Consi most people’s issues here deal with the idea that we want the government to stop terrorist attacks, and to do so with whatever means appropriate.  We just want them to follow the laws already created.  If you want to wire tap me, fine, get a fucking warrant.  If I really am a terrorist and there is good reason and evidence to believe so what judge wouldn’t sign the warrant?

The second we allow the government to over-step their boundaries, is the second we step forward into a nation of facism.  It is the second we say, “We don’t care about our civil liberties or privacy.” This is the second we open the flood-gate to a whole range of issues.

If we allow the government to wiretap or datamine other information without a warrant, what stops the government from driving down the streets listening in on everyone and making sure there are no terrorists.  Or better still, if we allow the government to do warrantless anything, who decides who is a terrorist.  The lines start to blur.  Suddenly anyone out-spoken against the GOP becomes a terrorist.

Call it a conspiracy theory if you like, but I simply do not trust the US pronouncmenets on terrorism, nor those of their lackeys UK and Australia.

This latest terrorist exercise smacks of something that has no relationship to combatting terorrism at all.... this is a political stunt to shore up the US and the UK’s ailing credibility, and to possibly divert the world’s attention away from the Middle East crisis… this is possibly a ruse for the US to start making move into the Middle East… Osama and his band of merry weapon had nuffin to do with Sept 11,or Afghanitstan, just as weapons of mass destruction had nothing to do with Iraq....

And to rub the point him,Bush and his administration IS evil.

Period.

Only the ignorant believe that the US is acting out of altruistic motives.

Consi, are you deliberately missing the point that covert activities need independent oversight?  Or that many of us are uncomfortable with the stridency with which the Bush administration has insisted that any oversight at all would help the terrorists by delaying their investigations just those crucial few hours needed to save the day?

Or is your failure to get the point truly accidental?  Have we all been stating it in the clearest terms possible and somehow you just still missed it?

As for your question about team sports, spoken like a true devotee of groupthink.

I simply do not trust US, UK, Israeli or Australian pronouncements on terorrism… those three countries are warmongers and terorrists states themselves.

This latest terrorist exercise smacks of something that has no relationship to combatting terorrism at all.... this is a political stunt to shore up the US and the UK’s ailing credibility, and to possibly divert the world’s attention away from the Middle East crisis… this is possibly a ruse for the US to start making move into the Middle East… Osama and his band of merry weapon had nuffin to do with Sept 11, just as weapons of mass destruction had nothing to do with Iraq....

And to rub the point him,Bush and his administration IS evil.

Period.

Only the ignorant believe that the US is acting out of altruistic motives.

Or better still, if we allow the government to do warrantless anything, who decides who is a terrorist.

Too late.

I simply do not trust US, UK, Israeli or Australian pronouncements on terorrism… those three countries are warmongers and terorrists states themselves.

Slow down, Tony. And don’t conflate things like the current US administration with the US as such. I have my hopes that the next one might be better.

Background reading…

Washington Post: Tip Followed ‘05 Attacks on London Transit

MSNBC: Source: U.S., U.K. at odds over timing of arrests

And to imagine that the British pulled it off without breaking their own laws. I wonder lesson hasn’t been learned by whom…

At the risk of sounding like a cop-out, I have nothing further to add to this discussion except that, while Consi has made some good points, I ultimately have to agree with Elwed, DOF, and Ingolfson on this one. There are no easy answers, and everyone’s point has validity, but as a civil libertarian my priorities still involve personal liberty and privacy.

Perhaps BushCo^TM can learn from the British intelligence. Or not.

I have a feeling the War on Terror is gonna be no easier to win than the War on Drugs which will never be won.

I always felt the “War on Drugs” is a joke and when stating it this way, the war on “terrorism” looks like a joke too.

Don’t get me wrong, I am all for getting rid of people who wish others harm.  The problem is, they will never really get rid of it because it supplies jobs and money to those who are in that business. 

Second thought after hearing about the foiled plot?  “Nice, now HLS can ask for even more money while we have tons of uninsured, homeless, and poor people.”

While some instances of data mining might help, overall I see it as a way to keep power over people while they play their little games.  The terrorists just happen to fall into line making their dreams come true. 

If they really wanted to hurt the people they hate in the US, they’d stop giving Congress reasons to give the shitheads money for their war machine.

“Terrorism�? can’t be fought. It’s an idea not a government.

Consi writes…

The plot was foiled in part because as I quoted above: “a large number of people�? had been under surveillance, with police monitoring spending, travel and communications.�?

As well they should be. No surprise there.

That included tracking of monies, wiretapping phones and tracking internet activities and e-mails.  The initial tip to police by the relative that triggered the investigation was rather vague and did not identify the international network that was involved.  It was from there that the net was cast that caught the other terrorists involved with the same and/or similar plans.  The arrests involved 3 distinct cells, not just one.

