POLICE STATE / MILITARY - LOOKING GLASS NEWS | |
Senate Puts Another Nail in the Coffin of the 4th |
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by Kurt Nimmo Another Day in the Empire Entered into the database on Thursday, September 14th, 2006 @ 17:46:18 MST |
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The National Security Surveillance Act, currently working its way through
the rubberstamp halls of Congress, is simply remarkable in its fascist depth
and breadth. But what is nearly as remarkable is the lack of response and outrage
to this bit of authoritarian legislation that effectively kills the Fourth Amendment
protection against unreasonable search and seizure. “[Senator Arlen] Specter’s
bill concedes the government’s right to wiretap Americans without warrants,
and allows the U.S. Attorney General to authorize, on his own, dragnet surveillance
of Americans so long as the stated purpose of the surveillance is to monitor
suspected terrorists or spies,” reports Wired.
Not only does the bill allow “the attorney general, or anyone he or she
designates, to authorize widespread domestic spying, such as monitoring all
instant-messaging systems in the country, so long as the government promises
to delete anything not terrorism-related,” it also allows “unfettered
wiretapping and physical searches without warrants.” If you believe the
government deletes “anything not terrorism-related” and does not
feed this data into its massive and long-standing matrix of snoop databases,
I have a bridge to sell you. Our government, unchecked for decades, has kept
a staggering pile of data on millions of citizens, particularly “terrorist”
Americans opposed to the government. As noted here on numerous occasions, the government has snooped in earnest
on Americans for decades, beginning officially with the creation of the National
Security state on November 4, 1952, and authorized earlier in a letter written
by President Harry S. Truman in June of 1952. From the beginning, the NSA and
the CIA have worked closely with telecoms, a fact highlighted recently with
NSA snooping revelations. Now we are told Verizon executive vice president and
general counsel William P. Barr began his career as a CIA “analyst”
in the 1970s and went “on to become an assistant legislative counsel for
the agency,” according to Brian
Beutler, writing for Raw Story. “He has also held a number of other
public positions since then, including those of domestic policy adviser to President
Ronald Reagan and even U.S. Attorney General under George Herbert Walker Bush.”
When that position expired after Bill Clinton became President in 1993, Barr
went to work as general counsel for GTE, the company that would later merge
with Bell Atlantic to form Verizon Communications, where he now serves as
executive vice president and general counsel. In those capacities, though,
he has maintained ties with officials in Washington who have repeatedly called
upon his testimony when crafting anti-terror legislation. That testimony reveals a record of sympathy with the sorts of legally contentious
activities the NSA is alleged to be conducting with its wiretapping and data
mining programs. After “everything changed” following nine eleven—that is
to say, when the Constitution and the Bill of Rights became even more irrelevant
than previously to our rulers—Barr “defended executive-branch war-time
actions before the Senate Judiciary Committee, including controversial measures
such as: the use of military tribunals to try suspected members of al Qaeda;
suspension of criminal justice procedures which, he noted, ‘will frustrate
our fight against al Qaeda’; and the withholding of operational details
by the Attorney General of ongoing criminal investigations. The USA PATRIOT
Act ultimately codified powers that closely mirror his suggestions, and he has
since gone on record in support of that legislation as well…. President
Bush’s chief rationale for ignoring FISA has been a contention, strikingly
similar to Barr’s, that the urgency of terror cases does not allow enough
time for the acquisition of surveillance warrants,” in other words the
Fourth Amendment is a dead letter. Arlen “Magic Bullet” Specter and the Senate Judiciary Committee
are in the process of embalming the Fourth Amendment once and for all, as the
point here is not to monitor “al-Qaeda,” a documented intelligence
contrivance, but snoop all opposition to the emergent fascist state. _______________________ Read from Looking Glass News |