freedoms

[toasty]

Re: freedoms

Nsa

[thesightless]

Re: freedoms

aaah.

[Lorn]

Re: freedoms

I agree with Toasty's sentiment on this. Its more a feeling and a knowledge of intrusion. Doing financial transactions, particularly in larger sums has been impacted. Data collection is the single biggest threat to privacy and individual liberty imo. One day they will use it and we will all feel it.

[thesightless]

Re: freedoms

gimme link or gimme death

[toasty]

Re: freedoms

gimme link or gimme death

Can I pick?

[thesightless]

Re: freedoms

you can but i fight back, and i aint no BS st lou boy. you get bronx hardass.

[FM]

Re: freedoms

I agree with Toasty's sentiment on this. Its more a feeling and a knowledge of intrusion. Doing financial transactions, particularly in larger sums has been impacted. Data collection is the single biggest threat to privacy and individual liberty imo. One day they will use it and we will all feel it.

Lots of that has been done for years through various record keeping and governmental acts. As aforementioned of sorts, it's just gotten to be more widely known through things like the Patriot Act and the like.

IMHO though, not very often is someone truly innocent of any wrongdoing screwed (it happens, but is expected)...if you do something sketchy/illegal or that's perceived as sketchy/illegal in the populace, then that'll come back to get you, or put more surveillance on you, like it or not...

[subterFUSE]

Re: freedoms

Lots of that has been done for years through various record keeping and governmental acts. As aforementioned of sorts, it's just gotten to be more widely known through things like the Patriot Act and the like.

IMHO though, not very often is someone truly innocent of any wrongdoing screwed (it happens, but is expected)...if you do something sketchy/illegal or that's perceived as sketchy/illegal in the populace, then that'll come back to get you, or put more surveillance on you, like it or not...

We have to decide, as a country...... which scenario do we prefer.

1. No government surveilance, with increased threats of large-scale terror attacks.

2. A little bit of surveilance, with vastly decreased threat of attacks.


I feel confident that my liberties have not been infringed upon in the slightest since 9/11. I have only left the country once since then, and went to England and Ireland. I encountered no hardships travelling through customs.

Had I taken a trip to the middle east, however..... I would completely understand if the government wished to monitor my movements. We are just living in an age where we must be careful. We are at war.

[toasty]

Re: freedoms

We have to decide, as a country...... which scenario do we prefer.

1. No government surveilance, with increased threats of large-scale terror attacks.

2. A little bit of surveilance, with vastly decreased threat of attacks.


I feel confident that my liberties have not been infringed upon in the slightest since 9/11. I have only left the country once since then, and went to England and Ireland. I encountered no hardships travelling through customs.

Had I taken a trip to the middle east, however..... I would completely understand if the government wished to monitor my movements. We are just living in an age where we must be careful. We are at war.

Wow. Way to hit those talking points. You angling for Snow's job?

I don't feel like expending the time and effort necessary to dissect the false dichotomy you present, but suffice it to say that you must assume everyone reading your post is a complete moron.

[thesightless]

Re: freedoms

Wow. Way to hit those talking points. You angling for Snow's job?

I don't feel like expending the time and effort necessary to dissect the false dichotomy you present, but suffice it to say that you must assume everyone reading your post is a complete moron.

listen, i understand that you were quite distant from NY, but I live here, please dont ever trivialize a terror attack, we lost around 4000 innocent people who did nothing but go to work. if a little more cops on the streets, and wiretaps aim to prevent it, i can deal. i NEVER want to be standing there watching people jump from 1000 feet to their death again. it indeed was that bad, you have been to NYC, and i assume the WTC site. i have barely worked in manhatten since it happened, i just feel weird when im there. i would rather the overkill and safety than the other.

[toasty]

Re: freedoms

listen, i understand that you were quite distant from NY, but I live here, please dont ever trivialize a terror attack

Although I'm not a resident of NYC, I've spent enough time there -- hell, I actually received mail at the W at 49th and Lex for about 8 months in 2002 -- that I feel a certain kinship with the city and yes, I have been to the WTC site, a number of times. We shared space with the St. Louis office of Aon on 9/11, and I remember none too fondly the anguish that was going on with our friends watching things unfold knowing their friends and colleagues were in the WTC that day. Nothing that I wrote in my previous post, have written in the past, or will ever write here or anywhere else should ever be interpreted as trivializing what happened on 9/11.

