Mozilla Refuses to Drop Domain Seizure Circumvention App
- Thread starter Scott Bullock
- Start date
Recommended Videos
Atleast common sense ain't dead yet, everyone should bow to the censorship whims of some agency in some country, how about we start implementing Chinese ideas everywhere too...
I think Anon got some work to do.
I think Anon got some work to do.
Hi. We are sort of on the same side. At least, we agree that the Patriot act, and many other excesses of post 9/11, are not good ideas. However, I think I should point out the following:tanis1lionheart said:
You. Are not. Helping.
You seem to have a very poorly developed understanding of the issues, or at least you communicate your case very poorly, and in a manner that will only serve to make people listen less to you and those who generally agree with you. Please don't talk to anyone about your views until you learn to do so effectively, because all you will accomplish is to convince the patriot act's supporters that they are right.
And also, in response to your comment that you don't know of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy, I would like to point out that you are on the Internet. One of the marvelous benefits of being on the Internet is that it is possible, with the investment of a minimum of time and effort, to look up just about anything you can imagine and educate yourself on what it is. A popular place on the Internet for people to do so is a site called Wikipedia. Google is also a fantastic tool for acquiring information. Please take advantage of these resources instead of telling someone you are unfamiliar with something as if it's somehow their fault.
Thank you.
You are as well...so don't think you can tell someone else what to do and or & how to write.(unless you're the owner of the site)McMullen said:
Not everyone pussyfoots on an issue and use 'high level language' and all that other PC/liar/think-before-you-speak stuff.
I'm blunt, say/write what's on my mind - no self editing so I can tell a 'white lie'.
Often times this means I come across as a jerk and while I don't mean to come across as a total asshole, it's how I am.
Folks who support the PA, and things related to it, need an 'Italian love tap'.
The USA has NOT RIGHT to 'control' the internet while, at the same time, talk trash about other governments that do the same.
President Bush Jr. was SUPPOSE to be a 'conservative' and support SMALL government.
Obviously he turned out to be more 'liberal' and BIG government than even Biden.
In doing so he betrayed those who voted for him and what he claimed/was suppose to represent.
Those that continue to support PA have nothing but my utter and total contempt and anger.
"They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
-Benjamin Franklin
zehydra said:
tanis1lionheart said:
Alright hopefully this copy/paste worked since I'm not sure how to get multi-quotig to work otherwise (having failed before).
To explain myself:
I consider the potential for power to be abused, and the actual abuse of power to be two entirely differant things. If you go after POTENTIAL for abuse, by definition you can't have any laws or enforcable rules, since anything can potentially be abused.
I have no objections to the existance of something like Homeland security, as long as they are kept an eye on, and are forced to keep within their mandated area, as opposed to being allowed to extend their area of influance to other areas of law. As I see it, Homeland Security has a lot of power, but is intended to have a very limited jurisdiction within which to use that power, and they need to be called on it when they start going outside of their allowed sandbox.
My attitude on "The Patriot Act" is similar. Simply put, when dealing with a nation, and the needs of dealing with other nations and opposing cultures in an adversarial fashion, national security becomes a concern. In times of outright conflict, the need for national security is nessicarly going to be very high. A lot of the rights and freedoms we posses by their very nature cannot exist in a time of national crisis if we want to preserve the nation as a whole. This is why the goverment has always had access to war powers, and the abillity to do things like declare martial law. Our rights and freedoms were never an absolute, and could always be taken away from us under such circumstances, albiet temporarly. Whether you like what happned or not, this is how the goverment got us through World War II. They quashed free speech and freedomn of the press, US Nazi supporters and anti-war isolationists were prevented from expressing themselves, the goverment turned propaganda into overdrive, and while a huge moral issue, it did things like round up and hold the Japanese citizens for the duration of the war (and incidently they WERE freed, a point a lot of people tend to forget when talking about the abuse of power. Exactly what was supposed to happen, is what happened there, even if it was distasteful).
