U.S. Used Patriot Act to Gather Logs of Website Visitors
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
"But the government stops short of using that law to collect the keywords people submit to internet search engines because it considers such terms to be content that requires a warrant to gather"
…because it turns out it is legal to go the other way around and ask the provider for a list of people who searched for a certain keyword: https://www.cnet.com/news/google-is-giving-data-to-police-ba...
"There are few things as revealing as a person's search history, and police typically need a warrant on a known suspect to demand that sensitive information. But a recently unsealed court document found that investigators can request such data in reverse order by asking Google to disclose everyone who searched a keyword rather than for information on a known suspect."
"Let's find all the people that committed X crime in this database."
It's insane with how much of this unconstitutional stuff the U.S. government has gotten away with, all because Congress has suffered from systemic corruption for decades and no longer cares about the little guy, in the sense that it's no longer that dependent on the "little guy" to keep their jobs (as Larry Lessig would put it).
If they can get donations from rich corporations or friends, it's fine by them to screw over the little guy, because that's mostly all they need to keep their jobs.
> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated[.]
While digital records can easily be considered “papers” the function of the possessive adjective “their” in English hasn’t changed since 1791. A person can complain about an unreasonable search of their digital papers. They can’t complain about the digital search of someone else’s digital papers, like Google’s IP logs.
Section 215 used to allow the FBI to apply to the FISA court for “an order requiring the production of any tangible things”—a subpoena duces tecum. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/subpoena_duces_tecum
That legal instrument has been in use since the 1600s, and was imported into American law. Until the 20th century, nobody thought it was an unreasonable search under the 4th amendment for the government to subpoena documents where the person complaining about the subpoena had no property interest in the materials: https://commons.stmarytx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=105...
Of course under a “living constitution” style reasoning you can do whatever you want. (After all many people think there is a right to “privacy” in the constitution, when it never uses that word, but think there is no right to own firearms, which is right there in black and beige!) We are probably well on our way to that with the Supreme Court’s 2017 decision in Carpenter which found the fourth amendment protected cell phone location information. But if you care about what the Constitution actually says, it’s difficult to understand why a defendant can complain about a fourth amendment violation for a subpoena demanding that Google turn over Google’s IP logs.
If you take the view GDPR takes, most data about the person is their data.
Google searches are tricky for sure. I'm asking Google to look something up for me. What I looked up is their record.
But for example, video rentals are specifically protected as are library checkout records. Even though I've asked those places to do something for me, they can't reveal that.
So yeah, it's tricky, but at the end of the day it should probably count as my personal property.
>> 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.
I'm not a lawyer, but, from what I understand, probable cause refers to whether the law was violated by the party subject to the warrant. If Google has not violated the law, then what is probable cause referring to?
Why would they even risk showing ill-gotten evidence? It would be way easier to just keep that evidence secret and have a cop stand in the right spot to arrest the mark as they go about their usual routine. They probably "look suspicious".
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_to_Privacy_(article)
It takes a pretty creative reading of the constitution to infer a right to privacy, then infer that that grants the right to an abortion.
One of the criticisms of Roe is that states were legalizing abortion on their own already, so doing it through the court angered people more than if it had happened in each state, and it's build on shaky constitutional underpinning, so it's not necessarily a robust decision.
Why hasn't a right to privacy amendment been discussed at all? Or even a Privacy Rights Act? Those would clarify things too.
I suspect that approach will have to change with the current composition of the Supreme Court.
Note that the constitution gives any 25% of the country "veto power" as far as amendments go. Folks are, yes, going to actually have to find privacy laws and amendments that significantly benefit almost everyone. And actually convince them of that.
> The way Justice Ginsburg saw it, Roe v. Wade was focused on the wrong argument — that restricting access to abortion violated a woman’s privacy. What she hoped for instead was a protection of the right to abortion on the basis that restricting it impeded gender equality, said Mary Hartnett, a law professor at Georgetown University who will be a co-writer on the only authorized biography of Justice Ginsburg.
Ginsberg realized that “equal protection” has the benefit of being in the constitution, while “privacy” nowhere appears in the document.[1] As the left has shifted away from social libertarianism, the ideological underpinning of Roe has become increasingly unsettled. That’s why in the recent confirmation hearings you only heard discussions of “super precedent” not any sort of debate about a sweeping privacy right.
