Only Terrorists Need to Worry. You're Not a Terrorist, Are You?
Jacob Sullum | August 8, 2007, 2:01pm
Judging from the response to my column from Townhall readers (a skewed sample, I admit), Americans are not just ready to let the government read their international email and listen to their international phone calls at will; they're happy to ditch the Fourth Amendment altogether, at least as it applies to wiretaps. A sampling:
1) Well, just don't discuss your evil plans when you call your mother. Save that for talking to your Democrat and Muslim friends.
2) What in the world do you talk about with your Mother that could possibly interest the US government?...You are sort of full of yourself aren't you.
3) Why would anyone want to listen to you? [A good question, in any context.] There has to be a valid reason to wiretap. How many people does this involve? Millions use the phones, a few need to be monitored. The resources are not going to be used to pry on folks like you. To think that, unless you have something to hide, someone would want to take their time to listen to you is, to be generous, taking yourself way too seriously (and maybe a little paranoid).
4) Unless you are...plotting death to Israel or death to the United States, you need not fear.
5) Maybe it's time for you to think less of "ME" and more of "US."
Some readers seem to have interpreted "a reasonable expectation of privacy" as referring to one's judgment about the likelihood that the government is listening in at any given moment, as opposed to one's assumptions about a particular kind of communication's protection from warrantless eavesdropping. For the record, I'm pretty sure my mother and I are not very high on the NSA's list of targets. My point was that most Americans probably do (or did) take for granted that their private telephone conversations cannot be tapped by their government without a court's approval.
TrickyVic | August 8, 2007, 3:41pm | #
“””Seriously though, this just goes to show you how little people understand about liberty and rights.””””
I think you can replace the word understand with care.
“””During the Cold War, COINTELPRO did significant intelligence work and monitoring of suspected terrorists. And by the way, their ability to do so was based on original authorization that FDR gave in performing such wiretaps and intelligence work.
Deal with the facts.””””
Since you like facts, you should deal with all of them. CONINTELPRO was shutdown due to abuse. The moral of the CONINTELPRO story was you can’t trust government to obey it’s own rules. It’s obvious that Bush can’t play by the laws of the land. THAT is what he has in common with the tyrants of the world. They think they are above the rule of law.
Jeff do you support the rule of law? That’s a simple question, yet if you do, you simply cannot support Bush’s tactics on spying. If you do not like citizens demand their rights to stand as written, Canada’s to the North, Mexico’s to the South take your pick. Also, we formally apologized about FDR’s interment camps, because we recognize it as wrong despite the sense of need at the time. Nonetheless, two wrongs don’t make it right, and just because someone else did it in the past doesn’t make it right either.
The question of “is someone an American”, at least in spirit, I would say depends on how much you believe in the Constitution which our country was founded.
""""Comparing the Islamic terrorists to the Nazis is insanely disproportionate.""""
Indeed, and it should take more than jr. high school to know better.
Jeff | August 8, 2007, 7:00pm | #
Andrew says "What laws would you pass to protect us from terrorism, mindful of the protections we enjoy as citizens in the Constitution?"
USA is not fighting terrorism.
That is the fundamental misunderstanding.
The term "war on terrorism" is the result of the Bush administration being unwilling to publicly identify the enemy, and having the delusions that they can play one enemy off of another in some type of global "realpolitik" maneuver that Henry Kissinger would think up.
The first law that should have been passed would have been the creation of a blue-panel organization of individuals who have studied the Islamist threat across the world to clearly identify and document the global Islamist strategy against the USA, and to provide a series of countermeasures and strategies against global Islamism, and against Jihadist activity.
The second law that I would have passed would have been an energy independence law that would have mandated serious fuel efficiency standards on all vehicles and transportation, and get a "Manhattan Project" for USA energy independence from the Middle East and foreign sources of oil and petroleum products.
Without these two laws, we are forced into a series of reactive and counterproductive measures to fight the enemy, which is our position today.
First the enemy has to be identified and a global strategy created.
Second, the enemy's main source of funding has to be eliminated.
Then you can effectively fight a war on every level.
digression | August 9, 2007, 4:50pm | #
Dear Jihad Jeff,
Dude... your total lack of understanding of the word 'logic' is astounding. I fail to see how you
can be so overwhelmingly stupid as to not realize that it is YOU and your kind that are a far more
dire threat to America than any external enemy could ever be. It's people like you that make me
realize that the right to keep and bear arms is so important... not because of some imminent
'Islamofascist' invasion... but because of how readily you accept (and DEFEND, no less) the
grave injustices that our own government forces upon us at gunpoint.
I find it comforting to know that Mr. Colt's model 1911 will be there for me on the day that
martial law is declared, all hell breaks loose, and you and your 'freedom-loving' butt-buddies
don your black shirts and armbands and go around the country enforcing your statist values on
the rest of us. Shooting you would be doing this country a service, since trying to educate
you on your faulty logic seems to be a lost cause.
Remember that our military is sworn to uphold and defend our Constitution, not our government.
Most of the soldiers I met could give a shit less about our government, but they all greatly
value our Constitution. I think you may find yourself on their bad side one day if you keep
going down the path you are currently traveling with your authoritarian drivel.
You, sir, are about as fucked up as a football bat. I fear your kind more than any Islamist.
A pox on you, and may lice infest your groin, etc, etc.
Have a nice day :D
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