So you're saying if he was informed he would have killed me? that's a good one. Or if he was informed it would be unanimous. I met the 1 guy in a billion who was out of step....... hahahahah

I spent some time with the guy and I would know if he was lying. That's not the case. You are just way off base.

sure, my feeling is that the present state of the USA is not unlike the 30's in Nazi Germany. We are in the preliminary stages of starting the next great war (or have already) due to our culture of fear being used against us to place people in power who have no buisness beuing in power. It started with the stripping of rights in germany and we all know where it went next. Whe i say sub, I mean replace republican/neoconservitism with National socialism. It fits, almost as though it was written about Nazi germany.

Do I think militant Islam is a problem? sure! but is it worth sacrificing all my rights fought for by my forefathers to fight them? no, they(the government) are deliberately using these scare tactics like raising the" terror level " when ever there is something bad coming out about the way they are "helping" us be free.
All empires fall, Rome did, and I strongly feel that we are in the downward spiral of our culture now.
the truth is that everyday we are less and less free than we were the day before. The errosion of our rights has been the goal of this government for too long, i personally do not agree with "voluntarily giving my rights up" for any reason.

How can a government that claims to "protect" us do this?
My right to privacy is MY right...not theirs to take away and not forsale or sway in any way.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB118714764716998275.html?mod=blog

U.S. to Expand
Domestic Use
Of Spy Satellites
By ROBERT BLOCK
August 15, 2007; Page A1

The U.S.'s top intelligence official has greatly expanded the range of federal and local authorities who can get access to information from the nation's vast network of spy satellites in the U.S.

The decision, made three months ago by Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell, places for the first time some of the U.S.'s most powerful intelligence-gathering tools at the disposal of domestic security officials. The move was authorized in a May 25 memo sent to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff asking his department to facilitate access to the spy network on behalf of civilian agencies and law enforcement.

QUESTION OF THE DAY


• Vote: How well does the U.S. balance security and liberty?Until now, only a handful of federal civilian agencies, such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the U.S. Geological Survey, have had access to the most basic spy-satellite imagery, and only for the purpose of scientific and environmental study.

According to officials, one of the department's first objectives will be to use the network to enhance border security, determine how best to secure critical infrastructure and help emergency responders after natural disasters. Sometime next year, officials will examine how the satellites can aid federal and local law-enforcement agencies, covering both criminal and civil law. The department is still working on determining how it will engage law enforcement officials and what kind of support it will give them.

Access to the high-tech surveillance tools would, for the first time, allow Homeland Security and law-enforcement officials to see real-time, high-resolution images and data, which would allow them, for example, to identify smuggler staging areas, a gang safehouse, or possibly even a building being used by would-be terrorists to manufacture chemical weapons.

Overseas -- the traditional realm of spy satellites -- the system was used to monitor tank movements during the Cold War. Today, it's used to monitor suspected terrorist hideouts, smuggling routes for weapons in Iraq, nuclear tests and the movement of nuclear materials, as well as to make detailed maps for U.S. soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Plans to provide DHS with significantly expanded access have been on the drawing board for over two years. The idea was first talked about as a possibility by the Central Intelligence Agency after 9/11 as a way to help better secure the country. "It is an idea whose time has arrived," says Charles Allen, the DHS's chief intelligence officer, who will be in charge of the new program. DHS officials say the program has been granted a budget by Congress and has the approval of the relevant committees in both chambers.

Wiretap Legislation

Coming on the back of legislation that upgraded the administration's ability to wiretap terrorist suspects without warrants, the development is likely to heat up debate about the balance between civil liberties and national security.


Access to the satellite surveillance will be controlled by a new Homeland Security branch -- the National Applications Office -- which will be up and running in October. Homeland Security officials say the new office will build on the efforts of its predecessor, the Civil Applications Committee. Under the direction of the Geological Survey, the Civil Applications Committee vets requests from civilian agencies wanting spy data for environmental or scientific study. The Geological Survey has been one of the biggest domestic users of spy-satellite information, to make topographic maps.