[1] “Privacy” as an “unenumerated right” makes little sense under either liberal or conservative readings of the constitution. If you, like Scalia, believe that the “unenumerated rights” were those that were understood to exist at the time of the founding, then privacy isn’t one of those rights. But even if you subscribe to a “living constitution” view that fundamental rights can change over time—what’s the basis for your claim that “privacy” is generally recognized as a fundamental right today? I’m not aware of any constitutional court in the world that has embraced a notion of “privacy” broad enough to include both abortion and freedom from surveillance. Around the same time as Roe courts in Canada, France, Italy, and Germany declined to recognize any right to an abortion. The first three found it to be a legislative matter. The latter found legalizing abortion to be unconstitutional as a violation of the German Basic Law’s right to life.
The constitution and subsequent amendments merely outline which rights the government may violate as a matter of necessity to run, and certain rights which it may not violate at all.
As you say, privacy is not mentioned; it does exist as a right but has no explicit protection except for the conditions in the 4th and 5th.
Of course, the federal government's role has grown so much, and the interstate clause abuse has basically expanded it's power to encompass anything and everything, it is not unreasonable to think that the first 10 amendments are the only rights we have anymore :/
Scalia believed strongly in the right to privacy and privacy was certainly considered a right at the time of the constitution. I'm not sure where your source got that idea, but it's easy to document otherwise.
https://iapp.org/news/a/scalias-privacy-impact-will-be-felt-...
"A machine that sees through walls, reasoned Scalia, in order to capture the heat emanating from lamps used to grow marijuana, infringes upon individuals’ reasonable expectation of privacy, even when law enforcement is positioned outside the house."
http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/533/27.html
"In United States v. Jones, probably the most important Fourth Amendment case since the 1967 decision in Katz v. United States, Scalia, writing for the majority, required the police to obtain a warrant prior to attaching a GPS tracker to a suspect’s car. While basing his opinion on narrow property grounds, Scalia rejected the government’s claim that individuals had no expectation of privacy while driving in broad daylight on city streets."
http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/10-1259.html
"In Florida v. Jardines, Scalia, again writing a 5-4 decision supported by three liberal justices and Justice Thomas, held that police use of a trained detection dog to sniff for narcotics on the front porch of a private home was, indeed, a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. The consequences of Jardines, as well as other dog sniffing cases, are far broader than for just narcotics searches. They implicate suspicion-less searches by other mechanized sniffers – for example, think about keyword searches of communications contents and metadata for cybersecurity or intelligence purposes."
Scalia believed in protection from government trespass on private property. That's a sort of "privacy" but its based on property rights, which was the original understanding of the fourth amendment.
LOL. Welcome to democracy.
Corporations like google are somewhere between neutral and pro-privacy, or rather, against sharing their data with law enforcement.
Where money-politics does play, it's probably apathy related. This isn't an issue that donors care much about, therefore legislators may not care much.
This seems to contract the fence a lot closer to 'thought crime'.
https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/09/google_search_arrest/
the judge are not supposed to allowed fishing expeditions, but in this case, the lookup requested was quite narrow. they still requested a search warrant.
I'll add some additional color this time, though: I was one of the people who went digging around the images of their drives, since I was working that night when they came in from the UK datacenter. They did their homework and logged "noip" in their Apache logs, so we were unable to provide the IP addresses associated with whatever activity it was they cared about.
This is very very old news. I guess it was less shocking when 9/11 was only 3 years old?
There is even a bigger problem underneath it - US government institutions were also proven (on numerous occasions) to unlawfully spy on citizens without any repercussions.
No amount of law will rectify the issue unless the law gets enforced.
The CIA isn't dropping-in to ship Fred down the street off to a reeducation camp for committing thoughtcrime.
Cops might shoot you for reaching into the glove compartment for your insurance and registration during a traffic stop over a broken taillight though. So, people were pretty willing to riot in the streets. Because it actually affects them in a meaningful way (at least the way they see it).
> adjective relating to a system of government that is centralized and dictatorial and requires complete subservience to the state.
The word “totalitarian” has a meaning—the root “total” reflects the intrusion of government and enforcement of behavioral norms in every facet of life.
Even snooping on the content of everyone’s calls, which the US never did, wouldn’t make it a “totalitarian state.” Snooping in everyone’s calls and prosecuting everyone who said anything bad about the President would be closer to the real meaning of the word.
"of or relating to a political regime based on subordination of the individual to the state and strict control of all aspects of the life and productive capacity of the nation especially by coercive measures (such as censorship and terrorism)"
People make a lot of noise about the Second Amendment, but, what, they gonna shoot down a predator drone with their semi-auto AR-15? They gonna stop a SWAT team from disappearing them at 3am? They gonna be able to lead a decent life if all of their bank accounts get frozen? Local police departments acquiring armored vehicles and driving around wearing tactical gear are slowly morphing into a network of sketchy paramilitary forces.
