Oil scenario

some dude:http://www.usagold.com/SennholzPerilDollar.html

It would suck if the euro took over

"Petro-Dollar or Petro-Euro?" Clark, William, May, 2003, Newsletter of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas #29

Continued US unpopularity is leading to the abandonment of the dollar standard

Carson, Roy, publisher, Venezuelan economic journal Veheadline.com, June 18th, 2003, online

A move by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez Frias to replace the US$ with the Euro is seen as upsetting Washington more than when Iraq’s Saddam Hussein started using the Euro for oil transactions last November… precipitating the US-led action to invade Iraq. CIA and other intelligence organizations, including Britain’s MI5, now fear that the next step is that the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is about to switch to Euros … the immediate effect would be a massive devaluation, perhaps sparking of domino-effect devaluations worldwide in US$-related foreign reserves and foreign debt calculations. With a massive budget deficit, the United States is running scared of latest intelligence that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is on the brink of converting to the Euros and the opinion held by many OPEC ministers is that the conversion is an inevitability … the only question left is WHEN? Arab sources claim that Euro conversion across the Middle and Far East is a rational step to counteract the United States’ capacity to “wage further illegal wars (a.k.a. State-sponsored terrorism)” around the world. A significant step in this direction is that Iran is contemplating switching to the Euro and, as a result, is the latest object of United States undiplomatic interference … an intelligence sources says “they are stimulating opposition forces, making covert threats … the next step is destabilization and quasi-liberation warfare under the pretext of promoting US-style democracy but essentially aimed at maintaining the US dollar as a global transaction currency.

Civil Liberties impacts

Upholding the Bill of Rights and the 4th Amendment specifically has the most direct effect on citizens' lives

Banks, William, and Bowman, M.E., "EXECUTIVE AUTHORITY FOR NATIONAL SECURITY SURVEILLANCE," 50 American University Law Review 1, October, 2000

It may have been only an after thought, but the Bill of Rights more directly affects the personal lives of Americans than any other aspect of our law. n1 We cherish our right to speak, assemble and worship as we please. n2 We also cherish our privacy, one aspect of which stems from the Fourth Amendment, n3 our constitutional remedy for a perceived evil of British law - the general warrant.

The British general warrant was a search tool employed without limitation on location, and without any necessity to precisely describe the object or person sought. n4 British authorities were simply given license to "break into any shop or place suspected" wherever they [*3] chose. n5 With that kind of unfettered discretion, the general warrant could be, and often was, used to intimidate. n6 General warrants executed during the reign of Charles I sought to intimidate dissidents, authors, and printers of seditious material by ransacking homes and seizing personal papers. n7 In 1765, the courts declared general warrants illegal, and Parliament followed a year later. n8

In the colonies, complaints that royal officials were violating the privacy of colonists through the use of writs of assistance, equivalent to general warrants, grew. n9 Because English law did not, as yet, recognize a right of personal privacy, the crown's abuses in the colonies were not remediable at law. n10 It was thus no surprise that the new American Constitution and the government it created would respect a series of individual freedoms.

James Madison authored what would become the Fourth Amendment and proposed it to the Congress on June 8, 1789. n11 For the new nation, warrants would require specificity to physically invade the privacy of its citizenry. n12 Today, that same specificity is required to authorize electronic and physical invasions of privacy.

Rule of Law Impacts

The rule of law has a clear meaning: the supremacy of law over arbitrary power

Zywick, Todd, "The Rule of Law, Freedom, and Prosperity," Law and Economics Working Paper Series, George Mason University School of Law, 2002, http://www.gmu.edu/departments/law/faculty/papers/docs/02-20.pdf

Commentators on the rule of law often insist that it is difficult to define the concept of the rule of law. This is untrue. Although there may be disagreement over the importance or desirability of the rule of law as a virtue, there is a fairly well-understood core understanding of its meaning. Indeed, the face that the rule of law has spawned so many detractors indicates that its meaning is well-understood among both enthusiasts and detractors.

Since Dicey restated the rule of law in the late Nineteenth Century in application to modern constitutional republics, there has been a general agreement as to the content and meaning of the rule of law. Dicey identified three fundamental characteristics of the rule of law as it emerged in Britain: (1) the supremacy of regular law as opposed to arbitrary power, i.e., the rule of law, not men; (2) equality before the law of all persons and classes, including governmental officials; and (3) the incorporation of constitutional law as a binding part of the ordinary law of the land. Although Dicey spoke primarily to the historical development of the rule of law in Britain, the core understanding of the rule of law that he articulated has remained remarkably stable since he wrote and has been readily generalizable to a universal understanding of the rule of law.

