Why it’s so hard to keep up with how the U.S. gov't is spying on its own people
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
It's been a lot longer than just recent days that surveillance agencies have had their top members inside of the power elite. J. Edgar Hoover ran the country for quite some time without any real democratic process to stop him.
Democracy encourages this kind of victim blaming through and through, and it reduces any political problem to Just A Simple Matter of Voting.
(It's even worse in FPTP systems because of the spoilt vote effect. There, if you actually do take the advice of the democratic mindset and vote for the candidate you see as just, you will again be blamed for depriving the more mainstream "lesser evil" candidate and therefore being responsible for the deeds of the ultimate winner. You voted for Ralph Nader, which means you stole Al Gore's victory, which means you started the Iraq War!)
You can't win either way. If you don't participate then you're not allowed to be discontent and vice versa.
Actually, most of it is an indicator of just how strong the other, coequal branches of the overt, Constitutional government are (particularly Congress, but the Supreme Court has a role, too.) The President is not (even before considering the influence of any "shadow government") a dictator, and most significant policy changes require Congressional action, or at least acquiescence.
Then there's the observation that a lot of voters certainly seem to want the President to be a dictator. Eras are routinely defined by presidential decisions, and Presidents are blamed for just about any political failure (though not necessarily always credited for successes).
The unitary executive theory is a theory about the structure of power within the executive branch (not the scope of executive branch power) under the US Constitution, so its not even a theory which applies to any other country, nor is it relevant to the relative balance of power between the executie and other branches (except insofar as strong versions of it restrict the legislatives branches ability to create final authority other than President elsewhere in the executive branch, but that's rarely relevant, one way or the other, to the President's ability to keep substantive campaign promises.)
> Then there's the observation that a lot of voters certainly seem to want the President to be a dictator
The things you point to to support this seem more like people acting like the President actually has the power of a dictator than actually wanting the President to be a dictator. (And, in the case of defining eras, seems more like "Presidents are convenient simple symbols" than anything having to do with dictatorships; this is more related to the ceremonial chief of state role than the substantive head of government role, the US system just happens to unite them in one person rather than having a separate King/President for the first and Prime Minister/Chancellor for the second.)
Hardly.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/ru...
None of this stuff is spelled out in specifics before election night and put up for bid on something like a prediction market. Failing that, I think we can only really say he "kept" or "broke" promises whenever there is a super clear, unambiguously understood outcome that can be indisputably verified and doesn't rely on anyone's interpretation of degrees.
This also doesn't address the further fact that many people find some of promises to be really insignificant next to other ones, and so they might do an importance-weighted sum of kept promises instead of just an equal-weighted sum. The total number of kept promises may not matter to them much if two or three major promises are believed to be broken.
This public demand is incredible, so the human god, the politician, meets incredibility with incredibility by promising the world and delivering nothing. So who is the bigger liar? the public? or the "godfather"?
This public behavior is surrender born of fear, laziness, and expediency. It is the basis of the welfare state as a strategic weapon, useful against a disgusting public.
I would argue that the reason we create "political structures" is because we are social hierarchical primates.
We evolved for living in small groups where "the boss" was easily removed if he abused too much of its power. Then the neolithic and the industrial revolution arrived and now we don't know how to deal we societies of millions of people. That doesn't mean we can't learn how to do it.
Maybe modern governs can be though as just another technology.
At least the people who choose not to vote can stand up and be proud that they didn't partake in the rigged theatre that passes for a republic's elections. They can be proud that they didn't waste time, resources, and money trying to vote and encourage people to vote for someone who would not carry out the will of the people, time, resources, and money that could have been better spent on actual solutions rather than promoting the illusion of a people's will. Pretending that elections matter and that by electing the right person, the people's will will be done is mere fantasy and wasting time promoting it is indeed a drain to society. So, yes, for the weak-minded idiots, if you don't vote, you're not allowed to complain. For the people that can think, not voting is the only act of power one has left in this high school popularity contest named politics (at least in the US).
"Democracy" is not just "people vote for stuff". Democracy is a whole system of interlocking institutions and practices that have to work together in order for a free society to be able to exist. Unless they are all there and functioning reasonably well, you don't have a democracy - even if people vote on stuff.
