OT: Say goodbye to your rights...

[JohnL]

Sorry for the off-topic post, but I feel this is important for those of us living in the USA.

The government is trying to push through a bunch of new legislation dubbed the Patriot Act II by critics. Some of the provisions in this are truly frightening, such as allowing them to arrest and detain people indefinitely in secret, strip US citizenship from native-born residents, deport people to any country they choose regardless of what the government of that country is like (or even if there is no government) without the possibility of a judge overruling them, stripping most of the legal protection from people in court, maintaining a DNA database and taking DNA against people's will and without a court order and more. All this under the guise of fighting terrorism. Of course the first Patriot Act basically gave them the ability to declare anyone or any organization a terrorist, so these new provisions could theoretically be applied to anyone. I've also seen it mentioned that this new act makes the first Patriot Act permanent rather than temporary.

The information on it seems a little out of date (Feb.), so I'm not sure where it stands now. The most recent info I found is that they're trying to get the various parts of it attached to other bills so that they can sneak it through without worrying that the entire thing will be rejected.

This really scares me, as it basically throws out all the rights that Americans have come to take for granted. Below are some links;

InfoWars
PBS
ACLU

Again I apologize if this is out of place, but I think it's something everyone should know about.

[Brother Ragnarok]

GYAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGH!!!  f**king DIE, Ashcroft!  Goddamn Bush administration has done nothing but this s**t from the get go.  Of course, since he was President during wartime and the first attack on the U.S. mainland, he'll always be regarded as a hero and everyone will forget what a f**kwit he is.

Brother R

[Ancient Flounder]

A fascist, tyrannistic (is this even a word?) America, eh?  All we need now is to turn Manhattan and LA into prisons and Kurt Russell and we'll be all set.  Seriously, though, no government should have the right to do that, even if they are trying to find terrorists.  If they want to find those, all they have to do is look at the extremist militia groups, the KKK and Neo-Nazi groups.  That should keep them busy for a while.