As of October, FBI To Allow Warrantless Investigations 574
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Attorney General Michael Mukasey has agreed to allow Congressional hearings, but not to delay, the implementation of new FBI regulations that would allow them to spy on American citizens who are not suspected of any crime. As an editorial in the New York Times points out, this is a power that has a history of abuse. In times past, it was used to wiretap Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and to spy on other civil rights and anti-war protesters."
As Dekortage points out, "Several senators have formally complained that citizens could be investigated 'without any basis for suspicion,' which the Justice Department denies."
Fascist America, in 10 easy steps (Score:5, Interesting)
Fascist America, in 10 easy steps [guardian.co.uk]
My history teacher pointed those out in 1997 and he wasn't thinking of the USA back then. I thought: come on, it can't be that easy! However, seeing what happens in the USA, I humbly have to retract that opinion.
Trends shape history (Score:5, Interesting)
History is not made by individuals. History is made by trends. Specific individuals who are surfing at the leading edge of a trend may get the spotlight, and hence the credit, but really it was the trend that made the change, not the person.
The net effect of current trends is a lot of corruption in our government, plainly visible to the public, with a large collective yawn in response.
Sitting around shouting that people need to stand up and do something will not, in and of itself, create a trend of people standing up and doing something.
For that we will need something bigger. And more painful.
Re:And what are us Americans going to do about it? (Score:3, Interesting)
If a mass protest couldn't pull it off, then yeah...I wouldn't mind seeing that. Heaven forbid we take back what is ours right?
you say nothing but I'm willing to go. (Score:1, Interesting)
Do you have the capital to secure weapons? The manpower? The staff?
To change the system would require those of us who "disagree" to become the "enemy".
If you want to protect the Constitution, it won't be without bloodshed. People will die. MANY people.
If you want to fight enemies, both foreign and domestic, you will have to take lives.
Most people here on slashdot will not take life. The days of men taking lives were in the past and in the future.
At the moment, we post on websites.
Re:We should start encrypting everything (Score:3, Interesting)
This shouldn't be rated funny but rather insightfull. Any lawyer or cop can tell you that you are almost certainly guilty of something.
Re:And what are us Americans going to do about it? (Score:2, Interesting)
No, some of us know that in order to get the gubamint to *listen* you must join a PAC (political action committie). So thats why I joined the ACLU two years ago. Its not like the abuses of the Bush administration have blind-sided anyone who has been paying attention. So you have a choice: piss and moan (as per usual) or join a lobby that will *fight* for your civil liberties.
HTH
Re:We should start encrypting everything (Score:1, Interesting)
Correction: pooly-made closed-source encryption ain't no guarantee.
Good encryption (such as AES [wikipedia.org]) is in practice unbreakable on a human time-scale, even knowing the encryption algorithm (with a few caveats for side-channels and grossly huge known-plaintext attacks). Of course, if someone some day far in the future manages to create a quantum computer that can factor a number larger than 15, then Shor's algorithm will be usable and all current cryptography based on currently 'hard' to compute problems will be, in effect, screwed.
Re:We should start encrypting everything (Score:4, Interesting)
Man, you sound like the southern states - I thought we took care of state rights with that little civil war of Northern Aggression? Some say Lincoln was the father of big government. [cnn.com] Big Business won [lewrockwell.com], state's rights lost, and further rights have kept slipping ever since.
The founders really didn't want an all powerful central government - good intentions and paving the way have taken care of the original design.
Not the only place (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Fascist America, in 10 easy steps (Score:3, Interesting)
>Again, see article and peaceful oriented groups have already been infiltrated. Okay, my source is Roger Moore so a grain of salt the size of Canada is needed.
Here's a MSM source about the military spying on Quakers [msn.com]. In the Pentagon's favor, they admitted it was a mistake and said they'd purged nonviolent protest groups from their database. On the other hand, that was after they got caught.
Re:armed result == bloodbath (Score:1, Interesting)
And what?
We have home-grown weapons of mass destruction. We have home-grown cyber weapons of mass destruction. We have spies. We have communication. We have the internet itself. We are programmers working with robots and automated systems. We are the assistants to the high-ranking officers or big executives. We are doctors, lawyers, surgeons.
