U.S. Marshals Spied on Abortion Protesters Using Dataminr

If we identify A, B, C, and D as potential rights, and you and I agree on rights A and B, but we disagree on the principles of C and D, then it’s ok that my side violates your rights A and B because if we can’t agree on all of them, then you deserve none.

It’s the kind of thing that ensures that compromise, understanding, and legislation won’t happen by way of conversation or respectful debate, but instead by name calling and force.

Is this unconstitutional? I was wondering what case law there is about the government buying data like this.

Words won't protect you. Precedent won't protect you. Guns won't protect you. If you are in a society where others want you surveiled or dead or removed or heavily restricted, and you're outnumbered, it's already too late. As you say, for many people already "Constitutional" is just a weapon to be wielded when it suits them and ignored when it doesn't. But the reason why that's bad needs to be much more than "because this piece of paper says so," it needs to be "because these are things we all agree are important."

When I was young, due to my family's business, I lived in multiple cultures outside of the US. I have personally experienced precisely the kind of political shift you mention in your post as a teenager, living in Argentina. I am referring to the military take-over.

Imagine a world where the police or military thugs can kick down your front door in the middle of the night and take some or all of your family, never to be seen again. Imagine a world where, rock and roll was declared illegal and you could be arrested, tortured or worse if found "guilty" --not by a jury, by a single thug-- of anything remotely associated with it. Or how about being in a bus going somewhere, the bus gets pulled over and they beat the shit out of a bunch of people, just because they can (and justify it in some form).

If you were known to not be in alignment with the prevailing ideology your life was worth nothing. Thousands died. Thousands disappeared.

I had the personal experience one evening of getting pulled over by a couple of police cars while just walking home with friends after going to the movies. They threw us (and I do mean threw us, violently) up against the wall, harassed the shit out of us, slapped a couple of us around, took whatever money we had and sent us on our way. We were LUCKY that it didn't go beyond that.

Americans are alarmingly ignorant of history outside their own borders. Our system of education is so one-sided, in an ideological sense, that kids leaving high school, and, in particular, college, become adults with truly distorted and troubling ideological programming.

You talk to ANY immigrant who came from anywhere where the ideologies promoted by our universities and mass media are the "law of the land" and you are far more likely to get a treatise on how horrific this is rather than enthusiastic support for it. This ideology has proven to be a generational disaster across the world and across time. And yet, we, collectively, have allowed this to happen.

> So many people are okay with unconstitutional things as long as it supports their side and beliefs.

This is a major point that, once again, isn't taught in schools. The consequences will not be favorable over the long term. The idea that you should protect the rights of those you do not agree with is so fundamentally unique that it is rare, very rare, around the world. The US, in that sense, was unique. I say "was" because, today, I believe this is history. The fact that university students will riot when someone their puppeteers do not agree with comes to give a presentation at their school is evidence enough of the intolerant society we have manage to "educate" ourselves into.

In this twisted world, the reality is that those espousing such things as tolerance, equity, freedoms, etc. actually, through their actions, actually do the opposite and represent the opposite: intolerance, non-equity, a desire and willingness to curtail freedoms, etc.

We have managed to create an entire generation of adults full of hatred and intolerance.

This is not a good outcome. This is the kind of thing that, in the chess game of a globally competitive world, your enemies absolutely rejoice about. While the US is busy polarizing its own population --alarmingly, through education-- actors around the world spend ever day placing one foot in front of the other. The result of this massive lack of foresight will not be pretty.

> It is genuinely unsettling.

Yes. I'll add, scary, disappointing, unproductive and dangerous. I do realize that a good percentage of the HN college-educated audience is in the grips of ideology that was pounded into their heads. It's Plato's Allegory of the Cave. All you can do is try to lead them out of the shadows. Yet, they have to be the ones open to viewing the world with their own eyes, rather than the shadows they were presented with.

