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In every Western democracy civilians need to defend themselves against too much government intrusion. Whether they will win or not, what is quite sure is that Verizon will not be happy about it and will think twice before they will give information lik…

At the end of every e-mail and telephone conversation we will use the following:

To you spies listening in My name is ______, and we believe that GWBush should be impeached and tried at the hague.

It just irritates me how blind some people are to the reality surrounding them.

Kind of like those Bible literalists…. I wonder if Ret Rep Soldier also thinks the Earth is 8,000 years old… hhmmmm….

Plus it is fun to shoot down their talking points ;-)

Re-read my posts. The Maryland case set a precedent to the warrantless wiretaps only in your imagination. That you insist on clinging to this notion shows your inability to understand the written word.

Unlike the warrantless wiretaps that record entire conversations, a “pen register” is a device “that records the numbers dialed on a telephone ” but “does not overhear oral communications”. Read the case notes.

Unlike the warrantless wiretaps that affect thousands of callers, the Maryland case was against one person against whom police had sufficient probable cause. Read the case notes.

Unlike the warrantless wiretaps, the pen register was a matter of local law enforcement not a foreign intelligence situation.

You have chosen to ignore that legal and constitutional scholars say Pres Bush doesn’t have the authority to order wiretaps at will.

You have chosen to ignore the fact the the Republican-controlled Congress already conducted a research into the matter and concluded Pres Bush’s authorisation conflicts with existing law and is on weak legal ground -in lay man’s terms, he’s full of it.

You have also ignored that, by existing law, during foreign intelligence wiretaps the communications monitored must be “exclusively between or among foreign powers and there is no substantial likelihood any ‘United States person’ will be overheard”, something that has been ignored in the wiretap operations.

If the Maryland case were a precedent to recording conversations, Alberto Gonzalez et al would have used it already. That they didn’t means this defence is even weaker than anything they have used so far.

Republican Soldire is partially right -again presenting a fact that is barely relevant while ignoring what is inconvenient.

About Tice:
Russell Tice was a senior intelligence analyst at the National Security Agency until he demanded to know in April 2003 what had happened to a report he had filed about a former colleague he suspected of spying for China. Two months later, he found himself checking coolant at the agency’s motor pool.
Not only did Tice get demoted from the elite ranks of the intelligence community, but he was also deemed “paranoid” by one of the agency’s psychologists, a death sentence in the intelligence field. Just nine months earlier, Tice had been found psychologically sound during a routine evaluation.
In federal job: Blow whistle, get boot

He was not the only one to be labeled “paranoid”. Funny thing is, some whistleblowers are no liberals, but simply critical of the Bush administration’s misguided policies:

Whistleblowers who have stepped forward to accuse the National Security Agency of retaliating against them by falsely labeling them “paranoid,” “delusional,” or “psychotic,” cover a range of political views. Russell D. Tice, a self-described conservative, believes President Bush should be impeached over the current controversy involving the NSA’s domestic surveillance program. Another whistleblower, Diane Ring, is a staunch Bush supporter who supports the surveillance program.
NSA Whistleblowers Were Allegedly Isolated, Intimidated

Take heed, Republican Soldier. Even you can fall from your Supreme (mis)Leader’s grace and find yourself labeled “paranoid” or worse.

Smith was decided in 1979, and Chapter 121 was passed into law afterward, as far as I can tell.

Therefore, it might well be argued that, in the passage of time and with the passage of Chapter 121 since Katz and Smith, “society” has developed the recognition of “that individual’s expectation of privacy as legitimate” as necessary to invalidate Katz, Smith, etc. as a precedents.

BushCo. are terrorists of the most pathetic kind. Armchair terrorists who never served, but are more than willing to condemn thousands or americans to death in order to enrich the top 1 %. How anyone can call themself a Republican is beyond me.

t-mac