OK, and your point here is what?

I don’t think anyone here has a problem with officials tracking money, wiretapping phones, and tracking internet activities of people suspected of being terrorists. You’ll note the emphasis on that sentence.

This all started with a vague tip that pointed to a couple of people whom the British then went to work on. It DIDN’T start with the Bush Administration data mining every bit of traffic on the Internet in a secret NSA room on the backbone of AT&T’s data center. You’re just proving my point.

And, as Elwed pointed out, it appears they managed to pull of this off without having to break any British laws.

The police used good old fashioned gumshoe work, but they also employed data mining with filters as Elwed suggested was appropriate.

Actually nothing you’ve said so far suggests they used data mining of the sort most of us here have complained about.

You seem to think that we here, and liberals in general, are against using intelligence gathering to catch the bad guys and that’s just not the case. You’re arguing against a straw man. The fact is there are laws already in place that do a decent if not great job of walking the line between balancing civil liberties and the need for law enforcement to gather data on suspected criminals. The Bush Administration doesn’t want to follow those laws, however, because it’s inconvenient and they believe that if they toss a big enough net they’ll nab terrorists like picking apples from a tree and that’s just not true as this episode so aptly demonstrates.

What really galls is that the Bush Administration isn’t even doing what it should do if it feels the laws are inadequate—which is to get new laws enacted—until after they’ve been bitchslapped by one of the other branches or the hue and cry of the general public and then when they DO try to get a new law enacted it’s the worst possible kind of law imaginable such as the recent attempt to make all our soldiers retroactively immune from war crimes.

Les, you missed this one:

Gov’t Break a Law? Change It

The White House is nearing an agreement with Congress on legislation that would write President Bush’s warrantless surveillance program into law, the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman said Sunday.

And this one:

Wiretap Surrender

The bill would, indeed, get the NSA’s program in front of judges, in one of two ways. It would transfer lawsuits challenging the program from courts around the country to the super-secret court system that typically handles wiretap applications in national security cases. It would also permit—but not require—the administration to seek approval from this court system, created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, for entire surveillance programs, thereby allowing judges to assess their legality.

But the cost of this judicial review would be ever so high. The bill’s most dangerous language would effectively repeal FISA’s current requirement that all domestic national security surveillance take place under its terms. The “compromise” bill would add to FISA: “Nothing in this Act shall be construed to limit the constitutional authority of the President to collect intelligence with respect to foreign powers and agents of foreign powers.” It would also, in various places, insert Congress’s acknowledgment that the president may have inherent constitutional authority to spy on Americans. Any reasonable court looking at this bill would understand it as withdrawing the nearly three-decade-old legal insistence that FISA is the exclusive legitimate means of spying on Americans. It would therefore legitimize whatever it is the NSA is doing—and a whole lot more.

I suppose we could solve the energy crisis by harnessing the energy expended by the Founding Fathers spinning in their graves.

Thursday night I watched the O’Reilly factor at the gym

Wow.  I guess I have enough inner rage fueling me while at the gym without adding gas to the fire. 

They put the stairmaster under the TV.  With the TV controls just out of reach at the top of the stairmaster. 

Carrot/stick motivation.

The problem is that WInc, a subsidiary of BushCo, decided that even though they got their “hot” warrants out under the 3 day clause from the secret court, they didn’t want to pony up the justification b/c it was too much work.

The main thing I learned from team sports is that when one guy comes up with a great plan that will win the game if everyone follows it, and you follow his plan and it doesn’t work, and he complains about how everyone else didn’t do it right and if you had just done it right it *would* have worked…

that guy is an idiot who belongs on the bench.

Oh, and don’t break the rules and then argue with the ref about how you needed to break the rules to win the game.  That trick never works in team sports.

Ragman: WAR!ON!DRUGS!

I was looking for Bill Hicks‘ reference to what the young man on acid said and was reminded of the war on drugs and that the people ON drugs are winning it.

Today a young man on acid realised that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration ... that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively ... there is no such thing a death ... life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves ... here’s Tom with the weather.

I’d rather have a couple thousand people dead than a cop flagging what I write about on the internet for unpatriotic humor, muslim sympathies, my porn habits, or whom I associate with. The simple fact of the matter is, terrorists in general are underfunded, pathetic sorts of people whose only outlet to fuck you over is to strap some bombs on themselves and walk into a market to blow themselves up.

The people who are really dangerous can arrest you and have standing armies, they live in your town, and they know what you do. Sure, a terrorist could kill me and that would suck, but so would a mugger slashing my throat, and I’m not about to approve the cops rumaging through my phone records to find muggers either. Not under any circumstances, under any threat, ever.

