@BillRM,
Quote:I did not consent to give up my constitutional rights to privacy and no simple vote to do so would be good enough as nothing short of a constitutional amendment should be able to do that.
Now once more we have somewhere like forty years where all our population centers was at risk of nuclear hell fire within 15 minutes to a few hours and yet we never found the need to have secret courts or to give up our privacy but a few terrorists are such a threat that we have a need to tear up the bill of rights?
Stop foaming at the mouth. For heaven's sake, no one has ripped up the Bill of Rights. And you haven't given up your Constitutional right to privacy.
The Constitution never guaranteed you complete privacy in all circumstances. Nor is it at all clear whether the government's phone surveillance is a violation of the Fourth Amendment or, in any way, illegal. Those issues have yet to be determined in the courts. Past court rulings on small-scale phone metadata collections did not find Fourth Amendment violations.
During the Cold War we knew exactly who the enemy was and where that enemy was located, and the enemy was a specific government entity. That's not the case with "the war on terrorism," which is why your comparison is absurd. Even JTT just pointed out, "Times have changed, Bill - different boogeymen need different rules."
Yes, "a few terrorists" can pose such a threat--it only took 19 of them to kill almost 3000 people, bring down the World Trade Center, hijack and crash 4 airliners, and damage the Pentagon. One terrorist can kill and injure a significant number of people--the same way Timothy McVeigh killed 168 and injured over 600. You toss off the phrase "a few terrorists" to suggest they don't pose much of a threat--a few terrorists can pose a significant threat, and, in reality, the terrorist threat is coming from considerably more than just "a few" and it's coming from those within our midst and from those elsewhere.
I neither want our national security compromised nor our civil liberties unlawfully curtailed. Unlike you, I'm willing to give up some personal privacy in the interests of national security--I'm already accustomed to having the contents of my handbag or my luggage searched, and I accept the need for doing that. I might well agree to the government keeping tabs on my phone records
if I knew about it. and if
there was adequate justification for doing it. And I'm glad that the entire issue of national security vs personal privacy is now in the arena of public and Congressional debate. I think we have to decide how we will strike a balance between national security considerations and personal privacy because
both are important. The public and Congressional debate is long overdue, but I'm glad it has finally begun.
