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Comment by zmmmmm | Hacker News Reader

One of the rather interesting side issues in this whole debate has been how casually the rights of foreigners are tossed aside as secondary to those of american citizens. There is intense debate about whether US citizens rights are being violated, but almost nobody questions whether there's any moral or ethical issue with completely unrestrained spying on everybody else.

While I understand that this is largely because the legality of the spying hinges on whether US citizens are subject to it, I still find it a rather fascinating aspect.

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Absolutely. I remember how in 2001 when the US as the first country ever invoked article 5 of the NATO treaty, within hours all NATO members had followed through with support. And the minute of silence that was held all over Europe for the 9/11 victims. Then we joined them in two wars.

We bought their cell phones, their operating systems and productivity suites, their internet adds, hosting and email services and movies and music. We even let some of their largest corporations get away without paying taxes on the money they made in our countries.

We may not be citizens of their country but we are allies, not terrorists. When it comes to the bad things groups of people, such as governments, do to individuals, whether it's killing, torture, imprisonment with or without trial, surveillance or any other of the misdeeds that seems to have returned from the dark ages we deserve the same protection as American citizens.

> When it comes to the bad things groups of people, such as governments, do to individuals, whether it's killing, torture, imprisonment with or without trial, surveillance or any other of the misdeeds that seems to have returned from the dark ages we deserve the same protection as American citizens.

Despite the actions and statements of our government, most of us Americans feel the same way. (It's just that the shitty entitled xenophobes are just so damn loud sometimes...)

You'll note that in our declaration of independence, it states that the rights to life and liberty are the inalienable birthright of every man, endowed by his creator, before it says fuck-all about anyone's government.

>We bought their cell phones

To be fair, folks in the US bought a LOT of European cell phones first. :)

And to complete the circle (triangle?), nowadays we all but Korean/Taiwanese phones :-)

But not Chinese because lord knows they'll spy on us.

s/but/buy

&#! # keyboard autocorrect...

>allies

No, we're vassals. The USA orders and we obey, whether it's supporting their military machine or handing over information, people, research, or economical advantages. It's a hegemony.

>the misdeeds that seems to have returned from the dark ages

You've been fed propaganda. The crimes have always been there. The USA has always supported tyranny, cruelty, and crimes against humanity if it served its best interests (like every other country, I might add.)

>we deserve the same protection as American citizens

If the government wants someone naked, chained, and tortured in some foreign place, it'll happen. No matter who it is. True? Maybe not (yet), but it's telling enough that it sounds plausible, no?

The poor helpless Europeans, laboring under the yoke of their North American oppressors. Exactly what method is being used to relieve you of your responsibility for your own country?

Um, well, the one-sideness of how everything is treated? An European boy charged with making a website aggravating an American corporation? Handcuff and to the plane (yep, that was stopped by a court, but still)! An American businessman charged with commanding the murder of an European chief of police? No, sorry, we won't hand you our citizen (search for the case of general Papała).

Even if this is not stated in any treaties, it's simply the practice.

Had to google what article 5 of NATO was:

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security.

I can't speak for others, but as far as I am concerned, every person on earth has the exact same rights. I see no difference between an American and someone from another country. This informs my stance on all of US foreign policy. To me, spying on an innocent Iraqi or Chinese citizen is just as morally reprehensible as spying on an innocent American citizen. That being said, not all people feel as I do, and you are right, the legality of it all, unfortunately, hinges on how Americans are affected.

At least in most countries, this is just not the way it works, legally.

Every country has different rights for citizens and non-citizens.

For example, the US has held the 4th amendment does not apply to non-citizens who are not "part of the national community" (IE if a bunch of canadians came down and fished every weekend, you could search them however without violating the 4th amendment. If they lived here illegally, you couldn't).

It's not just the US of course, almost all countries are like this (the EU has broader protections for EU citizens than random other people, like US citizens living in the EU).

