Rand paul slams establishment republicans, declares victory over nsa

Without the content, which btw the gbhq is getting, you can still put together 80% of what everyone in the US is doing in their personal lives, and it is not OK. The government should not have a record if you call a crisis or suicide hotline. Should not have the ability to determine if you are having an extramarital affair (metadata is how they caught Petraeus and Broadwell oh btw). The government should not know if a woman makes an appointment with planned parenthood, or if you call for information on a VD. I can go on and on. This is beyond the purview of our authorities authority, and I dont care if you are OK with it. The government should not know what candidate sees my volunteer time, not when this president or any other uses the IRS to attack threats for instance. It has also never stopped a single attack.

No, absolutely not. Dr. Paul knew exactly what he was doing, it is you who did not.

 

Thank you for your simple, to the point post.

The question is does the threat of some theoretical future terrorist attack (like the Boston Marathon bombing, which the government could not stop even with the Russians clearly identifying a threat to us) justify them taking and holding onto an extensive record of all your personal and private activities and acquaintances?

The answer is resoundingly no! Not even if the government were trustworthy and highly efficient (which they are not) and people that want to give away their 4th Amendment rights because they can see no harm cannot guarantee that the people that hold our secrets will always treat them as the private information that it is.

They've already demonstrated they cannot.

 

Well you can say it a couple of more times, but you are not talking about any exception that I'm aware of that exists in US law or the 4th Amendment. Basically, you are merely stating that you are not really interested in the legalities. If it seems necessary (to you), than do it and if you don't like it you merely label it unconstitutional.

As I've already stated, you don't understand what probable cause is. Repeating the same argument doesn't make it true over repetition.

I've already listed those examples (travel, financial records personal health records) and you've made clear that you're fine with it. And if you can't see how there is a loss of privacy from having the government get, read, and use your personal financial information without a warrant, however collecting phone records, but NOT accessing them unless there is a warrant is 1984 all over again, than it's clear that it's not possible to explain it to you.

You stated that Cheney made billions off the Iraq war, then posted a link saying that Halliburtion got billions in no bid contracts. Even though Halliburtion has continued to get no bid contracts into the Obama administration. None of that has to do with Cheney since he had long since left the company. How exactly was he profiting from the Iraq war?

As for Rand Paul, I've already posted his conspiracy nonsense, so for me, that's game over. But I'm not sure what point you are trying to make by stating at one point in time he said that we should have declared war on ISIS. Ask him about it now. He's probably the only Republican who's foreign policy is to the left of Obama's. I don't think for a second a President Paul would declare war on ISIS, even if they were sponsoring a beheading a week and a bombing a month in this country. That's all irrelevant of course since Paul will never be President.

 

If memory serves, we battled quite a bit when Snowden defected over the metadata program, and although I disagree with you profoundly, I respect the fact that your opinions on the matter were at least very well informed. As to the amount of information that can be gleaned from metadata, well yes. That's the point. If it held no information whatsoever then it would be of no use to anyone. As it is, the information provides pieces to a puzzle if you are trying to tract down a terrorist cell in the US based on say, a single overseas contact. But all of those things that you are concerned about the government accessing require a warrant. I find it interesting, considering the broad potential scope of warrants under current US law, it's the phone records, where people seem to batguano crazy about stopping. Even with a warrant, they want those records inviolate. Meanwhile if the government wants to pull a warrant for you credit card info to find out if you bought your mistress gifts or trips, purchased anti-depressant medication, paid for counseling, paid for an abortion or STD services....that's all fine. But if you call them......

I admit, I don't get it.

 

Well now that he told the truth and had to flee, yeah. But he was working for NSA and not the Kremlin at the time he told Americans that they were having every email, text, and phone call recorded on huge spacial database arrays in buildings the size of Walmart filled floor to ceiling with hard drives.

 

No, I don't believe he was telling the truth, definitely not the whole truth. The guy was releasing information in such a way as to influence US foreign policy. President Obama goes to Germany, he releases something about Germany. President Obama goes to China, Snowden releases something embarrassing about China.

It is very clear that Snowden is and always was a traitor. Snowden is an unelected twit who tried to influence US foreign policy by selective release of information that was timed with Obama's foreign diplomacy efforts.