Among those necessary parts of democracy are:
- Transparency and accountability of elected leaders
- Separation of powers (legislative, judiciary and executive at the very least)
- A free and competent press
- Freedom of speech
- Freedom of assembly and of association, with the ability for various groups and institutions (everything from the local chess club to the ACLU) to form, organise, and take actions without control or approval from a central government
- Rule of law
- The ability for people to exercise control over the three branches of government (e.g. via voting).
This is by no means an exhaustive list. But it's already a whole lot more than "voting"...
The real strength is that we can remove the people in power without violence.
If we examine this in the context of human history is a remarkable achievement.
This had led to a two party system in the US where both parties are nearly identical, save for some superficial differences, so that any notion of choice is an illusion.
Even if I agree with you that policies undesirable for most of the population are pushed using this "two parties one program trick", we have to admit that is not so simple and that is preferable to a dictatorship.
I think we have to try to improve from here because is undeniable that there is some advance.
In the EUA, maybe you have dynasties that take turns in power, but the idea of some president just refusing to left the white house is inconceivable.
Just compare that with the normal in human history.
I think that removing people from power is the "strong problem" to solve and, democracy, the current imperfect democracy, is a big steep in the right direction.
Why not? The average voter has so little information that the entire enterprise seems to be a bad joke.
A sham.
I don't have any evidence that the government is doing anything other than what people want with regard to surveillance.
Keep in mind that the composite median voter is basically my mother: thinks the world would be chaos without authority; thinks drugs make people morally bankrupt; wants a big SUV; wants to ban guns; is nearing eligibility for Social Security and Medicare, etc. She loves Hilary Clinton. And of course, she's going to vote. I'm not.
All of these media are going to inform them about recently past, near future, historical, or hypothetical terrorist attacks, and how bad they are. There are no popular pieces currently which emphasize the dangers of totalitarian surveillance or dystopian government, and if there were a few, they'd still be drowned out by the above.
As far as believing that the government isn't working for the people... it's much too long for a single comment to capture, which is also part of the problem. "Terrorists are bad and terrorist attacks are bad" fits in Twitter, but even a simple understanding of how the government prioritizes its own enrichment and power over that of the citizens is quite complicated and has many details, most of which require a historical complex and understanding of the underlying social and political theory.
And thus you admit to being part of the problem.
Participation in a corrupt system can be seen as granting it legitimacy.
I can't even begin to explain how frustrating it is to be blamed for "the problem" when I tell someone I don't plan to vote. In Philadelphia, it's "Democrat" vs "Democrat" - there hasn't been a serious Republican government in power in 50+ years - and while I tend to lean left, a lack of competition has left a trouble, corrupted government. In PA, we're presented with pre-vetted candidates to choose from. In national elections, if there were 1000 of me it wouldn't matter, our electoral votes go to the Democratic candidate and has since 1998.
Voting is a pointless waste of time for me. There isn't actually a candidate that thinks like I do, and even if there were, I hope they're in the pre-selected party. I don't find the least of evils to be anything but useless to any cause to have government be actually representative or "work for the people."
I think that's pretty unambiguously true, but voting is free and relatively easy.
Guilty until proven innocent.
Indefinite detention without a trial.
Vote suppression.
Taxation without representation.
Search and seizure without probable cause or a warrant.
Well, the media are doing their work.
And not just outright propaganda. Take any good thriller series, e.g. "Persons of Interest". The authorities routinely have all the surveillance information about anyone, track phones, etc. This is seen as normal, accepted, and desirable.
> she's going to vote. I'm not.
BTW why? "The only winning move is not to play"?
Also note how vocal minorities with clear goals achieved in the past some serious shifts in mass consciousness. Black rights, women rights, gay rights — these things were not lead by establishment, or even by excessively huge groups. These were lead by vocal, unrelenting activists, initially seen as idealists and nuts. Exactly like RMS looked 20 years ago, and Snowden looks now.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_To_Read
Just as developers think their security-conscious coworker is nuts until their site gets hacked, people sometimes think those with the extreme long-term outlook are nuts because the people can't see that far ahead.