"The Patriot Act" inherantly does nothing that I disapprove of for the situation it was intended for. What it does is effectively give the goverment a middle ground between invoking full on war powers/martial law, and peacetime operations. That DOES represent something of a slippery slope, and I personally prefer an "all or nothing" attitude here, especially seeing as I think a lot of our current problems with "The War On Terror" are due to being half assed and not keeping domestic sentiment in line properly, but I can see why this was done, and why it's worth experimenting with.
If anything, by straddling the line between wartime and peacetime policy, it castrates itself by raising too many questions about civil law vs. emergency law, and what courts should have jurisdiction over specific things in this kind of situation.
For the most part it does work though, because it lets the goverment do things like round up societal enemies, and ignore a lot of the peacetime due process rights and civil liberties, while at the same time allowing things like free speech and freedom of the press to remain in play. Of course the problem is that you wind up with the issue of the free speech being using to try and castrate the govermental authority being allowed by these same laws.
As much as people might dislike war powers, we wouldn't be here right now if we didn't have them. What's more I trust our goverment when it comes to the "big issues" more than on the small ones, largely because after declaring martial law in World War II, it did wind up relinquishing those powers, and for all the whining, it eventually let The Japanese out of the camps rather than finding constant excuses to keep them locked up beyond the need.
Right now I think "The Patriot Act" needs to stay in play. If it's pulled, I think we're in a place right now that it should be done in the way of invoking full martial law in order to resolve the current problems, rather than returning to peacetime operations.
The issue when it comes to powers like this being why they are used. When it comes to Homeland Security for example, I fully support them stepping all over the "rights" of suspected terrorists. What they do being open to review, with all kinds of eyes on them. We did all kinds of nasty things during "World War II" in order to stop german spies and the like. Check out the US propaganda department at the Smithosonian sometime as well. To put it bluntly in that "good" war, we basically won by being bigger bastards than the Germans were. The problem is when Homeland security goes beyond it's mandate and starts using it's authority in purely civil matters. If it could logically tie it's behavior into stopping terrorism or enabling the US to win it's current wars, you wouldn't hear much complaining from me, but I fail to see how defending the IP rights of private businesses in any way involves anything but the bottom line of those businesses. At least if they pull some Muslim into a special national security subset of the legal system due to his social circle, backround, or recorded conversation, they can justify how that impacts national security when we're at war with The Middle East (similar to how doing it to a German could be justified when we were at war with Germany), what your seeing here can't be defended that way.
As far as claims like "OMG, Therumancer your a Nazi Stalinist, no real American would support some of the things you defend!", this is pretty much what "real America" is all about, we've already been here, we've already done these things, and we've had the abillity to do stuff like this since the country was founded. The USA during wartime, and the USA during peacetime are *VERY* differant entities... but again, people who make moral arguements typically don't have the remotest clue of what we've done, or why such things have had to be done. They operate under the illusion of a set of absolute freedoms that were never absolute and which have been removed temporarly in the past.
At any rate, this is long and rambling, but the bottom line is that I support The Patriot Act because it's there, and in play. After the current crisis, I do think he needs to be laid to rest, and in the future when such situations occur we need to just invoke Martial Law and be straightforward about it, because we've caused more problems than we solved due to trying to be nice and find a middle path when there really can't be one.
It's kind of ironic when people go off about "The Patriot Act" when they don't realize that it was started to preserve as much freedom as possible in a time of crisis as opposed to either having the glories of peavetime, or the complete removal of liberties that comes with wartime.
Everything you just said is true, except perhaps the Italian love tap part, but that's a matter of opinion. But it is also true that you will not change any minds in your favor by being a jerk. For example, I was a jerk to you just now, and as you can see, I did not change your mind in my favor. It is an absolutely ineffective method of persuasion.tanis1lionheart said:
The only time being an asshole will ever get people to work with you is when you are an asshole with power. If you don't have any means to harm those who don't like you, they won't see any reason to cooperate with you. To get your equals or superiors to agree with you requires charm and diplomacy.