 

You are saying his intentions were not honorable. Your points seem potentially legit, though I am not sourcing them. But the real question is: Did NSA really collect every phone call, every text, every email, every Facebook post?

 

As soon as I saw Snowden A) had fled to our adversaries and B) was timing his release of information to influence US foreign policy as 1, unelected man, I knew he was a US enemy. I don't know what the NSA did, and I wouldn't believe Snowden. He wouldn't have told you the whole truth, if any of it.

 

I'm pretty positive that Congress looked into it and Snowden was 100% telling the truth. In fact, taking Snowden out of the equation for a moment: A NJ Supreme Court Judge said this a mere 3 days ago:

"In their continuous efforts to create the impression that the government is doing something to keep Americans safe, politicians in Washington have misled and lied to the public. They have violated their oaths to uphold the Constitution. They have created a false sense of security. And they have dispatched and re-dispatched 60,000 federal agents to intercept the telephone calls, text messages and emails of all Americans all the time. In the process, while publicly claiming they only acquire identifying metadata -- the time, date, location, duration, telephone numbers and email addresses of communications -- they have in fact surreptitiously gained access to the content of these communications." NJ Supreme Court Judge Andrew P. Napolitano 04 June 2015

 

Napolitano is not a NJ Superior Court judge anymore. He doesn't say how he knows what he knows. There is nothing in his statement that is actual evidence. He just claims to know something.

 

the did not tell the President, they told Congress, Congress was the one that created the law in the first place

we liberals are glad it was not renewed

if they can't put a clause in it that it will only be used for terrorist type crimes and any information collected for any other purpose would poison the well and not be allowed in court, then it should not exist

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face book is public, you put something out there on facebook you have no right to privacy of whatever that is imo


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Wow. So I list a bunch of things and you ignore the bunch and yap your mouth about stupid Facebook? Your texts between you and someone else - does NSA deserve to have that? A private email you send to a friend or family - does NSA deserve to have that? You call a friend or family member - does NSA deserve to have that? How about snail-mail? Would you be OK if NSA came to your mailbox every day with a scanner and scanned everything in your mailbox before you opened it up? What is wrong with you people? Once your liberties and privacy are taken from you, you don't ever get them back.

 

Sony holds no authority over me. Sony cannot focus the cannons of authority at me. Sony has personal information because people GIVE IT to them. Sony doesn't know (*)(*)(*)(*) about me because I do not surrender my privacy for convenience of service, and I cannot stop the government from it having gross detail on my day to day activities. Imagine McCarthyism with these tools at its discretion. And it is much much much more than the data on a phone bill. It is your location. It is every device your device encounters. It is EVERYTHING about you outside of the contents of your words which they can if they choose, also have.

We will not ever see eye to eye on this. I respect you too, but it is none of the governments business what kind of porn you like or if you go to an AA meeting tonight.

 

Are you by any chance claiming that airport security checks are unconstitutional and counter to the 14th Amendment somehow?

Do tell me more, professor. You find the secret store housing of personal information (in the form of phone records), gained without cause to be A-Okay with you. Yet you think the ubiquitous screening of airport passengers, done above board and with all the cause in the world, to be somehow not really legal?

Holy inconsistencies, Batman! It's you who don't seem to have a handle on reality.

That's a funny comment coming from some one pouting because Rand Paul wouldn't stand aside and let the NSA simply take whatever they want from everybody who's ever spoken on the telephone.

You can say I don't know what probable cause is but of course making that case is something you won't even attempt.

Let's be clear that we are talking about one specific thing...tax returns, because that's all I've ever discussed in this context.
And, of course, by "you're fine with it" you must mean I acknowledge that tax returns are a perfectly legal
way of fulfilling 16th Amendment income tax requirements and trying to deflect the NSA's illegal harvesting of personal information behind people's backs by dragging my tax returns into this is childish and pretty desperate.

Let me know when the Supreme Court strikes down tax returns on any grounds at all.

The government doesn't need a warrant to obtain your tax return! It's a necessary by product of our income tax laws. Stop the cravenly cowering behind your tax return.