I don't remember all the details, and i certainly agree with "morally reprehensible", but you are suggesting a "natural rights" based approach, which, while common, but not universal.

> For example, the US has held the 4th amendment does not apply to non-citizens who are not "part of the national community"

Could you please provide a reference for this?

United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez - 494 U.S. 259 (1990) at 264-266

From the headnote:

"The Fourth Amendment phrase "the people" seems to be a term of art used in select parts of the Constitution, and contrasts with the words "person" and "accused" used in Articles of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments regulating criminal procedures. This suggests that "the people" refers to a class of persons who are part of a national community or who have otherwise developed sufficient connection with this country to be considered part of that community."

Thanks for this. The OP suggested that non-citizens inside the US aren't afforded the same Constitutional protections as citizens. I believe this is incorrect.

From the Wikipedia article about the case you cited [1]: "...Fourth Amendment protections do not apply to searches and seizures by United States agents of property owned by a nonresident alien in a foreign country. [emphasis mine]"

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Verdugo-Urquid...

It is not incorrect. Heck, it's even been tested on the bar exam as part of the MBE, using the canadian fishing example I gave, which is a real MBE question based on a real case (I am a bit too lazy to look it up).

This is how the case has been interpreted by every court to follow it. See US v. Guitterez, 983 F.Supp. 905 for a fourth amendment example from the 9th circuit.

Here is another from the fifth circuit: UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. ARMANDO PORTILLO-MUNOZ (i don't have cite handy)

"Portillo relies on Verdugo-Urquidez and argues that he has sufficient connections with the United States to be included in this definition of "the people," but neither this court nor the Supreme Court has held that the Fourth Amendment extends to a native and citizen of another nation who entered and remained in the United States illegally"

There are something like 2000+ cites to Verdugo, and and the general viewpoint of courts so far is as i said it is.

If you've got a court of appeals or SCOTUS cite to the contrary, where a court has held that they do apply, i'd love to see it.

Thanks, I stand corrected. For anyone else interested, The Volokh Conspiracy blog has a detailed post on this very topic:

http://www.volokh.com/2011/06/13/the-constitutional-rights-o...

Right that's the holding, but the dicta suggests that some non-resident, non-citizens (i.e. temporary visitors) also are unprotected by the fourth amendment.

Various lower court decisions have fleshed out what constitutes "substantial connections".

Is it possible, then, that my government can get hold of my private data without technically spying if another country (which could've been spying on me legally, as I'm not its citizen) would provide it?

Oh yes, and what I understand it is par for the course that intelligence agencies do trades with each other for that exact reason. Either explicitly or implicitly (As in - We know you operate in our country, but we'll turn the blind eye. Just remember to alert us, if you happen to find anything suspicious.)

Foreigners don't want equal rights. Just equal protections from the government.

protection (from harm) is a right granted by the government.

Yes, but that you can identify one right that governments can/should afford non-citizens and citizens alike doesn't mean that's true of all rights. Venomsnake was trying to identify the kind of right that it should be true for.

As a British citizen I have a right to not be tortured by the government (under A.3 HRA1998), and a right to NHS healthcare. The former (a negative right) is one the government should afford to the whole world. The latter (a positive right) is not.

Maybe they should, but they usually don't.

You mean harm inflicted by the government, so it's the Mafia: join our club, or we extort you ... sound delightful.

Let's leave aside morality and focus on self-interest. Considerations of self-interest make FISA 702 an impresssively self-destructive piece of legislation for the US to pass and to see upheld in its courts. And I'm not talking about relatively nebulous things like sapping the US' moral authority to call for Internet freedom and so on, though they should be real concerns for Americans too. This is very straightforward.

