Government accused of 'full-frontal attack' on whistleblowers
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
If you picture in your minds eye the most dysfunctional, deceitful, lunatic-filled version of politics you could possibly imagine, you still won't come close to the giant sinkhole that is British politics right now. Utterly depressing.
Edit: Also, "unfold" is a more polite verb than I would have used there.
Of course, in practice, they are limited by what the public lets them get away with, same as any other government. But that is an extremely low bar.
Attacking whistleblowers is damaging because it is postponing inevitable discussions that need to happen and interfering with discourse nations need to have within themselves and with other counter-parties.
Wow, I guess we watched the same documentary, but I didn't pull that message from that movie at all.
Just seemed like kind of a two front warning to me:
1. Those type of cyber operations are extremely difficult to pull off effectively. Stuxnet did little to damper Iran's progress.
2. Those type of operations are extremely difficult to control. Stuxnet got into the wild, even though its original targets were airgapped networks and industrial machines.
This is a proposal from the Law Commission, an independent body that advises the Government, and might or might not be taken up as a policy position. The title in the article makes the distinction clear.
Donating to the ACLU, EFF and NRA is something most of us should be doing.
The NRA is not a civil rights group for all gun owners.
> DeJarion Echols was caught with forty-four grams of crack (along with $5,700 that was computed as another 450 grams) and an unloaded rifle under his bed, according to Families Against Mandatory Minimums. The resulting sentence, handed down in 2006, was twenty years in federal prison:
If we can agree that the federal government has no business wasting taxpayer dollars to lock people--who cause no harm to anyone else through recreational drug use--up in for-profit prisons, then that is the problem here.
Further, discrimination does exist: prescription drug use is an illegal-yet-ignored marketplace of predominately White, upper-middle-class-on-up users who are not targeted by DEA enforcement the way street drugs are. This is consistent with the the Nixon administration's goal of targeting Blacks with the War on Drugs.
Conclusions: discrimination and civil rights abuses do exist, but this particular article about the NRA is really desperately reaching for examples to support the idea here.
> The NRA, funded (to a significant but unclear degree) by an industry that depends on a huge market for illegal guns to ensure profitability, has called for putting those very same black-market (and, not incidentally often black) customers in prison for extremely long periods of time.
> At the NRA’s May convention, Donald Trump, accepting the group’s endorsement, complained that “President Obama tried to take the guns from law-abiding Americans but has reduced prosecutions of violent criminals who use guns.” Trump, as usual, knew his audience well, and his speech was in line with a recent push by the NRA to double down on foreboding law-and-order talk, warning that liberals, in the name of reform, want to flood the streets with criminals and disarm the citizenry.
> But the NRA has a long history of agitating for harsh sentencing and prison construction. And it has relentlessly warned that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” The notion is not only vigilante but profoundly carceral, grounding the right of certain people to own guns in the criminality of others.
> When a Minnesota police officer shot Philando Castile dead by in his car, he was carrying a legal gun that his girlfriend has said he told the officer he possessed. His bloodied body, viewed by millions online, called the gun rights movement’s bluff: is a black man carrying a gun that he was licensed to carry a “good guy” when he is shot dead by the police? The NRA was criticized, seemingly even by its own members, for, like the officer who shot him, failing to acknowledge Castile’s right to carry.
I think you're kidding yourself if you think the NRA exists to support anyone except for white gun owners and cops.
I don't mean to defend the NRA here -- as you'll see from my other comments while I recognize and appreciate the stated role they perform, I'm not their biggest fan. Regardless, that particular allegation doesn't carry much water for me.
Speaking in broad strokes, every time there is a shooting, it seems incumbent on every gun owner to bear the responsibility for the bad action. Because we support the right to keep and bear arms, we are often cast by the media as the very reason that whomever was able to effect whatever recent spate of gun violence occurred, and must all be held accountable. Whenever politicians hold session, they urge to DO SOMETHING, and rarely care what that something is so long as they can show that they have been responsive in passing legislation that may positively affect this situation in a future outcome, even when it's unlikely to have any effect.
