So I don't have a problem with drone strikes. I think they're cheaper and safer than the only practical alternative, which is sending special forces abroad. I also don't think non-Americans outside American soil have rights under our Constitution, because they're not members of our society. I also don't have a problem with monitoring of internet communications so long as its done by computers with security protocols to prevent misuse of the information, and robust court supervision of the use of the resulting evidence. I think my views are actually representative of typical Americans. So where does that leave us? You think those things on that list are "bad things" and I think they're "better than the alternatives."
This is why discussions turn legalistic, because people dissagree about what's good and what's bad, so they instead fight over what is legal and what is illegal.
Yes, it is amazing how quickly some Americans shift from a discussion on whether it is justified to recognise the rights of non Americans to whether it is justified to not murder them.
> I also don't have a problem with monitoring of internet communications so long as its done by computers with security protocols to prevent misuse of the information, and robust court supervision of the use of the resulting evidence.
"Security protocols" to prevent misuse, huh? Why would you think they'd be concerned with something like that?
What do you think is the idea behind NSA's massive spy center in Utah? "Hey guys, let's capture all traffic on the Internet, and then make damn sure we'll never do anything with it that might compromise someone's privacy, ever!"
> robust court supervision of the use of the resulting evidence
As robust as the supervision on mortgages in the past few years, perhaps?
Case in point: With all those hundreds of thousands of mortgages the bank bought, it simply stopped filing basic paperwork – even the stuff required by law, like keeping chains of title. A blizzard of subsequent lawsuits from pissed-off localities reveals that the bank used this systematic scam to avoid paying local fees. Last year, a single county – Dallas County in Texas – sued Bank of America for ducking fees since 1997. "Our research shows it could be more than $100 million," Craig Watkins, the county's district attorney, told reporters. Think of that next time your county leaves a road unpaved, or is forced to raise property taxes to keep the schools open.
But the lack of paperwork also presented a problem for the bank: When it needed to foreclose on someone, it had no evidence to take to court. So Bank of America unleashed a practice called robo-signing, which essentially involved drawing up fake documents for court procedures. Two years ago, a Bank of America robo-signer named Renee Hertzler gave a deposition in which she admitted not only to creating as many as 8,000 legal affidavits a month, but also to signing documents with a fake title.
This is why discussions turn legalistic, because people dissagree about what's good and what's bad, so they instead fight over what is legal and what is illegal.