VIDEO-Tom Ridge on Patriot Act and BUSH SPYING

[liveoaktx]

selected comments from CNN interview this morning

Not only does Ridge praise the extension AND say that scaring people shouldn't be the case but the most interesting part of what he said involved the Technology/FISA argument. He more openly states what Bush alluded to the other day, Detection versus Monitoring. If the technology is such that thousands of pieces of information are coming in every hour and FISA isn't the appropriate forum for this, instead of saying that FISA should be updated to allow fishing expeditions, the technology needs to be reined in to conform to FISA. Ridge is wrong but the argument is laid out for all to see.

[liveoaktx]

1. kicking because I want to talk about this.... the issue is technology

I'm not a luddite. I like technology, but I want it to serve ME. I don't agree with the argument, as posed above by Ridge, that because technology is able to gather, quickly and easily, thousands of transmissions, that we, the American public, must change our freedoms in order to accomodate that.

[sabra]

2. might as well be the Soviet Union

all calls will be tapped, to make sure only approved information is disseminated.

[Marr]

3. He seems to be describing wide-spread monitoring of Americans

without any specific cause. That's even more troubling to me than wiretapping without a warrant.

[liveoaktx]

4. One more -Mark McKinnon-this is a pattern

and, again, exposes the trashing of the Constitution in favor of "detecting" randomly, through, in this instance, libraries