President Obama Should Shut Down the NSA’s Mass Spying Before It’s Too Late

As a libertarian, I agree. Many liberals have opposed these policies. I think even Glenn Greenwald may have or may still identify as a liberal.

However, every person I know who self-identifies as a "Democrat" and not a "liberal", has supported "all" of Obama's policies (including mass surveillance), and has condemned Snowden in the strongest terms. There are a few of those on HN, but I agree that by far most HNers oppose mass surveillance (unless there's a large "hidden" segment as is apparently the case with Trump supporters, who have come out en masse on HN in the past few days).

I have long warned friends that Obama's refusal to address the proliferation of technologies supporting a future turnkey totalitarian state was a huge risk to our future stability.

With Trump's ascension to the presidency I am dismayed to find myself perhaps proven correct. At the very best interpretation, Trump will not use these executive powers to target opposition. However his future potential use of these powers will cause a large segment of the population to mistrust everything he does.

What about the wars? Does anyone here even know why we are bombing Yemen?

When people campaign against the expansion of government powers, it's not because we're afraid that the Good Guys are going to abuse them, it's because we know that eventually the Bad Guys will.

There is a sickness in this country, and it is called partisanship. Its destructive power is more frightening than anything Trump could hope to do.

Please show where this activist writes in support of the NSA programs in the past.

Even if there were such a thing as homogenous left: I believe the number of people from the left defending these programs has been pretty short for as long as I can remember.

The EFF and EPIC, which have been around longer, has worked against NSA spying under the Obama, Bush II, Clinton, and Bush I organizations; the ACLU, all of the above and more.

What about you?

I guess you might be referring to a particular provision from a particular year? You're going to have to be more specific.

Maybe we should remember the words written in the founding document that precluded our noble country's separation from the English State:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men/women (language added by me) are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men/Women (same semantic addition), deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness

If one's right to privacy is being infringed upon, we are bound by this document to remind the powers that be that they are beyond their right to govern.

I think the initial thought is incredibly prescient, as Trump seems far more laissez-faire when it comes to moral governance than President Obama is and has been. Let's not put the cart before the horse, but let's also make sure the toys are all child proof before we hand them down, n'est-ce pas?

If you think the problem is old news, that doesn't make it any less urgent to fix. It's like seeing firefighters arrive and tell them not to bother, because the house started burning hours ago.

But even if what you say were true, it invalidates nothing.

For starters, there is no united group known as "liberals" whom either of us can speak on behalf of, but I will indulge you and also speak in generalizations.

Liberals do not arbitrarily support "moving as much power to Washington as possible". Rather, they believe strongly that human rights should be dispensed equally to everyone in the country. If abortion is a right, then being born in Texas shouldn't deprive a woman of that right any more than being born in the south in the 19th century should've deprived blacks of their freedom. Similar arguments can be made for gay marriage, miscegenation laws, female suffrage, the availability of healthcare for the poor, quality education, etc.

There's nothing whatsoever baked into the liberal ideology that supports things like domestic spying and warrantless wiretaps. Rather, the better explanation is any branch of government (in this case the executive branch) is incentivized to increase its own power, and people tend to be biased in favor of their party's presidents. But I've met countless pro-Snowden liberals, and I think you've really mischaracterized the essence of what makes liberals liberal.

Civil rights are a great example. Minorities living in the south during Jim Crow were always legally allowed to move north to freer states that wouldn't discriminate against them. But they didn't. Mostly because they were economically and informatively suppressed to the point where they no longer possessed free movement - either they could not afford the cost, or did not know the option existed through intentional disinformation.

The same applies today, for everything from legalized cannabis, to right to die, to bathroom law, to abortion availability and rights, to gay marriage before the supreme court decision. People who are oppressed by hostile local legislation still choose to stay, often because they don't have a choice.

But that is fairly black and white, and reality really isn't. The more interesting, and I think where the liberal argument gets its support more than anything, is in those who have the choice but have to weigh their options. It is an awful situation to be in to decide between gaining rights and leaving everything you know behind. People really resist leaving their homes, in all definitions of the term. There is resistance to leaving your parents house. To leaving your hometown. To leaving your home culture. And that resistance often defeats people who would, objectively, and purely analytically, be better served just leaving.

But that is 20/20 hindsight showing itself. At the time, these people do not know what might happen. They have to weigh the risks. And there is a tremendous natural human aversion to risk. It drives millions of people who would be more prosperous - economically, personally, etc - to stay where they are and not take what they perceive and weigh as unnecessary risk.

A lot of this is a problem of the times. The more opportunity you have in your destination the lower the risk of moving there. Opportunity, in aggregate, is at generational lows today in the US. It suppresses mobility, and that generational lack of opportunity and thus promotion of conservative decisions regarding your own prosperity and rights creates the environment for top-down policy to centralize authority over the whole, to use a wide brush to direct ideology than letting people chose their own. Because in practice, many people cannot make that choice, objectively or as a product of their own uncertainty, and the liberal wing that pushes centralized power to assert their beliefs see that people suffer in conditions they wouldn't need to if they had perfect information and had no emotional baggage holding them back from seizing opportunity.

Distributing power, localizing governance, and making it as democratic as possible in the process is the path to maximal liberty and happiness. But it requires that people actually take advantage of that opportunity. If you build it, how are they to come if they don't know its there?