I would highly recommend watching a series on Netflix:

"BREAK IT ALL: The History of Rock in Latin America"

https://www.netflix.com/title/81006953

One of the very interesting things about this series is that they actually explore the political shifts you hinted at in your comment. They, of course, cover this in the context of Rock, but also provide a generalized view. This kind of thing has happened in nearly every Latin American country. It is disturbing that Americans don't know this history well. If they did, many of the political actors and most of the militant academics in this country would be laughed off the stage. There is HISTORY to prove that these people are not only demented, they are actually dangerous to society.

I feel like we're currently in this death spiral where its just a never ending war to get the other parties people out of power by any means necessary. While the entire time, its the people who have to suffer through it and pick sides.

It appears the centrist moderate has evaporated from American politics - which to me was the last group of voters who kept both sides honest. There is no compromise either, its just a scorched earth approach now where nobody wins.

Assuming there is some truth to this, the rise of the internet and a daily deluge of culture war content seems like it could easily explain the transformation.

I've become deeply cynical about this argument. The Constitution is a weapon, used by the powerful against the powerless. I think it's pretty clear that in many cases the Supreme Court decides cases on purely ideological grounds, then goes back and creates post hoc justifications from precedent and the text.

Public opinion is useless here - it doesn't matter whether people are "OK" with something. What will you do, elect a new Supreme Court?

As with so many american issues, just amend the fucking constitution!

I swear this country needs to stop everything and do a constitutional convention (can be done, never be done before).

It doesn’t seem that there was any intimidation of peaceful protesters, which obviously would be concerning.

1. Bulk surveillance for pattern recognition

2. Breaking cryptography so they can go directly to the source/plaintext

Perhaps we need to figure out some other ways to make the population resistant to crime. For example reducing poverty and increasing opportunity often leads to reduced crime, why not spend billions on pursuing lasting changes on that front?

You would think with AI we could track all guns and bullets to crimes eventually.

tl;dr: I see it as the difference between using search tools to monitor for potential suspects vs search tools to implicate already identified suspects.

The law (thankfully) is not some hard coded machine that follows cold logic ignoring all context. (Good) judges are able to look at changes in context and recognize that the underlying factors have shifted and so change rulings.

You are entitled to privacy even for certain public situations. Even if you can see through a window, the government can't go training telescopes inside your home without a warrant. It's an active battle for things like location data.

How would you feel if you found the past three weeks, there was someone parked outside your home, who followed you to work, and logged when and where you left?

I mean, it's all public information, right?

How would you feel if they did this, specifically because of your political beliefs?

Government money also tends to raise all ships^H^H^H^H^Hprices, so many of the social welfare programs - tuition and home buying loans and assistance, for example - have had the effect of raising prices to the point that most people couldn’t afford them without that assistance. That seems like a good indicator that the program has lost its purpose and should be scrapped for a new idea. Getting rid of those would be immediately deflationary for several sectors (good, imho).

As someone on the hook for $116k in deficit, I’d be much happier to direct my tax dollars to eliminating debt and interest payments and reducing inflation than a great deal of what public money is being spent on.

I really don't see the issue. This is information people knowingly release to the public, so the cops are not spying on anyone. A protest is a potential security threat, which is why the cops always show up. I see no evidence this information was abused to try to prevent people from expressing their opinions. What am I supposed to be upset about?

Also, as you very well know, the large majority of the Federal budget goes to social services like healthcare and social security. The entire DoJ budget is a drop in the ocean. Slashing federal budgets will do nothing to eliminate this sort of program but will result in Granny living on the street.

If you want to stop this kind of surveillance, your best bet is to advocate that it be illegal, with accountability. You can also advocate for a reduced budget, but it's not going to get you very far. If anything, it would tend to lead to more use of this kind of tool.

[0]- There are some agitators on the fringes of both parties for specific reductions to parts of law enforcement that those agitators have a problem with. Whether correct or not, the fact is that these are two disjoint proposals from elements that have no interest in compromising with each other. Neither proposal covers the U.S. Marshals, and neither is going to amount to anything at the federal level.

I'm sure there's some underlying universal principle related to entropy. You see the same with code bases. Unless you are diligent about caring for and correcting things, every large code base will eventually become a steaming pile of tech debt after a few decades.