items tagged with National Security

(Editor’s note: U.S. Senator Rand Paul [R-Kentucky] released the following letter to his fellow Senators on February 15.)

James Otis argued against general warrants and writs of assistance that were issued by British soldiers without judicial review and that did not name the subject or items to be searched.

He condemned these general warrants as “the worst instrument[s] of arbitrary power, the most destructive of English liberty and the fundamental principles of law, that ever w[ere] found in an English law book.” Otis objected to these writs of assistance because they “placed the liberty of every man in the hands of every petty officer.” The Fourth Amendment was intended to guarantee that only judges – not soldiers or policemen – would issue warrants. Otis’ battle against warrantless searches led to our Fourth Amendment guarantee against unreasonable government intrusion.

My main objection to the PATRIOT Act is that searches that should require a judge’s warrant are performed with a letter from an FBI agent – a National Security Letter (“NSL”).

I object to these warrantless searches being performed on United States citizens. I object to the 200,000 NSL searches that have been performed without a judge’s warrant.

“The minute the FBI begins making recommendations on what should be done with its information, it becomes a Gestapo.” – J. Edgar Hoover

The history of the FBI is the history of how America – once a nation that abided by the rule of law and held the government accountable for its actions – has steadily devolved into a police state where laws are unidirectional, intended as a tool for government to control the people and rarely the other way around.

The FBI was established in 1908 (as the Bureau of Investigation) by President Theodore Roosevelt and Attorney General Charles Bonaparte as a small task force assigned to deal with specific domestic crimes, its first being to survey houses of prostitution in anticipation of enforcing the White Slave Traffic Act. Initially quite limited in its abilities to investigate so-called domestic crimes, the FBI slowly expanded in size, scope, and authority over the course of the 20th Century.

Among the year’s seemingly endless spate of business-as-usual Hollywood product, with the remakes and sequels and – in the case of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines – a de facto remake of a sequel, I saw exactly one work in 2003 that, with absolutely no qualms, I would call a masterpiece, and it made its debut on HBO. (It was that kind of year.)
Read More About 2003 In Movies...

CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND

George Clooney’s directorial debut, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, plays like the funny, ironic companion piece to A Beautiful Mind, and the new film shrewdly, and hysterically, plays off your knowledge of Ron Howard’s Oscar-winning opus.