Obama’s crackdown views leaks as aiding enemies of U.S.
mcclatchydc.com
mcclatchydc.com
"Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."
Fortunately, ubiquitous computing opens up new approaches to democracy.
What's worse, many citizens have long since adapted that "argument", and do the dirty work for their leaders without even having to be asked, much less ordered.
This is exactly what happened after 9/11 to those who opposed conflict in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Except these people weren't even "Peacemakers" per-say: they just didn't feel military excursions were an appropriate response to a terrorist attack.
So are we talking about there actually being the need for self-defense, or about self-defense as pretext for self-destruction of the many for the gains of the few? The few existential threats the US faces seem mostly to be inside of it.
The daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador pretending she's a nurse and that Saddams's soldiers are throwing newborns on the floor just because they can, Powell with his slides telling the UN some trailers could be weapons laboratories, and that Saddam must be attacked immediately, it's all the same to me... it's not really about nuclear weapons, whatever works is used.
The art of good propaganda is simplicity. The aim is to convince the masses, not confuse them.
It is disturbing how easily this rhetoric comes.
Even in the most ruthless dictatorships there were a lot of normal people who supported their leaders, the surveillance and police states. That's the scariest part about this. If so many people believe in such ideas, it can take several decades to turn away from that, just like if you would live in a "communist" or "muslim" state, you'd know you're probably not going to see a true democracy in your country in your lifetime, even if there's a revolution.
If US becomes a surveillance state and abuses are common, and people just learn to "live with that", instead of protesting [1] before it's too late, it's going to be very hard to fix that later on, and it's going to have to become a lot worse for every single person, before things even begin to change, and that will take many years.
Some simply recommend to just suck it up as the price of doing business, but that goes against everything America has typically done with regard to terrorism, all the way back to the Barbary Pirates: "Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute!"
What I find most annoying about the comments on hacker news over the last couple weeks, is the amount of people crying about the problems or potential problems and hardly anyone talking solutions. The lack of solutions itself is a sign that no one has anything better to offer than what the NSA is currently upto.
Not doing what the NSA is currently up to, and letting a 9/11 happen every year, would be better than what we're currently doing.
"Preventing all terrorism" is both impossible and wildly impractical: to even get close, you must eviscerate the freedoms in your society and undermine the rule of law.
The "solution" is "be an adult, and don't go in to a frenzied panic every time you get hurt".
In a democracy, you have to at least try to get people to agree with you, and given what we know about the NSA program, you're nuts if you think any politician who proposed the tradeoff you're making would get 15% of the vote.
Preventing all terrorism isn't actually the goal though.
Just like our vaccination regimes are not intended to completely eradicate disease, merely prevent epidemics and pandemics, the anti-terrorism programs are intended to increase safety and security for Americans (and by proxy, other nations who would also be targets of the groups aligned against the USA), in a way such that terrorism does not happen so often that the people demand the police state we all claim here to despise.
It is recognized that completely eradicating terrorism is probably impossible, but the U.S. can make it almost impossibly difficult to form large enough terror cells to repeat things like 9/11.
And unlike your rather defeatist attitude, I think that can be done without "eviscerating" civil liberties, as long as we employ ample doses of transparency, watchdog groups, and organizational structures designed to keep those programs directed to the mission and provide accountability and oversight. Of course it can be done; how do banks holding billions of dollars of their customers funds manage to provide strict accountability for those?
Pretty much every prior technological breakthrough has made tyranny in the U.S. more likely, and the U.S. has managed to pull through in each case (though sometimes with roadbumps...).
And, if you're really concerned about the rule of law you will do everything possible to avoid "a 9/11 every year". When the state fails to protect the people, the people (armed by the 2nd Amendment) will take matters into their own hands, and it won't be pretty for many innocents in America.
But again, if you have better ideas I'm sure the NSA is listening...
Just felt a simple up vote didn't convey enough of a thanks. You've provoked the conversation in far more interesting directions than it would otherwise have taken. Thank you sven7.
It was indeed an eye opener.
If asking a question, in what generally appears to be an open minded forum of seemingly well read people of above average intelligence, can be this complicated...its easy to imagine why Congress has a tough time doing anything.
I guess we just have to keep trying to refocus on solutions and hope for the best.
I know this sounds cheesy but I think repression is just making things worse.
What the NSA is doing, but properly implementing mandatory access control (like what they added to Linux over a decade ago with SELinux) to ensure that admins do not have more access than they should.
That said, I'm not eager to let them define the Overton window and just settle for that - I'm leaning a little further on the "radical transparency" side of the spectrum - but clearly, what the NSA is up to is not treating our data with the care it merits.
- Any data collected under a general warrant is encrypted immediately.
- Access to this data is audited to a WORM-style server.
- Decrypting the data requires 2 persons to provide a key (I believe there are crypto schemes that do this in the literature; if not I'm sure NSA could figure it out).
- The process that decrypts the data after the authentication creds are provided also notifies a random 3rd party within NSA (or even a Congressional/FBI/etc. panel setup for this purpose).
On top of this there need to be changes to how NSLs and FISA warrants are treated. They are secret only so long as needed for the law enforcement purpose.
Afterwards, if there is still an issue of sensitivity from a counter-terrorism standpoint (e.g. enemy groups would learn too much about our capabilities if fully detailed NSLs/warrants were public), then they are scrubbed as little as necessary to allow for public dissemination. This could mean aggregate reporting, sunset provisions for gag orders, etc. But having permanent gag orders is not befitting our Republic.
Finally I agree that having NSA write its own rules is not a good idea. I would require Congress to set overarching policy and limits on NSA's actions and prevent Congress from delegating that into the Executive Branch. I think even the Dems and GOP could hopefully get along long enough to ensure national security is being guarded...
For that I would hop into a time machine, not train Al-Quaeda, not mess with Iran, and let Saudi Arabia find someone else to buy their oil with which they sponsor what they sponsor.
Some might claim then I would have been utterly usurped by the USSR, and without a time machine, who knows. There's really only one way to find out what acting like a decent person, and in extension like a decent nation, would have lead to. Or what it might lead to starting from today.
Feels like I am in an evangelical church questioning god.
Ironically, that itself is also rhetoric. You didn't even address anything I said, can not point what makes what I said mere rhetoric either, but just dismissed it all with that statement.
So maybe even if there are solutions, even if they get posted in plain sight of you; as long as you're trying hard to not see them, you won't.
What you're really saying is "give me solutions which keep me and my current outlook intact", and I don't see a reason to automatically assume that's possible or desirable.
Solutions please.
The solution to what, exactly? To drummed up fear? To hypocrisy and double standards? That's all just in the mind, and as Bill Hicks said, I recommend sit-ups. Or do you mean the fires that in large parts don't just get fueled, but were started by the very people who claim to protect from them?
from your other post:
The lack of solutions itself is a sign that no one has anything better to offer than what the NSA is currently upto.
Does this not also apply to your comments? Why aren't you making the comments you want to see, instead of "crying" about the problems with the discussion? Because it's not that easy, is it?
Also, this is hardly an issue everybody is completely informed about, much less in the mainstream. Talking "solutions" now, instead of simply talking and see where that leads, strikes me as premature.
You can't change a century of statism and the shrinking of the individual overnight with a "solution". We need to evolve out of consumerism and passivitiy, out of confusing symbols and things, not just consume the right change or come up with the correct symbol. We need to overcome atomization and rediscover solidarity instead of better skinner boxes, and that may take more than a generation even. If it is something you or I can fully experience in our lifetime, it is not aiming high enough IMHO. If it is something that can be explained to someone without all of attention span, intellectual honesty and passion, it is not worth a second thought.
And in a process that involves all people on the planet, I would not ever hold my breath to ever have a full explanation of the full picture, or expect a full map before I even do one step. But I can get to know myself and my immediate surroundings, see how I feel about each and act on those.
To me that is infinitely better than a full, but false explanation of how the world is, which is exactly what most people operate on, stories that cease to exist the moment they're no longer told. This leads to incredibly insecure people, who go insane as soon as the jukebox who tells them who they are goes silent, which in turn leads to all sorts of nonsense. As Voltaire said, those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities. Oh, the irony of complaining about "rhetoric" and then expecting a "solution, pronto".
My "solution" would be, hmmm, we all read and implement the writings of Erich Fromm and Marcus Aurelius, get to know ourselves, all 7 billion of us. Then we have a second round of discussions. If you don't like it, give me a better one.
