FBI misused surveillance powers more than 280k times in a year
theregister.com
theregister.com
If they have a good reason, they can spy, and they can get a warrant for it. If they don't have a reason, they shouldn't be able to search anything, American citizen or not.
The core part of story was the spying on citizen part without warrants.
A Little history...in early 20th century there was a big concern when the pen warrant precedents were established as the FBI felt that it was somewhat illegal. Several SC cases changed their view on that namely specifying that they needed to get a pen warrant for telecommunication eaves dropping.
current 702 upended that as pen warrants generally applied to US citizens even out of country whereas 702 changed that to a probability of there being a US citizen caught in the telecomm eaves dropping.
What would be nice is a revamp of 702 to be warrant based wire-taps that go through a special court for the warrants with the appropriate increase in judges to handle such a change.
San Marino? Costa Rica? Tuvalu?
> San Marino
Is 23 square miles of land with a population of 33K and is land-locked by Italy. Even still -- as a tiny micro-state land-locked by a friendly NATO and EU member state -- San Marino participates in foreign surveillance in a variety of ways; e.g., a member of the Customs union it collaborates with Europol on counter-terrorism.
> Tuvalu
Is 10 square miles with 10K people, and even then collaborates with a Five Eyes nation on maritime surveillance.
> Costa Rica
Unlike the other two examples, Costa Rica is a reasonably sized country. Like other countries which are not tiny micro-states, Costa Rica has its own dedicated intelligence agency independent of collaborative agreements/treaties. It additionally collaborates with both INTERPOL and western intelligence agencies.
There is a general rule in public discourse that it is best to assume good faith of all parties. It is difficult to apply that to the FISA court while still believing the legislators can be allowed to legislate. They are looking past a system that was always going to be used for political suppression that, if tested, is likely to be scandalous and probably illegal. Someone has to be lying in the conversation.
The only silver lining here is that the political right wing of the US were the ones who championed it most strongly and it is their candidate who is being hit the most effectively. The world isn't fair, but occasionally karma happens. They should have listened to the human rights advocates and people standing up for honourable legal traditions.
Non-Americans don't have the same rights as Americans. They may also be looked at more in a more adversarial manner.
I'm not suggesting this is right, just what I'd guess the logic is.
I want them to spy on our enemies. And I want them to roast for spying on us.
Protect you from who?
>I want them to spy on our enemies.
Who are these enemies, and how did we identify them as such? Do we just spy until we found one?
Investigation should begin with crimes that have occurred, suss out those circumstances where there is a bigger picture, and attain warrants for further investigation. Lack of probable cause means no search, a right extended by Amendment IV to all people (at least within US holdings as described above, which is where I think the FBI should be operating).
The fault here lies with Congress. FISA is their doing, and it expressly violates all clauses of Amendment IV. The FBI is at fault for swinging this particular bat in a room full of citizens, but they shouldn't have been given the bat to begin with. Why FISA hasn't had a Supreme Court challenge on constitutional grounds is beyond me, but IANAL.
The fault lies with the idea that there always needs to be an enemy.
I agree with self defense. However, I'm not sure this is always the case.
Is that perhaps a direct result of the USG protecting you from them?
I think the FBI has succumbed to scope creep and overstepped what I perceive as their remit; however, that doesn't mean they're an unnecessary body.
Not for lack of trying. Apparently it's very hard to show standing[1]. This is going to need a legislative solution, or none at all.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2013/02/26/172998760/supreme-court-makes...
"It" may decide on courses of action that are in its best interests but detrimental to others, even if it has no history of that behavior.
Same reason the US had war plans targeting essentially the entire world in the interwar years -- you never know.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_color-coded_wa...
The Bill of Rights is a statement from the people to the government. "These are some of our rights and you will respect them."
One could say there are natural desires, or natural ethics/morals, but these have no weight without a granting and enforcing entity.
E.g. "my personal right to not pay taxes"
At its heart, the Constitution and Bill of Rights are a formal trade between the people and the proposed government, each of whom start with some power.
People: "We will give you legitimacy and support, if you give us these rights."
Government: "We agree to give you those rights, in return for your legitimacy and support."
The people and the government can believe they have other rights (e.g. a right to privacy), but until they're codified and agreed to by the government they don't exist.
Hence why it usually takes revolution, civil disobedience, or riots to force a government to grant (natural) rights it doesn't want to.
Which was the same argument that lead (rightly, IMHO) to their enumeration in the Bill of Rights, in contrast to the unenumerated British system.
Individuals protecting "their" un-enumerated rights risk the violent wrath of the state, or are able to do so only because the state chooses to ignore them.
How is an individual supposed to protect their own rights?
That's a strange negative. How about, my personal right to control my body (without harming others including not stealing from others).
I do not have a right to steal from you. Goverment is granted some authorities from the people to the government. People can't grant to others what they don't have (like a non-existent right to steal). Therefore, government does not have a right to steal from you or me.
If you want to enter into a commercial agreement with government for some purpose then sign whatever forms and contacts you desire. For me, taking the fruits of my personal labor is theft.
Do you have friends too? Does being spied on by the states mean you're their enemy?
