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Comment by eyegor | Hacker News Reader

Nice, I see we're entering the new era of us surveillance. This guy was a public figure who associated with a party under investigation, he was not directly involved. In other words, a judge issued a gag order and a data handoff request on a private citizen to Google without probable cause. How could this be anything other than a fishing expedition?

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>This guy was a public figure who associated with a party under investigation, he was not directly involved.

Martin Luther King Jr was just a preacher advocating peace and love for all man kind.

The FBI was tasked with surveilling King at the request of J Edgar Hoover in 1963 (a full 5 years before he was killed). [0] [1]

Powerful people are threatened by those who ignore their wills and feel compelled to stop those people by any means necessary.

Nothing new here imho.

At least not new in the last 50+ odd years.

I imagine this has been happening since the dawn of time.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King_Jr.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens%27_Commission_to_Inve...

At least the decades-long civil rights campaigns that MLK Jr., X and others were part of led to actual demonstrations, wide-scale public unrest and finally, major legislative changes.

Compared to that, the Wikileaks, Snowden leaks and Panama Papers revelations have resulted in tumbleweeds.

As it turns out, fleeing the country and hiding in your nations nominal rival is no way to start a grassroots campaign to thwart civil injustice.

Snark aside, King wanted to lead a movement and take all the associated risks with it. In the end, history showed us that he would become a martyr before seeing his goals met.

I can’t fault Snowden, for wanting only to blow the whistle then immediately seek personal safety.

Apples to oranges.

King was fighting against non technical, publicly understood, explicit interpretations of laws carried out by local/state police.

Snowden was/is fighting against secret interpretations of laws dealing with highly technical subject matter carried out by secret police seeking national security on a global scale.

Moreover, remember that as soon as King spoke out against the national security state in his Beyond Vietnam speech, a great many of his supporters abandoned him and the secret police drastically ramped up their campaign to neutralize him; he was assassinated exactly 1 year later.

Just a quick comment on "Nothing new here imho." One of Martin Luther King's friends and supporters, Rabbi Abraham Heschel, said the following:

"I am surprised every morning that I see the sunshine again. When I see an act of evil, I’m not accommodated. I don’t accommodate myself to the violence that goes on everywhere; I’m still surprised. That’s why I’m against it, why I can hope against it. We must learn how to be surprised. Not to adjust ourselves. I am the most maladjusted person in society."

I think this perspective is what drove Heschel to "pray with his legs" as he put it. I appreciate this perspective of spirituality, and thought it might be insightful.

So?

I mean you are right, but you are right in a very odd way. Imagine this headline:

Local boy gets beat to death.

Then some random guy comes to comment: "Well that happens all the time, it's not news."

I mean sure, it's true, but it's callous, it's minimizing and trivializing what happened, it's acting like it's always inevitable and it's not bringing anything new to the table. It's not just helping, it's actually detracting from any meaningful conversation. In short, I get the feeling that such responses come from smug people who aren't very kind. Not saying you are, just saying how you come off to me.

I am not sure what you were responding to, but my "Nothing new here" comment was directly referring to the OP's statement that read:

>Nice, I see we're entering the new era of us surveillance.

(Emphasis mine)

So I just said it's not new.

That's all.

I apologize profusely for coming off as smugly unkind!

> Nothing new here imho.

True statement. However - the laws are mostly officially predicated on this not being true. They're predicated on people whose stuff gets subpoened and end up under surveillance actually having more of a hint of guilt, rather than mere association. There's a mismatch between laws and a legal system that surveil and subpoena and investigate based on some kind of evidence, and putting someone into that system based on mere association.

> a judge issued a gag order and a data handoff request on a private citizen to Google without probable cause

They weren't a US citizen they where Australian so the judge didn't need probable cause.

It is perfectly legal and that should make any foreigner question their relationship with America.

Do we really want an ally that has proven them selves as totalitarian as China and is determined to spy on us?

The constitution does not explicitly grant due process to non-citizens, but statutes and judicial rulings since have generally enforced that non-citizens have most of the same rights as citizens when it comes to criminal investigations. I don't think we know whether or not there was probable cause to believe a crime had been committed. We don't even know what sort of search order was granted. For example, maybe the account owner is not the subject of the investigation, but the account is believed to contain information that would be relevant nonetheless.

This is a complex topic, and is especially unclear when the person is not on US soil, so saying "judicial rulings since have generally enforced..." is not really accurate.

> They weren't a US citizen they where Australian so the judge didn't need probable cause.

This is not true, the warrant served would absolutely have to be signed under a finding of probable cause.

I believe the GP is saying they don't believe the probable cause was valid, not that no probable cause was given.

> Do we really want an ally that has proven them selves as totalitarian as China and is determined to spy on us?

No, but who would that be and how is it related to your points about the US?

