macsimcon

Oh for crying out loud, President Obama didn't submit it as a treaty, it's an Executive Agreement. You may not like that, but you're not the president. When you are, you can submit it as a treaty.

Cotton violated the Logan Act, and along with the other Republicans involved, should be tried and imprisoned for it. Only the Executive Branch is permitted to speak for the United States to foreign nations.

I'm so sick of the rhetoric from Comey, Cotton, and Hillary. If you're all so damned smart, how about YOU explain your method for breaking AES-256? Oh wait, you aren't a cryptographer are you? You're just a stupid politician who doesn't seem to understand: you can have no encryption, or you can have encryption. It's boolean, there's no middle ground. And as we've already seen how various governmental agencies are either hacked or lose our personal information every month or two, you aren't exactly to be trusted holding the master decryption key for everyone's communications. You're not even smart enough to encrypt the sensitive data you already have! OPM lost scans of security clearance holders' fingerprints, for Christ's sake! What are they supposed to do, get new fingers?

And what happens when the master key falls into Russian hands? Or Chinese hands? Is there a government employee alive who wouldn't hand over that key for $10M? How about $1B? Because that's what it would be worth to read all individual and corporate communications going on in America.

For hundreds of years, if the government wanted access to your personal information, they presented you with a warrant, and then you were free to try to stop the government by presenting your case in court. Why do Comey and Cotton want ALL surveillance to be conducted in secret now? Exactly what violations of the Constitution are they trying to hide?

If they want the information so badly, then get the encrypted data from Apple, Google, or Facebook, and then try to compel the individual involved to hand over his or her key. They'll probably challenge it in court as violations of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, but that's the way the justice system is SUPPOSED to work. Not everything need be conducted in secret.

These morons have gotten so used to getting everything they've wanted since 9/11 that they've gotten addicted to secrecy and forgotten about the rules. They want to continue to shift constitutional decisions from the Judicial Branch to the Executive Branch, and that's not the way our government is set up.

A few corrections: all branches are coequal, none of them is more powerful than the other. But if you wanted to make an argument, it would be fair to say that ever since Congress decided to let presidents do whatever they wanted under a never-ending AUMF, they effectively abandoned the requirement for a declaration of war, and ceded much of the Legislative Branch's power to the Executive.

And Comey is a Republican, appointed by President George W. Bush as Assistant Attorney General; he had a job before he was FBI Director under President Obama.

jdw said:

focuspuller said:

...Him and 46 other Republican senators subverting the President while in critical negotiations with a foreign power those senators consider "the enemy." This is what passes for patriotism in the GOP today.

Let's leave specific political parties out of this. The Donkeys are just as guilty of expanding Big Brother as the Elephants are — yes, even on the military front. There can be no debate about that at all. Furthermore, traditionalist Republicans (i.e., Goldwater style Libertarians) like Ron and Rand Paul never have supported this kind of thing, have actually been vocally against it, and they are both in the Elephant party, proving the entire GOP cannot be entirely cast in the ideological fire.

If you'll pardon me for saying so, that's a false equivalency. Republican presidents started the first gulf war, and the second, which by the way is the longest war in American history. It was a Republican president who created DHS, and who greatly expanded the power of the NSA. It was a Republican president who invaded a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. It was a Republican president who caused the creation of Al Qaeda, and a different Republican president who caused the creation of ISIS/ISIL/Daesh. Democrats are not just as guilty as Republicans, they simply clean up the messes left behind by Republicans.

Be that as it may, Hillary Clinton is completely wrong on this.

You're really going to use words like "mediocre" and "failure" when the Apple Watch was more accurate at counting calories than any of the other devices?

The Apple Watch was only off by two percent! I'd hardly call that mediocre or a failure, I would say it's close to perfect.