Basically, anyone "not a Fed" in the USA, is an enemy. And even then ..
When you can't tell who the enemy is then everyone is suspect and the later naturally arises.
It is an overall net negative strategy.
EU human rights law doesn't make this distinction between citizen and non-citizen.
Mass surveillance of this type is always directed at a countries own sphere of influence, domestic and at close allies. There is little camaraderie between people in power and the average citizen. On the contrary, to keep the power, you must collect info on everyone that could become a danger to you.
In racing teams your largest opponent is often your racing partner.
Surveillance of foreign adversaries is best done by getting info on key players. Why would info on the average foreign citizen matter at all? It just isn't interesting information.
You poll 10 random Americans on whether they think the government should have all powers necessary to defend against another January 6th riot and I don't know what they'll say.
>A spokeswoman for the department told Roll Call that Lt. Mike Byrd will be investigated after his Glock-22, which has no manual safety to prevent unintended firing, was found “during a routine security sweep” by another officer in a bathroom on Monday.
https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/431924-cap...
30+ people were killed during the riots of 2020.
It is precisely this violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that is causing so much calamity in the world today, alas. Americans should really, really not accept this state of affairs - either American lives are human lives, and are thus as valuable as any other human life, or they aren't - and therefore international law need not apply to Americans in other aspects of life, either.
The efforts to which an American citizen will proclaim their exceptionalism over the rest of the world and duplicity in applying that exceptionalism is a major cause of the diminished trust that the world feels for the USA, today.
Not actual law or legally binding.
Pretty much all countries distinguish citizens from non-citizens. This isn't an American thing. And you're committing a category error, namely that rights Americans have aren't a superset of any internationally agreed rights. They are.
In all seriousness though, I've no idea what this means in any practical sense. I don't know what being a subject of a government is, not how it compares to being a sovereign.
Human rights supersede citizenship, which is as it should be - especially for those human beings who want to exercise their rights while not being citizens of any state, whether by choice or by war, etc.
Non-citizens are humans too, and therefore have the same rights citizens do.
It's still the case that spy agencies will have more of a difficult time in court and in public perception dealing with the ramifications of spying on citizens. Nonetheless, I don't think this means very much, and if the Federal government would like to, they could take this 'right' away, lie about not violating it, or violate it and ignore the fact that it's happening.
And this isn't about American citizens proclaiming exceptionalism. I suggested no such exceptionalism, and I highly doubt there are many citizens who agree with this any more. I would guess that somewhere near a majority of Americans prefer that we don't waste money spying on anyone. You can put this on the citizens if you like, but I view it similarly to hearing some Americans complain about "the Chinese" rather than "the Chinese government." It doesn't reflect what I believe reality is, that most normal people are not in support of these policies, and normal citizens from 'foreign adversary' nations are not our enemies, and we should not talk about them that way. (Edit: A caveat on this, the US is a democracy so I can see it being argued that the citizens are complicit in their government's behavior. Briefly stated, I disagree, but that's a really long argument and tangent I don't want to go down this morning.)
Here's a poll touching the subject from 2021 (no idea about the veracity, just a result I found Googling "poll americans who support spying"):
> In particular, 46% of Americans say they oppose the U.S. government responding to threats against the nation by reading emails sent between people outside of the U.S. without a warrant, as permitted under law for purposes of foreign intelligence collection. That’s compared to just 27% who are in favor. In an AP-NORC poll conducted one decade ago, more favored than opposed the practice, 47% to 30%.
https://apnews.com/article/technology-afghanistan-race-and-e...
The exceptions written to this by Congress (FISA, USA PATRIOT, etc.) are unconstitutional and should be struck down.
https://www.criminallegalnews.org/news/2018/may/14/parallel-...
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Our laws, particularly those restricting government power, apply equally to all humans.
A shocking and terrible event happens, a report identifies that intelligence agencies collectively had all the pieces to prevent it but were unable to see the entire picture due to compartmentalization, and the country decreases that compartmentalization.
Cause, reflection, and effect.
After that, it's been the intertia of "hidden privacy erosion" vs "visible perception of safety." (Yes, actual safety has poor statistical support)
But democracies generally discount hidden evils and multiply visible goods when voting.
Do you have a citation for this assertion?
I'd watch the linked interview below. It gets really interesting when Binney talks about how much money and contracts were awarded to make TrailBlazer. All of the data storage, etc. Huge, massive contracts to keep it going. It also greatly increased their annual budget. ThinThread was internal, and fairly cheap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinThread
A very good interview with Binney who discusses this and a lot more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3owk7vEEOvs
Uh… how about we start with Americans
The answer is that most democracies have various fundamental protections against spying on their own citizens (including the USA), because citizens want that. But governments still want to spy on their own citizens anyway, because terrorism and think-of-the-children and the war on drugs and geopolitics and general control of 1%ers over 99%ers. So it's not even really about non-Americans.
So what to do? How to get around that, in a way that citizens don't mind? Why, you set up a secretive Five Eyes agreement (also the other "Eyes"). UK spies on USA citizens, USA spies on UK citizens, the USA shares that gathered intelligence with UK, and UK shares their intelligence with USA.