This man has to be charitable, "issues" and it's hilarious the lengths people go to excuse his behavior.
Maybe. My mom values security and social order above all else, much like most Americans. But she didn't get those values from the American media--she lived in Bangladesh until her late 30's.
> BTW why? "The only winning move is not to play"?
Because I'm quite happy with where the country is headed. Gay marriage is the law of the land, we've got Obamacare, we will probably have a woman President, and there is little real risk of overturning Roe. I think we are on the verge of real reform in the drug war. I'm not worried about a "V for Vendetta" future any more than I am worried about nuclear winter.
[1] I think once certain conduct creates the risk of a harmful social effect (e.g. drunk driving), society is entitled to intervene. It does not have to wait for that harmful social effect to actually come to pass (e.g. an actual accident caused by drunk driving).
For example I like outdoor sports like kayaking or climbing. If I am killed or seriously injured doing so, it will harm society in a variety of ways--my insurance companies will impose the cost of my care on others, if I can't work then overall economic productivity is reduced, if I'm permanently disabled then Social Security will have to pay for my care, if I die or can't earn a living then my family might need various government aid programs.
Now you might say that these are not really harms, because they are planned for in advance. Insurance companies and government programs employ statisticians to help predict costs and set their rates accordingly. But the same is true of addictive drug use--not everyone will choose to use addictive drugs, and private and government programs can use statistics to predict the level of treatment and assistance they will need to provide.
Or you might say that you're only thinking of direct physical harm, like a drunk driver killing people who are themselves acting responsibly. But there's a difference between regulating the use of dangerous equipment under the influence, and regulating drug availability in general. For adults, alcohol is generally available with little restriction. So the question is, why not other drugs, too?
It seems like the more that we create shared services to help each other out, the more that individual risks become accountable as risks to society, and therefore create opportunities to regulate behavior.
It sure would be nice to have some sort of consistent framework for what gets outlawed and what does not. Right now we have ridiculous situations like: cigarettes are legal but demonized, pot is illegal but tolerated, and alcohol is legal and celebrated, despite being in many ways more dangerous than cigarettes or pot.
And this does not even get into the nascent social battles over food, nutrition, and weight. Which is worse for society, a high-functioning cocaine addict, or an obese person on Medicare who does not manage their diabetes properly? Is drug-testing welfare recipients a means of practical program management, or an offensive intrusion into personal decisions?
I think society has the right to regulate lots of different things that create externalized risk.[1] That does not mean that society should ban anything that creates risk.
[1] Note that certain things, like insurance arrangements, are not externalized costs.
"we've got Obamacare" So the government's ever-increasing power now includes what products we /have/ to buy, and here that compulsory purchase is part of a completely broken system that's essentially the worst of it's kind in the developed world
"we will probably have a woman President" Any woman right? Doesn't matter who
"little real risk of overturning Roe" We can keep murdering innocent defenseless babies in the womb unimpeded that's great!
The government spying on everyone all the time isn't the future it's the present.
All it really would take to plant such an idea in the public consciousness is mentioning the technology one wants to control in the same breath as an existing boogeyman, and the people will do the rest. Look at how authorities were so quick to blame encryption and Snowden for Paris when there was no evidence supporting that blame.
Even if I totally agreed with you on those issues it would be incredibly naive of me to think that those issues are the sole indicators of "where the country is headed" beyond the fact that there are issues beyond the social questions du jour that need settling... don't forget financial and national security problems that both sides of the aisle are very concerned about (with cause or not). Also whoever wins this election is very likely to determine if we go to war in the Middle East again, so unless a non-deterministic state of simultaneous war and peace is your objective you still have a bone in this fight.
There is no reasonable interpretation of the facts that can lead you to a conclusion that the civil rights and gay rights movements were outsider movements.
They both started out, and spent large amounts of time, as outsider movements: they are both, therefore, examples of how outsider movements can shift the public consciousness (and, in doing so, stop being outsider movements.)
If you reject that something was an outsider movement by the fact that it eventually achieves success, then, sure, by definition outsider movements can't succeed. But that's a definition which robs all meaning from the discussion.
No, it doesn't, at least in any way relevant to the immediate discussion.
