Unsurprising, but still disappointing. Actually I'm glad someone is trying to hold them accountable. It seems silly tho that we need to pass a law to uphold what's already written into the constitution. It highlights that the constitution only has teeth in some legal contexts, primarily where a court case is being heard on a citizen being prosecuted. Conditionality seems to not have any bearing on preventing agencies from violating the constitution or stopping them when they're found out, nor punishing those responsible for the violation.
This, among a few other nuggets of which I was unaware, are described in Snowden’s book Permanent Record (although briefly, it’s a biography first and foremost) which I enjoyed.
Given the extreme asshattery history of Assange, it seems just as probable that he was mostly trying to get some attention with guesses and then later claimed that it was a deliberate disinformation campaign.
Unless you are quite rich and powerful, saying that what Assange has done is mostly "asshattery" is dishonest, yes he has had flukes but consider the mental state of someone being prosecuted and hunted by the most powerful and corrupt people in our planet, mostly what Assange has done s good and denying and calling him an asshat is dishonest and shows a clear bias on your part
We don't expect public figures to be humans anymore. You're never allowed to make mistakes and some video of you from 2-yrs ago in college can be a reputation killer.
This is a very irrational mindset and we'd have no great minds of history because they were immature at a young age.
People constantly grow, learn, and improve themselves. They also make mistakes or act emotionally.
I feel like we've entered a social media era where only the flawless and speaking within socially acceptable Overton window are given a chance.
> I feel like we've entered a social media era where only the flawless and speaking within socially acceptable Overton window are given a chance.
It has nothing to do with flawless. Nobody is flawless. Even if they were, half the things people are now being condemned for aren't even rooted in fact.
You can't attack someone like Assange for revealing official misconduct. That's against the rules, and unsympathetic. But you can attack him for <something else>. The something else is irrelevant. It's only the proffered reason for the attack, not the real one.
Your defense seems to boil down to asshattery being understandable when one is persecuted by national security organisations.
That would be a valid defense of Assange -- if the asshattery had come after the persecution. But from all I've read about him, it was the other way around. He has always been a humongous asshat.
No, colluding with the GRU to create false documents interfering with the US Presidential election, resulting in the disaster that was Trump's election can not, in any sense, be called 'good'.
Yes, that is very bad. It also never happened. There are only vague claims from the US intelligence services to this effect, which mean less than nothing.
this has never been proven. but it was the final blow to his public image after the rape charges. from then on most intel / infosec people who still remained partial moved on to condemning him.
Even if he had collaborated would it matter? what it proves is that you can not do OSINT and be "independant/neutral". bellingcat and all other self-proclaimed citizen journalists know it too. the message here is "if you stand up against the US and hang out in a FVEY country you're dead".
collaborating with enemies of US (no matter if DPRK, Iran or whoever) would be justified considering the nature of the material which was exposed. but doing so without thinking about his ___location and safety is the most "I can fix society because I'm a hacker" thing I've ever seen. it is a small crime though in comparison to the shit the US has gotten away and still does so until today. e.g. Gitmo and black sites are still operating, drones still kill civilians, their war on terror will go unpunished, people are still being brainwashed into believing "US army good", the CIA is still executing people overseas the same way as the FSB, while they shout "terror" or talk a big game about "law and justice" their crimes can't be held accountable in the ICC: pot. kettle. black.
Law is primarily about voluntary submission, not power. A law that is followed only as long as it is enforced is not much of a law and is unlikely to last.
In terms of your broader point, something about restricting the authority of a law-giving entity via the law seems paradoxical. An example of this paradox is the fact that it's difficult to have standing to sue the government over an illegal spying program that is classified.
The best we seem to be able to do is the future-government holding the past-government accountable.
> Law is primarily about voluntary submission, not power
Power is itself largely a product of voluntary submission, which radiates out. When some people voluntarily submit to the putative leadership, including in its request to back up the leaders orders with force when necessary, to report violations, etc., it increases the inclination of other people of others to submit without force being directly applied, and so on.
This is a semantic argument. I agree that power flows from consensus. When it doesn't, we're talking about coercion, force, and violence, not power. But the word power is often used colloquially to mean those things: coercion, force, violence, and that's how I was using it.
> When it doesn't, we're talking about coercion, force, and violence, not power
“Power”, at least in the social sense, is the ability to get people to act as you wish; idealized moral or rational persuasion is one mechanism of that, the direct application or imminent threat of violence is a mechanism, and there’s a whole spectrum in between. But a leader’s ability, in practice, to apply power (by any mechanism) over a population is largely due to the successful use of power to influence a group of agents to act on behalf of the leader, and their application of power to others, etc. We might talk as if the state is a real concrete thing, but its really just an abstraction of the penumbra of indirect power emanating outward from the leadership.
First you said "power is itself largely a product of voluntary submission". Then you said "'power', at least in the social sense, is the ability to get people to act as you wish".
These are not commensurate statements. If submission is voluntary, you aren't "getting people" to do anything...they're doing it voluntarily. Anyway, from what you write, it's clear you don't believe that anything is voluntary.
> Idealized moral or rational persuasion is one mechanism of that, the direct application or imminent threat of violence is a mechanism, and there’s a whole spectrum in between. But a leader’s ability, in practice, to apply power (by any mechanism) over a population is largely due to the successful use of power to influence a group of agents to act on behalf of the leader, and their application of power to others, etc. We might talk as if the state is a real concrete thing, but its really just an abstraction of the penumbra of indirect power emanating outward from the leadership.
Power is the possession of a group of people rooted in their ability to act in concert (i.e. their voluntary submission or assent to something). "Persuasion," moral or immoral, rational or irrational, doesn't come into it. And power is never the possession of a leader or a party or anything like that. You mistake power for authority, coercive force, and violence.
For you, all political categories run together in a category you call "power". This view does not acknowledge the fact that people can voluntarily choose to act together. Everything for you is about "persuasion," "threat of violence," "influence," and so on. As I said, you don't believe that anything is voluntary. This is a political philosophy that cannot make meaningful distinctions between political things.
Those are all forms or uses of power. Where English uses one word, "power," the French use two, puissance and pouvoir, referring to "strength/energy" and "influence/control" respectively (and very roughly translated).
The problem is that certain of our laws are written in a way that makes them hard to enforce, especially when the people breaking those laws are part of the government. Often the problem is that the only people with the authority to charge someone with a crime are specific people in a specific government organization. If those are the people breaking laws, there may literally be no outside party with the legal authority to charge them with the crime they've done. That can be changed, it just takes a lot of work and understanding. People generally don't have a very good understanding of the law, and part of the reason is that law is pretty much intentionally complex and obfuscated.
> Law is primarily about voluntary submission, not power.
Let me know how that works out for you, k? I can assure you that although state power ultimately comes from the people, the state most definitely will enforce its laws against you, should you break them. That is, unless you're rich and powerful enough to afford the best lawyers and a handful of legislators.
