Quotes

"Fascism and communism both promise "social welfare," "social justice," and "fairness" to justify authoritarian means and extensive arbitrary and discretionary governmental powers." - F. A. Hayek"

"Life is a Bungling process and in no way educational." in James M. Cain

Jean Giraudoux who first said, “Only the mediocre are always at their best.”

If you have ten thousand regulations, you destroy all respect for the law. Sir Winston Churchill

"summum ius summa iniuria" ("More laws, more injustice.") Cicero

As Christopher Hitchens once put it, “The essence of tyranny is not iron law; it is capricious law.”

"Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." Ronald Reagan

"Law is where you buy it." Raymond Chandler

"Why did God make so many damn fools and Democrats?" Clarence Day

"If I feel like feeding squirrels to the nuts, this is the place for it." - Cluny Brown

"Oh, pshaw! When yu' can't have what you choose, yu' just choose what you have." Owen Wister "The Virginian"

Oscar Wilde said about the death scene in Little Nell, you would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh.

Thomas More's definition of government as "a conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of a commonwealth.” ~ Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English Speaking Peoples

“Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.” ~ Jonathon Swift

Thursday, June 6, 2013

Hello George Orwell! How Outraged Should You Be About the NSA Grabbing Your Phone Logs?

How Outraged Should You Be About the NSA Grabbing Your Phone Logs? - NationalJournal.com

By 

Updated: June 6, 2013 | (1984)

And six other questions arising from the latest White House scandal.

Washington is reeling after a court order was uncovered last night showing Verizon has secretly been handing over reams of customer phone records to the National Security Agency on a daily basis. The records don’t contain the content of phone calls—so, just to be clear, this isn’t wiretapping—but they do contain information such as phone numbers, the location and duration of calls, and subscriber and handset ID numbers, all of which fall under the category of “telephony metadata.”
Unless the NSA has some superpowered intelligence algorithm that helps them separate signal from noise, the agency is simply Hoovering up vast amounts of noise for little if any signal.
Calibrating the appropriate level of outrage will probably occupy us for most of the day. But far from a frivolous exercise, it’s an important process, because it involves the weighing of factors that might or might not matter to you depending on how serious (or potentially expansive) you think this violation of user privacy really is.
The court order alone probably doesn’t merit the ACLU’s charge that it was “beyond Orwellian”—though it’s no small irony that “1984” was published 64 years ago today.

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