First of all, it's stranger that you think I said that YOU said conservatives like the Patriot Act. I would challenge you to quote me saying that, but I have more confidence in the sanity of the other posters to see.

Secondly, your continued hissy fit for being challenged on your authoritarian attitude, when you even admitted that you are an authoritarian is pathetic. Sobriety may help with the anger you have when called on your own words.

Thirdly, the fact that you keep talking about my comments on the US Constitution being a tangent in a thread about the Patriot Act and in response to your authoritarian attitude and your desire for a centralized power in government tells me, and any other Americans, all we need to know about your knowledge of the founding principles of this country. If there is a remedial section for founding principles and US government, perhaps you should start posting there.

Grow up. If you don't like your authoritarian attitude challenged, don't tell us you have one. If you don't like having your desire for centralized power in government challenged, don't type that. It's simple, for those who are mature, that is.

As long as you keep typing bullshit, I'll keep addressing it. Sometimes it's interesting to see emotional meltdowns of those who are challenged on their written words.

It is not really a "Conservative Republican" issue.

After all, look at me. I am a Republican, but I come from California. In most areas of the country, a "California Republican" would be considered to be a "Democrat". In much the same way that a Democrat in most areas of the country would be labled a "Radical Republican" in an area like California.

However, I have always been strong on issues of National Defense and Law Enforcement. And this is obvious, both in my choices of career, and how I have lived my life. I follow the laws of this nation, and willingly serve to protect and defend it.

And I support things like the "No-Fly List" and the "Patriot Act" because I feel they do just that. Yes, it is a pain in the butt, especially since I am one of the innocent individuals that the No-Fly list affects every time I travel. But it is the price I pay in order to make everybody else safe.

Actually, that is a "Red Herring" that most people have absolutely no idea how it works.

Things like monitoring phone calls has been done for decades. In modern days it is done electronically, and it is not used for the purposes of targeting individuals. And this is done legally, because of rules and regulations put in place not only by the FCC and PUC, but through the capture of "Ove The Air" communications by the NSA, NIA, and open-capture of more modern communications like VOIP.

In short, anything sent "ove the air" is liable to be intercepted. Whenever you make a cell phone call, it can be intercepted by anybody with a radio scanner set to the appropriate frequency. These calls can be tapped, monitored, and recorded without a warrant, because they are broadcast in the clear, over the air. And believe it or not, over 95% of our communications are transmitted at one point or another in that form.

It is amazing how much information can be gathered legally through simple means. Anybody with a pre-1990 frequency adjustable scanner can receive most cell phone calls. Anybody with an antenna can park in front of your house, and with the right software and knowledge, can tap into your router, and with an IP Packet Sniffer can capture all of the information being sent to and from your house over the internet.

And it is not hard to build a system to capture satellite signals. I have seen it done for a few thousand dollars. Hobbyists do it on a daily basis with "Free To Air" boxes.

But one thing the Patriot Act has not changed. The intelligence gathered through such means can not be used in a court of law. In fact, most people seem confused as to what an "Illegal Tap" is. The tap itself is not nessicarily breaking the law, it is just that the evidence gathered can't be admitted in court as evidence.

So that has not changed. Any intelligence gathered has been gathered for decades. It is now simply shared more openly between agencies, and has put in place a way to act if trends are noticed. Increased calls in a region to a region in Afghanistan will cause the appropriate agency to start digging for local intelligence. Phrases picked up through automatic monitoring ("Jihad", "suicide bombing", "martyrdom in America") now trigger the monitoring agency to notify a local agency (FBI) to start an investigation to see if there is a cell in the region, or if it is innocent traffic.

But it went on before the Patriot Act, and will continue afterwards. It made nothing new in that aspect legal. Mostly the Patriot Act was enacting new rules for inter-agency cooperation, something sadly lacking previously.

So yes, Big Brother is listening to your phone calls. Or rather, a computer is that listens for key words, and makes a database of how often they are said, and what area the call originates and ends at. But no, it is not recording that you made the call, nor is it keeping a recording of your call.