Whistleblowers, however, really are on the front-lines of protecting us from actual, meaningful government corruption, overreach, and misconduct. They're what head-off 1984 before it turns into 1984.
If you have to worry about stockpiling ammunition in your basement, things have already gone way too far. Whistleblowers and the press are mechanism by which we don't get to that point.
How would you compare the success of guerilla war in the last few decades against larger powers?
Guerilla warfare is asymmetric warfare fought by a small minority against a more powerful enemy. It typically emerges in situations like Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan where you have a large, technologically advanced invading force that you are resisting. In the United States, there is very low risk of an exogenous actor occupying US soil, so we don't really have to worry about that.
Rather, we have to worry about our own government, and our best option is to take full advantage of our democratic system to head tyranny off at the pass.
Lebanon was a Civil War in the context of a failed state. The state no longer had a monopoly on the use of violence. A more recent analogy you could draw that would be more apropos would perhaps be Mexico where large swathes of the country are outside of state control, and rather in the hands of transnational criminal organizations.
I would again, argue that we should worry about preventing our country from becoming a failed state. The effort of preparing for the worst case scenario could perhaps be better spent through political engagement and activism to ensure that our country does not reach the point of being a failed state.
As you see right now, the current presidential administration is in the process of attempting a coup. It is not the lone citizen with an AR-15 that has prevented it. It is our institutions. What stands between the current administration staying in office for the next four years in full defiance of the voters as they would very much like to do? It's our institutions, including the whistleblowers, the free press, the judiciary, congress, state legislatures, and a military with a good head on its shoulders.
In fact, I have hundreds of rounds of 7.62x39 in my garage and a few thousand of 9mm. But, I have it because it's cheap in bulk, not because I have any aspirations to shoot another human being in any conceivable scenario. I believe in the strong institutions of my country, rather than my ability to murder my fellow Americans.
I bear no ill will, however, towards those who choose to 'trust in Allah, but tie up your camel.' I only ask that they consider giving their time to mending the patchwork of our society rather than simply preparing for when it rips.
I feel like if you asked people whether it's more important to them to cancel college debt than to end mass surveillance, the results would not tilt toward the latter.
People think that they have nothing to worry if they do nothing wrong, which is not correct obviously.
So the issue of surveillance is very hard to understand at once. On the other hand, they can see their college debt and feel their effects first hand.
A prioritization similar to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.
Citizens don't get to vote on how much surveillance they want, they chose from 2 big bundles of unrelated positions, with surveillance-related positions buried within. The 2 parties might both have unpopular opinions on surveillance, the issue is comparatively not pressing enough to have any influence on their candidacy.
But it's certainly not democratic at the scale of a country-continent such as the USA. Their citizens don't have the freedom to vote with their feet (even less than other countries due to the unique tax on citizenship that follows them around the world), and city/countryside people have opposing opinions on many important issues.
If we sat here and said we will cancel college debt, refund everyone that actually paid for college their money, refund those who paid their college loans, then refund everyone that went to college ever with an inflation-adjusted amount, then we come to the core of the issue of the price of education, and what is fair when you give amnesty to one group of college goers but not others. The true debate is about fairness, and on a technical level, what is affordable, and lastly who bears responsibility of giving and taking loans. Anyone truly ready to discuss this in-depth? Or do we just want to say the rent is too damn high?
Politician A says they will help students by funding higher education and lowering tuition, but will have to implement higher taxes than politician B who says they will help students by enabling students to borrow unlimited amounts of money from the federal government.
Politician B will win the election every time, because voters want lower taxes more than helping those below them in the socioeconomic order. Higher education facilities will raise prices because people that work at those facilities like more money than less money. The customers have infinite amounts of money due to being able to borrow as much as they want, and don’t have fully formed brains nor the requisite education or guidance to be able to calculate return on investment to make an informed decision.
If you're worried about paying rent, and whether you have enough in the bank to replace the bald tires on your '97 Civic, are you really going to riot in the streets over the government collecting some data that they will never use against a tiny cog in the machine such as yourself?
They do. We even have a museum about the terror commited against the everyday tiny little cogs.
I'm talking about the United States in 2020, not the former Soviet Bloc.
Our threat vector is local police, not the state surveillance apparatus.
Don't know if you happened to catch it on the news, but we burned down a bunch of stuff, and millions of us marched in the streets over it this past summer.
