The Senate handed the White House a major victory today
Sigh.
I don’t like to get overly political here, but still… this is ridiculous…
Who needs privacy? Who needs civil liberties? Not Americans. Apparently that’s what our elected officials believe. The NYTimes is reporting on the Senate putting a big, fat stamp of approval on Bush’s previously illegal wiretapping without a warrant schemes. FISA retroactively gives immunity to the telecoms for complying with the illegal actions and broadens our executive branch’s ability to spy on us unfettered by check nor balance.
Salon is covering it also - they pointed out “the Senate handed the White House a major victory” from the nyt piece and from whence I stole my title. Importantly, they have created an online petition
you
should
sign.
Seriously. I believe there’s only two things saving this thing from being abject horror. One is that it still needs to get through the House. The other is that, I believe, it isn’t a permanent passage, but it’s a temporary extension, the second of its sort - I think that’s right, although someone smarter than me (Scott, I’m looking at you) can tell me about that.
Interestingly, and tellingly, Obama happily voted against this while Hillary was the only Senator not to vote. Dude. How can a presidential candidate not take part in this either for or against? Yeah.
It just is not surprising given our government’s believe that Privacy and security are a zero-sum game. Thankfully Bruce Schneier debunks that theory. So does ars technica. It’s simply a use of fear mongering tactics to make a power grab for the executive branch.
Compare and contrast to the Privacy Commissioner of Canada’s blog. I don’t know much about Canada’s privacy policy, but the blog seems interesting and they also suggest that they think this zero-sum game thing is a bunch of crap. I’ll end with just the last two grafs of that post:
Worse, perpetuating this myth forces people to take one side over the other. If you want to protect your country from a crippling attack on its information architecture, you shouldn’t mind having your Google searches and personal emails scanned - or so the logic goes. The flip side of this logic implicates privacy advocates and defenders of civil liberty as ambivalent to national security concerns, or worse, traitors to their country.
It seems the better approach is to recognize that privacy and security can happily co-exist and that governments can develop policies that respect and protect the privacy of its citizens while ensuring national security against the threat of attack.
That’s Bush’s whole game, painting a picture where you’re either for him or against America.
February 13th, 2008 at 12:47 pm
I am always hearing that if you want to deter an attack, you should not mind having stuff of your scanned or prodded. This si a worthless non point for several reasons. One, the government is already doing this, was already doing this and will always be doing this. Why we have to fight about it publicly is beyond me. The second reason is the chances of it hampering an attack are minimal to zero. Look at all the information they had pre 9/11, what did they do with it?Not a thing. So this leads you to believe what you were saying fee, which is this is not to protect us, it’s top give power to the executive branch. You don’t think Bush’s tax cuts for the extremely wealthy have proved this? Lastly, in order for there to be a true revolution, one this country has not seen in over 100 years you have to go to the bottom of the barrel. We are almost there. If there next couple of presidents don’t change out forign and domestic attitudes I fear there will be hell to pay in violent protest the likes of which out cities have never seen. Least I would hope that people would give a shit enough. I think if they knew the extent to which they are being screwed they might.
February 13th, 2008 at 1:44 pm
I dunno, I think America isn’t really close to any sort of mass violence. I just don’t see it. At any rate, the optimist in me suspects that even in the worst case our next president has to be much better than Bush ever was. But maybe that’s just my five martini lunch talking.
February 13th, 2008 at 5:37 pm
Last thing I want is violence in the streets, believe me. I am just saying that if the government continues to not only ignore the masses of it’s own citizens and do nothing but produce counter productive measures there won’t be much else to do. How many people can you undermine before it all goes haywire?
Yes, Bush has set a new low and there is no place else to go but up but you know what? I found the country saying that when Bush Senior was in office and look what happened. I just hope the bottom is now that’s all. I want to focus on all the cool stuff we do again. Not all the things that hurt ourselves and everyone around us.
San Dimas High School Football Rules!!!
February 14th, 2008 at 9:01 am
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