International politics is dicey that way. I'd be willing to bet that neither Sweden nor Australia feels like picking a fight with the United States on this issue. If they did though, here's how that would work:sheic99 said:
Swedish and Australian diplomats send letters/have meetings with US diplomats to discuss the issue. US says something about it being in their national interest since the companies involved are largely pirating material whose lawful sale would benefit the US. If reported this way to Congress/Senate etc., this could be grounds for less cooperation with Sweden and Australia since such cooperation benefits the US less than it did before. If this costs Sweden and Australia more than what they stand to gain from continuing to pursue their issues, they'll leave it alone.
When you're thinking about international politics, it helps to think in terms of each country as a particularly entitled 11 year old.
What's that? Why yes, it is more depressing when you understand it.
I agree with you to an extent. I heavily disapprove of the Patriot Act and the fear mongering and the disregard for personal liberties and the fact that i probably am considered by the US government a renegade because of that.tanis1lionheart said:
However, there are many people in america with many different values and ideologies and even though i disagree 100% with the poster in question it's his right to feel that way.
I appreciate you taking the time to write this. This is the first coherent explanation I've heard from a Patriot Act supporter. It was refreshing.Therumancer said:
I still don't agree with a lot of what you said, mostly for moral reasons, but your opinions at least make sense.
I did note a recurring theme of "this is the way it has to be done if we're going to make it". I'm curious to know if the alternative has ever been tried. I know that in the history of our nation, it hasn't. The Patriot Act has better or worse but very similar counterparts for every war, cold or otherwise, we've ever been in.
The other major reason I didn't like the Patriot Act was that the administration at the time was one that I didn't trust with that kind of power, and if the behavior of the Justice Department during that time was any indication, it was a very well placed distrust.
Oh my god piracy trouble! I need to hide in my bunker!BiH-Kira said:
___________________________________________________________________________________
This really should go through a court and not be done without a second thought.
post="7.282227.11064289"]
Alright hopefully this copy/paste worked since I'm not sure how to get multi-quotig to work otherwise (having failed before).
To explain myself:
I consider the potential for power to be abused, and the actual abuse of power to be two entirely differant things. If you go after POTENTIAL for abuse, by definition you can't have any laws or enforcable rules, since anything can potentially be abused.
I have no objections to the existance of something like Homeland security, as long as they are kept an eye on, and are forced to keep within their mandated area, as opposed to being allowed to extend their area of influance to other areas of law. As I see it, Homeland Security has a lot of power, but is intended to have a very limited jurisdiction within which to use that power, and they need to be called on it when they start going outside of their allowed sandbox.
My attitude on "The Patriot Act" is similar. Simply put, when dealing with a nation, and the needs of dealing with other nations and opposing cultures in an adversarial fashion, national security becomes a concern. In times of outright conflict, the need for national security is nessicarly going to be very high. A lot of the rights and freedoms we posses by their very nature cannot exist in a time of national crisis if we want to preserve the nation as a whole. This is why the goverment has always had access to war powers, and the abillity to do things like declare martial law. Our rights and freedoms were never an absolute, and could always be taken away from us under such circumstances, albiet temporarly. Whether you like what happned or not, this is how the goverment got us through World War II. They quashed free speech and freedomn of the press, US Nazi supporters and anti-war isolationists were prevented from expressing themselves, the goverment turned propaganda into overdrive, and while a huge moral issue, it did things like round up and hold the Japanese citizens for the duration of the war (and incidently they WERE freed, a point a lot of people tend to forget when talking about the abuse of power. Exactly what was supposed to happen, is what happened there, even if it was distasteful).
"The Patriot Act" inherantly does nothing that I disapprove of for the situation it was intended for. What it does is effectively give the goverment a middle ground between invoking full on war powers/martial law, and peacetime operations. That DOES represent something of a slippery slope, and I personally prefer an "all or nothing" attitude here, especially seeing as I think a lot of our current problems with "The War On Terror" are due to being half assed and not keeping domestic sentiment in line properly, but I can see why this was done, and why it's worth experimenting with.
