We Have No Privacy, We Are Always Being Watched.

there is a good argument the Snowden is a hero...and a lot of your peers swing that way, so your assertion that this position is nonesense is in itself nonsense.

One of the really gratifying things here in A2K...is that there are plenty of people who have not fallen for the "Snowden is a hero" nonsense.

I'm proud to be among you folk

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One of the really gratifying things here in A2K...is that there are plenty of people who have not fallen for the "Snowden is a hero" nonsense.

I'm proud to be among you folk

I do not care if anyone consider Snowden a hero of a traitor my problem is that the US government and all three branches of the government seems to be disregarding the constitution.

As had been pointed out by others the word prism for the one of the programs is likely a cute way of standing for the tapping of optic cables at the internet backbone level.

That how the claimed that the government have access to the servers of such firms as google and facebook can be true along with the claims by those firms that the government is not allow free rein to their systems.

They are tapping all traffic into and out of the servers in question and recording all that traffic.

Bet like hell the government was not happy when they started to go to SSL connections still the government would have access to all email and such that google put out on the internet in the clear.

Bill...I understand and appreciate your apprehension. But other people can have other opinions. I, personally, do not think the government is disregarding the Constitution. It may come to a court challenge to determine if it is or not...but right now, I think they are working within allowable tolerance.

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Bill...I understand and appreciate your apprehension. But other people can have other opinions. I, personally, do not think the government is disregarding the Constitution. It may come to a court challenge to determine if it is or not...but right now, I think they are working within allowable tolerance.

As I said it looking like all three repeat all three of the branches are disregarding the constitution and it would hardly be the first period that this had occur in our history.

The one example that first come to my mind is the imprisonment of a movie director for ten years for creating a movie that showed England in a very bad light during our revolution when we was busy fighting WW1 with our British allies.

I, personally, do not think the government is disregarding the Constitution. It may come to a court challenge to determine if it is or not...but right now, I think they are working within allowable tolerance.

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I, personally, do not think the government is disregarding the Constitution. It may come to a court challenge to determine if it is or not...but right now, I think they are working within allowable tolerance.

Were you good at balancing on wide pavements set low to the ground in your younger days?

If a politician here used the phrase "within allowable tolerance" the whole bloody nation would guffaw.

Essentially the law is whatever the courts say it is...a law or an action IS Constitutional if the Supreme Court says it is.

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Essentially the law is whatever the courts say it is...a law or an action IS Constitutional if the Supreme Court says it is.

There are limited to that type of thinking as no matter if the courts allowed it or not placing a man in prison for producing a political movie during WW1 the government does not care for is a clear violation of the first amendment.

If the courts allow the tearing up of the fourth amendment when it come to the privacy rights of every man and woman and child that used the internet or a phone it is still a clear violation of the constitution.

All it mean that de facto that courts are not willing to enforced the constitution rights not that the bill of rights had disappear as if written in disappearing ink.

Given that the "contract" between the people of the US and the government of the US is that they will follow the constitution the longer and the further this kind of thing go on the more illegitimate appearing the government will seems to the people.

You certainly are welcome to your opinion, Bill, but I think you are dead wrong...by definition.

Essentially the law is whatever the courts say it is...a law or an action IS Constitutional if the Supreme Court says it is.

A 1979 ruling over small-scale collection of calling metadata held that such records were not protected by the Fourth Amendment privacy rights since people have revealed such information to phone companies. In a 2012 case involving GPS trackers, however, the Supreme Court suggested that the long-term, automated collection of people’s public movements might raise Fourth Amendment issues.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/12/us/aclu-files-suit-over-phone-surveillance-program.html?pagewanted=all

.I have a choice to accept the word of the Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States about what is or is not Constitutional...

...or I can accept the opinion of a guy who posts in this forum using the name, BillRM.

I think I should choose the former.

Can you give me three good reasons why I should choose the latter?

Bill, that's twice you have mentioned that case, can you provide any sort of link to it?

http://www.illinoisfirstamendmentcenter.com/history.php

Wartime censorship was also employed during World War I. Another Sedition Act, passed in 1918, considered speaking “disloyal or abusive language” about the flag, Constitution and government a criminal act.

Passage of the Espionage Act of 1917, which made it a crime to write or say anything that might encourage disloyalty or interfere with drafting of servicemen, also hindered First Amendment protections. “Subversive” books were taken off the shelves in stores and libraries. A Federal Censorship Board was assigned to regulate such activities. Again, the argument of protecting national security interests was maintained.

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/us-congress-passes-sedition-act

On May 16, 1918, the United States Congress passes the Sedition Act, a piece of legislation designed to protect America's participation in World War I.

Along with the Espionage Act of the previous year, the Sedition Act was orchestrated largely by A. Mitchell Palmer, the United States attorney general under President Woodrow Wilson. The Espionage Act, passed shortly after the U.S. entrance into the war in early April 1917, made it a crime for any person to convey information intended to interfere with the U.S. armed forces' prosecution of the war effort or to promote the success of the country's enemies.