Sounds more like you are the threat vector, with the whole burning things down thing and stuff.
It's 'we' as in 'we' rowdy Americans getting out and exercising the First Amendment, with a minority of protestors committing some property crimes along the way. A common sentiment among those who committed those property crimes was 'no one listened to us before we started burning buildings,' and in this sense I have a sympathy for their claims. I don't believe that the 2020 protests will ultimately be found to have been on the wrong side of history.
My grandfather, as an old old man, still referred to MLK as the 'bane of the south.' In his time, the civil unrest of the Civil Rights movement was an unforgivable disruption to the lives of ordinary white folks, and...well, we all know 50 years later that this was such a trivial complaint in the face of the great progress made in healing a society still dealing with the ripple effects of a most monstrous institution, which our nation firmly embraced without hesitation upon its founding. We are still grappling with the fact that when my father was a boy African Americans had to enter through the 'colored' entrance, and the song 'Strange Fruit' was disturbingly still relevant. Remember Emmett Till was lynched in 1955. That's not that long ago. The wounds are still raw.
The vast majority of protestors were peaceful, and the point of the protests was that law enforcement should no longer be able to commit violence with impunity against those without a voice.
Many, including myself, have expressed sorrow at the damage done to small businesses over the course of the civil actions. But, it's good to see a robust and healthy willingness of the citizenry to turn out in order to oppose just the kind of targeting of the little guy that our friend from the former Soviet Bloc is concerned about.
You and your comrades are dangerous.
People would not have been condemning BLM if it wasn't for the burning.
"Rather, the [Department of Homeland Security] bulletin said that “the greatest threat of lethal violence continues to emanate from lone offenders with racially or ethnically motivated violent extremist ideologies and [domestic violent extremists] with personalized ideologies,” specifically pointing to boogaloo-related groups as likely to be “instigating violence” at the protests."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/06/22/who-cause...
Does that change your reasoning about the situation at all? An overwhelming majority of peaceful protestors turned out to protest police violence and racial inequality, and a very, very small minority carried out the bulk of meaningful violence.
Does that invalidate the movement?
How am I in particular dangerous? No need to clutch at pearls comrade. Feel free to be unafraid. No one bears you any ill-will, unless you're a public servant who has murdered someone with impunity recently.
> No one bears you any ill-will, unless you're a public servant who has murdered someone with impunity recently.
The situation is a lot more nuanced than this and I'm sure you know it. Yes the police is over militarised, yes there's a huge problem with urban killings, but you also don't get to solve those problems with violence.
Consider the black business owners who suffered greatly from the BLM riots.
I personally harbor no ill-will towards you, and I only ask that you empathize with those who have been at the receiving end of institutionalized violence themselves.
Yeah, all of Antifa and a lot of BLM. And yes, a lot of unaffiliated looters.
> www.washingtonpost.com - who-cause-the-violence (it wasn't antifa)
The WaPo article you mention clearly has TDS, and it supported Biden who said Antifa didn't exist. It probably won't be that accurate in this regard. I'd suggest looking for streams from people at the protests.
Videos of Antifa violence are everywhere, and there are comparatively few (and minor) videos of right-wingers. Considering how social media is left-dominated, it doesn't seem to be censorship related, leaving you to just conclude that Antifa was much more violent.
And from reports from friends who were at various rallies, the level of potential violence was incredibly lop-sided. The worst Proud Boys protest in Portland had the PBs shooting people with paintballs if they tried to block or attack vehicles. The worst Antifa violence was straight-up unprovoked murder. Second-worst was throwing molotovs at counter-protestors and cops. Or maybe trying to burn down residential high-rises with people in them. And with 190+ night of it, there were a lot of runners-up.
> Does that change your reasoning about the situation at all? An overwhelming majority of peaceful protestors turned out to protest police violence and racial inequality, and a very, very small minority carried out the bulk of meaningful violence.
There were a few days where the majority seemed to be sincere, but once the big crowds left it was just anti-society vandals. All the statue-removal fights, for instance, were entirely warriors and no poets. Portland doesn't seem to have ever had a single sincere protest, and there are now articles about actual black BLM members telling Portland Antifa off for ruining their credibility.
> Does that invalidate the movement?
No, not at all. But you can't reasonably claim huge turnouts of mostly peaceful people because there were months of violence. The majority, by far, was unreasonable and violent. People were killing in the first day of looting in Minneapolis. The days of protest in Kenosha were violent from hour one.
