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President Obama co-sponsored legislation when he was a member of the Senate that would have banned the mass collection of phone records that his administration is now engaged in. The SAFE Act, introduced by former Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho), would have amended the Patriot Act to require that the government have "specific and articulable facts" to show that a person is an "agent of a foreign power" before seizing their phone records. The bill was referred to the Judiciary Committee in 2005, but never received a vote. It had 15 co-sponsors in all, including then-Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), who are now members of Obama’s Cabinet.
friends always scratch each other backs. eventually time will pass and we will enjoy our privacy being peered into. the patriot act is really no better. But, as long as we have facebook and football, we dont really care what happens. Threaten to take those away and we will have a revolution
Plenty of times bills are submitted for reasons other than getting passed.
And then you hear "But I tried to....." in defense.
Just like McConnel giving Harry Reid no contest on the immigration reform bill, then voting against it to give the illusion that he was against it from the beginning. There are some seriously crooked people in DC!
1. Congress voted to legalize expansive surveillance powers in 2001 ...
2. Congress declined to force administration transparency/honesty on secret
interpretations of the law in 2001 ...
3. All of the opprobrium you should feel at the government’s ridiculously broad surveillance powers needs to be
directed at CONGRESS ...
4. The NSA, despite the broad nature of its warrant request, did nothing illegal ..
5. The information the NSA is collecting is metadata, not content (like a wiretap), and not account names.
6. Judging by the order (and not the media coverage about the order), it seems to have an end
date of July 19, sucking up data for the three months before. That would make
its effective start date April 19, which is the day Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was
arrested in Boston.
7. No one will respond to this by voting out their representatives or Senators during the next election because, despite the
temporary outcry, Americans (including the Congressmen and Senators who tried to add amendments) don’t care about this very much.
8. None of you will stop voluntarily giving Verizon (or AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, etc.) your personal
information out of the fear that they might be legally compelled to hand it over to an intelligence agency through a legal process.
Tell me that dialing a phone number is now "metadata" rather than "transmission data" ?
All they did was call the transmission information a new name and *poof*, it all became legal.
The effective date is 4/25/2013 and the order itself is linked in the Guardian article so there's no guessing needed.
The order was effective 10 days AFTER the Boston bombing.
I've noticed for several decades that D's & R's tend to take turns beating up on each other about civil liberties. Twenty years ago under Clinton, R's screamed about civil liberties, and indeed even liberal critics like Nat Hentoff decried Clinton over it. Then R's took over in 2000, and we had John A$hcroft dismissing concerns of 'phantoms of lost liberty.' I'm pretty sure that one Sen. Obama joined in on the outcry about the Bush admin's trampling of civil liberties. Now fast forward a few more years we've got a D admin, so once again it's R's pummeling D's.
All that said, I'm still persuaded that the conservative side is the only side with even a basis for protecting basic freedoms. Diminishment of freedom is inherent to collectivism. You're going to have more & more decisions made by the collective (gov't) rather than the individual human.
President Obama co-sponsored legislation when he was a member of the Senate that would have banned the mass collection of phone records that his administration is now engaged in.
Back in 2007, while criticizing GWB, he also said -
"I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom," he said in a speech then. "No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime. No more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war. No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient. That is not who we are. And it is not what is necessary to defeat the terrorists."
What is with modern day liberalism? 11 million need healthcare, the Democrats subject all Americans to the miseries of Obamacare. 20 children die in Newtown, CT and suddenly we have to take away or restrict the rights of every law-abiding gun owner across the United States. Instead of surveilling those most likely to commit an act of terrorism in this country, everyone gets PRISM'ed.
Is this Obama's ideal of fairness?
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