White House: "We expect" Hong Kong to comply with Snowden extradition

[JDPriestly]

23. I understand and appreciate the concern about Chinese hacking of our

company's trade secrets. That is a horrible thing.

But, these surveillance programs pose a greater threat than that hacking.

I answered another post with this rant.

This eavesdropping is the greatest threat to our Constitution that I can imagine.

How can we claim that we have freedom of the press if the government tracks all the phone calls that reporters call as they investigate stories?

Our government is violating the Constitution with this program. I am sorry if you do not understand our Constitution or how it works.

But this program violates most of our rights, our most fundamental rights. We are not free as long as this surveillance continues.

At this moment, our government is not complying with our Constitution. That means it may not be a legitimate government.

The surveillance program has to stop and we have to return to constitutional government.

Sorry. I suggest that DUers who think I am wrong sign up for a course on constitutional law. This program chills speech, eviscerates the freedom of the press, and those are only two of the ways in which it violates our Constitution. There are more. It's a very serious matter. Please try to understand what I am saying. I am not trying to put you down. I am trying to explain to you the reality of the damage these programs do to the delicate balance of power and authority within our government.

We have a tri-partite system of government. That means that we have three branches as you may know -- the executive, the legislative and the judicial. With this program, the executive branch and track all the phone calls of all people working in or with the legislative branch. That means that legislators have not confidentiality, no privacy in their contacts with their constituents or other legislators or anyone, not even their own family members. The same is true of the judicial branch.

Knowledge, it is said, is power. And the executive has a degree of knowledge about the political and personal lives of members of the other two branches of government that gives the executive ultimate power to embarrass or indict or control members of the other two branches. Obama may or may not be using his ability to have that information. There is no way to know. But, just the fact that it exists hampers the ability of members of the other two branches to carry out their constitutional functions of oversight. It isn't a matter of whether there really is a situation in which a legislator fails to call a resource on an issue, say national defense. It is the fact that this program might cause a legislator to think twice before calling a resource that would tell the legislator the truth about a defense program that the administration does not want the legislator to know.

The only reason people are not very, very upset about it is that those people have not read enough history and/or enough about constitutional law, its origins, the concerns of the founders of our country, their historical perspective, etc. to understand that this program is an attack on the very structure and function and purpose of our Constitution and of our system of government.

My post is long and rambling, but if we don't want China stealing our secrets, we need to cut them off of our internet and stop trading with them.

We funded and assisted the Chinese industrial revolution. That was perhaps one of the stupidest things we could have done. Thank you Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

The Chinese were pushed into the industrial age without having the experience in living in an industrial society to understand the values of creativity, questioning authority and many of the other values that are essential to making an industrial society work.

Face it. The reason that we buy so much stuff from China is that the 1% can make a huge profit buying it cheap from China and selling it expensive to Americans. The differential is actually the inflation that would exist in the US if we made our own products here. If we made them here, the workers would have to be better paid and they would cost more. We buy the products for less than we could make them here for, but they are sold here for far more than they would cost if made in our dollar economy. So, the rich profit from that differential when they invest money in companies that produce products in China and elsewhere in what used to be called the third world.

If we didn't import so much from China, they would have less incentive to steal our secrets. The chickens are coming home to roost on the companies that sold our equipment to China and import so much stuff from there to sell to us.

That does not justify this surveillance program which is unconstitutional in every sense of the word. And worst of all, it is unconstitutional in that it gives the gift of nearly omnipotent knowledge to the executive branch. The legislature may be apprised of the program, but they cannot know the details that the surveillance produces on their own lives and work. And if the do, then the program has chilled the exercise of our democratic functions and structure.

There is just no way to justify this attack on our system of government and on our personal rights.