I knew I didn't like Bush's appointments, but now I am really scared.

TWB

I Love Hineys
Joined
Aug 7, 2001
Posts
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WILLIAM SAFIRE writes:

If the Homeland Security Act is not amended before passage, here is what will happen to you:

Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend — all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as "a virtual, centralized grand database."

To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial sources, add every piece of information that government has about you — passport application, driver's license and bridge toll records, judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the F.B.I., your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance — and you have the supersnoop's dream: a "Total Information Awareness" about every U.S. citizen.

This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario. It is what will happen to your personal freedom in the next few weeks if John Poindexter gets the unprecedented power he seeks.

Remember Poindexter? Brilliant man, first in his class at the Naval Academy, later earned a doctorate in physics, rose to national security adviser under President Ronald Reagan. He had this brilliant idea of secretly selling missiles to Iran to pay ransom for hostages, and with the illicit proceeds to illegally support contras in Nicaragua.

A jury convicted Poindexter in 1990 on five felony counts of misleading Congress and making false statements, but an appeals court overturned the verdict because Congress had given him immunity for his testimony. He famously asserted, "The buck stops here," arguing that the White House staff, and not the president, was responsible for fateful decisions that might prove embarrassing.

This ring-knocking master of deceit is back again with a plan even more scandalous than Iran-contra. He heads the "Information Awareness Office" in the otherwise excellent Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which spawned the Internet and stealth aircraft technology. Poindexter is now realizing his 20-year dream: getting the "data-mining" power to snoop on every public and private act of every American.

Even the hastily passed U.S.A. Patriot Act, which widened the scope of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and weakened 15 privacy laws, raised requirements for the government to report secret eavesdropping to Congress and the courts. But Poindexter's assault on individual privacy rides roughshod over such oversight.

He is determined to break down the wall between commercial snooping and secret government intrusion. The disgraced admiral dismisses such necessary differentiation as bureaucratic "stovepiping." And he has been given a $200 million budget to create computer dossiers on 300 million Americans.

When George W. Bush was running for president, he stood foursquare in defense of each person's medical, financial and communications privacy. But Poindexter, whose contempt for the restraints of oversight drew the Reagan administration into its most serious blunder, is still operating on the presumption that on such a sweeping theft of privacy rights, the buck ends with him and not with the president.

This time, however, he has been seizing power in the open. In the past week John Markoff of The Times, followed by Robert O'Harrow of The Washington Post, have revealed the extent of Poindexter's operation, but editorialists have not grasped its undermining of the Freedom of Information Act.

Political awareness can overcome "Total Information Awareness," the combined force of commercial and government snooping. In a similar overreach, Attorney General Ashcroft tried his Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS), but public outrage at the use of gossips and postal workers as snoops caused the House to shoot it down. The Senate should now do the same to this other exploitation of fear.

The Latin motto over Poindexter"s new Pentagon office reads "Scientia Est Potentia" — "knowledge is power." Exactly: the government's infinite knowledge about you is its power over you. "We're just as concerned as the next person with protecting privacy," this brilliant mind blandly assured The Post. A jury found he spoke falsely before.
 
brokenbrainwave said:
Big Brother is alive and well. Is Bush the anti-christ?

No. The anti-christ will be a smooth talker, with the ability to sway people to his side with his public speaking ability; not someone who can't pronounce "nu-cle-ar".
 
How is it possible the American people are letting this happen??

Is everyone just THAT ill informed? This whole thing scares the piss out of me.
 
sunstruck said:
How is it possible the American people are letting this happen??

Is everyone just THAT ill informed? This whole thing scares the piss out of me.

Or things are being blown out of proportion again. Can you imagine the disk space to monitor even one person's activities that closely?
 
RawHumor said:
Or things are being blown out of proportion again. Can you imagine the disk space to monitor even one person's activities that closely?


Granted, but have you looked at these laws?
 
TWB said:

Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend — all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as "a virtual, centralized grand database."

So when my teachers were saying "This is going on your permanent record" they weren't just tryin to scare me?
 
seriously scared............