My tax returns don't form a comprehensive record of who I talk to or do business with (giving the police a clear picture of my associations they would otherwise have to follow me around secretly twenty fours hours per day in order to obtain).
And you talk about not accessing phone records without a warrant is bull (*)(*)(*)(*) because (A) we know the secret FISA court grants virtually every single request for a warrant they receive.
And (B) if the data is taken illegally and without cause or notice then how are you going to guarantee anyone that that data is not accessed in exactly the same way...illegally and without notice?

Of course you can't and if David Petraeus would give you the time of day he might discuss with you how collected metadata was used to hunt him down.

Former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney became Chairman and CEO of Halliburton in 1995. He then got a golden parachute from Halliburton when he became Vice President (including
$39 million dollars in stock options alone).
You wonder why when you realize when Cheney left Haliburton stock had fallen from $25 a share at it's high point down to $7 per share in 2002.
Why was Cheney given such a rich parting prize and allowed, by special vote, to take an early retirement?
Because with their man in the White House they could practically smell all the business he would push to them through Iraq ($39.5 billion in Iraq related contracts).

I'm not really interested in how Haliburton has faired during the Obama years. Cheney made a lot of money from Haliburton when he transitioned from CEO to vice president. That's a fact.

But not as irrelevant as your biased, bitter opinion of a man who made the NSA take it's greasy hands out of the cookie jar.

 

Better hide under your bed girlyman, the big bad terrorists are coming to get you.

 

you were the one complaining they were monitoring face book posts, I was just replying to it, if you did not want to discuss it why bring it up?

I have made clear that as long as there is a clause that any information nsa collects can NOT be used in any non terrorist crimes, I am ok with it, we need a clause that treats it like data collected without a warrant or without reading your rights, the data is poisoned fruit and all fruit arising from the data is also inadmissible in court.... that prevent abuse

now, without that language in the law, I would not support it... and so far they refuse to add that language into the law because they want to use it for more then what they say they do

.

 

Sigh...this is all rather pointless. You're really repeating the same points over and over, and should I respond with the same responses over and over? I think not. If you can't see why a physical search without probably cause or a warrant or having the IRS go through every bit of your financial records (again without warrant or probable cause) has 4th Amendment implications but having your phone records stored but not accessed without a warrant doesn't then I don't have anything else to add to that conversation. I merely despair that people such as yourself on the right have taken the easy (and therefore usually liberal way) of switching positions depending on which party was in power. From the time Obama was inaugurated until about 2013 I had quite a laugh at the expense of Democrats who flipped on virtually every sacred position for the sake of Obama. But I got my comeuppance when Snowden defected, and suddenly, the same people who thought Bradley Manning was a traitor (myself among them) started to call Edward Snowden a hero. And why, because of the metadata program? How Snowden could be anything other than a traitor, after skipping off to Red China, where he revealed the extent of US spying on China, and then off to Russia, where he did the same, I can't fathom.

Of course, more troubling than that even is how easily you've slipped into Rand Paul and Alex Jones' conspiracy mindset. Usually the party out of power goes conspiracy nuts. Under Clinton the right was worried about Black Helicopters and trains of Russian made military equipment, ready for some UN type coup. Under Bush, it was, as you demonstrated, Cheney and Bush engineering the war to pad their pockets, and also causing 9/11. In fact, at one point during the Bush administration, a majority of Democrats believed 9/11 was an inside job. I won't ask you since I don't think I really want to know your answer on that. But then under Obama, birtherism (which originated with the pro Hillary set) filtered over to some conservatives, and on and on it goes. Snowden serious damaged US intelligence efforts with his releases, and it saddens me that there is a gang of people on the right who want to finish the job.

 

Of course they do. They want to use it in all kinds of illegal and intrusive ways. And what is terrorism anyway - isn't that sort of a grey area? A drunk gets in a fight at a bar. Turns out one of the 2 people he punched were muslim. BAM - call NSA. Let's get every phone call conversation and email he made in the past 15 years. Look - he hates muslims and one of the guys was muslim. Send him to Guantanamo and water-board him until he admits he is a terrorist. Slippery slope.

- - - Updated - - -

Facebook is not public. You can set your comments to "share only with friends". NSA can see those too.

 

Well... except...

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/03/nsa-surveillance-fisa-court

Of course before Dr. Paul got this all killed, Obama was heralding himself a champion of ending this practice...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/24/obama-nsa_n_5024969.html

But... whatever.