Voila! Now each government can spy on all its citizens via trusted foreign proxies. It's legal, and the citizenry is not informed enough to care.
Anyway, that is the answer to your question. 1%ers want it, and citizens are not informed enough to care.
It is in fact an agreement to NOT spy on the citizens of the four other nations.
Because this 180 degree myth about skirting domestic law by spying on each other's citizens is so widespread, it actually makes accurate information difficult to find.
The Wikipedia page is squatted by editors who refuse to admit they are wrong, but this article is pretty clear [0]; "The partnership has one core rule, that the members agree not to spy on each other."
Wikipedia implies this is limited to governments but it is not.
[0] https://www.lowyinstitute.org/publications/we-need-five-eyes...
What the original aim of the agreement is somewhat unknown, but the Snowden documents revealed multiple examples of spying on each others civilians and sharing the results. Such as, https://web.archive.org/web/20140125021330/http://uk.reuters...
You've never heard anything like this because it's the intelligence agencies responses to the Snowden documents. They're usually mentioned in the same articles but nobody really buys their excuses.
The Snowden leaks included material acknowledging that this was the purpose of the agreement. The reason the incidental collection was controversial was _because_ it was against a strict reading of the agreement.
See this article[1] which I believe is quoting straight from Snowden leaks; "[The March 1946 UKUSA agreement] has evolved to include a common understanding that both governments will not target each other's citizens/persons. However, when it is in the best interest of each nation, each reserved the right to conduct unilateral Comint action against each other's citizens/persons.
"Under certain circumstances, it may be advisable and allowable to target second-party persons and second-party communications unilaterally when it is in the best interests of the US."
Note that this is saying that they reserve the right to do it unilaterally i.e. without the knowledge of the other, and this is considered against the purpose of the agreement.
I stand by the statement that the general understanding of the agreement - that it is a way for countries to request surveillance of their own citizens to skirt domestic law - is 180 degrees wrong. The agreement is the opposite.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120202160554/https://www.nsa.g...
[1] https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/02/history-of-5-e...
>Note that this is saying that they reserve the right to do it unilaterally i.e. without the knowledge of the other, and this is considered against the purpose of the agreement
Yes, the US independently decides to spy on Brits. What makes it malicious is they then share that data with the British. The UK didn't request anything, but the end result is the UK intelligence agencies having sensitive data on UK citizens.
The five countries are actively spying on their own people if they are respecting the agreement, Constitutions be damned.
Because modern governments are going to spy on everything they can.
We already know FBI agents used domestic spying infrastructure to stalk women and mistresses and ex-wives. That level of casual use means there is a 99.9999% chance it is used by the government for tracking journalists, leakers, liberal activists (but not right wing ones), profiling uppity citizens, etc.
If facebook and internet ad companies have complete information on you and your associates and post history and beliefs and location, the government has it. Multiple government have it.
We're already running shameful (Obama and Trump) concentration camps for immigrants (aka "lesser" humans), have detained US citizens as enemy combatants, performed extrajudicial assassinations on US citizens overseas, have two gestapo departments (Immigration Customs Enforcement and Customs Border Patrol) with radicalized right wing membership in their ranks.
All it takes is a charismatic strongman (probably from the right but can be from the left too), a false flag event like Gulf of Tonkin, do McCarthy hearings in Congress to stoke fear of external enemies within us, and start rounding up people.
The US could turn into a fascist regime in record time aided by complete IT awareness, soon with AI for profiling and analysis, AI agents for complete propaganda, and all the legal, historical, and dirty pool history to enable it.
This is an article for an AU government-funded policy think-tank, written by a China-hawk who is also a fellow at America's government-funded, war-hawk Center for Strategic and International Studies, saying that 5Eyes is actually fine. His main thrust seems to be that AU just needs super-effective oversight like the US has with its secret rubber-stamp courts and nothing-to-gain-from-it Congressional review.
> The partnership has one core rule, that the members agree not to spy on each other.
The US's core rule #4 is that you can't rifle through people's shit without convincing a judge of the crime you suspect them of committing, and why you need to look, and what the narrow limits of your search are.
Yet here we are.
I'm sure the PR departments proclaim that this is the agreement, but afaik there are no legal grounds to hold them accountable to that.
<citation needed!>
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/20/us-uk-secret-d...
On the other hand, I'm not sure that the USA has enough protections in place that they feel the need for an intermediary.
"In recent years, documents of the FVEY have shown that they are intentionally spying on one another's citizens and sharing the collected information with each other."
If ASIS is interested in a US citizen, they ask the FBI to spy on them. The FBI does this _within US law_, and gives the intelligence to Australia.
This is the opposite of what OP claimed.
Your quote is just saying that the parties think that any information they could get by spying on each other they could get by directly asking the person they would have spied on instead.
Who are you talking to? The people being surveilled certainly had zero say in implementing this law.
The problem isn't an unaccountable minority; it's that if you poll ten Americans on whether these are actually good policies, you get different answers depending on how you structure the question (and that's borne out in the voting booth, where Americans keep sending the Congresspeople who passed these laws back to Washington).
