Pentagon surveilling Americans without a warrant, Senator Wyden reveals
vice.com
vice.com
They are two different things in the eyes of the judiciary.
The military can get away with surveillance under the mandate of defending the United States from all threats, foreign and domestic.
The product of that surveillance, however, is not permissible as far as I know in a court of law unless it's specifically UCMJ.
Not a lawyer though. If one is around willing to enlighten us on this odd question, it'd be much obliged.
The main use of surveillance is, always and everywhere, extortion. We see this daily among local, state, and federal police, abusing it to coerce the public to become informants; among prosecutors to coerce false admissions of guilt; and among spooks to convert formerly free individuals to "assets", and to enforce silence about abuses. It is used to coerce judges to issue unjust orders and decisions, to coerce witnesses to remain silent, and to coerce elected officials to vote against the interest of their constituents, or even to step down from an elected position or not to seek re-election. It is used to coerce awarding contracts or custom to undeserving suppliers, or to coerce lower prices in services sold.
Coercion need not be based on surveillance of the person coerced; it can come from surveillance of parents, siblings, offspring, friends, business partners, customers, service providers.
However, there is a long history of interpreting 'people' to mean specific groups - from only white people to only citizens.
No, it talks about "the people." As in the preamble: "We the People of the United States."
> However, there is a long history of interpreting 'people' to mean specific groups - from only white people to only citizens.
Playing with the interpretation of "people" has never been a mechanism for excluding people from constitutional protection. For example, the 3/5ths clause states as follows:
> Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons
It refers to enslaved people as "persons." The Fugitive Slave clause likewise refers to a "person held to service or labour."
The preamble is discussing who is creating the constitution and why. It does not say it only applies to certain individuals. I don't see how you can use that to argue that the government is free to infringe upon the rights of noncitizens.
The Constitution makes it clear that these rights are universal by saying that the government may not make laws that infringe upon them. They aren't granting rights, they are declaring which rights they must abide by. And with that, the use of "the people" in the part about free assembly should rely more on the context there then the preamble, where it clearly means "the people assembling" not "the citizens assembling."
Further on your "persons" point, the relevant Fourth Amendment makes it clear the terms are interchangeable.
>The right of the people to be secure in their persons...
also, foreign governments in general spy with non-cover agents not to undermine our (US) government secretly, but to get an edge for their own power and prestige. undermining activities usually happen either with government agents for high secrecy operations (like stuxnet) or relatively openly if obscurely (disinformation/propaganda campaigns).
the long-running encroachment against our liberties has been largely due to fundamental misgivings/misunderstandings like 'everyone is out to get us'. those are the same impulses that led us to performative responses to a pandemic rather than relatively minimal but targeted federal action (e.g., honest information dissemination and financial support for r&d and the at-risk/marginalized).
Law is enforced via power. When it meets a greater power then the law is contravened.
Look at the US and how it broke international law to force a plane down that it thought had Snowden.
Why do you think it wouldn't be dishonest if I were quite "rich and powerful"?
No, colluding with the GRU to create false documents interfering with the US Presidential election, resulting in the disaster that was Trump's election can not, in any sense, be called 'good'.
Even if he had collaborated would it matter? what it proves is that you can not do OSINT and be "independant/neutral". bellingcat and all other self-proclaimed citizen journalists know it too. the message here is "if you stand up against the US and hang out in a FVEY country you're dead".
collaborating with enemies of US (no matter if DPRK, Iran or whoever) would be justified considering the nature of the material which was exposed. but doing so without thinking about his location and safety is the most "I can fix society because I'm a hacker" thing I've ever seen. it is a small crime though in comparison to the shit the US has gotten away and still does so until today. e.g. Gitmo and black sites are still operating, drones still kill civilians, their war on terror will go unpunished, people are still being brainwashed into believing "US army good", the CIA is still executing people overseas the same way as the FSB, while they shout "terror" or talk a big game about "law and justice" their crimes can't be held accountable in the ICC: pot. kettle. black.
>colluding with the GRU to create false documentsThis is a very irrational mindset and we'd have no great minds of history because they were immature at a young age.
People constantly grow, learn, and improve themselves. They also make mistakes or act emotionally.