Unlike electronic eavesdropping, which is subject to legislative and some judicial control, this use of spy satellites is largely uncharted territory. Although the courts have permitted warrantless aerial searches of private property by law-enforcement aircraft, there are no cases involving the use of satellite technology.

In recent years, some military experts have questioned whether domestic use of such satellites would violate the Posse Comitatus Act. The act bars the military from engaging in law-enforcement activity inside the U.S., and the satellites were predominantly built for and owned by the Defense Department.

According to Pentagon officials, the government has in the past been able to supply information from spy satellites to federal law-enforcement agencies, but that was done on a case-by-case basis and only with special permission from the president.

Even the architects of the current move are unclear about the legal boundaries. A 2005 study commissioned by the U.S. intelligence community, which recommended granting access to the spy satellites for Homeland Security, noted: "There is little if any policy, guidance or procedures regarding the collection, exploitation and dissemination of domestic MASINT." MASINT stands for Measurement and Signatures Intelligence, a particular kind of information collected by spy satellites which would for the first time become available to civilian agencies.

According to defense experts, MASINT uses radar, lasers, infrared, electromagnetic data and other technologies to see through cloud cover, forest canopies and even concrete to create images or gather data.

.

Tracking Weapons

The spy satellites are considered by military experts to be more penetrating than civilian ones: They not only take color, as well as black-and-white photos, but can also use different parts of the light spectrum to track human activities, including, for example, traces left by chemical weapons or heat generated by people in a building.

Mr. Allen, the DHS intelligence chief, said the satellites have the ability to take a "multidimensional" look at ports and critical infrastructure from space to identify vulnerabilities. "There are certain technical abilities that will assist on land borders...to try to identify areas where narcotraficantes or alien smugglers may be moving dangerous people or materials," he said.

The full capabilities of these systems are unknown outside the intelligence community, because they are among the most closely held secrets in government.

Some civil-liberties activists worry that without proper oversight, only those inside the National Application Office will know what is being monitored from space.

"You are talking about enormous power," said Gregory Nojeim, senior counsel and director of the Project on Freedom, Security and Technology for the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit group advocating privacy rights in the digital age. "Not only is the surveillance they are contemplating intrusive and omnipresent, it's also invisible. And that's what makes this so dangerous."

Mr. Allen, the DHS intelligence chief, says the department is cognizant of the civil-rights and privacy concerns, which is why he plans to take time before providing law-enforcement agencies with access to the data. He says DHS will have a team of lawyers to review requests for access or use of the systems.

"This all has to be vetted through a legal process," he says. "We have to get this right because we don't want civil-rights and civil-liberties advocates to have concerns that this is being misused in ways which were not intended."

DHS's Mr. Allen says that while he can't talk about the program's capabilities in detail, there is a tendency to overestimate its powers. For instance, satellites in orbit are constantly moving and can't settle over an area for long periods of time. The platforms also don't show people in detail. "Contrary to what some people believe you cannot see if somebody needs a haircut from space," he says.

James Devine, a senior adviser to the director of the Geological Survey, who is chairman of the committee now overseeing satellite-access requests, said traditional users of the spy-satellite data in the scientific community are concerned that their needs will be marginalized in favor of security concerns. Mr. Devine said DHS has promised him that won't be the case, and also has promised to include a geological official on a new interagency executive oversight committee that will monitor the activities of the National Applications Office.

Mr. Devine says officials who vetted requests for the scientific community also are worried about the civil-liberties implications when DHS takes over the program. "We took very seriously our mission and made sure that there was no chance of inappropriate usage of the material," Mr. Devine says. He says he hopes oversight of the new DHS program will be "rigorous," but that he doesn't know what would happen in cases of complaints about misuse

Hardflex is a Pagan?????