There are some politicians who side with the American people on this, sure, but they are few and far between, even if you look at who is running in primaries. People who voted against the patriot act, like Bernie Sanders or Ron Paul are considered political extremists, even from their own parties. Add to that silence from SCOTUS on the matter (as recently as this: https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/22/supreme_court_wikimed...), and it becomes clear that to say that my right to vote for congressional representatives gives me a say secret surveillance is awfully hand wavy, I think to the point of naivety or victim blaming.
In the wake of Snowden's leaks, Gallup found that only 37% of American adults approved of the program, even saying it was designed to fight terrorism: https://news.gallup.com/poll/163043/americans-disapprove-gov..., which is a very charitable way to frame the question for proponents of the program, but again, it doesn't matter what Americans think even when they go into the voting booth, because intelligence community is going to continue doing this anyway.
If you ask the average American whether they're comfortable with this tradeoff (added general scrutiny for added ability to prevent the next attempt at a 9/11), I don't know what they'd say.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9yQq4NxyOE (Habitual Line Stepper)
At this point, it's an ongoing joke. Just doing whatever, whenever they feel like it.
Let's say for example country A invades country B.
Country C sends aid to country B.
Some segment of citizens in Country C are upset by this.
Country A now creates an indirect funding route to people in Country C who are influential on social media. They amplify their voices through shares, likes, retweets and other aspects of social media algorithms. They employ farms of people around the world to ensure that these voices are liked, shared and amplified, to create the illusion that this is the popular view.
Citizens in country C take the approach of "crowd wisdom" and go along with it. This influences elections and influences policy. The funding stops, and the invasion is now successful without the external defense funding.
What mechanisms do countries have to deal with this? One could argue that surveillance may help uncover whether a common thread is linked to internal discord in society, and that thread can be pulled on to reveal a foreign adversary.
Let's say the reverse happens. Country A and country B have a territorial dispute. Country A occupies parts of Country B. Country C is aligned with Country B. The intelligence agencies in Country C do the same kind of social media influence operations to manufacture consent for their policies.
What mechanisms do countries have to deal with the intelligence agencies manufacturing consent in this manner? What if there are counter-intelligence operations run by foreign adversaries who are calling out these manufacturing consent operations on social media. One could see how surveillance will help follow the thread and identify these adversaries, if they exist in this part of the tapestry.
In the 2016 election there was evidence that this type of activity is now routine and commonplace between countries.
We also already know that the US government has conducted operations like Mockingbird, Cointelpro and others through the news media in the past. It is not a stretch to presume they engage in this as well, except now through social media.
There is ample evidence to assume that all the conversations taking place online, and the downstream effects thereof, are simply the manifestations of some other prime movers. How does the citizenry become educated about these phenomenon in a way that somehow at least partially inoculates them against becoming pawns in this bigger chess game?
Here is a better article by a reporter who understands what the government's report said: https://archive.is/jgWUt
That seems excessive.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/former-special-agent-ch...
I can't believe these traitors are against Liberty in the USA
Sadly, it didn't occur to me at the time that they had a really good point.
Your fellow Man is corruptible and treacherous.
You refuse to believe you are not alone in your own mind, and that thought control is screwing with you.
You refuse to believe white hate Americans are waging a secret war for power among you.
You refuse to believe Muslims Russians and Chinese aren’t the threat to the free world (though these may be instrumented against you); that white American thought control is playing God in your minds (and of these others), exploiting you in ways ordinary minds cannot perceive or comprehend (and would refuse to believe when confronted.)
The US government is not the true enemy, while their incompetence and duplicity may well be a chronic threat.
You are thought controlled America, and thought controlled America is the enemy of truth, law, and free world.
It's an inherent problem with "dark budgets" though.
When Nixon tried to stop it in his time, the intelligence services set him up, creating the Watergate scandal [0]. We are now learning from whistleblowers there were hundreds (!) of agents from many different agencies present at the Jan 6 "insurrection", it was probably the same playbook [1]. The FBI is even using this as an excuse and refuses to release hundreds of hours video, claiming it would expose too many agents [2].
Loosely connected to this is the "Russia Collusion" hoax, where they FBI willingly interfered in elections to smear the opposition with the full knowledge that the accusations were baseless, uncovered in the the Durham report. [3]
Not long ago I would have laughed those stories off as nut job conspiracy theories, but the pattern becomes hard to ignore.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09JHKYQP9/
[1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12085527/3-FBi-whis...
[2] https://twitter.com/ricwe123/status/1659557297197133825
[3] https://auronmacintyre.substack.com/p/the-durham-report-and-...
There are difference in how the different branches operate, though (every federate state has also their own agency) and some seem to do good work, but others (thuringa) seem to be made up of Nazis themself, who rather support the neonazi organisations, they are supposed to be fighting against.
Frankly, I don't see a strong argument why they should exist in the first place and why their work cannot be done by ordinary (professional) police.
So yes, neonazis (and left wing extremists and islamists) operate in secrecy. But so do common criminals.
