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Originally Posted by Sexxxy Sites
The Supreme Court has a previous ruling that phone records are not entitled to privacy protection. Phone calls are but not phone records.
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If everything they are doing is sooooo legal, then why are they completely bypassing the FISA Court, not informing Congress in full, and HIDING it all?
Bush looked nervous as hell today with his 4 points about it. First time I've really sensed he's starting to sweat and be worried about skirting the constitution and pushing the edge so much.
The reason this country was founded with 3 branches, the Executive, the Legislature, and the Judicial is so no one branch could have supreme power and each would have oversight on the other. Its called Checks and Balances. And that is what this administration is saying GFY to constantly.
Do you want all your phone calls for the past 5 years sitting in a government database that can then be accessed by other government agencies and who knows who else?
Suppose you get a new phone number that used to be one used by a terrorist? Knowing how incompetent the government can be and with the attitude of hit first and ask questions later, you could be unfairly connected into an investigation.
What if you have some bad apples at the NSA? With tens of thousands of employees, certainly there are a few. Let's say this guy is really a foreign mole and he decides to zip and ship the phone records connected to major politicians, corporate CEO's, and military leaders to a foreign government spy agency. Now they do the cross database matching and presto, they can blackmail a lot of important people, by knowing all their "dirty phone calls". Maybe its an important member of congress and he's been having an affair. This guy could be compromised by the foreign spy agency.
Or what if its your business phone records and some employee of yours is doing something funky and he's only there a short time and leaves. Then the gestapo comes raiding your company offices one day and takes all your computers away as part of the investigation of this guy? They may assume if he worked in your company you might have been in on it too? Or they might not even be able to know who it is in the company, just that the phone call was made from your company, and they put all your employees through the investigation.
The problem you have is once you give power, it is very difficult to reign it back in. That can lead to a police state because if ever our government were to change, and don't say it can't because history teaches us all governments can come and go, just like we saw Communist Russia go. Now you have all this information in the hands of a dictatorship government. Then what? And that is exactly how bad governments control the people. Just like in China, you can't take a piss without a party member knowing about it. They see everything you do online over there and censor like crazy.
So the bottom line is checks and balances. And without that as the phrase goes, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.