It just fires me up when people present it as if we have two options: (1) letting the terrorists run free and subjecting ourselves to certain doom, or (2) ignoring "minor" deviations from the fucking Constitution which will no doubt ensure that we never have to deal with such horrors again. The fearmongering is just absurd. I would think that someone leveraging this horrible act for their own political agenda would be equally offensive.

More cops on the streets? I'd love to see that. More funding for homeland security? I'd love to see that, too. In fact, I have no problem with wiretaps, provided you get a warrant at some point, which no judge in his/her right mind would ever deny. It does not dishonor those who died on 9/11 to ask that our leadership continue to hold to the ideals that had been in place and working quite well for 225 years prior, though. We weren't attacked because we have too many civil liberties, we were attacked because these folks are whack jobs who were willing to stop at nothing, including ending their own lives, to attack us.

[Jenks]

Re: freedoms

It just fires me up when people present it as if we have two options: (1) letting the terrorists run free and subjecting ourselves to certain doom, or (2) ignoring "minor" deviations from the fucking Constitution which will no doubt ensure that we never have to deal with such horrors again. The fearmongering is just absurd.

God that is so true, and that's exactly how it's presented. Pisses me right off loyd.

[thesightless]

Re: freedoms

God that is so true, and that's exactly how it's presented. Pisses me right off loyd.

where the beer flows like wine.

[rubyraks]

Re: freedoms

every time in this thread I'm about to add something, I hit refresh and toasty has covered exactly what I'd wanted to say...he's spot on

+1

[BSully828]

Re: freedoms

The wiretapping issue just seems so overblown to me. I know we like to think that we're important and that our lives are worth all that trouble, but in the grand scheme of things 99.9% of us just aren't worth that much attention from Uncle Sam. If your concern is based on the idea that some suit in the pentagon is tapping your phone, take a second to think of the logistics of it:

Forget emails, let's just look at phone calls. How many do you make and receive on an average day - 10? 11? Maybe if you're the popular sort it could be close to 20. How about if your work has you on the phone all day, maybe its even as high as 40 - but let's lowball it for the sake of discussion that the average person makes and receives 5 calls a day.

What's the population at now 300 mil? Let's cut that in half to exclude kids and old folks - so 150,000,000 average Americans on the phone an average of 5 times a day. That is 3/4's of a BILLION individual phone calls in a single day. A DAY!

Now its no secret that there are programs designed to pick out key words in a conversation, "bomb", "assassinate", "mutha fukkin jihad" ect.. ect.. I don't know about you but I don't use those words very often and I'd bet that average Joe American doesn't either. So let's say, just for the sake of argument, that 1% of those daily calls include one of those key words. That is over 7 MILLION private calls each and every single day that only hint at a possible threat - and those calls would require a second look by real live people locked up in the dungeons of the Pentagon, evil Rumsfield wannabe's patrolling the aisles whips in hand.

Now, you live your day to day life like you always do. As far as I can tell, no one here is a terrorist, no one is involved in plotting the destruction of the West, we all just go about our normal, not-posing-any-threat-to-America way of life. When they have numbers like that to contend with, what interest do you really think we offer to the government? Do you really think they are that intrusive that they would track our phone calls? Read our emails? Unless they're dying to know what the current feeling is on the state of post-progressive house music in America and Europe, why would they ever bother looking at this website? I'm sorry to say folks, but we just aren't that interesting as average, law abiding citizens.

I understand why this issue still circulates though. It paints the government in Orwellian terms, offers a juicy espionage-laced story for mainstream media to run with, and gives Bush bashers a new tune to beat their drum to. But when one looks at it in an objective manner, its clear that the chance that one of our phone calls or emails ends up on the desk of some seedy government worker is just far too remote.

But the results of these wiretaps and message tracking are evident - attacks have been stopped, plots have been foiled. And you have to believe that some of those plots were never made public for intelligence reasons. Where is the intrusion? Where are the trampled rights? We are not the target of these taps, hell we aren't even on the map.

But perhaps these acts will lead us down a *ahem* "slippery slope", that the groundwork is being laid for a more penetrating means. Do you really think that would ever get through even the most closed-door government meeting? Imagine all the hands that would be involved in such an act, do you really think no one would stand up and say, "Is this necessary?". Capitol Hill has more leaks than a public toilet - do you really think that would go unnoticed?

Like I said, its nice to think that our lives are meaningful outside of our little sphere of influence, that somehow we are on the radar of a high-tek tracking board - but when looked at from high above we are but a sea of faceless figures, one completely indistinguishable from the next. And if you truly believe that our government is more concerned with the comings and goings of each and every single American than they are with stopping another 9/11 - well brother, I think you need to loosen up that tinfoil hat of yours