Showing posts with label Civil Liberties. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Civil Liberties. Show all posts

Thursday, February 13, 2014

Rand Paul Sues the Bastards


Kentucky Senator Rand Paul just manned up big time and stepped to the plate, filing a class action lawsuit against President Barack Obama for his lack of control over an NSA gone rogue. It is about damned time that a national political figure showed a set of stones and demanded accountability from a flagrantly out of control administration and the ongoing assault against the Constitution that it is conducting.  The rank cowardice from the political class has been evident since the revelations of former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and has been not only an embarrassment to this country but also a violation of their oaths to uphold the Constitution that borders on treason. If we still lived in a land where the rule of law was upheld the entire Congressional leadership and their little gangs of eight and sixteen that operate outside the legal parameters would be removed from office and placed on public trial after which they would be thrown into the prisons in which they belong for the remainder of their miserable lives. They are all jackals and thieves and their war on the American people must be stopped. Thanks to Senator Paul the proverbial shot across the bow has been delivered.
The Washington based establishment went into their usual mode when the sanctity of their incestuous little bubble gets pricked, they unleashed the smear brigade. From the tip of the spear that is the neocon dominated Washington Post the scorn for Paul (but really for the country itself) erupted shortly after the suit was filed in the D.C. federal district court. The veteran house lackey Dana Milbank immediately accused Paul of plagiarism and hijacking the lawsuit from the seasoned conservative activist Bruce Fein. Charles Kraüthammer and Jennifer Rubin are likely well into their standard poison pen propaganda and will inveigh against Paul, the demon of the month libertarians, privacy rights and the Constitution itself come Friday. The winter storm that has hit the pox along the Potomac and resultant bad weather event closures will have many a blood-sucking leach that is dependent on the bloated fascist surveillance industry flying into action to denounce the lawsuit in print and on message boards.
Pity that the good Senator from the Bluegrass State had the audacity to float a turd in the punchbowl of the WAPO Snowden bashing party. The paper launched an asinine story today that will spread throughout the state media like ticks jumping from rabid dog to rabid dog that Snowden gained his access to the purloined data by stealing the password of a co-worker.  That this sordid little character attack has nothing to do with the proverbial price of rice in China that the NSA was the violator of the law is as pearls before swine to the masses of asses. It plays directly into the Mike Rogers-James Clapper war on the First Amendment argument that journalist Glenn Greenwald is a "thief" and so is Snowden so they cannot be held as any thing other than enemies of the state. In the corrupt den of star-spangled iniquity that is the post 9/11 Homeland the best way to defend oneself from their own criminal acts is to play the victim and go on the attack against the very people who exposed their illegality. It is so effective that even that the operatives of that corrupt fat bastard Governor of New Jersey Krispy Kreme  Christie are doing it.
Paul will be smeared six ways from Sunday and then some from the big five TV networks operating in unison during the regular state propaganda Sabbath vomit fests by the usual array of scum trotted out on NBC's Meet the Press, ABC's This Week, CNN's State of the Union, FOX News Sunday and CBS's Face the Nation and they will be looking to destroy him. That is the way that it works in this country anymore, it is far more sophisticated than just unleashing hordes of brownshirt thugs on those who question and even worse fight the criminal acts of the government that have so effectively served the interests of history's despots.
In an opinion piece written by Paul (along Matt Kibbe and Ken Cuccinelli) that is a CNN Exclusive the challenger to Leviathan states his case and I excerpt the following:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.
This is the beginning of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and defines one of the most important rights we have against a potentially tyrannical government.
Throughout history, governments have used the confiscation of private property, as well as bullying and surveillance techniques, to keep populations under control and maintain a continuous threat against those who would dare criticize them.
AND
In recent years, however, this right, like so many others, has come under attack by the overzealous powers that be in Washington, eager to sacrifice liberty in the name of security, and using fear as a weapon to make us forget the importance of being free.
In 2013, the revelation that the National Security Agency was collecting and storing the metadata from the phone calls and e-mails of millions of American citizens -- without any suspicion of criminal activity -- served as a striking wake-up call for the country.
Americans do not like to think of their government as some Orwellian leviathan, engaging in surveillance tactics that we only expect to see in oppressive autocracies. That such surveillance could be going on in what is ostensibly the freest nation in the world is a chilling thought indeed.
Since 2006, the NSA has been spying on us, treating American citizens as no more than common criminals, casting suspicion on honest people with not even a whisper of criminal activity about them. These are not the actions befitting a country that was once held up as a paragon of freedom and a model for the rest of the world.
AND
It's time to hold government officials accountable for their habitual trampling on the Constitution and on our rights as individuals. Our case will be an important step down the road of restoring our Constitution and reining in our own overreaching federal government.
Bravo to Senator Paul. I must admit that I have never been much of a supporter although I greatly admired his father Ron Paul for his courageous stand against the criminal Bush administration during the darkest years of the civil liberties destroying "War on Terror" when it wasn't easy to denounce the establishment and get away unscathed. Today in 2014 however, the same advances in communications and social networking technology that allow the NSA to conduct their unconstitutional mass surveillance and data-mining against us also has a flip side in that millions who lacked that capability in the early years of the New American Century can now organize and fight back. I support the efforts of Senator Paul to bring these criminal bastards to heel and so should any decent American.
Rand Paul is not the first person to sue Obama over the excesses of the permanent and fraudulent “War on Terror”. Journalist and author Chris Hedges, a former New York Times foreign correspondent and others filed suit against the latest imperial president over the NDAA Act. The Obama administration and his savage, unprincipled attack dog of an Attorney General Eric Holder brought all the state power to bear against Hedges and the same corrupt courts packed with politically appointed judges that fought him will only increase their efforts versus Senator Paul and the rest of us whose civil liberties have been shit upon by an entrenched fifth column.
As patriotic Americans it is of the utmost in importance and urgency to do what you can to get behind Senator Paul's lawsuit. To my liberal and progressive friends I ask that you please put aside any ideological differences to stand in unity against the greatest menace to freedom in the history of the planet - the NSA oppression machine and the corrupt elite that it serves and protects against the rabble. I have long been a proponent of a libertarian-progressive alliance based on these most important of matters and there is now way to fight this threat unless petty differences are set aside before we ALL end up in those internment camps that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia just waxed nostalgic over where we will be pitted against each other for the amusement of our captors.
There is nothing else that is going to matter in the long run if we can't stop fascism.

