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Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

Transcript: http://votesmart.org/public-statement/295064/cbs-early-show-...

MR. SMITH: Well, the president, though, said yesterday, we're not listening to the phone calls; we're just looking for patterns.

SEN. BIDEN: Harry, I don't have to listen to your phone calls to know what you're doing. If I know every single phone call you made, I'm able to determine every single person you talked to; I can get a pattern about your life that is very, very intrusive.

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Mind blown. I think history just went into an infinite loop because it EXACTLY repeated itself in just seven years.

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Transcript: http://votesmart.org/public-statement/295064/cbs-early-show-...

SEN. BIDEN: But this idea that no court will review, no Congress will know, and we've got to trust the president and the vice president of the United States that they're doing the right thing, don't count me in on that.

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Mind blown x 2

"Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible."

It is only evil when the other guys are doing it.

I'm actually fairly impressed by the degree of outrage from my left-wing friends. I figured most of them would be far more rationalizing now that "their guy" was in charge.

Similarly, I'm not getting too riled up about all this, since I thought programs like this were Constitutional back when "my guy" was running them.

I have to admit I like the variant with court and Congressional oversight just a wee bit better... but as long as people are able to buy guns all willy-nilly and avoid vaccinating their children because of their special religious rites, it's hard for me to claim with a straight face that the NSA is even in my top 25 list of things I'd worry about.

Or to summarize, you're too bothered by freedoms to worry about tyranny.

Everyone has a priority list, whether they acknowledge it or not. If everything is important, nothing is important.

Not to cause offense, but I find that, in general, leftists are more likely to speak against "their guy", and conservatives usually support "their guy". Not sure why, but it's just what I've observed through the years.

I wonder how much of it is a lame duck effect: The bottom never fell out of GWB's conservative support until his second term, either, despite much to complain about.

The bureaucracies don't change much between administrations and there is a lot of the same faces at the top between administrations. It causes a permanence of policy regardless of the party. In fact, the bureaucracy are more or less required to be non-partisan in their long term policies. The hypocrisy is probably more of an effect of indoctrination into the bureaucracies than of actual changes in an individual politicians views. It would be difficult for a president to reverse 8+ years of an institution's operations, especially when those have been funded for longer by congress.

Well, they do lobby heavily for the religious vote. Better to keep a 'good Christian' in the Presidency than some 'godless Liberal.'

If faith in something greater than oneself gives people hope; I'd think that liberals would not have a problem with that.

Liberals aren't against it, but the most fanatically religious people tend towards conservative candidates, which was what I was (ineffectively) trying to get across.

Speaking as a leftie, we haven't had an "our guy" since maybe Carter. If you think Obama is left-wing, I have some nice beachfront property you might be interested in. He talked a good game in 2008, though.

Well on that note, Conservatives haven't had a guy in office since Reagan.

You must not know a lot of Tea Partiers. Though to be fair, they are more "right-wing revolutionaries" than "conservatives" by any reasonable sense of the word.

That's your bias in wanting to believe that people like you are more honest and true to their convictions.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5864729 ... looks like Republicans and Democrats are pretty close in their consistency. Small sample, but usually what you see on most similar issues.

Unfortunately your friends are not representative of most people on the left in the US. According to a recent Pew poll Democrats find NSA surveillance programs more acceptable than in 2006 despite all the recent revelations:

Democrat Views of NSA Surveillance (Pew)

  Jan  2006 - 37% Acceptable, 61% Unacceptable
  June 2013 - 64% Acceptable, 34% Unacceptable
    Change:  +27%            -27%

Also despite a more negative wording of the question (in my opinion):

Jan 2006: "NSA has been investigating people suspected of terrorist involvement by secretly listening in on phone calls & reading emails without court approval..."

June 2013: "NSA has been getting secret court orders to track calls of millions of Americans to investigate terrorism..."