I feel like we've entered a social media era where only the flawless and speaking within socially acceptable Overton window are given a chance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
This is the death of radical aka experimental thought.
It has nothing to do with flawless. Nobody is flawless. Even if they were, half the things people are now being condemned for aren't even rooted in fact.
You can't attack someone like Assange for revealing official misconduct. That's against the rules, and unsympathetic. But you can attack him for <something else>. The something else is irrelevant. It's only the proffered reason for the attack, not the real one.
That would be a valid defense of Assange -- if the asshattery had come after the persecution. But from all I've read about him, it was the other way around. He has always been a humongous asshat.
Stopped reading there.
Seems we benefit from them no?
The US government was hacking Google by tapping cables between its data centers with direct access to Google accounts. The US government was paying tech companies for data on their customers. The US government had Verizon turn over phone records on millions of their customers daily. The US government used other countries spy agencies to spy on US citizens.
In terms of your broader point, something about restricting the authority of a law-giving entity via the law seems paradoxical. An example of this paradox is the fact that it's difficult to have standing to sue the government over an illegal spying program that is classified.
The best we seem to be able to do is the future-government holding the past-government accountable.
Let me know how that works out for you, k? I can assure you that although state power ultimately comes from the people, the state most definitely will enforce its laws against you, should you break them. That is, unless you're rich and powerful enough to afford the best lawyers and a handful of legislators.
If there's a busy road where people are routinely speeding, the state is actually incapable of pulling every single speeder over and ticketing them. Instead, the state relies on setting reasonable speed limits and scaring drivers with the prospect of fines.
This isn't a personal philosophy as much as it is a statement of truth: it's really expensive to enforce laws.
a) technology exists where you can just record license plates and send speeding tickets automatically - which is a nice prallel for mass surveilance tech - it makes large scale enforcement much cheaper
b) you don't really need to enforce on everyone, a high deterrant + random enforcement creates strong incentives against doing something (ie. making examples)
This makes no difference because nobody wants to play Russian roulette with regards to risking whether the state will come after them.
Indeed, the state’s power comes from this threat of force application.
It chooses not to.
Sometimes it does, which provides an interesting case study that proves slibhb's point -- "A law that is followed only as long as it is enforced is not much of a law and is unlikely to last."
One example is a portion of interstate near the St. Louis airport that runs through St. Ann, MO. (right next to Ferguson, MO), which resulted in changes to state law [1].
Many other munis in that region -- most notably Ferguson -- went far beyond strips of interstate and handed out fines as abundantly as possible, enforcing every law with an iron fist. And then the whole area exploded into chaos, reverberating out of the local community and, over a period of years, boiled over in dozens of communities.
You can rule with an iron fist. Until you can't.
[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/st-louis-county-municipal-cou...
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.” ― A.I. Solzhenitsyn
One of the main reasons the war on drugs failed is a lack of voluntary submission. Pure enforcement, even with the progressive strengthing of enforcement powers, was simply unable to stop drugs being widely available in the USA.
Our society runs on trust and voluntary submission to the rule of law. If either of those went away in a signifant fashion, the our legal system and society in general would cease to function in it's current form.
> “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.
> “You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-rich...
From that perspective, the drug war makes perfect sense, and was a spectacular success, not in terms of submission, but in terms of control.
You don't think Nixon could have disliked blacks, hippies, and drugs, and just found a convenient way to tie them all together while at the same time being able to say "think of the children?" Nixon was many things, but dumb and politically naive are not among them.
Additionally I don't find the subsequent argument compelling. 'Sure Nixon hated hippies and blacks, but it wasn't an effective policy until workshopped by subsequent presidents, so targetting those groups couldn't have been the point" doesn't really hold a lot of weight for me.
On top of all of that, corroborating quotes seem to keep being removed from that wikipage, with an edit note that doesn't match the edit, pointing to brigading.
"voluntary submission" sounds like people that walk around claiming to be a sovereign citizen thereby exempt from "laws". i always find it funny that the ones screaming this the loudest are usually in the midst of some sort of legal troubles.
Power is itself largely a product of voluntary submission, which radiates out. When some people voluntarily submit to the putative leadership, including in its request to back up the leaders orders with force when necessary, to report violations, etc., it increases the inclination of other people of others to submit without force being directly applied, and so on.
What argument?