I just don't get the uproar over domestic wiretapping. I don't call anyone who's a suspected terrorist. If the NSA's data mining algorithms somehow mistakenly pick up one of my calls, why do I care? It would be discarded as soon as a human looked it over. I haven't committed any crime and the gov't. could not prosecute me for any non-terrorist-related info they get from such a call anyway. They have better things to do. When they picked up the "zero hour" phone call on 09/10/01 but didn't get around to analyzing and translating it until a few days later, I don't know why I have much to worry about. Their workload has increased exponentially. The NSA wants to catch terrorists just as badly as you and I want them to. Unlike totalitarian states, where the domestic spying is all done in the name of state security and keeping the regime in power, here it's for catching people who want to kill us all. I think that's a big difference.

While it is a very good commentary, I just wanted to note a quick correction to this. It was not written by an australian dentist, but by Peter Ferrara, an associate professor of law at the George Mason University School of Law in Northern Virginia. It was published in the National Review on 25 September 2001.

Since Terrorists also sell drugs, should we not expand the wiretapping to include Drug related charges. And then Child Molesters. Rapists. And drunk drivers. and Tax cheats. Where do we stop? Should we stop?

Who decides that YOU aren't a terrorist? The suspension of rights they have instituted means that even if you did nothing wrong...you may just "disappear" and they would have nothing at this point to stop them. There would be nothing you could do, no lawyer to see, you get no trial. We have the NSA just like the Germans had the Geheime Staatspolizei. Who decides where terrorists lie? whether it is a terrorist or a person against the government? who decides that? They do. These agencies are accountable to no one, that is what is scary
The names have changed but the spirit remains...NSA> Geheime Staatspolizei

Founding and early development
The Gestapo was established on April 26, 1933, in Prussia, from the existing organization of the Prussian Secret Police. The Gestapo was first simply a branch of the Prussian Police known as “Department 1A of the Prussian State Police”.


Heinrich Himmler (left) chief of the SS, with Adolf Hitler (right)Its first commander was Rudolf Diels, who recruited members from professional police departments and ran the Gestapo as a federal police agency, comparable to several modern examples such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the United States. The Gestapo’s role as a political police force was only established after Hermann Göring was appointed to succeed Diels as Gestapo commander in 1934. Göring urged the Nazi government to extend Gestapo power beyond Prussia to encompass all of Germany. In this Göring was mostly successful except in Bavaria, where Heinrich Himmler (head of the SS) served as the Bavarian police president and used local SS units as a political police force.

In April 1934, Göring and Himmler agreed to put aside their differences (due in large part to a combined hatred of the Sturmabteilung (SA)) and Göring transferred full authority over the Gestapo to the SS. At that point, the Gestapo was incorporated into the Sicherheitspolizei and considered a sister organization of the Sicherheitsdienst.


[edit] Increasing power under the SS
The role of the Gestapo was to investigate and combat “all tendencies dangerous to the state.”[cite this quote] It had the authority to investigate treason, espionage and sabotage cases, and cases of criminal attacks on the Nazi Party and Germany.

Laws passed in 1936 effectively gave the Gestapo carte blanche to operate without judicial oversight. Nazi jurist Dr. Werner Best stated that “[a]s long as the Gestapo ... carries out the will of the leadership, it is acting legally.” The Gestapo was specifically exempted from responsibility to administrative courts, where citizens normally could sue the state to conform to laws.

A further law passed later in the year gave the Gestapo responsibility for setting up and administering concentration camps. Also in 1936, Reinhard Heydrich became head of the Gestapo and Heinrich Müller, chief of operations; Müller would later assume overall command after Heydrich's assassination in 1942. Adolf Eichmann was Müller's direct subordinate and head of department IV, section B4, which dealt with Jews.

The power of the Gestapo most open to misuse was called Schutzhaft—“protective custody,” a euphemism for the power to imprison people without judicial proceedings, typically in concentration camps. The person imprisoned even had to sign his or her own Schutzhaftbefehl, an order declaring that the person had requested imprisonment (ostensibly out of fear of personal harm). Normally this signature was forced by beatings and torture.

During World War II, the Gestapo was expanded to around 45,000 members.


