Ben Franklin said, "Anyone who trades liberty for security deserves neither liberty nor security." Agree?
Do you agree or disagree with his statement? We fought against the Nazis during WWII, and faced down Russia and their thousands of nuclear missles during the Cold War but now we are sooooo scared of a bunch of terrorists that we have to give up our liberties? Not me! I'd rather die in a terrorist attack than have my children, grandchildren and great grandchildren grow up in a world of diminished liberty. How does the War on Terror, the Patriot Act (which has given unprecedented invasive powers to the government) and the Military Commissions Act, (which has trashed the Bill of Rights) jive with Ben Franklin's statement? Please don't ask me to verify my statements about these two laws... do some work and find out for yourself... our forefathers would expect us to be concerned, engaged, informed, patriotic Americans!
Do people feel that they don't need the 4th amendment or are they protecting Bush?
When the NSA spying scandal came out, I hear people who make the argument of: "I have nothing to hide, so I don't mind the government gathering my private phone records without a court order to protect me from terrorists." This argument is used to justify the spying. Do these people prefer to abaddon this sacred right to protect themselves from terrorists, or do they prefer to abaddon this right to protect Bush's unconstitutional action - it was already ruled in federal court that the spying was unconstitutional. I'm not American...I just see what I see. And right now I see that these types of Americans are a danger to the preservation of the liberties granted in their country. I remember reading an important thing from one of your forefathers: "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety"-- Benjamin Franklin Note that Ben is saying that the safety is TEMPORARY!
Why do people oppose the USA Patriot Act? Doesn't it protect us from terrorists?
It's a bit more complicated than that, and as a general rule, I would caution against simply going with what seems to be the popular and obvious interpretation of any complex subject.Many people, both knowledgeable and merely reactionary, have concerns regarding the privacy risks that the Patriot Act appears to generate. For example, it appears that since the implementation of the Act, sensitive information can now be collected by government agencies far more easily than before. One example of this was an audit by the Justice Department during the Bush administration that found abuses of the Act by the FBI, using national security letters, rather than court orders, to obtain private information from private citizens.An author of the Patriot Act, Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, stated during an interview with PBS, "I am shocked. I think that the Justice Department has overreached. There's something seriously wrong with the internal management of the Justice Department, and that better be fixed, because if it isn't, the support for the internal part of our war against terrorism is going to evaporate rapidly."It appears, however, that there has not been much progress with regard to aborting the many uses of the Patriot Act to curtail civil liberties. A similar, more recent, example is the FBI's collection of phone data from millions of Verizon customers using Section 215 of the Patriot Act to justify their action.