Wiretapping Bill Puts Telcos on Hold

"Those who give up essential liberties for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." ~Benjamin Franklin

That's all I have to say about that.

Trevelyan_06 wrote:"Those who give up essential liberties for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." ~Benjamin Franklin

That's all I have to say about that.

agree 100%

That's exactly what I was going to say.

So in short terms, what does this mean?

It means that phone companies that provided conversations that they thought were "threats" to the Federal Government without a wire tap are not going to be protected from lawsuits resulting from this.

Wiretapping without a warrant is illegal, unconstitutional, and, many say, immoral. Bush is apparently pulling special "executive authority" out of his butt and saying that he can do it.

Trevelyan_06 wrote:"Those who give up essential liberties for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." ~Benjamin Franklin

All safety is temporary, as are all threats, unless they are not swiftly dealt with.

I really love it when people try to sound smart by pulling out 200 year old Ben Franklin quotes and suggesting that his opinions and statements would be exactly the same now as they were then. Times change, people. The dangers of the world, the people who cause them, and the ease with which they can do so all change.

If you want to squabble about drawing a line in the sand and infringing civil liberties, that's fine. But wiretapping is definitely not the issue to get all steamed up about. If the country gets hit by a major attack, millions of people will volunteer civil liberties on a grander scale without hesitation, and the last thing they will think about is the government listening to their phone conversations. I'd just as soon get it over with now and avoid the hassle.

Besides, if the average person is deluded enough to think that they have anything interesting enough to be worth listening to on the phone, they deserve to be shot. This is a tired debate fueled almost exclusively by inflated egos and alarmist thinking.

{DSG}DarkRaven wrote:All safety is temporary, as are all threats, unless they are not swiftly dealt with.

Swiftly dealt with, right. Right, we're expected to give our president MORE powers to conduct his War on Terror, when apparently Al Qaeda is as strong as it ever was, despite two wars and 500 billion dollars spent?

Bring this shit up when the next president and his administration shows up. Bush is a moron as is his entire administration.

{DSG}DarkRaven wrote:If you want to squabble about drawing a line in the sand and infringing civil liberties, that's fine. But wiretapping is definitely not the issue to get all steamed up about. If the country gets hit by a major attack, millions of people will volunteer civil liberties on a grander scale without hesitation, and the last thing they will think about is the government listening to their phone conversations. I'd just as soon get it over with now and avoid the hassle.

Anybody who would voluntarily give up their civil liberties is an imbecile. I would rather the country be hit by waves of terrorist attacks then lose my civil freedoms.

There's a difference between sensible security measures, and what this administration wants. Here's an example:

One of the provisions of the Patriot Act was for wiretaps for specific people instead of specific phone numbers. This makes a lot of sense, as with the old system the person could easily get around the wiretap by simply using a different phone. And if you can get a judge to approve a warrent, then go ahead. But believing that you can butt in on anyone's private conversation without a warrent is absurd.

Cloral wrote:But believing that you can butt in on anyone's private conversation without a warrent is absurd.

Exactly. This mostly applies to americans who receive or make international calls, and much less rarely to people making their usual, boring domestic calls.

DarkDragoonX wrote:Anybody who would voluntarily give up their civil liberties is an imbecile. I would rather the country be hit by waves of terrorist attacks then lose my civil freedoms.

So, say some terrorists let a nuke or a dirty bomb loose in Miami, for example. You'd just sit back in your recliner, cross your hands behind your head, and say "Well, at least nobody can listen to my phone calls without a warrant."? That's BS, man, or at the very least, it suggests that someone else is playing the role of imbecile.

Daarkseid, it would be foolish of me to try and rationalize and support every decisions Bush has made over the last seven years. I'm not going to say that he's the best president we've ever had, because he's not. But bashing him with absolutisms and suggesting that every problem that's been stewing in the middle east for decades (or even centuries) is his fault is just as foolish. When I used the words "swiftly dealt with", I was referring to the fact that Al Qaeda and the like have been ignored for far too long, and have thus become a much bigger problem.

Whew. AGN should be changed to stand for Angry Gamer's Network. :tongue:

What a terrorist blowing some shit up and what I talk about on the phone have to do with one another must be over my head. more is lost than gained by giving up privacy or civil liberties.

SUCCESSOR wrote:What a terrorist blowing some shit up and what I talk about on the phone have to do with one another must be over my head. more is lost than gained by giving up privacy or civil liberties.

Right, so, here's how things work in real life.

1. Person makes or receives an international call.

2. If there is a reason, suspicion, whatever, to believe that either person has connections to terrorism, the line can be tapped, recorded, and listened to without the hassle of going through courts. For instance, if two people were discussing an attack that was to take place on the following day, it wouldn't take the government a week to get the court order to listen to the call.

3. That's it.

That a nice ideal you hold but does it exist? could it work?

SUCCESSOR wrote:That a nice ideal you hold but does it exist? could it work?

Obviously, like any idea, there are odds that it will or will not work. It's very complex, and I'm not going to suggest that it's impossible for it to fail or be abused. But unlike many people, I simply refuse to jump on the bandwagon of thought that making wiretaps easier to obtain will lead to some gigantic federal voyeurism ring.

I understand that while I am not concerned about strangers hearing what I say over the phone, many people are, and this is totally legit. Some people are just uncomfortable with the idea that some CIA stooge will be able to listen to them say "I love you, Mom", or heaven forbid, have awkward phone sex with their significant, or other. After all, embarassing behavior is only embarassing if people know about it.

That being said, I don't believe that there are any other legitimate concerns to be spoken of. Phone taps are designed to fetter out illegal behavior; in this particular case, terrorism. But if one should uncover some other illegal action, is it any less important for the offender to be prosecuted? As a firm believer in justice, I believe that people who do illegal things should get caught.

The more extreme alarmists are undoubtedly worried that Uncle Sam, Big Brother, The Feds, or whatever you want to call it/them, are going to use this newfound power to somehow put the common man further under their thumb. Faking phone records, inventing evidence and so on in order to squash free speech, etc. is an idea straight out of Hollywood. At the worst, the government might tap domestic calls for the purposes of statistical gathering in order to raise funds by selling data to marketing corporations.

If you want to catch terrorists, make it easier for the government to catch them. If you're a terrorist, write your congressman and ask him/her not to support this bill. If you're not a terrorist, stop worrying.

And if you want to keep worrying, get off the internet and go watch Enemy of the State instead.