Watch out or Newt will have you boy's out of a job!

What will George W Obama do?

There was a lot more than surveillance going on at that office and they certainly went beyond investigating 'Islamic terrorists'!

My husband and I had our communications continuously interrupted.

At one point and for several months we were receiving a virus alert every 1-3 seconds... and all this while trying to develop a first-of-its-kind online fair-trade, organic and vegan gift collections and information site. At one point, we were taken completely offline by our provider who claimed that a worm infection on our system was the worst they had ever encountered.

The operations out of SF supported traditional COINTELPRO harrassment operations. Our phone calls to companies, government agencies, etc. were routinely interrupted and handled by agents instead of the people with whom we legitimately had business. In the end, we were forced to give up our business and take a loss of tens of thousands of dollars.

A couple of years later, we endured similar interruptions when living in San Jose, CA.

In the end, this is what happened: http://allinharmony.org/about_us
(scroll down to the second section and read what we have to say about COINTELPRO operations targeting us.)

These surveillance/harassment operations target EVERYONE who is in any way considered a progressive or a potential activist!

"US gov't can be sued"

- too bad it's out of money.

"the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld a 2008 law immunizing AT&T "

this was an EX POST FACTO piece of legislation - unconstitutional.

This will be appealed, moved to the Supreme Corp. and then overturned.

Move along, everyone ... nothing to see here.

The Bushies and the telecoms that cooperated with NSA's warrantless surveillance program knew full well that what they were doing was illegal and unconstitutional. I'm glad the 9th Circuit at least has left open the possibility of holding the government's agents civilly liable, although AT&T and the other corporate conspirators are off the hook courtesy of the 2008 grant of immunity given to them by Congress.

The real question which remains, of course, is why the Obama Justice Department has not charged the ringleaders of this systematic violation of the Fourth Amendment criminally. It is a federal felony to wiretap "suspected terrorists" without getting a FISA warrant first. Some of the participants in the government/telecom operation have publicly acknowledged this is precisely what they did.

Everybody involved knew this was the law at the time this wholesale sweeping up of the citizenry's domestic electronic communications took place. It was an illegal NSA intelligence eavesdropping program on American soil which, by the way, is believed to have been begun several months BEFORE September 11, 2001, in the first months of the Bush/Cheney presidency. This exact time frame and other details about this scandal could be declassified tomorrow by the current administration, if the political and prosecutorial will to enforce the federal Criminal Code could only be mustered up.

A civil damage remedy against spooks who trashed the Fourth Amendment is a small, nice step in the right direction, but the silence about the lack of criminal prosecution is deafening.

Bill from Saginaw

If you think any of the current candidates R or D including the incumbent are going to protect the rights of individual citizens from this kind of surveillance, think again. Corporations have been granted the rights of individual citizens ("Corporate Personhood") so corporations pretty much rule our government.

Until we can get a Constitutional Amendment that says "Corporations are not People" and "Money is not Speech" we will continue to have these outrages occur.

That said, I am encouraged that there may still be some shreds of the law which citizens can use to protect themselves against these rogue government actions.

if the patriot act was written before 9/11; that doesn't prove that ghwb was in on the assination of jfk--but it makes it a possibility

--so don't worry too much about your freedoms or future -

george e, boston ma

Funny story--So every time I'm on the at&t land line phone to my very political mother who lives some distance away, the phone line inevitably just disconnects while we are talking politics. It just clicks and hangs up on my side, and on her side, she gets busy signal all of the sudden. We laugh and usually say the words, "community" or "terrorist" when we call each other back to reconnect (these are the buzz words for the NSA we've read...)

Another funny story--After 911, my verizon land line phone back then, was constantly "clicking" when talking long distance. Came to find out that yes, my phone was in fact being monitored by the phone company as a "mistake" by a technician who came out to "fix" the clicking problem, but they couldn't tell me anything more about it. Why? Because law enforcement was now involved. How did that happen? The local sheriff had descended upon my house claiming that my phone number had called them to request immediate assistance from criminal activity for some "not clarified by the local sheriff" reason, when I hadn't in fact done that (I was out at the time, but just arrived back when they were leaving my property.) This was the first clue that something in fact was terribly wrong with my phone (besides the still continuing clicking problem...)

