Sean Aqui doesn’t think so, but he has the same concerns I do…
This program, created as a temporary, emergency measure right after 9/11, is becoming entrenched as a permanent tool. If this is going to be a long-term effort, then the program needs to ensure that it takes careful care of individual rights.
And passages like these from the Wash Post give me little comfort…
Together with a hundredfold expansion of the FBI’s use of “national security letters” to obtain communications and banking records, the secret NSA and Treasury programs have built unprecedented government databases of private transactions, most of them involving people who prove irrelevant to terrorism investigators.
At the end of the day, I simply don’t trust this administration to protect our rights if even a whiff of a hint comes down that some link to terrorism could possibly be in the mix. Because this “One Percent Doctrine” Cheney and company adopted post 9/11 has consistently proven to injure and imprison completely innocent people, and so…this stuff makes me nervous.
So that’s where I am. Where are you?