Barr ’08

Over at the Huffington Post, Bob Barr makes the liberal case for his candidacy:

Sen. Obama’s rhetoric is uplifting and positive, but the Senator who showed genuine foresight and courage in opposing the Iraq war spent most of the primary season edging away from his initial tough stand. Will he order the troops to exit Iraq? Will he bring them all home, or simply shift them from Iraq to another foreign country?

Similarly, it would be hard for Sen. Obama not to be an improvement over the Bush administration on civil liberties. However, here, too, Sen. Obama has demonstrated his willingness to trim under pressure.

President George W. Bush violated the law when he ignored both the Constitution and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Congress should have held him and his appointees accountable for their law-breaking. Moreover, telephone companies that aided and abetted executive branch law-breaking should have been left liable in the courts.

Yet, Sen. Obama folded, backing a “compromise” that gave the administration most everything that it wanted. No individualized warrants or evidence of law-breaking is required to authorize government spying on U.S. citizens’ phone calls and emails. No administration officials paid the slightest cost for engaging in illegal conduct. No private firm suffered the slightest inconvenience for helping the government violate their customers’ constitutional rights. This was the moment for Sen. Obama to prove that he possessed a true dedication to civil liberties, and he failed.

Of course, we all hope that, as president, he will feel freer to stand up for American liberties. But there also will be voices advising him to use the executive powers so freely expanded by his predecessor. Will he be strong enough to resist this Siren’s Song? No one knows, but one thing is known: If freed from the limiting forces of public awareness and involvement, President Obama would follow a long line of presidents who talk of enhanced individual liberty, but practice a policy of increased government power.

In other words, the best way to encourage Sen. Obama, if he is elected president, to follow the straight and narrow is to actively and clearly demonstrate that we, the American people, are concerned both about our civil liberties and his commitment to protect them. The way to do that is to vote for Bob Barr and the Libertarian Party.

Bob spoke at Duke University yesterday about the assault on civil liberties by President Bush and congressional leaders from both parties:

“A wasted vote is a vote for the Democrats or the Republicans because, regardless of the Republican or Democratic candidate being elected, nothing will change,” Barr said at the outset of his speech.

Although Democratic Sen. Barack Obama and Republican Sen. John McCain have received most of the attention this political season, Barr said the two major party candidates have failed to address the proper roles of government.

“It is the job of the president to protect our liberty,” Barr said, criticizing both the Republican and Democratic parties for abusing the executive power.

He faulted the two parties and their respective presidential candidates for supporting new amendments to the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act, noting that it unjustly stripped American citizens of their privacy. Philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand correctly identified the right of privacy as foundational to civilization, he added.

The recent FISA amendments have been criticized for permitting the warrantless domestic wiretapping program of President George W. Bush’s administration.

“Both of the two major parties have an institutional interest in not diminishing the power of the president,” Barr said.

He also condemned the federal bailouts as an improper governmental intervention, and added that the politicians who constructed the recent congressional bailout of financial institutions had been “very clever” in construing the language of the legislation.

“The $700 billion was a floor, not a ceiling,” Barr said. “They have already put at risk some $2 trillion of our money.”

Some attendees shared Barr’s frustrations with representation from the Democratic and Republican parties.

“In this election, I’m supporting Barr because I’m dissatisfied with McCain and Obama,” said sophomore Chris Edelman. “I don’t think Obama’s competent enough to be president, and I don’t trust McCain’s decision-making ability…. I have supported Ron Paul, and Barr’s the closest thing to Ron Paul.”

Barr concluded the first portion of the event by outlining the problems third parties face in gaining representation on ballots and in debates.

He explained that the Commission on Presidential Debates unfairly excludes third parties because it is entirely run by Republicans and Democrats. Barr said the debates were useless because the candidates fail to answer the questions.

He elicited laughter from the audience when he said that he respected Republican vice presidential candidate Gov. Sarah Palin for admitting that she would not answer some debate questions.
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Munger, who was responsible for promoting the speech, acknowledged that more advertising likely would have drawn a larger crowd. He noted, however, that he only spent his own money-not the department’s-on publicity for the event because he felt it would be a conflict of interest for him to use department funds toward a candidate he personally endorsed.