Ever been addressed as a "possible criminal" in your own home by a local sheriff, when you have no idea what the hell is happening to you without a lawyer or friends or family present to protect you from this kind of event? Wow! Talk about chutzpah and complete and total immunity from f*cking other people up for no reason whatsoever except because they can and say so. Yeah, all because my phone was being tapped by the phone company for the government because of the event of 911....immunity? No.

"The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in its April (2011) decision in AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion that corporations may use arbitration clauses to cut off consumers’ and employees’ right to join together through class actions to hold powerful corporations accountable. The decision overruled the laws of 20 states.
Now that wireless companies are permitted to ban class actions, they can commit any number of bad acts against consumers without being held accountable."

..........Is this what "democracy" is all about?

..........Do you still think Ron Paul is wrong when he wants to give power back to the "states" and take it away from the Federal Government?

"The nation's telecommunications companies can't be sued for cooperating with the Bush administration's secret surveillance program, but their customers can sue the government for allegedly intercepting their phone calls and e-mails without a warrant, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday."

And if the perpetrators spying on ordinary American citizens, invading their privacy to the point of harassment, probing their past, etc. are not the government, but rather a private party?

What do we do?

Why are the perpetrators infiltrating a vegetarian religion (and putting vegetarians and vegans like myself) under surveillance, if these perpetrators are not interested in becoming vegetarian or vegan themselves?

Ladies, if you value your privacy and civil liberties, join the ACLU!

(125 Broad Street, 18th Floor, New York NY 10004. Or call: 212-549-2500)

In his 1992 book, Visions of Liberty, former Executive Director of the ACLU, Ira Glasser writes:

"The use of wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping emerged during the Prohibition era. Roy Olmstead was a suspected bootlegger whom the government wished to search. It placed taps in the basement of his office building and on wires in the streets near his home. No physical entry into his office or home took place. Olmstead was convicted entirely on the basis of evidence from the wiretaps.

"In his appeal to the Supreme Court, Olmstead argued that the taps were a search conducted without a warrant and without probable cause, and that the evidence seized against him should have been excluded because it was illegally gathered. He also argued that his Fifth Amendment right not to be a witness against himself was violated.

"By a 5-4 vote, the Court rejected his arguments and upheld the government's power to wiretap without limit and without any Fourth Amendment restrictions, on the grounds that no actual physical intrusion had taken place.

"Olmstead's Fifth Amendment claim was also dismissed on the grounds that he had not been compelled to talk on the telephone, but had done so voluntarily.

"Thus the Court upheld the government's power to do by trickery and surreptitious means what it was not permitted to do honestly and openly.

"It wasn't until 1967, in a similar case involving gambling, that the Court overruled the Olmstead decision by an 8-1 margin and recognized that the Fourth Amendment applied to wiretapping and electronic surveillance.

"The other major use of electronic eavesdropping has been to punish political dissent. For decades, former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover used wiretaps and other electronic devices to spy on political figures and citizens not yet suspected of having committed a crime.

"He built vast dossiers on their political activities and personal lives. Special units of local police called 'Red Squads' did the same.

"Nor has electronic surveillance been the only source of our loss of privacy. The widespread use of urine-testing in employment to see whether people may have been using illegal substances violates the rights of many innocent people.

"Urine-testing programs are usually not restricted to those who show evidence of impaired job performance that may be due to the use of drugs. These tests are normally administered randomly. Without any probable cause for search, this is a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

"Many of these random tests have been struck down by the courts, where the government is the employer. But some have been upheld. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (hardly a Constitutional liberal!), denounced them as 'an immolation of privacy and human dignity in symbolic opposition to drug use.'"

In January 2006, on the eve of the West Coast Walk For Life in San Francisco, CA, Carol Crossed of Democrats For Life (kind enough to write the foreword to my own book, The Liberal Case Against Abortion) spoke optimistically of Roe v. Wade being overturned.

When I asked her if Roe could be overturned without Griswold v. Connecticut (the 1965 Supreme Court decision which guarantees a right to marital privacy regarding the practice of contraception) being overturned as well, Carol froze, and couldn't answer the question!

Although this was well before the scandals involving Republican poltiicans David Vitter and Larry Craig, I would have preferred it if Carol had said:

"You're right. Only a pervert watches or eavesdrops when others pee, defecate, copulate, masturbate, etc.

"It's wrong to put people under surveillance without their knowledge or consent. Democrats For Life will never resort to draconian tactics to protect prenatal life."

Democrats For Life of America, 601 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, South Building, Suite 900, Washington, DC 20004 (202) - 220 - 3066