TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Re: Public Wants Court to Okay Wiretaps


Re: Public Wants Court to Okay Wiretaps


Thor Lancelot Simon (tls@panix.com)
Sat, 14 Jan 2006 05:44:49 UTC

In article <telecom25.19.8@telecom-digest.org>,
<steve_schefter@hotmail.com> wrote:

> You mean the checks and balances that are protecting the non-citizens
> who apparently have no rights?

What a strange, if thoroughly modern, point of view. What, exactly,
makes you think that non-citizens of a given polity are entitled to
respect for any "rights" its own citizens enjoy when they choose,
without the same obligations of those citizens, to reside within it?

Careful if you decide to haul in some kind of hoary civics-book
"natural rights" theory; earlier in your own message you made it
_very_ clear that you believe that it's perfectly legitimate to extend
some "rights" (you cited voting rights as an example) to some people
but not to others. What will you do next, I wonder, tell us that God
gives certain rights -- rights that it's obvious to _you_ that God
gives in this way, and we ought to all trust you about it -- to all,
and that none can legitimately take them away? A fine answer for the
seventeenth century; a rather worse one, I fear, for the twenty-first.

Thor Lancelot Simon tls@rek.tjls.com

"We cannot usually in social life pursue a single value or a single
moral aim, untroubled by the need to compromise with others." -
H.L.A. Hart

[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Leaving God out of the discussion, I
would answer by saying human decency requires that certain liberties
and rights be granted to everyone. We _are_ supposed to be a better
place to live than Iraq, are we not? I thought it was very odd how
after all the complaints many Americans -- or rather United States
residents -- made about complaints in Iraq at that one infamous prison
that as soon as _they_ (the USA people) took control over there,
things stayed as they were or even got worse. And on this side of the
water, in Guantanomo, Cuba the USA administration set up their prison
here based on the same concepts as the infamous one in Iraq. I used to
believe that America was a free country, but no longer. PAT]

Path: telecom-digest.org!ptownson
Date: Sat, 14 Jan 2006 19:43:56 GMT
From: John McHarry <jmcharry@comcast.net>
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Re: Surveillance and National Security During Nixon Years and Today
Message-ID: <telecom25.20.12@telecom-digest.org>
Organization: EarthLink Inc. -- http://www.EarthLink.net
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X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 25, Issue 20, Message 12 of 12
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On Fri, 13 Jan 2006 16:18:24 -0800, AES wrote:

> The Vietnam War then resulted, not because the North Vietnam
> government was threatened with invasion by the U.S., but because the
> NV government was simply determined to obtain sovereignty and control
> over South Vietnam, and to do so initiated an aggressive (and quite
> vicious) war to do this -- right?

Not really. There is a rather compact summary of how that got started
in the Wikipedia article on the history of Vietnam. The origins were
fairly complex, involving not just the two governments, but groups in
the south that had not been suppressed and foreign involvement from
the US, UK, France, and the Soviet Union.

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