Senators Want Secret Warrantless Wiretap Renewal 198
An anonymous reader writes "A group of Senators are meeting in secret today, while most people are focused on the 'debt ceiling' issue, in order to try to rush through a renewal of the FISA Amendments Act, which expressly allowed warrantless wiretapping in the U.S. The law isn't set to expire until next year, but some feel that the debt ceiling crisis is a good distraction to pass the extension without having to debate the issue in public. The meeting is being held in secret, but it's not classified, so people can demand to know how their Senator voted."
And You Know They Will Get It! (Score:5, Insightful)
Welcome to the "new normal" in America, where "Citizen" is a term that is interchangeable with "Felon" or "Enemy".
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Does that make Iran and North Korea member states?
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Did you see the metafiler [metafilter.com] discussion?
They asked whether [metafilter.com] anyone has written a Javascript library that encodes AJAX requests as extremely suspicious looking emails, meaning every person visiting the site using it would show up as sending emails talking about drugs, islam, etc.
Anyone seen such a library?
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Welcome to the "new normal" in America, where "Citizen" is a term that is interchangeable with "Felon" or "Enemy".
How else are the career criminal politicians going to keep tabs on the voters that hate their guts.
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More likely, all those voting yes will have been victims of successful secret warrant less wire tapping and a yes vote will ensure their secrets remain secrets.
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Where's Rand Paul when you need him?
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AQUA BUDDHA!
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Re:And You Know They Will Get It! (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm only 49, and I'm still freaked out by what people allow to happen. I remember watergate; I remember Iran-Contra. it seems to me that we hit the toppling point about 1995 or so?
LOL! American Freedom! (Score:3, Insightful)
LOL! Is this the "American Freedom" we secretly heard so much about when I was a youth growing up in Hungary during the Cold War?
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Re:raging plummet. (Score:2)
Hiya.
Thank you for confirming that I am not a Tin Foil Hat for thinking this stuff is accelerating.
Causes, timeline (Score:2)
Don't forget the War on Drugs and the expansion of the ATF. Waco and Ruby Ridge weren't about corporate profits.
I notice how carefully you selected your beginning and supposed end dates for the plummet. It's still plummeting under Obama. He doesn't get a pass. If you believed his "hope and change" rhetoric during the campaign,
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Re:LOL! American Freedom! (Score:5, Insightful)
If we don't collapse economically thanks to the US senate, there is some small hope that justice and liberty can be restored in time. America needs a valid liberal progressive party instead of the conservative democrats and regressive republicans.
Re:LOL! American Freedom! (Score:5, Interesting)
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it's cute that you think the repiblicans would allow that.
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Default is not inevitable, we can balance the budget, but if we only do a short term debt limit increase the US AAA rating will drop and cost the US another 100 billion a year in interest, making it that much harder to balance the budget in the future. That is what Obama is trying to do. The republicans in the senate are holding our govornment hostage and their only offer is an extra trillion dollars in debt over the next 10 years.
Re:Mod parent up (Score:4, Interesting)
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With you 100%, but it should be noted we're not that far off from Clinton levels of spending and will more or less reach it once we wind down our two land wars in Asia. We've cratered revenues, however. If we returned taxes to Clinton levels, we would have a small enough deficit that Republicans would be back to calling for tax cuts to prevent a surplus, instead of tax cut
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The US really needs to stop thinking that it has to be the worlds police force and pull its troops out of places that it doesn't really need them. Iraq for one (let the new democratically elected government of Iraq decide what sort of military Iraq needs to defend itself).
Get out of Europe altogether (the cold war is over and the threat of the Russians are going to send fleets of tanks west is long gone and that's assuming they actually have any armies left after the collapse of their military)
Pull all the
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Re:LOL! American Freedom! (Score:4, Informative)
I've been listening to more and more old style folk music (pete seeger, woody guthrie, that era of true progressive lefties) and if you hear the 'fight' in their words and songs and compare to what the right calls 'liberal', you'd see that there are no liberals left in politics or in any kind of power.
if you mention 'unionize' to most people, they look at you like you've said a naughty word. yet, many decades ago (but less than a century) we *needed* the union movement to balance the power that the corporations had. it worked and we got 5 day work weeks.
now, likely, you and I are in software or technology and we say "WHAT 5 day work week?".
exactly.