> I agree that power flows from consensus.
That’s...not what I said, really.
> When it doesn't, we're talking about coercion, force, and violence, not power
“Power”, at least in the social sense, is the ability to get people to act as you wish; idealized moral or rational persuasion is one mechanism of that, the direct application or imminent threat of violence is a mechanism, and there’s a whole spectrum in between. But a leader’s ability, in practice, to apply power (by any mechanism) over a population is largely due to the successful use of power to influence a group of agents to act on behalf of the leader, and their application of power to others, etc. We might talk as if the state is a real concrete thing, but its really just an abstraction of the penumbra of indirect power emanating outward from the leadership.
These are not commensurate statements. If submission is voluntary, you aren't "getting people" to do anything...they're doing it voluntarily. Anyway, from what you write, it's clear you don't believe that anything is voluntary.
> Idealized moral or rational persuasion is one mechanism of that, the direct application or imminent threat of violence is a mechanism, and there’s a whole spectrum in between. But a leader’s ability, in practice, to apply power (by any mechanism) over a population is largely due to the successful use of power to influence a group of agents to act on behalf of the leader, and their application of power to others, etc. We might talk as if the state is a real concrete thing, but its really just an abstraction of the penumbra of indirect power emanating outward from the leadership.
Power is the possession of a group of people rooted in their ability to act in concert (i.e. their voluntary submission or assent to something). "Persuasion," moral or immoral, rational or irrational, doesn't come into it. And power is never the possession of a leader or a party or anything like that. You mistake power for authority, coercive force, and violence.
For you, all political categories run together in a category you call "power". This view does not acknowledge the fact that people can voluntarily choose to act together. Everything for you is about "persuasion," "threat of violence," "influence," and so on. As I said, you don't believe that anything is voluntary. This is a political philosophy that cannot make meaningful distinctions between political things.
This isn't true, look at for example the nineteenth amendment (men giving up power).
That wasn’t giving up power, it was trying to regain power by no longer claiming power through the abstraction of law that there was insufficient support to practically exercise and which claiming, as a result, merely diminished the general power of the State, because it reinforced in the public eye the gulf between law and power, reducing willingness to defer t9 the former in general.
The constitution only grants or limits power of various branches of government, it doesn't prescribe punishments for breaking the rules. That's a job of Congress (or courts, for civil cases).
It's the same with presidents, kings, and dictators. If people just stopped doing what they said, they become nothing.
There's an incident in Soviet history where Stalin was sure they were coming to arrest and execute him. He was shaking and completely powerless. But they were just coming to affirm his power.
The Arab Spring came about because people stopped following orders.
When Nixon was on his way out, the military decided to not follow his orders (so I've read).
The US will end when people just decide Constitution Shmonstitution.
Gun control is neither here nor there for me personally, but what greatly concerns me is if the Bill of Rights is ignored wrt the 2nd Amendment, then what about the rest of the Bill of Rights? Is that next?
Indeed we just had a bit of a lesson in the recent past which showed exactly how dependent our country is (and probably most other countries as well) on shared values and tradition. The Constitution isn't all-powerful as a piece of paper, its real power is as an idea.
If people in the US really want to grab back power to the citizens of this country it can be done (peacefully even). All it really takes is a large enough consensus of voters to upend all the garbage we're being subjected to. The issue is that the consensus is more difficult to reach due to the scale of the US voter population combined with tactics like gerrymandering and overall difficulty of orchestrating movements to support ideals most people seem to support (which isn't oppressing a minority unless we classify power and wealth hungry individuals as a protected minority which we currently seem to do).
Reaching consensus amongst citizens is far far more difficult these days, giving an edge to those already sitting in positions of concentrated power with fewer players, lending itself more likely to reach a consensus. It doesn't help that those in power actively try and divide the general voter population and set us against one another making it even more difficult to reach a consensus.
Also, people _have_ been in the streets in the US last year, a lot...
> the right of the people to keep and bear Arms
I don't understand how you could read that and interpret it as a right for anything other than the people?
