1 post tagged “civil liberties”

Apparently many conservative pundits have discovered a new aversion to snooping into private emails, at least when it's not done by the government — and when it's done to them.  See this from Glenn Greenwald at Salon regarding the hacking of Sarah Palin's private email account:

... whoever did this committed a serious crime -- it's rather revolting to see screen shots of someone's inbox splattered across the Internet -- and the hacker should be apprehended and prosecuted.

Still, it's really a wondrous, and repugnant, sight to behold the Bush-following lynch mobs on the Right melodramatically defend the Virtues of Privacy and the Rule of Law. These, of course, are the same authoritarians who have cheered on every last expansion of the Lawless Surveillance State of the last eight years -- put their fists in the air with glee as the Federal Government seized the power to listen to innocent Americans' telephone calls; read our emails; obtain our banking, credit card, and library records; and create vast data bases of every call we make and receive and every prescription we fill and every instance of travel and other vast categories of information that remain largely unknown -- all without warrants or oversight of any kind and often in clear violation of the law.

Seriously, the people now in full-throated outrage mode are the same ones who called people "privacy crusaders" and "constitutional absolutists" and "civil liberties absolutists" who were concerned about the loss of civil liberties under the Patriot Act and the later retroactive immunity for companies that KNOWINGLY broke the law to spy on U.S. citizens without court warrants.  And if you want to know one of the reasons that approval for Congress is at historic lows AMONG DEMOCRATS, here's an example:

Maybe the hacker who invaded Sarah Palin's emails can hire lobbyists to pour money into the campaign coffers of Jay Rockefeller and Steny Hoyer so that they'll meet with Dick Cheney -- again -- and sit together and write a law to retroactively immunize him for the hacking.

The Republicans in Congress have had their Democratic enablers.  Makes me just as mad as it does you.