Without the rule of law, there necessarily is tyranny, and under tyranny, anyone can be sacrificed for any end

Zywick

In particular, the rule of law constrains arbitrary action by political actors that is not taken pursuant to established rules and procedures announced prior to the action. Government under the rule of law preserves individual freedom; government without the rule of law is tyranny, in that it leaves individuals subject to the arbitrary will of rules. As one observer has noted, "The rule of law is a solution to a problem, and as the classical tradition has always recognized, the problem is tyranny--the social relationship in which some people can command the lives or property of others at will and in pursuit of discretionary ends."

A free, peaceful, prosperous society cannot exist without the rule of law

Zywick

The rule of law should not be understood as a mere means to a social order predicated on limited government, freedom, and prosperity. Instead, the rule of law is an inherent part of a free, peaceful, and prosperous society. A society organized under the rule of law is a "liberal" order of private ordering and constitutional limits on government; conversely, the rule of law can exist only in such an order. Thus, the rule of law and a liberal order and inextricably intertwined: neither can exist without the other.

Arbitrary government that ignores the rule of law threatens all rights

Bovard, James, author, Future of Freedom Foundation, "Rule of Law versus Unlimited Rule," February, 2003, http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0302d.asp

In recent decades, support for the classical concept of the rule of law has evaporated; instead, competing bands of intellectuals champion the executive branch or Congress or judicial activism or some other fad. Rather than focus on the actual operations of government agencies, political thinking is often characterized by a “Do it now!” philosophy. Discretionary power has been granted to bureaucrats by many laws because congressmen don’t have the courage to say openly what they want the bureaucracy to do, leading to government by stealth.

Arbitrary power is the mirror image of the rule of law. Benjamin Constant beautifully expressed the danger of arbitrary power in his 1815 book, Principles of Politics:

Arbitrary power destroys morality, for there can be no morality without security. . .. Arbitrariness is incompatible with the existence of any government considered as a set of institutions. For political institutions are simply contracts; and it is in the nature of contracts to establish fixed limits. Hence arbitrariness, being precisely opposed to what constitutes a contract, undermines the foundation of all political institutions.
The essence of arbitrary power is government’s refusal to issue clear rules limiting its prerogative to punish private citizens.

At some point, the sheer accumulation of penalties and threats in the statute book fundamentally changes the citizen’s relation to the government. Rather than a government of laws, it becomes a government of threats, intimidation, and browbeating. When the law books reach a certain length, there is little or no difference between laws and arbitrary commands, because few people know what the laws or regulations actually are.

Because there can be no level playing field between the citizen and the state, every expansion of the state means increased subjugation of the citizen. Every increase in the cost of achieving justice from the state is a de facto subsidy for government oppression. The higher the cost of legal self-defense, the more likely that government agencies will abuse their power. Government employees who carry out vendettas against citizens almost never have to pay either the government’s or the citizen’s legal bills; their incentive is to stretch their power as far as possible.

Every increase in the cost of traversing government administrative processes increases the arbitrary power of government employees over every citizen who cannot afford hefty legal bills. Sen. John Taylor wrote in 1822, “There are no rights where there are no remedies, or where the remedies depend upon the will of the aggressor.” And with the constantly expanding power and prerogatives of federal agencies, those remedies depend more than ever before on the bureaucratic aggressors.

A/T T-SWOPC

Bypassing the FISA Court bypasses its probable cause requirements

Rivkin, David, and Casey, Lee, New York Times, December 27th, 2005

In an effort to control counterintelligence activities in the United States during the cold war, the surveillance act established a special court, known as the FISA court, with authority to issue wiretapping warrants. Instead of having to show that it has "probable cause" to believe criminal activity is taking place (which is required to obtain a warrant in an ordinary investigation), the government can get a warrant from the FISA court when there is probable cause to believe the target of surveillance is a foreign power or its agent.

