The U.S. government's long and shameful history of intercepting people's letters
reason.com
reason.com
This isn't about the ban; it's that a president got a strong signal from the supreme court that he can't do X, then did X two weeks later.
That the cdc would go right ahead and roll out a new moratorium is a stunning failure of checks and balances.
It was inconvenient so they eroded it.
When it came to the black panthers they took away both the 2nd and the 4th.
Notice the implication that it was reasonable to censor mail going to soldiers outside the country, (in WWII) but not inside the US.
"I get a letter from my wife that says, “It's very difficult writing because I feel that the _____ is looking over my shoulder." And where the word was, there is a splotch made with ink eradicator.
So I went down to the bureau, and I said, “You're not supposed to touch the incoming mail if you don't like it. You can look at it, but you're not supposed to take anything out."
They said, “Don't be ridiculous. Do you think that's the way censors work - with ink eradicator? They cut things out with scissors."
I said OK. So I wrote a letter back to my wife and said, “Did you use ink eradicator in your letter?" She writes back, “No, I didn't use ink eradicator in my
letter, it must have been the____ and there's a hole cut out of the paper"
"I went to see my wife in Albuquerque that day, she said, “Well, where's all the stuff?"
I said, “What stuff?"
She said, “Litharge, glycerine, hot dogs, laundry.”
I said, “Wait a minute - that was a list?"
She said, “Yes."
"That was a code", I said. "They thought it was a code - litharge, glycerine, etc."
Feynman's story of how he didn't get drafted is pretty well known.
He also tells some stories about how clueless the military was, because they had no concept of nuclear physics at that time, which would be expected.
Like, they didn't realize neutrons that go through water are much more dangerous.
When someone's using the mail to send anthrax to people, knowing who communicated with whom to trace it to the source is suddenly very reasonable.
Dying from anthrax is a lot less convenient than having record of every letter a person sent or received dry-rotting in a data warehouse somewhere.
When someone's using the roads to travel to kill people, knowing who travelled to whom to trace them to the source is suddenly very reasonable.
No wait, that's insane, we should never expect that it is reasonable to conduct mass surveillance on all the roads in the country to find out where people go all the time.
Why do people think this kind of stuff is reasonable and positive for society?
Utility and traffic light poles have cameras and license plate scanners that can capture up to 5000 plates/sec, even in smaller suburban areas, at an increasingly alarming rate.
EZ Pass and similar are scanned in lots of places that aren't toll plazas — at least that is possibly agreed to via a terms of use.
I was on a jury where the police were able to track down a hit and run driver who killed a teenager within about 45 minutes due to red light cameras.
Torture is a good example.
Mike Baker talks about why it was pointless for the CIA to torture someone and why when they train people how to handle being capture, they tell them to tell the truth with a little information redacted.
However, cellphones in particular do require the cellphone network to track at least which cell they're in in order to work, so in practice controlling a cellphone network gives you a pretty good idea of where all the subscribers are.
This is a big problem, and we need to figure out how to stop it if we are to enjoy the sort of freedom from government surveillance that people everywhere enjoyed since the Paleolithic until about 01998. The 20th-century results of giving too much power to governments are not promising.
"Reasonable" changes over time, with available technology, and with the tolerance of the public. People don't much care for "We could've stopped that murder / caught that murderer, but we didn't use the resources available."
If there's a murder on a street corner, do we expect the cops to not pull camera records from every nearby store with an outward-facing camera?
Not to mention, a trove of communication like this is a major risk to every citizen: it can leak, it can stolen, it can be used by corrupt agents to blackmail or otherwise coerce most people, especially in the age of sexting, dick pics, etc.
The Penn family was trying to buy their way out of having their American land-holdings taxed by offering to pay mercenaries to protect the Colony (in a single lump sum). Franklin was arguing the Colony should assert its sovereign right to tax the family.
The "essential liberty" in question was the liberty of a government to levy tax as it saw fit to provide for a common defence.
Spycatcher, Peter Wright, 1987-
"Around twenty Post Office technicians worked at these tables opening pieces of mail. They wore rubber gloves so as not to leave fingerprints, and each man had a strong lamp and a steaming kettle beside him. The traditional split-bamboo technique was sometimes used. It was ancient, but still one of the most effective. The split bamboo is inserted into the corner of the envelope, which is held up against a strong light. By turning the bamboo inside the envelope, the letter can be rolled up around the slit and gently pulled out Where a letter had an ordinary typed address it was sometimes torn open and a new envelope typed in its place. But to the end of my career we were never able to covertly open a letter which had been sealed at each edge with Sellotape. In those cases, MI5 took a decision as to whether to open the letter and destroy it, or send it on in an obviously opened state."
"Denman's proudest memento was a framed letter which hung on the far wall. It was addressed to a prominent Communist Party member whose mail was regularly intercepted. When the letter was opened the Post Office technicians were amused to discover that it was addressed to MI5 and contained a typewritten message, which read: "To MI5, if you steam this open you are dirty buggers." Denman classified it as "obscene post," which meant that legally he had no duty to send it on to the cover address. "
If you are interested in other freedom-oriented non-profits I highly recommend:
Institute for Justice https://ij.org/
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) https://www.thefire.org/
Cato Institute https://www.cato.org/
If by freedom-oriented you mean right-libertarian, which os very much not the only understanding of “freedom”, you would be correct.
https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Reason_Foundatio... https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Institute_for_Ju... https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Foundation_for_Individ... https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Cato_Institute
Many seem to associate themselves with libertarian ideals. All have been funded by the Koch brothers.
Give me liberty, as the saying goes, but also drivers licenses, and hold the bears.
Libertarianism isn't bad on spec. But it is not reasonable to suggest that people shouldn't be made aware when their sources are all libertarian, as these ones are, for the same reason that it's good to know if your sources are Jacobin, Current Affairs, and In These Times.
How is it not? It's deeply anti-democratic, basically handing over power to corporations and wealthy people. It's not like its biggest proponents are advocating "a great reset" where all people will start at zero property again or something, it's just a power grab for the already propertied.
Some other arguments though, yes, they go too far.