversation' we're all allowed our say... this thread STARTED as a complaint on how court decision took away our will to act. then i split it because the first post here wasnt on topic.
NOTICE that all the stuff on here DOES come back to court decisions and their consequences?

All I see as responsive posts is yet MORE simplistic Bush Derangement memes. I think Don's position is clear and has been for some time. He would rather die than have his 'rights to privacy' voided. I'll accept that. i write that he doesnt have the right to make that decision for others.. but there's no contretemps on that for some reason.
But I also cant seem to get an answer on my position that these arent OLD ESTABLISHED RIGHTS, they are NEW ones as decided by the unelected and unremovable.

And I have no ready answer on how to remedy the non-accepted issue positions. Also no urge to continue to voice my agreement that the latest PATRIOT activity, in particular, makes me uneasy. For the same reasons as Don states. How many times will I have to say it.. there's NOTHING black and white, here!

HOWEVER NO ONE has the right to assert mental and moral superiority IF:

1. The only kind word he ever had for Dubya was when he is criticized for his illegals program was to say he is a texan and has an empathy for hispanics...
As if I dont. Since I had previously stated I would never turn in a {otherwise} law abiding illegal AND I have hispanic relatives by marriage.

2. OR... Because I'm a conservative, lump me in with the quasi-racist {in my opinion} Pat Buchanan who 'cares nothing for the poor' yet admire Buchanan for his isolationism vis a vis the war.

Now...just because I brought both of those up, let's not diverge onto them in this thread. I WILL listen and I will give answers to them. But it will cause another thread split.

 

I'd say it goes 50-50. Petty makes very long intricate posts, sometimes they prove great points other times he looks like a mad man. Don tends to make short and sweet posts. Half the time he gets his point clear across and hits p-fog between the eyes. The other half of the time Don appears to be avoiding the issue not responding to fog's points cause their to hot to handle, and thus Fog in my eyes anyway comes off as the victor. So it more less 50-50.

For the purposes of debate I think fog's biggest mistake is that he'll hit a grand slam........AND then come back and post more and more stuff. To me once you've knocked the opponent out you should let it lie and strut away like you've done it before not stick around insult the coma induced guy as they load him into the ambulance!

When I get involved I try hard to adress the points of the others argument, and throw some Don type smackers in their aswell. Sometimes I think I hack it alright and other times I get BURNED :3d crying: I'm short on experience which means improvement is inevitable so you lot watch out!!! :3d tongue:

 

Fair ENOUGH.. all i want is for the reader to consider the points. I find it's a little disingenuous to say I overdo it, considering the overdone is USUALLY to address some knobbish response... but whatever.

What say we continue this by addressing the proposal over on the Privacy II thread.