To me in that book, he is fully credible. I can guess how he got the insights: Be a bright guy, have a good background in what was known, at least empirically, at the time about psychology and psychiatry, do a lot of clinical psychology, listen to a lot of people, and identify the main issues and forces in common. Now I can look at events A, B, and C, from Fromm find the intuitive, qualitative version of the conditional probability of event X given events A, B, and C -- P(X}A, B, C) -- when this conditional probability is high, take X as a candidate explanation, look at some more data, and often conclude that Fromm nailed it again.
for example ( from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psVNR51ctdc&t=33m28s ) :
[..] if one is in touch with one's own unconscious reality, I think one would have to admit that in all of us there is a piece of Eichmann, and if you ask why, on what basis do I say this, then I would ask you wether you have lost your appetite when you read that in India people were starving, or wether you have gone on eating. As soon as you have not lost your appetite, when you knew other people were starving, then your heart has hardened, and in principle, you have done the same which Eichmann did.
Nobody wants to hear that. I don't want to hear it either. If I read it in a book which otherwise is telling me many things that are obviously wise and come from a good motivation, I can ponder it. If someone just says that about me, to my face, I defend myself before I fully heard what was said. But it's true.
He goes on:
I don't think, that if we are really in touch with the inner reality of ourselves, that there is any crime, or perhaps any virtue, which we cannot discover in ourselves. We shut ourselves [off] from the awareness of our inner reality, we project the evil to our opponents and enemies, and believe that the good is in ourselves; indidivually, nationally, and group-wise in general.
But if you can really see that every one of us, carries all of humanity, the good and the evil, within himself, then indeed is very hard to be a fanatic, then indeed it's very hard to be a judge, then indeed would follow, a deep understanding, if not love, of your fellow man. Which is part of being truly a person.
Bam. Consider how far this is from the maturity of our so called leaders and us, how far away from even our highest standards. The fact that this stuff comes across as cheesy rhetoric so easily, is just testament to how lost we are.
Sorry for rambling, but I can't deny it, I love that dude, and I honestly think everybody should at least try to read him because they might, too.
And on India, he's right: I refuse to pay attention to India, and for essentially just the reason he said.
At the risk of overdoing it (even more), one last quote I consider a true pearl because it sums up so much, from http://www.marxists.org/archive/fromm/works/1961/man/ :
The whole concept of alienation found its first expression in Western thought in the Old Testament concept of idolatry. The essence of what the prophets call "idolatry" is not that man worships many gods instead of only one. It is that the idols are the work of man's own hands -- they are things, and man bows down and worships things; worships that which he has created himself.
In doing so he transforms himself into a thing. He transfers to the things of his creation the attributes of his own life, and instead of experiencing himself as the creating person, he is in touch with himself only by the worship of the idol. He has become estranged from his own life forces, from the wealth of his own potentialties, and is in touch with himself only in the indirect way of submission to life frozen in the idols. The deadness and emptiness of the idol is expressed in the Old Testament: "Eyes they have and they do not see, ears they have and they do not hear," etc.
The more man transfers his own powers to the idols, the poorer he himself becomes, and the more dependent on the idols, so that they permit him to redeem a small part of what was originally his. The idols can be a godlike figure, the state, the church, a person, possessions. Idolatry changes its objects; it is by no means to be found only in those forms in which the idol has a socalled religious meaning.
Idolatry is always the worship of something into which man has put his own creative powers, and to which he now submits, instead of experiencing himself in his creative act.
Among the many forms of alienation, the most frequent one is alienation in language. If I express a feeling with a word, let us say, if I say "I love you," the word is meant to be an indication of the reality which exists within myself, the power of my loving. The word "love" is meant to be a symbol of the fact love, but as soon as it is spoken it tends to assume a life of its own, it becomes a reality. I am under the illusion that the saying of the word is the equivalent of the experience, and soon I say the word and feel nothing, except the thought of love which the word expresses.
The alienation of language shows the whole complexity of alienation. Language is one of the most precious human achievements; to avoid alienation by not speaking would be foolish -- yet one must be always aware of the danger of the spoken word, that it threatens to substitute itself for the living experience. The same holds true for all other achievements of man; ideas, art, any kind of man-made objects. They are man's creations; they are valuable aids for life, yet each one of them is also a trap, a temptation to confuse life with things, experience with artifacts, feeling with surrender and submission.
To me Erich Fromm's writings are like a holograms, they all seem to contain a rough version of the whole ^^
There are some connections with some of the content in 'The Art of Loving', especially his -- rough quote:
"The fundamental problem in life is getting security in face of the anxiety from the realization that we are vulnerable to the hostile forces of nature and society. Human intelligence enables this realization. For responding to this anxiety, only four approaches have been tried, (1) love of god, (2) love of spouse, (3) membership in groups (get praise, acceptance, approval, feeling of belonging, coalition, support), and (4) 'orgiastic' behavior (sex and drugs) to suppress the feelings of anxiety."
So, the "idolatry" can be seen as another response to the anxiety, that is, a false approach to (1)-(3).
Fromm had another one, that can regard as a 'secret scorecard'! He explained that in a good case of love, the couple gives to each other knowledge, caring, respect, and responsiveness. So, in "knowledge" they keep each other informed on their thoughts, feelings, concerns, desires, etc. In "caring", they actually, actively care about each other. In "respect" they respect the other person, e.g., don't regard them with contempt or to be manipulated or exploited. For "responsiveness", they 'respond' to each other, e.g., don't do what was long in the Sunday newspaper cartoons of the wife talking to the husband over the breakfast table and the husband behind a newspaper repeating "Yes, Dear. Of course, Dear. That's right, Dear. That's nice, Dear. Yes, Dear.".
Then take these four 'attributes' and evaluate them for couples you know. If the couple gets a bad grade on all four, try to short the stock of their marriage, if it is possible to do that! Or be very cautious about marrying one of their children!
That little scorecard can give some surprising results: Can discover that some couples are going along for decades with what externally to the community looks like a good marriage but according to the scorecard really would like to knife each other in the back! Or, people can put on some really big acts.
There's more, from Fromm, and still more if combine Fromm with some other good sources (of which I know only a few).
Here's an exercise: Watch 'Roman Holiday'. There the reporter Bradley (Gregory Peck) and Princess Anna (Audrey Hepburn) were from the beginning basically lying to each other about whom they were but slowly mutually but silently worked past the lies. Then evaluate the scorecard: They did great. On each of the four, they started off okay and then grew to a grade of A or A+. Then they were in love. Otherwise they showed it by only quite subtle means, but it was convincing and enough. The writer (Trumbo), director (Wyler), and the actors did fantastic jobs. Fromm's scorecard wins again!
People really in love will likely be doing well on Fromm's scorecard whether they have heard of the four items or not. If they are not in love, are pretending to the public to be in love, and have not heard of the four items, then there is a really good chance that their act is not working and they are showing that they are not in love by getting bad grades on the scorecard.
I doubt that Trumbo or Wyler had read Fromm, but they knew enough about love to give a really good presentation of it including on Fromm's scorecard.
Note: I call Fromm's four attributes a 'scorecard'; I doubt that Fromm ever did!
That Fromm's little four item scorecard can look like X-ray vision through the public 'presentation' of couples trying to pretend in public to have a good marriage is to me amazing and astoundingly valuable. Some of the best information about anything I ever got.
One more exercise: The first item on Fromm's scorecard is giving knowledge. Well, that is a form of 'intimacy'. If you are in a romantic relationship without intimacy, then you are in deep trouble! On the other hand, if meet a girl and soon she is telling you lots of things from between her ears, then that's intimacy and inviting a romantic relationship. I've been in 'romantic' relationships where the girl was much more open about what was between her legs than between her ears. Or in 'Roman Holiday', they started between their ears and slowly worked down to, say, a nice hug and a kiss. In real life, it can be much more common to start below the waist and maybe move up, maybe never get above the shoulders, and only rarely get between the ears.
Or, in middle school it can appear that a lot of the mothers told their daughters to stay away from boys, not to talk to them: "Don't tell them anything. If they ask 'why', just say 'because'. Say it over and over until they feel insulted and give up." So, such mothers know that this way they can throttle a path toward intimacy for their middle school daughters.
Fromm's amazing.
