National "Dragnet" Connecting at State, Local Level 94
Squirtle tips us to a Washington Post story about the progress and expansion of N-DEx - the National Data Exchange. Developed by Raytheon for a mere $85 million, N-DEx is hailed as a unified intelligence sharing system, which will allow agencies to share and analyze data from all levels of law enforcement. From the Post:
"Three decades ago, Congress imposed limits on domestic intelligence activity after revelations that the FBI, Army, local police and others had misused their authority for years to build troves of personal dossiers and monitor political activists and other law-abiding Americans. Since those reforms, police and federal authorities have observed a wall between law enforcement information-gathering, relating to crimes and prosecutions, and more open-ended intelligence that relates to national security and counterterrorism. That wall is fast eroding following the passage of laws expanding surveillance authorities, the push for information-sharing networks, and the expectation that local and state police will play larger roles as national security sentinels."
That's cool (Score:4, Insightful)
In Some Back Server Room (Score:3, Insightful)
I have no criminal record. My only crime is to criticize the government's more egregious policies. And is the above document safe from access? Who has the key to it?
Re:That's cool (Score:4, Insightful)
wait for injustice (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:A helpful guideline: (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is... (Score:3, Insightful)
It may be cliche, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's extremely difficult to take over a country where everything is decentralized and/or chaotic. You might inflict damage on one spot, but all the others just keep cooking along. US problems in Iraq are a good example of this.
Conversely, a society where every detail of every citizen's life is available in a centralized database (which is conveniently located in the same place as a strong central government) virtually begs to be taken over. You have only to take over the brain, and the rest of the body politic just keeps obliviously going about its business. The only difference is that there's a new boss raking in the profits.
And to all those jackasses who like to say, "If you have nothing to hide, what are you afraid of", I'd simply ask in return, "Are you really stupid enough to believe the information a government collects on you is always accurate?"
These dipshits can't locate 10 million illegal aliens, and they found out the Berlin Wall was coming down on the evening news. But you trust them to notice you're not the same guy as the one with a similar name and SIN who likes to rob banks half way across the country?
If somebody doesn't put some reins on these bastards right quick, we're going to find out there's worse things than losing a city or two to terrorist action.
It's even more insidious than that: (Score:4, Insightful)
Reality is even more insidious than that. They may not even be lying, but be completely honest and never use the law "that way" - but their successors eventually will.
It's just the same with agreements in a contract. Even if the original party will not abuse the terms, their successors will.
The tree of liberty (Score:5, Insightful)
The only thing worse than criminals are rogue agents of the state, acting under color of authority, to undermine the rights of their fellow citizens.
Thugs and goons are bad enough, but they're 10 times worse when given a badge.
A good friend of mine once said: Most cops are NOT pigs, but an awful lot of pigs pursue a career in law enforcement. The older I get, the more I understand just how right he was.
At the end of the day, the only thing that stands between us and the would-be tyrants of the world is our willingness to oppose them, with deadly force if need be. Liberty and power are two sides of the same coin, and in the real world political power comes from the barrel of a gun.
There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order.
Oh, this is good (Score:3, Insightful)
Whole new layers of self-important morons sticking their nose in your business in the name of national security.
Re:A helpful guideline: (Score:3, Insightful)
It depends on your definition of "swear words". To use a George Carlin line, "You have bad intentions, bad emotions, and words." (in reference to the words you can't say on TV).
Ummm...No! All that will happen is they will abuse a part you didn't specifically address. Happens all the time. There is no way you can possibly address every abuse of a law. Take the DMCA (or any law designed to protect some "right") and look at the abuses never contemplated by Congress. They wrote the law with the intention of making it easier for a copyright holder to stop infringing content. They knew the take-down provisions would be abused. To say that situation was never contemplated is false since that was one of the warnings Congress was given before its passage. Yet they passed it anyway.
Re:The tree of liberty (Score:2, Insightful)
Good luck with that deadly force thing.
The Iraqi and Afghanistan wars (I use the term loosely) have cost around $3,000,0000,0000,000.00 [timesonline.co.uk] so far. How can you take up arms against a government which is willing to use those types of resources? I believe the ratio of dead Iraqi/American in this conflict is on the order of 100/1 (it is much less with documented numbers http://www.iraqbodycount.org/ [iraqbodycount.org] http://www.google.com/search?q=dead+iraqi+count&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a [google.com], but with these numbers it is still over 22:1). Just how do you propose using deadly force against something like that?
I think the boxes line needs some revision. With the type of money out there to buy the votes, individual votes in the ballot box have little impact. I am 33, and I have never been in a jury box. I don't see the ammo box as a viable option. However, the soap box is getting more and more powerful. Here is a draft for others to pick apart:
There is one box to be used in defense of liberty: soap. But other boxes can be a lot of fun.