The state is rarely capable of enforcing the law on more than a small minority of lawbreakers because enforcing the law is expensive.
If there's a busy road where people are routinely speeding, the state is actually incapable of pulling every single speeder over and ticketing them. Instead, the state relies on setting reasonable speed limits and scaring drivers with the prospect of fines.
This isn't a personal philosophy as much as it is a statement of truth: it's really expensive to enforce laws.
>The state is rarely capable of enforcing the law on more than a small minority of lawbreakers
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
― A.I. Solzhenitsyn
>the state is actually incapable of pulling every single speeder over and ticketing them.
a) technology exists where you can just record license plates and send speeding tickets automatically - which is a nice prallel for mass surveilance tech - it makes large scale enforcement much cheaper
b) you don't really need to enforce on everyone, a high deterrant + random enforcement creates strong incentives against doing something (ie. making examples)
The state is definitely capable of detecting every single speeder and sending them a ticket. You just need some smart centralization, wire traffic cameras and doppler radars on every corner, program tracking algorithms and decode the license plates to match them with the owner and record a fine.
Sometimes it does, which provides an interesting case study that proves slibhb's point -- "A law that is followed only as long as it is enforced is not much of a law and is unlikely to last."
One example is a portion of interstate near the St. Louis airport that runs through St. Ann, MO. (right next to Ferguson, MO), which resulted in changes to state law [1].
Many other munis in that region -- most notably Ferguson -- went far beyond strips of interstate and handed out fines as abundantly as possible, enforcing every law with an iron fist. And then the whole area exploded into chaos, reverberating out of the local community and, over a period of years, boiled over in dozens of communities.
It may have been a bit overstated, but the core point is solid.
One of the main reasons the war on drugs failed is a lack of voluntary submission. Pure enforcement, even with the progressive strengthing of enforcement powers, was simply unable to stop drugs being widely available in the USA.
Our society runs on trust and voluntary submission to the rule of law. If either of those went away in a signifant fashion, the our legal system and society in general would cease to function in it's current form.
Except you have it backwards. The "War on Drugs" came about as a way for the state to exert power over youth and minorities.
> “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.
> “You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
I'm not sure I'd accept the family's statement at face value. In fact that's the statement I'd expect out of them completely orthogonally to it's veracity.
Additionally I don't find the subsequent argument compelling. 'Sure Nixon hated hippies and blacks, but it wasn't an effective policy until workshopped by subsequent presidents, so targetting those groups couldn't have been the point" doesn't really hold a lot of weight for me.
On top of all of that, corroborating quotes seem to keep being removed from that wikipage, with an edit note that doesn't match the edit, pointing to brigading.
Interesting, would you mind to point to one of such edit you mention? I cannot see to what you refer. I see removal of newsmax URL few times, however that linked article is not supporting of Harper's original as I read. Perhaps I am not viewing enough backwards in history.
I don't see what's dubious about it. There doesn't seem to be any evidence the quote was fabricated, and the effects of US drug policy are apparent to anyone who lifts their head out of the sand.
You don't think Nixon could have disliked blacks, hippies, and drugs, and just found a convenient way to tie them all together while at the same time being able to say "think of the children?" Nixon was many things, but dumb and politically naive are not among them.
"voluntary submission" sounds like people that walk around claiming to be a sovereign citizen thereby exempt from "laws". i always find it funny that the ones screaming this the loudest are usually in the midst of some sort of legal troubles.
> This isn't true, look at for example the nineteenth amendment (men giving up power).
That wasn’t giving up power, it was trying to regain power by no longer claiming power through the abstraction of law that there was insufficient support to practically exercise and which claiming, as a result, merely diminished the general power of the State, because it reinforced in the public eye the gulf between law and power, reducing willingness to defer t9 the former in general.
Not everyone + you is "we". Lots of people are hurt by bad laws; your appreciation for your government's laws tends to correlate to how much money or clout you have. Mainly because it allows you to ignore them.
Parent post isn’t arguing against the existence of laws. They’re illustrating that laws have limits and can be overcome by entities that wield enough power.
Look at the post above yours. Yes, some want to make the case that laws on the whole are essentially oppressive. Whether of not foucault made that case precisely, or whatever, is totally irrelevant if it’s what most people actual mean, viz that laws are the tools by which the powerless are oppressed.
The US government was hacking Google by tapping cables between its data centers with direct access to Google accounts. The US government was paying tech companies for data on their customers. The US government had Verizon turn over phone records on millions of their customers daily. The US government used other countries spy agencies to spy on US citizens.
The Constitution is just a piece of paper. It is powerless if people ignore it.
It's the same with presidents, kings, and dictators. If people just stopped doing what they said, they become nothing.
There's an incident in Soviet history where Stalin was sure they were coming to arrest and execute him. He was shaking and completely powerless. But they were just coming to affirm his power.
The Arab Spring came about because people stopped following orders.
When Nixon was on his way out, the military decided to not follow his orders (so I've read).
The US will end when people just decide Constitution Shmonstitution.
Gun control is neither here nor there for me personally, but what greatly concerns me is if the Bill of Rights is ignored wrt the 2nd Amendment, then what about the rest of the Bill of Rights? Is that next?
This reminds me of the tension between the Confucians and the Legalists in ancient Chinese Philosophy; as well as Étienne de La Boétie with his [1] Discourse on Voluntary Servitude.
The Legalists believed that if you had good laws then the rest would take care of itself. They "advocated government by a system of laws that rigidly prescribed punishments and rewards for specific behaviours. They stressed the direction of all human activity toward the goal of increasing the power of the ruler and the state."[2]
But the Confucians, particularly Mencius, pointed out that good men would create the good laws; while bad men would corrupt good laws. The laws were important for the ordering of society but insufficient. i.e. : "The sage-kings of antiquity are a model, but one cannot simply adopt their customs and institutions and expect to govern effectively (4A1). Instead, one must emulate the sage-kings both in terms of outer structures (good laws, wise policies, correct rituals) and in terms of inner motivations (placing ren and yi first). Like Confucius, Mencius places an enormous amount of confidence in the capacity of the ordinary person to respond to an extraordinary ruler, so as to put the world in order." [3]
To borrow from the Confucians; the Constitution is a product of good men and good laws to help protect goodness and order in society, but without good men to continue to have a living embodiment of the principles, it is still just a law that can be corrupted or ignored.
A beautiful quote from Etienne that you reminded me of is this, where he advocates to simply stop supporting tyrants: "Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces."
Tyrants only have power because people choose to follow.
Indeed we just had a bit of a lesson in the recent past which showed exactly how dependent our country is (and probably most other countries as well) on shared values and tradition. The Constitution isn't all-powerful as a piece of paper, its real power is as an idea.
The real power is consensus in an idea. Hopefully that idea is good but ultimately, you need critical mass to accept an idea or reject it.
