So, You Ever Read Any Aldous Huxley?

You may already know about FISA and how the Bush administration wants nothing more than to give telecommunications companies retroactive immunity against lawsuits. The key word there being "retroactive". You wanna know why? It's because during the course of the alleged "War On Terror" people have been listening to you talk with your grandmother who's in the hospital, exchange gossip about the cute new boy in class, arrange a secret met-up at the mall to get that new dress before that bitch Marsha does, all because you might be talking with a terrorist.

Over the next few weeks and months, civil libertarians and consumer advocates will wage a battle against the telecommunications companies and the Bush administration to preserve some semblance of privacy rights in Americans' communications.

Congress will be considering several versions of bills that will, one way or another, expand government access to phone calls and e-mails. These legislative proposals are complex and in flux, but there are two main issues at the center of the debate that citizens can focus on. One is whether eavesdropping on millions of Americans simultaneously is acceptable. The second is whether communications companies should get a free pass for breaking the law by allowing illegal warrantless surveillance of all Americans' communications.

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Sure, surveilance can and is legal - if done through the proper channels. Of course, if you even bring up that argument within a 10 foot vicinity of a conservative, they'll throw their hands in the air and say " OH, we've got to do this without anyone knowing!!!! You want the terrorists to win!!!!! You're anti-american!!!!! *insert latest talking point here*"

Let's get one thing straight, I'm all for pretecting America, but not at the expense of capturing people who aren't terrorists, torturing people in order to gain information that will most likely turn out to be complete useless, throwing more money into Iraq which had ( and still has ) NOTHING to do with what happened Spetember 2001.

The one thing that many people don't seem to realize, is that a terrorist only has to attack once. Then, all they do is sit, wait, watch, occassionaly peeking from the other side of the curtain to say "BOO" and everyone jumps. Sometimes, they don't have to do anything - they just let people like the Bush administration do the rest of the work for them.