Aimed at socialists, pacifists and other anti-war activists, the Sedition Act imposed harsh penalties on anyone found guilty of making false statements that interfered with the prosecution of the war; insulting or abusing the U.S. government, the flag, the Constitution or the military; agitating against the production of necessary war materials; or advocating, teaching or defending any of these acts. Those who were found guilty of such actions, the act stated, shall be punished by a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than twenty years, or both. This was the same penalty that had been imposed for acts of espionage in the earlier legislation.

Though Wilson and Congress regarded the Sedition Act as crucial in order to stifle the spread of dissent within the country in that time of war, modern legal scholars consider the act as contrary to the letter and spirit of the U.S. Constitution, namely to the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. One of the most famous prosecutions under the Sedition Act during World War I was that of Eugene V. Debs, a pacifist labor organizer and founder of the International Workers of the World (IWW) who had run for president in 1900 as a Social Democrat and in 1904, 1908 and 1912 on the Socialist Party of America ticket.

After delivering an anti-war speech in June 1918 in Canton, Ohio, Debs was arrested, tried and sentenced to 10 years in prison under the Sedition Act. Debs appealed the decision, and the case eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where the court ruled Debs had acted with the intention of obstructing the war effort and upheld his conviction. In the decision, Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes referred to the earlier landmark case of Schenck v. United States (1919), when Charles Schenck, also a Socialist, had been found guilty under the Espionage Act after distributing a flyer urging recently drafted men to oppose the U.S. conscription policy. In this decision, Holmes maintained that freedom of speech and press could be constrained in certain instances, and that The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.

Debs' sentence was commuted in 1921 when the Sedition Act was repealed by Congress. Major portions of the Espionage Act remain part of United States law to the present day, although the crime of sedition was largely eliminated by the famous libel case Sullivan v. New York Times (1964), which determined that the press's criticism of public officials—unless a plaintiff could prove that the statements were made maliciously or with reckless disregard for the truth—was protected speech under the First Amendment.

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.I have a choice to accept the word of the Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States about what is or is not Constitutional...

...or I can accept the opinion of a guy who posts in this forum using the name, BillRM.

I think I should choose the former.

Can you give me three good reasons why I should choose the latter?

Common sense that it is not constitutional to throwed a man in prison for ten years for making a movie that show the British empire in a bad light for example.

But it is not my opinion that matter you are right in that it is the opinions of the mass of the American people if they would would come to the conclusion that their government is no longer operating under the constitution.

But I am so happy that you are willing to respect all the opinions of the SC during it whole history.

Let see it is constitutional to have separate but equal public facilities or blacks can never be citizens and going into free states to drag runaway slaves back into slavery is constitutional and so on.

Oh moving tens of thousands of birth right US citizens into camps due to who their ancestors happen to had been during WW2.

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You certainly are welcome to your opinion, Bill, but I think you are dead wrong...by definition.

Essentially the law is whatever the courts say it is...a law or an action IS Constitutional if the Supreme Court says it is.

BillRM sets himself up as the arbiter of what is, and isn't, Constitutional. He's not interested in actual court rulings, he's already decided the government has ripped up the Constitution. Our President, a former professor of Constitutional law, undoubtedly is much better versed on the subject, and knows where the current legal boundaries are, and I doubt he needs BillRM to instruct him from his armchair perch.

And it also seems BillRM ignores information which was previously posted in this thread:

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A 1979 ruling over small-scale collection of calling metadata held that such records were not protected by the Fourth Amendment privacy rights since people have revealed such information to phone companies. In a 2012 case involving GPS trackers, however, the Supreme Court suggested that the long-term, automated collection of people’s public movements might raise Fourth Amendment issues.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/12/us/aclu-files-suit-over-phone-surveillance-program.html?pagewanted=all

The value of the current ACLU lawsuit against the government may be that it forces the matter into the Supreme Court for an updated ruling regarding Constitutionality. And I'll trust their judgment more than Bill's.

And you're right, we are all entitled to our opinions. But just expressing opinions doesn't make for very interesting discussion, in fact, it may choke off discussion because people become more entrenched in defending their opinion, generally a one-sided opinion, then they are interested in fully exploring all sides of an issue. And one problem with A2k is that we have lots of opinionated people, but relatively few discussions here any more.

And I admire your efforts to try to side-step the name calling and sarcasm, and put-downs, that some of the opinionators throw at you, and try to goad you into mimicking.

Sen. Bernie Sanders has introduced legislation that would put strict limits on the domestic surveillance powers of the FBI and NSA.

In a statement, Sen. Sanders said, “We must give our intelligence and law enforcement agencies all of the tools that they need to combat terrorism but we must do so in a way that protects our freedom and respects the Constitution’s ban on unreasonable searches.”

The legislation puts limits on what records can be search, and requires agencies to have reasonable suspicion based on specific information in order to obtain a warrant. There would be no more data mining through open ended court orders, and agencies would have to reasonable suspicion to justify searches for each record or document. The bill would increase congressional oversight, and eliminate the presumption that anyone who is known to a suspect is relevant to an investigation.

Sen. Sanders is proposing a return to sanity. There is absolutely no justifiable reason for the open ended survielance powers in the Patriot Act. It has been 12 years since 9/11. It is time to look past the hysteria that allowed a horribly flawed piece of legislation to be passed, renewed, and renewed again.