Discouraging Days for Those of Us who Still Believe this Country Should Live by the Rule of Law
July 9th, 2008 by Gordon Cook
The cowardly democrats have capitulated.
As a friend wrote: And here’s Glenn Greenwald with the latest - including a direct response to the “yeah but right after 9/11…” argument…
And yes its is the immunity for the telco’s that is especially inexcusable. And quite depressing to see that Obama threw in the towel - as my friend said about apple - too bad to see this from the company that is the gold standard - so its too bad that the gold standard for our next president does this.
As Dewayne Hendriks points out
DOMESTIC SPYING QUIETLY GOES ON
With Congress on the verge of outlining new parameters for National Security Agency eavesdropping between suspicious foreigners and Americans, lawmakers are leaving largely untouched a host of government programs that critics say involves far more domestic surveillance than the wiretaps they sought to remedy. These programs - most of them highly classified - are run by an alphabet soup of federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies. They sift, store and analyze the communications, spending habits and travel patterns of U.S. citizens, searching for suspicious activity. The surveillance includes data-mining programs that allow the NSA and the FBI to sift through large databanks of e-mails, phone calls and other communications, not for selective information, but in search of suspicious patterns. Other information, like routine bank transactions, is kept in databases similarly monitored by the Central Intelligence Agency. “There’s virtually no branch of the U.S. government that isn’t in some way involved in monitoring or surveillance,” said Matthew Aid, an intelligence historian and fellow at the National Security Archives at The George Washington University. “We’re operating in a brave new world.”