But what does invalidate BLM is that the organization has known scammers for leaders, supports nonsense such as marxism and ending the nuclear family, etc. It supports black disempowerment through rhetoric that calls hard work and good fathering 'White'. It actively supports looters, both in words and money, even when they burn down black areas. It decries all personal responsibility. (Read many of the black voices who say this.)
When protestors/rioters in Minneapolis burned the first police station it was a good target. Nobody lived there, or did business from there. Nobody's life was destroyed and the cops had to work out of an ugly warehouse for a while which is a stinging rebuke in a way a few days off with pay isn't. Good target selection, good effect. And most people recognized it and they didn't get a lot of flack for that burning.
Later that night blocks of the city burned, where people lived and did business. Many lives were destroyed and some lost that night. And BLM came out strongly in support of the violence, most of which was against black people.
> I only ask that you empathize with those who have been at the receiving end of institutionalized violence themselves.
Sure, but you wouldn't wish BLM on your worst enemy. They aren't actually focused on anything that will help, they just push the lies about Breonna, Floyd, Blake, and others.
No no, I'm sorry, it was not the best choise of words. It's more that I'm perplexed by your naivety.
You freely admin that the police is the enemy of the people, the very police that's supposed to protect people. Now what makes you think that the organizations whose goal is to protect the state, and not the people would be any more benevolent?
Why worry about some guy who lives in a shitty apartment in the San Fernando Valley and works at 7/11 when you can use all the toys in the arsenal to disappear clerics in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan without anyone saying as much as a word.
They get to play with Predator Drones. JSOC drops kill/capture teams out of HH-60 Pave Hawks with satellite and drone overwatch in Afghanistan. They can run snatch-and-grabs on the streets of Italy. Nobody even knows all of the off-the-books operations they're running in the horn of Africa.
The domestic United States is pretty boring by comparison. What, are they going to hassle the 7/11 guy? Why would they even bother? Congress would throw an absolute fit if they caught wind of it.
It's not because they can't. It's because they believe their own bullshit and get to do way too much cool Rambo/James Bond stuff outside of the United States.
Regarding the police. They're not exactly the enemy of the people. Our relationship with the cops is sort of complicated in this country. It's more that they're an institution with a lot of freedom and discretion, relatively poor training, low entrance standards, they have guns (and we have a lot of guns too), and they're loosely operated by a checkerboard of local and state agencies, rather than being a monolithic state entity.
A lot of the calls our police go on are mental health-related, and it burns a lot of cops out. Add that to poor de-escalation procedures and training, historical emphasis on policing of drug-related crimes in a way that that disproportionately affects minority communities, and well, there's trouble brewing.
If you ever get a chance (I know it's a cliche), but watch 'The Wire.' It's an HBO TV show that is pretty entertaining and does sort of go into a lot of the subtleties and problems of institutional policing in America.
I got a little sidetracked there, but in answer to 'what makes you think that the organizations whose goal is to protect the state, and not the people would be any more benevolent?' I say because it's more boring and congress would throw a fit. And I wouldn't say it's because they're benevolent per-se, but there is a LOT of believe-your-own-bullshit patriotic sentiment in this country that is hard to understate. We have an almost fetishistic worship of our military, and the notion that they 'fight for our freedom' and 'protect' us. That also carries over into the intelligence community to a great degree.
But, with the ongoing efforts to overturn the most recent presidential election, and the President's usage of federal resources in the summer protests, I have to say a lot of us are having to rethink a lot of stuff.
Because a tough, macho president, who is also a rules-breaking maverick, decides he wants every protester who was anywhere near that burned-down police station locked up.
> Congress would throw an absolute fit if they caught wind of it.
You've got a very different impression of them to me, then.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/19/us/protests-lawsuits-arre...
'Ten days after leaving the White House with President Trump and walking with him across a park that had been forcibly cleared of protesters, the nation's most senior military officer is calling that excursion "a mistake."'
https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racia...
Despite the fact that the GOP will stand behind the president no matter what he does (even attempting a coup it seems), there is a younger generation (even within the GOP) who is a bit more grounded (e.g. Jeff Flake), and in ten years Mitch McConnell will be nothing more than a footnote in history.
If the courts keep throwing out Rudy's embarassingly-constructed cases, that fellow you're referring to is gone in a month, which is a pretty big difference from a puppet regime in the former Soviet Bloc.
Our country has been through a lot, but she has some life in her yet. Bear in mind that the younger generations have a very different political ideology than that of their parents. We are currently witnessing the death-throes of the political dominance of my parent's generation. They will slowly fade away and be replaced with a more forward-thinking and fresh approach to the same tired old problems. Glass half-full.
