Patriot II

Amos, on February 10th, 2003 at 6:18 pm Said:

Don’t over look Section 103: “This wartime exception is unnecessarily narrow; it may be invoked only when Congress formally has declared war… This provision would expand FISA’s wartime exception by allowing the wartime exception to be invoked after Congress authorizes the use of military force, or after the United States has suffered an attack creating an (sic) national emergency.”

This hollows out any remaining checks-and-balance. If the Executive decides that an attack has been suffered, it can invoke the wartime exception. The Drug War comes to mind. We are being attacked by the “scourge of illegal drugs” — is that sufficient?

The One True b!X, on February 13th, 2003 at 2:36 am Said:

Section 312 would end up having the most immediate nationwide effect, since it guts all the post-COINTELPRO consent decrees which instituted rules to avoid police spying on legitimate political, social, and religious groups and activities.

Silvester, on January 13th, 2004 at 9:52 am Said:

This is another function provided for dealing with the heap. After you’ve created some space in the Heap, it’s yours until you let go of it. When your program is done using it, you have to explicitly tell the computer that you don’t need it anymore or the computer will save it for your future use (or until your program quits, when it knows you won’t be needing the memory anymore). The call to simply tells the computer that you had this space, but you’re done and the memory can be freed for use by something else later on.