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Turn It Off: Fight the NSA Stasi at State Level


What has become painfully apparent is that any effort to restrain the rogue NSA and the ongoing illegal surveillance and mass data-mining programs conducted against law-abiding Americans is doomed to fail at the federal level. With each new report based on the data procured by former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden the outrage grows even as Leviathan on the Potomac digs in to resist calls for accountability. With the stories that came out yesterday on how the Obama administration is furiously working on their next extrajudicial murder of an American citizen without due process as well as SCOTUS Justice Antonin Scalia's remarks on the inevitable return of internment camps it is evident that the monstrous and bloated federal government is now fully out of control. It has been poisoned by corruption, driven mad by the prospect of an eternal war and all of the accompanying spoils and now is on the brink of being fully weaponized and unleashed upon dissenters. It is time to put an end to all of this and the target should be the NSA which provides the snooping and data that makes all future repression possible.
A few months back I wrote a piece based on something that I ran across in the Salt Lake Tribune proposing that there be organizing to appeal to the state to cut off the water to that mammoth data collection center that sits in Bluffdale. The op ed written by Connor Boyack stated:
Like the eye of Sauron, the NSA’s new facility in Utah overlooks hundreds of thousands of people in the valley below. Perched on a mountainside fortress of concrete and barricades, the 1-million-square-foot complex exists solely to allow the NSA to "see all."
In the wake of the Snowden leaks and widespread concern with the pervasive surveillance activities of the federal government, many Americans have been wondering how to fight back. Can an effective opposition even be mounted against the power of the NSA? What can be done to restore privacy and protect our rights?
The strategy to succeed is quite simple. When fully operational, the NSA facility is expected to require a staggering 1.7 million gallons of water every day to cool down the computers harvesting information on people worldwide. That water is supplied by the Jordan Valley Water Conservancy District, a political subdivision of the state. Without it, the facility cannot function.
It was actually a damned good idea although one that would be quickly squashed by the all powerful government that is located in Mordor or as it is formally known Washington D.C. The idea however has been gaining traction and there is now a national movement known as OffNow that is pushing for the nullification of the unconstitutional and illegal activities at the state level. No invading force can operate without water and resources and wherever possible laws prohibiting access to thwart what are blatantly illegal incursions on the civil liberties and rights of law-abiding, taxpaying, loyal Americans there needs to be local resistance. As history shows invaders are vulnerable to guerrilla warfare tactics and while the power may be centralized in the official confines of the elitist beltway there is much to the dismay and surprise to the ensconced transgressors a very large country out there. OffNow has a website that from first examination is not at this point as comprehensive as it needs to be (particularly in terms of locations where the NSA has set up criminal operations) but with support and the spreading of the word could experience a rapid spurt of growth. 
While I am aware of similar nullification efforts on other matters undertaken by groups that I do not agree with as well as the ongoing operations of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) which creates cookie cutter laws to be implemented at the state level by defacto corporate lobbyists disguised as legislators OffNow is different. ALEC is nothing more than a pack of wealthy corporate interests funding a system to circumvent the democratic process and should be shunned as such. The push for the implementation of state laws fighting the anti-American NSA however is about as democratic as it gets, especially so when the federal government not only ignores the vast majority of it's citizens but holds them in open in full contempt. 
It is time to take the fight to these bastards now while we still have a chance before the next war or 'terrorist' attack creates the conditions necessary for the mother of all crackdowns to preserve their power. 
The website is offnow.org.
Image: Wired)