Obama Administration Set to Expand Sharing of Data That N.S.A. Intercepts
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Why bother having separation of government branches with checks and balances if this can be done apparently now? The usual law making process / judicial review process has been circumvented. The US feds seem out of control and to be pushing this through unilaterally, and the elections right now seem to indicate most people are ignorant of it and/or don't care.
Interesting times. I feel bad for the American public.
True. But to look deeper, for an underlying cause, I think this is due in large part to Congress handing over their responsibility of law-making to bureaucrats in the Executive Branch. This has been evidence in multiple areas, including envrionmental law, healthcare, and likely financial law. Laws are passed to (de-)regulate, but the actual implementation is left up to the relevant departments in the Executive Branch.
As a practical matter I'm not sure Congress could do all the rule making that the executive branch does. At least not as it is currently organized. It just doesn't have the institutional capacity. But one could imagine a government with legislative agencies paralleling the executive agencies responsible for rulemaking with oversight / ratification done by congress.
I agree with you that Congress doesn't have the capacity to make all the rules as needed by the current laws. My general lean is towards smaller government, so my knee-jerk reaction is that it means the government is trying to do too much, or to do things too quickly. We have some poorly thought-out legislation (PATRIOT act, for example) and it's fairly often that laws are passed without a good understanding of how they will actually work (e.g., the "we need to pass it so we can see what's in it" comments about the Healthcare reform). Not trying to do as much and/or taking a slower, more thoughtful approach would be good.
>Interesting times. I feel bad for the American public.
I don't. As you pointed out, most Americans are happily voting for politicians who push these policies, so we can assume that most Americans are in agreement with these policies. If they didn't agree, they would vote for candidates who don't support these policies (and there are such candidates available). Americans are getting the government they deserve, as usual.
In my own state (and even at work) I see powerful interests suppressing ideas and news on a fairly regular basis. This is not just the people "getting the government they deserve".
The AUMF has also been cited by the Department of Justice as authority for engaging in electronic surveillance in ACLU v. NSA without obtaining a warrant of the special Court as required by the constitution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Milit...
Also, the legislative process is just as opaque and undemocratic everywhere else... (TTIP anyone?)
They are going to increase the number of human-related attack vectors with this and that pot of gold is going to end up getting exposed and/or sold.
The fact Snowden was able to do what he did is proof they aren't competent enough to be trusted to handle the human side of things competently.
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/there-might-still-be-crooke...
It isn't like the FBI is competent to screen their people either. They have enough agents willing to prostitute their integrity for money that their access is a problem as well.
So, what does this change look like in practice? For one, we'll move much closer to having the capacity for 100% enforcement, which would be even more disastrous than the over-enforcement that the USA has already suffered for the drug war years. Having the capacity for more enforcement doesn't mean that it will be exercised directly. Instead, I'd expect a lot of dossier-sharing in order to apprise local authorities about the intimate details of the people in their area.
From the dossiers and social networks, local authorities will have a very detailed view of the population they occupy, and will likely be able to directly infiltrate nearly any social group where strangers connect. This means that any kind of civil disobedience or political protests will be (further, more exhaustively) defused well before mattering. Additionally, it'll make harassment of police-accountability activists even easier once the federal level dossiers are handed down to the local police and paired with realtime facial recognition identification from the squad car.
TBH we suffered under a level of surveillance worse than Stasi or 1984 well before this change, so I guess it's not much worse to throw out the legal system's paltry protections known as due process. The bigger problem is the open acknowledgement from the federal government that the citizens have no agency and need to be controlled.
Both Trump and Clinton will support and expand these data sharing programs.