If the U.S. is fighting terrorists in Iraq so we don't have to fight them here, and if the Crawford Caligula is the only one who can keep us safe, and if we are keeping terrorists out, then why is this Administration behaving as though the entire country is lousy with....CRAWLING with....TEEMING with terrorists, to the point that the government needs to be able to open every single piece of mail that travels from Terre (heh) Haute to Texas?
And if you thought it was just about them opening your electric bill, guess again.
Now they want internet providers to keep records on every site you visit:
The federal government wants your Internet provider to keep track of every Web site you visit.
For more than a year, the U.S. Justice Department has been in discussions with Internet companies and privacy rights advocates, trying to come up with a plan that would make it easier for investigators to check records of Web traffic.
The idea is to help law enforcement track down child pornographers. But some see it as another step toward total surveillance of citizens, joining warrantless wiretapping, secret scrutiny of library records and unfettered access to e-mail as another power that could be abused.
"I don't think it's realistic to think that we would create this enormous honeypot of information and then say to the FBI, 'You can only use it for this narrow purpose,'" said Leslie Harris, executive director of the Center for Democracy & Technology, a Washington, D.C.-based group that promotes free speech and privacy in communication.
"We have an environment in which we're collecting more and more information on the personal lives of Americans, and our laws are completely inadequate to protect us."
So far, no concrete proposal has emerged, but U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has made it clear that he'd like to see quick action.
I'm sure he would. This is our old friend Total Information Awareness, a program that was supposed to be scrapped, dressed up in a pious suit of clothing called Cracking Down on Child Pornography. Given that the Republican Party protected a pedophile in Congress who was one of their own, it's hard to believe that suddenly Alberto Gonzales wants to know that I did Google searches this morning on various enemies of the Administration who inexplicably committed suicide solely because he wants to be sure I'm not a child pornographer.
Au contraire -- these lunatics running our government don't give a damn about terrorists, and they don't give a damn about keeping you safe. All they care about is maintaining their own power -- and they want to make sure that no one out here with a PC and an internet connection is in a position to threaten that -- at least not without being visited by federal agents.
The Administration has done nothing about security. Airport security is a joke, designed to inconvenience travelers while doing nothing to keep terrorists off planes. Amtrak still has no security. The ports aren't even secure (though at least the Democrats are hoping to do something about that by implementing the 9/11 Commission recommendations -- something Republicans refused to do). But reading your mail and monitoring where you go in the internet -- THAT they can do.
Does this actually make sense to anyone outside the Administration?