AT&T Whistleblower: Spy Bill Creates ‘Infrastructure for a Police State’

AT&T Whistleblower: Spy Bill Creates ‘Infrastructure for a Police State’:

“Congress has made the FISA law a dead letter–such a law is useless if the president can break it with impunity. Thus the Democrats have surreptitiously repudiated the main reform of the post-Watergate era and adopted Nixon’s line: ‘When the president does it that means that it is not illegal.’ This is the judicial logic of a dictatorship.

The surveillance system now approved by Congress provides the physical apparatus for the government to collect and store a huge database on virtually the entire population, available for data mining whenever the government wants to target its political opponents at any given moment—all in the hands of an unrestrained executive power. It is the infrastructure for a police state.“

What is curious is that in talking with some young people over the last few years since 9/11/2001 — and by this, I mean college-aged men and women — very few of them have issues with the Government collecting data on them, monitoring their email or telephone, or otherwise observing them. They reason that since they do nothing wrong, they have nothing to worry about. Plus, it stops the terrorists, right?

Most interestingly, many of these young people view my paranoia about personal privacy as almost a quaint, by-gone product of an earlier era, sort of the way like the Bush administration tends to view the Geneva Conventions.