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.