which is why we need unions for software and technology-based workers; and all businesses where the overly-powerful corporations get to dictate, essentually unquestioned, what we do, how we get paid and even IF we get fulltime benefits (healthcare, etc).
if we had a progressive party or even members of left in the government, we'd see more balance. we might see worker rights increase instead of steadily decrease.
if you have not heard those old folk and freedom songs, give them a listen. look into almanac singers, the weavers, pete seeger, joan baez. they all had a deep feeling for our country and were real patriots. they'd all be extremely ashamed (those that are still living, I'm sure they are ashamed) of what the US has become. we made so much progress in the 60's, only to reverse and actually lose ground in this decade.
we need more rebellion and more public show of dissatisfaction with our so-called leaders.
listen to some of those old songs and put them into today's context and you'll see that we're going thru the same kinds of repression again and again. we have to fight it, again and again, too, it seems.
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"America needs a valid liberal progressive party"
Clearly you've never lived in SF or you'd know that Liberal Progressives are the flip side of the coin to Neo-Conservative nutbaggers.
Thanks to Liberal Progressives, SF is knee deep in it's own piss and shit while it's political environment while always to the left has become an absolute farce and quite frankly an international joke thanks to these clueless assholes blocking gentrification and non-affordable housing development which has driven out the middl
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If we don't collapse economically thanks to the US senate, there is some small hope that justice and liberty can be restored in time. America needs a valid liberal progressive party instead of the conservative democrats and regressive republicans.
If you think the Democrats are conservative, the United States needs "a valid liberal progressive party" like it needs forced labor camps. You are far too ready to take The Road to Serfdom [amazon.com].
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I'm reposting a "5 Insightful" on the members of the committee just to illustrate that your precious liberal progressive party is also very in on this fraud. The ones in bold are from the liberal progressive party. For God's sake, look who the f'ing chairperson is?!!?!?! We already have a progressive liberal party running the show and has been since 2008; are you not aware of who has been president for the last few years?!?!? So, no America does NOT need a liberal progressive party, we need a party who
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I guess they learned this from somewhere or where just doomed to repeat history.
âoeNaturally the common people donâ(TM)t want war. But after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and itâ(TM)s always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.
Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and for exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.â
--- Hermann Goering, Hitlerâ(TM)s Reich Marshall, at the Nuremberg Trials after World War II.
That explains everything. (Score:5, Insightful)
Suddenly, it makes sense why all the senators and representatives are making so much noise about the debt ceiling instead of just voting to fix what should have been a relatively minor and uncontentious issue. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, the purpose of government is not to wield power, but to distract attention away from it.
Re:That explains everything. (Score:5, Interesting)
I need some input from the Lawn Crowd, did it feel like this in the Watergate days? I'm getting the horrible feeling that after a nice quiet 90's with nothing but a fun little sex scandal we're seeing a whole different class of nastiness today.
Re:That explains everything. (Score:5, Interesting)
It was much worse in the Wategate days. You could tell Nixon was a meglomaniac who might start a nuclear war or conduct a coup d'etat to stay in power.
Congress pretty much rallied together to rid the country of this madman.
The current budget stuff is pretty sickening, but really is a throwback to earlier times in the republic when politics was pretty disgusting as a normal way of life. It isn't the same level of insanity as having a completely deranged President.
Re:That explains everything. (Score:5, Interesting)
I disagree, I don't think it was worse in the watergate days.
the wholesale cut-out of personal freedoms - WORLD WIDE (yes, the US controls the intertubes. this is news to you? all core routers go thru US owned datacomm centers, dummy; and every one of them that is on the backbone has taps for (cough) calea use. and other things.
watergate only fucked over the US and not really citizens, but it was mostly politicians doing the hurting to each other.
this stuff we have now is them doing it to US.
far, far worse for us all. its the sell-out of privacy, in official terms!
and yes, I was around in the nixon days; as a child but still was very aware of the tv coverage and even what we were discussing in school. it was still ok to discuss current events in school, back then.
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Nixon was doing the same kind of corruption of personal freedoms that is happening right now - except all on his own and clandestinely without the knowledge or consent of Congress, for his own personal power. Enemies lists and using the IRS to harass political opponents. Massive use of the FBI and CIA to track US citizens including war protesters and other dissidents. It was and still is illegal for the CIA to track US citizens.
And all of this was for one purpose - to preserve and extend his personal power.