Gwillim Law, a Chapel Hill resident, said he read about the event in The (Raleigh) News & Observer.

“I’m conservative, and I don’t feel like there is a good choice in this election,” he said. “But I liked a lot of what I heard tonight.”

Many thanks to Michael Munger for organizing the event. Please visit his campaign website, and if you live in North Carolina, ask how you can help his campaign.

A new report shows us something that most of us already knew to be true. Our government is spying on innocent Americans. As you can imagine, Bob has a few things to say about that:

Many of us warned about the potential for abuse, especially the threat to the privacy of all Americans posed by widespread and secret government surveillance. Neither the administration nor the Congress, including Senators Barack Obama and John McCain, listened. Now, however, a book about the National Security Agency by James Bamford — The Shadow Factory — reveals that the government has been routinely eavesdropping on innocent Americans.

The then-head of the NSA and now Director of the CIA, Gen. Michael Hayden, has denied to Congress that Americans’ private conversations were being tapped. But two former military intercept operators have now come forward independently to reveal that they in fact listened in on the personal phone calls of Americans.

For instance, Adrienne Kinne, a U.S. Army reservist, reports that, “[T]hese were just really everyday, average, ordinary Americans who happened to be in the Middle East, in our area of intercept and happened to be making these phone calls on satellite phones.” Many of them were serving in the military, or working for aid organizations or the press. They were not planning attacks on the U.S. Rather, explains Kinne, the subjects discussed were “personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything to do with terrorism.”

Navy linguist David Murfee Faulk says much the same of the results of his work between 2003 and 2007. He listened to Americans “calling home to the United States, talking to their spouses, sometimes their girlfriends, sometimes one phone call following another.” Moreover, Faulk admitted that he and the other operators would share especially interesting phone calls, like “some colonel making pillow talk.”

The point is not that no useful information was ever recovered. But when operators wasted their time eavesdropping on the conversations of innocent Americans — and invading their privacy — they were not monitoring genuine terrorist suspects. Adrienne Kinne admits: “It’s almost like they’re making the haystack bigger and it’s harder to find that piece of information that might actually be useful.” In short, violating our liberties makes us both less free and less safe.
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For nearly eight years, the Bush administration has enshrined disrespect for the law as official government policy. The Congress, under both Republican and Democratic control, has failed to uphold either the law or the Constitution. Since both Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain have endorsed expanded warrantless surveillance, neither one would restore our constitutional liberties as president.

As if the interfering in the market and spending $812 billion isn’t enough, the bailout passed by Congress and signed by President Bush contains an IRS snooping provision:

The bailout bill also gives the Internal Revenue Service new authority to conduct undercover operations. It would immunize the IRS from a passel of federal laws, including permitting IRS agents to run businesses for an extended sting operation, to open their own personal bank accounts with U.S. tax dollars, and so on. (Think IRS agents posing as accountants or tax preparers and saying, “I’m not sure if that deduction is entirely legal, but it’ll save you $1,000. Want to take it?”) That section had expired as of January 1, 2008, and would now be renewed.

Starting with the so-called Anti-Drug Abuse Act in 1988, the IRS has possessed this authority temporarily, with occasional multiple-year lapses. A 1999 internal report said the IRS had 126 “trained undercover agents” working in field offices at the time. This is the first time that such undercover authority would be made permanent.

Sens. Max Baucus (D) and Chuck Grassley (R) have been pushing to make it permanent for a while, claiming (PDF) in April that: “Undercover operations are an integral part of IRS efforts to detect and prove noncompliance. The temporary status of this provision creates uncertainty, as the IRS plans its undercover efforts from year to year.”

There’s another section of the bailout bill worth noting. It lets the IRS give information from individual tax returns to any federal law enforcement agency investigating suspected “terrorist” activity, which can, in turn, share it with local and state police. Intelligence agencies such as the CIA and the National Security Agency can also receive that information.

The information that can be shared includes “a taxpayer’s identity, the nature, source, or amount of his income, payments, receipts, deductions, exemptions, credits, assets, liabilities, net worth, tax liability, tax withheld, deficiencies, overassessments, or tax payments, whether the taxpayer’s return was, is being, or will be examined or subject to other investigation or processing, or any other data received by, recorded by, prepared by, furnished to, or collected by the Secretary with respect to a return.”

