‘Infrastructure for a police state’
Jun 29th, 2008 at 12:46 pm by Susie
Mark Klein, the AT&T engineer who blew the whistle on the illegal wiretaps, on the FISA “compromise”:
Congress has made the FISA law a dead letter–such a law is useless if the president can break it with impunity. Thus the Democrats have surreptitiously repudiated the main reform of the post-Watergate era and adopted Nixon’s line: “When the president does it that means that it is not illegal.” This is the judicial logic of a dictatorship.
The surveillance system now approved by Congress provides the physical apparatus for the government to collect and store a huge database on virtually the entire population, available for data mining whenever the government wants to target its political opponents at any given moment—all in the hands of an unrestrained executive power. It is the infrastructure for a police state.
This reminds me of when I used to watch movies about World War II and the Holocaust. I’d watch those complacent Jews shrugging off the latest outrage, and yell at the screen, “Don’t you see what’s happening? GET OUT!!!”
And you know what. There will be absolutely no political penalty for enacting this law. I’ll bet 25,000 quatloos that less than 5% of the electorate gives two shits about this.
I don’t think the American public is any keener on being spied on than blog denizens. What they aren’t is as aware, because they depend on the MSM, which aren’t giving the issue the coverage they should.
Well, that and distractions like trying to survive in a shitty economy. Not everyone seeks out extra issues to worry about.