Not that Republicans are any better. They went the other way for probably similar political reasons. But at least, in my opinion, they are moving in the right direction for now. I think I can safely predict this will at least partially reverse next republican president[1].

http://www.people-press.org/2013/06/10/majority-views-nsa-ph...

[1] Edit: Interesting side effect of democracy: since our leaders have the support of a majority of voters the cognitive dissonance of voting for someone who supports policies you don't like will lead a significant portion to support those policies anyway.

These aren't polls of the same thing, or of "NSA Surveillance" generally, despite Pew's spin on it.

The 2006 question askes about warrantless wiretapping ("listening in on phone calls...without court approval")

The 2013 questions asks about tracking calls (not listening in) under FISA warrants ("secret court orders to track calls").

Not the same thing.

Just to be clear, though, we're still doing the 2006 thing, with the only "warrant" being a general FISC ruling on the overall legitimacy of the program. Specifically, that it has acceptable measures in place to reduce and eliminate purely domestic intercepts.

> Just to be clear, though, we're still doing the 2006 thing, with the only "warrant" being a general FISC ruling on the overall legitimacy of the program. Specifically, that it has acceptable measures in place to reduce and eliminate purely domestic intercepts.

Just to be clear, that's not at all the same thing. FISA warrants have always been allowed to be quite broad, and were primarily concerned with identifying that there was a foreign intelligence target and that appropriate minimization procedures were in place, exactly as is the case now.

What was at issue in 2006 had no review from anyone outside of the executive branch for either of those issues.

You can oppose what is being done now, but you cannot (without erroneously assuming that everyone else in the world agrees with you on everything but partisanship) validly look at the 2006 polls and the 2013 polls, especially given the difference in both the kind of surveillance at issue (listening in vs. call tracking) and the procedures at issue (warrantless vs. FISA warrants) and makes claims about consistency because they aren't about the same things, even if you think that people should feel the same about them.

Do you believe that, in actual effect, the 2006-era program was substantially different from its 2013 equivalent? And that the program had "no review" is false, members of the "Gang of Eight" were briefed, and of course could have pursued legislative measures to shut down the program consistent with separation of powers (i.e., defunding it).

I actually agree with you about the wording of the poll and the difference between the metadata collection and "warrantless wiretapping". But hey, all the stuff HN is going nuts about for the past week was all cleared by the FISA court, AFAICT, so the lack of that fig leaf wasn't really what would have pissed off a consistent citizen in 2006, no?

> But hey, all the stuff HN is going nuts about for the past week was all cleared by the FISA court, AFAICT, so the lack of that fig leaf wasn't really what would have pissed off a consistent citizen in 2006, no?

Assuming by "a consistent citizen" you mean the same people "going nuts" on HN, probably not.

But that's not really relevant, now, is it?

You always have to look at the wording of polls - that is exactly why I included it in my comment. I don't think this is "spin" on Pew's part but the fact that the current situation is different today than in 2006. In this case the comparison is mixed: the wording is worse is some ways better in others.

On one hand listening/reading without warrant is worse than tracking with secret order. But on the other hand targeting suspected terrorists is not as bad as targeting millions of Americans. After all that might be you!

The theory is that a secret court order procedure on much broader surveillance program is enough to make NSA's surveillance acceptable to 27% of Democrats seems farfetched to me.

Of course the clencher is that the new program is IN ADDITION TO the continuing 2006 program. This was not mentioned in the poll question. Too bad most people don't understand this.

> The theory is that a secret court order procedure on much broader surveillance program is enough to make NSA's surveillance acceptable to 27% of Democrats seems farfetched to me.

The procedural difference isn't the only difference in either the public facts or, more relevantly, the poll questions, and the issue isn't that it explains the entire difference, its that the difference in the circumstances and the poll questions makes the conclusion that the swing reflects a change of opinion on the same thing (whether partisan or otherwise) invalid.

Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qk12ALX9fz8

There can be only one country to spread democracy.

``History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme." -- Mark Twain

That line isn't by Mark Twain.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:History

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