Why is it framed as totalitarian and unfair when China do what the US has been doing since 2001?
A few other things from the article: "The government revealed last year that it was also building a nationwide database that would score citizens on their trustworthiness." ... I doubt we do this. It seems like NSA data collection is broad and encompassing, but not detailed analysis on every single US citizen. Sounds inefficient if the goal is to stop terrorism.
Also FTA -- "New antiterror laws that went into effect on Jan. 1 allow authorities to gain access to bank accounts, telecommunications, and a national network of surveillance cameras called Skynet."
Skynet?! Really?! Come on China. It was a movie not a playbook!
No, both the NSA and Chinese efforts are aimed at identifying and suppressing dissent. We're not that different.
Seems to me that it's about stopping deaths. The reason they don't go after drunk driving and heart disease is because different kinds of deaths are valued differently. And while that's obviously crazy from a rational perspective, it's how the public views things.
Surely you're joking. The United States government is eager to punish dissent to a lethal degree.[0]
Second, planning terror attacks is not "dissent." I mean, if this guy is your poster boy for the goals of NSA surveillance, then you're arguing that it is about fighting terrorism.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/07/nsa-surveillance-chill...
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131108/10430625184/22-ex...
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/17/chillin...
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/nsa-chilling-effect
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/12/15/1263032/-Now-It-s-O...
http://www.pogo.org/our-work/straus-military-reform-project/...
U.S. Federal government spends more on health care than defense.
Anyhow, in terms of health care to defense ratio the US -- despite spending more of the nation's GDP, and far more per capita, in public health care than many other developed countries providing universal, all-public care (and even though the nation spends more than the same amount, in addition, in private healthcare spending) -- is still lower than most countries in the world. So, even looking at health care rather than health research, the US spends relatively little proportional to its defense budget when compared to other nations.
Then again, the US not too long ago was outspending the rest of the planet on defense, and is still at a bit over a third of the planet's total military spending, so compared to other nations the US spends relatively little on anything compared to defense.
This is a silly statement. Fighting terror is more than just preventing deaths. It's preventing the destabilization of a society, of markets, etc.
Not all deaths have an equal impact.
Look, I agree with you in general. We over-reacted, and it has hurt us. But to say that terrorism has had no impact is overstating your case.
Just looking at terrorism related deaths in the US in the last 15 years, let's round up to 4000. Now compare to the actually preventable deaths as I indicate in another comment: around 7.5 million.
Terrorism is down in the noise and it's certainly not worth giving up our liberties or our democracy over.
The freedom we lost on 9/11 make the lives we lost pale in comparison. People grieve but get over the loss of their loved ones. Death is a normal part of life, however horrific, and people can cope with it.
The things I've seen since 9/11, some of them I find harder to cope with. Police carrying submachine guns on street corners; every government building sprouting snipers and anti-tank barricades and razor wire; oblique-angled antennae-sprouting APCs and god knows what else carrying legions of power-armored riot police at every protest. America looks scarier now. It's hard to feel safe in an environment like this, where you feel besieged by an invisible enemy.
Of course, this is exactly the intention of the people carrying out these policies, and ironically, also the intention of the terrorists. Politics make strange bedfellows indeed -- it's not hard to see how the Pentagon has seized on terrorism as a way to increase its own power, and conversely, as the Pentagon acts against "global terror," "global terror" is able to ratchet up the propaganda and recruit even more jihadists to the cause.
Terrorism has had an impact because people in the United States wanted it to.
I probably wouldn't be able to spot a genuine terrorist if it leaped out from behind a bush and shouted "boo!" But I have noticed how cops and bureaucrats and securibots have become more paranoid and fearful over the last 15 years.
It has even created some kind of bizarre psychological feedback loop, wherein some cops use widespread belief in a mythical "war on cops" to cover up anything from honest mistakes to outright corruption, and the stories they make up reinforce the myth. Then formerly normal and expected behavior, such as protesters hurling verbal abuse or criminal suspects committing violence to evade capture, is recruited into the myth, becoming part of a coordinated conspiracy instead of just normal behavior. At some point, when the cops have thoroughly convinced themselves that someone is out to get them, and armed and trained themselves for war, another hand rises up to meet the one that was clapping, and the mythical war begins recruiting soldiers into the de facto opposing army. Treat people like your enemy for long enough, and they may oblige you by becoming one in fact.
This is exactly the same phenomenon I have seen in foil-hatted crackpots. Once you get it in your head that lizard people are ruling the Earth, confirmation bias takes over, and you start seeing evidence of lizard people everywhere. If you stand up in the local city council meeting and accuse one of the members of being a lizard in disguise, you get thrown out of the meeting for being a disruptive lunatic, but in your mind it is because they don't want you blowing their cover. If you get a speeding ticket, it's because the lizard people have targeted you for retributive harassment. If your milk spoils before the sell-by date, it's because they're sneaking into your house and tampering with your food when you're away.
You just cannot combat that kind of contagious insanity with facts and logic.
The tiresome, paranoiac behavior of government officials just makes us all less tolerant of their ordinary, everyday bullshit. And that makes the marginal individuals, like the Ammon Bundy "Y'allQaeda" sit-in group at Malheur NWR, act out. And that winds the government officials up tighter. And that encourages the next group to blow their lids. And that winds the government officials up tighter....
Someone will eventually have to realize that government is manufacturing its own dissent, by acting like a bunch of dangerous lunatics. If it would just take a deep breath and do a little bit of introspection, it will become obvious just who needs to be fired in order to halt the spreading madness, and who needs to be promoted in their stead to reverse it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths...
Not to trivialize 9/11, but the death toll was only about 0.1% of all deaths that year. Sad, but ultimately only a blip in statistics.
The impact 9/11 has had is all due to what we did to ourselves, not what the terrorists did.
Of course the families of the 9/11 victims would disagree. If my family had been victims to a freak meteorite rain accident, I'd probably disagree with someone who claimed meteorite strikes are very low probability events and therefore should be low in the list of priorities.
What was the "terrorist" (hey, they were Muslim, so...) shooting spree used for? Laws to make us safer from actual terrorists? Nope. Laws to enable more spying and intrusion. The government is fearful that dissent will overtake it, and that's what the security state was built to stop.
Credit card companies provide this dubious information; I imagine gleefully? I say gleefully because those willy nilly interest rates should be considered Loan Sharking? That Credit card protection act didn't go far enough.
Still smarting over a mandatory arbitration clause. With CC paid lawyers acting as mediators. Mediators that found for the defendant 3 times over thousands of arbitrations. I still see these mandatory arbitration clauses. I had to sign one when getting a phone recently.
Look, I'm not a fan of Big Brother either (I don't think any of us are). But unqualified black-white statements like this (combined with Good Intentions™) are largely what got us into this mess in the first place.
To be fair about the data collection efforts in the USA, something that I very much oppose as an affront to the individual rights of its citizens, I suspect that those efforts are nonetheless almost always conducted very much for proper purposes of protecting national security and the lives/property of its citizens... rather than to ensure government entrenchment in spite of its citizens.
Where the NSA and like agencies go wrong is in assuming ends justify means. They don't. And of course the possibility of misuse of these methods to be used against citizen rights rather than to protect them.