The Legalists believed that if you had good laws then the rest would take care of itself. They "advocated government by a system of laws that rigidly prescribed punishments and rewards for specific behaviours. They stressed the direction of all human activity toward the goal of increasing the power of the ruler and the state."[2]
But the Confucians, particularly Mencius, pointed out that good men would create the good laws; while bad men would corrupt good laws. The laws were important for the ordering of society but insufficient. i.e. : "The sage-kings of antiquity are a model, but one cannot simply adopt their customs and institutions and expect to govern effectively (4A1). Instead, one must emulate the sage-kings both in terms of outer structures (good laws, wise policies, correct rituals) and in terms of inner motivations (placing ren and yi first). Like Confucius, Mencius places an enormous amount of confidence in the capacity of the ordinary person to respond to an extraordinary ruler, so as to put the world in order." [3]
To borrow from the Confucians; the Constitution is a product of good men and good laws to help protect goodness and order in society, but without good men to continue to have a living embodiment of the principles, it is still just a law that can be corrupted or ignored.
A beautiful quote from Etienne that you reminded me of is this, where he advocates to simply stop supporting tyrants: "Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces."
Tyrants only have power because people choose to follow.
[1] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Discourse_on_Voluntary_Servit...
[2] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Legalism#:~:text=The%20Lega....
The argument is probably pretty simple. These companies will sell your data to anyone for the right price, why would a government agency be any different. It's probably not a search or seizure, just a purchase between parties that don't even include any specific member of the public.
First congress needs to make all this data selling and trading illegal, then we'll see how the government goes about obtaining it and weather that's legal or not. But too many lobbyists represent companies that make a ton of money on it, and of course these agencies would prefer to just purchase the data "legally", so I'm not terribly optimistic.
- More than 120 retired generals and admirals wrote to Biden appearing to back a false election conspiracy and questioning his mental health - https://www.businessinsider.com/former-generals-admirals-let...
- An open letter by former officers calling the president a “Marxist” dictator is a greater threat to U.S. democracy than the ouster of Liz Cheney. - https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/05/12/joe-biden-military-revo...
- Over 120 retired generals and admirals signed on to a letter falsely claiming the 2020 election was stolen in a move other veterans say erodes democratic norms. - https://sofrep.com/news/retired-officers-question-2020-elect...
30 Brigadiers, 16 Lietenant Generals, 42 Major Generals.
In any other normal country, at this stage people will call a military putsch brewing an inevitability.
The statutory limit on US army general staff is 241, and most of those guys are quite recent retirees.
Countries had putsches with much lesser portion of generals mutinying, and some times made without general staff involvement as such. In fact there are almost as much succesful putches on record by majors, and colonels, than generals.
can be applied to US constitution as additional laws needed not for those who WANT to uphold the US constitution but those who want to violate it.
Most of you probably already saw a Michigan-congress rep submit a bill to violate the US constitution by trying to force twitter posters to register with Michigan to post facts because he wanted to prevent others from outing him in the form of fact checking.
The saying goes the other way: "Locks are for honest people", implying that criminals aren't deterred by locks, and will just break a window if they want to get in.
The DoD tracks large scale threats to our nation. When the economy is rigged, then the establishment worries about the citizen base turning on the establishment.
Congress corruption (via lobbyiests) happens by:
a) Wall Street rigged economy HF front-running trades,
b) Wall Street is rigged
c) 2008 Mortgage crisis theft
d) Pharma is rigged
e) Medical costs are out of control. Every price fixes are killed by lobbyists): Hillary, Obama cost controls, etc.
DoD doesn't do surveillance due to lobbying. They do it because they view a potential risk in citizen uprising due to the rigged economy. DoD and Davos attendees share a worry about a risk from the citizen base.
What makes you think that they will respect new laws?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worcester_v._Georgia
The constitution and Supreme Court do not consider Blacks humans or citizens:
It's like, if you're of a certain age, you had to read 1984 or whatever in school. You'd think "well, no one would stand for that sort of thing in real life!" Okay, so we don't live in that society, exactly, but time after time, we're shown the breadth of government surveillance and the reaction from the broader public isn't to call for anyone's head on a pike -- it's not even to vote anyone out!
Outside of little communities like this one, people don't give much of a fuck. I guess that was Orwell's real point.
I think a fair number of people intuitively understand just how massive the internet is and it's hard to conceptualize someone or something sifting through the sand to find your few little grains.
https://www.tau.ac.il/education/muse/maslool/boidem/170forew...