If people in the US really want to grab back power to the citizens of this country it can be done (peacefully even). All it really takes is a large enough consensus of voters to upend all the garbage we're being subjected to. The issue is that the consensus is more difficult to reach due to the scale of the US voter population combined with tactics like gerrymandering and overall difficulty of orchestrating movements to support ideals most people seem to support (which isn't oppressing a minority unless we classify power and wealth hungry individuals as a protected minority which we currently seem to do).
Reaching consensus amongst citizens is far far more difficult these days, giving an edge to those already sitting in positions of concentrated power with fewer players, lending itself more likely to reach a consensus. It doesn't help that those in power actively try and divide the general voter population and set us against one another making it even more difficult to reach a consensus.
I think it's more a coordination problem than a consensus problem. Ditching first past the post for approval voting or somesuch would likely solve a lot of issues.
The problem with the constitution is that it provides few good legal mechanisms to enforce the provisions of the constitution. It doesn't incentivize government officers and representatives to follow the constitution. If there were clear consequences for doing things or supporting things that violate the constitution, and if there were clear procedures for indictment with a broad ability for those procedures to be started, we would be in a far beter position to protect the constitution. As it stands, lawmakers can just create unconstitutional laws that are in place for years or even decades until someone brings it all the way to the supreme court. And once they do, the lawmakers that created those laws aren't held responsible at all - no consequences for them. That must change if we want to protect the constitution.
The 2nd Amendment is always a great point in these kind of debates if any other right had half as many restrictions on it people would be on the streets. Requiring an ID to vote is viewed as completely unacceptable by many but the very same people think it's perfectly reasonable to require it for other rights.
The right of voting is more essential, however, it is the sine qua non of all the others. If we fall down to the point where guns are required to indeed defend the rights, they functionally are not existing any more.
Although to distinguish the 2nd Amendment, its the language specifically mentions firearm ownership in connection with a "well regulated militia." There are disagreements about the effect of that part of the text, but it's worth mentioning.
On the contrary. Many other key rights in the US are curtailed and restricted - like security against unreasonable search and seizure, the subject of this story - while the right to bear arms has been expanded massively in recent decades beyond the context of allowing for a well-regulated militia.
Also, people _have_ been in the streets in the US last year, a lot...
i'd go one step further and prohibit our government from surveilling any non-governmental foreigner without an auditable warrant, and strictly prohibit corporations with heavy sanctions from sharing any non-governmental surveillance with the government whatsoever (on top of existing privacy laws of course). the government should be in service, not in command, of the people.
The text of the US constitution explicitly talks about the rights of people, not citizens - so I would argue that the constitution itself has always prohibited this.
However, there is a long history of interpreting 'people' to mean specific groups - from only white people to only citizens.
> The text of the US constitution explicitly talks about the rights of people, not citizens - so I would argue that the constitution itself has always prohibited this.
No, it talks about "the people." As in the preamble: "We the People of the United States."
> However, there is a long history of interpreting 'people' to mean specific groups - from only white people to only citizens.
Playing with the interpretation of "people" has never been a mechanism for excluding people from constitutional protection. For example, the 3/5ths clause states as follows:
> Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons
It refers to enslaved people as "persons." The Fugitive Slave clause likewise refers to a "person held to service or labour."
>As in the preamble: "We the People of the United States."
The preamble is discussing who is creating the constitution and why. It does not say it only applies to certain individuals. I don't see how you can use that to argue that the government is free to infringe upon the rights of noncitizens.
As a grammatical matter, the phrase “the people” must refer to an antecedent. Even standing alone, “the people” clearly refers to certain people, not “all people.” The term isn’t read as applying only to citizens, because certain provisions of the constitution specifically require citizenship. It encompasses citizens and non-citizen residents, and to some extent people present on US soil. But it’s hard to read “the people” to mean “people in other countries.”
>But it’s hard to read “the people” to mean “people in other countries.”
The Constitution makes it clear that these rights are universal by saying that the government may not make laws that infringe upon them. They aren't granting rights, they are declaring which rights they must abide by. And with that, the use of "the people" in the part about free assembly should rely more on the context there then the preamble, where it clearly means "the people assembling" not "the citizens assembling."
Further on your "persons" point, the relevant Fourth Amendment makes it clear the terms are interchangeable.
>The right of the people to be secure in their persons...
No it doesn’t. The condition of slavery wasn’t addressed by interpreting “people” to exclude enslaved people, additional words were added to distinguish enslaved people from free people. But free Black people, for example, were always included in the count of “free persons.” Other laws may have imposed limits. In 1789 women couldn’t vote and in 2021 children still can’t. But they were all included in the definition of “people.” Those other laws changed but the meaning of “people” didn’t.
The first half of your argument is about how the constitution specifies citizens (a subset of people) with "we the people". The second half is about how "we the people" refers to everyone (not a subset of people).
yes, i'd generally agree, but not everyone does. and we see that politicians are relentlessly driven to expand their own power, so soemtimes we need to spell out limitations like this explicitly.
The US government has a history of requesting extraordinary powers for extraordinary situations and never give them back. All the modern surveillance apparatus had its beginning during WW2. When the war was over, instead of pacifying the world, they immediately switched to create a cold war against a former ally to justify an even more expensive surveillance apparatus. With the end of former Soviet Union, instead of dismantling the surveillance industry, they started to create new enemies around the world, so people would be coerced to keep them employed against the interests of the population.
The government only has the powers granted to it by the constitution. If the power for the executive to unilaterally conduct searches was not given to it, then it doesn't have it. Just because it doesn't say the government can't surveil foreigners doesn't mean they can - it has to specifically say the government is granted the right to surveil foreigners. And there's really very little reason to think that a power never granted to the government in the first place in the case of Americans was actually, somehow in secret, granted in the cases of non-Americans.
Government exercises exactly the powers it claims and is not restrained from exercising. E.g., the US Constitution does not grant the Executive branch the power to torture prisoners taken without due process. Instead, persons nominally overseen by the Executive branch exercise those powers exactly until they are exposed and stopped.
The main use of surveillance is, always and everywhere, extortion. We see this daily among local, state, and federal police, abusing it to coerce the public to become informants; among prosecutors to coerce false admissions of guilt; and among spooks to convert formerly free individuals to "assets", and to enforce silence about abuses. It is used to coerce judges to issue unjust orders and decisions, to coerce witnesses to remain silent, and to coerce elected officials to vote against the interest of their constituents, or even to step down from an elected position or not to seek re-election. It is used to coerce awarding contracts or custom to undeserving suppliers, or to coerce lower prices in services sold.
Coercion need not be based on surveillance of the person coerced; it can come from surveillance of parents, siblings, offspring, friends, business partners, customers, service providers.
