I concluded my last blog with the idea of us each looking to add our "piece of the picture, and puzzle". I was delighted later into the evening to see, on the Tenth Amendment Center site, reference to just that, as taken up by Utah and with supporting legislation being proposed in Arizona, on the matter of the NSA operating - or not - in their states. The story:
from tenthamendmentcenter.com: 'Arizona Legislation tells NSA "You're Not Welcome Here"' - Dec. 9
For Immediate release: Dec. 9, 2013
An Arizona state senator has committed to take on the National Security Agency spy machine.
Sen. Kelli Ward announced Monday that she plans to introduce the Fourth Amendment Protection Act to stop her state from supporting the NSA in its unconstitutional spying.
“While media attention is focused on a possible effort to shut off water to the NSA data center in Utah, I’m introducing the Arizona Fourth Amendment Protection Act to back our neighbors up,” she said. “Just in case the NSA gets any ideas about moving south, I want them to know the NSA isn’t welcome in Arizona unless it follows the Constitution.”
Based on model legislation drafted by the OffNow coalition, the Arizona Fourth Amendment Protection Act blocks state support for the NSA through four provisions.
- Prohibits state and local agencies from providing any material support to the NSA within their jurisdiction. Includes barring government-owned utilities from providing water and electricity.
- Makes information gathered without a warrant by the NSA and shared with law enforcement inadmissible in state court.
- Blocks public universities from serving as NSA research facilities or recruiting grounds.
- Provides sanctions against corporations attempting to fill needs not met in the absence of state cooperation.
Ward called stopping unconstitutional snooping a national security issue.
“I believe the number one priority for national security is defending and protecting the Constitution. Without that, the rest becomes irrelevant. There is no question that the NSA program, as it is now being run, violates the Fourth Amendment. This is a way to stop it.”
Arizona becomes the first state to officially consider the Fourth Amendment Protection Act. Tenth Amendment Center communications director Mike Maharrey says he expects at least four other states to take up the bill early in the 2014 session.
While the NSA does not currently operate a data or “threat operations” center in Arizona, Maharrey said states around the country need to pass similar legislation to make NSA expansion more difficult.
“We know the NSA is aggressively expanding its physical locations, not just in Utah, but in Texas, Hawaii and other states too,” he said. “Since the NSA isn’t transparent about its plans, it’s essential to not only address where it is today, but work to get the rest of the country to say, ‘You’re not welcome here either!’”
Two Arizona state universities have partnerships with the NSA. The Arizona Fourth Amendment Protection Act would address the status of Arizona State University and the University of Arizona, Tucson, as NSA “Centers of Academic Excellence.”
Maharrey said he was thrilled with Ward’s decision to introduce the legislation, noting the OffNow coalition strategy was always multi-state.
“Right now, all the talk is all about denying water to the NSA facility in Utah. That’s important, but we hope every state will stand up and say, ‘No!’ to the NSA,” he said. “In Federalist 46, James Madison told us a single state resisting an unwarrantable act could create ‘serious impediments.’ But when several states work in union, he said it would ‘create obstructions which the federal government would hardly be willing to encounter.’ Arizona is an important piece of the obstruction puzzle.”
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Contact: Mike Maharrey
Communications Director
O: 213.935.0553 F: 213.402.3938
media@tenthamendmentcenter.com
www.tenthamendmentcenter.com
Communications Director
O: 213.935.0553 F: 213.402.3938
media@tenthamendmentcenter.com
www.tenthamendmentcenter.com
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kibitzer3 (Dec. 9 10:21pm MT)
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An excellent post, an excellent idea. Well done, all, on the OffNow coalition scheme – and on following up on the sentiments of James Madison as put so well in his Federalist Paper No. 46, as cited in the article.
It looks as though the time has well come to dust off our copies of those Papers and start putting them to good use. The federal government has gotten too big for its britches. Time to rein it in, and let it know who is REALLY boss in this country. And it ain’t them.
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…and a timely follow-up. This, from TeaParty.org:
…and a timely follow-up. This, from TeaParty.org:
Why Are Key Obama Policies Shrouded in Secrecy?
“Everything secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity.” — Lord Acton
(New American) - Barack Obama campaigned for president promising to usher in an era of transparency in government. That promise stands next to you “if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor” in the Barack Obama Presidential Hall of Shame.
One of the most egregious examples of President Obama’s duplicity is the way he and his administration have responded to the roster of revelations that have come from the leaks of documents defining the surveillance activities of the National Security Agency (NSA).
Not only has the president been called out on his support of secrecy at home, but leaders around the globe have turned on him, as well, after learning that American snoops have been monitoring their phone calls for years.
Then there is the bugging of the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and other organizations by none other than the NSA. This is germane to the secrecy analysis because the NSA is part of the Executive Branch and the head of that branch is Barack Obama.
Anita Kumar, writing for McClatchy Newspapers, points out the criticism the president has faced after his 180 on openness.
As criticism swelled at home and abroad, Obama said the nation should examine how the government can strike a balance between national security and privacy concerns. He said at an August news conference that Americans will resolve any disagreements about the NSA programs through “vigorous public debate.”
But what started out as a national examination largely turned into a private review with few public meetings, little document disclosure and next to no public debate, say some lawmakers, technology organizations and civil liberties groups. And now, as those behind-the-scenes reviews begin to wind down, Obama is not providing details of the results.