> It's also illogical to single out a movement for being small, given that every movement starts small, and most movements fail.
It might be, but no one is doing that. What is being argued is that examination of the success of particular movements distinct from other movements that also start out small shows the ways in which movements which start out small can manage to avoid the usual result of failure. What they are being singled out for is distinctions like (in the upthread post) clear goals, strident and unrelenting leadership, etc.
One can argue about whether or not there is sufficient evidence that these traits are the right ones on which to pin their eventual success, but nothing about the argument rests on singling out a movement for being small.
Also note how vocal minorities with clear goals achieved in the past some serious shifts in mass consciousness. Black rights, women rights, gay rights — these things were not lead by establishment, or even by excessively huge groups. These were lead by vocal, unrelenting activists, initially seen as idealists and nuts. Exactly like RMS looked 20 years ago, and Snowden looks now.
First, the idea that civil rights is a movement originally led by "lead by vocal, unrelenting activists, initially seen as idealists and nuts" assumes facts not in evidence. In fact, a huge portion of the US population sympathized with civil rights and the vocal leaders of that movement even before the civil war: civil rights supporters weren't even seen as nuts when Africans were still chattel slaves in the south!
Second, I'm sure there are successful movements led "by vocal, unrelenting activists, initially seen as idealists and nuts." But that also describes the Michigan Militia, the antivax movement, and Branch Davidians.
My argument is simply that we cannot assume anything about the legitimacy of a movement by the outsider status of its early adherents. The onus is on you to show that we can.
For example, the idea that black people should be the legal equals of white people was indeed seen as nuts by most Americans before, during, and even following the Civil War. There existed a huge gulf, even among abolitionists, between the idea that black people should not be property, and the idea that black people are entirely equal. The movie "Lincoln" touches on this a bit--even while arguing in favor of the 13th Amendment, every political leader agreed publicly that black people could never be equal with white people.
That gulf has essentially collapsed now, so it's hard to appreciate how large it actually was. And it collapsed progressively. First, people weren't property any more. Then they were citizens and deserved equal treatment under the law. But then it took 100 more years before Americans broadly agreed that federal law should protect their right to sit where they wanted on a public bus.
Likewise in the gay rights movement, which saw its first public airing in establishment settings at the beginning of the AIDS crisis. There weren't reporters asking President Reagan (or any previous president) about gay rights, but they did start asking questions about AIDS, which at the time was thought to only affect gay people. But if you go back and read the transcripts, not only did the Reagan press secretary publicly mock being gay, the reporters played along with the jokes, even while asking pointed questions about AIDS. Being gay had such low social currency, even among liberals, that it took a massive public health crisis to even elevate it into broad public conversation.
I agree with you that the mere fact that a movement starts "outside the mainstream" does not help predict that it will succeed. But let's not forget to take off modern glasses when looking at the cultural environments in which the movements we know today as successful, started.
I've found that the average person's views on this issue can actually be quite strange. For example, several of my relatives have told me that they think the NSA is doing a good thing, and that they are perfectly fine having the NSA perform it's activities because they have "nothing to hide". They then tell me that the thing that actually unnerves them is being served targeted ads by companies based on their search history etc. If I try to tell them that these two things aren't easily disentangled, as the NSA gets a lot of their data from these same companies, they can't process it.
No, it really isn't. There is no "them", there is no "us", there is no "you", there is no "we".
Believing it's "us" versus "them" is an extremely lazy way to way to describe an incredibly complex social system. Of course, those who describe the system this way are always on the "us" side, never with the "them".
If you don't think these groups or patterns exist, I'd encourage you to meet some CIA agents. Or Washington defense contractors. Go get a job with them. Try joining them for a whole. You can practically smell the power-lust on them. The love of secrecy. The need to feel special. It's a profession where you don't have to make a profit or provide value for value. It's totally different at a glance. I haven't met many politicians outside of a handshake but I'd guess they're about the same.
But "the government" as a whole is far, far, far too large and diverse for this to make sense. You've got so many different levels and units of government you're lumping in together that it just doesn't make any sense. Is the city councilperson no longer "working for you" when they change garbage service from every week to every two weeks, and add a recycling program? Weekly garbage service is my right as an American!
