"Bush Seeks to Expand Access to Private Data"

Now those amongst the Mudcat community who live the US of A, squawk about their concern. Erosion of civil rights, a means to subvert the constitution and hi-jack the nation for all time, being offered up as the ultimate motives behind this legislation.

Grounds for making any of those assertions are pretty thin on the ground.

While predicting all of the above, those same people castigate the current administration for not acting, or responding, quickly enough to various intelligence warnings regarding the attacks of 11th September, 2003. They would far rather prefer to believe some highly convoluted conspiracy theory than face up to the reality, that intelligence and security organisations are secretive, they do treasure and hoard both information and sources of information, they do "protect" what they perceive as being their turf, all of which counters effective co-operation. Post 9/11, that situation could not be allowed to continue, those matters had to be addressed.

Homeland Security, Patriot Act, go someway towards that - they are something similar to the temporary anti-terrorist legislation introduced in the UK during the days of the PIRA bombing campaigns.

If what all the alarmists contend were true, particularly for the motives they espouse - judging by some of the posts running throughout this forum - a whole stack of them would have gone silent a long time ago. They haven't, they are still here, exercising their right to free speech, still exercising their right to criticise, still highly vocal in their condemnation of their current government. Long may they continue to do so - I have no doubt they will, and will be allowed to do so, by the current American Administration and whatever one that is elected to replace it in 2004.

You are the guys that are running around yelling that, "The sky is falling." DougR, myself and a few others only draw your attention to that every now and again in order to tell you THAT IT AIN'T.