Of course, they are very much opposed to such measures in other countries, especially their enemies.
I'm struggling to think of a single negative thing that I can directly associate with mass surveillance in the US. Certainly nothing bad has happened to me personally or anyone that I know because of it. So no one cares because it doesn't impact anyone's lives.
A justice system that contradicts itself like that can't be just.
What is the road to hell paved with?
That's right, good intentions.
See you in hell, folks, when the laws change and your perfectly legal existence up until that point becomes a problem to the state, and then the good cops will break a few little constitutional protections to build a parallel case against you...which of course, ordinary people view as a positive, not a negative.
Sometimes I think I should run away to another place that isn't turning in to a fascists police state, but then I realize ordinary scared people act predictably, so I guess I welcome our fascist overlords, hand me an arm band, let's clean up these streets of the checks notes trash.
lots of sarcasm included for free.
The bit that you seem to have missed in the parent post is that most people will not consider something bad unless that bad thing has directly negatively impacted them. Some people will go further and make excuses for the bad thing, even when it has negatively impacted them: "yeah, it's really bad that I got falsely accused because of this bad thing, but I think it's still a useful tool, and law enforcement just needs to be more careful using it so they only snare the real bad guys".
Most people seem to have no opinion on mass surveillance, or a positive one. They've done nothing bad, so they have nothing to hide, right? And even when someone gets caught up in it by mistake, the error rate is low enough such that we'll never get mass denouncements from regular people.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-surveillance-watchdog...
They remain ignorant of the fact that this means that people who actually do need privacy for purposes of organization against the harmful elements of the status quo (civil rights leaders, labor leaders, political party upstarts, et c) will be kneecapped by this for the remainder of the time the USA exists.
It's a lack of imagination, really. The Long Now.
I'd point out that the DoD is purchasing this data from private entities, not collecting it themselves.
As such, I'd say that it's less about government surveillance specifically, and more about surveillance in general.
Corporate surveillance is nothing new (Equifax/Experian/etc. have been doing that for at least half a century) and those folks collect, store and correlate enormously more data than does the US government.
There is a massive effort by corporations to hide this sort of data collection, which has been mostly successful.
Complaining about the government dipping into all that tasty, tasty data is like blaming the child who was sickened by stealing a cookie from a batch that was poisoned, then making sure that the rest of the batch is fed to the intended target.
That most folks are just complaining about big, bad government (which isn't wrong, but just a tiny portion of the larger issue), rather than the folks who are collecting, correlating and using such data to their own advantage (of which selling it to governments is just chump change) seems rather silly and short-sighted.
Corporations don’t generally have guns or handcuffs that they can use on arbitrary people. The state does, which is why there’s such a danger associated with them being able to access the data.
Experian doesn’t have a torture chamber. The Chicago PD and the CIA do.
And that makes it perfectly fine for corporations to do so? Because they can't rough you up or arrest you?
Please.
As I said:
...complaining about big, bad government (which
isn't wrong, but just a tiny portion of the
larger issue)
It's much easier (at least in the US) to restrain the Federal government than hundreds (thousands?) of corporations, regardless of their monopoly on the use of force.
Railing against the government for compromising the privacy of its citizens is absolutely appropriate. That said, there is the much, much more widespread issue of corporate surveillance that should also be addressed.
Corporate surveillance is bad, sure. But, even when maximally bad, it doesn’t pose that grave a threat to a society’s correct functioning.
When the state gets to use it for what is called “law enforcement” (qualified because, for example, the aforementioned CIA torture prisons, and MLK Jr was targeted thus by the FBI, and sent threatening letters by them as a result) the maximum danger from misuse is a grave risk to a free society.
Except it does. Especially in this case, since the government purchased the data collected via corporate surveillance. Or did you miss that part?
If the data hadn't been collected via corporate surveillance,the DoD would have nothing to buy, would they?
We can vote out of government those who would allow violations of our privacy (whether or not we do so is a different, but equally important discussion). We cannot do so with corporations.
Given the circumstance in this case (the DoD purchasing this data from private corporations rather than collecting it independently), including corporate surveillance in the discussion is critically important.
When one's paycheck depends on a not understanding certain things, it's often difficult to get that person to understand those things. Some food for thought, friend.
