Republicrats Chugging Down The Tracks
This is why the Tea Party will have legs. Despite the alleged Republican resurgence in Congress, there’s already emerging evidence backing the old cliché that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Here we have so-called conservatives throwing their weight and support not only behind insanely expensive and ultimately ineffective high-speed rail madness, but also a push to further erode basic privacy rights.
First up, train madness, which apparently has caught the GOP in high fevah. This from The Hill:
Key Republicans are embracing a major spending initiative outlined in President Obama’s State of the Union address.
Two top members of the House Transportation Committee said they will push the president’s initiative seeking to give 80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail over te course of the next 25 years.
“I believe it’s good for America to develop a high-speed rail corridor in the Northeast corridor,” Rep. Bill Shuster (R-Pa.), the chairman of the railroad subcommittee, said according to the Connecticut Post.”It’s a place we have to start, we have to accomplish it, because then I believe all of America, in the various corridors around the country, will want high-speed rail if they see success here.”
Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.), the chairman of the whole committee, also said Friday he was “pleased that President Obama has helped to launch a system for improved passenger rail service for our nation.”
If that’s not enough Republicrat wonderfulness, there’s a GOP-led bipartisan push to revive Bush-era legislation that would force Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to maintain detailed records of the websites users visit, to be turned over at the demand of police and government agents. This from cnetNews:
The House Republicans’ first major technology initiative is about to be unveiled: a push to force Internet companies to keep track of what their users are doing.
A House panel chaired by Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin is scheduled to hold a hearing tomorrow morning to discuss forcing Internet providers, and perhaps Web companies as well, to store records of their users’ activities for later review by police.
One focus will be on reviving a dormant proposal for data retention that would require companies to store Internet Protocol (IP) addresses for two years, CNET has learned.
Tomorrow’s data retention hearing is juxtaposed against the recent trend to protect Internet users’ privacy by storing less data. Last month, the Federal Trade Commission called for “limited retention” of user data on privacy grounds, and in the last 24 hours, both Mozilla and Google have announced do-not-track technology.
A Judiciary committee aide provided a statement this afternoon saying “the purpose of this hearing is to examine the need for retention of certain data by Internet service providers to facilitate law enforcement investigations of Internet child pornography and other Internet crimes,” but declined to elaborate
Thanks to the GOP takeover of the House, the odds of such legislation advancing have markedly increased. The new chairman of the House Judiciary committee is Lamar Smith of Texas, who previously introduced a data retention bill. Sensenbrenner, the new head of the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security, had similar plans but never introduced legislation. (It’s not purely a partisan issue: Rep. Diana DeGette, a Colorado Democrat, was the first to announce such a proposal.)
There’s certainly nothing wrong with cracking down on purveyors of child pornography, over the Internet or otherwise. But at its heart, this is just another example of big brother government using an isolated crime committed by a relatively small percentage of people to justify invasive legislation that treats everyone as a presumed criminal. If the government has legitimate reason to suspect an individual of committing an Internet crime, the government and its agents can identify whose data specifically they want and get a warrant to obtain it.
Erosion of privacy rights and ridiculously expensive fast trains: just the kind of hope and change I’m sure we all had in mind from the new Congress.
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