If you travel outside the United States this summer, you can kiss your right to privacy, and perhaps your laptop, digital camera and cell phone, goodbye.
Did you know...
1. Border security can seize your laptop, cell phone or camera with no suspicion or explanation. And keep it indefinitely, and share the data with anyone they want to.
4. The TSA recently expressed interest in having every airline passenger wear "electro-muscular disruption" bracelets that could be used to shock passengers into submission.
Traveling shouldn't mean checking your rights when you're checking your luggage. It's time for some sanity when it comes to security.
I just asked my members of Congress to rein in travel abuses by the Department of Homeland Security. You can learn more about this and email your members of Congress at the ACLU website.
But look now what we have lost. Now when a bad guy crosses our threshhold, America becomes a pants-piddling mess.
Iran's president speaks at a great American university. That university's president, in the act of introducing his lecture, whines like a baby bereft of his pacifier that his guest is a big meany poopy-head. City Council members, too, and a rabbi, make like ten-year-olds, giving their press conference in front of a sign with his face struck through and the legend "Go To Hell." Up in Albany, Democratic leader Sheldon Silver treat the students of this great university like ten years olds, threatening to defund Columbia University lest censors like himself prove unable to shut the poor children's ears to difficult speech. (What, was he worried they'd be convinced, join the jihad?) Then a Republican presidential candidate chimes in—bye, bye, federalism!—saying Washington should starve the school of funds, too. American diplomats used to have the gumption to spar face to face with dreaded foreign leaders. Now they go on cable TV and whine about what a "travesty" it would have been to visit a site which properly should belong to the world. Hundreds of foreign nationals died in the World Trade Center on 9/11 (maybe even some of the Iranian!). Yet we have to systematically repress that—as if our national ego would crack like fine crystal if we were forced to acknowledge the mingling of American blood with that of mere foreigners.
This is a wonderful article about what America was, and what it has become. And it makes me sad. There is more, go read it.
Tell me again how we are not turning into a police state?
(CNN) -- Americans may need passports to board domestic flights or to picnic in a national park next year if they live in one of the states defying the federal Real ID Act.
The act, signed in 2005 as part of an emergency military spending and tsunami relief bill, aims to weave driver's licenses and state ID cards into a sort of national identification system by May 2008. The law sets baseline criteria for how driver's licenses will be issued and what information they must contain.
The Department of Homeland Security insists Real ID is an essential weapon in the war on terror, but privacy and civil liberties watchdogs are calling the initiative an overly intrusive measure that smacks of Big Brother.
More than half the nation's state legislatures have passed or proposed legislation denouncing the plan, and some have penned bills expressly forbidding compliance.
Several states have begun making arrangements for the new requirements -- four have passed legislation applauding the measure -- but even they may have trouble meeting the act's deadline.
The cards would be mandatory for all "federal purposes," which include boarding an airplane or walking into a federal building, nuclear facility or national park, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told the National Conference of State Legislatures last week. Citizens in states that don't comply with the new rules will have to use passports for federal purposes.
"For terrorists, travel documents are like weapons," Chertoff said. "We do have a right and an obligation to see that those licenses reflect the identity of the person who's presenting it."
On Monday night's "Countdown" Keith Olbermann updates his disturbing timeline of how the Bush Administration has strategically used terrorism and fear to counter bad publicity, starting in 2002 all the way up to the most recent terrorist plot to blow up JFK airport.
…from the mind-bending idea that four guys dressed as Pizza Delivery men were going to out-gun all the soldiers at Fort Dix…to the not-too-thought-out plan to blow-up J-F-K Airport… here we go again. Time for an update of our segment "The Nexus of Politics and Terror".
Crooks and Liars has the video. I highly recommend you watch it.
“The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”—George W. Bush, State of the Union Address, 2003
Nicely done but man, the chorus of Coulters and Rices freaks me out.
President Bush has signed a directive granting extraordinary powers to the office of the president in the event of a declared national emergency, apparently without congressional approval or oversight.
It was issued with the dual designation of NSPD-51, as a National Security Presidential Directive, and HSPD-20, as a Homeland Security Presidential Directive.
The directive establishes under the office of the president a new national continuity coordinator whose job is to make plans for "National Essential Functions" of all federal, state, local, territorial and tribal governments, as well as private sector organizations to continue functioning under the president's directives in the event of a national emergency.
"Catastrophic emergency" is loosely defined as "any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions."
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