If anything, by straddling the line between wartime and peacetime policy, it castrates itself by raising too many questions about civil law vs. emergency law, and what courts should have jurisdiction over specific things in this kind of situation.
For the most part it does work though, because it lets the goverment do things like round up societal enemies, and ignore a lot of the peacetime due process rights and civil liberties, while at the same time allowing things like free speech and freedom of the press to remain in play. Of course the problem is that you wind up with the issue of the free speech being using to try and castrate the govermental authority being allowed by these same laws.
As much as people might dislike war powers, we wouldn't be here right now if we didn't have them. What's more I trust our goverment when it comes to the "big issues" more than on the small ones, largely because after declaring martial law in World War II, it did wind up relinquishing those powers, and for all the whining, it eventually let The Japanese out of the camps rather than finding constant excuses to keep them locked up beyond the need.
Right now I think "The Patriot Act" needs to stay in play. If it's pulled, I think we're in a place right now that it should be done in the way of invoking full martial law in order to resolve the current problems, rather than returning to peacetime operations.
The issue when it comes to powers like this being why they are used. When it comes to Homeland Security for example, I fully support them stepping all over the "rights" of suspected terrorists. What they do being open to review, with all kinds of eyes on them. We did all kinds of nasty things during "World War II" in order to stop german spies and the like. Check out the US propaganda department at the Smithosonian sometime as well. To put it bluntly in that "good" war, we basically won by being bigger bastards than the Germans were. The problem is when Homeland security goes beyond it's mandate and starts using it's authority in purely civil matters. If it could logically tie it's behavior into stopping terrorism or enabling the US to win it's current wars, you wouldn't hear much complaining from me, but I fail to see how defending the IP rights of private businesses in any way involves anything but the bottom line of those businesses. At least if they pull some Muslim into a special national security subset of the legal system due to his social circle, backround, or recorded conversation, they can justify how that impacts national security when we're at war with The Middle East (similar to how doing it to a German could be justified when we were at war with Germany), what your seeing here can't be defended that way.
As far as claims like "OMG, Therumancer your a Nazi Stalinist, no real American would support some of the things you defend!", this is pretty much what "real America" is all about, we've already been here, we've already done these things, and we've had the abillity to do stuff like this since the country was founded. The USA during wartime, and the USA during peacetime are *VERY* differant entities... but again, people who make moral arguements typically don't have the remotest clue of what we've done, or why such things have had to be done. They operate under the illusion of a set of absolute freedoms that were never absolute and which have been removed temporarly in the past.
At any rate, this is long and rambling, but the bottom line is that I support The Patriot Act because it's there, and in play. After the current crisis, I do think he needs to be laid to rest, and in the future when such situations occur we need to just invoke Martial Law and be straightforward about it, because we've caused more problems than we solved due to trying to be nice and find a middle path when there really can't be one.
It's kind of ironic when people go off about "The Patriot Act" when they don't realize that it was started to preserve as much freedom as possible in a time of crisis as opposed to either having the glories of peavetime, or the complete removal of liberties that comes with wartime.[/quote]
Sorry to come out of nowhere, as I usually only come here for Zero Punctuation and a few news articles, but this thread is so interesting I had to chime in. To the above post, I say google "Patriot Act/German Enabling Act". I have actually read both for a research paper and one is almost a copy/paste job of the other. I'm sure the german civilians of 1933 felt the same way you do now prior to hitler taking over, and unfortunately there are more parallels between our country now and that country then than you'll want to believe (especially economically).
PS: Please actually google and read before flaming, thank you.[quote="Therumancer"
zehydra said:
tanis1lionheart said:
Alright hopefully this copy/paste worked since I'm not sure how to get multi-quotig to work otherwise (having failed before).