Edit: And the actual dangerous nazi terrorism cell that operated for years was indeed caught not by the specialised secret agency Verfassungsschutz, but by ordinary police. (With strong hints, that they were protected by some parts of the Verfassungsschutz)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Undergrou...
If that was so, then it’s natural for folks employed by the government to vote to keep their own jobs. If one party thinks, we need fewer government employees, and one side thinks, we need more of them, you can see how incentives might line up.
That said, Republicans talk about limited government, but in my lifetime, I’ve seen very little difference in the expansion of governmental powers regardless of which party is in control.
It doesn't even have to be the "greedy self-serving" kind. Just thinking you want "to make the world a better place" is enough to justify funds, power and influence. It takes a very rare kind of restraint to not intervene.
> That said, Republicans talk about limited government, but in my lifetime, I’ve seen very little difference in the expansion of governmental powers regardless of which party is in control.
Sad but true.
Since what they say in order to get votes and/or keep up the facade of democracy, can be 180deg opposite of what they big biz "partners" and "campaign donors" what them to actually do. Govt does not serve people at this point, it merely claims it does and that is just one of their many lies (especially on the top, less so at the municipality level).
Tell me about how libertarianism and Christian nationalism come together to form a base that supports law enforcement (eg FBI), the military and CBP.
Frankly, I find the current version of the party most confusing, but especially the “small government” part.
It is true of course that "Deep Throat", the source who allegedly kept the journalistic investigation climbing through the Nixon Administration's ranks, is commonly held to have been Mark Felt[2], occupant of the number two job at the FBI at the time, so there is that.
What did for Nixon in the end, though, was mostly the taped evidence of his clumsy attempts to have the CIA, in the person of Richard Helms, warn the FBI off investigating his campaign's dubious money trail, or risk having "the whole Bay of Pigs thing" revealed if they didn't. (Whatever that might have been!)
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoff_Shepard
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Felt#%22Deep_Throat%22_in...
Why? I mean we need "dark budgets" to some extend (spy agencies, military). But do we need a "deep state", meaning: big biz and govt make the decisions behind closed doors and then merely project an image of democracy/voting/transparency?
Where was the public support for Iraq/Afghanistan/Unkrain and soon Taiwan? The deep state need no public support, they just need a "positive impact on the bottom line" (profit) of their "partners". Disgusting.
Yeah gonna need a source for that.
What I did find, and what I possibly confused it with, was that political spending of the respective government employee unions are overwhelmingly democrat:
"Of course, it’s not just teachers’ unions. In the 2020 election cycle alone, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) dedicated 99.1% of its political spending to Democrats. The American Federation of Government Employees gave 95.6% to Democrats." [0]
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20210416210710/https://www.balti...
https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2022/11/poll-federal-emplo...
Many conspiracies have turned out to be real. The Gulf of Tonkin incident (how the US tricked everyone in believing North Vietnam attacked them) being an obvious example. That puts the whole "conspiracy theory come from bad civilians" and "misinformation comes from bad civilians" narrative in a psy-op kind of day light. I see most problematic mis-info being peddled by govts, NGOs (WEF, NATO) and the(ir) MSM. The BS they crank out in the context of the Ukraine destabilization by the US+NATO is, quite literally, unbelievable.
The problem is that the ones perpetrated by the state are more severe because the consequences are often war, and only a small minority (usually rw) has any idea they took place. Ultimately, falsehoods and fabrications are how democracies launder war. Most people still believe Pearl Harbor came out of the blue, which is ridiculous if you know about the preceding blockade.
"Leftists" do not exist in US political arena. Sanders was close but even he would not want to "socialize" (bring under control of the workers) US business. What is called "left" in the US is generally more right-wing than right-wing liberal parties in Europe. Probably you mean Democrats (that we know since the Durham report do not give a f*ck about democracy).
Not just the FBI. Remember when the head of the NSA lied to congress, and got away with it? The spy agencies have gone rogue, acting however they wish without consequence.
Voting is basically a facade at this point. There is no democracy, we should stop repeating that it is and demand our schools stop repeating as well. We live in a somewhat-free dictatorship/plutocracy. Somewhat free means that you can use freedom of speech to criticize the govt a little bit, but not too much (or you get Assanged/Snowdenized).
For lack of recommendations to prosecution, the rest seems opinion? At least the Mueller investigation resulted in 34 separate indictments. So I don’t understand the disconnect here. Seems overtly political.
Again giving you an answer you will hate and refuse to believe…
Your fellow Man is corruptible and treacherous.
You refuse to believe you are not alone in your own mind, and that tho-ught contr-ol is screwing with you.
You refuse to believe wh-ite ha-te Americans are waging a secret war for power among you.
You refuse to believe Musli-ms Russians and Chinese aren’t the threat to the free world (though these may be instrumented against you); that whit-e American th-ought c-ontrol is playing God in your minds (and of these others), exploiting you in ways ordinary minds cannot perceive or comprehend (and would refuse to believe when confronted.)
The US government is not the true enemy, while their incompetence and duplicity may well be a chronic threat.
You are thoug-ht control-led America, and t-hought contro-lled America is the enemy of truth, law, and free world.
