Tag: Constitution

John Cusack Interviews Law Professor Jonathan Turley

TURLEY: That’s exactly right. In fact, President Obama has not only maintained the position of George W. Bush in the area of national securities and in civil liberties, he’s actually expanded on those positions. He is actually worse than George Bush in some areas.

CUSACK: Can you speak to which ones?

TURLEY: Well, a good example of it is that President Bush ordered the killing of an American citizen when he approved a drone strike on a car in Yemen that he knew contained an American citizen as a passenger. Many of us at the time said, “You just effectively ordered the death of an American citizen in order to kill someone else, and where exactly do you have that authority?” But they made an argument that because the citizen wasn’t the primary target, he was just collateral damage. And there are many that believe that that is a plausible argument.

CUSACK: By the way, we’re forgetting to kill even a foreign citizen is against the law. I hate to be so quaint…

TURLEY: Well, President Obama outdid President Bush. He ordered the killing of two US citizens as the primary targets and has then gone forward and put out a policy that allows him to kill any American citizen when he unilaterally determines them to be a terrorist threat. Where President Bush had a citizen killed as collateral damage, President Obama has actually a formal policy allowing him to kill any US citizen.

via Truth-Out.org.

We’re at the point where the far left is starting to realize that Obama is simply shredding the Constitution.  I don’t think I’ve EVER agreed with  John Cusack before but he is 100% correct here.

CUSACK: Oscar Wilde said most journalists would fall under the category of those who couldn’t tell the difference between a bicycle accident and the end of civilization. But why is it that all the journalists that you see mostly on MSNBC or most of the progressives, or so-called progressives, who believe that under Bush and Cheney and Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzalez these were great and grave constitutional crises, the wars were an ongoing moral fiasco — but now, since we have a friendly face in the White House, someone with kind of pleasing aesthetics and some new policies we like, now all of a sudden these aren’t crimes, there’s no crisis. Because he’s our guy? Go, team, go?

I’m not sure that he means by “Pleasing aesthetics”.  Bush was not aesthetically pleasing?  I mean, he was no George Clooney but no ogre either.  … Or is that Obama is black?  I dunno.  But not sure I care either.  Where are all the anti-war protesters nowadays?

Overall this is an amazing piece that should be required reading for everyone on the Left.  They should think about all the venom they spewed at Bush for years for acting exactly like Obama.  I’m not saying Bush had it right… far from.  But the hypocrisy on the left is unbearable.

 

You’re Being Watched by Your Government

Back in July I wrote about how your government was utilizing all kinds of technology to spy on you.  At the time it appeared to just be speculation; now we know it to be true.

Part I

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is suing the Justice Department for details of last month’s ruling by a secretive U.S. court that National Security Agency’s domestic spying program violated the U.S. Constitution, Jon Brodkin of arstechnica reports.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) found that “on at least one occasion” the NSA had violated the Fourth Amendment’s restriction against unreasonable searches and seizures.  …

The kicker is that there is ample evidence that the NSA has gone above and beyond the powers granted through the 2008 FISA Amendment Act by actively spying on the electronic communications of American citizens within the U.S. and by coercing service providers to feed it any and all information it wants.via Business Insider.

And it that’s not scary enough for you, check this out!

Part II

A Naomi Wolf article in the Guardian about the rise of security cameras at Occupy hangouts and the multi-billion dollar biometric technologies industry includes this story:

A software engineer … visited Disneyland, and … the theme park offered him the photo of himself and his girlfriend to buy – with his credit card information already linked to it. He noted that he had never entered his name or information into anything at the theme park, or indicated that he wanted a photo, or alerted the humans at the ride to who he and his girlfriend were – so, he said, based on his professional experience, the system had to be using facial recognition technology. He had never signed an agreement allowing them to do so, and he declared that this use was illegal. He also claimed that Disney had recently shared data from facial-recognition technology with the United States military.

It turns out that Disney applies biometrics – that is, the statistical analysis of biological data – in the form of scanning visitor fingerprint information and identifying people with facial recognition software.

In fact, “Walt Disney World is responsible for the nation’s largest single commercial application of biometrics” and after 9/11 the government sought “Disney’s advice in intelligence, security and biometrics,” as reported in 2006 by Karen Hamel of News 21.

Hamel listed several former Disneyland employees that have gone on to fill “some of the most sensitive positions in the U.S. intelligence and security communities,”

via Business Insider.

That’s more than just a little creepy.

There’s also a guy who used to work for the NSA who’s coming forward and blowing the whistle.