Point me at an enemy of the country that’s a valid threat, and I’ll be there with a rifle and a salute with the rest of them. But no amount of criminal behavior becomes a war, not on drugs and not on terror and not on organized crime. “Wars” on criminals seek to establish credibility by preying upon the public’s sense of the glory of war without truly risking the horrors of war. In that way they gain the tools of warfare without the suffering. It’s a way of dehumanizing the criminal element.

And, as I write this, I understand that a lot of government proponents of data mining quite rightly whine that private citizens are allowed to do all sorts of things that the government needs legislatures and warrants to do. Cry me a river, because if something is harder to do as the government it still has almost limitless resources compared to its citizenry, armies, enormous bureaucracies, etc. There are all sorts of things that the public may do that are simply unacceptable for the government to do. It’s hogwash.

MisterMook,

the enemy of my enemy is my ___?

Consi,

*cough*cough*

NSA risking electrical overload

*cough*cough*

I cannot believe your government actually excists actually..I mean surely this is some big joke?...Reading Les’s link on making soldiers retroactively immune to war crimes literally made me chilled to the bone.
I am reminded of a statement one of your senators made in a hearing where he quite angrily reminded fellow Pollies that if we allow torture against enemy combatants(for any reason)..then we cant possibly whine when allies get tortured,kidnapped,be-headed etc… BOOM,BOOM!! - Make that man President please

More lessons: Concentric Circles

On the topic of terrorism and the DHS Terror Alert System, Countdown: Nexus of Politics and Terror.

Haven’t read all the responses, and don’t have the desire to for personal reasons unrelated to those who took the time to respond.  For that I apologize.  I had expected to devote much more time and energy to the response in this post, but life is not always what one expects.

While reading through another blog, Orrin Kerr took a different lesson from the foiled attack.  His take is probably more accurate than mine.  Here it is:

I’ve been reading lots of commentary about the recently-foiled terrorist attacks in the UK, and I have found that most of the commentary says the same thing: I told you so! The big lesson everyone is drawing: I was right!

Take the issue of surveillance. Supporters of controversial surveillance programs think that the episode proved the importance of controversial surveillance programs; after all, there was massive surveillance of the plotters, and that surveillance helped bust the plot. Opponents of increased surveillance think that the episode proved that they are right: You see, there is no sign that this particular surveillance came from controversial programs, and some of the key breaks in the case were from human intelligence not signals intelligence.

Or take the topic of airline security measures. Opponents of airline security measures say that the episode shows that airline security measures are silly; you see, the attack was planned to go around the measures. Proponents of airline security measures say that the episode shows that airline security measures work; you see, the measures stopped the terrorists from attacking as they did on 9/11, and made them have to plan on going great lengths to try another approach.

The same goes for the war in Iraq. Opponents of the war in Iraq say that the London plots show that the war in Iraq is a mistake; the war has only created more wannabe terrorists. Proponents of the war in Iraq say that the London plots show how important the war in Iraq is; it reinforces the seriousness of the war on terror, and the need for the United States to take major steps to bring democracy and Western values to the Middle East. (My apologies that I don’t have links for these; I have seen the arguments, but right now can’t find good sources. If others haven’t heard the same arguments, please let me know.)

The take-away lesson: Whatever you do, don’t use the London plots as an opportunity to rethink any of your preexisting assumptions about the war on terror, or the role of surveillance, or airline security measures. Remember, you were right all along! And the other guys are still too dense to see that they’re wrong.

Orrin Kerr, I Told You So! Lessons of the London Terror Plots, printed at the Volokh Conspiracy, Volokh.com.

Methinks Orrin Kerr is just a tad facetious. He’s right, though. The other guys are indeed still too dense to see that they’re wrong.

From Consi’s above - Orrin Kerr: ... and the need for the United States to take major steps to bring democracy and Western values to the Middle East.

This statement is laughable, slightly ignorant and fairly arrogant.
The USA can not “bring democracy and Western values to the Middle East” unless there’s a peoples’ revolution to desire it.
Unless there’s a big re-education programme and Islam is eradicated, or at least the power of the Mullahs limited, this will not/can not happen.
Turkey made the leap into the 20th century, from within, with the help of the authoritarian Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (the Wiki address won’t work) who, among many other reforms, changed the Turkish alphabet in 1928. 
“In Turkey to this day Islam is still curbed and women are not allowed to wear their headscarves in public buildings.”
Where is Iraq’s (or Iran’s, Syria’s ... let alone the Saudi’s, etc) Atatürk?
So what am I saying? Nothing much. Just raving. 

It’s always important to realize that the values that we hold so dear in the West and that we take so for granted (i.e. representative democracy, freedom of expression, individual autonomy) are often considered to be forms of imposition in the Middle East and the Muslim world. Turkey under Ataturk and the mess that we are making of Iraq are prime examples of totalitarianism under the guise of modernization.