If by "few" you mean multiple decades; then yes, I don't know how they will ever recover.
no, srsly, idk what's what
The West was consistently on defensive/deterrence against the USSR throughout the Cold War, there's no point denying that.
It is a bulletproof fact that throughout the Cold War the USSR had an offensive stance in Europe, and conventional NATO forces there only stood some chance in defensive. Eventually the insane military production, sometimes amounting to 25% GDP, including ludicrous quantities of tanks, IFVs and SPGs to support the supposed rush to the English Channel, brought the colossus down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_territorial_claims_agai...
Seems everyone forgets the US' forward-deployment doctrine whenever its inconvenient to mention it ..
"In 1961, the US government put Jupiter nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey. It had also trained a paramilitary force of Cuban exiles, which the CIA led in an attempt to invade Cuba and overthrow the Cuban government. Starting in November of that year, the US government engaged in a campaign of terrorism and sabotage in Cuba, referred to as the Cuban Project, which continued throughout the first half of the 1960s."
I'd recommend The Jakarta Method for some insight into the legitimacy of the concerns of regime change.
No, that's just crazy talk.
Now everybody is getting to see this happen in real time. Fabricating evidence to invade Iraq, a completely dystopic domestic surveillance system revealed by a whistle blower, what happens when societies faces even the slightest threat (from a pandemic in this case), the complete collapse of media integrity, completely routine abuse of spying powers, politicization of every single body of the government, and much more. This is what makes now, so much different than the past. "We", as in way more than 5%, are all seeing this play out in real time - and it's shaping our worldviews.
I appreciate that this is a very complicated space that requires flexibility, compromise, etc, my complaint is that we tend to pretend (often extremely enthusiastically) that the situation is actually simple.
If something is good, I don't think it should require continual lying, deceit, and delusion to prop it up in the minds of the population.
I'd say the US is democratic with a polity that is deeply split on some key issues. But that doesn't imply the government doesn't reflect the will of the people (sometimes the will of the people is "a hot mess;" this was one of the deep concerns of the people who set up the Constitution in the first place).
And what school curriculum here most of these people raised on? American school curriculum perchance?
That we believe that the average person is anywhere near remotely competent to judge such things is a big problem in itself.
> I'd say the US is democratic...
Based on what criteria, the fact that they get to cast a vote now and then, for a person that was pre-chosen in some also questionably democratic process?
If people were able to wonder what is true, perhaps we would stand a chance.
I'm disinclined to entertain that notion until I see the average participation in the primary elections go above 40%.
People need to stop complaining about the system choosing leadership without their input if they aren't providing the input.
Besides, the two thoughts you expressed are contradictory... If the public isn't sufficiently educated, they shouldn't be choosing their leadership. That was exactly the risk that the authors of the Constitution were concerned about when they put in checks against simple mobocracy. Maybe the opinion that the FBI shouldn't be surveilling folks stems from an uneducated point of view?
Either way we slice it, it seems like Americans are getting the government they should have... Paternalistic because they cannot self-govern, or governed by them and beholden to their general apathy.
> If people were able to wonder what is true, perhaps we would stand a chance.
We have plenty of folks who wonder what is true. Some believe (still) that a child prostitution ring was operating out of the basement of a building with no basement. Some believe (still) a massively decentralized election was centrally rigged via voting machine manipulation in spite of a media company losing a defamation suit... An incredibly hard kind of suit for a media company to lose, because truth is always an affirmative defense.
We need more critical thinkers, not blind questioners.
(Note: this isn't purely snark, there is a point to this style of thinking )
I'm sure I'm carrying some unjustified beliefs. I've never counted "child sex trafficking out of the basement of a building with no basement" as one of them. And I generally try, if I notice I'm gathering extraordinary claims, to bring the extraordinary evidence; I started working the polls when I had questions about how elections are done (turns out it's not hard to do; most municipalities are desperate for volunteers) and learned quite a bit about potential failure modes and the mechanisms employed to mitigate them.
Does this same law (of optimality?⁰ apply to manufacturing processes and various other human undertakings?
As for elections: seeing what you've seen, do you consider the system (across all states) to be more or less air tight, and also that this is necessarily knowable?
> As for elections: seeing what you've seen, do you consider the system (across all states) to be more or less air tight, and also that this is necessarily knowable?
It's definitely not airtight. But airtight is fragile. Not unlike the Internet, It's better than airtight: it's decentralized and distributed.
Each state runs its own election. Each election district (varies from state-to-state, because it really is fifty states with fifty sets of laws) sets its own policies for running its election. Each polling location is locally administered. The coordination necessary to attack such a decentralized and adversarial system (remember: the party affiliation of individuals within this process varies wildly, with many of the "battleground states" run by GOP operatives) is preposterous to assume, especially as a secret conspiracy. Any such conspiracy would be at a scale that would be obvious.
One potential attack vector would be electronic voting machines, but (a) as previously noted: lawsuit, settled, wouldn't have settled if the truth was on the side of those accused of defamation and (b) those digital records are backed (in most jurisdictions, and specifically in the jurisdictions that were considered "battleground" in 2020) by paper records. Aligning fraud in the two records to escape the notice of poll workers, counters, and board officials (who are, again, generally of both major parties) is an absurdly improbable scenario.