A/T War on Terror

Use of illegal wiretap surveillance undermines terror prosecutions

Lichtblau, Eric, and Risen, James, New York Times, December 28th, 2005

WASHINGTON, Dec. 27 - Defense lawyers in some of the country's biggest terrorism cases say they plan to bring legal challenges to determine whether the National Security Agency used illegal wiretaps against several dozen Muslim men tied to Al Qaeda.

The lawyers said in interviews that they wanted to learn whether the men were monitored by the agency and, if so, whether the government withheld critical information or misled judges and defense lawyers about how and why the men were singled out.

The expected legal challenges, in cases from Florida, Ohio, Oregon and Virginia, add another dimension to the growing controversy over the agency's domestic surveillance program and could jeopardize some of the Bush administration's most important courtroom victories in terror cases, legal analysts say.

The question of whether the N.S.A. program was used in criminal prosecutions and whether it improperly influenced them raises "fascinating and difficult questions," said Carl W. Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond who has studied terrorism prosecutions.

"It seems to me that it would be relevant to a person's case," Professor Tobias said. "I would expect the government to say that it is highly sensitive material, but we have legal mechanisms to balance the national security needs with the rights of defendants. I think judges are very conscientious about trying to sort out these issues and balance civil liberties and national security."

While some civil rights advocates, legal experts and members of Congress have said President Bush did not have authority to order eavesdropping by the security agency without warrants, the White House and the Justice Department continued on Tuesday to defend the legality and propriety of the program.

Trent Duffy, a spokesman for the White House, declined to comment in Crawford, Tex., when asked about a report in The New York Times that the security agency had tapped into some of the country's main telephone arteries to conduct broader data-mining operations in the search for terrorists.

But Mr. Duffy said: "This is a limited program. This is not about monitoring phone calls designed to arrange Little League practice or what to bring to a potluck dinner. These are designed to monitor calls from very bad people to very bad people who have a history of blowing up commuter trains, weddings and churches."

He added: "The president believes that he has the authority - and he does - under the Constitution to do this limited program. The Congress has been briefed. It is fully in line with the Constitution and also protecting American civil liberties."

Disclosure of the N.S.A. program has already caused ripples in the legal system, with a judge resigning in protest from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court last week. The surveillance court, established by Congress in 1978 to grant warrants in terrorism and espionage cases, wants a briefing from the Bush administration on why it bypassed the court and ordered eavesdropping without warrants.

At the same time, defense lawyers in terrorism cases around the country say they are preparing letters and legal briefs to challenge the N.S.A. program on behalf of their clients, many of them American citizens, and to find out more about how it might have been used. They acknowledge legal hurdles, including the fact that many defendants waived some rights to appeal as part of their plea deals.

Government officials, in defending the value of the security agency's surveillance program, have said in interviews that it played a critical part in at least two cases that led to the convictions of Qaeda associates, Iyman Faris of Ohio, who admitted taking part in a failed plot to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge, and Mohammed Junaid Babar of Queens, who was implicated in a failed plot to bomb British targets.

David B. Smith, a lawyer for Mr. Faris, said he planned to file a motion in part to determine whether information about the surveillance program should have been turned over. Lawyers said they were also considering a civil case against the president, saying that Mr. Faris was the target of an illegal wiretap ordered by Mr. Bush. A lawyer for Mr. Babar declined to comment.

Government officials with knowledge of the program have not ruled out the possibility that it was used in other criminal cases, and a number of defense lawyers said in interviews that circumstantial evidence had led them to question whether the security agency identified their clients through wiretaps.

The first challenge is likely to come in Florida, where lawyers for two men charged with Jose Padilla, who is jailed as an enemy combatant, plan to file a motion as early as next week to determine if the N.S.A. program was used to gain incriminating information on their clients and their suspected ties to Al Qaeda. Kenneth Swartz, one of the lawyers in the case, said, "I think they absolutely have an obligation to tell us" whether the agency was wiretapping the defendants. In a Virginia case, Edward B. MacMahon Jr., a lawyer for Ali al-Timimi, a Muslim scholar in Alexandria who is serving a life sentence for inciting his young followers to wage war against the United States overseas, said the government's explanation of how it came to suspect Mr. Timimi of terrorism ties never added up in his view.

F.B.I. agents were at Mr. Timimi's door days after the Sept. 11 attacks to question him about possible links to terrorism, Mr. MacMahon said, yet the government did not obtain a warrant through the foreign intelligence court to eavesdrop on his conversations until many months later.