The reason that foreigners want to have their contracts adjudicated in US courts, one of the main reasons they buy US real estate or buy US Treasuries and trade the NYSE for much lower expected returns than they would demand elsewhere, is that they have faith in the rule of law in the US. Not perfect faith, but real faith. Not faith in the moderation and good intentions of the US (or CA, NY or MD) government (though they have some of that too) but faith that their US interests are protected in law by things like the Takings Clause of the US constitution - and usually by statute law as well - even while they go on living outside the US as non-citizens of the US. Nor is this something that matters only to foreigners: this trust from foreigners is one of the major pillars of the US' wealth and power. Look at places like the PRC or the UAE http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIFC_Courts which are avidly trying to cultivate an image as a place where your real estate won't be swiped and your court case won't be nobbled to favour a crony.

Now, slowly but steadily, these non-resident aliens (like me) are cottoning on to what FISA 702 means for them. And what it seems to mean is that the rule of law doesn't apply to their Facebook or Google accounts the instant the Federal government chooses to get involved. As a non-lawyer reading FISA 702 http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/110/hr6304/text the remarkable thing is that it's not establishing a process where the US government presents a vague counter-terrorism or national-security rationale to a secretive, questionably-independent court. It seems to be a process where the US government can help itself to anything it wants from any specified non-resident alien without even having to state any motivation at all, and in which the FISC court's only role is to confirm that the targets (probably!) aren't US citizens or residents. Does the government feel like doing a spot of industrial espionage on your company's email or file uploads? Sam's your uncle. There aren't any reasons even in principle why the FISC might refuse to issue the FISA order - and the government is spared even the embarrassment of having to state its intentions in court. Your internet company could appeal, but the whole process seems to work on the basis that as a non-resident alien you'll have no applicable Fourth Amendment rights, and 702 seems to clear aside any rights you might have under statutory law ("Notwithstanding any other provision of law"). And in any case what information about the Federal government's interest in you would Google or Facebook have to base an argument on? And once it has your data the US seems to be free to do nearly anything it wants with it - share it with your US competitors? Why not? - unless it tries to take the data to court. (See sec. 106 http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/STATUTE-92/pdf/STATUTE-92-Pg178... )

Now it's true that CIA could (and maybe does) attempt to hack the EADS servers in (I'm guessing) Toulouse in search of engineering goodies to share with Boeing, with just as much impunity under US law. But at least EADS has a chance to try and secure its systems from hacking attempts, instead of being instantly defeated the moment the US decides to file some paperwork, and it can get whatever benefit it can from the fact that the industrial espionage would be illegal under French law. So FISA 702 seems to completely reverse the normal position: in legal terms your person and your property are usually better protected from the US government inside the US than outside it. And of course the final touch is that you'll probably never get to hear about any of the intrusions, so even if you're the world's richest person or organisation with all the best lawyers they won't be doing you any good. It seems that the only legal restraint on the US' behaviour with the online data of non-resident aliens is that it can't request a wide-ranging search like "everyone in Pakistan who searched for 'X'", though even that may not be the case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5845878 .

(Again IANAL. If someone qualified can correct important errors in my understanding of FISA I will be very grateful!)

So, imagine that the US Congress passed a law permitting the Federal government to expropriate any US property for almost any purpose from any non-resident alien at any time, for no particular reason, without compensation or even notice. Throw in some very effective judicial secrecy into the process established by law as well. Provide some unverifiable assurances that the Federal government will probably only choose to use the law against very bad people. Imagine that this law appeared to be holding up nicely against Congressional and legal challenge, at least for now. And please bear in mind that no non-resident alien would give a hot damn about which intriguing Constitutional arguments were being used to (rightly or wongly) deny them the protection of the Fifth Amendment. How would Wall Street, US real estate and the broad US economy be affected? It's not a perfect analogy at all, but it gives you some idea of what may be coming down the line for US internet companies.

> Every country has different rights for citizens and non-citizens.

The rights are inherent in the nature of the situation (i.e., humans living in a social order based on equality of individuals under the law). The scope of the protection of those rights varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction (and vanishes entirely where jurisprudence is slave to political demagoguery).