This is different, this is a president who's cut from the same cloth as Nixon, in everything from being the first one since him to refer to his political enemies as "enemies" to this new model of the Plumbers ... except the establishment and media hated Nixon with a passion starting in the late '40s, 1950 at the latest. Obama hasn't been subjected to that level of feedback, e.g. note how many on the Left are happy with or at least excusing his Administration's suppression of the TEA Party et. al., which is one of the things that casts the NSA's extreme data gathering---not "collection", you must understand...---in sharp relief.
Honest question: Why not?
Obviously we don't want mass casualties, but we don't want thousands of traditional murders or automobile fatalities or cancer deaths every year either, and we don't allocate insanely disproportionate budgets or construct a surveillance state to address any of those things. If anything we under-perform in addressing them.
I mean let's even compare to other mass casualty events. There have been hurricanes that have caused more deaths than 9/11. Where is the call for a war on CO2 to reduce climate change induced mass casualties? The answer is that there is no lobby for it. Nobody is going to get paid a trillion dollars, if anything the oil and coal companies would lose money. So the mass casualties there don't get politicians, lobbyists and PR flacks whipping the media into a frenzy over it, instead it just gets swept under the rug.
We as citizens have a duty to not allow ourselves to be manipulated like this.
But, geeze, this united the nation for a very brief period, I mean, when the ruling class in their national cathedral sings The Battle Hymn of the Republic 3 days after 9/11 it does mean something (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battle_Hymn_of_the_Republic...).
"Society is indeed a contract. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born." -Edmund Burke
I am completely convinced, however, that US government, with all its enormous might, is perfectly capable of ensuring reasonable - not complete, as it is impossible, but reasonable - level of safety to US citizens without turning into a police state and shredding the Constitution. Yes, it will be harder and some important people would be forced to work a lot harder than otherwise and spend more money and stay longer hours, and be frustrated and annoyed by how they have to follow all those pesky little rules while doing their work. It is the only way to do it without turning from citizens to subjects.
My point is people have to be pushed to answer the question on how to tackle terrorism to take this debate in a constructive direction. Ofcourse governments will do dumb things but the terrorism problem is a hard one.
Amazing to watch how defensive people get over a question.
So thank you, for showing everyone else who has been downvoting me into oblivion, the right way to react to questions that make one uncomfortable.
And in the end, this debate will only move forward over reasonable solutions. Not fancy speeches on privacy and freedom. Which I have had more than enough off.
What else are you upset about?
Obviously those who have chosen to deliberately kill civilians in spectacular ways are not right now a danger akin to imperial Japan or Nazi Germany. But will it really take a dirty bomb, a successful mass infection/poisoning, or god help us a nuke to stop this silly argument?
It's bizarre to me that one of the anti-anti-terror arguments of choice reflects that hilariously dystopian scene in the film Brazil, wherein the staff and patrons of a restaurant that has just been bombed attempt to paper over the incident by completely ignoring it, as innocent people suffer and die.
Obviously. Which is the point.
>But will it really take a dirty bomb, a successful mass infection/poisoning, or god help us a nuke to stop this silly argument?
These are movie theater plots. "Mass poisonings" are a very poor attack vector because as soon as they're identified they get publicized and people stop consuming the adulterated product, which minimizes the impact. Spreading infection has similar constraints, is difficult to contain (i.e. the attacker can't prevent it from spreading to his own family/country), and it is vastly more difficult to obtain weaponized infectious materials than poisons.
And dirty bombs are a media fabrication. Here's the money quote from Stratfor: "By its very nature, the RDD is contradictory. Maximizing the harmful effects of radiation involves maximizing the exposure of the victims to the highest possible concentration of a radioisotope. When dispersing the radioisotope, by definition and design the RDD dilutes the concentration of the radiation source, spreading smaller amounts of radiation over a larger area."[1]
[1] http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20100421_dirty_bombs_revisite...
Which leaves The Bomb. But terrorists can't build nuclear weapons. States can barely do it. So if your concern is nuclear terrorism, the solution doesn't require you to catch the terrorists, all you have to do is limit the availability of weapons grade material. Which is a completely different problem with completely different solutions that don't involve domestic surveillance or foreign wars, is required to prevent state-level nuclear proliferation regardless of terrorism anyway, and mostly just involves being the highest bidder if weapons grade material ever becomes available on the black market.
>It's bizarre to me that one of the anti-anti-terror arguments of choice reflects that hilariously dystopian scene in the film Brazil, wherein the staff and patrons of a restaurant that has just been bombed attempt to paper over the incident by completely ignoring it, as innocent people suffer and die.
I don't think anybody is arguing that there should be no response to a terrorist act. But why can't the response be to bring the terrorists to justice as international criminals, and not to let it change the fabric of our society?
In the US, we'd probably do what they did in NYC after 9/11 WRT to the excessive claims of danger from asbestos, say "never mind" (after cleaning up hot spots). And "don't eat dirt" and the like, but who knows?
Elsewhere I've touched on how I'm not as sanguine as you over the real nuclear threat.
Why not both? I've yet to be convinced that warrant-based searches of Internet traffic by a resource-constrained agency would actually appreciably change the fabric of society. Especially if we force better transparency and accountability controls on what is now present.
But also, while we're itemizing potential terrorist activities, am I the only one who is worried about MANPADs?
It barely deserves a response. Practically nobody dies of terrorism.
>to take this debate in a constructive direction.
To derail the debate with FUD?
Right, we're clearly remiss in prosecuting gov't overreach.
In terms of deaths? No, it wouldn't.
But what about the property damage and economic disruption that came from attacking an important financial center?
You're giving us a false choice.
I have never heard a shit happens lets move on speech.
So act tough. Demand justice. Capture Osama bin Laden.
The rest of it is just defense contractors and bureaucrats capitalizing on the tragedy to engorge their budgets and claim new powers.
In fact the aims of terror are principally to provoke a government to introduce repressive measures and lash out, and in the process, damage itself and its credibility with citizens. I think the aims of Bin Laden were probably to induce terror, fear, and paranoia in the US, and unfortunately they have succeeded, probably beyond their wildest dreams. Huge amounts of money and numbers of lives have been squandered, and the only result has been a series of failed states half-way across the world, a casual disregard for the rule of law, and a growing surveillance state at home destroying the very ideas the US claims to represent.
It's time for the US to recognise that expanding the architecture of surveillance and engaging in an eternal war against an ill-defined enemy is not going to make anyone safer, quite the reverse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Norway_attacks#Domestic
"At a press conference the morning after the attacks, Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg and Justice Minister Knut Storberget addressed the country. Stoltenberg called the attack a "national tragedy" and the worst atrocity in Norway since World War II. Stoltenberg further vowed that the attack would not hurt Norwegian democracy, and said the proper answer to the violence was "more democracy, more openness, but not naivety".
Even a repressive government can't guarantee that it will stop terror attacks.
The prevention efforts should be reciprocal to the threat.
That's a pretty powerful motivation to keep this beat back, to e.g. as I noted WRT to Afghanistan post-9/11 send a strong message that if you kill thousands of us we will return the favor to the leaders and enablers.
The idea of a successful attack on US with missile is just bad B movie trope. Even USSR strategies were for massive waves of missiles that could overpower the defenses.
Non state actors cannot manufacture nuclear weapons. This thing is hard. They could obtain possibly - but the fact is that US is somewhat defended by geography alone so Israel is much better (and more hated) target.
Now I know that the majority of US ruling class act as if USA is just some territory belonging to Israel and not sovereign country.
But if any credible nuclear threat for the US is to appear - it will be from a country. And there are better ways to contain Iran or Pakistan than to become surveillance state.
We also have absolutely no defenses for anything from our east, unless an Aegis ship with SM-3s and the upgrades to fire them is near the target and properly alert. This lack of protection was, after all, one of the reasons for the Bush plan to put ABMs in Eastern Europe, they'd protect everything there to the west, including the eastern part of the US.
As for sources, IF they got enough HEU they could most certainly manufacture working gun assembly nuclear weapons; as usual the trick is getting the fissionables, but are you entirely, "You Bet Your Life" sanguine about Pakistan's control over its nukes and nuclear materials??? And how responsible Iran will be when they get "the bomb" remains to be seen.
I will note that Manhattan Project scientists were so confident in the gun-assembly nuclear bomb, that they didn't even bother testing it (in the age before computer-aided design, no less!). The first working gun-assembly bomb was detonated over Hiroshima. In other words the first atomic bomb ever dropped in anger had never been test-fired, that's how confident the designers were that it would work.
The real magic of the Manhattan Project had been the industrial-scale development required to piece together all that weapons-grade nuclear material in the first place, not the design itself.
