Civil Liberities

[Capt_Nemo]

Goodbye to Privacy

If you think I'm exaggerating out of paranoid hysteria or simple
anti-Bush venom, just examine the recently passed Homeland Security Act
and the USA PATRIOT Act (the latter of which was rushed through Congress
a few days after 9/11 without most legislators having had a chance to
read it). As a result of these acts and other executive fiats, as of
this moment there no longer is a guaranteed right to privacy for any
citizen.

Your home, your business, your computer files, your emails, your library
visits, your credit-card purchases, your phone calls, your
communications to your friends and colleagues -- in short, just about
every aspect of your life now belongs to the federal government. (Where,
oh where, were all the anti-big-government conservatives? Oh, I forgot:
They now have the power and can drop their principles off at the moral
cleaners. It's OK to have a Big Brother government snooping on all its
citizens -- except, of course, when it comes to who might own assault
rifles and other heavy-duty weaponry, which Ashcroft has ruled the feds
can't go near -- as long as you're the Brother in charge. If Gore had
won and tried to carry on these police-state tactics, there would be a
rousing GOP outcry for impeachment. It all depends, I guess, on whose
Gore is being oxed.)

But, you say, none of this affects me. I've never done or thought
anything traitorous, and I don't have a Middle Eastern name, so I don't
have to worry. Doesn't matter. A ticked-off neighbor or colleague at
work denounces you to the authorities as insufficiently patriotic or as
engaging in "suspicious behavior" -- even though you've done or said
nothing wrong -- and you've got a file opened on you. The security
police begin nosing around, and suddenly you don't have a job anymore.
Or you are classified as a suspected "enemy combatant" and are locked
away on a military base, with no contact permitted, no lawyer permitted,
no judicial oversight permitted.

(Though Bush and Ashcroft promised, prior to the passage of the USA
Patriot Act, that the bill referred only to non-citizens and that
nothing like that would ever happen to Americans, it already has. In the
future, there may well be more citizens "disappeared" into the American
gulag; all it takes is a piece of paper signed by Ashcroft, with no
appeal process permitted. Welcome to the brave new world of permanent
war, permanent insecurity, permanent martial-type law.)

Friends, as some of us have been warning for more than a year now, we no
longer are inching toward a kind of fascism in this country. We're just
about there. Using legitimate post-9/11 fear in the citizenry, Bush&Co.
have been able to shred Constitutional guarantees of due process and
rush these draconian acts through Congress; aside from a few courageous
leaders on the conservative right and those of us on the civil
libertarian left, few have objected. Americans, it seems, are quite
willing to trade their several-hundred-years-old rights for the illusion
of "security."


Email,,,,,no link........

Rick...
"The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing."
-Oscar Wilde,

A place to report scum,,,errrrrrrr I mean scams......
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