Given that policing in the US was founded to protect wealthy merchant types (later evolved into slave beating union busting monsters), they've always been the enemy of the people.
And there are plenty of cops who should absolutely not have a modicum of the power they now have. But, in 2020, it's important to recognize that 'police' are not a monolithic state entity, and there are plenty of good, kind officers who truly make an effort to 'protect and serve.' Let's get the bad ones the hell out of there, take some of the pressure off of the good ones so they're not acting as community mental health counselors, and maybe work to disarm folks on both sides so they don't have to enter every situation wondering if someone is going to murk them through a tinted window on a traffic stop.
It's a complicated situation that demands empathy and nuance on all sides.
If they're trying to make a legitimate point, then it's been completely lost in all the waffle in the rest of the sentence.
I'm assuming you're speaking about college debt specifically, but people holding student loan debt are typically:
+ Higher class
+ Opted into taking the debt
+ Have enough income to not qualify for debt relief
+ 20% of that debt is held by people with graduate or doctoral degrees
It would take somewhere on the lines of $1 trillion dollars to cancel that debt (so that's money that can't be used for increasing healthcare, public utilities, issuing new student loans, etc). Oh and college prices would probably increase as a result - why worry about taking a loan if there's a chance the government is going to cancel it?
Why worry about providing people with public utilities if they're just going to use it to waste electricity playing video games and leaving the living room lights on?
I understand your cynicism, but I believe we are trapped in a local minimum where people are stuck having taken out loans for an education their parents led them to believe would help them, but which turned out to be not so useful from an employment perspective.
I choose to believe that education from good, public institutions should be encouraged as much as possible, in as many different fields as people have interest in for the overall benefit and competitiveness of the country. But I don't believe that it should trap people in debt situations that then hamstring their ability to use that education in a creative, and entrepreneurial way.
We have to move everybody that is stuck now past the sticking point, and then, as you pointed out, find ways to eliminate people from getting stuck in the first place.
I kept it cheap by going to community college and transferring to a state school. Let's get that more normalized because I paid the same amount for my first two years of college what I then paid for one quarter at the university.
There are better ways of doing things, and there are institutions in place to facilitate a better way. We just have to move past this and tweak the system a bit.
They know what kinds and amounts of student loans are available and they raise their prices based on that. If they can sell getting even more expensive student loans (knowing they have no risk and that you can't exactly get a refund on a degree..) then they'll keep raising prices.
And if all of these costs were resulting in the greatest workers ever who were geniuses in mathematics, maybe it'd be worth it right. Except generally it's not, these costs are going to administrators and fluff instead of things that help students or improve their outcomes.
The UCs go up in price, but they're also literally world-class research institutions.
Let's focus on funneling more people through a community college/Cal State type system where they're graduating with a reasonable education that helps contribute to a well-educated and intelligent society, while not saddling people with monumental amounts of debt. And if they choose to continue their education and become specialists, they can go to grad school at a larger research university. I'm pretty sure that's what the CC/Cal State/UC system was originally intended to be. We've just sort of strayed from that path.
But I'm against debt cancellation if it just means that we get to pay for their shitty schooling, and we both know this is what they're pushing for. Increasing the tax burden on those who didn't get loans and didn't go to fancy schools.
Why shouldn't they just be allowed to go bankrupt? Then people who made bad loans would suffer. And they wouldn't be able to buy TVs and other crap on credit for a few years which for this specific demographic, might be a lesson.
Say you're currently in $30k college debt. You're basically being asked to pay $30k to protect your privacy. Would you pay that? Is it irrational to reject it?
I'd never ask other people to repay it for me, not would I ask my government. I'm an adult and take responsibility for my actions.
How much of my career decision would truly be mine if several of my possibilities say "poverty subsistence" or "early death" and I have to accept that or toss those possibilities out?
The schools wasted everyone's time and money, from inflated rates to useless courses. If anyone should eat the debt, it's them.
I believe I would have skipped higher education if such debt would have been the result. I imagine these policies came from a time where a degree was sure to net you a well paid job. Seems unfitting for todays time especially since the logistical problems of education are irrelevant with modern communication infrastructure.
- 1978: Student debt first made nondischargeable, for loans less than five years old at time of filing: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-92/pdf/STATUTE-9...
§ 523. Exceptions to discharge
(a) A discharge under section 727, 1141, or 1328(b) of this title
does not discharge an individual debtor from any debt—
(8) to a governmental unit, or a nonprofit institution of higher
education, for an educational loan, unless—
(A) such loan first became due before five years before
the date of the filing of the petition; or
(B) excepting such debt from discharge under this paragraph will
impose an undue hardship on the debtor and the debtor's dependents; or
§ 3621.