'Any non-governmental foreigner' includes the vast number of non-official-cover spies sent by other nations. The government is to serve the people, but it must balance the fact that other world powers and enemy nations are seeking to undermine the nation.
then get a warrant since spying is probable cause. but no warrant, no surveillance. and the warrant should be reviewable/challengeable by more than a secret/military court. transparency and balance of power are crucial to maintaining a service (rather than a domineering) orientation.
also, foreign governments in general spy with non-cover agents not to undermine our (US) government secretly, but to get an edge for their own power and prestige. undermining activities usually happen either with government agents for high secrecy operations (like stuxnet) or relatively openly if obscurely (disinformation/propaganda campaigns).
the long-running encroachment against our liberties has been largely due to fundamental misgivings/misunderstandings like 'everyone is out to get us'. those are the same impulses that led us to performative responses to a pandemic rather than relatively minimal but targeted federal action (e.g., honest information dissemination and financial support for r&d and the at-risk/marginalized).
Congress is corrupt (via lobbyist money) which causes this problem.
The DoD tracks large scale threats to our nation. When the economy is rigged, then the establishment worries about the citizen base turning on the establishment.
Congress corruption (via lobbyiests) happens by:
a) Wall Street rigged economy HF front-running trades,
b) Wall Street is rigged
c) 2008 Mortgage crisis theft
d) Pharma is rigged
e) Medical costs are out of control. Every price fixes are killed by lobbyists): Hillary, Obama cost controls, etc.
DAVOS had the economic elites paranoid about a citizen uprising due to a rigged economy. The rigged economy would be fixed by congress (if they didn't sell out to lobbyists, to not fix it).
DoD doesn't do surveillance due to lobbying. They do it because they view a potential risk in citizen uprising due to the rigged economy. DoD and Davos attendees share a worry about a risk from the citizen base.
> It seems silly tho that we need to pass a law to uphold what's already written into the constitution.
The constitution only grants or limits power of various branches of government, it doesn't prescribe punishments for breaking the rules. That's a job of Congress (or courts, for civil cases).
Even if the Constitution did prescribe punishments (what's a law without enforcement? wishful thinking.), everyone seems to think that just because there's some lines in the constitution that the matter is settled. We've been debating the constitution since it was written. We need laws to be tested in order to find out if they can or should be changed, or if we need to do something else.
>> It seems silly tho that we need to pass a law to uphold what's already written into the constitution.
The argument is probably pretty simple. These companies will sell your data to anyone for the right price, why would a government agency be any different. It's probably not a search or seizure, just a purchase between parties that don't even include any specific member of the public.
First congress needs to make all this data selling and trading illegal, then we'll see how the government goes about obtaining it and weather that's legal or not. But too many lobbyists represent companies that make a ton of money on it, and of course these agencies would prefer to just purchase the data "legally", so I'm not terribly optimistic.
I very much disagree. Yes the constitution has been violated many times. But without the constitution, its tenants would be violated constantly everywhere in the country. Nothing is perfect, and the outcomes brought the constitution being imperfect is no indictment of the document.
it is often stated that locks are not for honest people, but to keep dishonest people out.
can be applied to US constitution as additional laws needed not for those who WANT to uphold the US constitution but those who want to violate it.
Most of you probably already saw a Michigan-congress rep submit a bill to violate the US constitution by trying to force twitter posters to register with Michigan to post facts because he wanted to prevent others from outing him in the form of fact checking.
> it is often stated that locks are not for honest people, but to keep dishonest people out.
The saying goes the other way: "Locks are for honest people", implying that criminals aren't deterred by locks, and will just break a window if they want to get in.
The statutory limit on US army general staff is 241, and most of those guys are quite recent retirees.
Countries had putsches with much lesser portion of generals mutinying, and some times made without general staff involvement as such. In fact there are almost as much succesful putches on record by majors, and colonels, than generals.
They mean making it into the White House I believe. Ron Paul would certainly attempt to dismantle it, and he'd fail miserably (he'd never win election to begin with though).
The larger confusion on the part of the parent is thinking the President is in charge of much of anything or has the power to dismantle any of these deep state perma structures that have been built up in the post WW2 era; these are structures that survive any given administration, regardless of political agenda, and which nobody really dares to challenge. That includes the always expanding spying systems and military industrial complex. Any President that tries it will be burned out of DC every which way possible. Instant lame duck, crippled by their own party, on the outs with the news media (which is entirely a pet of the deep state), lambasted coming and going, tripped up in staged scandals set up by deep state opponents in the FBI or CIA, probably get impeached a few times for relatively trivial things (vs, say, starting wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya that got a million plus people killed; you know, things you should actually get impeached for). The President is more of a token figurehead today than not.
I don't believe that. First, a pres. in their second term can do it without fear of electoral repercussions to themselves. And these days there's so much made up stuff that half the country believes that it wouldn't make any real difference in the big picture.
There was the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee after all. The people that benefit from the current situation would be against changing it of course. But I agree it's extremely unlikely to be changed. I think the reason is that most federal elected politicians have a comfort with what these groups are doing that gives them a sense that we need these things. Something like "we are doing a terrible amount of spying on americans but it's protecting us". Plus they get campaign donations from the military industrial and spying complexes. And not much attention is given to the fact that a dishonorable leader could use this to start blackmailing opponents and maybe even ultimately control the population. Fortunately we haven't ever come close to a leader like that, ha ha.
I'm skeptical of this media blackout. I heard lots of people talking about this, he was on podcasts, I saw him interviewed. Look at how much discussion there is about him running in NYC. I think it was much more that there were a whole lot of credible people running and there wasn't enough air in the room for him to get much. I saw every losing group complain of the election being stolen from them in some way, Warren, Sanders, Yang.
> I saw every losing group complain of the election being stolen from them in some way, Warren, Sanders, Yang.
The irony of this statement is you see it as evidence of there being no conspiracy, but I see it as exactly the opposite. Maybe everyone complaining about the same problem means the problem is real?
Easiest mainstream evidence is treatment of candidates in debates — which, reminder, are operated entirely by...basically whoever in academia or media.
I didn't watch your link (I rarely follow stray YouTube links). However regarding Ron Paul, I don't envy what he has endured in his lifetime from moronic opponents on both sides of the political aisle. The YouTube video of him being harangued & attacked by zombie anti-drug zealots on the Morton Downey Jr show is enough to feel sorry for him for a lifetime.
Persevere, though? Anyone that dares to tell the truth today is begging for a blacklisting. That's what building the big tech censorship systems is all about (which will be America's version of the great firewall), being able to dictate what the supposed truth is for any given topic at any given moment in time. It's a martyrs game, telling the truth, I assume Ron Paul has known that for a long time.
Can't say I'm surprised, the left didn't want to make huge news about it because it made Trump look good (and the establishment left supports the Patriot Act), and the right establishment/military supports the Patriot Act as well so they didn't want to raise a hubbub about it.