I think this is an illusion. There is ~no one to vote for that supports rolling back US government bulk surveillance.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/03/edward-snowd...
Do you remember when people freaked because the new Kinect would be on _all the time_ and (gasp) _always listening_? Obviously no parallels to future technologies.
Alexa, play Despacito.
We're Mildreds too busy being consumed by the stories of our parlour walls (social media?). Or Fabers too cowardly to really speak up and stand up to it when we had the chance. Or Montags working in the system that slowly eats away at us until we wake up one day to what has been lost.
I think the "average" person is fine because they never have the pressing need to exercise a freedom, and when one comes to the occasion and finds that the freedom is gone, it might be too late to regain.
http://scratchbook.ch/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Journalism-...
The vaccine question breaks down similarly, we either trust our inner circle and our own health, or our own judgement and that of the people who designed vaccines/protocols, but rarely both - it's like we orient to only a small or a large community.
It's not like this is a fringe subject, we have mainstream media exposing people to these ideas. There are so many movies and series where global surveillance is part of the plot. Every 21st century police procedural episode begins with the authorities briefing themselves on the situation and they always have access to ridiculous amounts of information. I can't possibly be the only one who gets uncomfortable watching these scenes.
It was scary as all hell, given the Trump presidency. But it's not just the surveillance that is frightening. Eg, the rewriting of history, and the Two Minutes Hate which seem characteristic of the Trump rallies
how little human beings really care about mass surveillance is just one in the long line of truths that prove that most of the population prefer perceived safety over liberty
A law is necessary to codify that this practice is a violation Fourth Amendment, and Wyden is currently one of a handful of senators trying to get it passed.
The story eventually mentions this, but the beginning focus on confidentiality makes it seem like they're hiding evidence of their crime.
My cynical take is that Wyden is only allowed to make these press releases because both parties know that they are unlikely to become law. People get less upset knowing someone is pushing for the issues they care about even though the effort is futile.
I would focus on the collection and sale of personal information first because it is often done without the informed consent of the person to whom the information is associated.
I want restrictions on EVERYONE buying my data. Not just one entity.
That's a start, but I'd prefer restrictions on EVERYONE collecting my data too.
flimflam: deceptive nonsense
Who defines "legitimate" and why should that be an argument for doing something that seems blatantly unconstitutional?
It seems strange and troubling to me that a senator would be restricted from making public any government information.
When the preservation of the formerly supreme law of the land is made subordinate to the interests of the ruling military, I think it is safe to say the american experiment is over.
I have long maintained that the US is basically a military dictatorship. There are many examples, like the CIA hacking congressional computers to cover up the fact that the CIA lied under oath to congress. Snowden telling us that all of the large US internet and web service providers have to spy on everyone, citizens and not, without a warrant. And now this.
The US is not a free country today, if indeed it ever was.
I understand why you're saying this, but I think it's profoundly dismissive of those who have fought for what we have.
The chief might get in trouble, but usually that has to do with policies against using external resources or for budget constraints.
I know... the CCC has been the target of infiltration and compromise in various ways throughout history, but that's a reality of standing up to abusive power.
Do you believe that it's alright for the NSA to conduct surveillance on foreign threats?
Strictly by the text this is false in a couple respects:
(1) the text does not refer to or limit its provisions to citizens at all.
(2) the text prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, not those without warrants (it also sets standards for warrants, when they are issued.)
The Supreme Court has inferred from the juxtaposition of the reasonableness requirement and warrant standards that warrants are presumptively but not universally required for reasonableness.
It is one thing for the NSA to conduct surveillance on foreign threats, but I have always been uncomfortable with the suggestion that the NSA is perfectly entitled to vacuum up the communications of ordinary, perfectly harmless foreign individuals because "the protections of the American Constitution don’t apply to foreigners". The American Constitution is largely a product of 18th-century natural-law arguments, and so you would think that case can be made that all human beings are endowed by their Creator with a right to privacy regardless of their citizenship.
> "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" He responded, "No, sir." Wyden asked "It does not?" and Clapper said, "Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly."
> The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-reco...
I like this question, but I think there's a better one: "do you believe it's alright for the NSA to exist?"
