obviously terrorist are gonna call their meetings subversive plots against America to tip off the government. I can't believe they're wasting time with these organizations. The FBI should stay away from waste management companies in Jersey too because that's obviously not the mafia.

What line? The government collecting personal information on political protesters that pose no obvious, credible threat is completely offensive on its face. I see no need for slippery slope type arguments.

And regarding your suggestion that a law prohibiting the collection of publicly available information would violate the constitution, no law is needed. What's needed is public outrage. I keep waiting for it to happen.

My problem is that a lot of the public outrage you want is going to come from the same people who decry Bush for his failure to protect us from 9/11. You know how he would have had to do that? By making better use of information on people that posed no obvious, credible threat.

And it's clear that the government has some rights to collect some intelligence on some people, so you absolutely have to draw a line as to where that ends. There's always a line.

Also, any definition of "personal information" that includes information of public record is not a legal definition.

I'm not trying to write law here so I don't care what the legal definition is...you know what I'm getting at.



I disagree. Until Bush II, it used to be the government's policy that any information collected during an investigation was destroyed when and if the investigation concluded that the individual was not involved in the commission of a crime. Now its kept in a database. That is a huge change is policy that's been given little attention to.

Edit: And its not clear what purpose any investigation at all served here. Where's the suspected crime. This screams big brother and/or let's try to silence and/or discredit our political opposition.



Not me.

I understand where you're coming from, and of course too much of this kind of thing is troubling, but absolutely this is a legal question. Unless you want to put just enough pressure on the government so that they stop long enough for people to become complacent, and then they start back up again. If you think there should be a limit to the government's action, that limit has to come from the constitution or other federal law, or it doesn't mean much.

EDIT: and I think the real question is what the government does with the information. If they use evidence that you peacefully protested in a trial for treason, it should be inadmissible, of course. But there's no evidence of wrongful government action pursuant to what they learned from their database.

its really hard to draw a line in this type of thing. but just as in criminal procedure we could start with the centuries old requirement of a warrant issued by a judge backed up by probable cause.

Yeah, but that refers to search and seizure of property, and even "personal information" is not property, and even libertarian legal thinkers don't think that it should be.

The hardest thing about this issue is knowing when/how to pick your battles... collecting info on Quaker meetings (or meetings that occur in a quaker building) seems crazy, but unless you're prepared to say that the government somehow has no right to collect what you, yourself have every righ to collect (public information) *and everything that comes along with that statement, then this reported incident at least isn't really anything more than just the government being too cautious. Silly, yes. The wrong direction for them to be going in, probably. Too far yet? No.

well to get ahold of some of this personal property they are going to have to search some people's homes, business, etc.

of course - if people make this information available to the general public by putting it out into the air via a wireless network, leave it laying out in the trash, invite the general public to a meeting - then those protections fall away.

not sure what happened w/ this quakers thing.

the information they're talking about sounds like info that was readily available from newspapers, notices publicly posted by the monitored groups, and attendance at public protests.

Why would they necessarily start back up? No law was necessary to prevent this in the past. Outrage and the knowledge that future similar acts will result in similar outrage should be enough to discourage it.




Why collect information for which you have no use? Clearly the implication from collecting it is that it might be used. What could possibly be a legitimate use of information that someone peacefully protested against government policy. I repeat its offensive on its face.

well then the constitution won't help em.

but then the real issue is whether the government should really be wasting time monitoring quakers. with limited resources they should try to concentrate on other things, in my opinion. peace protesters should be pretty low down on the list. there are plenty of other things to look into. hell some dudes were setting up a terrorist training camp in southern oregon and only got caught by sheer dumb luck.

I guess we differ on this point, but at least a law makes outrage enforceable.



I think the obvious defense to this is that in order to come across any valuable intelligence, you have to wade through a lot of useless intelligence. You collect information in order to find useful information... when you don't find any, you don't act on the information you have. And that's what the government appears to have done. Arguably, the government should ditch the bad data, as you've stated. The article mentions that this is the DOD's policy, but doesn't specifically state that this database is in violation of that policy.

To limit the government's ability to collect information to only that information which will definitely turn out to relate to illegality is to make criminal investigation well nigh impossible.

Don't forget though, rodney, those resources got a lot bigger after 9/11. They can probably afford to watch girl scout meetings now.

Nixon was a Quaker.

The article is a one-sided story so I don't know what they were investigating. It doesn't seem like there should be anything legitimate to investigate, but who knows.

My bigger problem is not with the collection but with the retention of the information. An investigation should be concluded at which time, either it charges should be pursued or it should be concluded that no crimes occurred and the records should be destroyed. It sure seems like the whole purpose was not to investigate any real threat but to merely collect and build records on political opponents/protestors and that's disturbing to me.

This all boils down to having nothing to worry about, if you got nothing to hide

the resources got bigger but I am not so sure they are really being used in any efficient way - well police dogs got some nice new armor and I bet there are some real kick-ass government parties. i used to work for the feds - I know how their budgeting processes work. it is absolutely insane.

and as a side note, my skepticism says that any time they wanted to keep something, they just would, law or no law. Same way things that are supposed to be kept go "missing."

this is pretty good review for my Information Society final.

so you wouldnt mind if the cops come to your house and look around every now and then?

the founders sure did.

I wish we were arguing the finer points of Economic Order Quantity and RFID. Final on such in t-minus 26 mins.

helloo....winky??

our founders grew pot

like jfk's head?