If you're incapable or unwilling to cede to things like increased background checks, or unable to sign on to a blanket ban of muzzle shrouds (as our politicians so often request), there aren't a lot of politically viable options for "doing something", which casts the second amendment lot as obstructionist. What's left? Well, increased sentencing for gun felons. These increased sentences are regrettably more constitutional, because they at least are the result of due process, and do not infringe the rights of law abiding citizens.
Are they good policy? I would argue not, but if you're faced with the nefariously binary options of removing rights from the law abiding vs. removing rights from proven criminals, it is easy to see how they routinely choose the latter.
That being said, if the dilemma is gun violence, you've presented a false dichotomy for options. Harsher criminalization likely doesn't do anything, it may just make recidivism worse and temporarily relocate violence into prisons. Economic violence and inequality is the root cause for much of the gun violence in the US (along with some cultural psychological heritage related to frontier life and individualism, but this is a more difficult issue to solve). Deep poverty, racist and invasive police, lack of access to nutritious food, lack of access to childcare and quality education, etc. Not just for people of color (although they disproportionately suffer from inequality), but for white poor people as well. Economic violence is the backdrop for violent crime, and if the NRA actually cared about solving their image of being an advocacy group for middle income whites and cops, they would spend time lobbying to solve these issues, not locking up poor people.
Aside from the infeasibility of it in today's political climate, great points all around.
Even aside from the ethical coherency of viewing civil rights as a comprehensive struggle for ordinary people, there are political advantages as well given you can widely expand your coalition across racial and income barriers. People of color own guns and enjoy using them, but will back a candidate supporting background checks, assault weapon bans, etc. if their alternative is pro-gun law & order racist.
That said, if the goal is to just get the NRA to do more outreach to minorities, they're making inroads (though slowly). They've got minority presenters, such as Colion Noir, who echoes many of your sentiments.
> "It's not a gun problem, it's not even a violence problem. It's a culture problem, it's a poverty problem, it's a history problem"
I don't disagree that they've been painfully bad at it, but as they get savvier with their shifting demographics and older, whiter board members get replaced with others, I have little doubt that they'll become more effective at representing a broader swath of the American populace.
That still doesn't make fixing socio-economic disparity fall particularly well under their single-issue umbrella (IMO).
[1] http://abcnews.go.com/Health/nra-takes-fire-stance-mental-il...
[2] http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/09/22/nra-h...
NRA supported Jeff Sessions for the attorney general, on the grounds that he "has a proven track record of going after the real criminals". Jeff Sessions was involved in prosecution of civil rights activists in Alabama, and is known for his hard anti-drug stance. Both of those are pertinent to civil rights, yet NRA ignored it.
https://www.nraila.org/articles/20170106/the-battle-to-confi...
NRA also consistently pushes the "tough on crime" narrative, including outright false claims that crime is on the rise in US, to justify both RKBA (for self-defense against said non-existent rising crime), and to redirect any accusations regarding too lax gun control. They are literally saying that the government should be jailing more people and dishing out harder punishments.
https://www.thetrace.org/2016/06/nra-mandatory-minimum-sente...
(It should be noted that this last one isn't even a new thing - NRA explicitly endorsed "tough on crime" politics since early 90s.)
At the same time, while NRA is presumably pushing back against federal gun laws, there's one on which they're completely silent: the prohibition of gun ownership for any users of illegal substances (i.e. drugs). Note that this applies even to those in states that legalized marijuana, and even to medical marijuana users with prescriptions. This is a very real problem, especially given the feds have been raiding dispensaries for lists of patients, and demanding lists of medical card holders from the states that maintain registries. NRA's stance on it is literally non-existent - they simply don't talk about it, and refuse to answer any questions from members regarding it.