[edit] Keeping Hitler in power

German Gestapo agents arrested after the fall of Liege, Belgium, are herded together in a cell in the citadel of LiegeBy February and March 1942, student protests were calling for an end to the Nazi regime. These included the non-violent resistance of Hans and Sophie Scholl, two leaders of the White Rose student group. Despite the significant popular support for the removal of Hitler[citation needed], resistance groups and those who were in moral or political opposition to the Nazis were stalled into inaction by the fear of reprisals from the Gestapo. In fact, reprisals did come in response to the protests. Fearful of an internal overthrow, the forces of Himmler and the Gestapo were unleashed on the opposition. The first five months of 1943 witnessed thousands of arrests and executions as the Gestapo exercised a severity hitherto unseen by the German public. Student leaders were executed in late February, and a major opposition organization, the Oster Circle, was destroyed in April 1943.

The German opposition was in an unenviable position by the late spring and early summer of 1943. On one hand, it was next to impossible for them to overthrow Hitler and the party; on the other, the Allied demand for an unconditional surrender meant no opportunity for a compromise peace, which left the people no option (in their eyes) other than continuing the military struggle.

Nevertheless, some Germans did speak out and show signs of protest during the summer of 1943. Despite fear of the Gestapo after the mass arrests and executions of the spring, the opposition still plotted and planned. Some Germans were convinced that it was their duty to apply all possible expedients to end the war as quickly as possible; that is, to further the German defeat by all available means. The Gestapo cracked down ruthlessly on the dissidents in Germany, just as they did everywhere else.

The fall of Benito Mussolini gave the opposition plotters more hope to be able to achieve similar results in Germany and seemed to provide a propitious moment to assassinate Hitler and overthrow the Nazi regime. Several Hitler assassination plots were planned, albeit mostly in abstract terms. The only serious attempt was carried out under the codename Operation Valkyrie, in which several officers attempted to assassinate Hitler in a coup d'état. On July 20, 1944, Colonel Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg brought a bomb-laden suitcase into a briefing room where Hitler was holding a meeting. The bomb went off and several were killed. Hitler, along with several others, was wounded, but his life was saved when the suitcase was unwittingly moved away by a meeting presenter. Hitler was shielded from the blast by the conference table, leaving him with minor injuries. Subsequently about 5,000 people were arrested and approximately 200, including von Stauffenberg, were executed in connection with the attempt, some on the very same day.

During June, July, and August, the Gestapo continued to move swiftly against the opposition, rendering any organized opposition impossible. Arrests and executions were common. Terror against the people had become a way of life. A second major reason was that the opposition's peace feelers to the Western Allies did not meet with success.

This was in part due to the aftermath of the Venlo incident of 1939, when Gestapo agents posing as anti-Nazis in the Netherlands kidnapped two British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) officers lured to a meeting to discuss peace terms. That prompted Winston Churchill to ban any further contact with the German opposition. In addition, the British and Americans did not want to deal with anti-Nazis because they were fearful that the Soviet Union would believe they were attempting to make deals behind the Soviets’ back.[citation needed]

When the Gestapo was founded, the organization was already a well-established bureaucratic mechanism, having been created out of the already existing Prussian Secret Police. In 1934, the Gestapo was transferred from the Prussian Interior Ministry to the authority of the Schutzstaffel (SS), and for the next five years the Gestapo underwent a massive expansion.

In 1939, the entire Gestapo was placed under the authority of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), the main office of the SS. Within the RSHA, the Gestapo was known as Amt IV (“office IV”). The internal organization of the group is outlined below.


[edit] Referat N: Central Intelligence Office
The Central Command Office of the Gestapo, formed in 1941. Before 1939, the Gestapo command was under the authority of the office of the Sicherheitspolizei und Sicherheitsdienst (SD), to which the commanding general of the Gestapo answered. Between 1939 and 1941, the Gestapo was run directly through the overall command of the RSHA.