To explain myself:
I consider the potential for power to be abused, and the actual abuse of power to be two entirely differant things. If you go after POTENTIAL for abuse, by definition you can't have any laws or enforcable rules, since anything can potentially be abused.
I have no objections to the existance of something like Homeland security, as long as they are kept an eye on, and are forced to keep within their mandated area, as opposed to being allowed to extend their area of influance to other areas of law. As I see it, Homeland Security has a lot of power, but is intended to have a very limited jurisdiction within which to use that power, and they need to be called on it when they start going outside of their allowed sandbox.
My attitude on "The Patriot Act" is similar. Simply put, when dealing with a nation, and the needs of dealing with other nations and opposing cultures in an adversarial fashion, national security becomes a concern. In times of outright conflict, the need for national security is nessicarly going to be very high. A lot of the rights and freedoms we posses by their very nature cannot exist in a time of national crisis if we want to preserve the nation as a whole. This is why the goverment has always had access to war powers, and the abillity to do things like declare martial law. Our rights and freedoms were never an absolute, and could always be taken away from us under such circumstances, albiet temporarly. Whether you like what happned or not, this is how the goverment got us through World War II. They quashed free speech and freedomn of the press, US Nazi supporters and anti-war isolationists were prevented from expressing themselves, the goverment turned propaganda into overdrive, and while a huge moral issue, it did things like round up and hold the Japanese citizens for the duration of the war (and incidently they WERE freed, a point a lot of people tend to forget when talking about the abuse of power. Exactly what was supposed to happen, is what happened there, even if it was distasteful).
"The Patriot Act" inherantly does nothing that I disapprove of for the situation it was intended for. What it does is effectively give the goverment a middle ground between invoking full on war powers/martial law, and peacetime operations. That DOES represent something of a slippery slope, and I personally prefer an "all or nothing" attitude here, especially seeing as I think a lot of our current problems with "The War On Terror" are due to being half assed and not keeping domestic sentiment in line properly, but I can see why this was done, and why it's worth experimenting with.
If anything, by straddling the line between wartime and peacetime policy, it castrates itself by raising too many questions about civil law vs. emergency law, and what courts should have jurisdiction over specific things in this kind of situation.
For the most part it does work though, because it lets the goverment do things like round up societal enemies, and ignore a lot of the peacetime due process rights and civil liberties, while at the same time allowing things like free speech and freedom of the press to remain in play. Of course the problem is that you wind up with the issue of the free speech being using to try and castrate the govermental authority being allowed by these same laws.
As much as people might dislike war powers, we wouldn't be here right now if we didn't have them. What's more I trust our goverment when it comes to the "big issues" more than on the small ones, largely because after declaring martial law in World War II, it did wind up relinquishing those powers, and for all the whining, it eventually let The Japanese out of the camps rather than finding constant excuses to keep them locked up beyond the need.
Right now I think "The Patriot Act" needs to stay in play. If it's pulled, I think we're in a place right now that it should be done in the way of invoking full martial law in order to resolve the current problems, rather than returning to peacetime operations.
The issue when it comes to powers like this being why they are used. When it comes to Homeland Security for example, I fully support them stepping all over the "rights" of suspected terrorists. What they do being open to review, with all kinds of eyes on them. We did all kinds of nasty things during "World War II" in order to stop german spies and the like. Check out the US propaganda department at the Smithosonian sometime as well. To put it bluntly in that "good" war, we basically won by being bigger bastards than the Germans were. The problem is when Homeland security goes beyond it's mandate and starts using it's authority in purely civil matters. If it could logically tie it's behavior into stopping terrorism or enabling the US to win it's current wars, you wouldn't hear much complaining from me, but I fail to see how defending the IP rights of private businesses in any way involves anything but the bottom line of those businesses. At least if they pull some Muslim into a special national security subset of the legal system due to his social circle, backround, or recorded conversation, they can justify how that impacts national security when we're at war with The Middle East (similar to how doing it to a German could be justified when we were at war with Germany), what your seeing here can't be defended that way.
