It seems the debates were demented contests. The objective: who could most enthusiastically throw the Bill of Rights out the window. The winners?
Said Trump: "We should be using the most brilliant minds to penetrate the Internet...I would certainly be open to closing it in areas where we are at war with somebody." We should be "infiltrating the Internet."
Not one to be outdone, Cruz: "The old program covered 20 to 30 percent of phone numbers to search for terrorists. The new program covers nearly 100 percent. That gives us greater ability to stop acts of terrorism."
Don't forget about me, says Kasich: "We must stop encryption. We must hold store data longer."
Fiorina: "The reason we don’t have Silicon Valley gathering data is because we haven’t asked them. I would ask them. We have to have our best minds on this."
It's not just speech and privacy under attach by the presidential hopefuls. They are also proud to pummel due process.
Rubio: "I would not treat suspected terrorists as criminals. We would not read them their Miranda Rights. We would treat them as enemy combatants."
Trump: "I would go after would be terrorist by going after their families. They may not care about themselves, but they do care about their families."
Christie: "We need to restore any tools of the Patriot Act that were diluted."
Lest this seem to be a concentrated attack on the Republicans, here are the democrats to have their say.
Clinton: "...there could be a Manhattan-like project, something that would bring the government and the tech communities together to see they're not adversaries, they've got to be partners."
Certainly security is vital. But we return to the words of Ben Franklin. “Those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.”
Maybe that pithy old statement, though, blithely downplays the real danger we are in. More likely, it recognizes where the greater danger lies.
Frederick Bastiat spelled out this dangerous process. "The politician attempts to remedy the evil by increasing the very thing that caused the evil in the first place: legal plunder."
Maybe these are just different times and the Constitution no longer applies. Apple CEO Tim Cook, however, is still fighting for it.
Cook: "If you halt or weaken encryption, the people that you hurt are not the folks that want to do bad things. It's the good people. The other people know where to go...
"There's likely health information, there's financial information. There are intimate conversations with your family, or your co-workers. There's probably business secrets and you should have the ability to protect it...
“If there’s a way to get in, then somebody will find the way in. There have been people that suggest that we should have a back door. But the reality is if you put a back door in, that back door’s for everybody, for good guys and bad guys...
“I don’t believe that the trade-off here is privacy versus national security...I think that’s an overly simplistic view. We’re America. We should have both.”
The hour is grave because of what we have forgotten.
Take a failed issue. Give it a righteous new name. Get people begging for government salvation. Ram the details through in secrecy. Paranoid indeed.
A must read: on the surface it is about the people who work behind the scenes for Trump. More deeply, it is an expose on the way the world really works. How are we brought to believe what we believe?
FIA acquired emails document favorable treatment for favorable treatment
How do banks keep fees high and rates they pay low despite "Competition"? They're all owned by the same people.