> libertarians have been saying for a long time that it's best to keep government as local as possible, so you could choose how you wanted to live

... and maximize the reach of the market, which is more global than any government on Earth, and in practice works in the opposite way: organize your life around making yourself useful to those with money, fast, or you will starve. If that means uprooting your family and moving someplace where you can work yourself to an early grave in the coal mines, so be it. If that means neglecting your duty as sherriff and looking the other way while the company machine-guns striking workers, so be it. If that means giving blowjobs to strangers on the street, So. Be. It. Such liberty! Very freedom.

> Libertarians have been saying that judges should do their best to interpret the meaning of the legislators

... unless they're striking down regulations that are a result of government overreach, which is quite OK.

Every corner of the political spectrum accuses judges of judicial activism precisely when the rulings don't go their way. It's like complaining about the referee in sports, except easier, because laws for society are much more complicated than the rules for sports, which are complicated enough. Yesterday's legislators and their laws agreed with each other about as well as today's legislators and their laws, which is to say "not at all," so everyone has a claim to the judicial activism argument and everyone uses it when they want to sound insightful but don't want to expose themselves to the risks of talking specifics. Yawn.

> All along, those promoting local government rather than central, unescapable authority have been derided as fascists by liberals.

That usually happens when local government is being especially asinine -- buying their police department tanks, targeting minorities, making poverty illegal, making protests illegal, etc. Local != benevolent. Local != escapable, either, because opinions and incentives tend to be highly correlated between communities, so even if it is worth it to up and move you'll find that every other "local" government is doing the same damn thing. Options without choice. Something that should be all too familiar to free-marketeers ;)

> Now the chickens come home to roost. Do you think now that maximizing and centralizing and moving out of reach as much power as possible was a good idea?

Even if we wanted, an option to federate power was never really on the ballot. All parties want power, that's why they seek it. Everyone thinks they are right, or else they would change their opinion, and everyone wants (reasonably) to fight for what is right. Show me a politician who wants to devolve power and I'll show you a liar. They may not know it yet, especially if they've never won power, but it's true.

everyone? Dial back the extremism for a minute. Get off Facebook.

Libertarians have in practice spent far more time trying to remove as much power from government as possible and handing it to corporations[1]. This strategy is either very naive or based on self interest, because it doesn't actually address the concentration of power; it only moves it to a different group of people.

The way to manage power is to spread it out as much as possible, subject to as many self interest based checks and balances as possible. Neither governments or corporations[2] can be allowed to "win", because it is the struggle itself that keeps power restrained to a necessary minimum. The system fails without both: corporations need to use their money and influence to push back against government overreach, and governments need to use their various powers to regulate the corporate world.

> those written by legislators elected by the people

That's what the judges are addressing, because it isn't always clear what those laws actually say, especially in ambiguous situations that didn't exist when the law was written.

> we want judges to interpret laws to mean what they ought to have said

Yes, which is necessary because the law isn't magically unambiguous. How else do you think we should interpret the law in ambiguous or unforeseen situations? Also, remember that the legislature - the people that were elected by the people - can simply override judicial interpretation at any time.

> the laws will be what the political elite want them to be

That problem happens anyway. The branch of government used is simply whichever is currently convenient. This is an orthogonal problem (that needs to be addressed).

> Liberals responded with a policy of moving as much power to Washington as possible

You are seeing what you want to see, which seems to have led to some very creative misinterpretations of how government works.

Instead of following the politics of fear and blaming a very large group of your fellow citizens, I suggest trying to find ways we can work together to dilute power away from "the political elite". A lot of people will try to distract from this idea with suggestions that prey on fear and ignorance to simply move power around, so this will require a lot of effort, vigilance, and sometimes a sacrifice. That cost, unfortunately, is the price of liberty, but it's a manageable cost if it keeps power form concentrating in the hands of the few.

[1] and the people, but most of the time the capital to actually take advantage of the power vacuum is usually held by corporations.

[2] the people (and things that serve the people directly like trade unions and civil rights orgs) are, of course, also involved as a check on the other two groups.

Also, can you give some examples of "deciding how everyone lives"? What have liberals actually put in place in the US that curtail what people can do, that isn't in the name of freeing up part of the population (such as anti-discrimination law). What are some actual examples of federal liberal enforced monoculture in the US?

To stop it from just continuing come January, it is well within his authority to instruct them to delete data.

But that's ok, because those other people did it in days gone by. Such hypocrites, they. What I do today is just a response, and I'm better than them.

And you know who exploited that episode for his own gain, called for a boycott of and criminal prosecution of Apple? Yeah, that guy.

Many even live in cities or states where it's impossible to own guns (NYC unless well connected, D.C.), or hard/decided by whim (e.g. Massachusetts), or where the types of arms that can be legally bought and owned are severely limited in a way that makes them less useful for this sort of thing (e.g. California, much of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic).

Me, when Obama was elected, I finally broke down and bought an Evil Black Rifle and ammo for it, but that was more a FU to someone I'd correctly pegged as a "gun grabber" than anything I was planning on making "serious social use" of (well, I'd bought those earlier). And I have a lot of company, for years, most every month, sales of guns through licenced dealers are greater than the same month in the previous year.

I didn't even realise the significance of the date until after I'd posted it.

https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/foKDxbyh...

It is a fearful recipe. The calculus pre-Trump wherein corporations were considered threats as you described has changed: now the government is far, far more dangerous.

Why don't you present an actual argument in support of "SIGINT Enterprise" instead?