"And how do you plan to stop the next attack?"
Suddenly the supreme vagueness of the question becomes apparent. After all, attacks in general provoke terror (at least for me--some random guy can rush at me on the street and I'll feel terror). So what attack are you talking about? By whom? The U.S. already has a framework to prevent "attacks" in general-- the CIA, the military, the police, the NSA, etc. Like with all security systems, it's a matter of calibrating them so they don't undermine our way of life.
As a micro example -- I can prevent future (terror) attacks on myself by burying myself in a sealed metal casket. But my way of life would be seriously undermined. So how do I want to calibrate my safety vs. how I want to live?
The exercise of removing the word "terror" is useful in almost all situations, because it actually makes things a little more accurate. For example, the "War on Terror" becomes the "War on ...". Which, as it panned out, more accurately describes the outcome.
Nations are, and have always been, in a state of competition for dominance and resources.
Knock one out, and some other will fill the vacuum instantly, while their people clap and cheer - death to the USA, my country #1.
This idea that the USA should just leave everyone alone, and then the world will be a perfect place is so naive that it's absurd and self-destructive.
Pretending that you can get a job as an IT guy at some contractor's place, then steal government laptops, bring them home, then sift through the data to gather whatever dirt you can find, and give that dirt away to other nations is most certainly treason and espionage.
Or all the other documents he is releasing about the USA spying/hacking on other nations? Because that's what the NSA and CIA do, and all the other countries take part in. It's part of the game nations play.
Or are you talking about whatever else he has / will release to help damage the USA?
Not only did he release those documents for anyone to see (in effect), he and his "journalists" sensationalized it to the point of it being a falsehood...
Read the response of the government, the number of FISA requests involved, how they are handled, the limited number of phone taps done, how this does not aplly to US citizens at all, and what the involved companies are saying. Even Google is claiming the media is downright lying about what is going on (no "direct pipes")...
http://allthingsd.com/20130618/google-formally-petitions-to-...
> Google's reputation and business has been harmed by the false or misleading reports in the media, and Google's users are concerned by the allegations.
Or just keep ignoring the facts, and pretend you know better because the government must be evil and you live is a Nazi Germany like state.
> Because that's what the NSA and CIA do, and all the other countries take part in. It's part of the game nations play.
Yeah, and so? That doesn't make those actions right, nor Snowden's actions wrong.
> Even Google is claiming the media is downright lying about what is going on.
It's he-said they-said right now, but Snowden has documents that allegedly corroborate his story, while all we get from the ISPs, telecos, and the government are simple denials.
It makes those actions necessary, and his actions absolutely wrong.
> It's he-said they-said right now, but Snowden has documents that allegedly corroborate his story, while all we get from the ISPs, telecos, and the government are simple denials.
What we got was clarifications and specifics to the media's sensationalism and falsehoods. But you've already made up your mind...
"Direct pipes" turned out to be nothing more than FTP accounts at google and facebook, were data has to be requested first, looked over by lawyers, and then moved to. And "unlimited wholescale spying" turned out to be extremely specific targeting of a few hundred phone accounts. Not to mention that US citizen targeting turned out to be completely against the rules.
Look, even DNI Clapper has admitted he lied, in giving the "least untruthful" answer to the question of whether the "NSA collect[s] any type of data at all on millions of Americans". Which apparently hinges on a definition of collect where they Hoover up lots of stuff, and promise to only look at it if they're following their rules.
Now, if we think the downright wrong things aren't some combination of Snowden's limited understanding of things AND the filter of the reporter and his editors, we might wonder if that warrant wasn't fabricated or sexed up. I don't know off the top of my head how to proceed on judging its validity.
Why do nations and states get special status in the geopolitical game? (Because it's a way to ensure that each maintains its own power, and not let those dumb plebs fuck up their designs.)
> But you've already made up your mind...
You're assuming that I believe all the claims he's made, when I've said nothing of the sort in this entire thread. Indeed, it rather seems that you are the one who has made up their mind that the clarifications made must be genuine, just as you have accused me of assuming that all of Snowden's allegations are geniune... Doesn't feel good, huh?
>treason
From the totalitarian point of view, history is something to be created rather than learned. -- George Orwell, "The Prevention of Literature" (1946)
I've heard there are "no-fly" secret lists which you can't challenge because, you know, they are secret. That can't be true, right? grin
The moment people get used to this shit - they have won.
As the organs of the state continue in this ... well, it isn't going to end well.
That is not even including the insanity or illegality of having a no-fly list to begin with.
Are you sure they weren't just worried he'd get drunk and fly the plane into the water?
Personally, I'd rather be vulnerable to a few nuts than vulnerable to the system.
It's easy to say, we shouldn't judge the people of the country because it feels good to us and, in reality, most people are rather decent. However, I think it should be the opposite, we should all be ashamed of ourselves for letting ourselves get bought off for a little convenience and comfort. We're all guilty to varying degrees. We should step up and accept that. The first step towards recovery is admitting you have a problem.
Sometimes people are truly in the minority, say for instance a gay man in Jamaica. He could essentially sacrifice his life to try to move the needle on his countries tolerance level, or he could be discrete and live his life. I'll be the first to cheer on the former, but I don't believe that its my place to judge the latter for inaction.
I don't believe that its right to hold people responsible for their governments actions while much of the world lacks freedom of movement, and those in power have nearly all the tools at their disposal to hold onto that power.
SWAT teams traditionally have been there to diffuse potentially violent confrontations -- to reduce violence. But in the last decade or so [correction: three decades], we've seen a change in the nature of SWAT. Now the teams are being used increasingly as shock police forces, bringing an escalated level of violence to a situation in order to overwhelm any possibility of danger to the officers or general public.
Seeing guys like the FDA, DOE, or EPA with their own SWAT teams is a bit unsettling, to say the least. One wonders where this will all stop.
*edited to add link
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ralphbenko/2013/03/11/1-6-billio...
[1]http://www.coburn.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?a=Files.Serve&...
http://cironline.org/reports/local-police-stockpile-high-tec...
http://www.aclu.org/militarization
http://stream.aljazeera.com/story/growing-militarisation-pol...
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/04/sunday-review/have-america...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/nov/...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/09/12/police-milit...
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/11/how-the-...
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/police-militarization-an-in...
The video in the first link is probably the most interesting.
Edit: Also shouldn't forget http://www.huffingtonpost.com/radley-balko/
Makes for very depressing reading.
Your news is about 30 years out of date. Since the late 80s, there has been a massive increase in the use of paramilitary police teams to serve basic search-and-arrest warrants. SWAT was used against hackers in the 90s, it is routinely used to prosecute drug cases (perhaps most famously), and of course against protesters. What has changed in the last decade is that paramilitary teams can be seen simply standing by in public places; whenever I visit my family in NYC, I see paramilitary teams. Once I even saw a heavily armed SWAT team in Greenwich Village, apparently guarding a bank (or maybe the newspaper stand near it).
You are right that it is disturbing, but this has been happening for a long time. The past decade's increase is part of a trend that has been occurring since I was in diapers. Sadly, most people believe that we need SWAT and that it is entirely acceptable to use paramilitary teams in this manner. There is also a shocking lack of transparency in many places, where the police need not disclose how often paramilitary teams are deployed nor why they choose to use such teams.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Hollywood_shootout
... probably because they expected SWAT. It's a bit of an arms race, literally, between the cops and the robbers.
To put it another way, this is no different from saying that the police should be armed with anti-aircraft missiles, because of the 9/11 attacks.
On the other hand, paramilitary police teams targeting the wrong house or killing innocent people happens with frequency. It happens every year. Even if only 1/1000th of the raids that occur each year were done in error, you would expect about 40 such mistakes to occur per year. SWAT teams do not need to hide their existence, they are rarely punished for attacking innocent people, and they exist even in small towns.
The Hollywood Shootout, as the link notes, had "Several officers also appropriated AR-15 rifles from a nearby firearms dealer." and mentions how this incident propelled the move to patrol carbines.
(Given how obnoxious they were afterwords about returning them, the gun dealer should have insisted they come back after the normally mandatory 2 week waiting period....)
You mean there is another one? There is no justification for the widespread militarization of police in this country.
For that matter, informal, I doubt they get off on killing dogs (if you don't know about that, search on swat puppycide, Radley Balko has written a lot on it).
Then, I saw the words on the side of the APC: "Chicago Police Department SWAT."