There is no need to fight from the out to the in. We are the in. We are the out.
We are legion. There is no where left to run. We have you surrounded. The cute girl in HR, the security guards, the hot-headed IT staff. We are your boss and your lackey.
There is no running. There is no need to run, because there is nothing to run from. You have already lost.
We are anonymous. We are legion.
And you, FBI, will now die, systematically erased from history.
Re:We should start encrypting everything (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm from the UK so I don't know that much about the American legal system. However, a crazy though just occurred to me ...
So does that mean that the law guarantees the right to use encryption ?
Re:Not the best plan (Score:5, Interesting)
The exact function of lots of people using encryption (or buying things in cash, or using anonymizers, etc.) is that an attacker (in this case, the FBI) can extract no information from the fact that you're using encryption (or whatever). They don't need to spread themselves thin, but it's no longer a useful "hey, this person might be up to trouble" flag.
I agree that this is good.
Re:That sucks D: (Score:5, Interesting)
Guns and homemade bombs worked pretty good against an army with tanks, snipers and airplanes in Algeria, Viet Nam, Afghanistan (twice), and in Iraq. So yeah, let's imagine a scenario where the Feds try to impose some sort of dictatorship... you'd have an army of 500,000 active duty soldiers trying to suppress an technologically sophisticated and armed citizenry with 80 million rifles and god knows what sort of homemade contraptions. Good luck. Government by the consent of the governed is a statement of fact, not an ideal.
Time to abolish the FBI? (Score:3, Interesting)
Should we just abolish the FBI? I mean, is there anything the FBI does that actually makes you feel safer than the threat posed by the FBI itself?
Re:ammo box (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, soldiers wouldn't fire on innocent civilians, but I reason they have no problem with "terrorists". People carying guns don't look innocent and if they pick up their guns to fight, expect a big intel spin on it. They will do it, I have no doubt about that.
The average American soldier probably doesn't have a problem considering an Iraqi civilian a 'terrorist', and therefore firing on him, but he might have a more difficult time buying the idea that a mass uprising of averge, everyday white Americans is "Al-Qaida in America".
Some things will be just too big to spin.
Re:armed result == bloodbath (Score:5, Interesting)
Aren't those in the military trained to follow orders from the government no matter what?
I'd ask my nephew, but he's a Marine stationed in Iraq, however when I was in the army we were taught not to follow orders we thought were illegal or violated human rights. When sworn in, yes people are sworn in when they go into the military, people pledge to uphold the Constitution of the USA though.
Surely those who would refuse to raise arms against those they were ordered to kill would be few and far inbetween
I take it you've never been in the military but when I was in there were plenty of people who'd disobey any such order. Viet Nam had a number of examples of fragging [wikipedia.org] where unpopular officers had fragmentation grenades, where the name comes from, tossed at them by those under their command.
Falcon
Re:That sucks D: (Score:3, Interesting)
As I posted above, all the situations you linked to involved troops of a foreign occupier, fighting far from home, against an intensely motivated, nationalistic home army. A better analogy would be the US Civil War, where, despite the guerrilla-like tactics of the South, the North won through the brute power of its military-industrial complex.
Re:We should start encrypting everything (Score:4, Interesting)
I think a butchered quote from Orwell's 1984 says it best:
Whoever controls the present, controls the past. Whoever controls the past, controls the future.
The schoolchildren are the next generation. Whatever the students in school are being taught, that is what will be the policy of our government this next generation. What will our students learn if the past is corrupted?
This has been going on since 2000. (Score:4, Interesting)
In 2000, I was investigated by the FBI after calling Janet Reno "the enemy I swore an oath to defend the Constitution against" in an email to my father and cousin. Within three days of my sending the email, they had interviewed numerous co-workers and convinced my housemate to keep tabs on my whereabouts so they could interview me. Interestingly, the printed copy of my email contained only what I had written; the parts of the conversation I had quoted were blacked out.
This was a few months before the name "Carnivore" started appearing in the news. The FBI swore up and down that Carnivore was only used to monitor suspected criminals. But I have no involvement in any kind of criminal activity (beyond the usual file sharing and moonshining, which I'm sure they know about so I don't mind saying it) and yet I was under surveillance. We are ALL under surveillance, and have been for a long time.