Courts, Congress Shun Addressing Legality of Warrantless Eavesdropping

Courts, Congress Shun Addressing Legality of Warrantless Eavesdropping.

Either a spineless Government, or a knee-jerk reaction of fear to anonymous terrorist threats that are not concrete. Even if a state secret, some sort of paradox exists in our legal system when both the courts and Congress engage in such default reasoning.

Where is the justice?

-- Tom

 

This isn't spineless, it's a bold, intentional "Shut up and sit down" from the administration to us, the people that unfortunately put them there. They've shown their willingness and determination to shun the Supreme Court (remember the last decision from then regarding financing, Obama, in public, to them did all but outright say "I don't care what you think, I'll go around you".).

That's the kind of administration we have for the next three years, a bullying, power-hungry group of people in the highest offices. For all the issues we all had with Bush, he never had the audacity to defy and ignore us on issues we've spoken quite loudly against. Perhaps in 2012 we can get less caught up in the "Oh my goodness, the first such and such!" and actually put someone in their that won't use our Constitution as toilet paper, and one that might actually give a damn what we think. He told us in his many speeches he was going to fundamentally change us. He told us who he was bringing with him and who he'd listen to. But we were so frustrated with Bush and so in awe of race, we didn't bother to clean out our ears.

I know I went all political there, but sometimes, it is what it is, whether someone wants to hear it or not. It's a drastically over-reaching intelligence program, that, if properly used, could do us a world of good. The problem with warrants is that they too are often politicized and, for sure, subject to red tape. The problem goes much deeper than warranted/warrantless wiretapping or any other intelligence gathering method. Until we remove politicians from the national security and military processes, we'll always have these kinds of issues come up.

 

Hi dw426,

I didn't mean spineless re: Administration, only Congress and the Courts reluctance to take up the judicial issues with regard to our laws an legal system. The power hungry appear to be the 5 majority of the Supreme Court (acting as activist judges) at this point in time which recent discarded 100 years of legal precedent to allow corporations to become the big spenders with regard to elections in the USA.

-- Tom

 

W's father was CIA Director (for sure). And I've read that Obama's mother worked for a CIA contractor in Africa (possibly a malitious rumor). Just FYI.

EDIT: Re Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, it's the Ford Foundation in Indonesia. And it's part of the Birther conspiracy, which is seriously bat-guano crazy.

 

CIA doesn't equal evil/bad, though. We NEED them. What we DON'T need is so much red tape and politics that things get pushed under rugs and agents basically get their hands tied behind their backs. Some folks are attributing decisions like warrant-less wiretapping to these agencies when in fact these sorts of things come straight from the desks of Congress, and, often, the President himself.

We'll never fight off future invasions of our rights or fix the current ones if we don't know where the attacks on rights are coming from. We can point fingers at the NSA/CIA/FBI, whoevers' security/spy agency we want to, but it's the White House, Congress and, to an extent, the Supreme Court that is wadding up our Constitution and playing trash can basketball with it. The more the blame game goes on in the public eye, the more rights that are going to erode away slowly and quietly while attention is drawn elsewhere.

 

Also, FYI, see the 2008 paper "Conspiracy Theories" by Sunstein and Vermeule at Harvard http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1084585 . Sunstein currently heads the US Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. For background, see Glenn Greenwald's article in Salon.

 

OK, what if the CIA has been running most of the US presidential administrations since Eisenhower? That's a conspiracy theory, for sure. And sometimes, I just gotta wonder.

 

That's the nice thing (for governments) about conspiracy theories. While networks like Discovery, History Channel, and others entertain and keep spreading all these theories about inside jobs and other long discussed theories, attention is drawn away from the real goings on. Instead of these "Inside Area 51", Sept 11th failure shows, and all this other nonsense that plays on fear, keeps people entertained, and keeps them from thinking for themselves and paying attention, we should all be watching live voting on CSpan.

We should also stop being loyal to newspapers and news on specific networks and actually get more than the Democratic/Republican/Liberal/Conservative-only point of view. Every party has a bad guy in it, there is no "only good" or "only bad side" anymore. People need to wake up, stop being loyalists, and understand that what is really happening both economically and in security, is far worse and far more permanently damaging than any conspiracy theory.

That's all I can really add to this. It's been turned into a political discussion, but there's only a short distance you can go with this kind of topic before the truth of politics has to be brought into it. Right now the Administration is busy pushing health care everyone has screamed about not wanting and spending money the country doesn't have. They'd be too wrapped up in things right now to deal with the courts even if they wanted to.