To give you an idea, it looks like this: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-kHTFUq0_Yec/T-s2AzxBmQI/AAAAAAAAHz... That's Nebraska, but it was basically the same model.
After the G20 came to Pittsburgh in 2009, the city used the money to purchase four of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Range_Acoustic_Device During the event, I had the privilege of becoming one of the first Americans to have this particular, previously military-only weapon used on me. Why would a city of 300,000 people need four of these, especially as we're closing schools and cutting bus lines?
The militarization of the police force is a real problem.
As a non American, I take a perverse sort of comfort from that idea that it looks like the US government is as scared of its own people as it is foreigners. At least we foreigners and American citizens are in it together.
Truth is, we are enemies of US government behavior, not the United States of America or its fine people. We critical non Americans are actually arguing for America to be better, not worse. We want it stronger through fairness, justice and, well, just plain decent behavior. Not through cowardice, fear, and the bullying fist. Just imagine how powerful the US could be if the rest of the world actually liked and respected it, rather than feared it. People who fear you are not friends, they are people who will bite back the second they can.
However, what I'm not sure of is whether or not the US government is actually as the majority of Americans want it. It is a democracy after all. I realize that democracy is distorted by money and vested interests, but TBH, given what we know today about all that, surely the American voter cant use that as an excuse any more. All those nasty lying attack ad campaigns, the distortion of facts, etc.... we all know how that works. So, surely Americans cant be swayed by that sort of thing? Would it not be a bit daft to know you are being manipulated, but still go along with such manipulations? So, cant people vote smart?
I dunno.... Its all a bit of a mess.
Oh...... why so many enemies? Fear.
My guess is because we are told that we live in a Democracy and our vote and our taxes going to aid and abetting the people that are responsible for massive amounts of random acts of violence all over the planet.
For more details, this article is the best initial exposition I've found, "America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution", "The only serious opposition to this arrogant Ruling Party is coming not from feckless Republicans but from what might be called the Country Party — and its vision is revolutionary.": http://spectator.org/archives/2010/07/16/americas-ruling-cla...
See also the expanded monograph: http://www.amazon.com/The-Ruling-Class-ebook/dp/B0040JHNZW
And the "revolutionary" bit, of an American nature, not at all in the violent French tradition, explains why the TEA Party et. al. has to be suppressed at all costs, and why the GOPe wasn't and still isn't interested in stopping it per se (e.g. the IRS has not changed its policies). We are existential threats to the GOPe, as e.g. Republican ex-Senator Richard Lugar knows as he's now spending more time with his family.
The author is an old school Cold Warrior, so I'm not dismissing his dismissal of e.g. traffic analysis and the general utility of the NSA's current methods out of hand, I'll have to read it carefully.
We are such a peace loving nation we would never do anything like finance a coup in a oil rich nation so we can murder and imprison the democratically elected leaders of a country in order install a tyrant so that we can hand over ex-British petroleum fields to American corporations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d'%C3%A9tat
Then later on we wouldn't do things like finance and arm both sides of a ethic war in the hope they would keep each other weak and easy for us to control.
http://whitenoiseinsanity.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/rum...
Our government wouldn't do terrible things like sell weapons to a enemy of Israel using the government of Israel in order to finance anti-democratic warlords in Central America, even though Congress specifically said supporting such groups was illegal without them approving it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair
When that failed we wouldn't do such things as import cocaine into the intercity and destroy the lifes of tens of thousands of poor black Americans in order to finance the warlords in a less discoverable manner.
And then murder the people we worked with.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_drug_traffic...
We didn't do things like smuggling heroin into the USA to finance the various assassinations, political coup, vote rigging, and terorrist training activities that we didn't secretly engage in from the 1950's through the 2000's.
http://www.corbettreport.com/the-cia-and-the-drug-trade-eyeo...
We would never do things like that. Because drugs are bad, M'Kay?. Because our US soldiers wouldn't being spending their time killing and dying in foreign lands, while protecting the drug trade and the primary source of income for their adversaries. And if they did that it would only be because we care sooo much for the farmers.
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/10/14066.html
Nope. The USA is innocent.
The secret activities that the USA government and their invasions of your privacy, if they even occure, are obviously for your benefit. And if the NSA or CIA or Obama hit squads ever grossly infringe on the constitution they will be very careful to only infringe on it when it's necessary for your own safety. Because, darn it, they just care so much.
So yep.
This must be it:
They hate us because our freedom.
Here in logical steps is the unavoidable answer:
(1) Due to whatever in history before 1776, the US founding fathers gave us the Constitution. Soon they gave us the Bill of Rights. In particular we have the Fourth Amendment.
(2) Congress, the FISA 'court', the Intelligence committees of Congress, the president, the NSA, etc. may have done this and that, but there are claims that the Constitution has been violated.
(3) Law suits are being brought claiming that the Constitution has been violated. Apparently there will be suits from Google, EFF, and the ACLU, and there's little to stop more suits from being brought. It appears that quite generally lots of lawyers will be burning midnight oil, word processing, filing cases, etc.
(4) Very likely some of these law suits will make it to the steps of the Supreme Court, be taken in by the court, studied, argued, and decided. If the Constitution has been violated as clearly and strongly as it is easy to guess from the recent news, then the court will likely strike down at least some of the laws that enabled the violations. Really, for this process, nothing can stop it now -- not the president, the NSA, the FISA court, Congress. People can argue this and that, that we need what the NSA has been doing or we don't, but still the Supreme Court will take this issue and address it.
(5) The founding fathers made sure that the Supreme Court was not just a bunch of kids playing tag on a playground. Instead the SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the US) is about as serious as anything in this solar system. The court is absolutely, positively 100% aware of the Constitution, their role in defending it, and threats to it. Arguments of short term expediency, the threats of Boston loser wackos with backpacks with pressure cookers, Jihaders with chembio in public places, or well funded efforts to sneak a nuke into a major US city will not be seen as repealing the Bill of Rights or even one comma in the Constitution. And the SCOTUS is just awash in power, both in principle and in practice, to strike down as unconstitutional whatever parts of the Patriot Act, the FISA court, etc. they conclude, with considerable study and wisdom, is appropriate.
The process of (1)-(5) has now started and will move forward "with all deliberate speed" which might be 1-2 years.
In simplest terms, the SCOTUS can, yes, understand the threats of terrorism but can understand with much greater concern the threats to the Constitution. The SCOTUS has no choice but to pay essentially all their attention just to the threats to the Constitution.
It's the process: The Executive branch is supposed to follow the laws and, really, can't change the laws. If the laws are too limiting for the important work of the Executive branch, then have Congress pass some new laws. We did that. If the new laws are unconstitutional, then bring suits before the SCOTUS to have the unconstitutional laws struck down. We're now in the process of doing just that. The SCOTUS has to protect the Constitution and can't change it. If the Constitution needs changing, then that's 2/3rds of the House, 2/3rds of the Senate, and 3/4ths of the states.
So, in 1-2 years we will know. The smart money is on the Constitution coming out whole. And the chances of an amendment to the Constitution are as usual from slim to none.
So, where will the SCOTUS defending the Constitution leave Congress, the Executive branch, the NSA, the FBI, local police, etc.? They will have to put their thinking caps on and find ways to protect the US from the Jihaders within the Constitution. Or the Executive branch will find more ways to violate laws and/or the Constitution, and then there may be more leaks, law suits, etc.
Whatever, and it may take time, in this mud wrestling the Constitution stands to come out whole. Thank you founding fathers.
Did the founding fathers see this coming? Absolutely. Been there; done that; got the T-shirt, 200+ years ago.
Or, we need to defend the US. One of the best parts of the US is the Constitution. So, it is logically impossible to defend the US and trash the Constitution. Instead, in defending the US, it is in particular necessary to defend the Constitution. For also defending the rest of the US, that's a problem we have to work to solve; I have no doubt at all we can solve it.
In simple terms, the problem is not finding ways within the Constitution to stop the Jihaders. Instead, the problem is stopping intellectually lazy, empire building bureaucrats and CYA politicians from using the Jihader threat as an excuse to trash the Constitution, build empires, and CYA.
There are certainly holes in the constitution, which over time politician and bureaucrats always find a way to "hack" their way into securing more powers for themselves, such as the commerce clause, the general welfare clause, or vague interpretations of the definition of "public", in the takings clause, that is used to justify eminent domain abuse...
Now, politicians and bureaucrats have seemed to have exploited a hole in the treason clause. Who gets to define what constitutes an "enemy" of the United States?