Re:That explains everything. (Score:4, Insightful)
I hated nixon. of course.
but I still see that as limited damage compared to world-wide surveillance that now passes as 'ok'.
not only is there more spying, but it feels a lot less 'free', now, than it did back then. just in general. we always talked about 'the russians' and how they were a 'papers please' kind of society and government. but today, them is us! the things we held up as differentiating are no longer. I see that much, much worse.
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Re:That explains everything. (Score:4, Informative)
I need some input from the Lawn Crowd, did it feel like this in the Watergate days? I'm getting the horrible feeling that after a nice quiet 90's with nothing but a fun little sex scandal we're seeing a whole different class of nastiness today.
No, it wasn't like this.
Watergate was a relatively singular event, which elicited widescale public outrage. You couldn't go anywhere without it being a topic of convesation and dispute.
This is one of ten-thousand such outrages, perpetrated over the past decade. Like most of them, people don't know of it happening, or why it might even be wrong.
Sleep tight, America.
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It is far, far worse today. The Watergate scandal was clearly limited to the executive branch of government and to a handful of men in the President's innermost circle. The danger to our democracy was clearly limited. There was no danger of a war.
Today we have tens of thousands of employees with secret and top secret security clearances (and I doubt the validity of their background checks also) who are monitoring, following, performing "sneak and peek" operations on U.S. citizens not in the pursuit of ter
Re:That explains everything. (Score:5, Insightful)
Suddenly, it makes sense why all the senators and representatives are making so much noise about the debt ceiling
No, not really. Despite what many on slashdot think, warrantless wire-tapping isn't terribly controversial with the most of the US. Remember, the only time we hear about public discontent with the TSA is when they grope a baby or a grandmother - the bullshit constitutional smokescreen of "administrative searches" isn't even mentioned, much less questioned. No one is getting groped over the phone, so most people don't give a damn.
I wouldn't be surprised to find that this meeting had been scheduled months in advance. But even if it wasn't, it's just opportunism to schedule it now, not the cause of the debt ceiling fiasco, just a side-effect.
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No one is getting groped over the phone, so most people don't give a damn.
You mean most Americans are too stupid to realize they're getting groped over the internet.
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You mean most Americans are too stupid to realize they're getting groped over the internet.
And yet apparently most people on Slashdot are too ignorant to know that they may have passed through someone's crosshairs despite the fact that the arrests and convictions keep coming week, after week, after week. Bomb plots, shooting plots, poison plots. Well, it didn't stop Duke Nukem from shipping, so it must not be important. Besides, everyone watches the Daily Show, right? What more would you need to form opinions about important questions?
Fort Hood Suspect Mentions al Qaeda Cleric Believed to Have [go.com]
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Which Senators was in the secret meeting? (Score:3)
It's thoroughly inappropriate to be doing things like this in secret.
Re:Which Senators was in the secret meeting? (Score:5, Informative)
FTA:
Dianne Feinstein, California (chair)
Saxby Chambliss, Georgia (vice chair)
John D. Rockefeller IV, West Virginia
Olympia J. Snowe, Maine
Ron Wyden, Oregon
Richard Burr, North Carolina
Barbara A. Mikulski, Maryland
James Risch, Idaho
Bill Nelson, Florida
Daniel Coats, Indiana
Kent Conrad, North Dakota
Roy Blunt, Missouri
Mark Udall, Colorado
Marco Rubio, Florida
Mark Warner, Virginia
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Democrat
Republican
Democrat
Republican
Democrat
Republican
Democrat
Republican
Democrat
Republican
Democrat
Republican
Democrat
Republican
Democrat
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Well, the first 2 are the chair and vice-chair. I am guessing after that it has something to do with the way the parties assign members to the committees, which is probably alternating parties, by seniority.
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Or let's look at it this way:
Feinstein: Anti constitutional rights
Wyden&Udall: anti spying
Considering that feinstein is the head, we're kinda screwed. That and the complete lack of transparency, not that they were ever going to make good on it [techdirt.com].
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John D. Rockefeller IV, West Virginia
Bwahahahaha!
Sorry, I shouldn't laugh.
Re:Which Senators was in the secret meeting? (Score:5, Funny)
Not all of them support the warrantless wiretaps
[secret citation needed]
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TFA good enough for you? No one reads it, so it might as well be secret :P
Anyway, it singles out Wyden and Udall as opposing the wiretaps, and there could be others too, since that list just consists of everyone on the committee.
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Please review the subject line.
