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Originally Posted by stevo
Sec 505 of the patriot act does not require someone to be suspected of terrorist activities. Don't you think passing on classified information unauthorized and in secret can fall under clandestine intelligence activities. I'm sure the FBI's lawyers do, and I'm sure plenty of judges do too.
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I think that Rekna's point is that the PA was purportedly passed to help law enforcement fight terrorism. It is now being used in ways which violate the prinicpals this country has held in high esteem for more than 200 years.
The terrorists ARE attacking our way of life, and we're helping them by dissolving that way of life in the name of protecting it. Burning the village in order to save it is a logical fallacy. It is similarly not logical to usurp basic human rights in order to supposedly protect basic human rights.
It is a basic human right to be able to travel and communicate without government spying on our every activity. Just because we are doing nothing wrong does not mean that government has the right to come in and snoop.
I can see these investigations of journalist's phone records easilly being abused. Think of the following scenario:
The CIA suspects that Agent X is communicating with a journalist. They get the journalist's phone records and discover that, while Agent X has not called the journalist, the journalist has been talking with another source who, while not breaking any confidentiality laws, is known to be very critical of the CIA. The CIA decides they don't want information like that in the press, so they put intense pressure on the source to clam up - the source that they wouldn't even know about if they hadn't been snooping into the journalist's phone records.
A democracy requires an open government, and it requires journalism to keep that government open. Any action by the government to try and stop that openness is an attempt to reign in democracy.
Is that something we really want?