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January 21, 2006
As long as.......................
" As long as Patriot act does not infringe on any American citizens civil liberties, it should be renewed ", That quote is part of a rant I wrote a few days ago. My friend Live life seems not to agree. Again as a Moslem American citizen who looks very much like one, with dark hair, beard and all I like to confirm my belief about what I said. I like to even go further and say that even if American government chooses to use profiling as a tool to combat terrorism, it is all right with me.
My friend Live Life had asked me " How do you feel if the government ease drops on your personal conversations. Well there is a program that came to inception during Clinton administration, it is called ASHALAN ( I am not sure about the name). Under this program, all the cellular conversations that goes on is collected by the government, and reviewed. The agents look for terms and words that might be suspicious and then review the conversations. So you see my friends, we are under surveillance already, and this happened long before 9/11. That is how Newt Gingrich's private conversations on his cellular phone was picked up, and was written about in the media.
Our main civil liberty and the most vulnerable one at these times is the liberty to live our lives, to be alive, since if we ever were robbed of that liberty, the rest does not really matter. We live in a different times after 9/11. And these times require us to use any technology we have to protect ourselves. I do not care if the government ease drops on my conversations. It is a well known facts to all of us that the minute we pick up our cellular phones and converse, the signal we use is in danger on being incepted by almost any one. and by using our cellular phones we are accepting that vulnerability. I personally am not much fond of the cellular phones, and only use it for business when I go to New York. Again I like to emphasize, the only element that allows us all the Civil Liberties we have , is the fact that we live in United States of America, and we are rich enough, all of us in our lives and liberties we enjoy, to put some of them on hold in order to protect our existence.
However I feel this way since I do like this president and trust his instincts. I probably would have felt differently if another president like Bill Clinton was in office.
Posted by Idinraha at January 21, 2006 01:06 PM