NYT - time for a complete boycott
 

OK, so, I'm a US citizen (born in the country to people who were born in the country whose parents were here legally). If I am in the international terminal at LAX, having arrived from, um, Australia, I have no constitutional protections? Or protections of other laws?

And what Burger asked about, because it interests me.

NYT - time for a complete boycott
 

Is this a serious question? I think the benefits for not having the government, at its discretion, within the United States, listen to your phone calls or search your house are obvious. On the flip side, the US trying to enforce the constitution, or thinking that US. Constitutional protections should apply outside the US is, to me, also obviously absurd. Do you disagree? Do I really need to explain the benefits to one and the drawbacks of the other?

NYT - time for a complete boycott
 

If you are interested why don't you look it up? You are a lawyer correct?

NYT - time for a complete boycott
 

The profile of David Addington in this week's New Yorker says that the NSA has been listening to domestic calls.

NYT - time for a complete boycott
 

If someone reported those facts, it would be treason, no?

NYT - time for a complete boycott
 

Yes, I do disagree. Your argument is an odd form of utiliatarianism. You believe that government surveillance of people is good, because it can thwart terrorist activity. The value of detecting or deterring such activity is greater than the harm to the privacy* of those being surveilled, as well as the perceived threat to privacy suffered by all others.

Yet, for some reason the same argument does not apply within the United States. Here, the value of detecting terrorism is outweighed by the privacy interests of the citizens.

Let me sharpen the point: If torture is a legitimate means to obtain information from people, why is it legitimate against foreigners, but not U.S. citizens?

Or, in a different way, if markets are the best way to protect democracy in the U.S., should we not be able to assume the same in foreign countries?




*I'm using the term "privacy" here in the narrow sense, and shorthand for, protection from search, seizure, and other government surveillance without some articulable suspicion.

What you suggest here would be more plausible -- not actually plausible, but farther from sheer lunacy -- if it were the Democrats who were following the party line on Iraq lately and the Republicans who were openly disagreeing with each other.

NYT - time for a complete boycott
 

Funny how the NYT likes to expose secret government programs - harming the many - while going to the wall to protect its secret sources - protecting only the one.

By party line - I'm assuming you mean Kerry/Murtha/Feingold?

NYT - time for a complete boycott
 

The two seem entirely consistent. Without the latter, the likelihood of being able to do the former is reduced.

Why isn't the Bush administration seeking out the leakers within the government? The press is just reporting what the government (i.e., the Bush white house) lets out.

NYT - time for a complete boycott
 

1) Good Question. Why isn't Gonzales going after the leakers to the NYT?

2) But um, Bush White House? It's clearly disaffected jerkoffs at State or the Pentagon.

NYT - time for a complete boycott
 

It should be obvious. Gonzales hates America!! He's another ratfaced traitor!!

NYT - time for a complete boycott
 

Sigh. I remember the good old days, when terrorist-loving sympathizers only resided at Foggy Bottom.

Only now, because of their clear incompetence and failure to Win This Fucking War For Our President, can we also find them across the river sitting somewhere inside the E-ring. Sad.

NYT - time for a complete boycott
 

Apparently the idea that the SWIFT monitoring system was still producing anything of value is...well...wrong .

• In The One Percent Doctrine, Ron Suskind spends a lot of time describing the way U.S. intelligence tracked global money flows after 9/11, including accounts of the cooperation they got from Western Union (wire transfers), First Data Corporation (credit card records), and the takeover of a "money store" in Pakistan. He doesn't mention the SWIFT program specifically, but he makes it clear that U.S. teams had their fingers in a lot of financial pies and had a considerable amount of success with it.
  
  But only for a while:
  
  In the closing months of 2003...the carefully constructed global network of sigint and what can be called finint, or financial intelligence, started to go quiet.
  
  In short, al Qaeda, and its affiliates and imitators, stopped leaving electronic footprints. It started slowly, but then became distinct and clear, a definable trend. They were going underground.
  
  ...."We were surprised it took them so long," said one senior intelligence official. "But the lesson here is that with an adaptable, patient enemy, a victory sometimes creates the next set of challenges. In this case, we did some things that worked very well, and they started to evolve."
  
  Or devolve. The al Qaeda playbook, employed by what was left of the network, its affiliates and imitators, started to stress the necessity of using couriers to carry cash and hand-delivered letters. This slowed the pace of operations, if not their scale, and that was, indeed, a victory.
  
  By the beginning of 2004, Suskind says, the finint operation was in a "state of increasing obsolescence." The money store had closed down, the Palestinians had gotten wise to Western Union, and the "matrix," as he calls the overall finint operation, was becoming less and less effective.

No, I meant that there was no Democratic party line on the issue.

"I'm not a member of any organized political party, I'm a Democrat."
-- Will Rogers