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U.S. Police State & Prisons

Congress authorizes vast expansion of domestic spying

by wsws (reposted)

Sun, Aug 5, 2007 10:44PM

Sunday, August 5, 2007 :The House of Representatives approved legislation Saturday that provides sweeping new powers to the government to spy on the American population. The 227-183 vote in the Democratic-controlled House capped a weeklong campaign by the Bush administration to push through changes in laws governing wiretapping surveillance, in which Bush officials branded any legislators opposed to the revisions as “soft on terror.” The Democrats’ surrender to White House demands to pass the legislation was extraordinary even by their standard of repeated capitulation.

Despite popular feeling that the Bush administration has engineered a war based on lies, and despite countless exposures of lawless and criminal government behavior—torture, CIA “renditions” and secret prisons, illegal spying, the concentration camp at Guantánamo Bay—the Democrats provided the votes required to pass legislation that tramples on Fourth Amendment constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

For months, the Bush administration has been lobbying for proposed changes to essentially gut Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court oversight of its domestic spying operations. The new legislation grants the government the authority to intercept, without a court order, international phone calls or emails between a surveillance target outside the United States and any person in the US.

Under the Bush plan, the attorney general—and not the FISA court—would have the authority to order the interception of communications for up to a year, as long as he determines that there is a “reasonable belief” that surveillance is directed at someone outside the US.

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For more information: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/aug2007/...

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§Another BushCON Surge in domestic terrorism

by DLi

Mon, Aug 6, 2007 11:40PM

Desperately seeking a way to institutionalize a Fascist state apparatus(now that their game of using the terror card is increasingly exposed--even among the largely apathetic and distracted Public--as the fraud that it is), the GOP NeoCONs have concluded that whipping up the Fear Factor is their last remaining chance. So the Cheney-Bush Cabal threw down the gauntlet at the Dim-o-rats, and once again, the principle-less and gutless party of Asses(donkeys) caved in to the domestic terrorists inside the bunker at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

If nothing else, you have to "credit" those rightwing GOP "deadenders" for perfecting the art of "Using the terror threat to sanctify more Hitlerian domestic terrorist tactics."

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