- Oct 7, 2011
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By Nat Hentoff
Not long before Dick Armey a conservative Republican constitutionalist retired as House majority leader, he gave a speech expressing his worry about the governments increasing blanket surveillance over We the People. He practically begged President George W. Bush to use these tools we have given you to make us safe in such a manner thatll preserve our freedom (my book, The War on the Bill of Rights and the Gathering Resistance, Seven Stories Press, 2003).
Bushs response, alas, was to listen more and more to Vice President Dick Cheney.
And now for the first time in American history, according to the Government Accountability Projects Jesselyn Radack, Attorney General Eric Holder has officially and publicly declared new guidelines that permit the federal counterterrorism investigators to collect, search and store data about Americans who are not suspected of terrorism, or anything
According to the Justice Department, law enforcement and other national security agencies can copy entire databases and sift through the data for suspicious patterns to stop potential terrorist threats (Govt. Keeping Data on Americans With No Connection to Terrorism, whistleblower.org, March 23).
Where in the Constitution do suspicious patterns otherwise undefined and outside the jurisdiction of our courts allow the government to put large and growing numbers of us into databases for future tracking?
Indeed, Radack writes, this gossamer of information is being stored on Americans who are not even thinking about committing a crime.
Read More:
Obama’s NSA: Close to knowing all about us
Not long before Dick Armey a conservative Republican constitutionalist retired as House majority leader, he gave a speech expressing his worry about the governments increasing blanket surveillance over We the People. He practically begged President George W. Bush to use these tools we have given you to make us safe in such a manner thatll preserve our freedom (my book, The War on the Bill of Rights and the Gathering Resistance, Seven Stories Press, 2003).
Bushs response, alas, was to listen more and more to Vice President Dick Cheney.
And now for the first time in American history, according to the Government Accountability Projects Jesselyn Radack, Attorney General Eric Holder has officially and publicly declared new guidelines that permit the federal counterterrorism investigators to collect, search and store data about Americans who are not suspected of terrorism, or anything
According to the Justice Department, law enforcement and other national security agencies can copy entire databases and sift through the data for suspicious patterns to stop potential terrorist threats (Govt. Keeping Data on Americans With No Connection to Terrorism, whistleblower.org, March 23).
Where in the Constitution do suspicious patterns otherwise undefined and outside the jurisdiction of our courts allow the government to put large and growing numbers of us into databases for future tracking?
Indeed, Radack writes, this gossamer of information is being stored on Americans who are not even thinking about committing a crime.
Read More:
Obama’s NSA: Close to knowing all about us
