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Comment by grkvlt | Hacker News Reader

> We have secret courts that authorize the killing of American citizens

You say this like it's an everyday occurrence, something that happens repeatedly, many many times. But it isn't - it happened once when Anwar al-Awlaki [1] was killed in a drone strike. [ EDIT - should be "happens rarely" not just once ]

As for the 'electronic police state' comment, again this is untrue. The purpose of the bulk surveillance is absolutely NOT to gather evidence against citizens. In fact, it is used agains foreigners only for national security and intelligence purposes. In absolutely exceptional circumstances it is permissible to search the collected data for records pertaining to citizens, but we see in the Snowden documents that there are legal safeguards and procedures to protect against accidental or inadvertant surveillance of citizens.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki

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The frequency is not really relevant. It was and is legal and faced no real opposition.

>The purpose of the bulk surveillance is absolutely NOT to gather evidence against citizens.

They admit themselves they gather bulk data on everything. The intent of an organization that has proven to lie through their teeth and break the law really means nothing. Intent is also pointless, the action is what matters.

>In fact, it is used agains foreigners only for national security and intelligence purposes.

This is simply not true.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/27/nsa-employee-sp...

www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/26/nsa-porn-muslims_n_4346128.htm

www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/08/23/bloomberg_report_nsa_employees_have_deliberately_abused_their_power.html

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-nsa-can-abuse-data-on-ame...

https://www.rt.com/usa/nsa-domestic-surveillance-abuse-684/

There are hundreds of resources and examples showing rampant abuse and non-security related surveillance of Americans.

edit: don't forget its use for corporate espionage: http://sputniknews.com/latam/20150707/1024322295.html

The cases you are citing are all unauthorized accesses and abuses, not systematic government policy. Your argument seems to be that because a law could be broken, then it must be being broken, which is hardly useful.

The law can be broken, there is abundant evidence that it is broken constantly, and there is very little to no accountability when it is broken. There may as well be no law at all. The entire fucking program was illegal for years and it didn't stop them. They literally don't give a shit if what they're doing is illegal.

Your supposition that "there may as well be no laws at all" is very extreme and no credible person would support it.

We all saw the GCHQ documents, and we all know there is no way to separate bulk "American" content/metadata from non-American. The government considers the most intimate affairs (LOVEINT, SEXINT, etc) as firmly their business to snoop on for the purposes of future blackmail-- it does you no favors to deny this, and puts you in a counterfactual position.

The "Main Core" intel database has dossiers on every person they could find data on. There are no distinctions between foreigners and Americans, as we saw from the Snowden docs.

We also saw from Snowden docs that the DEA among other organizations definitely (100%, utterly indisputable, look at wikipedia if you are unclear on this matter) use "parallel construction" in which the NSA passes evidence for criminal cases to the DEA, which then obfuscates the source before going to trial.

Stop shilling, either intentionally or unintentionally.

How on earth can I be an unintentional shill?

"A shill [...] publicly helps a[n] organization without disclosing that they have a close relationship with the organization." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shill

Try replying to my argument. Your OP talking points are false.

Nobody is going to engage with you if you use the word "shill". It is the rhetoric of conspiracy theorists, and debate with conspiracy theorists is not technically possible.

Try replying to the points I raised. Responses like yours which essentially state "we can't discuss this issue as a group because of some social norm I don't like" really do scream out that someone doesn't want to bite into the meat of the issue.

> it happened once when Anwar al-Awlaki was killed in a drone strike.

There have been three US citizens[2] killed by two separate drone strikes. Anwar al-Awlaki is one; in that same strike also killed was Samir Khan — the very Wikipedia article you linked to mentions this. In a separate strike[1], Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki (the son of Anwar), a 16 year old with "no connection to terrorism", was killed.

> You say this like it's an everyday occurrence

Even that it isn't an everyday occurrence, how does that justify taking the life of an American citizen without providing due process to that citizen?

> procedures to protect against accidental or inadvertant surveillance of citizens

This is not even remotely true; the Wikipedia article on the NSA states that the NSA "[relies] on a secret interpretation of the Patriot Act whereby the entirety of US communications may be considered 'relevant' to a terrorism investigation if it is expected that even a tiny minority may relate to terrorism"; the 120 million Verizon subscribers whose data was collected were protected against "accidental or inadvertant surveillance"?

Programs such as MUSCULAR[3] gathered data secretly on American companies' data-center links.

But let's consider that perhaps you don't believe "merely" spying on someone to be a violation of the constitution; let's say that the collected information needs to be actually used against a citizen:

> In August 2013 it was revealed that a 2005 IRS training document showed that NSA intelligence intercepts and wiretaps, both foreign and domestic, were being supplied to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and were illegally used to launch criminal investigations of US citizens. Law enforcement agents were directed to conceal how the investigations began and recreate an apparently legal investigative trail by re-obtaining the same evidence by other means.

(emphasis mine)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdulrahman_al-Awlaki [2]: https://www.aclu.org/cases/al-aulaqi-v-panetta-constitutiona... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUSCULAR_(surveillance_program...

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