And I remember hearing a while back that on average, over 250 million calls are made in the US every day. How in the world is any agency going to track all of that?

Actually, I have always been fascinated by the idea of "Mass Hysteria". And the Patriot Act and Terrorism seem to be a modern-day example.

If you listen to a lot of people, the PA will turn the US into Nazi Germany. Yet, even after 8 years, nothing like that has happened. There have been no mass arrests, no mass detainments, only a few isolated incidents, the same as will happen for any other law that is enacted.

Has it kept us safer? That is hard to tell. But it certainly has not come close to the hysteria that some people seem to show when they talk about it.

But if the hysteria had any foundation in truth, then it there should at least be somebody that was affected. Otherwise, all you have is a bunch of pubescent girls writhing on the ground screaming "Witch!". Or paranoids pointing at anybody that likes Russian Dressing and screaming "Communist!".

Actually, that is not true. So many people are reading more into this then I intended. And just because somebody is locked up innocently, that does not mean the law is bad.

People are wrongly arrested for crimes every day. But that does not mean that the arrest was wrong, nor does it mean the arrest was illegal. And I am sure that in most cases like that, charges are dropped before the person is ever brought to court.

We hear about children arrested for bringing plastic knives to school in their lunchboxes. Does that mean that the "Zero Tolerance Weapon" laws are bad? Or does it mean they are simply enacted to rigerously? Should the weapons laws be repealed, simply because one student is suspended for having a plastic knife? A student is expelled for having a Midol in her purse, in violation of a "No Drug" policy. Is the law itself bad, or the enforcement of the law?

And I ask for personal incidents, because everybody knows about the "friend of a friend that read about this in the newspaper". Heck, I can tell you all about the lady that dried her dog in the microwave, or the guy that found a mouse in a bottle of beer.

No, but there is a difference between "effected" and "fact".

Heck, some people are affected when Brittney Spears dyes her hair. Thousands of people were affected when Michael Jackson died.

But how many people were really affected? To me this is really kind of a personal research into paranoia and hysteria. How many people scream "The sky is falling", compared to how many actually had a piece of it fall on their head.

Both sides scream a lot. That is a given. But how many are actually affected? Are any actually affected?

'shroom - interesting argument, I'll ponder it for a while. So not such a big deal in your opinion, and not a direct invasion of privacy.

Sorry, can't resist - just saw The Life of Brian last weekend. The part I bolded above reminded me of the stoning scene. The accused was guilty of uttering the word "Jehova". The poor guy carrying out the sentance and directing the stoning got himself killed, as he had to explain the crime comitted (he said "Jehova" - whooosh, bang, more stones thrown).

You said "Jihad", "suicide bombing", "martyrdom in America". Better watch out!! Oh crap, I said it too......

Lets hope the government filters function well, and the last 6 utterances are ignored.

Most cell phones now broadcast digital signals, so it would take more than a frequency adjustable scanner to know what was being said. You'd need to do the D2A conversion as well. Only the early cell phones broadcast analog.

Only if your router is wireless could the 2nd part be done, and it would only be picking up the information you sent over the wireless portion of your network. If you had a desktop hard-wired with ethernet to your router it would be completely insulated from that type of spying. (Of course the patriot act allows them to spy without warrants at the ISP level so everything you do actually is vulnerable under the patriot act, and is admissable in court).

That is not true. The patriot act makes spying on communications legal without warrants. This is why it is so abhorrent to me.

Thus far the needle in the haystack syndrome is the only reason any of us are safe. But the mechanisms for punishing individual citizens for what they say and do, ala Orwell's 1984 are set-up now courtesy of the patriot act. That is the part that has affected all americans adversely. The infrastructure is now in place for government abuse. Whether the government has abused it yet (and they have in some cases) isn't the point. The fact that a highway has been built to spy on every citizen is the dangerous part. We should be doing everything we can to dismantle that highway.

