Then let me be explicit. Let us please defend our constitutional rights. That means punishing those who violate them and rewarding those who do. If people want to give away their rights then it has to be done legally.
I love how you just blindly assert they are acting unconstitutionally without any citation or any reference to what they are doing that violates the constitution, and how.
I mean, they are clearly doing things that are highly dubious, and at least one FISC judge has questioned the constitutionality of some of their actions, but unsupported blanket assertions only resonate with those already in the echo chamber (which, unfortunately, seems to be most of those who visit these forums).
My comments are based solely on dweller_belowâs use of the Brandeis quoted sentence above. I believe that Brandeis intended it to suggest a clear way to identify âthe greatest dangersâ. My point is solely that identifying these dangers (in the form of enchroachments by men of zeal) is not as easy as the quote suggests it might be.
What they are doing is unconstitutional. At a minimum we should be very, very suspicious of people in power doing crap like this. Well, I take that back. I care about the fourth amendment but I am realizing not everyone does. I also fear secret government. Again, I realize not everyone does. We have more to fear from government run amok than from so-called terrorists.
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Itâs not just that youâre doing a bad job of explaining it; itâs that when you try to explain things using the method popularly called âlying through your teethâ, some people arenât going to believe the specific lies youâre telling, and some people arenât going to know which things youâre telling are lies, but have seen you get caught lying enough times that theyâll assume youâre lying about the rest of it. And even if some of the things youâre saying are true, in some very narrowly interpreted sense, that doesnât mean theyâre not also lies.
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The very article you post says that they are no longer doing the acts that were deemed unconstitutional, so at the moment itâs not clear that â[w]hat theyâre doing is unconstitutional.â
As I said, I think theyâre doing things that are definitely suspect. But lots of what theyâre doing seems to be supported by existing, non-secret (i.e., non-FISC) law. Simply blaming the NSA doesnât address things like the Patriot Act, which democratically authorised a lot of things that many people are uncomfortable. Blaming agencies wonât fix the Patriot Act.
Intelsplaining
âŚnobody told them the facts of the program.
Yeah, well, that whole âwe donât need to explain ourselvesâ attitude just may be to blame there, combined with the revelations that their âcontrols,â where they exist at all, and where they are respected, are woefully inadequate. Most of those controls boil down to self-control, which is never a good idea in government.
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âIf our nation of Constitution and Law is to survive, we can not ignore this dangerâ
But our nation is not supposed to survive. Weâre heading back into the 18th century.
The 12,400 oligarchs think that thereâs already too many people alive, soâŚ
Alexander just doesnât get it. What theyâre doing IS wrong. Their safeguards are nice, but theyâre completely voluntary. They can decide at any time to break their own rules, which they have on many occasions.
Itâs really depressing to realize Big Brother is really watching. No online data is secure nowhere no how. If you keep it in your home, they still need a warrant to get to it. So far, the best way to keep your stuff safe from prying eyes is to get a private cloud, like a Cloudlocker (www.stoamigo.com) that works like a regular cloud service but stays at home. Look for more inventions like this to help protect us from the people supposed to protect us.
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âNobody told them the facts of the program and the controls that go around it.â
They must not have told Snowden about those controls either.
Letâs take the NSAâs argument as the truth. That would mean that the people in charge of going to secret courts, with secret laws, and presenting a case on gathering all of this secret data on the citizenry arenât capable of truthfully explaining what they are doing and why.
If thatâs the case, then the agency is run by people not capable of performing their duties and therefore should be removed.
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