Tag: constitution

The March to Tyranny

How quickly a country can fall…

If you’ve ever wondered how a democratic country can become a dictatorship, just look around you right now. The current “president” of the United States has:

  • Tried to ban immigration
  • Arrested journalists for covering events unflattering to him
  • Tried to silence the media
  • Told people to ignore the media and only listen to him
  • Fired people for daring to challenge him
  • Uses his own private security force, loyal only to him personally
  • Trying to concentrate power in a small group of people and bypass the legislative branch
  • Removed military leaders from decision making about national security
  • Describes people who disagree with him as having “betrayed” their country

These are not the actions of a free and democratic society, they are the actions of a despot.

We do not have a president anymore; we have a tyrant, and he deserves to be deposed as one.

A Victory for Privacy

A recent court decision has granted e-mail the same 4th Amendment protection as your home and your phone calls.

A recent court decision has granted e-mail the same 4th Amendment protection as your home and your phone calls.

From Bruce Schneier’s Blog:

This is a great piece of news in the U.S. For the first time, e-mail has been granted the same constitutional protections as telephone calls and personal papers: the police need a warrant to get at it. Now it’s only a circuit court decision — the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Ohio — it’s pretty narrowly defined based on the attributes of the e-mail system, and it has a good chance of being overturned by the Supreme Court…but it’s still great news.

The way to think of the warrant system is as a security device. The police still have the ability to get access to e-mail in order to investigate a crime. But in order to prevent abuse, they have to convince a neutral third party — a judge — that accessing someone’s e-mail is necessary to investigate that crime. That judge, at least in theory, protects our interests.

We can only hope.