Hey guys, well i came across an article in USA Today related to our discussion in class regarding surveillence. It's not camera surveillence it's about a bill that the Bush administration is seeking to expand a law allowing them to surveil any communications used by a possible terrorist suspect. This includes wire tapping, intercepting e-mails and any other type of systems. The full article can be seen here. http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20070417/a_fisa17.art.htm

The reason I posted this article was because within the proposed changes the bill asks for a lot of freedom surveilling suspects and more leeway in surveilling without warrants. One proposal asks that up to a week of surveillence should be allowed before seeking approval from a judge. Currently the law is 48 hours, with this provision, the agencies could basically surveil whoever they wanted for up to a week, with no one ever having to find out. Another issue is they want permission to store information not relavant to the reason of surveillance, previously required to be destroyed. This law is extended to non US citizens and a proposal similar to this failed to pass last year. Since citizenship can take years, many innocent people who come to America to pursue a better life are subject to surveillance and investigation, no matter who they are. This issue is starting to be confusing because of the events of 9/11 and how intelligience knew the planned attack at that point, but never had a law to surveil, hmmm. I don't know how much of a difference passing the bill will make for all we know they surveil anyone whenever they want, is this just to make them feel better about themselves and be able to sleep through the night? Also if this gets passed, next year they'll just ask to pass the bill for all people, US citizens or not. If we were receiving attack upon attack and were in serious danger i would understand more. The last major attack was 2001, almost 6 years ago now, and we knew about that but didnt act. I dont know about anyone else but the requests in the bill just dont make sense based on their previous actions. I guess this could kinda be tied into the camera surveillence arguement being that every person they surveilled could essentially be stalked. I'm not very comfortable with the idea of that, even if there is nothing to hide. This country was founded on freedom, shouldnt we try to stay somewhat close to that?