It's too shallow an analysis, it's like a conspiracy theory--like the way medical conspiracies try to get you to think that your run-of-the-mill doctor is conspiring to keep REAL medicine out of your hands, etc etc.
But small groups of, or a handful of shell-game power players, even in high up positions? Sure, I can buy that.
The sad thing is that the US intelligence community apparently notified the French spooks about the possibility of an impending ISIS attack(s) (which seems ambiguous, after all, an attack could occur anywhere) and a few of the attackers were on fundamentalist watch lists, and yet the attacks still happened. Yet no major media outlet has (at least that I have seen) identified this as an example of a failure of the US/EU ICs. Glenn Greenwald was on CNN yesterday throwing CNN's anchor under the bus for allowing all these major IC talking heads to come on and blame snowden, talk up dragnet, etc. - it was pretty interesting.
Terrorist attacks, which are black swan events, are not preventable. So if I have to deal with them, I would rather deal with them without the dragnet than with it. I also cant think of a single example of the NSA/CIA preventing a major terrorist attack in the US (at lets face it, if they had one, they would have used this as a shining example by now). All of the attacks that were thwarted were just by luck: shoe bomber, underwear bomber, time square bomber, etc.
For the people who accept authority as the source of ideas, the anti-surveillance/pro-privacy movement is a non-starter because the dominant military figures say it's harmful, and their word is king because they are the top of the hierarchy. We have now lost about 40% (maybe more, or maybe less? I made up that number based off of how many people vote Republican because conservatives are traditionally associated with being more authority-compliant) of people with this exclusion. That leaves the remaining 60% of the population, for which there is pervasive propaganda. The mainstream media outlets mention the surveillance issue only in passing, and typically give undue weight and time to government accounts, leading to a skewed perspective. People like Greenwald/Snowden get very little airtime, and when they do, they're framed as eccentric outsiders (social undesirables) who have a stupid opinion that the news is obligated to share to appear "balanced".
EDIT: Clarified my Republicans comment a bit. The main thrust is that there is a large population of people who are going to be swayed by authority figures, and these people tend to be politically conservative.
It was also the FBI's "bomb" that he tried to detonate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsuccessful_terrorist...
FYI Glenn Greenwald is never interesting.
In effect, they say that it is unreasonable for us to expect the NSA to both obey the law and do their jobs.
Nevermind that they've re-written the laws to make their invasive surveillance completely legal.
Good. Government officials should be on guard for lawbreaking.
It's hard to keep up with the latest abuses because, as the article mentions explicitly, the government is perpetually playing a shell game with its surveillance programs in order to deceive the public and its other enemies which the programs target. The government works from the assumption that an outed surveillance program is a surveillance program rendered ineffective, meaning that there's consistent internal pressure to reorganize, rename, and reconfigure existing programs that get hit with daylight. In order to kneecap oversight, regulatory questions are answered as literally as possible, using the most deceptive and narrow terms as possible. The terms that they use are typically internally defined in bizarre and obtuse ways for the purposes of propaganda, and these definitions are never made explicitly clear to the public or regulators. This is how we get to the point of a very straightforward, unambiguous term such as "collection" actually being defined by the NSA as "processing data for intelligence purposes after it has been found, categorized, scraped via algorithm, and stored."
In summary: it's hard to keep up because the surveillance agencies are intentionally being evasive of public and political oversight, because they are engaged in immoral programs which are perpetually extralegal.
EDIT:
An additional bonus of this maskirovka-style strategy is that the press will be bungled up habitually by reporting in the government's desired terms. This means that if the press even does understand the true meanings of the propaganda terms used, the public will be getting a confusing and often inconsistent narrative that is hard to make sense of. The press will also typically publish articles detailing the denial of wrongdoing from the government, and will rarely publish the highly detailed and factual accusations of wrongdoing in the first place.
Feinstein even admitted after the Snowden revelations that she wasn't even aware of many of the leaked programs NSA uses. A failure to punish the abuses only increases the number of abuses, as they learn that they can "get away with it" with no accountability.
Didn't they use unencrypted SMS messages to coordinate?