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At least one "For the People" caucus asspile (Feinstein) is for it... because she's the chair. She also hates the 2nd Amendment... Freedom of Speech (If someone wants to call a gay person a fanny bandit, goddamnit, he should have the right to do so...) :)
But then again, she's a Senator... that means she's more out of touch than Helen Keller on acid.
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I keep hoping California will get just a couple of competent Republicans running for major offices so we can get rid of Boxer and Feinstein, but instead, the Republicans keep giving us people like Meg Whitman (who ran one of the most evil companies of the Internet age) and Carly Fiorina (who nearly bankrupted two major technology companies in a row before trying her hand at politics...).
It's purely the illusion of
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Constitution? You mean that fancy toilet paper with writing that they have in the Senate bathrooms?
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Seeing as warrantless wiretapping is clearly unconstitutional, it's thoroughly inappropriate to be doing it at all.
Warrantless wiretapping for national security purposes has been found Constitutional by courts repeatedly. You don't know what you are talking about.
Intelligence Court Releases Ruling in Favor of Warrantless Wiretapping [washingtonpost.com]
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Warrantless wiretapping for national security purposes has been found Constitutional by courts repeatedly.
hands up, all here, who consider this an example of 'people giving themselves power'.
yeah, the government assigns itself a lot of self-importance and overrides the rights and will of the people.
well, color ME surprised!
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well, color ME surprised!
How about if I color you uninformed instead?
You have no right to private communications with foreign powers or organizations aimed at attacking or overthrowing the government of the United States, particularly if they have declared war on the US.
yeah, the government assigns itself a lot of self-importance and overrides the rights and will of the people.
The will of the American people is to not be blown up at Christmas tree lightings [oregonlive.com] and other public functions by terrorists. They are OK with spying on terrorists communicating with Al Qaeda. The Constitution is OK with that. I'm not sure you're "hip" to any of th
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FTFY (Score:5, Insightful)
in order to try to rush through a renewal of the FISA Amendments Act, which unconstitutionally allowed warrantless wiretapping in the U.S.
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in order to try to rush through a renewal of the FISA Amendments Act, which unconstitutionally allowed warrantless wiretapping in the U.S.
Don't worry, with the Roberts court, if you sacrifice yourself and push the issue, the Supremes are sure to have a nice 5-4 split vote that will, indeed, prove it's constitutional. It happened with Citizens United, it will happen here.
The court via Clarence Thomas is up for sale [huffingtonpost.com], what less would his sponsors expect?
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Bad news. Things are only unconstitutional if SCOTUS agrees that they are. And given authoritarians like Scalia and Clarence "Strip-search-teenage-girls" Thomas, I doubt warantless wiretapping will become unconstitutional any time soon.
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Nonsense. The Supreme Court is composed of fallible (and corruptible) human beings. If you believe in the rule of law, and not men, they cannot simply change the constitution by disregarding what the constitution actually says. When the Supreme Court fails in their obligation to uphold the constitution, it doesn't make unconstitutional acts constitutional, it makes the US government illegitimate.
Awful, (Score:2, Interesting)
warrantless anything is wrong and such acts should be punished for attempting, people should be burning with anger about this subject! Thanks for the info slashdot.
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Terrorist
Terrorism
Pedophile
Children
Drugs
War
If you suggested that government was going to search everyone (using the airport scanners) leaving a store to ensure that they didn't steal anything there would be blood in the street.
ugh... (Score:3)
Re:ugh... (Score:4, Interesting)
sigh.
its not about ballot box; that obviously does not work.
its not about soap box; they don't listen to us.
its not about ammo box; their guns are bigger than ours
you know what its about? IGNORE THEIR SO-CALLED LAWS.
they ask for it and so we give it to them. they have ruined the respect of the rule of law; so we are not obligated to follow their made-up bullshit laws.
yes, you risk 'problems' in life; but so did so many patriots in our past. be patriotic and IGNORE CONGRESS' LAWS.
we already ignore the copyright bullshit. we copy things 'right', actually (lol), but we don't follow bullshit made-up laws.
civil disobedience: we have a long history of it. its needed, now, folks.
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Civil disobedience is not ignoring the law. Civil disobedience is flagrantly and publicly violating the law with the full knowledge of and the willingness to accept the consequences of doing so. This is why demonstrations are most often done en masse--one guy publicly violating the law is a nutjob or a nuisance; several hundred create a spectacle that is much harder to ignore, strengthening the demonstrators' chances to land in the spotlight and hopefully find widespread support for their cause.
