Chris Calabrese

ACLU: Gun Control Bill Threatens Privacy Rights and Civil Liberties

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I have to admit, I have a really hard time understanding the perspective of liberty minded folks that lean toward the “progressive” or “liberal” side of the traditional political spectrum when it comes to gun control.  Here is why.

I can understand where their visceral dislike of guns comes from.  Many of them are urbanities and cannot possible conceive the reason anyone would need or want a gun, let alone an “assault rifle.”  I grew up in Manhattan, believe me I get the mentality.  It is very much a cultural phenomenon more than anything else.   That said, many of these people fully understand how criminal our corporate government has become and how these oligarchs are systematically attempting to remove the civil rights of the citizenry.  While this may not be a “right” you agree with, it is a right nonetheless.  I think at a time when we are dealing with such fascist tendencies at the top, we should not advocate for the removal of any rights whatsoever from the citizenry.  This has been my position all along and continues to be.

Yet there is more.  As we see from the ACLU, Harry Reid’s gun control bill is about far more than gun control.  It is about government databases, as well as various other blatant threats to privacy and civil liberties.  From the Daily Caller:

As Senate Democrats struggle to build support for new gun control legislation, the American Civil Liberties Union now says it’s among those who have “serious concerns” about the bill.

In an exclusive interview with The Daily Caller, a top lobbyist for the ACLU announced that the group thinks Reid’s current gun bill could threaten both privacy rights and civil liberties.

The inclusion of universal background checks — the poll-tested lynchpin of most Democratic proposals — “raises two significant concerns,” the ACLU’s Chris Calabrese told TheDC Wednesday.

Calabrese — a privacy lobbyist — was first careful to note that the ACLU doesn’t strictly oppose universal background checks for gun purchases. “If you’re going to require a background check, we think it should be effective,” Calabrese explained.

Calabrese wouldn’t characterize the current legislation’s record-keeping provision as a “national gun registry” — which the White House has denied pursuing — but he did say that such a registry could be “a second step.”

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Another Bait and Switch: Congress Defeats E-Mail Privacy Legislation…Again

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This is how the corporate state rolls.  They remove all the important stuff at the last minute, you know, like provisions that might actually protect constitutional rights.  This is exactly what they just did with the NDAA, which I outlined in my post The Section Preventing Indefinite Detention of Americans without Trial Removed from Final NDAA Bill.  Now we find out from Wired that:

The Senate late Thursday forwarded legislation to President Barack Obama granting the public the right to automatically display on their Facebook feeds what they’re watching on Netflix. While lawmakers were caving to special interests, however, they cut from the legislative package language requiring the authorities to get a warrant to read your e-mail or other data stored in the cloud.

But another part of the same Senate package — sweeping digital privacy protections requiring the government, for the first time, to get a probable-cause warrant to obtain e-mail and other content stored in the cloud — was removed at the last minute.

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