It's been three years since the 2020 election. That's more than enough time for the accusations levied by one party to materialize into something concrete and legally-actionable, something other than ghosts and innuendo. When all the accuser has is ghosts and innuendo, the critical thinker asks why a concrete story of fraud with numbers and responsible parties hasn't manifested.
It is regarding (the italicized part): "But there's been more than enough money spent on teaching me critical thinking that if I'm not somewhere past the median, we're not capable of teaching it."
> Not unlike the Internet, It's better than airtight: it's decentralized and distributed.
This depends on what variable(s) one is optimizing for - if optimizing for correctness (which is what I'm interested in, [in part] because that is what has been claime3d by The Experts), your argument seems to be doing the opposite of supporting that aspect.
> The coordination necessary to attack such a decentralized and adversarial system...is preposterous to assume, especially as a secret conspiracy.
Representing a strawman characterization of concerns and then knocking it down is an excellent way to persuade the public, but it is terrible when it comes to logic & epistemology (something The Experts tend to be not very good at (on an absolute scale), but do not seem to realize). To me, this is a very big deal, "pedantry" aside.
> Any such conspiracy would be at a scale that would be obvious.
"Obvious" is mostly related to belief, not knowledge....but then belief is what matters most, so credit where credit is due I guess?
> but (a) as previously noted: lawsuit, settled, wouldn't have settled if the truth was on the side of those accused of defamation
Incorrect - this requires that there is zero discovered misjudgments by courts in the past, which is not the case. Legal scripture covers the epistemic issues of this problem extensively, and is why we use "presumed innocent", "beyond reasonable doubt", etc.
> is an absurdly improbable scenario
Again: belief (derived from prediction, possibly sub-perceptual), not knowledge.
> That's more than enough time for the accusations levied by one party to materialize into something concrete and legally-actionable, something other than ghosts and innuendo.
It's also adequate for it to not to have happened.
> something other than ghosts and innuendo
You have no way of knowing if this is all that exists.
> the critical thinker asks why a concrete story of fraud with numbers and responsible parties hasn't manifested.
A "critical thinker" on a relative scale may be satisfied by only this, but on an absolute scale the competition is much higher.
Not at all. There was no judgment here in that sense: Fox looked at the circumstances and instead of offering truth as an affirmative defense, refrained from doing so and settled the case. the likeliest conclusion is they couldn't offer truth as an affirmative defense (slightly less-likely conclusion: they could but doing so would open them up to even more liability than the defamation suit).
> Representing a strawman characterization of concerns
You may not have been claiming a vast conspiracy, but the people claiming election rigging definitely are. Look how many states they tried to sue in. That implied a vast multi-state conspiracy.
> Again: belief
Sure, I have a lot of beliefs grown from my personal experience. If you're going to argue epistemology, we'll be here awhile because that's a rich and dark sea to swim in. I don't know we'll have a productive discussion if epistemology is actually what you want to discuss. You asked me "seeing what you've seen, do you consider the system (across all states) to be more or less air tight," and I've answered based on my epistemology; I don't have nearly enough drugs to discuss "But how do you, like, know that you know" right now.
> It's also adequate for it to not to have happened
Unsupported conjecture. As T approaches infinity, odds of action approach 1. T of three years is plenty of time for something to have stuck and nothing has.
You can flip that script and say it's been a long time for Trump to not have had criminal charges brought. It's true. It's entirely possible he did nothing criminally wrong. Burden of proof is on the other side to prove he did.
> You have no way of knowing if this is all that exists.
You're right; I have beliefs based on experience. But the parties claiming an election-theft fantasy have not provided concrete evidence to dissuade that belief; what they have put together doesn't hold up under simple scrutiny. My default belief will be "they're lying or blowing smoke" because that's the skeptical position; absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but it's also not evidence of evidence (and lacking evidence, the likeliest scenario is "things were basically on the up-and-up" because they tend to be).
> but on an absolute scale
What does that even mean.
This is certainly a possibility (I'd say even the most likely, by far), but in law it is not that uncommon to realize one doesn't have a great case and going for innocence can backfire. Plea deals with not well educated inner city people are alleged to be a common abuse of this inherent complexity.
> You may not have been claiming a vast conspiracy, but the people claiming election rigging definitely are.
There is a lot of nuance in this space, please acknowledge it (perhaps conceptualizing it as billions of rows of survey answers across millions of people would help....say, like the extensive analytics that are captured at runtime in a video game?).
> Look how many states they tried to sue in. That implied a vast multi-state conspiracy.
I think it's fair enough to say that that's what they were representing. It's funny, all humans do this, but generally disapprove when [certain] others do the same. I wonder if humanity has received any guidance on these matters....
> I don't know we'll have a productive discussion if epistemology is actually what you want to discuss.
Based on extensive experience: we won't! :)
> and I've answered based on my epistemology
You have expressed your opinion on the matter.
> I don't have nearly enough drugs to discuss "But how do you, like, know that you know" right now.
