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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wayners who wrote (681037)	4/29/2005 7:52:43 AM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Respond to of 769670

TO THEM WE ARE ALL CATTLE Increasingly 'scientific advances' are being used by government and business to rape our privacy; and I do mean rape-- in the sense that word means abusive or improper treatment and a violation of one's person. Big Brother school officials in California tried to make students wear ID tags equipped with the same radio frequency chips (RFIDs) used to track retail merchandise and cattle. Fortunately, irate parents rose up and stopped the nonsense. Yet hundreds of millions of these RFIDs are sold and used every day -- and they are being used to track you. The worst example has been the wrongheaded insistence of the US State Dept. on plans to issue US passports containing RFIDs with the holder's personal data readable with electronic equipment up to 30 feet or more away -- by anyone, terrorist or bureaucrat. Because the feds decided not to encrypt data on passport chips, the holders would be exposed to such serious privacy risks as financial skimming and eavesdropping. Ayn Rand wrote that 'the savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe.' She believed that 'civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy.' Today, in the measure of our privacy, we are all being dragged back to the days of savages. Yet few people seem to know or care about this mass rape in which they, too, are victims. --- from the Sovereign Society's Offshore A-Letter * US government rethinking RFID passport plan. LINK: wired.com * How RFIDs Work. LINK: electronics.howstuffworks.com * ACLU comments on electronic US passports. LINK: aclu.org * Government 'compromise' on passport RFIDs not enough. LINK: wired.com * EU to build biometric ID, terror database. LINK: theregister.co.uk

To: Wayners who wrote (681037)	4/29/2005 8:20:23 AM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

WHITE HOUSE ERRS ON DETENTION OF AMERICANS A new report from the Congressional Research Service disputes the Bush Administration's claim that the President has unlimited authority to detain American citizens in wartime if he deems them to be enemy combatants. The CRS report reviews the legislative history of the 1950 "Emergency Detention Act," which was repealed in 1971, and finds that it clearly limited the authority of the entire executive branch, and not only the Attorney General, to detain American citizens. To argue otherwise, "one would have to believe that Congress, in 1971, intended to limit imprisonment or detention [only] by civilian authorities [but not by military authorities]. The legislative history does not support that nterpretation...." Most CRS reports are even-handed to a fault and do not normally endorse either side of a disputed issue. So it is noteworthy that the new report deviates from that standard practice and concludes that the Bush Administration is simply wrong. A copy of the report, issued today (though not publicly "released"), was obtained by Secrecy News. See "Detention of U.S. Citizens," by Louis Fisher, Congressional Research Service, April 28, 2005: fas.org