Patriot Act/NSA spying on Americans

[Zuccala]

[Tepshen73]

[Zuccala]

LOL!

We sure do, you guys have a MUCH better idea of how to play football. We only have 3 downs an a bigger field. They say it makes for a better game, blah, blah, blah! I love American Gridiron.

Nothing is more exciting than watching NFL playoffs. I am egarly awaiting them. even though there are gonna be no Buffalo Bills!

[iceman5]

Most people in the US (including alot of you guys) want the government (including the police) to keep you safe. You just dont want to know what it takes to accomplish that and when you find out...you get all freaked out. You dont want to SEE what it takes. You just want it to happen.

You dont want Rodney King anywhere near your belongings or your family members but you dont want to see the police forced to beat him down in order to arrest him.

You want the government to stop people like Bin Laden from blowing our country to pieces but you dont want to know about the tortures and other "atrocities" that it takes to fight these maniacal fanatics.

You want the crime rate to drop, but you dont want the police to "racially profile" the black guy in raggedy clothes who is walking down the alley of your middle class, mostly white, neighborhhood at midnight for no apparent reason.

Take it from someone who has fought these battles and has been in countless of these type situations for YOU.....this type of thinking makes me sick.

Ive heard this crap from alot of very naive suburbanites and the few who have been dumb enough to come ride with me for a shift (when I was still in patrol) have changed their tune quite quickly. Most of you really have no idea what humans are capable of and what it takes to keep this world of ours livable.

[Tepshen73]

I do know what you police officers are up against I have multiple friends who are cops as well as my best friends unlce being a homicide detective in Miami. I do want to be kept safe,I do want terrorists stopped and shot, I don't want vagrants wandering my neighborhood. What I do want though is a system of checks and balances when the the goverment does not have to anwser to anyone to get warrents or to hold people against their will then I get scared. If you know someone is a criminal or terrorist then by all means take them down but whoeever takes them down needs to be held accountable for why they did it and not just do it without the evidence to back the warrent up.

On a side note Ice what exactly is required to get a warrent? I understand plain sight,smell,hearing aspect of the law but do not know exactly what it takes to get a warrent? Is it true that an informant can pass along incomplete information to have a warrent issued on that alone?

[iceman5]

It depends how creative the detective wants to be in his wording for the warrant. The standard is reliable information from a credible person.

What kind of warrant are you talking about?

By the way, I want to make it clear that officers jack up just as many white guys in nice cars in bad neighborhoods as black guys in beat up cars in rich neighborhoods. White guys dont drive their BMW down to the projects unless they are buying drugs. Is that racial profiling? Or good police work? Funny, nobody ever complains about that.

[Tepshen73]

What would it take to get a warrent to tap my phone?
To search my house? Also how much does what the suspected reason have to do for it? If its for drugs vs say I was a suspected serial killer. There is so mcuh I do not know when it comes to warrents that if I knew what it took to get various warrents I may change about how I feel about them in the context of keeping the people safe vs civil liberties.

[EscapePlan9]

[iceman5]

Phone taps are very very tough to get. The police rarely do it. The FBI does, but the requirements are very strict.

We do what we call "one party consent" phone calls, where we have someone call you and we record the phone call (which is competely legal and no warrant is needed as long as one party knows the call is be recorded). The most common use of this is when someone has molested a child. We have the kid call the pervert and talk about what happened and of course the pervert, not knowing the call is being reocrded, will say things like "I didnt mean to hurt you" or "You know you liked it when we did.........".

If you were a suspected drug dealer and we had an informant go to your house an buy drugs, that would be enough to get a search warrant for your house.

If you were a suspected serial killer, we would need some reaosn to believe that there was evidence in your house. The police cant just get a warrant to search your house to see if they find anything. basically they would have to be able to articulate to a judge that they already know that certain evidence is there. (or that theyre are reasonably sure).

Another example: if a girl accuses you of rape and she gives a detailed description of your bedroom (this is a date rape), we could get a warrant to search your house to see if your bedroom carpet really has a red stain in the east side of the carpet like she said, for example. That wouldnt prove you raped her but it would prove she was there and if you said she had never been there during an interrogatrion, you would have problems. During the search, we might also find her blood or other evidence.

Believe me, the police cant just get a warrant to search anything they want.


EscapePlan, Im not sure what youre getting at. Rodney King was not beaten mercilessly. Most of those strikes missed him. You didnt see what happened before the video tape started. His own friend who was riding in the car said he was acting so crazy that he thought the cops were going to shoot both of them. He also threw 4 cops off of him who tried to tackle him before any beating started. He was apparently very strong and I believe he was on PCP. He was tazed and it had no effect. Have you ever seen what a tazer normally does to a man?

Im not actually trying to defend the cops in the Rodney King incident because Ive been in several similar situations and I (we) were able to handle it much better than the LA cops did. Im just saying that most people want criminals like him locked up and put away, but they dont want to see what happens sometimes when you try to do it. Fighting crime is a very dirty and dangerous business. Crooks dont play by the rules and sometimes the cops have to bend them also to get the job done.

A whole lot of people are crying that the government didnt do anything to stop Bin Laden from taking down the towers, when they had the chance. Well, now they are trying to stop and him and they dont like to see what it actually takes to do it.

[kennyg]

[Dumb Snowman]

But kenny, when you look at other people's history, they've all done the same thing. I'm not saying that makes us justified, but you can hardly say our government is any more evil than than the rest. And as to why it's so important to be a superpower, well, there are only two types of people in the world - Those that take advantage of others, and those that get taken advantage of. The strongest get stronger and the weaker get weaker. I would rather be on this end than, say, Columbia or something. If we don't maintain our country's power, we WILL get weaker, and we WILL become the next rome. Yeah, we'll become the capital of some crappy country

Wait, is rome even the capital of italy? I dunno....

[Rhound50]

[Felonius_Monk]

[Felonius_Monk]

[redhouse]