This is debatable, of course, but in my view secret services ("intelligence agencies") and secret police (the FBI) are a deal with the devil for societies in general: in the long run much, much more harmful and costly than beneficial. You're taking human beings -- brutally fallible and power-mad like we all have the capacity to be -- and telling them "here, you have a special hall pass to cheat, lie, steal, and kill, but promise to only do it to those guys over there, okay?" Can we really be shocked when, a few years down the line, they forget everything after "but"? Note, too, that this hall pass is both legal and moral, couched as it is in the language of patriotism ("national security"): it's wrong to kill, but this is for your country, so you're good. (Incidentally, things like this really show that Ian Fleming was a pretty good satirist - "license to kill" is much more macabre and darkly funny when you realize that it's real.)
It may sound naive or even callous to say that nothing the NSA does is or can be legitimate - yes, al qaeda could kill Americans if the NSA doesn't spy on them or if the CIA doesn't lob a Hellfire missile at their daughter's birthday party. But we citizens make these kinds of decisions all the time, explicitly or implicitly.
Take automobiles as an example, or the legal status of alcohol - we've decided that we're okay with hundreds of thousands of people dying every decade in return for using those things. That's on all our heads, as I see it. I'm not certain, but I'd put money that there's no threat the NSA looks out for that, absent the NSA, could wreak as much havoc on the US as car crashes and whiskey (and that's not even counting the interaction of cars and whiskey, heh). And if there was, it'd probably be attributable in whole or in part to how the US has behaved out there beyond our shores. In fact I'm shocked sometimes that the rest of the planet hasn't been more out for our blood given what we did in the 2nd half of the 20th century alone. This isn't to be a mouth-foaming hater, by the way - I love this country very much. But a lot of ugly shit goes down on our dime, and in our names.
Whether anyone believes it's okay to do or not is irrelevant, the NSA is charged to conduct foreign intelligence surveillance by US law, and does so accordingly.
They knew exactly what they were doing every step of the way.
If you have a bug placed on someone's purse and they talk to others, you are wittingly surveilling them. Unwittingly would imply it was not foreseen that others would be spied on (e.g. placing a wiretap on the wrong phone number).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Massie#Early_life,_educ...
I've met a lot of very smart people in my lifetime that are wrong about all sorts of prominent topics, despite being well-read on the topics in question. Pick nearly any subject and you can bet there are smart people on both sides that will disagree, and some of them will bring very potent arguments to the table even when they're wrong.
Massie operates a cattle farm in Garrison, Kentucky, with his wife, Rhonda, and their four children.[153][154] They live in a solar-powered home that Massie built himself.[155][156] He is a Methodist.[157]
I would rather have a non degreed non corrupt politician.
I would prefer a highly competitive political system with all sorts of different people as politicians, that has little to none power to affect real people's lives without consent
Just one example out of many - last weekend had long conversation with very successful and very smart urology surgeon here in Switzerland, where he repeatedly stated how covid is great and godsend and mankind should be culled, too bad that not more are dying from it etc.
The same person who in his early 30s is quite a bit overweight, has type 3 diabetes, can't handle physical effort, passed to his kid some genetic abnormality and if he got covid he would probably have some serious issues.
I couldn't change his opinion a nanometer. A doctor. Needless to say my faith in humanity decreased a bit on that evening.
That and everybody has a price. Or almost everybody. Definitely those that manage to get to top politics and remain there for decades, it ain't for average joe and nice honest folks in any way.
We occasionally find wonderful people like Richard Feynman who can sidestep this inverse relationship, but not frequently.
I guess "tech-literate" isn't really worth that much as a label.
I know enough people wired into local politics that if he had some huge hidden dark side, it'd be out there. He really is pretty much what he puts out there.
The only difference is they go through a commercial entity now. If it is legal to trade with the Brits, it is legal to go through a private entity. Data is big business.
That said, are they really in illegality ? Can I buy this type of localization data as a private individual ?
If so, then they don't need a warrant, am I right ?
Now, you might observe that the country's money says "In God We Trust" on it, its legislature openly prays to the Christian God, its Head of State goes to a Christian church, and its Supreme Court sure seems like they have some very peculiar ideas about how exactly such freedom for "private citizens" manifests...
But in principle the United States does not have an Established Church and is not permitted to establish one. This may be cold comfort de facto if you see Organised Religion with its tendrils deep in the heart of government, but there you are.