As totalitarian as China? Come on. It's not even close.

I'll assume you're exaggerating for effect, but please don't do that.

I don't think people understand how much hyperbole like this undermines their arguments.

"I think this is horrible" [maybe I don't agree but it's a valid opinion]

"The US is as totalitarian as China" [ok, this person doesn't know what they are talking about]

Exactly, and it really diminishes the plight of the billion plus people in China, the citizens of Hong Kong who were sold out by the UK, and the horrific situation forced upon the Uighurs.

>Do we really want an ally that has proven them selves as totalitarian as China and is determined to spy on us?

The US went through a judicial process and didn't just imprison or delete this person's account ( I know this isn't a US national), but this is a false equivalency to say that this process is even close to China when China currently has over a million prisoners in concentration camps.

US has about 5 times as many people locked up, proportionally, as China.

The people you mentioned in the US went through a judicial proceeding which resulted in their imprisonment. We can debate the merits (or lack therefore) of the laws broken which resulted in their imprisonment, but the point is there was a process and a review in place before said people were sent off to prison.

Contrast that situation to China. China has over 1 million Uyghur Muslims in concentration camps for non-criminal, political reasons. Most (if not all) of the said Uyghur people imprisoned were given no judicial review, and have no access to legal counsel.

God damn I hate the whataboutism on HN I see with regards to China - it is really rampant. It may shatter some folks' liberal sentiments but the US really is not the worst country on the block (planet), by a long-long margin.

I don't think having people in concentration camps getting their organs harvested is so similar that comparing numbers makes sense.

I'm amazed at just how little press coverage that is getting. Some public figure says something that's not sufficiently woke and it's on the front page of every news site in the country. China gets caught putting religious and ethnic minorities into camps and harvests their organs and most Americans haven't heard about it.

This is what leads me to believe the information is shaky at best. The press has no issues reporting “bad and scary” news about China since it sells, and they report on the re-education camps all the time. However, if they are shying away from the “organ harvesting” story, then it’s probably suspect.

It's getting reported on by major outlets, just not very loudly or prominently. There have been articles in the Guardian, The Daily Mail, Reuters, Forbes and others. The press frequently gives China a pass on things that any Western country would be pilloried for.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_...

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1018646

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2019/11/16/china-cov...

https://www.foxnews.com/world/organ-harvesting-china-survivo...

https://nypost.com/2019/06/23/the-ugly-truth-about-chinas-or...

https://qz.com/1717338/china-accused-of-harvesting-organs-fr...

https://www.chinaorganharvest.org/

https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/the-nightmare-of-human-orga...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-rights-organ-harves...

I hear this claim repeated a lot, but has anybody got a good source for it?

All I can see are extreme news sources (Breitbart) and NBC reporting on https://chinatribunal.com, and while I know nothing about the chinatribunal, its name somewhat implies a clear stance at the outset.

Particularly in relation to the Uyghur muslims, I can't find any evidence that they're having their organs harvested

> The China Tribunal has been initiated by the International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China (ETAC), an international not for profit organisation, with headquarters in Australia and National Committees in the UK, USA, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.

I find the fact that the media doesn’t report this, but they do report the re-education camps, suggests the sources aren’t very solid.

It seems that you created a new name just to doubt organ harvesting by China. You say the media doesn't report it, but a single search for china organ harvesting turns up this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_...

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1018646

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2019/11/16/china-cov...

https://www.foxnews.com/world/organ-harvesting-china-survivo...

https://nypost.com/2019/06/23/the-ugly-truth-about-chinas-or...

https://qz.com/1717338/china-accused-of-harvesting-organs-fr...

https://www.chinaorganharvest.org/

https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/the-nightmare-of-human-orga...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-rights-organ-harves...

Here you go, from the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/17/china-is-harve...

It's about the Fulan Gong movement, FWIW.

This is reporting the same china tribunal mentioned in my OP. Interestingly, the interviewee mentioned by the Guardian here 'did not see any direct evidence of forced organ removal'; if the tribunal heard evidence from people with direct experience of organ removal, I'm surprised they were not quoted. It seems like I may have to dig deeper into the tribunal's actual report to gain more insight.

Yeah agreed. It is terrible that US has the largest prison population and it is also terrible that China has harvested organs and puts Uyghur Muslims in concentration camps. They are terrible in different dimensions and it would serve no clear purpose to me to try and figure out which is the “more terrible” one to focus the criticism on to the cost of ignoring the other.

China doesn't need to keep them locked up. China has the largest rate of organ transplants in the world, the highest rates of executions (actual number a state secret) yet has low rates of organ donors with trial registration schemes only starting within the last decade. Guess where they get the organs from.

Journalists investigating the suppression of Falun Gong estimated that approximately 60,000 convicted members were executed and their organs harvested. People are routinely arrested and never heard from again. In some cases families have been told a relative was executed years previously, but often they hear nothing at all.