Section 523(a)(8) of title 11, United States Code, is amended—
(1) by striking "for an educational" and all that follows
through "unless", and inserting the following: "for an educational
benefit overpayment or loan made, insured or guaranteed
by a governmental unit, or made under any program
funded in whole or in part by a governmental unit or nonprofit
institution, or for an obligation to repay funds received as an
educational benefit, scholarship or stipend, unless"; end
(2) by amending subparagraph (A) to read as follows:
"(A) such loan, benefit, scholarship, or stipend overpayment
first became due more than 7 years (exclusive of any applicable
suspension of the repayment period) before the
date of the filing of the petition; or".
§ 971. NONDISCHARGEABILITY OF CERTAIN CLAIMS FOR EDUCATIONAL
BENEFITS PROVIDED TO OBTAIN HIGHER EDUCATION.
(a) AMENDMENT.—Section 523(a)(8) of title 11, United States
Code, is amended by striking "unless—" and all that follows through
"(B) excepting such debt" and inserting "unless excepting such debt".
§ 220. NONDISCHARGEABILITY OF CERTAIN EDUCATIONAL BENEFITS AND LOANS.
Section 523(a) of title 11, United States Code, is amended
by striking paragraph (8) and inserting the following:
"(8) unless excepting such debt from discharge under this
paragraph would impose an undue hardship on the debtor
and the debtor's dependents, for—
"(A)(i) an educational benefit overpayment or loan made, insured,
or guaranteed by a governmental unit, or made under any program
funded in whole or in part by a governmental unit
or nonprofit institution; or
"(ii) an obligation to repay funds received as an educational
benefit, scholarship, or stipend; or
"(B) any other educational loan that is a qualified education
loan, as defined in section 221(d)(1) of the Internal Revenue
Code of 1986, incurred by a debtor who is an individual;".
(1) Qualified education loan
The term "qualified education loan" means any indebtedness
incurred by the taxpayer solely to pay qualified
higher education expenses—
(A) which are incurred on behalf of the taxpayer,
the taxpayer’s spouse, or any dependent of the taxpayer
as of the time the indebtedness was incurred,
(B) which are paid or incurred within a reasonable period
of time before or after the indebtedness is incurred, and
(C) which are attributable to education furnished during
a period during which the recipient was an eligible student.
Such term includes indebtedness used to refinance indebtedness
which qualifies as a qualified education loan.
The term "qualified education loan" shall not include any
indebtedness owed to a person who is related (within the
meaning of section 267(b) or 707(b)(1)) to the taxpayer
or to any person by reason of a loan under any qualified
employer plan (as de-fined in section 72(p)(4))
or under any contract referred to in section 72(p)(5).- Have a family
- Have a family that have money
- Have a family that have money and are willing/able to loan or give you some of it.
Cancelling college debt is about as screwed up an idea as one can come up with. It rewards exactly the wrong behavior, and is subsidized by those most deserving of a reward. Those who rack up unsustainable debt, picking expensive schools to earn degrees the market doesn't value, then go on to not repay those debts stand to gain the most from this. Meanwhile, those who take personal responsibility and sacrifice to make their college education sustainable — who went to cheaper colleges, who worked their way through it, who sacrificed their lifestyle post-graduation to get their debts paid off — are subsidizing the cost of that giveaway. It's a massive transfer of wealth from the responsible to the irresponsible.
The problem is that debt financing is given to people who never should have gotten it in the first place. You should not give loans to such bad investments, not pay off the bad investments while allowing continued issuance of debt.
The latter is more important, the former more urgent.
I don't think that it's an arduous sum at all. I came from a working class family and I had nearly twice that amount ~$40,000 when I got out of college in 2001. I set up a payment plan and paid it off with about 5-6% interest.
Is this “mass surveillance?”
Even civil litigation allows you to compel ISPs to produce data based on targeted searches.
However, in the current arrangement of federally backed student loans, the incentives are completely misaligned. The taxpayers are shelling out tens of thousands of dollars to fund ever-more-expensive universities, which can keep jacking up the prices because there will always be feds who’ll write the check with few questions asked. Then, if you could just discharge it in bankruptcy, why wouldn’t just everyone do it first thing after graduation? Sure, you’ll have mangled up credit score for a few years, but for most people it’s worth the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars saved, and if everyone does it, credit score companies will have to account for it to keep the scores informative, so it likely wouldn’t even cause any problems for you at all.