Well, when was the last time you saw a router for home use that was not wireless? I can't remember seeing one for years.

And there are still ways. Most people are on Cable Internet, and anybody on your segment can watch traffic from anybody else in the segment (a Cable "segment" is normally from 5-25 homes). I know that I have run Packet Sniffers on my connection at home, and monitored traffic to at least 15 different IP addresses earlier this year.


There is no guarantee to privacy in the Constitution. There is no law that prevents the Government from spying on you, either before 2001 or afterwards.

The only restrictions are in what evidence is used against you in a court of law. If evidence is gathered through a hard-wire tap, it can only be used if there is a warrant. An agency can still gather the evidence, it simply can't submit it in a trial. However, it can use what is gathered to obtain warrents for other searches or intelligence gathering.

And there is no warrent needed for "over the air" signals. This is a long-proven fact. Be it a CB radio, a line-of-sight FM radio, cell phone, or line of sight WIFI signal. The Government is free to intercept and use this in any way they wish. Because anybody can gather this information, and information sent over the air is considered to more or less be in the "public domain", with no guarantee of secrecy.

This is why in the Military, there are 4 groups of communication. One is basically the POTS (Plain Old Telephone System), unencrypted and useing conventional phone lines. The second is Voice Over Secure Internet Protocol, an encrypted phone system, that uses VOIP and encryption, mostly over secure and private network communications. Then you have unencrypted radios, and encrypted radios.

Unencrypted radios are pretty much dead in the military now. And even the old mainstay of Government security, the STU (Secure Telephone Unit, a scrambled phone over commercial lines) is largely dead. I have a STU on my desk, but it has no card, so can't be used for secure calls. Thousands of them are used this way, simply because they are in the inventory and they do make strudy conventional phones.

Nothing you said counters what Mushroom said. Evidence gathered through these wiretaps, while legally obtained, can't be entered into evidence.

Another example of that concept is a lie detector test. The information gathered during one is certainly legally obtained, yet it cannot be entered into evidence during a trial...

__________________
Science flies you to the moon.

Religion flies you into buildings.

That is actually a great example. But it is not that small of a number.

Somebody saying "suicide bombing" itself is not enough to start a query in a region. But if a routine survey records dozens of calls a week from say SW Anaheim to East-Central Afghanistan, with the words "mission", "security", "Seal Beach", and "package", then you had better believe that Naval Investigative Service is going to sit up and take notice. That would probably trigger that branch and the FBI into taking a look at local activities.

And the inverse is true also. If they monitor such calls on a weekly basis for several months, then suddenly the lines go quiet, that probably means that the planning stages are completed, and an attack may be imminant. And security in the region will be stepped up as investigation goes into overdrive.

But the monitoring and tracking themselves are not used for the purposes of making a case, or bringing somebody in for questioning. They are simply used as a way to guage the threat.

I have been out in town, and we know where Taliban and Al-Qaeda operatives gather. I have seen them on the street. And as long as they are only observing and doing nothing, nothing is done to them. But if a day comes where they dissapear from the streets, you had better believe that my base will be put on the highest alert.

When the people in question are known al Qaeda operatives, yes, that would seem prudent.

Not at all; my position is that, lacking access to the classified portions of the investigations, it’s best to defer judgment to those who actually have access and can make an accurate evaluation. You know, people like Obama, who made a quick 180° in the issue once he was actually privy to everything involved.

All that means is that you’re still a disagreeable chap.

DEMONSTRATE A RIGHT THAT HAS BEEN TRAMPLED DUE TO THE PATRIOT ACT! I’m certain I already stated that a number of times.

I think I agreed with you once a long time ago, but not in this thread. And I never said "I think they can only detain non-citizens under the PA”, I said there is absolutely NOTHING in the PA that allows indefinite detention of US citizens.

Proof never included a trial before. If you really believed that, you’d have spoken up about the horrible trampling of illegal immigrants’ civil liberties that takes place every day at the hands of ICE agents.

