Topic: The Obama Presidency

[Hts121]

^Probably a bad idea for you to type all that into one post.  Either stay inside for a few days or watch out for the laser beam they can fire from sattelites in space. 

But seriously, is Comrade Scrabble back 'on board'?

I wish. Pretty sure HS is someone entirely different. He's a Cincy poster.

Cincy..... Dayton.   Tomayto..... tomahto

[E Rocc]

^ Kind of, but it's called 'Words with Friends' now.

I have to agree with some of the sentiment in HS's post. My issue doesn't lie with whether or not the communications companies voluntarily provided the info, or under warrant, but the fact that it has been consistently collected for 7 years. If you're not at least a little creeped out by that much data being continuously collected and stored, then you have a higher tolerance for what information the government is entitled to than I have.

It means you trust the government, and that's just plain naive to about the 87th power.

It doesn't even matter if your perceive them as being on your "side".  At some point, they will not be.

What's really disturbing is these laws forbidding disclosure of the snooping.  I'm not sure how all that can be reconciled with Miranda.

[Hts121]

What would the Miranda concerns be?

[Gramarye]

I have a reflexive sympathy for the proposition that we shouldn't have secret courts giving secret interpretations of secret laws to secret agencies based on secret arguments.  And I've been one of those fabled conservative-libertarian opponents of the PATRIOT Act basically since it was proposed.  It was one of the principal reasons I got involved with the ACLU in college.

P.S. Miranda concerns are barking up the wrong tree.  In fact, they're really in the wrong forest.  Miranda was a Fifth Amendment decision (regarding the rights to due process and against self-incrimination).  The principal constitutional concerns here are the First and (especially) Fourth Amendments.  And, of course, the larger liberty concerns are related to the privacy of those not even under suspicion, not the procedural protections of those actually in custody.