So, as far as I'm concerned, NRA is not in any meaningful way a civil rights organization. It's a "just let me keep my guns, and I don't care about others" organization.
Those are good points. They also concern me. Is there a better organization which fights for second amendment rights that you recommend?
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ccrkba-urges-members...
"Instead of promoting or defending schemes that impact law-abiding Americans, his track record shows that he will go after genuine criminals."
Note that the man who said this is Alan Gottlieb, who's also effectively the head of SAF.
Are you implying that the reason those drugs are not targeted, is because they are used by middle class whites? It's just as likely the other way round.
Frankly, the NRA has plenty of money behind it.. but I feel that it's important to protect civil liberties spelled out by the constitution and implied under the 10th amendment.
There are a few others: Gun Owners of America (GOA), Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA), etc., but perhaps the biggest and most effective (though not nearly as large as the NRA) is the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) - who effects most of the change they desire through lawsuit.
The two largest gun rights cases of our era (to date) are DC v Heller and Chicago v McDonald. Both of those cases were the result of a suit initiated by the Second Amendment Foundation. They're also better about keeping themselves single-issue than the NRA, which is good for me personally because outside of gun rights and safety, I disagree with the NRA on very little.
Who's going to want to challenge anything any government says? No one that wants an easy life. Frightening.
That's essentially one of the reasons I don't post a whole lot here. The 'community guidelines' are a real trainwreck to anyone who has experience running a community. I ran BBSes, half of these 'guidelines' were proven unworkable decades ago.
But then again, engineers are rarely known for hindsight or historical perspective.
While there may be similarities and overlap, Slashdot and HN are different communities and have different expectations and community standards. I don't think it's a matter of HN not managing the balance Slashdot has: it's more that HN's sense of where that balance should be is different. I'm sure there are plenty of members who frequent both sites, just as you do, and are aware and accepting of the differences.
State secrets are often nefarious. However, they are often well-meaning (nuclear weapons schematics, etc). It is highly non trivial to ascertain the long-term impact of intelligence leaks upon the state.
Whistleblowers expose an organization for doing something illicit. If your job is to make nuclear weapons than that's not really illicit in that context.
But if your job is to surveil enemies over seas and you are actually also surveilling people domestically (sorry, I mean collecting meta-data on) without warrants and doing it completely in the shadows, that is over the line.
So by definition, you can only whistleblow if the government (or company) is doing ILLEGAL (and often IMMORAL) things. So you may not find many people on HN who are too interested in arguing about the downsides of whisteblowing; it'd almost be like asking what the upsides of spousal abuse are.
Essentially, yes, but the difference is with the sad fact that a certain percentage of people, unfortunately, have a will to bow before power in certain ways, i.e. enter nationalism. In other words, it's more like arguing about the upsides of torture, or the upsides of unjustified wars--those are atrocities committed by your government, not your neighbour. These I have seen discussed with (unbelievable) earnest on cable news, such as CNN.(1)
1 - https://theintercept.com/2016/09/09/wolf-blitzer-is-worried-...
I will say that both Snowden and Manning went well into the territory of leaking stuff that wasn't illegal in addition to stuff that was at least debatable.
Legal channels were shown to be utterly ineffective in these matters, accomplishing nothing but drawing retribution against the would-be whistleblower: http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/12/15/nsa-inspector-wh...
And how many judges were consulted on wether the spying was legal, let alone got to rule on it? How carefully chosen were they? And how legitimate are such secret trials? You accuse whistleblowers of playing judge and jury for merely revealing what the government is -doing-.
Finally, the entire appeal to 'legal matters' is misguided - whistleblowing is done when someone feels something is -morally- wrong, regardless of what the law, written by the government and interpreted in secret, says.
You could probably draw similar stories around any other currently illegal but largely accepted activity - e.g. imagine a whistleblower uncovering that a police department doesn't charge people with possession of marijuana.
It seems to me that whether you consider a particular whistleblower a "positive" depends on your political stance on the illicit activity they were uncovering.