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Born at the Crest of the Empire

Thursday, January 19, 2006

We don't need no stinking badges....

This is important. The protections offered under the fourth amendment are on their last legs. Two stories.

First, the whitehouse has issued a white paper explaining why their black program, NSA spying, is legal. I haven't gone through it yet or read the reviews, but this is really good news because now the legal arguments will be out there. And even if the Bush admin has the greatest lawyers in the world, which they don't, their legal argument will now be picked apart by literally tens of thousands of lawyers across the country.

I see this release as desperate by the Whitehouse, coming as it does the day before the first Dem hearings on the matter in the house. If they felt they were winning, they would have stuck to the "protecting you from terror" stonewall.

Second, the Justice Dept has issued a subpoena for a massive amount of data which may contain the searches of literally millions of people, "including a request for 1 million random Web addresses and records of all Google searches from any one-week period." Google has refused to comply.

The Justice Dept's rationale is that it wants to see how often pornography turns up in searches. (It depends on what you search for, you idiots.) This subpoena was issued last year, and with Google failing to respond, this sudden publication of the subpoenas sounds to me like an effort by Justice to limit Google's customer's behavior by threat of future subpoenas.

It strikes me as very similar to the efforts to seize all medical records of women who had abortions just before he left. They retracted the policy, but after the public furor, I would guess that it might have factored into the thinking of women.

I don't know the law well enough to really get at this, but this doesn't seem right to me.

By the way, the pornography squad in Justice was a recent creation of Gonzales while Ashcroft spearheaded the subpoenas for the medical records. I guess that's why he got the job at Pat Robertson's grad school when he left.

Don't you guys have fucking terrorists to catch? There's been this one guy on my TV all day today. Can't you leave the porn for later and do something about this shmuck?

2 Comments:

  • I would argue that it's because one of the conditions he requires is that the US pull its military out of the middle east.

    And it's a judgement call from the leaders of our country both dem and republican that the risk to to US citizens is an acceptable price to pay to maintain a military presence there.

    Not passing judgement, but that, I think is the bargain.

    Mike

    By Blogger mikevotes, at 6:46 PM  

  • Now our busy DOJ is after some nuts who blow up SUVs -- the real terrorists. What bull.

    When are they going to pick up the Miniutemen?

    Oh, I forgot, they are the Minutemen...

    By Blogger janinsanfran, at 12:36 AM  

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