Sold Out Again

Yep...we elected them for change. To stop the Bushco assault on our Constitutional rights. We got change alright....they changed the speed at which Congress rolls over for Bushie from lightening speed to warp speed, and threw in a little hemming and hawing about it to try to appear to give a damn. Apparently defending the Constitution is "off the table" as well.

Compromise (SELLOUT)reached on government wiretaps

Senate leaders announced a compromise Thursday on legislation to expand the government's eavesdropping authority and protect telephone companies that cooperate from being sued.

If approved, the compromise would give U.S. spy agencies sweeping power to siphon international e-mails and phone calls from fiber-optic networks in the United States.

Update: Big surprise...the House has indeed approved the Sellout Agreement: House Approves Spy Bill Protecting Phone Firms

Cheney Calls for Permanent Warrantless Wiretapping

Vice President Cheney called on Congress today to permanently extend the Protect America Act as the White House launched a drive to secure the tools it says are needed to fight a continuing terrorist threat beyond the law's Feb. 1 expiration.

In a speech to a sympathetic audience at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington-based think tank, Cheney also said the law must include immunity from lawsuits for telecommunications companies that assisted the U.S. government's electronic surveillance efforts after Sept. 11, 2001.

"There is no sound reason to pass critical legislation like the Protect America Act and slap an expiration date on it," Cheney said. "The challenge to the country has not expired over the last six months. It won't expire any time soon, and we should not write laws that pretend otherwise."

yep..perpetual war and perpetual tyranny....the terrorist threat to our country inhabits the halls of government.

Intel Official: Say Goodbye to Privacy

A top intelligence official says it is time people in the United States changed their definition of privacy.

Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguards people's private communications and financial information.

Kerr's comments come as Congress is taking a second look at the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act.

Lawmakers hastily changed the 1978 law last summer to allow the government to eavesdrop inside the United States without court permission, so long as one end of the conversation was reasonably believed to be located outside the U.S.

The original law required a court order for any surveillance conducted on U.S. soil, to protect Americans' privacy. The White House argued that the law was obstructing intelligence gathering.

The most contentious issue in the new legislation is whether to shield telecommunications companies from civil lawsuits for allegedly giving the government access to people's private e-mails and phone calls without a court order between 2001 and 2007.

Yep...I trust Big Brother to "protect" us don't you? How much more are Americans going to take? Do the sheeple even notice how very quickly this nation is turning into a police state?

GOP targeting Clinton on phone-call snooping (illegaly tapped cell phone calls)

Republicans are focusing on an allegation in a recent book by two Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters, which suggests Clinton listened to a secretly recorded conversation between political opponents.

In their book about Clinton’s rise to power, Her Way, Don Van Natta Jr., an investigative reporter at The New York Times, and Jeff Gerth, who spent 30 years as an investigative reporter at the paper, wrote: “Hillary’s defense activities ranged from the inspirational to the microscopic to the down and dirty. She received memos about the status of various press inquiries; she vetted senior campaign aides; and she listened to a secretly recorded audiotape of a phone conversation of Clinton critics plotting their next attack.

“The tape contained discussions of another woman who might surface with allegations about an affair with Bill,” Gerth and Van Natta wrote in reference to Clinton’s husband, former President Bill Clinton. “Bill’s supporters monitored frequencies used by cell phones, and the tape was made during one of those monitoring sessions.”

A GOP official said, “Hillary Clinton’s campaign hypocrisy continues to know no bounds. It is rather unbelievable that Clinton would listen in to conversations being conducted by political opponents, but refuse to allow our intelligence agencies to listen in to conversations being conducted by terrorists as they plot and plan to kill us. Team Clinton can expect to see and hear this over and over again over the course of the next year.”

Gerth told The Hill that he learned of the incident in 2006 when he interviewed a former campaign aide present at the tape playing. He has not revealed the aide’s identity. Clinton’s campaign has not disputed any facts reported in the final version of his book, which became public this spring, he said.

“It hasn’t been challenged,” said Gerth. “There hasn’t been one fact in the book that’s been challenged.”

This certainly should be an insight for the "Anybody but Bush voters" out there who think she couldn't possibly be as bad as the current dictator....Hitlary is no different....she will just step right into the Decider's shoes...if she changes things at all, it won't be for the better.

Who Loves Real ID? AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo Do.

“The federal Real ID Act doesn’t have many friends these days. Eighteen states have passed legislation rejecting the law, Congress has refused to put any money into implementing it, and just this week New York Gov. Elliot Spitzer announced he, not the Feds, would determine New York’s drivers license policy, with officials in his administration indicating the state might opt out of the Real ID program altogether.

The few remaining cheerleaders for this national ID system, which promises to be a nightmare for privacy and identity security, have resorted to classic doublespeak to try to salvage Real ID’s reputation. On the Department of Homeland Security blog Wednesday, Secretary Michael Chertoff claims Real ID would actually protect
privacy. (‘War is Peace’ and ‘Freedom is Slavery’ will be the subjects of future blogs.)

Chertoff isn’t completely alone though. The Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) sent a letter to Congress this week begging for more federal funding for Real ID. Why would an organization, whose membership includes AOL, Microsoft, Verizon and Yahoo, support a national ID card? For the answer, let’s employ that fundamental adage of Washington politics: Follow the money.

Also included in the ITAA membership list are Digimarc and Northrop Grumman, companies that specialize in creating high-tech ID cards, as well as Choicepoint and LexisNexis, data brokers that make their money selling personal information about you to advertisers and the government. These companies stand to make millions in contracts from states who are struggling with a federal mandate to overhaul their licensing systems and share more data by the May 2008 deadline (now widely viewed as impossible to meet).

It remains to be seen whether politicians like Spitzer will actually stand up against Real Id once the sheeple start to complain because the feds won't let them on a plain or in public buildings without it....demanding that he allow the federal government t take away even more of their rights.

New Phone Service Will Eavesdrop, Sell Ads

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The Skinny: Internet Telephone Will Be Supported By Advertising Related To The Conversation

Some people have just devised a new way to listen into private telephone calls and use the information gathered from them for their own purposes - and for once they don't work for the NSA.

The New York Times reports on today's launch of a new Internet phone service that will be supported by advertising related to what people are talking about in their calls.

Dreamed up by Pudding Media, a start-up based in San Jose, Calif., the service is similar to Skype (let's hope not too similar) but is free. The trade-off is that the company will use voice recognition software to monitor the calls, select ads based on what it hears and push the ads to the user's computer screen while he or she is talking.

I wonder how many people will sign up for this incredibly intrusive scheme....allowing constant surveillance on private conversations in return for free phone service?...Personally, I can't imagine ever thinking this would be a good idea....besides..can you imagine the ads that would be generated from MY conversations...HA HA HA....could be amusing in a dark humor big brother is always watching sort of way....