skiwillgee opened this issue on Jul 27, 2013 · 29 posts
Quest posted Sun, 04 August 2013 at 7:54 PM
Thomas Jefferson:
“All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent"
"Experience hath shown that even under the best forms of government, those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny."
James Madison:
"The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home"
"If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be under the guise of fighting a foreign enemy"
John Adams:
"Liberty, once lost, is lost forever"
Benjamin Franklin:
"It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority"
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety"
Thomas Paine:
"That government is best which governs least"
"It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government"
Outrage doesn’t begin to express my disdain for the improprieties this government has allowed to be visited on its citizens over the last few years. All justified under the pretense of in the defense against terrorism when it has become blatantly obvious that spying on its own innocent citizens and subverting their Fourth Amendment rights goes way beyond the pale. A government protecting its country from its enemies is one thing; a government protecting itself from its citizens is quite another…that’s the start of tyranny.
The genius of the Constitution is that it strove to empower a federal government to govern a nation and at the same time govern itself by creating three independent branches of government with a built-in system of checks and balances; the executive branch (The President), the legislative (The Congress) and the judicial (The Supreme Court), and yet not impede on the rights of the individual. Nowhere in the Constitution is there a provision for the secret shadow court that is FISC (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court a creature of Congress). Yet FISC has been signing off (rubber stamping) on government surveillance programs through the NSA that infringe on the constitutional rights of American citizens. It begs the question; who is checking and balancing FISC? I pray for all those who over the centuries made the ultimate sacrifice and laid down their lives to protect the Constitution.
So on this point I disagree with Willie, that the question on who we trust becomes moot when government and an arm of that government, in this case the NSA, is one and the same. So with that in mind it would suffice to say that I trust neither with my country’s constitutional rights. I don’t think that this entire discussion on the questionable practices of the NSA who is empowered by the questionable laws passed through FISA should be trivialized by minimalizing it into a simple packaged question of trust.
Rather, the question should center on those we have entrusted with the privilege of being vigilant over this country’s laws and hard won rights. What were they doing while our rights were being drained away? Sure, now they’re all running around with their pants down and pointing accusatory fingers at one another now that the public eye is on them and is demanding answers and putting pressure on them. Sleeping dogs indeed.
Brandon Smith of PPJ Gazette;
“At the very foundation of perhaps every modern day conflict between the expansive powers of unchecked bureaucracy and the dwindling freedoms of the ordinary citizen dwells the vital issue of privacy. Privacy and the right to hold personal and political views without being singled out and scrutinized by government is absolutely essential to any society which dares to deem itself “fair and just”. Ultimately, without the presence of these two liberties, and without people to defend them, a nation is ill equipped to circumvent the growth of tyranny, and anyone claiming to be “free” in the midst of such a culture is living a delusion of the highest order……
Under tyranny, privacy is usually the first right to be trampled in the name of public safety. Its destruction is incremental and its loss a victim of attrition in the wake of more immediate crisis. Disturbingly, many people become so fixated upon the threats of the moment that they lose complete track of the long term derailment of their own free will in progress. Government, no matter how corrupt, is seen as an inevitability. Conditioned by fear, desperation, insecurity, and sometimes greed, we begin to forget what it was like to live without prying eyes constantly over our shoulders. In the past decade alone, Americans have witnessed a substantial invasion of our individual privacy as well as a destabilization of the legal protections once designed to maintain it. Not just America, but most of the modern world has undergone a quiet program of surveillance and citizen cataloging that goes far beyond any sincere desire for “safety” and into the realm of technocratic domination.”
http://ppjg.me/2011/10/06/why-criminal-governments-spy-on-citizens/
” Today the government is spying on Americans in ways the founders of our country never could have imagined. The FBI, federal intelligence agencies, the military, state and local police, private companies, and even firemen and emergency medical technicians are gathering incredible amounts of personal information about ordinary Americans that can be used to construct vast dossiers that can be widely shared through new institutions like Joint Terrorism Task Forces, fusion centers, and public-private partnerships. And this surveillance often takes place in secret, with little or no oversight by the courts, by legislatures, or by the public.”
Fortunately there has been some movement recently from the sleeping dogs in the right direction but I contend that it shouldn’t have taken the revelations of a computer analyst; one Edward Snowden to have rattled their cages by bringing some transparency to the monstrosity the Congress had created and should have been on top of all along.
“Members of Congress are considering 11 legislative measures to constrain the activities of the National Security Agency, in a major shift of political opinion in the eight weeks since the first revelations from whistleblower Edward Snowden…..
…If enacted, the laws would represent the first rollback of the NSA's powers since 9/11…
There are other lawmakers who are pushing for more profound reforms. They include Republican James Sensenbrenner, the author of the post-9/11 Patriot Act, which the NSA has used to justify some of its data collection methods…
Sensenbrenner said the Patriot Act was being interpreted to allow for forms of surveillance that were never envisaged when it was passed. He now supports an Amash-style bill that would prevent the NSA from hoovering up phone records without specific justification…
Intelligence officials have struggled to show how collecting bulk phone metadata was critical to foiling even one terrorist plot…
"It has become increasingly apparent that the balance between security and liberty has been tainted," Sensenbrenner said in a statement after he left the White House meeting. "The conversation was very productive and everyone agreed something must be done."
A good optimistic sign of this happening is that it has an abundance of bipartisan support. To see which other congressmen and senators are pursuing the issue click on the links below.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/02/congress-nsa-legislation-surveillance
Also see;
http://www.ibtimes.com/nsa-fisa-controversy-congress-looks-reform-secret-court-1348875
One very troubling issue is section 215 of the U.S. Patriot Act which seems most egregious and needs to be reformed. The ACLU on section 215;
“Section 215 vastly expands the FBI's power to spy on ordinary people living in the United States, including United States citizens and permanent residents.
So I can be sectioned 215 because I’ve exercised my freedom of expression (First Amendment) by writing this post and not know that I was a target of surveillance and therefore my privacy compromised. And if I were sectioned 215 and approached about it, I would be prohibited of ever telling anyone. How would I approach the services of a lawyer? Very spooky stuff (pun intended).
But wait it gets better still. During my research I came across articles from several years ago which generally went unnoticed which also ties in with these surveillance programs. It’s all very shady and illusive mostly because of the security nature of the whole thing but it seems some people have put some patches together.
It entails a database search engine software owned by Inslaw Ink. (William Anthony Hamilton and wife, Nancy Burke Hamilton) Written back in 1970 Called PROMIS (Prosecutor’s Management Information System) to help keep track within the legal system. The government appropriates this program and later in the 80’s it gets tied into a secret government database code name called Main Core. The existence of this database was first reported on May 2008 by Christopher Ketcham from now defunct Radar Magazine. It is claimed that eight million Americans are listed on this database as of 2008 and; “According to a senior government official who served with high-level security clearances in five administrations, “There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.” He and other sources tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.”
http://www.salon.com/2008/07/23/new_churchcomm/
If all this is true then, who knows…maybe I made the list.
More database links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Core
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inslaw_Inc._v._United_States_Government
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/07/salons-new-revelations-illegal-spying
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecutor%27s_Management_Information_System
http://www.scribd.com/doc/44581072/Promis-Main-Core-Time-line-and-Documentation#fullscreen
http://www.globalresearch.ca/spying-on-americans-business-as-usual-under-obama/13249
Interested in what could be found out in metadata see;
NSA Spying On Americans FAQ;
https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/faq