That provision had already existed in federal law and automatically expired on January 1, 2008.

What’s a little odd is that there’s been little to no discussion of the IRS sections of the bailout bill, even though they raise privacy concerns. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said this week: “I will continue to work with congressional leaders to find a way forward to pass a comprehensive plan to stabilize our financial system and protect the American people by limiting the prospects of further deterioration in our economy.” He never mentioned the necessity of additional IRS undercover operations.

Bob recently said in a video on privacy, “When government grows so large that it knows virtually everything a person is doing, then you have no freedom.” Renewal of this provision is just another example of the government ignoring our basic liberties. My f

riends, this is why we need Bob Barr in the White House.

We have another issue video up on the YouTube channel. This one is on civil liberties and privacy.

Bob goes into how our liberties have been put at stake by the Bush Administration and Congress, under both Republicans and Democrats. He blasts the recent FISA law and says, “When government grows so large that it knows virtually everything a person is doing, then you have no freedom.”

Bob Barr and the Electronic Privacy Information Center held a press conference this afternoon to launch Privacy ‘08, a campaign to address privacy rights and civil liberties, issues that are being ignored in the midst of all the flashing lights, television cameras and speeches in football stadiums and hockey arenas:

Barr spoke during the launch of a new EPIC campaign called Privacy ‘08. The goal is to make privacy issues a larger part of the campaign debate and to educate voters about privacy issues, said Marc Rotenberg, EPIC’s executive director. “We need to have this debate,” he said.

Barr called on the next president to rein in government surveillance of U.S. residents and called on Congress to update privacy laws by limiting what private businesses can do with personal data. Libertarians generally oppose new laws and new regulations, but Barr said limitations on the use of personal information are needed.

Both Republican candidate Senator John McCain of Arizona and Democratic candidate Senator Barack Obama of Illinois supported a bill, passed by Congress in July, that updated the nation’s wiretap and surveillance laws. The legislation allows U.S. spy agencies in some cases to intercept the phone calls and e-mails of U.S. residents, based on a suspicion that the person they’re communicating with is connected to terrorists.

Barr called the surveillance bill “breathtaking expansion” of the U.S. government’s power to spy on residents.

A recent housing finance industry bailout bill required a fingerprint registry for housing lenders, Barr added. “I do give these folks [in Congress] credit for great imagination for the number of new databases they come up with,” Barr said.

You can listen to Bob’s thoughts on the FISA legislation passed earlier this summer, with the support of Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain, over at the campaign YouTube channel.

You may have heard in the news recently about some of the eavesdropping methods that will be employed by the Chinese government during the Olympic games. The State Department has issued a privacy warning to American citizens attending the games.

Bob points out that due to laws like the USA PATRIOT Act and NSA wiretapping programs that China “sounds an awful lot like America,” adding that while the United States isn’t a communist nation, “our government has acquired from Congress-and sometimes simply seized on its own-the power to electronically surveil citizens’ phone calls and e-mails.”

Bob Barr 2008 is launching a petition to STOP the Bill of Rights Blackout. Petitioning signatures will be sent to House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers. Party affiliation doesn’t matter. The liberties we are losing concerns all Americas, regardless of party.

We’ve also made the Blacked Out Bill of Rights available for download.

Sign the petition and send a message to Congress.

“The administration and its supporters have used the terrorist attacks of September 11 as an excuse for a host of power grabs, even though the government failed to protect Americans on that tragic day because it didn’t use the authority that it already had, yet rather than updating the law, the Democratic-controlled Congress decided to gut it.”

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Here is the press release sent out from the campaign on today’s landmark decision regarding the Second Amendment.

Today the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the individual right of Americans to own guns in District of Columbia v. Heller. The ruling “will go down as one of the Supreme Court’s most important rulings on behalf of liberty,” says Libertarian Party presidential candidate Bob Barr.

As part of the Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment undergirds American liberty. “The individual’s right to keep and bear arms helps ensure all of our freedoms,” says Barr. “The Supreme Court’s recognition of the constitutional right to gun ownership is a recognition of the right to life, liberty, and property for all Americans.”

[VIDEO] Here is video of Bob talking about today’s decision: