zehydra said:
Therumancer said:
I'm a big supporter of Homeland Security, and actually felt that "The Patriot Act" does not go far enough in what it needs to do. I supported Gitmo, and all kinds of things that make left wingers uneasy to even think about.... however in reading this, and similar things, I can't help but say "WTF Is Homeland Security doing involved in this?". There is no justification for using what is supposed to be an organization intended to defend the country against terrorist threats, acting as a punkhammer for anti-piracy slapfights. It's sort of like how the definition of "Terrorism" is extended and trampled on to deal with any kind of major case that law enforcement needs a bit more oomph with.
It's like this, unless Homeland Security can prove that there is some direct connection to terrorism, they need to butt out. By this I don't just mean hypothetical exploitation by terrorists.
It's this kind of irresponsibility, and the breadth of operations of "Homeland Security" that cause people to have so many problems with them. I believe such organizations can operate without abuses of their authority, or taking undue advantage of a broad mandate, but actions like this certainly make my defense of them being a lot more difficult. Piracy revolves around private businesses losing money, NOT about threats to our nation as a whole, Homeland Security has no part being involved here, heck there are plenty of criminal cases that they get involved in where they shouldn't besides this.
I might not care for piracy, but this while thing just generally stinks. Piracy might be wrong, but you can commit greater wrongs in the course of going after it, and abusing authority given to deal with terrorists so some company can save a few bucks is one of
those greater evils.
What's interesting is that you are in favor of the patriot act, but you fear the abuse of power.
tanis1lionheart said:
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This is troll, yes?
Cause, if not - must be Kim Jon Ill, Mao, or Stalin in disguise.
No AMERICAN - who support the US Constitution would be a fan of the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. A.C.T 2 - unless they're traitors.
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.