Derby FALs said:
Waaaah! Just google spain, lawyer, patriot act. Takes less typing than asking for a link.
Sounds like the man was aptly compensated for his troubles.
ceetee said:
Except when it comes to eavesdropping on us, wiretapping our phones, and intercepting our e-mails, apparently. Then the government should have an absolutely free hand, with no oversight whatsoever, correct?
Did I say that? I have no problem with the government being scrutinized. All I asked for were examples, and so far we had one guy that was wrongly accused, and consequently acquitted and paid handsomely for his troubles. 1 guy out of a population of nearly 301 million?
I'm sorry if I don't understand the panic and outrage.
Jrsmith said:
My issue is the fact that this whole situation, being so public, seems worthless to me. If the potential terrorists know that the government can tap phones, email, etc on a whim... won't they then just use a different means of communication? Then what's next, cameras on every street with facial recognition software? Random house searches?
The point is they [terrorists]
didn't know anything about it until that liberal rag, the NYT, leaked everything the CIA and FBI was doing to the general public, which includes all terrorists reading it.
The way Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups are approaching this war is to bank on all of the lefty hand wringing going on over every damn little thing our troops or intelligence officials are doing. The reason the Bush Administration didn't want this out there for the general public is:
A - This exact paranoid reaction we see from people on both sides of the isle.
B - So that the terrorists were clueless of the methods being used to track them.
There's plenty of stuff going on in the government that the general public has absolutely no clue about, and it's kept that way for national security purposes.
If people like you and me started disappearing out of the blue we have a media, and a freedom of speech to speak out about it. The point is that it's
not happening, and we are in a time of war. Our system is full of checks and balances, and this is the removal of a check that involves nothing more than the elimination of a 24 hour time period in emergency circumstances.
I certainly understand the uneasiness and the frustrations. We also know damn well who the fingers would be pointed at if we were attacked again in a time of war.
"Why didn't you do more?" "What did they know, and when did they know it?"
The stuff the NSA is doing will suddenly become logical
after the fact. It's the same crap that we heard after 9/11.