Obama Administration Asserts Broad Surveillance Powers

[spin]

10. It's worth the effort but I fear it is already too late.

We elected Obama and he was opposed to the Patriot Act.

Posted: September 16, 2009 01:34 AM
Did Obama Break His Campaign Promise to Scrap the Patriot Act?

Then-Senatorial candidate Obama in 2003 branded the Patriot Act "shoddy and dangerous" and pledged to dump it. He made the pledge in response to a candidate's survey by the National Organization for Women. Obama reneged on the pledge. But he did work to shave off some of the more blatantly outrageous constitutional abuses in the Act by imposing some civil liberties protections in the gathering and use of intelligence, on the use of torture in interrogations, and requiring at least some semblance of due process in court proceedings. But that paled in significance when Obama in a letter and with little fanfare and comment routinely let stand most of the still noxious provisions in the Act.

***snip***

Obama justifies keeping nearly all of Bush's terror war provisions in place with the standard rationale that the government must have all the weapons needed to deal with the threat of terrorism, even legally and constitutionally dubious weapons. That, of course, was the Bush and Cheney stock line. The one small difference between them and Obama is that Obama has sought to put a softer casing around those illicit weapons. That's no consolation for those who took candidate Obama and later Senator Obama at his word that he'd scrap or at least radically overhaul the Act.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/earl-ofari-hutchinson/did-obama-break-his-campa_b_288112.html

I will join you in the fight for our rights but realistically short of a revolution there's little chance that we can succeed. At this time our government is not dictatorial or tyrannical enough to justify an uprising and hopefully it never will be. If we continue down the same path we are on we may be under the thumb of a dictator in 20 or 30 years.

I just can't realistically figure out how we win this fight. Hopefully I am wrong. One positive note is that many Americans of all political backgrounds are upset at our loss of rights caused by our War on Terror.