How many illegal things must President Bush do before he is removed from office. I don’t know if this country can wait until January 20, 2009 when a new administration is sworn in.
The GOP came within a Senate vote of removing President Clinton because he lied about a blow job and President Bush gets free ride after free ride for violating the Constitution.
The latest is the disclosure in USA Today that all the major phone companies but one gave the NSA phone records the NSA requested.
Bush defenders said that the collection of phone records was necessary.
“This is nuts,” Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., said of the furor over the latest disclosure. “We are in a war, and we’ve got to collect intelligence on the enemy, and you can’t tell the enemy in advance how you are going to do it. And discussing all of this stuff in public leads to that.”
Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., said his colleagues’ reaction was hard to understand. “Let’s talk about this in a rational way. We are in a war with terrorism. There are people out there who want to kill us, and I don’t think this action is nearly as troublesome as is being made out here.”
“Because they are not tapping our phones and getting our conversations. They are merely maintaining these numbers from which they have some system, apparently, to utilize those to match up with international phone calls connected to al Qaeda,” Sessions said.
But Republican Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa slammed the database program.
“Why are the telephone companies not protecting their customers?” Grassley said. “I think they have a social responsibility to people who do business with them to protect our privacy as long there isn’t some suspicion that we’re a terrorist or a criminal or something.”
And this:
While Capitol Hill debated the issue Friday, many lawyers voiced surprise that three major phone companies had agreed to make available to the National Security Agency the phone records of tens of millions of Americans.
That’s because Congress made it illegal 20 years ago for telephone companies and computer service providers to turn over to the government records showing who their customers had dialed or e-mailed.
The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 was passed when cell phones and the Internet were emerging as new forms of communication. Section 2702 of the law says these providers of “electronic communications . . . shall not knowingly divulge a record or other information pertaining to a subscriber or customer . . . to any government entity.”
Companies that violate the law are subjected to being sued and paying damages of at least $1,000 per violation per customer.
“It is simply illegal for a telephone company to turn over caller records without some form of legal process, such as a court order or a subpoena,” said James X. Dempsey, a lawyer for the Center for Democracy and Technology in San Francisco.
First of all we are not “at war”. The Bush nazis may think it is a war and they say it is to justify their illegal violations of the 4th amendment. Since it is not a declared war the Bill of Rights still apply and the government has to have a warrant or subpoena to get records of US citizens and to get a warrant the government must provide specific probable cause and the gathering has to be specific – they can’t troll for information.
I don’t know what is worse, a President subverting our rights or citizens who allow it. An ABC/Washington Post poll the day after the USA Today story broke showed that more than 60% of respondents said the gathering of the records by the NSA was ok with them.
According to the poll, 65 percent of those interviewed said it was more important to investigate potential terrorist threats “even if it intrudes on privacy.” Three in 10–31 percent–said it was more important for the federal government not to intrude on personal privacy, even if that limits its ability to investigate possible terrorist threats.
This lack of concern reminds me of a famous quote:
Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. – Ben Franklin