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Comment by cronix | Hacker News Reader

Bush started after 9/11.

According to James Risen, one of the reporters that the Obama DOJ went after, "the [Obama] administration has prosecuted nine cases involving whistle-blowers and leakers, compared with only three by all previous administrations combined".[1]

Here's more context from Risen's article, which was written in December, 2016:

> Criticism of Mr. Obama’s stance on press freedom, government transparency and secrecy is hotly disputed by the White House, but many journalism groups say the record is clear. Over the past eight years, the administration has prosecuted nine cases involving whistle-blowers and leakers, compared with only three by all previous administrations combined. It has repeatedly used the Espionage Act, a relic of World War I-era red-baiting, not to prosecute spies but to go after government officials who talked to journalists.

> Under Mr. Obama, the Justice Department and the F.B.I. have spied on reporters by monitoring their phone records, labeled one journalist an unindicted co-conspirator in a criminal case for simply doing reporting and issued subpoenas to other reporters to try to force them to reveal their sources and testify in criminal cases.

> I experienced this pressure firsthand when the administration tried to compel me to testify to reveal my confidential sources in a criminal leak investigation. The Justice Department finally relented — even though it had already won a seven-year court battle that went all the way to the Supreme Court to force me to testify — most likely because they feared the negative publicity that would come from sending a New York Times reporter to jail.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/30/opinion/sunday/if-donald-...

thanks for this article link. very good

Patriot Act and the NDAA are nails in the coffin of a free society.

Agree 100%

This does strike true. A useful inquiry would be: what can we do about it? The technological sidestepping game seems to be running out of steam.

one thing i've been thinking about is one issue political parties.

"our mission, once elected, is to..."

US example: thinking about medical care here: what if a political party came out and said, "we don't care about marijuana, gay marriage, federal debt, ...: only getting medical care for all.

you'll say, well that's impossible, people won't vote for them without knowing e.g. what their stance on abortion is.

but... i'm convinced those wedge issues are what keep the 2 party system intact. they'll just ruin you by pitting the other k % of people against you as mortal enemies, demonizing and alienating those voters. easy example is abortion, who probably have a lot of bright line voters.

anyway, it'd be really tough, as would any new political party in the US, would be attacked endlessly by the RepubliCrats. but, seems like an interesting thought nonetheless.

You'd be interested in alternative voting systems, for example direct democracy or liquid democracy, proportional representation, ....

Maybe convince presidential candidates to start talking about the pressing issues before distant future measures like UBI

Where does using an ally's spy agency to circumvent being unable to target US Citizens fall on that list?

Or, you know, Truman. Or Hoover. Generally speaking, people capable of getting themselves elected President have authoritarian tendencies.

Bush ushered in the modern surveillance state. Since him, the differences of the 2 parties has blurred insomuch while the government may vary from administration from administration as to what services the federal government as a whole provides, but one thing is for sure: it will always be watching you no matter what. The alphabet agencies will never relinquish their newfound surveillance powers.

It's pretty likely that your and my (dis)taste for particular politicians and parties overlaps, but keep in mind that only one single senator voted against the passage of the Patriot Act as originally presented. My strong suspicion is that the association of W. with the modern surveillance state, while accurate, has far more to do with timing than with party.

My Constitutional Law professor was big on not just exploring the legal analysis of cases but on making sure we understood the social/historical context at the time decisions were made. He used to tell us fear is the biggest threat to freedom because nothing erodes the constitution as quickly as a public panic. At the time I honestly thought he was being a little dramatic but seeing all of the things we allow the government to do in the name of "fighting terrorism" I realize he had a pretty good point.

He certainly did. Indeed, similar sentiments have been expressed before, and not always by nice people:

Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy: all you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger.

(Hermann Goering, commenting on the ease of taking a country to war regardless of its political system, during the Nuremberg trials)

Of course it was timing. A Democrat in office during 9/11 would have made no difference. Nobody was seeing straight at that time. Everyone wanted the federal government to do something about those darn terrorists. With the PATRIOT Act passed, it was like that quote from the Stars Wars prequels: "So this is how liberty dies: with thunderous applause..."

Biden wrote the patriot act and Clinton couldn't pass it at the time, but Bush was able to.

They wouldn't willingly but they can be forced, the agencies aren't natural phenomena they exist because they're legally allowed to, it just takes a greater political will that isn't isolated to one political party, because from the TLA's POV these programs help them do their jobs and politically it's easier to be seen 'doing something' about threats than it is to say 'some threats are only counterable by fundamentally sacrificing freedoms that shouldn't be sacrificed.' This is partially because the sacrificed freedoms are less tangible and real than the threats, it's hard to quantify the trade-off of living in a surveillance state to most people vs the idea that people could just come in one day and blow up/shoot up a store/concert/festival you happen to be in.

Clinton and CALEA don't get enough credit for creating the infrastructure of the modern American surveillance state.

Recent developments made me realize that we need to add cloudflare to this list.

perhaps a downvote on that came from lack of reference, I had assumed most here had read the 'recent developments' from cloudflare, but perhaps there are those who would downvote that have only read headlines. I was not aware of how much cloudflare had become a part of the survielance state until I read the recent post from the ceo there.

Here are a few quotes to substantiate my outrageous claim:

-- because we have a very effective technological solution that provides security, performance, and reliability in an affordable and easy-to-use way. As a result of that, a huge portion of the Internet now sits behind our network.

-- ...monitoring potential hate sites on our network and notifying law enforcement when there was content that contained...

-- We will continue to work within the legal process to share information...

This is edited merely to show proof of the statement about surveilance. I am intentional taking parts of it out of context that includes their 'reasoning' and all that. This statement from me is not about whether this is a good or bad thing they are doing or for which reasons they do or do not, should they are shouldn't they, or whatever.

I suggest reading more about their side of the story they posted: https://new.blog.cloudflare.com/terminating-service-for-8cha...

and read discussions on other threads around HN and other places on the web about the good, bad, etc on the issue.

It saddens me greatly to have to make that above statement that was downvoted by the way - there was a time when I placed great faith in the ability of cloudflare to protect free speech from the Xchans and those who peruse them (4 chan was used at one time to coordinate LOIC DDoS attacks against sites I maintain and several hosting companies that tried to handle that. So I was relieved with cloudflare at one time in protecting data transit - now it's become another instrument in censorship at the direction of the few to affect the many sadly.

That faith has now been destroyed as they have chosen to take a different route and instead suriveil and silence at the whim of changing goalposts.

I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of the politics of Herbert Hoover if you'd call him (or any of the republicans like him) authoritarian.

COINTELPRO?

Since I'm being downvoted (probably appropriately for a half-assed answer), some clarification: Mr. Hoover was demonstrably happy to (ab)use the powers of the state against both political and civilian domestic opponents.

I actually don't mean to single him out in particular, but more to point to the overall trend.

I think you're confusing Herbert Hoover and J. Edgar Hoover.

EDIT: to sibling comment, you are correct. I'm both learning and eating crow.

As an aside, the fact that the FBI building is still named after Hoover says something about the values of that organization (yes, I know they passed a law giving it that name which would make it tricky to rename).

This is based on the incorrect impression I was working on when making that argument, corrected elsewhere in this thread--Hoover the president and Hoover the first head of the FBI were different men.

I assumed you were talking about J. Edgar Hoover since the president and the guy who founded the vacuum company don't seem very relevant to a discussion about surveillance and censorship.

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