The fourth Amendment isn't the source of the right, it guarantees that the right won't be abridged by government action. As the Constitution is defined by and for the people of the United States, that the protections "guaranteed" (in quotes because the guarantee has to be maintained by vigilance) don't extend to those who are not the people of the United States isn't logically surprising, but can remain somewhat disappointing (politically and ethically).

Your assertion is essentially that all of these rights are natural rights.

This is, as I said, an interesting claim.

I'll point out the irony that the freedoms everyone considers so important didn't even make it in the original document, only the addendum :)

What I am stating is that "rights" are a necessity of creatures like human beings living in societies based on equality under the law. You can have national (and sub-national) jurisdictions that do not honor certain rights, but that doesn't make the concept of rights relative, it makes the ability to judge the jurisdictions by the protections they guarantee, and thus whether they are actually based on equality under the law.

They may be deemed "natural rights" by the nature of mankind living in what I will term "just" societies (where jurisprudence and justice coincide), but they are not "natural" in their springing forth from the natural sciences of physics, chemistry and biology.

There were a number of people involved in the Constitution of the US of A who did not want to enumerate the rights, knowing that they were not the government's to give and receive. The pragmatic reality of the day was a yield to legal codification, since most knew that a government not explicitly bound, was bound to implicitly violate those rights. The escape clauses were (probably, I'll let others debate that) the 9th and 10th amendments.

>>Every country has different rights for citizens and non-citizens. And in some they are almost entirely equal if not better. (Social security, but it's a bit over the top here :/) Well they can't vote of course, but that's about it.

this is just not the way it works, legally

While true, there is this bit in the Declaration of Independence about inalienable human rights. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be a legal document anymore.

I think a better way to look at it is that rights are cultural, but that if we are serious about living in a decent and respectful world we should in our actions extend to others the rights we want to have ourselves.

Does free speech extend to advocating going out and killing all African Americans at a white supremacist rally? In the US it does, but only because of our bad experiences during the Red Scares. In Canada or the EU it wouldn't. What right do either side have to force their definitions on the other?

This being said, the argument can easily be made that spying is somewhat different. The general fear is that since governments monopolize violence their actions towards spying on their own must be more restrained than spying on others because the dangers in adopting a "show me the man and I will find you the crime" apply at home to a much greater degree than they apply abroad.

we should in our actions extend to others the rights we want to have ourselves

That belief is cultural too - it just so happens that almost every culture has independently arrived at it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule is a fascinating read.

I think there is a natural necessity that when you accept someone as an equal partner in a process, you assume they are like you are.

It goes the other way in not so great ways also that we tend to project those things we do not like about ourselves onto our enemies.

If someone accuses everyone else of being a thief, expect that the accuser is the one responsible, but the person who respects everyone is probably respectable himself.

What you quoted is actually the Silver Rule, which deals in negatives. It's also much easier to consistently apply without people hating your guts for being a condescending, paternalistic imperialist.

To me, spying on an innocent Iraqi or Chinese citizen is just as morally reprehensible as spying on an innocent American citizen.

Prepare to be jumped on by "anti-imperialists".

There is intense debate about whether US citizens rights are being violated, but almost nobody questions whether there's any moral or ethical issue with completely unrestrained spying on everybody else.

Almost nobody in the US, perhaps, but this whole mess isn't doing the US any favours at all with the international community, certainly not here in Europe.

I'd say there's a fair chance the cavalier attitude towards the rights of non-citizens so overtly displayed by leading US politicians and security people over the past few days could ultimately swing the entire public debate in a way the US administration really doesn't want it to go. Those statements get broadcast on TV internationally, too, and everyone in the room cringes when they hear them.

Let's hope so. The sooner the US gets marginalized and put on the shelf internationally, the sooner the world will become a safer place to live.

So those fleets of warships keeping shipping lanes open and free from pirate activity have done nothing for safety?

I'm not saying america is perfect, but if we scale back our navy for example, there is going to have to be a lot of slack for other countries to pick up. And that means costs rising and more taxes for others. As well as the chance of increased conflict.

The world isn't so cut and dry as you make it out to be.