As far as claims like "OMG, Therumancer your a Nazi Stalinist, no real American would support some of the things you defend!", this is pretty much what "real America" is all about, we've already been here, we've already done these things, and we've had the abillity to do stuff like this since the country was founded. The USA during wartime, and the USA during peacetime are *VERY* differant entities... but again, people who make moral arguements typically don't have the remotest clue of what we've done, or why such things have had to be done. They operate under the illusion of a set of absolute freedoms that were never absolute and which have been removed temporarly in the past.
At any rate, this is long and rambling, but the bottom line is that I support The Patriot Act because it's there, and in play. After the current crisis, I do think he needs to be laid to rest, and in the future when such situations occur we need to just invoke Martial Law and be straightforward about it, because we've caused more problems than we solved due to trying to be nice and find a middle path when there really can't be one.
It's kind of ironic when people go off about "The Patriot Act" when they don't realize that it was started to preserve as much freedom as possible in a time of crisis as opposed to either having the glories of peavetime, or the complete removal of liberties that comes with wartime.[/quote]
Sorry to come out of nowhere, as I usually only come here for Zero Punctuation and a few news articles, but this thread is so interesting I had to chime in. To the above post, I say google "Patriot Act/German Enabling Act". I have actually read both for a research paper and one is almost a copy/paste job of the other. I'm sure the german civilians of 1933 felt the same way you do now prior to hitler taking over, and unfortunately there are more parallels between our country now and that country then than you'll want to believe (especially economically).
PS: Please actually google and read before flaming, thank you.[quote="Therumancer"
I forgot that there were lawyers who were willing to be shady for our side. If the domains were seized illegally, then Mozilla has it's point. I do believe those of us in America have a Constitutional protection from just that occurrence.
quoted for truth, AngryMan101. Too many Americans are hopelessly lost to the blind devotion they mistake for patriotism, and the fallacy that is "appeal to authority". I apologize again for messing up my first few posts, and just a reminder, please everyone google "Patriot Act vs. German Enabling Act". The world is different in many ways, but it's also similar in many ways as well.
McMullen said:
Well, in the end there isn't room for an alternative. In the end when it comes to matters of national security during a war, there is no way you can be 100% positive before apprehending someone. What's more time is typically of the essence, and while during peacetime you have the luxury of taking weeks, months, or even years to find answers, in a war you don't when the fate of a nation of millions could be decided based on a bit of information right now.
Most people who argue morality do so from the comfortable position of peace time, and not being the ones in the hot seat. To most people the threat isn't real enough for them to be a serious question when they ponder lofty issues like human rights.
The US has more or less acknowleged the situation by drafting two entire sets of rules, one for times of peace, one for times of crisis.
The Patriot Act arguably is an attempt to try an alternative, and it hasn't worked out all that wonderfully. Rather than allowing people to have a high degree of freedom during a time of crisis, what it's done is pit the peacetime authorities and standards against those of war time. We've spent tons of time bickering over the rights of the people being brought into custody, and things like Gitmo, because we permitted that level of freedom of speech to remain, rather than the civilians just doing their own thing, and the goverment being given the free hand to do what it needs without a big deal being made about it.
Most cultures that operated on a large scale that didn't have martial law, or a practical version of it, wound up falling as a result. While it wasn't the exclusive cause of Rome's fall, one of it's problems was that the Romans became convinced of their nessecity to the entire world, due to people being dependant on them for trade, and to maintain the roads. As a result they wound up seriously reducing the power of their armies, and placing them away from the major cities so they wouldn't get under foot. The old saying "Barbarians At The Gates" comes from the Romans literally ignoring massing threats about them, due to being convinced of their own invincibility, and not wanting to deal with the troubles a war would entail. As some historians have pointed out, had Rome decided to invoke martial law, go on a war time footing, and bring it's armies to more strategically viable positions, it probably wouldn't have fallen. Of course the reasons why they didn't do these things are hardly simple when viewed from their perspective.
