Thursday, December 22, 2005

Eavesdropping revisited...

I was posting a comment about this and it got a little long, so I thought I would just post it here.

I've been listening to the Phillips Phile on XM radio and they've been bashing Bush over this every day since the eavesdropping story broke.

I'm kind of on the fence about the whole situation.

On one hand, it is a violation of the fourth amendment of the Constitution and the reasoning behind it was because of time issues with getting proper warrants to put in wire taps and other things. We've all seen how hard it can be to get warrants on TV cop shows, but that's not so different from real life. However, the federal law enforcement agencies have a judge on call 24 hours a day and his job is to do nothing but decide whether or not to give them warrants for these procedures.

That kind of makes things look a little worse than they actually are, but even I can understand how they may feel they don't have time to consult with this judge anyway. I've also heard something about a 72-hour window where they can start the spying while they are working on getting the warrant. I'm not positive on the truth of that, but I've heard it mentioned.

On the other side of the coin in this situation, I'm not a terrorist so I'm not worried about being spied on. But I sincerely hope that my tax dollars aren't being spent on spying on an idiot such as myself when there are better things they could be doing.

I haven't been watching much of the news so I don't really know exactly how the public feels about the whole situation, but I know that everything will probably be fine until they haul off an innocent man and he or his family sues the government for violating his right to privacy and pistol whipping him for information. And the media will run with it because they already hate Bush anyway.

We are also talking about amendment four and not amendment 25. When drafting our Constitution, this was the fourth most important thing they came up with, so Bush and the government had better be sure of everything before they start hauling people off to jail after illegally snooping on them.

In this day and age I think we all have to expect to lose a little bit of our privacy. I watched the World Trade Center towers collapse on live TV after being awakened by a guy on my radio saying that the Pentagon had been attacked. I don't care to see that happen again and I don't care how much you hate the president or how much you value your right to privacy, you should at least be able to acknowledge the reasoning behind this move.

I kind of have an idea that this wouldn't be such an issue if the media wasn't so against the current administration anyway. They act like Bush is making these moves like a slow-witted dictator without consulting with dozens of experts who advise him on these things.

People should realize that this president isn't smart enough to hatch a scheme like this on his own. LOL

1 comment:

Travis said...

Here's the thing, Bush isn't spying no innocent people. Why would he? He's spying on numbers that have known links to terrorists. Congressmen (as they are prone to do in this day and time) loved it when they met with Bush then they bash him after the fact.

Politics is a dirty business. Any fool knows that, but the current political climate is undermining any serious criticism of the administration. Personally I'm fine with it until an innocent person sees their rights violated. But until then, Congress needs to shut up.