The Right to Be Left Alone
What if the federal government captures in real time the contents of every telephone call, email and text message and all the fiber-optic data generated by every person and entity in the United States 24/7? What if this mass surveillance was never authorized by any federal law and tramples the Fourth Amendment?
What if this mass surveillance has come about by the secret collusion of presidents and their spies in the National Security Agency and by the federal government forcing the major telephone and computer service providers to cooperate with it? What if the service providers were coerced into giving the feds continuous physical access to their computers and thus to all the data contained in and passing through those computers?
What if President George W. Bush told the NSA that since it is part of the Defense Department and he was the commander in chief of the military, NSA agents could spy on anyone, notwithstanding any court orders or statutes that prohibited it? What if Bush believed that his orders to the military were not constrained by the laws against computer hacking that Congress had written or the interpretations of those laws by federal courts or even by the Constitution?
What if Congress has written laws that all presidents have sworn to uphold and that require a warrant issued by a judge before the NSA can spy on anyone but Bush effectively told the NSA to go through the motions of getting a warrant while spying without warrants on everyone in the U.S. all the time?…
Awesome article! Thanks
Sadly for the South, Lincoln ran circles around Davis as a President and Commander in Chief.
A "confederation" cannot defeat a "federation" and a "Defense" cannot defeat an "Offense" all things being equal, and the South was no where equal to the North with the exception of the Gen Lee/ Jackson combination.
But without an early Confederate taking of DC the gig was up as superior force resided in the North.
As far as historical politics, the USA Republic probably was surrendered paradoxically with the CSA in 1865. The following Domestic Indian Wars by the Union Army, and the establishment of the Phillipines as a colony following the Spanish-American War birthed the American Empire.
WW1, Wilson ; WW2, FDR ; created the bureaucrazy necessary for expansion into the current
NSA/Cia/Fib/ATF/IRS/ and Etc Feral/State Polezi/Intel Agencies are out of Pandora's Box.
What's Next ??? I do know the current democRat/rinoRat/NeoCon/"Money" paradigms cannot solve or survive the coming times.