A lot of people draw parallels between the US and Rome nowadays because of some similar mentalities, even if a lot of the specifics are differant. One of the areas we're similar on is our focus on morality, as opposed to practicality.
Basically without martial law, your not going to have the abillity to easily move troops around because nobody wants the troops in their back yard, what's more since nobody wants to die (or see their kids die), you need to have the goverment in control firmly enough to institute and enforce a draft to gain as many troops as possible, then you need to be able to ensure all the resources your country can muster are put towards the war, which of course people who want their stuff are going to object to. During all of this you need to maintain control, so you can't have people exercising their freedom of speech to rant and rave and try and cause resistance to your "tyranny" even if it's for their good. Such things exist because time has shown that all of these problems and more will occur without tight controls.
With The Patriot Act, we kind of figured we had enough people in our reserves where we didn't need a draft, we also had enough resources where we didn't need to muster every bit of scrap metal we could for the war effort. Our enemy simply not being the kind of threat where we feared imminant invasion, our big concern being mostly one of internal security to stop terrorist strikes. We kind of figured we could thus get by mostly by taking the parts of martial law dealing with internal security, and let the civilians otherwise go on doing their thing, but it didn't work out that way.
If you look at say "World War II" and things like it's propaganda, you'll notice that in addition to the "give them both barrels" posters with the factory worker and soldier standing side by side, and the picture of an malevolently shadowed german helmet peering over a wall and the caption "He's watching you", and of course "Loose Lips Sink Ships" (which had apparently been used before this conflict), we also had posters of happy housewives packing away all their preserves to send to uncle sam, or making do with one spoon instead of the four differant sized ones they kept to cook (the others being sent to the war effort), or kids lining up to hand over their toys to be melted down for the war effort... etc... This kind of thing worked largely because the goverment had the abillity to produce this kind of material, while preventing the anti-war movement from basically saying "hey, go to hell, we want to keep our own stuff" or whatever. Those guys were out there, it's just a dissenting word could get someone jailed, because again, the big picture mandated that we literally throw everything we have into the war. The Middle East does not represent that kind of threat, if we go to war with China though... well that might be a differant story. As it was we almost lost World War II, if we hadn't instituted war powers, it's doubtful we would ever have produced the materials or manpower to be the factor that we were.
At any rate, I'm rambling and pretty much saying the same things. The basic point is that The Patriot Act *IS* the attempt to do things a differant way. It's arguably failed. We spend all our time bickering over the morality of arresting the people we round up using it, the anti-war elements are constantly underfoot, and just about anything that can be spun to justify pulling out before the fighting is resolved is being spun that way. Every military action we're involved in gets analyzed by civilians 20 ways until sunday, to the point where civilian reception figures into military strategy as much as defeating the enemy, and so on.
See, people don't like slaughters and collateral damage, they never have. One of the big reasons why under Martial Law the goverment takes control of the news media, is so it can determine what the people actually hear, and you don't have people screaming about how our troops are a bunch of baby killers. Rather if civilians hear about military actions at all, it's in a very brief, very official blurb, etc. We kind of hoped with "The Patriot Act" that US Citizens would be smart and well educated enough to be realistic about things like collateral damage, but just like we hoped for a mature attitude on civil liberties in a war situation, we saw that it failed.
... and your right, there are TONS of moral issues with all of this, but that's exactly why Martial Law exists. War bloody sucks, we try to avoid them, but when it happens it all comes down to who the biggest bastard is. All tales of heroic troops fighting the good fight, and winning with honor and a lack of collateral damage (it's always the other guys that do that, cuz they're the bad guys) are BS propaganda. There is no good or evil or right and wrong anymore, when the war actually happens it becomes "our side against their side" and whoever wins gets to write the history books talking about how great they are. How do you think history books would read if the Nazis won World War II? Do you think they would take the blame for half those historical atrocities, or would it be the "evil Americans and Brits" who did all the really bad stuff? The patriot act was largely drafted by guys who gave American citizens too much credit for being able to really get that.