At what point is it considered a good idea to find sneaky ways around the Genevia Convention against torture ?

 Washington Post

Good news, the renewal of the so called Patriot Act has stalled, hopefully it will stay that way.

washingtonpost.com
 

It is sad that the people we are supposed to trust to defend us are our own worst enemies. Time to take a stand against those who would reduce our civil liberties.
 

 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4538286.stm

FBI Widens Use of National Security Letters

An anonymous reader writes “The Washington Post reports that the FBI has drastically increased its use of National Security Letters (NSL), which permit it to collect information without judicial oversight. According to the article, the use of NSLs is up by a factor of 100, and the records are kept forever (in the past they were thrown away if the subject was cleared). Deep in the article, the author reports that NSLs were used to collect records ‘[…] of every hotel guest, everyone who rented a car or truck, every lease on a storage space, and every airplane passenger who landed in [Las Vegas]’ for a two week period, in response to a terrorism threat in 2003. Those records, apparently, will be kept forever by the federal government. There’s an ombudsman, and a procedure to resolve complaints, but the mere existence of an NSL is secret, so it’s not clear how anyone can complain!

from Slashdot.com

Turns out that the CIA has secret jails. Is that anyway for a democracy to behave