Government Intelligence, Part 2 - Incompetence and Anti-Freedom

Yesterday we talked about government intelligence and how incompetent it was relative to the recent terrorist attempt to bring down a jet liner coming in for landing at Detroit. Today we will review how government intelligence operations are really anti-freedom and anti-liberty when it comes to spying on American citizens within the boundaries of the U.S.

According to an article in The American Conservative, written by Brian Doherty and summarized in the January 29, 2010 issue of The Week magazine, the government intelligence community:

• Wiretaps international calls without warrants.
• Creates and maintains profiles of citizens even if there is no just or reasonable cause to do so.
• Seizes information without getting judicial permission beforehand. Mr. Doherty cites the case of Sprint Nextel that provided the government "with GPS locations of its subscribers 8 million times in a recent one year period."
• A specific intelligence agency, the National Security Agency, built a secret room at an AT&T California center to look at all of the company's Internet traffic.

In the "Boring But Important" section of the same issue of The Week, a Washington Post article is cited that claims the FBI illegally gathered the information of over 2,000 domestic phone calls between the years of 2002 and 2006. The Post claims the records were collected under the guise of nonexistent terror threats or by just simply asking for the records from various phone companies. To cover their tracks, the FBI sometimes issued formal approvals of the records seizure after they had already been seized. The article concludes that these types of requests continued on for two years after FBI lawyers raised concerns about their illegality.

Certainly starting to sound a little like Big Brother from George Orwell's classic, 1984. Thus, we are now paying the government and the ruling political class billions and billions of dollars to harass and track us for no reason. The laws in this country should be set up to protect privacy and government snooping, laws should not be used to maintain dossiers on us for no reason. Maybe these resources used for extensive spying on innocent Americans would have been better deployed to track people outside of the country like the Nigerian underwear bomber. Just another example of wasteful, useless spending while other more vital areas go underfunded and receive less attention than maybe they should.

If the concepts listed in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" were adopted, this type of intrusive, unwarranted government and political snooping would be eliminated. Specifically, Steps 20, 21, and 22 would:

• result in an independent review of the effectiveness of the Patriot Act and its detrimental effects on freedom.
• make it more stringently illegal to do the types of things listed above without getting a valid warrant PRIOR to the activity.
• would tell innocent citizens what information and dossiers have been gathered on each citizen and delete that information once the investigation was over.

During the FBI reign of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI kept extensive files on many ordinary, non-criminal Americans that were at Hoover's disposal to use for his own political gain. No person or government agency should be able to do what Hoover did. Although we are headed in that direction, the three steps listed above could help abort our trend to more snooping and less freedom for the country.

Thus, in the past two days we have proven that the current intelligence apparatus of the U.S. government, as run by the political class, destroys our privacy and freedom while not really protecting us from true terrorist plots. And for this we pay tens of billions of dollars. Looks like we are getting low value for high taxes in this area of government responsibility also.

Visit our website at www.loathemygovernment.com to order an autographed copy of the book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government -Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom and Destroying The American Political Class" and to sign up for the cause. The book is also available online at Amazon and Barnes And Noble.