Web Letters: Data-Mining Our Liberties

Any communications that begins or ends in the United States requires a warrant! Any communications that begins and ends in other countries is fair game for signal intelligence. No, if ands or buts, those are the limits.

Pervis J. Casey

Riverside, CA

Only one sentence in Aziz Huq's otherwise plain-speaking and plainly devastating web article disappoints me: the one in which he says the Bush Administration "rams legislation through Congress." Since the Democrats are now in the majority, exactly how can a Republican President "ram" through legislation without the consent of at least a few Democrats?

I was able to understand, if not condone, the capitulations of Congressional Democrats while they were in a position of absolute weakness, before the year 2006. Real weakness could perhaps account for, if not excuse, Congress's passing of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which Aziz has helpfully, if painfully, recalled to memory. However, I cannot understand why Congressional Democrats, now in the majority, continue to act as though they had neither the power nor the responsibility to restore limits to Executive power.

Exactly what have so many Congressional Democrats found so indispensable about the Protect America Act that they "had" to vote for it? Did this bill perhaps contain relief for Katrina survivors? Universal health insurance? A timetable for closing our military bases in Iraq and withdrawing all troops?

Whatever these Democrats-in-name-only (DINOs, who I hope will soon meet their long-overdue extinction) imagine they have gained through such concessions, their losses are greater. By assenting to policies motivated by paranoia and lies, they have only helped to strengthen both.

Eric Paul Jacobsen

Saint Paul, MN

Seems the entire country is in an uproar over the capitulation or, more likely, the complicity of Congress with this latest assault, but not a mention of this betrayal here. What is worse--the thief, or the guard who allows the thief in the backdoor to burn down the house?

R. del Vecchio

Trenton, NJ