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Politics : View from the Center and Left
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To: michael97123 who wrote (6997)12/16/2005 12:04:03 PM
From: JohnM  Read Replies (1) of 540803
 
They werent looking for you. There were real reasons to be concerned in the months following 9/11 that more attacks were in the works. Can you imagine the outcry if there had been a bunch of attacks that we could have thwarted using these techniques? I dont want to end up a dead liberal. I would rather be cautious in these matters and not jump to ridiculous conclusions.

I disagree. There is a balancing act here between preserving liberties, preserving the entire point of a democratic polity, and the sort of security pictured here. Your way of framing it completely ignores the other side of the argument.

In fact, court reviewed requests protects precisely this kind of surveillance. It's the lack of any protections that's the problem, not the loss of surveillance.

It's once again, the wrong metaphor. We are told to think about officially sanctioned torture in terms of the metaphor of immediate danger in the hands of a terrorist who knows how to save us by giving up his/her information. Right now. However, the one has little to do with the other. The metaphor that says we have to give up court reviewed surveillance in the name of some immediate danger is the same sort of bad reasoning.

If the state can tap our phones without any approval process, however, weak a court review is, we are taking another step down that slippery slope that ends in a state that is out of control.
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