There will be costs to all of us, but at some point the US is costing more than it's saving us. I think we must be close to that point if not already past it.

That is a statement that can't even be backed up with anything but conjecture.

How would you even start measuring the cost/benefit ratio? What monetary value do you assign to things like privacy? How do you know where you're moving things to doesn't have a "better hidden" equivalent to what the US is doing? Do you even know if it would be worth moving things? What is the opportunity cost to moving? What is the cost if you're wrong?

As much as I'd love to agree with the pathos response to these things, its better to see and wait than to kneejerk react to things.

The sooner the US gets marginalized and put on the shelf internationally

FWIW, I certainly wouldn't go that far. However, I would prefer to see the administration of the US promoting more equal partnerships with other nations, rather than arrogantly presuming that they are somehow automatically qualified to lead the world in every field of human endeavour or that they should for some reason be exempt from normal standards of decent behaviour that they expect everyone else to follow.

I suspect the primary reason we (in the USA) are focusing so much on it is that these are the people appointed, promoted, funded, etc., by people we elected. Some people think that has meaning while many are cynical enough to think that they're all the same under the various masks.

This is a revelation for most people, especially younger people, and they're dealing with the immediate, personal, consequences.

As with the embarrassment created by the second Bush administration, whereby we squandered a great deal of global goodwill after 9/11, we've done a stellar job of undoing the redemption we thought we had gained by electing Obama in 2008.

Many Americans really thought we could be less embarrassed of our leadership with that decision.

The story is still unfolding. Our government will be measured by how it acts out the next few months and how it responds to the inevitable criticism from the rest of the world. As Americans, we will be measured by how we respond to our government.

But it is also that it is far easier for the police who have lots of surveillance to jail their own citizens than to swoop in and jail foreigners. The risk of abuses are there in both cases but they are orders of magnitude more when the police doing the arresting are from the same country as the ones doing the surveillance.

The risk for foreigners is the same when you consider the US gov sharing intelligence with other governments.

I wouldn't say it is the same. It would only be the same if all the governments shared everything they know, and I doubt that is the case.

Its more complicated than that, in fact. The likelihood of the US sharing data about a Saudi citizen and the Saudi gov acting against said citizen is less than than the likelihood of the us acting against a US citizen. But the consiquences are far worse for a Saudi. So the risk could in fact be higher. But you're right, we dont know what the US shares.

It was the same with the drone strike debate. The whole buzz was about the fact that the US president now could order a drone strike on US citizens.

No discussion about non US citizens. It was just assumed that drone striking them was OK. Made me really feel weird as an European.

It made me feel weird as an American.

The irony is that this issue (the universality of human rights) was the starting point of the dissent in the colonies in the 1760s that eventually lead to revolt against British rule in 1775. The people in the British colonies supported Parliament during the long revolutionary/counter-revolutionary period that lead up to the passage of the English Bill Of Rights in 1689, which everyone, in 1689, assumed applied to everyone under the rule of the crown. It was only the 1760s that Parliament adopted the attitude that the Bill Of Rights were privileges that only belonged to those who lived in Britain proper -- and the colonists were outraged that the rights they had assumed they had won 80 years earlier were now being denied to them. In 1774, when the government of Virginia asked Thomas Jefferson, to draw up a list of the grievances that the colonies had with Parliament, Jefferson referenced the long history of events that started under the Stuart Kings.

When the Founding Fathers eventually drew up a Bill Of Rights for the new nation, most of them wrote things that explicitly suggest that they felt the rights being granted were universal -- in particular, Benjamin Franklin was vehement on the subject, arguing that the Bill Of Rights extended to everyone, including the blacks who were being held in slavery (and when Congress met for the first time in 1789, Franklin pushed a bill to abolish all slavery).

Does anyone know how these companies, et al., actually differentiate US Citizens from Non-US Citizens? I don't remember clicking the "I'm a US Citizen box" on any website.