“As part of the overall review of our intelligence-gathering practices, decisions are being made by the president and implemented by the president, but beyond that, I have to ask you to wait until the reviews, the various reviews have been completed and we have more to say,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said.
A key tenet of the Obama administration’s code of silence seems to require the thickest walls be built around the sectors of government that can take advantage of the cover to do the most damage to liberty. As reported by Tech Dirt:
The administration, which likes to pretend it’s the most transparent in history, is actually one of the most secretive. Its attempts at transparency have almost exclusively been focused on where it can get the most political bang, not for what areas people expect the government to be transparent about — such as how it interprets the laws that allow the government to spy on everyone….
What’s incredible is that it appears that no one high up in the administration seems to recognize how this is a strategy that will almost certainly make things worse, not better. It may be how the administration is used to functioning, but it makes it much more difficult to believe anything that is said about a supposed “vigorous public debate” being held on the surveillance activities. It also means that as more leaks come out revealing more questionable practices, the constant backtracking and excuses will just destroy whatever credibility the administration has left on this issue. If, instead, it were to actually be transparent and simply reveal things like how it interprets the law, and allows for a real public discussion on these matters, that would actually result in some frank discussions that the administration seems terrified of actually having.
Beyond the violations of the Fourth Amendment evident in the NSA’s dragnet surveillance turning citizens into suspects, there are several other significant examples of President Obama’s fierce determination to keep Americans in the dark when it comes to policies and programs that pose the most potent threats to their freedom.
One of the most egregious examples is the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Every round of negotiations are conducted in secret and even the content of the draft agreement itself would be completely unknown were it not for a WikiLeaks project that resulted in the publication of a chapter on intellectual property.
William F. Jasper, writing for The New American, explains how and why President Obama is keeping details of the TPP trade pact under wraps.
If there is one word that is used more often than “reform” by governments, politicians, and international organizations — and abused even more frequently and egregiously — it is “transparency.” As with the United Nations and the World Trade Organization (WTO), the White House and the U.S. Trade Representative’s (USTR) office regularly proclaim their commitment to transparency while doing everything possible to hide their actions from their constituents. The USTR’s “Fact Sheet: Transparency and the Trans-Pacific Partnership” is intended to give the impression that the Obama administration is forthrightly providing the American people with all the up-to-date information they need to accurately evaluate the agreements that are being made in their name, and that would, if accepted by Congress, devastatingly impact their lives, their liberty, and their future.
And, perhaps the most deadly deception perpetrated by the secrecy-loving president is the number of innocent civilians who have been killed by missiles fired from U.S. drones. Until recently, in fact, the Obama administration denied the drone war was even being waged. Now, even though he admits to targeting “militants” using the remote control weapons, the president refuses to comment on how many civilians have been blown up in the process.
Then, of course, there is ObamaCare. After the roll-out derailed, press reports revealed that the president likely knew there were problems with his hallmark legislation and also knew that Americans would not be able to keep their doctor. A CBS News report about the weekly GOP address that Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) gave on November 16 on the president’s broken promise noted:
“Millions of Americans are coming to realize that those are your tire tracks on their canceled policies,” Johnson said to the president, accusing Mr. Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress of perpetrating “political fraud” to aid their political goals.
“Consumer fraud this massive in the private sector could — and should — bear serious legal ramifications,” Johnson said. “For President Obama, however, it helped secure enough votes to pass Obamacare and win re-election.”
As he continues burrowing deeper and deeper into the sands of secrecy, President Obama seems not to realize that that soil shifts and there will always be those committed to digging around until the truth is told.
McClatchy writes:
Mark Jaycox, a policy analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said he doesn’t expect the administration to change much even amid the intense criticism. This administration, he said, has always held fast against similar criticism. For example, it resisted for years bipartisan pressure to release more information about its top-secret targeted killing program.
“It’s a pattern of the Obama administration,” he said.
Tech Dirt recognizes the problem for the president:
Extreme secrecy may seem like the easier short-term strategy, but it’s just digging an ever deeper hole that the administration is going to have to try to climb out of in the long-term. Hiding reality from a public that’s going to find out eventually is just making the problem worse.
http://thenewamerican.com/usnews/item/17124-why-are-key-obama-policies-shrouded-in-secrecy
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…and a very apt comment to this story:
D.b. Swanson · Top Commenter · Asheville, North Carolina (Dec. 9)
…and a very apt comment to this story:
D.b. Swanson · Top Commenter · Asheville, North Carolina (Dec. 9)
Everyone can learn about obama by simply reading a quote by a little known radical Communist from the early 1900's. Read the following quote and then apply it to almost everything he says. When he talks against something, he's guilty of doing it, and yes I am serious...
In the words of prominent Party theoretician Nikolai Bukharin, "We asked for freedom of the press, thought, and civil liberties in the past because we were in the opposition and needed these liberties to conquer. Now that we have ^conquered^, there is no longer any need for such civil liberties."
In the words of prominent Party theoretician Nikolai Bukharin, "We asked for freedom of the press, thought, and civil liberties in the past because we were in the opposition and needed these liberties to conquer. Now that we have ^conquered^, there is no longer any need for such civil liberties."
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