Re:A helpful guideline: (Score:3, Insightful)
Whether or not they are wrong is irrelevant. The Supreme Court has held that the Bill of Rights applies to state laws, whether you like it or not. And the states can't have laws that the Supreme Court has found to be unconstitutional.
Re:A helpful guideline: (Score:4, Insightful)
"Obscene" language is a class thing. People from working class backgrounds frequently use such language - and why shouldn't I talk the way my parents brought me up talking? Whilst people from middle class backgrounds perceive certain words to be inherently offensive. This perception is never stated to be, but originates from, the belief that such language is of the lower classes.
You ask why choice of words is necessarily part of freedom of speech, but the censorship of "obscene" language is merely the repression of the language of one part of society by another part of society. Your term of "civil speech" shows you come from or have adopted a particular cultural viewpoint but this is not necessarily universal. This linguistic division in society along class backgrounds is real and to demand that someone adopt a different subset of language in order to put forward their views is to demand that they renounce their own culture in favour of the one with more power (to some extent). It is not acceptable to proscribe words on behalf of others. I have every right to talk in the language I am familiar with, rather than adopt some other group's mode of expression.
Re:That's cool (Score:2, Insightful)
Won't be abused? Think National Security Letters (Score:3, Insightful)
Consider that the national security letter abuse and data dragnet are concurrent with illegal government wiretaps and recent concerns about DNA profiling (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/health/24dna.html).
Observe, also, that Congress, no matter which party holds the majority there, is clearly uninterested in checking the excesses of the executive branch that oversees the FBI/CIA/NSA/Homeland Security. And it's not a partisan issue, since Bill Clinton began some of the steps that Bush has expanded on, and which either Hillary or McCain would continue.
I submit, fellow citizens, that we are quickly approaching a crisis in our democracy, when we each shall have to decide how important our freedom is to us, and what we're going to do about it.
Re:The tree of liberty (Score:-1, Insightful)
>
>There is one box to be used in defense of liberty: soap. But other boxes can be a lot of fun.
No, you missed the point.
The soap box is moot. Because it costs a billion dollars to buy the presidency, we're permitted to rant and rave on our soap boxes, because nobody who matters is listening. That's a good thing; freedom of speech doesn't require anyone to listen. Letting your population blow off steam by saying "The King is a Fink!" lets them vent their frustrations without actually changing anything. Probably for the best, since most changes that come from mobs tend to suck :). NSA's logging this post, and filing it away against whatever database holds political opinions. So I get a little tickmark by my name that files me under "harmless crank, still confused by the recent Slashdot change that makes some Anonymous Cowards start at zero, and other Anonymous Cowards start at -1". BFD.
The ballot box is next. We could vote out all incumbents, and within two or three electoral cycles, they might start listening. But let's get real - that's probably not going to happen. Plus, the election system itself has been compromised by the use of non-verifiable electronic voting. So, that one's toast.
We're at the jury box stage now. It's not you sitting in a jury defending someone else's freedom. It's also a jury deciding your fate. Although the most serious crimes never make it to court (this Administration effectively placing itself above the law), for most of us, our liberty is defended by the jury system. When you're in court on some trumped-up charge, the jury can still find you innocent. "Your honor, we don't accept that the prosecution's evidence was legitimately gained. We find the defendant Not Guilty by reason of lack of evidence."
The point of Ed Howdershelt's quote is that the ammo box is the last resort. Most of the time, even a "successful" revolution leaves liberty worse off than it was before the shit hit the fan. The people of America revolted against the King, and got Washington -- but the people of Russia revolted against the Czars, and got Lenin and Stalin for their troubles. China fared similarly poorly. For every East Bloc country that democratized itself, a dozen tinpot dictators sprung up in Africa and the Middle East.
America-1776 was the lucky exception, but it's emphatically not the historical rule. The ammo box is Pandora's box: once opened, all its horrors are let loose into the world. The box is supposed to stay closed until everyone has been tried everything else, and nobody feels they have anything left to lose. We're pretty far past the tipping point, but we're still decades away from that stage.
Re:It's Just NIBRS (Score:3, Insightful)
Interesting that all the FUD comments come at 3am after this article was posted, and all the "voices of reason" come during daylight hours. Just saying...
It is not just in the movies -- it's here. (Score:4, Insightful)
You really think that even though "evil political overlords" can and did take power in Germany, Russia, China, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Uganda, Rwanda, etc. etc, and delight in every kind of abuse possible in those places, that somehow those same "evil overlord" types are prevented from doing this in America?
What's really amazing is that the current rulers of the U.S. have publicly admitted torturing their victims and holding them without trial. They have also publicly admitted to mounting a massive campaign of unrestricted domestic surveillance, and entering into illegal partnerships with corporations to do it. Yet somehow you still think it "can't happen here" and even get modded "insightful" for it.
That attitude of "it can never happen here" is precisely why it is happening here.