Framing epistemology as drug-addled "woo woo" is typically a very effective approach for persuasion, it works well in all communities I've experienced, even The Rationalists.
> Unsupported conjecture.
Is the irony intentional?
Is what's good for the goose not good for the gander?
> T of three years is plenty of time for something to have stuck and nothing has.
Have there been zero legal cases in the past where the truth took longer than 3 years to emerge?
> You can flip that script and say it's been a long time for Trump to not have had criminal charges brought. It's true. It's entirely possible he did nothing criminally wrong. Burden of proof is on the other side to prove he did.
Yep! But then, hardly anyone cares about burden of proof these days, or proof in general. The mainstream ideology of this era has many similarities to the hippies of the sixties, except without the good vibes lol
> But the parties claiming an election-theft fantasy have not provided concrete evidence to dissuade that belief; what they have put together doesn't hold up under simple scrutiny.
I sometimes wonder if these people, and the people who subscribe to their dumb stories, are fucking idiots tbh. But then there go I if not for the Grace of God!
> My default belief will be "they're lying or blowing smoke" because that's the skeptical position
If one thinks in binary, which seems to be the rather convenient (for some, less so for others) evolutionary/cultural default. Wouldn't it be wild if people could be taught not only what to think, but how to think?? Holy mackarel, you could control the world!
> absence of evidence is not evidence of absence
There's a good paper out there poking holes in this theory, that's why I always use "absence of evidence is not proof of absence".
> and lacking evidence, the likeliest scenario is "things were basically on the up-and-up" because they tend to be
And the best part: this requires literally zero probabilistic calculations....it's just "the way it is"!
>> but on an absolute scale
> What does that even mean.
What is possible vs what is actually done. Think of it in terms of efficiency at extracting energy from fuel: humans have gotten much better over time. What's interesting is that we seem intuitively aware that the physical world can be improved, but the metaphysical world seems beyond our ability to perceive (at least with the same quality of thinking we use in science). I wonder if people will ever figure this out, the parallels to religion vs science in the first enlightenment are uncanny imho, but its like people have switched teams!
Many thanks for the excellent conversation btw!
Meanwhile, during peak "War on Terror", they routinely accused people who raised concerns about law enforcement abuses of being unpatriotic "bleeding hearts"
I have little faith in efforts to criminal justice reform, because just about everyone, regardless of party, has a crime for which the mere allegation is enough to justify throwing the book at the alleged perpetrator. This seems just as true with government abuses (at least in the social media era -- no idea what the real median is) -- but the far left seems more than happy to allow the government to abuse the rights of the far right, and vice versa. The degree varies depending on what suspected wrongdoing has occurred, but the point of rights is that if they don't apply in the worst cases (e.g., hate speech "exemptions") then they don't really exist, so nobody should be surprised when the government does a poor job of protecting them.
I completely agree with your position that the stance on the war on terror was abhorrent - although I wouldn't claim it to be as uniquely republican as you make it out to be, democrat warmongers were and are aplenty, and it was under obama that the biggest surveillance scandals of this century occurred-. All this shows is that both sides are about as hypocritical as the other really, three letter agencies are good when they're on my side, bad when they're on the other side, the population in general be damned.
*:curiously they may not even have been the brunt of people that felt it, due to its use on the george floyd riots.
I don't really care who was "cared" 20 years ago. There's a problem that needs to be fixed now. It's a wasted of time to whine about different people at a different time not being upset at a similar thing that was going on.
I give as an analogy nuclear weapons. People are pretty universally in agreement that the threat of global armageddon is, well, bad, and we could really minimize it if we just ditched the nukes. Even unilateral disarmament, given the massive disparity of the US stockpile vs. other stockpiles, would take a huge chunk out of the apocalypse pie-chart.
... so why is suggesting unilateral disarmament absolutely horrifying to so many people?
People vote their hearts. Dig into the feelings underpinning support for a surveillance state and address them, because if the feelings don't change the votes won't change. Propose alternatives to the surveillance state that address those feelings.
Americans just watched a faction try to take over the government with violence. There's a story that can be told there, and told one way it creates feelings that encourage more centralized surveillance, and told another way it creates feelings that encourage far, far less surveillance.
I do not agree with this "Americans just watched a faction try to take over the government with violence."
The think they watched someone try to take over the government because that's what the media and certain politicians wanted you to think. In no way was that a government takeover unless you're talking about the actors (cops) that opened the doors and led clueless people inside. No government takeover consists of unarmed people with zero plan, where the only person killed was one them doing nothing.
Certainly no successful one that I can think of. But that doesn't mean it wasn't an attempt. Also, they were not unarmed (https://www.npr.org/2021/03/19/977879589/yes-capitol-rioters... ); they were (thankfully) under-armed to deal with the resistance they encountered.
> where the only person killed was [the] one [of] them doing nothing
I'm assuming we both saw the same video. That's definitely not "doing nothing." Never was and never has been, and the question has already been litigated and put to bed.
But all that aside, to determine whether they were trying to take over the government, one need merely ask: had they succeeded in getting to the floor while the Senate was still in session, what did they want to do? What did those who spoke about their intentions say they were going to do?