What started out as Senator Specter wanting to rein in the president's program has turned on its head and is now not just a legislative ratification of the program, but an expansion of warrantless wiretapping of Americans.It would allow the NSA to turn its vacuum cleaners on even domestic phone calls and emails of citizens.
And -- they do all of this in Alice-in-Wonderland fashion by defining all kinds of categories of surveillance to be not surveillance.
The bill is basically saying that any time you are targeting a foreigner, even if you are collecting calls to us citizens, that's not surveillance.
And anytime you are targeting nobody, but scooping up vast quantities of calls, that's not surveillance.
[...]
"Today, the Senate Judiciary Committee acted as a rubber stamp for the administration's abuse of power," said Caroline Fredrickson, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. "Congress has a right and obligation to conduct meaningful oversight on the unlawful actions of the president. But instead of investigating lawbreaking, the Senate Judiciary Committee wants to make it legal. We urge the full Senate to reject any attempts to ratify this illegal program."
In other news, citing the need to minimize expenditures, the NSA is hiring millions of Anglophile Indians to process the vast amounts of information this program will gather.
yeah, um, hi, can i get an extra large mushroom and pineapple pizza over here? six pack of coke too. thanks!
We here at the NSA know that's code for "Two hookers and a dime bag. Deliver at midnight."
ooooooooooooooooooooooooooh yeah, babeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Your un-American toppings have been noted.
That's BUTTLE! Not TUTTLE!
now what? if they make it legal, what will people do then, they won't be able to say its illegal anymore, so then what? It would have been through the supreme court who said if congress doesn't like it they can change the laws.
Personally I'm more amused than anything, it's sweet irony for everyone who went on going 'BUT ITS ILLEGAL' like they forgot the government were the people who made the laws or that they were surprised that an entity they mostly consider immoral acted immorally.
Sometimes I wonder why we even bother to have a congress anymore. The President does whatever the hell he feels like regardless of whether it's legal or not and congress just rolls over and lets him get away with it. You'd think they'd at least be miffed that he considers them so completely unnecessary.
Please, guys, think of the children...
as in, the Russians love their children too by Sting?