In 2008 China's own deputy health minister estimated over 60% of transplant organs were sourced from prisoners, but Chinese officials have clamped up about this in recent years. They have occasionally said that this source of organs has been excluded, but there's no way to verify this as rates of donor registration aren't known, rates of executions are a state secret and none of the people or facilities involved are known or open to investigations.

So yes, sure, just like the USA.

> We kill suspects whose names we know, and whose names we don’t; we kill the guilty and the not guilty; we kill men, but also women and children; we kill by day and by night; we fire missiles at confirmed visual targets, but also at cellphone numbers we hope belong to targets.

> In 2014, former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden said in a public debate, “We kill people based on metadata.”

> According to multiple reports and leaks, death-by-metadata could be triggered, without even knowing the target’s name, if too many derogatory checks appear on their profile. “Armed military aged males” exhibiting suspicious behavior in the wrong place can become targets, as can someone “seen to be giving out orders.” Such mathematics-based assassinations have come to be known as “signature strikes.”

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/how-...

That, while terrible, has nothing to do with the subject being discussed. That's plain whataboutism.

The US military's stance is that this is war.

Certainly there's no rule that during war one has to know the name of someone before killing them.

We are entering a new era and no one knows what the rules are.

... Not to mention "Bodies" exhibit, filled with corpses of Chinese prisoners -- very reason I refuse to buy tickets.

Places like gitmo aside, almost everyone goes through a judicial process before they're locked up. China has judicial processes too. It's a question of the integrity of those processes.

If you'd like to understand the integrity of the US process, please read The New Jim Crow. It's not at all clear the US process is better than China's.

It's not at all clear the US process is better than China's.

Yes..just last week I was stopped outside Pennsylvania Avenue and forced to install a government mandated app on my phone and submit a DNA sample...

Right right, the whatabouttheUSbeingracist argument. The US does not put people in jail for political speech.

I don't think that's quite the argument.

The argument is that the US justice system uses pressure of plea bargains to put millions of innocent people in prison, financial pressure to keep millions of people from getting justice, etc.

The level of injustice seems at least similar.

You're right the reasons are different. But until we fix our courts, we don't quite have the moral high ground here.

Plus gitmo.

The person has no rights under that judicial process so it's no defence.

They weren't a US citizen they where Australian so the judge didn't need probable cause.

Why do so many people think that human rights flow from US citizenship? That's not how the Constitution works. The 4th Amendment to the Constitution doesn't say anything about citizenship:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The Bill of Rights is a set of limitations on the government, saying that the government is not allowed to do these things. It doesn't say anything about who they might hypothetically be doing them to, just that they cannot do it.

So regardless of your citizenship, the government can't prevent you from practicing your religion, can't throw you in jail without a trial, and they can't search you without a warrant. This applies to any actions the US government takes, regardless of who they're directed against and where.

You've clearly never read most OLC memos. Especially ones used to justify killing random Iraqis.

This touches on the Guantanamo Bay thing, too, where people are being held without trial. The gov't position is that they're enemy combatants, and thus covered by the rules of war.

I don't buy that, but there you go. It just goes to show that the people (whoever they might be) need to be continually vigilant - in a sense, government is always the adversary.

That's clearly untrue. Otherwise we wouldn't have the CIA as an organization to spy on foreigners.

It is true you don't need to be a US citizen to have protection. However, you do need to be under the jurisdiction of the US (on US soil). Otherwise, the US Constitutional rights don't apply to you.

The CIA doesn't feed or perform as a part of the United States Justice system (parallel construction or the occasional slip aside).

Therefore, using it as a argument for why due process is only restricted to a certain group is a bit of a non-sequitur. A case against a foreign person still has to be conducted through proper channels, either with Constitutional protections in force if the U.S. has ultimate jurisdiction, or through diplomatic channels to ensure conformance with whatever other country considers due process or actionable if the U.S. doesn't have ultimate jurisdiction. This doesn't really negate the GP's point in the way you may have been intending to.

I agree (unfortunately) with everything you said.

While the government technically isn't allowed to do some of these things, the way our judicial system works, there's no lever with which these can be stopped (other than at the ballot box, and it seems no one cares enough to vote based on this). In particular, what little controversy there was surrounding the Edward Snowden revelations showed us that the Courts don't recognize any of us as having standing to pursue the question in court.

No, the applicability of Constitutional rights outside the US has yet to be completely settled. The Supreme Court discussed that issue somewhat in Hernandez v. Mesa in the current session. I suggest listening to the oral arguments on oyez.org. It is a sad and infuriating, but also fascinating case.

The meaning of that amendment turns on the phrase "the people". Who, exactly, are they? Many constitutional cases have determined that you are a member of "the people" by being either physically in the US, or outside but a US citizen.