Posted on 09/28/2011 6:20:35 AM PDT by Texas Fossil
Since this spring’s blink-and-you-missed-it debate over reauthorization of several controversial provisions of the Patriot Act, Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Mark Udall (D-CO) have been complaining to anyone who’d listen about a “Secret Patriot Act“—an interpretation of one of the law’s provisions by the classified Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court granting surveillance powers exceeding those an ordinary person would understand to be conferred from the text of the statute itself. As I argued at the time, there is an enormous amount of strong circumstantial evidence suggesting that this referred to a “sensitive collection program” involving cell phone location tracking—potentially on a mass scale—using Patriot’s “Section 215″ or “business records” authority.
Lest anyone think they’d let the issue drop, Wyden and Udall last week released a sharply-worded letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, blasting the Justice Department for misleading the public about the scope of the government’s surveillance authority. The real audience for an open letter of this sort, of course, is not the nominal recipient, but rather the press and the public. Beyond simply reminding us that the issue exists, the letter confirms for the first time that the “secret law” of which the senators had complained does indeed involve Section 215. But there are some additional intriguing morsels for the attentive surveillance wonk.
The letter focuses particularly on “highly misleading” statements by Justice Department officials analogizing Section 215 powers to grand jury subpoenas. “As you know,” Wyden and Udall write, “Section 215 authorities are not interpreted in the same way that grand jury subpoena authorities are, and we are concerned that when Justice Department officials suggest that the two authorities are ‘analogous’ they provide the public with a false understanding of how surveillance law is interpreted in practice.”
(Excerpt) Read more at cato-at-liberty.org ...
Now the real question? Why would 2 Dems like Wyden and Udall concerned about an abuse of surveillance? Especially knowing the history or Eric Holder. Is there a bigger controversy from Holder's Justice Department than the Fast & Furious flap?
“Is there a bigger controversy from Holder’s Justice Department than the Fast & Furious flap? “
Yes.
OK, that answers it.
I was thinking that the Dems might be sensing the defeat in 2012 and concerned about We the People tracking their actions.
Well, there was Janet Napolitano and her announcement that white male Christians, people who hold the COnstitution as the final say, those who uphold the 2nd Amendmen, and soldiers are ‘terrorists’.
Add to that the massive datacenters that they built to collect and store data that we were ‘assured’ would be purged ‘aftfer a time’.
Imagine the East German Stasi, but here in a modern American techno-age.
Well, Big Sis did have her panties all tied up in a knot about those “threats”. Fact.
And NSA has been doing “extensive” phone tracking for a long long time.
The difference now is the new “foreign Commie Leadership” that is running the Federal Government.
I am convinced the only way to root them out after the 2012 election is to DownSize DC. Eliminate the Departments and move any worthwhile functions back to the states. Otherwise the subversive elements will remain even when we remove Obozo and his immediate supporters.
It may be that the Dems see this coming and think it is time to shred some electronic data that might be used against them.
Libya is missing some weaponry.
Expect Obozo and Holder to make certain it gets used to justify their assault on our freedoms.
Libya’s weapons are not missing. They were transferred into the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood as Obozo intended.
Nothing happens by accident with this traitor. It is destruction of the U.S. by design.
FUBO!
Exactly.
Recall that the left has long accused others of doing what they themselves were doing or wanted to do.
Thinking back, they accused Dubya of ‘faking’ 9/11, which is what the left would have done.
They accuse others of trying to create ‘re-education camps’, which is what they would do, they accuse others of trying to squash freedom, yet that is what the left has always tried to do.
The left accuses their opponents of doing what THEY themselves are doing in hopes of keeping people from lookng at them too closely.
We will be shocked if what this current administration has done comes to light.
Some will, especially those who still watch TV. I am receiving some of the results of being outspoken. Over the past year I have noticed my efforts to gather and propagate news using Twitter are being "filtered" I first noticed it over a year ago when I actually saw some of my "tweets" removed by Obots. They had hacked the system or they were employees of Twitter that were also Obots (would be nice to be paid 2 times for your work, hee hee hee) Now it has reached a whole new level. I expect it is being done by filtering via the web, not within Twitter. When I post a comment about an article that deals with Fast & Furious or one of the tentacles that relate to it, it simply disappears. But, another user noticed that my posts were still there on his cell phone, but were not visible to me on my PC. Conclusion, there is a filtering system that routinely filters my content based on my history. Should be no surprise, but it was.
Net Neutrality? (Orwellian Double speak) already in place. 2 years ago I had e-mails frozen by Yahoo/ATT because of a screen capture that I made of a Technorati search concerning the Sarah Palin e-mail hacker. Welcome to the brave new world. /sarcasm
It may be even worse.
Heck, Krugman wants it to be worse, he’d applaud a dictatorial takeover and has said as much.
There’s a hell of a lot of people on this site who would be ecstatic with a dictatorial takeover too, as long as the dictator had an ‘R’ after their name, professed ‘Christianity’ and or wore a flag pin.
We should never let the government (ANY BRANCH) have any more power under the best of rulers than we would want it to have under the most evil of rulers, *THAT* is the reason for ‘limited government’.
I remember well “Family Security Matters”, a site some supposed conservatives have at times referred favorably to suggesting that GWB declare a dictatorship and refuse to step down.
All the blathering and caterwauling about “high tech” changes nothing, a warrant to do ANYTHING should require appearing in front of a judge and presenting solid evidence as to why the right to presumed privacy of even the lowest life scumbag possible terrorist should be violated, for how long and to what end.
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