This is likely the root of the issue, which is that they probably capture all communications, but when they have a foreign target, that is when they actually "look" at the stuff they captured, trying to find stuff "related" to that foreign target.

The NSA at least was supposedly run as a very tight ship (I have no idea now, i have no friends who have worked there recently), so I'm sure they theoretically have really detailed redaction and other procedures meant to keep personal or private info of americans from appearing in reports, but that is not exactly comforting.

I do not think any decent human being has friends THERE.

That's what I've been wondering:

- if they aren't targeting specific persons, how do they know what country the person is from & if they (the govt) are violating the law?

- if I'm American living in another country, am I safer from or more likely to be tracked (terrorism aside) Am I being picked up "freely" as someone from outside the country?

- many, many, many similar questions I'm sure you are also asking

I realize these seem rather naive questions, but my first thought on reading Obama's response was, "How can you possibly know what country the person is a citizen of?"

Considering that that was a major part of his defense - "Don't worry, it's only those foreign people we're looking at"- I really think that needs to be a bigger part of the whole discussion.

I think it is quite obviously more bullshit.

It is unlikely bullshit. They are likely not indiscriminate in targeting. It's just likely post-hoc targeting. That's the question you really want to ask: "So do you capture all the data, and then only look at the data for foreign people, or do you only capture data for foreign people?"

At one point, with watchwords/etc, it was clearly the latter. I think they've moved to the former.

I have heard (no guarantees) that they collect information on everyone, and analyse it later as it is needed. They only investigate this information if and as if relates to a foreign suspect.

Doesn't seem like there's any way to abuse this .....

> Does anyone know how these companies, et al., actually differentiate US Citizens from Non-US Citizens? I don't remember clicking the "I'm a US Citizen box" on any website.

I think you were just trolling but if not then one of hundreds possible ways to find that:

1. get a hold of your your email (or name and then facebook / gmail snoop)

2. your email leads to your paypal account

3. your paypal account leads to your dob and ssn, bank accounts

4. your banks accounts hold information whether you are citizen or not;

- OR -

4. your ssn codification tells whether by the time obtaining the number you were citizen or not

PayPal, Facebook and Palantr has the same co-owner, P. Thiel.

But seriously I don't think they discriminate. Last thing they look at is whether you are citizen or not. Your IPs (all the one you ever used while login to any website you have an account with) can quickly tell them whether you are on US soil or not. Most likely as long as you are here, you are consider us citizen, whether lawfully or not but you "operate" on US soil so the same rules apply to you. Good example would be if you are in US as a tourist -- you still need to obey US laws and regulations.

Doesn't this mean that they are spying on you without actually knowing if you are a US citizen? By your logic, only after step 4 they actually know if you are a citizen, but they have collected a lot of data about you in steps 1-3.

I think you were just trolling, but the GP was asking a very pertinent, reasonable question specifically about companies like Facebook, Google, etc, and how they differentiate. Your reply -- ostensibly about what an organization like the FBI might do to identify someone -- is not relevant to their question at all, making it all the more bizarre that you decided to question whether they were "trolling" (apologies to all others, but that is a growing peeve of mine -- this noisy declaration of things people say as trolling).

Google knows a lot about someone, but they have no idea what citizenship I hold. They can guess, of course, but that isn't a lawful way to discriminate.

Does anyone know how these companies, et al., actually differentiate US Citizens from Non-US Citizens? I don't remember clicking the "I'm a US Citizen box" on any website.

According to the whistleblower, they don't in any meaningful sense. They collect all the data they can, and then currently only use bits of it, when they feel that is justified. His point about checking the US president's email in the video was that all they need is one email from a foreigner in order to tie anyone in the US to an investigation, and look through all their records.

In addition I am in the process of composing a letter to my elected representatives. One thing I am noting is that the published standards are quite a bit more lax on this than the data, permitting the NSA to quite heavily over-select for Americans.