Just in case anyone sees that and thinks it was due to any sort of principles or concerns about mass surveillance, a quote from the article: "Thank you to our GREAT Republican Congressmen & Congresswomen on your incredibly important blockage last night of a FISA Bill that would just perpetuate the abuse that produced the Greatest Political Crime In the History of the U.S., the Russian Witch-Hunt. Fantastic Job!"
The campaign was certainly surveilled. Have you seen any indication it was unwarranted? I found https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/03/doj-fbi-review-of-s..., which suggests nothing untoward was going on. As I said, I don't think Trump was approaching this in a particularly well-considered way.
> The campaign was certainly surveilled. Have you seen any indication it was unwarranted?
If it was any other campaign and there was sigint that a foreign power was trying to influence the campaign then they would have reached out to the candidate to alert him as such. But the intention here was not to prevent foreign tampering. It was to use the FISA process as an excuse to surveil the campaign wholesale.
That's not entirely true either. The Trump campaign did receive intelligence briefings in 2016 and there is evidence, although no official confirmation, that Russia was discussed. [1]
Well good. The Russian Witch Hunt was an illegal spying against an American president, who is also an American citizen. While it's not the best look I guess, at some point, I guess the president himself will need to be affected by this shit before they finally get rid of it.
Yes, blame GWB. But I'm not sure why you're giving a pass to Obama, Trump, and Biden. Their failure to address it is every bit as bad as anything that was (presumably) set up under Bush.
The thing I still can't fathom, all these years after Bush II and then Snowden, is just how little human beings really care about mass surveillance. Yeah, the Snowden leaks made a splash, but the media cycle turned over a couple weeks later and everyone moved onto other things.
It's like, if you're of a certain age, you had to read 1984 or whatever in school. You'd think "well, no one would stand for that sort of thing in real life!" Okay, so we don't live in that society, exactly, but time after time, we're shown the breadth of government surveillance and the reaction from the broader public isn't to call for anyone's head on a pike -- it's not even to vote anyone out!
Outside of little communities like this one, people don't give much of a fuck. I guess that was Orwell's real point.
I think most people would oppose it if the media were really presenting it as an issue to keep in mind. However, most of the people in the media are very much supporters of such powers, as they are deep believers in the rightness of US institutions and their 'fundamentally benign' nature. If you look at the media, most are still in support of every single war America has ever been in, with the only opposition being on matters of strategy (e.g. "The US should have retreated from Vietnam earlier", not "there was no defensible reason for the war in Vietnam, it was just a blatant display of imperialism"). And I'm not talking about Fox (who pride themselves on such views), but even the most liberal papers or news channels.
Of course, they are very much opposed to such measures in other countries, especially their enemies.
I think this is on point, and way underappreciated by the non-hard-right in the US. People who vote Democrat tend to think of "their" media institutions as objective or sincere, and they're quick to forgive the litany of examples of heinous shit the NYT or WP or CNN has pulled over the years - salivating and fully turgid support for endless wars being just the most obvious example.
This video of CNN host Brian Williams referring to 'The Beauty of our Weapons' has stuck with me as one of the most bizarre examples of the prevailing pro-war attitude in the 'left press':
I think most people don't care much about privacy for themselves ("I have nothing to hide") and are happy to let military intelligence daddy read their emails, as long as it doesn't affect their life.
They remain ignorant of the fact that this means that people who actually do need privacy for purposes of organization against the harmful elements of the status quo (civil rights leaders, labor leaders, political party upstarts, et c) will be kneecapped by this for the remainder of the time the USA exists.
>I think most people don't care much about privacy for themselves ("I have nothing to hide") and are happy to let military intelligence daddy read their emails, as long as it doesn't affect their life.
I'd point out that the DoD is purchasing this data from private entities, not collecting it themselves.
As such, I'd say that it's less about government surveillance specifically, and more about surveillance in general.
Corporate surveillance is nothing new (Equifax/Experian/etc. have been doing that for at least half a century) and those folks collect, store and correlate enormously more data than does the US government.
There is a massive effort by corporations to hide this sort of data collection, which has been mostly successful.
Complaining about the government dipping into all that tasty, tasty data is like blaming the child who was sickened by stealing a cookie from a batch that was poisoned, then making sure that the rest of the batch is fed to the intended target.
That most folks are just complaining about big, bad government (which isn't wrong, but just a tiny portion of the larger issue), rather than the folks who are collecting, correlating and using such data to their own advantage (of which selling it to governments is just chump change) seems rather silly and short-sighted.
Corporate data collection doesn’t generally send the police or military to your house when you sufficiently challenge the status quo.
Corporations don’t generally have guns or handcuffs that they can use on arbitrary people. The state does, which is why there’s such a danger associated with them being able to access the data.
Experian doesn’t have a torture chamber. The Chicago PD and the CIA do.
>Corporations don’t generally have guns or handcuffs that they can use on arbitrary people. The state does, which is why there’s such a danger associated with them being able to access the data.
And that makes it perfectly fine for corporations to do so? Because they can't rough you up or arrest you?
Please.
As I said:
...complaining about big, bad government (which
isn't wrong, but just a tiny portion of the
larger issue)
My point (apparently, I wasn't explicit enough) was that it's not just governments that are the issue. What's more, if there were appropriate restrictions on collecting and monetizing peoples' data, in this case the DoD would have nothing to buy.
It's much easier (at least in the US) to restrain the Federal government than hundreds (thousands?) of corporations, regardless of their monopoly on the use of force.
Railing against the government for compromising the privacy of its citizens is absolutely appropriate. That said, there is the much, much more widespread issue of corporate surveillance that should also be addressed.
There’s a big difference between being under surveillance because people want to manipulate you into giving them money, and being under surveillance so that you can be kidnapped at gunpoint to stop you from whatever it was you were doing (even if it is all legal).
Corporate surveillance is bad, sure. But, even when maximally bad, it doesn’t pose that grave a threat to a society’s correct functioning.
When the state gets to use it for what is called “law enforcement” (qualified because, for example, the aforementioned CIA torture prisons, and MLK Jr was targeted thus by the FBI, and sent threatening letters by them as a result) the maximum danger from misuse is a grave risk to a free society.
>Corporate surveillance is bad, sure. But, even when maximally bad, it doesn’t pose that grave a threat to a society’s correct functioning.
Except it does. Especially in this case, since the government purchased the data collected via corporate surveillance. Or did you miss that part?
If the data hadn't been collected via corporate surveillance,the DoD would have nothing to buy, would they?
We can vote out of government those who would allow violations of our privacy (whether or not we do so is a different, but equally important discussion). We cannot do so with corporations.
Given the circumstance in this case (the DoD purchasing this data from private corporations rather than collecting it independently), including corporate surveillance in the discussion is critically important.
When one's paycheck depends on a not understanding certain things, it's often difficult to get that person to understand those things. Some food for thought, friend.
> We can vote out of government those who would allow violations of our privacy (whether or not we do so is a different, but equally important discussion).