I think this is very, very dangerous.
The job of lawyers is to find loopholes. Since the entire scotus is composed of lawyers we more strongly risk having a court that chooses to sympathize and reward cleverness in finding loopholes that are technically correct according to the letter of the law. For example, myriad genetics.
Those cases involve really tricky stuff in the sense that there's nothing really clear in the Constitution on how to resolve the cases. So, the SCOTUS had to 'interpret'. For what they did in those two cases, I see no big threat to the US. For Kelo, my sympathies for the poor guy who owned the property that got taken away from him. For Myriad, I thought that that was a really nice step toward something that makes sense in patent law. So, if invent some DNA, then maybe can patent it. But if just read some DNA from a drop of my blood, then can't patent it. For cDNA, I saved time by not checking out the details -- maybe after I watch some more Eric Lander videos!
But for the NSA getting the phone call metadata on all 120 million or so Verizon customers, apparently once a day, for years, I see mud tracked over the Fourth Amendment with no real doubt. And I see a threat to the US, e.g., another Nixon "taking the gloves off", using that data to go after his "enemies", and building a tyrannical dictatorship.
So, I can see it now: "Dear NSA: I'm a good, long time Verizon customer. I met this girl on-line, and we met at a bar and then went back to her place. I saw her for six months, and then she told me that I'd gotten her pregnant. I don't believe it. So, what I need are her phone records so that I can track down who she was talking to on her phone, who she was sleeping with, and who got her pregnant. So, from you, I need the phone records. Help!"
So, between the two cases you cited and the present NSA-Verizon issue, I see a difference in kind. There are some bright people on the SCOTUS, even if they are lawyers. Maybe they are bright enough to go above some narrow, loop-hole infested view of the law and think effectively about protecting the Constitution and the US essentially as the founding fathers did and intended. I hope so.
Arguably eminent domain abuse is more of a big deal than NSA wiretapping, it's something that has an impact, an disproportionate impact on the unwealthy and politically marginalized, and it happens in your backyard, all the time, for example: http://reason.com/reasontv/2007/11/15/national-city
As for myriad, I happen to be against patents in general, but my point was that the myriad lawyers really did a solid job of patenting genes. Despite my objection to patenting, given that it's constiutional and legal, I disagree with the SCOTUS decision, that the PCR product (cDNA or otherwise) is actually an artificial molecule by any reasonable definition of molecule and should be allowed to be patented. More subtly, I think it is Congress' responsibility to decide whether or not genes (in the fashion of myriad's patents) should be patentable. So it's an example of crafty lawyers (myriad's lawyers) extending their de jure power (using "composition of matter" patents to de facto become "gene" patents). And then the SCOTUS comes and creates this convoluted judgement about cDNA vs PCR, and introns versus no introns, which speaks to my point about how the court (probably not deliberately) works to incentivise legal cleverness, further justifying the existence of its own profession - possibly at the expense of society's broad interest in having a simpler legal code.
> Arguably eminent domain abuse is more of a big deal than NSA wiretapping,
Yes, except for what I'm concerned about, another President Nixon with an "enemies list" who wants data not just from the IRS but also the NSA, CIA, FBI, and Obamacare. Then he might become a tyrannical dictator.
In the 'normal course of events', with the NSA getting even a grade of C in protecting the data they have, you may be correct that Kelo is of more concern.
Apparently for now, so far, all that data the NSA has gotten has not actually caused much in real problems to our democracy. And I can believe the claims that we're talking only a few thousand people in the US individually 'investigated' via that NSA data. And I can believe that on a good day General Alexander really does do the right things for the US and, really, is a significant aid to US national security.
Still, there's the Fourth Amendment and the chance of another Nixon. And there are the concerns of the founding fathers. So I believe that the NSA has been trashing the Constitution and that the SCOTUS has to correct that situation.
It might take two years for the SCOTUS to issue even their first related opinion. Really, the whole process will take time. I don't think that what the NSA has done so far is so dangerous to the US in the short term that we can't afford the time. Still, long term, we need the Constitution intact.
Here's some 'perspective' on the threat of Kelo: Last night watched a VCR of an old PBS program 'Great Composers', this one on R. Wagner. I like classical music.
If forget about everything about Wagner except just the music, keep just the music, and ignore even the libretti, f'get about his love life, politics, connections with wacko King Ludwig, his various essays, what his wife Cosima wrote about some of what he said in his 60s, some of his professional fights, etc. and pay attention just to the music, and there only the better, say, 90% of his music, and like classical music, then he can be amazing. To me, astounding.
I want to get my start up done and then work through some of his orchestration, say, for the "Prelude" to 'Parsifal', and get an idea how the heck he did it. The orchestration for his "Magic Fire Music", from 'Die Walküre', is likely simpler, and still I'd like to work through the details.
Heck, I'd like to type in such music and have a computer-based synthetic orchestra calculate the 'performance' and then adjust the orchestration to see what was causing some of the amazing effects he did achieve.
Long ago I picked out some of his 'themes' ('leitmotifs') on violin -- they can be simple to play and still be just magic, and much that he did was not at all simple.
So, the PBS program mentioned that Wagner had an idea: In Munich is a big, long, wide street with a big statue in a big circle in the middle and the street leading up to a big parliament building or some such. So, Wagner's idea was, next to the parliament building, put up an opera house, by far the biggest ever, and have 'government and art' joined! And before his opera house he wanted another long, wide street.
One little problem: His street would require leveling much of old Munich, much as you mentioned. Well, the 'city fathers' of Munich were not quite as taken with Wagner's grand dreams (likely great to have when sitting alone at a piano and writing fantastic music about fantasies of magic swords, flying horses, magic gold rings, gods coming to earth and mating with humans, etc. but a disaster if applied to level much of Munich) and turned down Wagner's dreams. So later a much more reasonable opera house was built for Wagner's music in Bayreuth!
Wagner's music was a good start on much of the music of Hollywood of the past 80 years or so, e.g., Max Steiner's music for 'King Kong'. So, Wagner's music has had an impact even without leveling much of Munich!
Generally, if the city fathers of Munich can turn down Wagner, and maybe also King Ludwig, then generally US city fathers will be somewhat reluctant to level large parts of their cities, Kelo decision or not!
The university of chicago, my alma mater, is very guilty of converting hyde park through heavy handed use of eminent domain.
There's this: http://battleforbrooklyn.com/
This one is also pretty crazy: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/25/nyregion/25columbia.html?_...
A general watchdog for eminent domain abuse: http://www.emdo.blogspot.com/
To the credit of what you say, though, 7 states have passed strong legislation against abusive eminent domain takings in the wake of Kelo, and 15 more have tightened the ship significantly, and a few state supreme courts have weighed in as well.
There is
> The community’s efforts to have a meaningful say in its future, in the face of top down development and crony capitalism, is a universal story being played out all across the US,” said director Mike Galinsky.
Sounds like democracy, politics, or that bad part of democracy 'the tyranny of the majority'. Mike got elected and, one can believe, has tried to 'make NYC a great place'. In doing so, can believe he'd rather eat a fancy lunch with the Barclays guys than the Brooklyn neighbors of the development site. It's 'democracy' in that Mike was elected.
There's an old comment on democracy: It's intention is just to avoid bloodshed. So, fight it out at the polls as a proxy for what it would be like if the sides met with weapons and fought it out to the death. So, we've avoided bloodshed. If we haven't been really fair or achieved 'social justice', if some 'little people' got stepped on, we expected something else? But, for such tyranny of the majority, courts and a constitution can be important fixes.
(Not that I'm complaining, I'm fine with the court doing this, but it would be nice if it were an enumerated power)
Its not a separately enumerated power, but you can't resolve a legal case without first determining what the law is, including resolving conflicts between different laws that appear to be applicable, such as the Constitution and federal statutes.
However, it does seem to follow inherently from:
1) Precedent (as policy, not any particular instance)
2) The ability to determine/resolve contradictions between laws
3) The supremacy clause of the Constitution
I agree. But, we should not be surprised since Jefferson told us
"The price of liberty is eternal vigilance."
I believe, certainly I hope, that the SCOTUS will see the danger with crystal clarity. E.g., one of the main concerns of the founding fathers and objectives of the Constitution was to limit the powers of the central government and just because of the "dangers". I'd bet that the SCOTUS will see all this and not weasel out with some nonsense about "aiding enemies of the US".