Don't kid
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This is why demonstrations are most often done en masse--one guy publicly violating the law is a nutjob or a nuisance; several hundred create a spectacle that is much harder to ignore
Also: it is harder to catch every one of the demonstrators, so there is some sense of "safety in numbers."
For the same reason, fish school. I really like that one, actually: the fish is not getting up close to his neighbor because he's being friendly; he's doing it so that when the predator comes, there's a greater chance of his neighbor gets eaten first.
We can learn a lot from nature. :)
(Similarly, the joke whose punchline is "I don't have to outrun the bear; I just have to outrun you.")
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Civil disobedience is a great way to effect change, it's true, but it really can't be applied to warrantless wiretapping. Hell, for us to "ignore" their laws about wiretaps is exactly what they want.
If you want to change this, you need to vote for the most liberal candidate in every election. For the purposes of this post, I'm talking about liberal in terms of civil liberties. Don't worry about their views on economics or foreign policy or whatever, if your main concern is civil rights. Usually, there a
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Civil disobedience is a targeted act intended to draw attention to injustice. Not just being too lazy and too cheap to go buy something instead of pirating it. (Not that I'm in favor of current copyright laws, but the vast majority of file sharers are not violating copyright for political reasons -- they're doing it simply out of convenience.)
As for warrantless
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Having an opinion on gay rights or abortion doesn't mean you will stomp over everyone else's rights or right to choose. Im not going to force people to say nice things to gay people just because I think gay people should have all the rights of straight people. That is against a person's right to free speech. Assuming he gets the presidency, he can't even make laws anyway since that is under the purview of Congress. Sure, he can veto the hell out of bills, but Congress can still over-ride. If you believe he
To anyone will still vote for one of the senators: (Score:2)
Email your Senators today (Score:3)
Let then know this is not slipping under the wire. Email the President as well. Calls are good too.
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silly person. still thinks that the will of the people matters when its a power-grab we are talking about.
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We do still vote them in. If a large enough percentage of their constituency says, "vote this way and I will vote you out," they will very likely change their tune. It works very well in the House and less so in the senate, though it is still effective. Public pressure is the best tool that the public possesses.
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kang and kodos.
nice choice we have.
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Why waste the opportunity to screw the public (Score:2)
"Never let a serious crisis go to waste. What I mean by that is it's an opportunity to do things you couldn't do before."
- Former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel
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Solution (Score:2)
Frame the NSA for wiretapping senators on the intelligence committee.
Wait... was that was in V for Vandetta? Damnit.
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well, lulzsec had their main guy nabbed, so they're out of action. right? or, wait, did they get the wrong guy? [dailytech.com]
maybe l.s. can refocus world attention and let everyone know that we have rogue senators trying to pull a fast one on us.
the world needs new heros. sadly, we can't count on our 'elected' officials to work in our interests. I hope there is someone out there who can.
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The real Topiary better hide in a cave now, all his personal details and pics are available online.
Phone Hacking (Score:2)
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Dear US government: (Score:3)
1984 is NOT an instruction manual.
Seriously, I'm actually reading 1984 again, and the parallels are scary to what has been going on in the US post-9/11. And to imagine that Orwell came up with this in the late 40's and it's mirrored in today's USA, is literally unbelievable.
How much longer do you let this continue?
Read The Shock Doctrine (Score:2)
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Because it wouldn't do any good - at worst they would be martyrs, and at best they would be replaced by someone else just like them. Violence is rarely the best solution, and they were elected after all, so if you want to make a change then campaign for someone else. If you can't find someone better then run for office yourself.
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You are all suspected terrorists. Where is that phone number for the local FBI office...
Maybe these will help:
Minneapolis Man Pleads Guilty to Terrorism Offense - July 18, 2011 [fbi.gov]
Pennsylvania Man Indicted for Soliciting Jihadists to Kill Americans - July 14, 2011 [fbi.gov]
Accused al Shabaab Leader Charged with Providing Material Support to al Shabaab and al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula - July 5, 2011 [fbi.gov]
Two Men Charged in Plot to Attack Seattle Military Processing Center - June 23, 2011 [fbi.gov]
Chicago Businessman Tahawwur Hussain Rana Guilty of Providing Material Support to Terror Group and Supporting Role in Denmar [fbi.gov]
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