I think this is an illusion. There is ~no one to vote for that supports rolling back US government bulk surveillance.
While I agree that the major reasons for being anti-surveillance is because of the long game, can we not also complain about our tax dollars being wasted in the short term?
I think this might be overly pessimistic. imo more people care about their privacy but feel powerless to affect change than don't really care about it at all
Brave New World becomes ever more prescient. Fahrenheit 451, too:
We're Mildreds too busy being consumed by the stories of our parlour walls (social media?). Or Fabers too cowardly to really speak up and stand up to it when we had the chance. Or Montags working in the system that slowly eats away at us until we wake up one day to what has been lost.
I think the "average" person is fine because they never have the pressing need to exercise a freedom, and when one comes to the occasion and finds that the freedom is gone, it might be too late to regain.
> Bush II and then Snowden, is just how little human beings really care about mass surveillance.
I'm struggling to think of a single negative thing that I can directly associate with mass surveillance in the US. Certainly nothing bad has happened to me personally or anyone that I know because of it. So no one cares because it doesn't impact anyone's lives.
I don't think most people think of that as negative. I believe most people would read that Wikipedia article, and think "great, law enforcement sometimes gets hamstrung in how it can collect evidence, and this lets them get the bad guys even when the legal process makes it difficult".
The bit that you seem to have missed in the parent post is that most people will not consider something bad unless that bad thing has directly negatively impacted them. Some people will go further and make excuses for the bad thing, even when it has negatively impacted them: "yeah, it's really bad that I got falsely accused because of this bad thing, but I think it's still a useful tool, and law enforcement just needs to be more careful using it so they only snare the real bad guys".
Most people seem to have no opinion on mass surveillance, or a positive one. They've done nothing bad, so they have nothing to hide, right? And even when someone gets caught up in it by mistake, the error rate is low enough such that we'll never get mass denouncements from regular people.
See you in hell, folks, when the laws change and your perfectly legal existence up until that point becomes a problem to the state, and then the good cops will break a few little constitutional protections to build a parallel case against you...which of course, ordinary people view as a positive, not a negative.
Sometimes I think I should run away to another place that isn't turning in to a fascists police state, but then I realize ordinary scared people act predictably, so I guess I welcome our fascist overlords, hand me an arm band, let's clean up these streets of the checks notes trash.
I don't see that as a clearly negative thing. At worst it's controversial and theoretically could lead to negative things. But I don't see any concrete harm to associate with that practice.
> At least a dozen U.S. National Security Agency employees have been caught using secret government surveillance tools to spy on the emails or phone calls of their current or former spouses and lovers in the past decade, according to the intelligence agency’s internal watchdog.
Yeah, this is fucked up. How can people not care about this stuff?
It's not like this is a fringe subject, we have mainstream media exposing people to these ideas. There are so many movies and series where global surveillance is part of the plot. Every 21st century police procedural episode begins with the authorities briefing themselves on the situation and they always have access to ridiculous amounts of information. I can't possibly be the only one who gets uncomfortable watching these scenes.
Honestly it could also be it's just hard to fathom the breadth and scale. Easier to imagine someone opening your mail or tapping your phone or otherwise physically interacting with things you own over the government intercepting a request to post a picture to facebook, for instance.
I think a fair number of people intuitively understand just how massive the internet is and it's hard to conceptualize someone or something sifting through the sand to find your few little grains.
Here's a good behavioral experiment that shows surveillance can reduce people's comfort speaking online. Likewise, if people are afraid to speak up, you aren't hearing it.
That is why I find most interesting about social media generally. Many people seem to care about government mass data collection all the while voluntarily and intentionally providing to private companies from which the government purchases it. Having your cake and eating it too.
I’m of the age where I had a Kinect in my bedroom when I read 1984, and it was interesting to reflect on how basically everything was already happening IRL and it wasn’t that big a deal.
Do you remember when people freaked because the new Kinect would be on _all the time_ and (gasp) _always listening_? Obviously no parallels to future technologies.
Something I've noticed is that some people have a very emotional tie to privacy while most people don't. When my oldest daughter learned about Alexa (I think she was 13ish at the time), her response was "So it's always listening, and connected to Amazon? Who would ever want that?" While most of the rest of my family ranged from ambivalent to uncaring about the privacy issue.
I think part of the reason, maybe by design, is it took 7 years to be ruled illegal. I'm actually surprised it didn't take longer. A lot happens in 7 years.
People will always perfer the guided cage of illusory safety constructed by government over the messy unpredictable chaos of freedom....
how little human beings really care about mass surveillance is just one in the long line of truths that prove that most of the population prefer perceived safety over liberty
Maybe, but you are not selling freedom. Your previous comments here make that abundantly clear. People are smarter than you seem to think. They know that for the vast majority, Propertarianism in practice means subservience to the propertied. That's not a rejection of freedom, but rather a defense of what's still left of it.
I think what confuses me most is that one side of the political isle says their major concern is big government and them taking away rights. Yet these people are the hardest to convince to use services like Signal, VPNs, or even basic privacy things like ad blockers (or pick your poison of basic privacy tools). Like if you don't want them to take your guns you should also be concerned about them spying on you. It has utterly surprised me how little they are. If we're going with the super inaccurate political compass I'd say it tends to be lower center and lower left that tend to care more about surveillance. I'm not sure why it isn't everyone that is afraid of the government. I just don't get it. Maybe someone can actually explain it to me, because my friends and family just say "what can I do" and "well I have nothing to hide."
I've a theory that it might break down along 'faith in process' vs 'faith in community' - the types to hold on to their guns seem to generally imagine using them alongside a few people they trust very deeply on a personal level, while the types to care about privacy seem to imagine more that well-intentioned individuals can steer things into a better direction without ever building the sort of interpersonal trust a militia movement would require.
The vaccine question breaks down similarly, we either trust our inner circle and our own health, or our own judgement and that of the people who designed vaccines/protocols, but rarely both - it's like we orient to only a small or a large community.
I reread 1984 several months back, my first time reading it since 8th grade, I believe.
It was scary as all hell, given the Trump presidency. But it's not just the surveillance that is frightening. Eg, the rewriting of history, and the Two Minutes Hate which seem characteristic of the Trump rallies
I don't like how this article buries the important parts of this story. There is good reason to think that this surveillance by public info is legal currently, there was a court ruling stating that's the case.
A law is necessary to codify that this practice is a violation Fourth Amendment, and Wyden is currently one of a handful of senators trying to get it passed.
The story eventually mentions this, but the beginning focus on confidentiality makes it seem like they're hiding evidence of their crime.
Sorry, I'm basing this off other articles on this subject I've read recently but my 30 second search didn't locate them. The DoD has some reason to believe their interpretation is correct though, a law clarifying it's not would still be a good idea.