Mr. MacMahon said he was so skeptical about the timing of the investigation that he questioned the Justice Department about whether some sort of unknown wiretap operation had been conducted on the scholar or his young followers, who were tied to what prosecutors described as a "Virginia jihad" cell.

"They told me there was no other surveillance," Mr. MacMahon said. "But the fact is that the case against a lot of these guys just came out of nowhere because they were really nobodies, and it makes you wonder whether they were being tapped."

John Zwerling, a lawyer for one of Mr. Timimi's followers, Seifullah Chapman, who is serving a 65-year sentence in federal prison in the case, said he and lawyers for two of the other defendants in the case planned to send a letter to the Justice Department to find out if N.S.A. wiretaps were used against their clients. If the Justice Department declines to give an answer, Mr. Zwerling said, they plan to file a motion in court demanding access to the information.

"We want to know, Did this N.S.A. program make its way into our case, and how was it used?" Mr. Zwerling said. "It may be a difficult trail for us in court, but we're going to go down it as far as we can."

Defense lawyers in several other high-profile terrorism prosecutions, including the so-called Portland Seven and Lackawanna Six cases, said they were also planning to file legal challenges or were reviewing their options.

"Given what information has come out, with the president admitting that they had avoided the courts, then the question becomes, do you try to learn whether something like that happened in this case?" said Patrick Brown, a Buffalo lawyer in the Lackawanna case. "I would have to talk to my client about whether that's a road we want to go down."

Gerry Spence, who is the lead counsel representing Brandon Mayfield, a Portland lawyer who was arrested in error last year in connection with the Madrid bombings and is now suing the government, said of the security agency program: "We are going to look into that. The calmest word I can use to describe how I feel about this is that I am aghast."

Because the program was so highly classified, government officials say, prosecutors who handled terrorism cases apparently did not know of the program's existence. Any information they received, the officials say, was probably carefully shielded to protect the true source.

But defense lawyers say they are eager to find out whether prosecutors - intentionally or not - misled the courts about the origins of their investigations and whether the government may have held on to N.S.A. wiretaps that could point to their clients' innocence.

Stanley Cohen, a New York lawyer who represented Patrice Lumumba Ford in the Portland Seven case, said many defendants would face significant obstacles in mounting legal challenges to force the government to reveal whether material obtained through the security agency's program was used in their cases.

"You really could have standing problems" for many of the defendants, Mr. Cohen said.

But some Justice Department prosecutors, speaking on condition of anonymity because the program remains classified, said they were concerned that the agency's wiretaps without warrants could create problems for the department in terrorism prosecutions both past and future.

"If I'm a defense attorney," one prosecutor said, "the first thing I'm going to say in court is, 'This was an illegal wiretap.' "

The NSA surveillance program is ineffective in monitoring terrorists

Yglesias, Matthew, reporter for The American Prospect, published at http://www.tpmcafe.com, "Doing the Math," December 26th, 2005

Legal issues aside, is having the NSA do some kind of wide-net surveillance for the purposes of counterterrorist data mining a good idea? Arguably, yes, but it's very hard to know without knowing more about the program. But here's a thought. Suppose I have an algorithm that's supposed to listen to a certain amount of recorded conversation and evaluate whether or not the speaker is a terrorist. It's a pretty damn good program, but thanks to the inherent difficulty of the task, the challenges of voice-recognition and dealing with foreign languages, etc., it has a ten percent error rate. That's to say -- if the program says you're a terrorist, nine times out of ten you are, in fact, a terrorist. That's a pretty decent program. So what happens if we put it into use on a widespread basis? Well, it sort of depends:


Dec 26, 2005 -- 12:24:30 PM EST
Suppose we had a group of 1,000 people we were interested in monitoring and 900 of them are terrorists. The program will correctly itentify 810 terrorists as terrorists. 10 terrorists will evade its clutches. Out of the 100 non-terrorists, 90 will be correctly identified as innocent, and 10 will be wrongly labeled as terrorists. That seems pretty useful.