 

You get the same responses from me because I keep getting the same tiresome points from you.

Just as the courts have ruled that DUI checkpoints are constitutional (whether one might agree or not) so air security screenings are proper.
And as I've pointed out so many times before, boarding an airplane IS the probable cause. It's what terrorists do before they blow up airplanes. And now you (you as the airline passenger) are doing it too. Therefore some admittedly perfunctory screenings are called for.

I won't even indulge your ignorance with regards to tax returns anymore.

I've never called Snowden a hero but I'm thankful he has tipped the US public off to the secret and unconstitutional harvesting of personal information counter to the 4th Amendment as conducted by the NSA. Because now the problem is being addressed (sort of).

I am somewhat more amused by your flip flopping. Most conservatives worth a damn that I've ever encountered have a healthy distrust of unchecked centralized authority and the potential for abuses by Big Government. But not you! You seem very happy and indeed a cheer leader for giving government license to collect a record of who you know, who you talk to, etc.

And you think somehow you can trust the same people who have harvested a vital record of your private life and
personal dealings without your knowledge to never ever cross you again and to keep your private information private forever? You seem certain that future leaders as yet unknown are absolutely trustworthy and incorruptible?

What worries and concerns people of common sense never seems to have crossed your mind. Amazing!

I'm really very tired of the whole Dick Cheney thing.
Why not start a thread over it?
What we know for a fact about Dick Cheney, that he went from Secretary of Defense to CEO of a huge multi national corporation (that made billions of dollars in no bid security and supply contracts with government-which is troubling enough, in and of itself considering the military industrial complex that whacked out old tin foil hat wearing fool Dwight Eisenhower warned us all about ).
And then he was given an unusually extravagant special early retirement gold parachute package (despite a not very profitable job of running Haliburton, which usually doesn't win you any rewards from multi national boards of directors...except perhaps when you are going back into government at it's highest levels) and, of course, when we went to war (unwisely) who was there to gobble up oodles of no bid government contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan? Why, amazingly enough, good old Haliburton!

Perhaps the wise old birds that run Haliburton knew something we didn't know (but had every reason to suspect).

That sort of dim partisanship...accepting anything any of "our guys" do because they are, well, one of us
is precisely the reason leftists hold their nose and support Hillary Clinton. And we condemn that behavior, don't we. Except many of us do exactly what it is we find so abhorrent when lefties do it. You know what I mean.

Rand Paul happens to be right about the NSA and it's unconstitutional harvesting of private, without cause information on it's citizens cannot be obscured by you no matter how many Black Helicopter references you throw in to smear and win your dishonest argument.
Please go on about your dirty business but leave me out of your baseless accusations. It's frankly beneath me.

 

The government can also use satellites and other tech to look into your home if they wanted to. Maybe we should dismantle our satellites that allow spying. Because they could be used to violate our rights.

Again, where are the victims of the NSA spy program? Where is the group of people, or even individual, who has had their rights violated through the use of the NSA programs?

 

OR...we could not turn our backs and accept it if we learn such a thing is happening (as some anti 4th Amendment proponents suggest we do with the NSA harvest metadata).

So, in your view, if a peeping Tom repairman was able to set up a secret video feed from your home and spy on your daughter or wife (or yourself) as they showered, dressed and undressed, etc. that is okay with you as long as they never find out they are being victimized in their own homes? Most people would disagree with you.

If someone is siphoning off small amounts of money from your pay check before it even gets to you and you are unaware, are you still being robbed?

 

I also know that some people have connections with law enforcement and/or DMV employees. They can use their contacts to find out information about me through my license plate. Should we dismantle the licensing process because it can be abused?

I never said or implied anything like your scenario. Government employees who abuse the tools of the government for personal reasons should be prosecuted just like anyone else.

The people who would abuse the NSA program, or any other government program, are individuals. They are not violating my rights. Individuals can't violate my rights. Individuals break laws, and sometimes I can be the victim. Only governments can violate my rights. And I do not see where the government is violating people's rights through the NSA program. Only if they used the information against me during application of the law would my rights be violated.

 

No. The licensing process serves a specific purpose.

A police state gathers information on it's citizens without due process.
Whether you see the harm or not is irrelevant.