The pessimist in me wonders if Senator Wyden is being funded by a company who stands to gain when their competitor can no longer supply the Pentagon with surveillance data according to the letter of the law.
Three things on that. First, the law would just require a warrant before they get that data, there isn't really some other source that would benefit from it. Second, Wyden has been supportive of similar issues for years, not beyond suspicion but there should be some substance to any suspicion cast on him. And finally, I wouldn't care if Wyden was being paid to ensure that law enforcement needs a warrant.
My cynical take is that Wyden is only allowed to make these press releases because both parties know that they are unlikely to become law. People get less upset knowing someone is pushing for the issues they care about even though the effort is futile.
The Third Party Doctrine is one of the things that is so obviously out of date, and needs to be changed. When so much of our lives (to the point where it is our lives) are online, why is there no expectation of privacy?
Apple sells privacy, so there's a market for it and it's expanding into the public conscience. Apple isn't a bank though, and they aren't beholden to the same paternalistic/sinister interests. So what's really needed is reducing the size and scope of what paternalistic/sinister interests manage. Design principles such as separation of concerns come to mind.
So Wyden's issue is the DoD is buying access to these data sets from private industry? I'm not sure there has been a court ruling declaring this practice to be illegal, and it might very well be legal depending on the dataset's coverage and what it's intended use would be. The DoD's OGC are not stupid when it comes to these sorts of matters, and surely they've had to weigh in on this collection point already. I guess this is why Wyden is trying to pass legislation for this practice to be illegal unless explicitly directed by court order to do so? I'm betting the DoD has already anticipated this and filters out the domestic traffic they don't care about prior to ingest - I think they have to do so by law anyway. So Congress can pass a law saying a court order is needed first to buy these communications datasets, but the FISC will continue to be a rubber stamp for the IC, and not at all the friction barrier the legislators are hoping for. This strikes me as posturing and nothing more.
Agree, buying sampled Netflow data would technically hit this bar. Hard to know if it is troublesome without knowing the purpose. Are we using this for analyzing citizens traffic and correlating with other identifiers... Or are we analyzing traffic patterns to critical infrastructure and/or foreign nations?
Regarding the DoD purchasing data from data brokers, I would much rather first focus on laws or regulations that set legal standards for the collection, sale, and other distribution of personal information. For example, make the sale of personal information to a government agency an act that requires posting notice on a public register. Also, a hefty tax on the sale of personal information would be nice to see.
I would focus on the collection and sale of personal information first because it is often done without the informed consent of the person to whom the information is associated.
We should all be grateful that Senator Wyden has been a champion for these issues. I like to watch him in hearings and it's clear he's one of the most well prepared questioners on issues of privacy and liberty. To the staff of his office, if you're seeing this comment section - thank you!
A warrant is not required for the government to purchase commercial data products and there are plenty of legitimate uses for this kind of data. Security analytics would seem to be an obvious use case for netflow data, for example. Commercial datasets are also used for address correction and standardization and most government agencies routinely do.
Some of the answers the DoD provided were given in a form that means Wyden's office cannot legally publish specifics on the surveillance; one answer in particular was classified. In the letter Wyden is pushing the DoD to release the information to the public. A Wyden aide told Motherboard that the Senator is unable to make the information public at this time...
It seems strange and troubling to me that a senator would be restricted from making public any government information.
"We can't tell you if we are violating your constitutional rights or not, because that's classified on the basis of national security."
When the preservation of the formerly supreme law of the land is made subordinate to the interests of the ruling military, I think it is safe to say the american experiment is over.
I have long maintained that the US is basically a military dictatorship. There are many examples, like the CIA hacking congressional computers to cover up the fact that the CIA lied under oath to congress. Snowden telling us that all of the large US internet and web service providers have to spy on everyone, citizens and not, without a warrant. And now this.
The US is not a free country today, if indeed it ever was.
I fear that arguments like this lead to people devaluing what freedoms they have, since hey, we're already in a military dictatorship, so there's nothing left to lose.
I understand why you're saying this, but I think it's profoundly dismissive of those who have fought for what we have.
You seem to be implying that the PI has additional powers. It's quite the opposite. Any search that a PI can legally do can also be done by legally by the police. Police have access to government sources of data that PIs do not, can collaborate with other departments, and can detain people (under the right circumstances).
The chief might get in trouble, but usually that has to do with policies against using external resources or for budget constraints.
Also with the legal precedent from the Supreme Court that telecom metadata IS not protected by the 4th amendment? It is NOT clear from the article that what is doing is legally unconstitutional, as much as I might personally disagree with the Judicial branch's current view.
I think U.S. based developers need to create something akin to the CCC in Germany to combat the clear abuse of privacy that many developers are now engaging in on a daily basis.
I know... the CCC has been the target of infiltration and compromise in various ways throughout history, but that's a reality of standing up to abusive power.
The lawsuits are usually against incredibly wealthy corporations. It's best to make sure your case is air tight before going up against the best lawyers money can buy.
Can't watch because I am at work but the NSA conducts foreign surveillance. If a foreign target talks to a US citizen that's "unwittingly" surveiling a US citizen.
Do you believe that it's alright for the NSA to conduct surveillance on foreign threats?
> Do you believe that it's alright for the NSA to conduct surveillance on foreign threats?
It is one thing for the NSA to conduct surveillance on foreign threats, but I have always been uncomfortable with the suggestion that the NSA is perfectly entitled to vacuum up the communications of ordinary, perfectly harmless foreign individuals because "the protections of the American Constitution don’t apply to foreigners". The American Constitution is largely a product of 18th-century natural-law arguments, and so you would think that case can be made that all human beings are endowed by their Creator with a right to privacy regardless of their citizenship.
But the NSA did collect data on hundreds of millions of US citizens, knew about it, and lied about it to congress and the US people. That is the exact opposite of "unwittingly". That is the action of a domestic threat that has escaped democratic and even government control.
> "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" He responded, "No, sir." Wyden asked "It does not?" and Clapper said, "Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly."
> The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-reco...
Under the 4th amendment NSA is forbidden from collecting the communications of US citizens without a warrant. Do you disagree or think the constitution should be amended to authorize that?
> Under the 4th amendment NSA is forbidden from collecting the communications of US citizens without a warrant.
Strictly by the text this is false in a couple respects:
(1) the text does not refer to or limit its provisions to citizens at all.
(2) the text prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, not those without warrants (it also sets standards for warrants, when they are issued.)
The Supreme Court has inferred from the juxtaposition of the reasonableness requirement and warrant standards that warrants are presumptively but not universally required for reasonableness.
With their charter (scope of their power), and with their budget, and with their actual (not nominal) level of accountability? Sincerely, no, I don't think so, and I want to make sure you know that I'm taking your question seriously. It's a good one, and a difficult one.