A 51% confidence that your target is not American when looking at a service where 15% of the users are American, or one where only 29% of the users of the users are Americans is a meaningless standard. Now the only hope right now is that companies push back but the question is how much given that they were not willing to push back enough to break silence.

This is something that already pissed me off when drone strikes were discussed. While not caring about foreigners is probably the most important reason, there is another one that actually makes sense, and which is why I give Americans a little bit of benefit of doubt: Given the strict protections of your constitution, it is much easier to fight the parts that concern citizens of the US. Edit: accidentally submitted after the first word, rest of post added.

Drone strikes are also different. They represent currently a sort of danger to the world I don't think people really appreciate because they allow an elite to control more firepower with fewer henchmen than is possible otherwise. Air strikes are nothing new but in the past you had to contend with the fact that enough people might disobey orders to force a change of plans. With drones, the number of people you rely on is far less.

I remember a story that on 9/11 orders were issued to shoot down any aircraft left in the sky and that fighter pilots refused to carry out the order. How would things be different if it was 8 specially trained anti-terrorist folks commanding largely autonomous drones?

An excellent point, but you're not going far enough.

Machine intelligence keeps getting better, so it won't be long before we have entirely autonomous drones that just need general instructions to do their job. At that point..

The democratization of weaponry is what caused the end of feudal society, concentrating it might will cause its rebirth.

For a fictional take on this, see Kill Decision by Daniel Suarez.

Feudal society? I think at that point you won't be looking at something that resembles fiefdoms so much as global hegemonies....

I am not sure it will get that far though. More likely it will expand until the economic stress from an oversized national security budget and rising energy prices will force it to collapse with global consequences. For the record, no, I do not think those consequences will be pleasant for anyone :-P

I absolutely agree with you about drone strikes being even more dangerous. The analogy I saw was the mindset that causes people to be enraged about US citizens being killed/spied upon while being rather indifferent to the same thing happening to people in other countries.

"Show me the man and I'll find you the crime" though is very much more of a problem for citizens than non-citizens and so I think that it's reasonable to say that it is a lesser problem when foreign governments are spying on non-citizens abroad than when they are spying within their own borders.

As an American I would far rather be spied upon by the Chinese or the British than the American Government. I would further expect that if a British individual was concerned about the same thing, the NSA would be far less threatening than British intelligence.

'Foreigners' are customers too. They are expected to abide by the terms of service agreements (TOS) issued by these companies, which all include statements about protecting customers' data and privacy. As far as I can see, all these companies broke their contracts (their own TOS).

And from a legal standpoint just because there's a law that happens to force you to break a contract does not usually absolve you from liability for doing so. Of course, many of these contracts may contain some kind of "you have no rights if the law says so" clause, in which case the companies would be in the clear.

And this is a key point, a decision that many people said would never happen again: dividing the world into two groups of people is what started a few problems before.

Looking at some of the bigger selling newspapers in the UK, I don't think people get it or the writers believe people wouldn't get it. On the whole most people in the UK who are not technical appear to know pretty much nothing about it and do not understand why it might be bad for them.

The whole, "I have nothing to fear" point of view. It's the bigger picture they need to think about :(

I would imagine the UK expected this was the case all along. I mean, you guys arrest people for tweets, after all.

I think there's also a slightly different reaction to it, because most Americans like to feel like, at some level, the government works for citizens, and is ultimately responsible directly to them.

If the government is willing to spy directly on the people it should be serving, then it starts to feel like it's out of control.

I believe this gets to the heart of why Americans are (and should be) disturbed about programs like PRISM. When the US spies on a foreign citizen, the full weight of that citizen's government is there to protect their interests.

When the US spies on US citizens, who do we have to turn to?

The US legal system is only accessible by citizens of the USA.

It should be of no surprise then, that citizens of other countries have no ability to protect themselves from over-reaching laws and actions by the US government.

When you enter america as a tourist you (used to) sign a document saying you wave all rights of personal freedom. Now they make you pay for it up front online every couple of years.

As a non american; Thank you for caring!

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