[edit] Department A (Enemies)
Communists (A1)
Countersabotage (A2)
Reactionaries and Liberals (A3)
Assassinations (A4)

[edit] Department B (Sects and Churches)
Catholics (B1)
Protestants (B2)
Freemasons (B3)
Jews (B4)

[edit] Department C (Administration and Party Affairs)
The central administrative office of the Gestapo, responsible for card files of all personnel.


[edit] Department D (Occupied Territories)
Opponents of the Regime (D1)
Churches and Sects (D2)
Records and Party Matters (D3)
Western Territories (D4)
Counter-espionage (D5)

[edit] Department E (Counterintelligence)
In the Reich (E1)
Policy Formation (E2)
In the West (E3)
In Scandinavia (E4)
In the East (E5)
In the South (E6)

[edit] Local Offices
The local offices of the Gestapo were known as Staatspolizeistellen and Staatspolizeileitstellen. These offices answered to a local commander known as the Inspekteur der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD (“inspector of the security police and security services”) who, in turn, was under the dual command of Referat N of the Gestapo and also His local SS and Police Leader. The classic image of the Gestapo officer, dressed in trench coat and hat, can be attributed to Gestapo personnel assigned to local offices in German cities and larger towns. This image seems to have been popularized by the assassination of the former Chancellor General Kurt von Schleicher in 1934. General von Schleicher and his wife were gunned down in their Berlin home by three men dressed in black trench coats and wearing black fedoras. The killers of General von Schleicher were widely believed to have been Gestapo men. At a press conference held later the same day, Hermann Göring was asked by foreign correspondents to respond to a hot rumour that General von Schleicher had been murdered in his home. Göring stated that the Gestapo had attempted to arrest Schleicher, but that he had been “shot while attempting to resist arrest”.


[edit] Auxiliary Duties
The Gestapo also maintained offices at all Nazi concentration camps, held an office on the staff of the SS and Police Leaders, and supplied personnel on an as-needed basis to such formations as the Einsatzgruppen. Such personnel, assigned to these auxiliary duties, were typically removed from the Gestapo chain of command and fell under the authority of other branches of the SS.

wow...been channeling the Ghost of FastPat.

Once you've opened the door, you can't close it. Today they want to monitor calls under the guise of 'looking for terrorists,' but once the precedent is set and the the technology is in place, where does it stop? What's to keep Hillary from listening in on Karl Rove's phone calls? (Actually, Karl is probably smart enough to use a secure line)

If you have nothing to hide, then you won't mind if I watch your g/f take a shower? You know, just to be on the safe side.

Good to see a real Conservative!

hahaha!!

Please!:rolleyes: that's really naïve Rick.

we barely have the freedom to assemble anymore without fees, permits, blackout dates, etc. based on actions in the 60s.

slippery slope.

One of us is. You must not have read the previous post. Not every muslim is ready to strap tnt to their 12 yo daughter. MANY of the ones that aren't identify more with OBL than anybody from the west.

Get out your koran. Everyone not in submission to big al(lah) is an infidel.

Don't get it wrong. I'm highly suspicious of the govt. Additionally I know the peace lovers want a world caliphate. Since I think there is wisdom in the statement, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, I'm going with the govt.

Yep. Christians and Jews are in submission to Allah.

So Hardflex is a Pagan?????

The Gestapo had total police powers with little or no recourse from defendants, subjects or family members. The NSA is not a police agency, has no arrest powers and I highly doubt they'd even cooperate with any orders to share eavesdropping info with fed. police agencies not related to nat. security. And Hillary Clinton already can listen in on Rove's phone calls. Just about anyone can. It's not legal and even if it were, he could not be prosecuted for anything he said that wasn't conspiracy or terrorism related. If you guys have such a problem with this stuff, what do you suggest the gov't. does? Ignore terrorist communications and hope it goes away? Can you name a single case where an American was harassed by the feds over non-terrorist-related info gotten from a tapped phone call? I'd be particularly uncooperative if the FBI came knocking on my door and my disappearance would certainly move plenty of folks to action. You can make up any crazy scenario and say we're one step away from it. But has anything close to that really happened? Is absence of evidence proof of gov't. efficiency in silencing people?