Terrorists help under the PA still get their day in court; in fact they get many of them, as their cases come up for judicial review at regular mandatory intervals.

__________________
“Nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests.” - Lord Palmerston

What hissfy fit?

If i had a hissy fit or shared in your need for menapausal rants, i would actually go ahead and adress every falacious point you have spewed up in this thread.

I even thought at first that i should just this post go, seeing as we now can seem to have a more respectful dialogue, seeing as other posters who oppose the patriot act don't post as retardedly as you do.

As for being an authoritarian, i don't have any objection to being labelled as one, as i often reffer to some of my views as such. Thus, to have a hissy fit about it would be contradictary and absurd to the level of which it would reach stupidity of only your level.

There isn't. That still doesn't give you the right to just mke shit up, post it in here, and fuck up the thread. You have somehow anaged to set a record on this forum, that for the first time in which Slon posts his nonsense in a thread, he doesn't come off as the most idiotic member. Well done, you have achieved something that was an impossibility until now.

As for the constitution, founding fathers etc, i am still yet to say anything about it, you're just continuing to pull stuff out of your ass, and then counter it by pulling stuff out of the left side of your brain and using that counter what you made up in the first place, from the right side of your brain.

Seriously, do you even read what you, yourself post?

Yes, as most folks have noticed with your menapausal breakdown. Maybe you should find a different way to deal with hot flashes and dealing with the fact you are hormonally fucked up. (So much for being a 5 year old). I share no emotion for you at all. I have the odd chuckle at your posts, pity you mostly.

But if you really want the last word, have it here, i won't reply, then you can finish "addressing"...

Then the rest of the folks can continue to beat up on your mentor, Slon.

__________________
The George W Bush Store:

http://georgewbushstore.com/

The point of requiring a trial is so that the authorities are forced at some point to determine if the arrest/imprisonment makes sense.

Well, I don't support using mere association to condemn people. That falls in the same category as arresting people for being family members of known criminals.So we should let known liars tell us that what they're doing is completely right, with no evidence to back it up, and we should accept it as fact? Yes, that is what you're saying.No, it means I think that your reasoning (that correlation = causation) is stupid. Do you disagree?Uh, are you sure?

http://www.uspoliticsonline.com/1565058-post104.html
WTF are you talking about? Where the hell else would he be proven guilty if not at a trial? Seriously, stop assuming the unlikely and irrational to support your presumptions about me.Well, according to section 412, it appears as though they can be held indefinitely, or at the very least, an incredibly long period of time without a trial:

‘‘(6) LIMITATION ON INDEFINITE DETENTION.—An alien
detained solely under paragraph (1) who has not been removed
under section 241(a)(1)(A), and whose removal is unlikely in
the reasonably foreseeable future, may be detained for additional
periods of up to six months only if the release of the
alien will threaten the national security of the United States
or the safety of the community or any person.
‘‘(7) REVIEW OF CERTIFICATION.—The Attorney General
shall review the certification made under paragraph (3) every
6 months. If the Attorney General determines, in the Attorney
General’s discretion, that the certification should be revoked,
the alien may be released on such conditions as the Attorney
General deems appropriate, unless such release is otherwise
prohibited by law. The alien may request each 6 months in
writing that the Attorney General reconsider the certification
and may submit documents or other evidence in support of
that request.

The ACLU appears to agree, and so do these guys:

the deportation, or indefinite detention, of non-citizens without charging them with, or showing evidence to them of, a crime; and

http://www.universityofcalifornia.ed...iotact0704.pdf

Have they changed those sections of the PA since then?

And where in the Patriot Act have the trials been removed? Where are the mass-detention centers for people being held without trial? Where are the Star Chambers?

Heck, we are even talking now about jury trials for enemy combatants who are captured in civilian attire (under the Geneva Convention, they are classified as "Spies", and simply the act of being a spy warrants execution under that law).

A lot of times, things that start an investigation are never admitted into a trial as evidence.