But say we have a group of 1,000 suspects and only 100 of them are terrorists. A ten percent shot that a given person is a terrorists doesn't reach the "probable cause" standard, but seeing as how thousands of lives could easily be on the line, maybe we want to relax the burden of proof and run the 1,000 through the program. Well, we'll catch 90 terrorists out of the 100, which is good. But out of the 900 non-terrorists, 90 innocent people are going to get labeled terrorists. In other words, out of the 180 people the program will say are terrorists, we can expect half to actually be innocent. Thus, even though the algorithm only has a very small 10 percent error rate, the overall surveillance program makes a lot of mistakes.

If we expand the program things get worse. Say we want to monitor a group of 10,000 people that includes 200 terrorists. We're going to catch 180 actual terrorists plus a whopping 980 innocent people. Thus, out of our total pool of 1,160 "terrorists" only 15.5 percent will genuinely be terrorists.

Depending on what we do with the output of the program, this could be very problematic. If, for example, the CIA picks up all the purported terrorists and subjects them to "coercive interrogations" we're going to be torturing a bunch of innocent people. Worse, coercive techniques are going to lead to a lot of innocent people "confessing" and probably "ratting out" various other innocent people. This is bad on its own terms, but it's also going to further pollute our basic data pool with all kinds of wrong information. Lather, rinse, repeat and all of a sudden you're looking at a witch hunt rather than a serious counterterrorism program.

And that's all assuming the program comes in with a very low 10 percent error rate. Even something as bad as a 25 percent error rate might look like an appealing tool. And it could be, in some ways, but the number of innocent people swept up by an algorithm like that could be absolutely enormous, especially if the program is being deployed in a very wide-net manner as sort of seems to be the case.

Of course, if you do something less drastic than torturing the people labeled by the program, this might not be so bad. Or it might be pretty bad after all. It sort of winds up depending on what, exactly, you do with the information. It also depends, as the math here shows, on how many terrorists there actually are and how wide a net the program casts. We don't know any of that, which makes it impossible to say what we're talking about. But this sort of thing is the reason any big surveillance program needs fairly robust oversight. Not only do members of congress need to be able to monitor it, but they're going to need to be able to consult relevant experts -- computer people, counterterrorism people, etc. -- who could say something meaningful about how well it works. And they're going to need to know what the government is doing with the data it mines, since even a very reliable data mining program can produce a lot of errors depending on how big the needle-haystack ratio is. My sense with regard to terrorism is that we're looking for a quite small number of needles in a pretty large haystack of "Muslim people with anti-American views" or whatever, which gives me a lot of concern.

A/T Legitimacy

Protection of individuals from state intrusion is key to court vitality

Grossenbacher

Some fear constitutional adjudication in the federal courts will lose its legitimacy as the activity of judges becomes, at least in the public perception, more politicized and less principled. n36 This concern, however, is misplaced. Courts could hardly fulfill their historical function of protecting individuals from state overreaching unless substantive constitutional rights and the adjudicative process that governs them are continually adapted to maintain their vitality in the face of changing social standards and practices. If, in the future, the structural injunction and what it portends for the role of the courts in society causes more problems than it solves, then the courts will have to adapt again. Better to allow courts flexibility than to restrict their function because of overstated concerns about where this flexibility may lead.

solvency

Contempt damages shield individual freedoms

Karla Grossenbacher, "Implementing Structural Injunctions: Getting a Remedy When Local Officials Resist," 80 Georgetown Law Review 2227, 1992

Traditionally, when an individual's constitutional rights were violated, judges redressed the violations either by ordering government officials to pay damages to compensate for prior injuries or by subjecting the officials to preventative injunctions that prohibited specific future actions. The judge's emphasis was on prescribing government action (and compensating for government inaction) in an effort to shield individual freedoms from government intrusion.

Contempt fines against individuals are permissible

Grossenbacher

The Court held that the district court had abused its discretion when it imposed contempt sanctions on the individual councilmembers for refusing to vote in the way prescribed by the district court order. The Court stated that Judge Sand "should have proceeded with such contempt sanctions first against the city alone in order to secure compliance with the remedial order." Only if that approach failed to achieve compliance within a reasonable time should Judge Sand have considered contempt sanctions against the individual councilmembers. The Court in Spallone did not reach any of the constitutional issues presented, nor did it decide whether local legislators were entitled to immunity for their actions. The Court held only that Judge Sand had abused his discretion by imposing contempt fines on the individual officials and the city simultaneously. Thus, the Court left open the question whether contempt fines would be permissible against the individuals if the bankrupting fine was not successful in achieving compliance.