We need to protect the Constitution and the rest of the US, not sacrifice one for the other -- yup, Franklin said something like that.
What if SCOTUS decides to interpret this as "the price of liberty is eternal surveillance"?
But I believe that the founding fathers saw this possibility and designed the system to keep this from happening. In particular, the SCOTUS is darned serious; they understand with crystal clarity the threats to the Constitution and the US. Their main job is to defend the Constitution. To this end, they are plenty bright, are awash in power and independence, have plenty of resources, and do have the respect of the citizens. So, I believe that the SCOTUS will do the right things.
In fact, they've already ruled that challengers to the 2011 FISA act have no grounding to sue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clapper_v._Amnesty_Internationa...
The founders actually chose to be extremely vague as to the exact role and powers of the court and for the first several decades of the US, SCOTUS was irrelevant and weak. The Court led by Chief Justice John Marshall, solidified its role as the third check on federal power.
While IANAL (although my brother got his Ph.D. in con-law), I would guess that by now just how the SCOTUS could strike down a law is well established. History aside, apparently the situation now is that the SCOTUS can strike down a law as unconstitutional and the rest of government and the citizens will accept that decision.
If your point is that we will ultimately be protected by the Supreme Court, I think you are wrong. This is the same Supreme Court that enabled Obamacare, a law that allows the Federal Government to force every american to buy something. And, if you don't or don't pay a penalty the IRS will come after you. Beyond that, this is a law virtually nobody read and, per Nancy Pelosi we had to "pass it to find out what's in it". I can't remember a greater perversion of authority in my adult life.
I am sure there are other examples but IANAL.
That's exactly like saying the Federal Government forces everyone to get married and have children, since they'll charge you higher taxes if you don't.
As it stands, I can remember a greater perversion of authority: the USA PATRIOT Act...
However at this point it appears that W and Cheney were not the brightest bulbs on the tree because we really have not exactly roasted all the Jihaders.
Indeed, OBL could laugh that just a few wacko Muslims sucker punched the US into wrecking its commercial airline system, trashing its Constitution, blowing $3 trillion (net present value) on absurd foreign adventures, killing 4000+ US soldiers and seriously wounding tens of thousands more, and still got run out of Afghanistan like so many before.
You know, there's good liberal stuff, good conservative stuff, some places for genuine argument, and then there's just plain dumb stuff. We blew it.
"All we need is another man like Richard Nixon again" -- sung to the theme song of 'All in the Family'. So, Tricky Dicky had an "enemies list" and wanted to use IRS data. If he had had IRS data, NSA data, CIA data, FBI data, and Obamacare data, we might not have a country now.
Er, is it so amazing that you have execute code and see the results of the running process before you can really find the bugs?
The people who passed it had their fun and, due to the delay in implementation, so far have not had to pay for their fun.
When people don't like it, Congress can repeal it, and the next president can sign the repeal. Mostly the waste will have been however many paper pushers wrote 10^10th pages of bureaucratic nonsense no one will ever read.
And then we will debug the code while flying at 0.75 Mach at 35,000 feet!
IANAL! But my 'point' is that there is a process of bringing cases, claims of unconstitutionality, to the SCOTUS and now that process has started. There will be the issue of a plaintiff having 'standing' to bring the case, but maybe now 120 million Verizon customers have such standing; if not, likely still Google does. At this point, someone's gotta have enough standing.
Then the 'conclusion' is that in 1-2 years we will find out what the SCOTUS wants to do about what appear to be laws enabling serious violations of at least the Fourth Amendment.
To respond to much of the discussion in this thread, I made a side point that it is the job of the SCOTUS to defend the Constitution and not to permit bending the Constitution so that the Executive branch can find it easier to go after bad guys. So, in particular, a lot of the discussion here about just how we will get the bad guys will mostly just be set aside during this process and mostly the SCOTUS will not be much influenced by that consideration. Sure, maybe some Admin lawyer can argue something about 'treason' or "the Constitution is not a suicide pact", but my guess is that the main issue will be just a simple, clear protection of at least the Fourth Amendment. SCOTUS is interested in defending the Constitution and not much interested in how to stop Boston wackos with pressure cookers.
For a longer term 'conclusion', I pointed out that if after the SCOTUS decision the citizens still want NSA listening in on pillow talk, steamy e-mails, tracking people to their romantic meetings, etc., then we can try to amend the Constitution.
> If your point is that we will ultimately be protected by the Supreme Court, I think you are wrong.
No, in simplest terms the process has started; likely nothing can stop it; SCOTUS will make a decision, in all likelihood defending the Constitution; and then we will see where we stand.
That this process will move inexorably to a solid (the other two branches won't argue with it) conclusion is, in the context of much of the discussion in this thread, quite significant: Or, we can discuss this and that issue and fine point and what if, but, still, this unstoppable process will move to its conclusion which promises to be quite meaningful.
For being "protected", I see no alternative to the usual from Jefferson
"The price of liberty is eternal vigilance".
For Obamacare, I don't know what the legal status is or what cases have been decided.
For me, my guess is just that Obamacare is so poorly designed that too soon so many people will be screaming bloody murder, especially appropriate in the context, that Congress will just repeal it.
I don't think that Obamacare was ever a serious attempt to help the US healthcare system but just some political posturing -- Nancy had a really good time, a lot of fun. She had the smile of a Homecoming Queen. Now that she's had her good time, we can go back to reality.
Obama? He knows nothing about Obamacare: How do we know? Because during his efforts at helping it pass, too soon he said things that were really dumb, got slapped down hard, and then just shut up. In particular, at one point the US College of Surgeons put out that what Obama said was "uninformed, misinformed, just plain wrong, and dangerous". And that caused Obama to shut up. One more point was, one of his tear jerk cases said that due to her existing bad health she couldn't get insurance. Nonsense: All she had to do was move to a state with 'community rating', e.g., as I've been told, NYS. Obama's interest in Obamacare was about political posturing, not healthcare. Also someone from Arkansas, maybe Bill Clinton, said that Arkansas had a program for people like her.
If the IRS comes after many people, Obamacare will go down in flames.
But for SCOTUS and Obamacare, that case is less clearly about the Constitution than the attack on the Fourth Amendment by grabbing all that Verizon data.
That's actually one of the points Justice Ginsburg addressed in her concurring/dissenting opinion about the Obamacare case.
In the long term Obamacare systems have failed in individual states that have tried to impose it, because the inevitable result is that neighboring states dump their unhealthiest people into those states using a community rating.
It's the same problem as any other actuarial scheme like life insurance or fire fighting. Having a lower whole-community rate for everyone only works when the most-expensive people can't unilaterally decide to arbitrage against the least-expensive community.
With Obamacare the incentive for that type of arbitrage is drastically reduced, as wherever you are moving from will have some form of community rating as well.
Of course with the old scheme it is likely that the state using community ratings would have moved to establish a firm time-based residency requirement. But then it would not be possible to claim that all someone has to do is move to the right state. For that 12-24(+?) month window that person would be essentially screwed.
But my overwhelming impression is that Obamacare was, in the end, poorly designed. Maybe enough writers of 'regulations' can make it helpful, but I doubt it. I just believe that the whole thing was politics, not healthcare. Or, I can't trust in the seriousness of something that made Nancy smile like a Homecoming Queen. And I can't trust the academic 'health care system economic planning' community. That's Karen Davis, right? I've been too close to such academics, and I wouldn't trust it to hand me a band aid.
The exceptions have already started. Supposedly Congress doesn't want it for themselves (does this mean they actually read some of it or understood it was junk just on general principles?). Some states are fighting it.
My guess is that after Obama leaves office there will be no one strongly supporting it. Then the IRS will torque off one too many people, and Congress will just repeal it. I'm just guessing of course.
That's the same thing they did for military Tricare health care (which is as socialist as they come, by the way :P). Instead of replacing Tricare with the national plan they simply declare that Tricare is a national plan that complies with the requirements for PPACA.
I wouldn't be surprised if Obamacare is altered in the future but I would be surprised if it's repealed entirely, especially once people start to realize how many people have nothing else to rely on.
And then in about 10-20 years or so we'll have people like today, screaming and protesting "KEEP GOVERNMENT OUT OF MY OBAMACARE" in completely unironic fashion, just as they do with Medicare today.
But, really, the existing system has faced such problems for a long time and put in place a complicated, disorganized, collection of pieces, patchwork, to respond to it. E.g., there is the Hill-Burton hospital act where to build a hospital can get Federal money but then can't turn away patients who can't pay. So, do 'cost shifting' and charge more for patients who can pay. Or have a city run and funded hospital. Patchwork.
