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RE: No need for change
RE: No need for change
Thank you. That explains it.
Yes I share your outrage if telco carriers, at the behest of government officials, are breaking serious federal laws and not being prosecuted by the feds for it, and being annoyed about civil suits. They should be sued into bankruptcy in my opinion and those who requested the taps or implemented them should be sent to a federal prison for a very long time.
Our existing interception laws are nicely balanced as a result of decades of fine tuning. If government agencies have a genuine concern then they can get a warrant. If that process is too slow then attention should be given to speeding the process up - even, in extreme cases, by letting them anticipate a warrant and justify it to a judge soon after.
You are logically correct that foreign citizens should have the same privacy rights as US citizens. However in our democracy the citizens have voting rights and this gets them special consideration. It has always been the case that innocent people calling a person whose phone is under interception will be recorded. US law even tries to get around that problem by requiring that the officials monitoring the call should terminate the recording if there is no suspicious content during the first few seconds. Fat chance! In some comparable overseas jurisdictions citizens are not permitted to record even their own conversations without first warning the other person that they are doing so. The Film "Bonfire of the Vanities" was based on this aspect of our law.
We gave a stupid young citizen, David Hicks, of our most loyal ally in the War on Terror, Australia, the full shameful rendition and GitMo treatment,doing terrible things to him that we would never have been able to do to a US citizen.
Many of us probably feel that this kind of thing is justified in the post 911 War on Terror and I will refrain from the tired cliche that this makes us more like them, but it certainly does appear that this US administration has gone overboard in tossing out priceless justice provisions in our free society to make life easier for the intelligence agencies. In doing so it has given a major victory to the terrorists
RE: No need for change
As to the first issue, we should all be outraged that the telecoms went along with the warrantless wiretaps, that the administration asked for wiretaps without securing the appropriate warrants, and that the Congress is voting to make the telecoms immune to the backlash.
I agree. When I read that the Senate voted in favor of immunity for telecoms, I was surprised. Well, what actually surprised me was the balance of yea vs nay. So many in favor?
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RE: No need for change
There are two issues here. The first, is that the telecoms put in some wiretaps without a warrant, and the administration wants them to be immune from the lawsuits that resulted from it. Second, the administration wants the ability to tap any phone call between some one in the US and any other party that is reasonably believed to be outside of the US without the need for a warrant to be issued. (I don't know if they will have to apply for a warrant within some amount of time after the tap is activated, or not, like the current FISA court warrants.)
As to the first issue, we should all be outraged that the telecoms went along with the warrantless wiretaps, that the administration asked for wiretaps without securing the appropriate warrants, and that the Congress is voting to make the telecoms immune to the backlash. The fact that the Senate vote was 68 - 29 (the full bill, and motions) in favor shows that we are not outraged nearly enough. The good news is that the House version of the bill does not include the telecom immunity, but unless the dumbocrats get a collective spine ...
As to the second issue, it is conceivable that under this law, a US citizen within the country calling another US citizen outside of the country may have their phone call recorded by the US government. My question is: why does the mere fact that a citizen is outside of the country entail that they lose their rights as a US citizen?
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