Google Vs Bush Admin., Another privacy issue

I for a fact can tell you that the government ( I thought we the people were supposed to be the government ) has already requested from your local library a list of the material that you, yes you, read! I know this because my wife is a local library director and her library refused to comply... they did not just want records on certain people they wanted them all. Where will it stop?

Shadows,
Somehow "We The People" fell thru the cracks not sure when but some thing went haywire, and it scary that our lives can now be looked at by anybody who knows how.
I do not understand why if something goes amiss fingers point to the Peresident, True he is our leader but as i stated before (not saying you shadows) the FBI CIA etc do things he might not know about or fed just enough info so he knows and if something goes wrong the blame falls on him and the snakes that did it get off free. Papers say the Gov. knew of all the things that have happened over the past few years ahead of time but did nothing. The CIA failed the FBI failed The Gov. failed, Why? What was to be gained by letting all those people die. The only answer i can think of is a lot of politicians have thier hands in defense prodjects and are getting rich from it. Yes I can say this I served, not in war but i did my time.
(Fiddler) NO Bush does not sit in front of a pc all day that is what he has said people do and that is thier job to keep this country safe to look for threats, but only at people that
are known or have connact with such people all the other things are not going to hurt this country.

Shadows, for your wife and the library, someones library card is of no concern of the Gov. I can see it know 10 year old jailed for reading Harry Potter charge
"praticing turning a pet into a glass" oh my god, life in prison

Our country is a mess but the Gov is to busy bieng nursemaid to the world and concern ourselfs with us.

I was screaming just as loud and long as I'm screaming now, making many of the same arguments.

It doesn't matter one bit which administration is in power at any particular time. What matters is how the government wants to gather and use information without our knowlege or understanding.

That doesn't change with whichever party is in power. Sorry guys, it's not a partisan issue regardless of which set to thieving low-life scum-bag poliiticians you want to be unhappy with at any given time.

Once again, if we don't demand our rights be respected, then for practical purposes those rights don't exist at all.

Swanny

Everyone keeps hollering about the government staying out of their lives but when something like 9-11 happens (and even Katrina to an extent) people holler about where the government was and why they didn't protect us. We can't have it both ways.

We seem to have become the most fickle society in the world. Out of one side of our mouths we scream for privacy and less government involvement but , when something bad happens we scream from the other side that the govenment should have known about it in advance and done something to stop it.

With everyone doing so much "business" online these days how is the government supposed to get this "probable cause" you speak of? Do pedofiles, or terrorist or the like look different on the outside from you and me? Do they give some clue that would cause someone to get suspicious and dig deeper? Probably not. If the government was only taking records from selected people you would probably be hearing more cries of "racial profiling" or perhaps "religious profiling".

Although I can't prove it I would bet that there are still terrorist cells residing here in the U.S waiting for the right opportunity to strike. I'm also quite sure they arent carrying out conversations over AT&T phone lines but encrypted computer programs that are highly sophisticated. If this cell strikes a building where your wife/child/mother/father/brother etc was, and it's found out later (you know there will be a commision to investigate whose fault it was and who knew what) that all the information about this strike could have been found online and prevented, will you say, "that's okay, at least I still have my privacy and they can't see the smut site I visited the other day." On the contrary, I think most people will yell and scream that the government should have done more to protect them.

If you give up any freedom for the sake of "security" you lose!


What abut protecting your freedom at the expense of "security"? Who do you blame when the bomb goes off and vast numbers of "innocents" are killed?

I for one hadn't discovered this web site yet and so wouldn't have been able to say anything.

I can't believe that this has come down to democrat vs republican again. This has nothing to do with what Clinton did or democrats or republicans or whatever. This has to do with the Government, under any designation, poking their noses where they don't belong. It doesn' matter if Clinton did it or Bush is doing it. Clinton was just as wrong to spy on the people as bush.

And really, it isn't about clinton or bush. It's about The government as a whole.

And who do I blame for 9-11? Who do i blame for the terrorist acts now? I blame the terrorists. But I'm not willing to give up my freedoms just to be safe. I'd be willing to fight and die so that the people in this country can live free.

Besides, if we give up our freedoms to our government just to be safe from terrorists, we are simply trading one terror for another.

A question then, how much of your personal freedom are you willing to give away to the government, free of question or concern, for the sake of national security? How much have you already given up for the sake of the misguided "war on drugs"? How much is enough?

At what point will we have given up enough of our freedom that we can no longer be considered a "free" nation, or a "freedom loving people"?

Swanny

I'm not sure if this was directed to me or not, but I'll go ahead and answer.

I'm not willing to give any of my personal freedom away for the sake of national security.

I'm against the war on drugs, and so it doesn't matter to me how much I might have given away for that, it's too much.

Giving away any personal freedom is too much.

I would say we are far away from no longer being a free country, but every bit of freedom we lose is a step closer in that direction.

I've said it before and I'll say it again:

When you trade liberty for security, you don't have either.

Nah, I was going to let you go when you just said it once.

But when you said it twice I had to jump in.

The Ben Franklin quote that has been so misused and abused originally appeared in 1755:

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

The version that appears on the Statue of Liberty's pedestal reads:

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Your omission of those key qualifiers--"essential" and "little"-- makes all the difference in the world. Ben Franklin has been hijacked to endorse an untenable and deadly view that no sacrifice of any liberty for any amount of safety at any time should ever be made.

The conflict against al Qaeda is, in fundamental respects, a war of information. We cannot build walls thick enough, fences high enough, or systems strong enough to keep our enemies out of our open and welcoming country. Instead, as the bipartisan 9/11 and WMD Commissions have urged, we must understand better who they are and what they’re doing – we have to collect more dots, if you will, before we can “connect the dots.” This program to surveil al Qaeda is a necessary weapon as we fight to detect and prevent another attack before it happens.

It's worth noting that Franklin was talking about liberty, not privacy. There is a relationship between the two, but I find it strange that no one bothers to quote Franklin when we're talking about the liberty to choose how your children are taught.

The misquotation of Franklin in the argument about information gathering strikes me as particularly amusing in light of Franklin's role as one of the premier intelligence agents during the Revolutionary War. The CIA has a nice summary of the intelligence activities undertaken during that war, and no one is so prominent as Franklin, including in covert activities. More to the point here, Franklin was a member of the original committee, appointed by the Continental Congress, to review and publish intercepted communications from England. Hmm, Benjamin Franklin: Domestic Spy?! If he meant what the liberals think he meant, we're going to have to change his statues to read "Printer, Inventor, Statesman, Hypocrite".

Funny that the same screamers currently in a Franklin frenzy never quote this:

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

TOOK YOU LONG ENOUGH SHAMALAMA!

All liberty is essential, and privacy garunteed under the bill of rights is a liberty.