« Great Rumsfeld Quote | Main | PETA Protest: Revisionist History? »
November 16, 2002
Re: Dr. Poindexter, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying Yet Still Loathe Big Brother
There has been a lot of talk lately about the proposal to create a national information database to help discover the villians amongst us. The defenders of civil liberties are saying the usual things; predicting the complete loss of our privacy is one of them. Even instapundit is jumping on the bandwagon.
On the other hand, PJ Hinton says:
However, getting something like this assembled, online, and yielding anything close to a usable product will take several years, lots of money, and countless man-hours. Are you doubtful? Consider the track record another [sic] agency of evil proportions -- the Internal Revenue Service. The press has covered its repeated failures to upgrade their computer systems, despite spending huge amounts of money.
I agree. The real threat to civil liberties is the bloatage of Title 18. Let's face it, if someone in federal law enforcement wants to screw with you, they probably already can, just using existing federal law. I think the civil liberties crowd would be better off using their political capital, such as it is, to push for a sunset provision on all new federal laws. Let's make it a constitutional ammendment: No federal law shall apply for more than ten years. At the end of ten years, the law cannot be renewed without an act of Congress.
Posted by crandal at November 16, 2002 08:22 PM