Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Constitution? What Constitution? We Don't Need No Stinking Constitution.

Once upon a time, in a land far, far, away, there was a government which abided by a Constitution which accorded it limited and enumerated powers, and specifically denied it certain others.

Over the course of a hundred years that government was infiltrated and taken over by people who held the Constitution in contempt. They denied that the Constitution needed amending to increase their power: They asserted that the Constitution granted them the power to do anything they thought worth doing. They infested and controlled every branch of the government, Executive, Legislative, and Judicial, so there was no one left with the power to stop them, and few left who even wanted to. The latter were mocked as radicals, racists, and as woman-haters who wanted to bring back slavery. And thus it came to pass that the country which was exceptional among all the countries of the world, became just as the others had always been, and that country was hailed for no longer being exceptional.

More here on just one step on the road to non-exceptionalism.

A Senate proposal touted as protecting Americans' e-mail privacy has been quietly rewritten, giving government agencies more surveillance power than they possess under current law...

...A vote on his bill, which now authorizes warrantless access to Americans' e-mail, is scheduled for next week.

Leahy's rewritten bill would allow more than 22 agencies...to access Americans' e-mail, Google Docs files, Facebook wall posts, and Twitter direct messages without a search warrant. It also would give the FBI and Homeland Security more authority, in some circumstances, to gain full access to Internet accounts without notifying either the owner or a judge.
The agencies which could search your ePapers without search warrants:
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the Federal Maritime Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Mine Enforcement Safety and Health Review Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission, the Postal Regulatory Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, the Office of Financial Research, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and any other similar agency designated by statute as a Federal independent regulatory agency or commission.
Once upon a time people revered such as this, until they derided it for making their country exceptional:
Amendment IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Finally, after many years of struggle against the exceptional, the exceptional country was just like all the others, and power unchecked reigned again throughout the land.

Labels: , , , ,

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home