This dichotomy sounds completely made up, is there a basis for implying pro free college politicians are quiet about mass surveillance?
From a legal standpoint, what matters is principle/precedent. Law works on principle, and doesn't often deal with volume issues. But this is a digital issue. With data, quantity is a quality.
On one end of the spectrum, you can have a cop obtaining a printout that he can read, evaluate and use for an investigation. Practically, this is similar to obtaining a building's visitor log or CCTV footage.
On the other end of this spectrum, you have the police version of Google or FB's datasets. Everyone's data, lots of data points. NN evaluation and all that goes with it. Operationalising that yields a different way of policing entirely.
I have no complaints to judges or lawyers that treat this all in the same way. That's their job. Legislators, OTOH, do need to make this distinction. The volume of data, and policing methods utilizing it matter a lot. It also dovetails with commercial data gathering and utilization.
Ultimately, I think we need some new principles, new articulations of rights and limits on power. Working by analogy to pen and paper has the tendency to make sense in landmark examples, but miss the actual implications.
Legislators need to think outside of a lawyerly frame where analogies and principled comparisons are the basis.
I’m tired of local Toronto packets going through Chicago or NYC.
Meanwhile the smaller providers do their best to spend as little on transit as possible and use local IXs as much as possible. Doesn’t help on wireless though :(
Like, hey Telus, you’re a Canadian ISP. Maybe peer in Canada instead of US only?
https://www.peeringdb.com/net/76
Teksavvy sells service in Shaw areas. Not sure which other independent ISPs do.
Can always use tor or VPNs, but need to understand their limitations and problems too.
Many services use them for 2-step, but very likely also share them past that, that's also how the numbers end up with spammers/scammers.
VPN I'm a bit lukewarm on, heavily depends on the VPN because in the worst case you will funnel all your traffic trough one party giving them very convenient access. Least of all look for a VPN that offers anonymous payment options, afaik there are even some that accept cash-drops or money sent in.
The real lesson is that obama should have expanded executive power even more and done anything he could (including norm breaking) to executive order away as much of the patriot act and guantanamo as the courts would give him.
All you really need to look at is whether the insurance companies liked obamacare: they loved it. Because it was a great deal for them and at the expense of everyone else.
It did nothing to lower costs. It did raise the age limit to stay on your parent's plan, disallowed pre-existing conditions exclusions, and made contraception more accessible though. Those could have been passed separately without trying (and failing) to overhaul the entire industry, which ultimately contributed to the ridiculous pricing we see today.
Which were easily waived during your tax return process by showing you were below X income line.
I was making $27K a year at my previous job and couldn't afford health insurance. All I had to do was check off that I couldn't afford it in turbo tax which then verified I was below the cutoff line and the fees were waived.
Politicians like Obama often make promises like this with the same open-source information about these programs that you or I have. What if the failure to follow through was driven by a change of heart caused by having full access the the details of such programs?
I'm not saying these details do justify continuation, just that we need to consider that there are things Obama did not know about these programs when he made these statements that he found out when he was elected thus changing his views of these programs or his decisions on where to spend political capital).
An analogy I would use is buying a car. On the outside it looks great. I have normal concerns, but the salesman won't allow me to either inspect it, or have an independent mechanic inspect it, but he'll allow his mechanic to inspect it and he'll report the results to me. That's what I feel our democracy is like on these issues.
If you sign up with an email that can be traced to you, or if you ever mention your email in a PM, or post it in a comment, or access an anonymous account in a browser that has been fingerprinted and tied to another account in your real name - my assumption is that this can all be tied back to you. I think anonymous activity on the web is completely dead unless you're using Tor or a VPN with a browser that can't be fingerprinted (nonviable for nearly everyone), and even then there is speculation.
If someone on the right-wing gets the messaging right, intermixed with competent political infrastructure, we could easily see more bills like the Patriot Act in the future, especially since Trump showed there is a massive appetite for some of the toxic rhetoric in this country. Anyone that can package those ideas in a palatable way can snake in nasty bills named ‘Totally not nasty and very good Act’.
Everyone I know that voted for him liked him for this particular reason.
Anyone want to take a guess at what this could be about?
But I still don't get what that has got to do with the U.S. government's dubious mass surveillance, that's been going on since long before Covid came along ...
Curious. 4 minutes, no comments, and this in top-5 here. How ?
So, a small number of legit votes soon after posting can easily get it to the top of the page, but then if there are no more votes it will drop quickly.