I just knew Bush could't get elected, and yet, here we are.........Ashcroft scares me to death.......... the whole concept of invoking this Axis of Evil thing, holding all these people without charges, no legal council, not even disclosing where they are.......the whole country is just giantly scared of almost everything and everybody........and now the US seems to claim some mandate to go wherever we please and take out whoever we want.......I am equally embarrased..................god help us.......

greybeard
 
I would be amused if we stormed into Iraq and there were no "weapons of mass destruction" only to find the biggest weapon of mass destruction was George Bush's imagination and the damage was only to our constitutional rights.
 
RawHumor said:
Or things are being blown out of proportion again. Can you imagine the disk space to monitor even one person's activities that closely?


I'd still like to hear your take on the whole thing.
 
TWB said:
I would be amused if we stormed into Iraq and there were no "weapons of mass destruction" only to find the biggest weapon of mass destruction was George Bush's imagination and the damage was only to our constitutional rights.
this would be hillarious. Unlikely but hillarious.

To raise a question that I have before, when do we envoke our "right to bear arms against a tyranical government"? Things are getting a might messy...

edited to add this is not something I am advocating, but if the deterioation of civil liberties continues, reckon we might see it on a mass scale?
 
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sunstruck said:
I'd still like to hear your take on the whole thing.

I don't know of the bill(s) he's talking about. Like PC said, a link would be nice. But I'd prefer a link that wasn't to that same article. Sometimes it's tough to find an unbiased source for things like this.
 
RawHumor said:
I don't know of the bill(s) he's talking about. Like PC said, a link would be nice. But I'd prefer a link that wasn't to that same article. Sometimes it's tough to find an unbiased source for things like this.

How do you know the article is biased? You don't even know where it came from yet. He's a writer for the NY Times by the way.
 
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sunstruck said:
How do you know the article is biased? You don't even know where it came from yet.

Well...

This ring-knocking master of deceit is back again with a plan even more scandalous than Iran-contra.
 
RawHumor said:

LOL ok. I'll give you that. But I don't think he blows things entirely out of proportion.

The road this country is traveling right now doesn't scare you? It's not about whether they CAN track us like that, it's about the fact that we are willing to let them. That isn't supposed to be what this country is about.
 
So GW Bush is the anti-Christ or the beast....damn it, you mean I've been listening to Marilyn Manson under false pretenses?
 
sunstruck said:
LOL ok. I'll give you that. But I don't think he blows things entirely out of proportion.

The road this country is traveling right now doesn't scare you? It's not about whether they CAN track us like that, it's about the fact that we are willing to let them. That isn't supposed to be what this country is about.

I'm not saying that I'm not concerned. My point is only that I'd like to here something from "the other side".

The truth, as they say, probably lies somewhere in between.
 
Bob_Bytchin said:
So GW Bush is the anti-Christ or the beast....damn it, you mean I've been listening to Marilyn Manson under false pretenses?

You should be in prison. I'm pretty sure it's illegal for anyone over 17 to listen to him of their own free will.


It should be, at least.
 
I can't find any links that aren't so steaped in legalease I'd need Mishka to translate them.
 
sunstruck said:
I can't find any links that aren't so steaped in legalease I'd need Mishka to translate them.

That's also a problem. I consider myself quite intelligent, but I'm not fluent in lawyer-talk and politi-speak.
 
RawHumor said:
I'm not saying that I'm not concerned. My point is only that I'd like to here something from "the other side".

The truth, as they say, probably lies somewhere in between.

But it shouldn't. There has to be a cut and dry statement somewhere. It's not a matter of opinion. They want to put an act into affect, the act has to be clearly defined.

I just can't sift through the legal jargon to get to the facts.
 
sunstruck said:
I just can't sift through the legal jargon to get to the facts.

Exactly. Part of the problem with our bloated government is that people will literally disagree on what a bill means. If politicians with years of law school experience who live in DC can't agree on what they're voting on before they even vote, then how are you or I supposed to understand it?
 
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