This is debatable, of course, but in my view secret services ("intelligence agencies") and secret police (the FBI) are a deal with the devil for societies in general: in the long run much, much more harmful and costly than beneficial. You're taking human beings -- brutally fallible and power-mad like we all have the capacity to be -- and telling them "here, you have a special hall pass to cheat, lie, steal, and kill, but promise to only do it to those guys over there, okay?" Can we really be shocked when, a few years down the line, they forget everything after "but"? Note, too, that this hall pass is both legal and moral, couched as it is in the language of patriotism ("national security"): it's wrong to kill, but this is for your country, so you're good. (Incidentally, things like this really show that Ian Fleming was a pretty good satirist - "license to kill" is much more macabre and darkly funny when you realize that it's real.)
It may sound naive or even callous to say that nothing the NSA does is or can be legitimate - yes, al qaeda could kill Americans if the NSA doesn't spy on them or if the CIA doesn't lob a Hellfire missile at their daughter's birthday party. But we citizens make these kinds of decisions all the time, explicitly or implicitly.
Take automobiles as an example, or the legal status of alcohol - we've decided that we're okay with hundreds of thousands of people dying every decade in return for using those things. That's on all our heads, as I see it. I'm not certain, but I'd put money that there's no threat the NSA looks out for that, absent the NSA, could wreak as much havoc on the US as car crashes and whiskey (and that's not even counting the interaction of cars and whiskey, heh). And if there was, it'd probably be attributable in whole or in part to how the US has behaved out there beyond our shores. In fact I'm shocked sometimes that the rest of the planet hasn't been more out for our blood given what we did in the 2nd half of the 20th century alone. This isn't to be a mouth-foaming hater, by the way - I love this country very much. But a lot of ugly shit goes down on our dime, and in our names.
Calling it unwitting is as lame an excuse as "I was suveiling the middle school locker room walls to prevent graffiti with hidden cameras when I recorded twenty-five terabytes of undressing minors. Therefore no crime was committed by shipping it over interstate lines to third parties for back up."
They knew exactly what they were doing every step of the way.
Are you saying that the NSA has a different definition of wittingly than the standard definition of wittingly?
If you have a bug placed on someone's purse and they talk to others, you are wittingly surveilling them. Unwittingly would imply it was not foreseen that others would be spied on (e.g. placing a wiretap on the wrong phone number).
> Do you believe that it's alright for the NSA to conduct surveillance on foreign threats?
Whether anyone believes it's okay to do or not is irrelevant, the NSA is charged to conduct foreign intelligence surveillance by US law, and does so accordingly.
I knew before even reading that the senator would be Ron Wyden. He's a treasure and the most tech-literate politician I know of. Oregon is lucky to have him, and we could use a lot more like him.
He's one of the very few politicians I support with little to no reservations about him getting stuff really wrong. We are indeed extremely proud to have him.
I know enough people wired into local politics that if he had some huge hidden dark side, it'd be out there. He really is pretty much what he puts out there.
As an Oregonian I also strongly suspected that it was Ron Wyden prior to opening the article. Oregon is fortunate to have two good Senators (Wyden and Merkley).
Respectfully, the most tech-literate politician is without a doubt Thomas Massie, who went to MIT for both his undergrad in electrical engineering and his masters in mechanical engineering, who formed a decently successful startup working on novel computer input mechanisms.
Massie operates a cattle farm in Garrison, Kentucky, with his wife, Rhonda, and their four children.[153][154] They live in a solar-powered home that Massie built himself.[155][156] He is a Methodist.[157]
> On April 10, 2019, Massie got in a tense exchange with former Secretary of State John Kerry during Kerry's testimony to the House Oversight and Reform Committee when Massie called Kerry's political science degree from Yale University a "pseudoscience degree" and called Kerry's position on climate change "pseudoscience." Kerry responded, "Are you serious? I mean this is really a serious happening here?"
Political affiliation doesn't have to be the factor there at all. He can also think you're wrong about those topics - in the counter positions to his views - and he can believe his argument is strong and well supported, superior to the arguments on the other side.
I've met a lot of very smart people in my lifetime that are wrong about all sorts of prominent topics, despite being well-read on the topics in question. Pick nearly any subject and you can bet there are smart people on both sides that will disagree, and some of them will bring very potent arguments to the table even when they're wrong.
Thomas Massie is an example of what I like to call the "tetazoo paradox": As a person gets more adept regarding technology, their capacity to communicate with laypeople about technology diminishes. The best advocates for tech literacy are not the most tech-literate, but rather the ones in the middle ground who are smart enough to understand the technology and patient enough to communicate about it with laypeople who are a few eureka moments behind.
We occasionally find wonderful people like Richard Feynman who can sidestep this inverse relationship, but not frequently.
There is some common perception that an educated person is automatically a moral person. I can see why on average it could increase chances a bit, but my life experience contradicts this quite a bit. Upbringing, general environment and society, the rewards morality brings bear make much bigger impact. I would say even traveling the world, especially the not-so-nice parts and meeting poor ie via backpacking, has much bigger effect on personality than education.
Just one example out of many - last weekend had long conversation with very successful and very smart urology surgeon here in Switzerland, where he repeatedly stated how covid is great and godsend and mankind should be culled, too bad that not more are dying from it etc.
The same person who in his early 30s is quite a bit overweight, has type 3 diabetes, can't handle physical effort, passed to his kid some genetic abnormality and if he got covid he would probably have some serious issues.
I couldn't change his opinion a nanometer. A doctor. Needless to say my faith in humanity decreased a bit on that evening.
That and everybody has a price. Or almost everybody. Definitely those that manage to get to top politics and remain there for decades, it ain't for average joe and nice honest folks in any way.
that's a horrible choice to make, an honest idiot with great power might bring a disaster without even knowing it.
I would prefer a highly competitive political system with all sorts of different people as politicians, that has little to none power to affect real people's lives without consent
And yet, he's a climate-change denier who wants the EPA disbanded, seemed to downplay the seriousness of COVID-19, and voted against human-rights bills relating to Hong Kong and China.
I guess "tech-literate" isn't really worth that much as a label.
The US Intelligence Agencies have been using this trick for a long time. They ask the Brits for intel on US persons and they trade for intel on Brits.
The only difference is they go through a commercial entity now. If it is legal to trade with the Brits, it is legal to go through a private entity. Data is big business.
I would be more surprised at this point to find out that the American three letter agencies bothered to get a warrant for anything. My base case is that they are constantly warrantlessly surveilling everyone.
In the United States the government is not allowed to get religion. Private Citizens can worship whoever or whatever they want, but the Government isn't supposed to.
Now, you might observe that the country's money says "In God We Trust" on it, its legislature openly prays to the Christian God, its Head of State goes to a Christian church, and its Supreme Court sure seems like they have some very peculiar ideas about how exactly such freedom for "private citizens" manifests...
But in principle the United States does not have an Established Church and is not permitted to establish one. This may be cold comfort de facto if you see Organised Religion with its tendrils deep in the heart of government, but there you are.