Could we improve it? To borrow from Cheney, no doubt. Could we make it worse? No doubt.
To me, the 'sausage making' process of Obamacare promises a poorly designed product. And the origins and motivations of Obamacare concern me: As I recall, really Obamacare was in its first drafts (did anyone read the 2000 pages enough to do a second draft?) was basically pulled off the shelf from where it had been stored by a health care team under Senator Ted Kennedy. There the dream, Ted did like the "dream", was simple -- socialized medicine.
I suspect that 'socialized medicine' can be made to work well; maybe it does in Switzerland. But I don't trust the results of the people who want 'socialized medicine' in the US mostly just as I don't trust the people who just want socialism in the US. My guess is that too soon we will be paying too much (yes, we are now, also) or screaming about bad medicine like people do in the UK and Canada.
In a sense Medicare and Medicaid have an advantage because they are mostly just payment mechanisms placed on top of what is roughly, very roughly, a 'free-enterprise' system. But if just socialize the whole thing, then can end up with a bad version of the USPS.
I'm not against the Federal Government doing some things: In places what the Federal Government does works out great -- Hoover Dam, Bonneville Dam, TVA, Los Alamos, NSF, NIH, DARPA, funding of the top three dozen or so US research universities, the Interstate highway system, the FAA (the safety and engineering parts; some of the air traffic control parts), in the end most aspects of the USPS, the Agriculture Extension Service of the USDA, the FDA (pretty good on safety, a bit slow on efficacy), and more. For the VA, I don't know: There are complaints about the access and quality, but I know no details.
So, for Obamacare, I'm concerned that in the US 'socialized medicine' is just super tough to get right and that the Nancy, etc. efforts are not even 10% as serious as needed. Then, from the structure of the 'board' or 'panel' appointed by the president, I'm concerned that Obamacare will become a 'political football' that results in low quality health care at high prices.
"Political footbal"? For an example, that's my view of 'climate change' and 'clean energy': For fossil fuels, use 'climate change' as an excuse to tax them and throttle them. E.g., in his 2008 interview at the SF Chron., Obama explained his intention to raise carbon taxes enough to "bankrupt" our coal fired plants -- then 49% of our electric energy and, as I recall, ~23% of all our energy. I suspect he was just posturing, but it was dangerous. Then supposedly about $92 billion of the various 'stimulus' and TARP (I and II) funds went for 'clean energy' but turned out to be make-work jobs and campaign contribution kickbacks. Supposedly since then we've thrown another $45 billion at 'clean energy' -- to me, 99 44/100% about politics, e.g., campaign contribution kickbacks, and the rest water and not at all about energy or the even the climate (in my view, there's no very good evidence that the climate is at risk).
So, with US socialized medicine, I fear 'waste, fraud, abuse' from a political football.
E.g., now we've got NSA: Politics? Sure: No politician wants to get blamed for "being soft on terrorism". So, NSA suspends good judgment and goes overboard -- 'over reaches', e.g., data on calls of 120 million or so Verizon customers, maybe all the US e-mail traffic, maybe all the US phone voice data.
E.g.? Sure: Snowden was a GED, contract, bottom level employee in Hawaii but apparently had his fingers directly on huge volumes of data, all at the NSA supposedly just terrific at 'computer security'. Why? Poor oversight. Poor execution. From the White House, don't give a sh!t about the details and otherwise a political football.
I fear the same for a US national health care system. Yes, what we have could be better, but it could also be worse, and for having it worse Nancy is just the person to lead us there.
Maybe in an honest moment Nancy would have said, "We will just pass it. That's all we can do. Then we will leave the details up to the execution of the Executive branch, in some big office buildings somewhere within 100 miles of the Washington Monument, and pass more bills if really necessary. So, we will just get it started and then let others make it work well." But they don't have to make it work well -- they might just make a mess. I'm thinking, re-engineer and rebuild a Boeing 747 in flight, with people who just started learning about sheet metal.
It could even be much like those "basic income" schemes being floated around here; the government pays out up to a certain cap to cover basic preventative and "major life function" care. If people want fancier doctors that's fine, but they have to pony up the excess themselves.
I think the best examples of government interaction with the business sector have come when the government says this is what needs to happen without enforcing how it has to be done, and then letting entrepreneurial types figure out how to do it best. I see no reason why healthcare has to be fully nationalized, or why ObamaCare can't be the first step toward a system like that.
More generally, you are correct because you are trying actually to think about it. If we think about it carefully, we might actually get something both better and quite good. E.g., along the lines you said, if some Hollywood actress wants her nose again to look like it did when she was five years old, then she can pay a top Beverly Hills plastic surgeon. If some poor guy in a ghetto has a badly swollen foot and can't even pay taxi fare to the hospital, then he gets the basic work on his foot for free. Fine. That's like a 20 second, free hand, rough sketch of a Boeing 747 -- making it fly like a real 747 is a lot of hard work yet to do.
I wish we'd done that work. I can't believe we did.
But in the case in the Obama town hall, supposedly the woman could pay a reasonable amount for health insurance. In that case, just move to a community rated state, wait whatever waiting period if any, get medical insurance at the same rate as everyone else in that 'community rated' state, and be fine.
Could argue that in part Obamacare is a path to 'community rating' for all the states. But some of the states don't want community rating -- as far as I can tell, really only the richest states want that.
My view, in brief, is that Obamacare was not about healthcare. Instead, Obama wanted to play politics and, generally, just wanted a bigger Federal Government to have still more ability to play politics. Nancy wanted a big case of 'socialism' -- Nancy just dreams of socialism, in particular of Big Daddy Big Federal Government taking care of everyone and making everything 'all right', especially for insecure, single women with small children. Really Nancy wants to use the Federal Government to establish a lot of 'social and cultural values' that would conflict with 'limited government'. Nancy wants a big, security blanket, socialistic government providing a basic level of material support and quality of life for everyone.
I could agree with Nancy except I fear that her hands on the economy would make the economy so sick it couldn't provide what she wants, that is, she will choke the goose that lays the golden eggs. If Nancy could actually do a good job, then we have something to discuss; I just fear that Nancy will make a mess, a disaster. To me it's first mostly a matter of simple competence at execution and not 'political principles' or 'social philosophy'. I just think her boat will leak and not float.
And, yes, even if in simple terms the execution is good, there will be the issue of motivation -- if the 'floor' provided by the Federal Government is high enough, then a lot of people will try less hard and the goose will lay fewer golden eggs.
Yes, there's a 1-2 year timescale - but after those 1-2 years we won't necessarily see a SCOTUS judgment. There's nothing to stop complete martial law being imposed in the interim due to a non-specific threat (perhaps Ed Snowden and his super-secret cell of ninja-jihadist-nuclear-biological-ultra-weaponised mega-terrorists), at which point your constitution, its amendments, and all immediate hope go clean out of the window.
Then again, if a second civil war does end up playing out, it'll at least make for some interesting history.
Which people will hopefully learn from, but won't.
Unfortunately there are many who believe that because of the ethnicity of the POTUS he can do no wrong. I spoke to a neighbor yesterday who is a staunch Obama supporter and he parroted the Cheney line completely. When I mentioned the Bill of Rights he justified the spying as a necessary evil.
If the 4th Amendment is to be abrogated then it should be amended to reflect the current state of affairs.
There goes that fabled "Moral High Ground," again...
If the government was really concerned with our safety alcohol would be outlawed. Compare the statistics regarding deaths attributed to "terrorism" and deaths attributed to alcohol.
It's more a matter of degree, and pervasiveness. By many measures we're still a largely uncorrupt nation, but I find it difficult to believe that if what's happening at the top isn't stopped that it won't filter down a whole lot. Although e.g. the Japanese are an example of a largely uncorrupt people with eternally "corrupt" rulers, going back many centuries.
Jesselyn Radack, Thomas Drake, John Kiriakou, Peter Van Buren, and William Binney didn't seem to think that those "internal systems" were effective. Judging by their treatment, I can't blame Edward Snowden for not deciding to become another body amongst foundations.
Anyone who makes this "a friend to whistleblowers" claim is simply not living in the same universe I am.
"They (NSA) have prevented a very large number of harmful actions"
"I don't see any alternative to trying to track all these groups
around the world who are trying to wreck the ordinary operations
of life in America and probably kill a lot of people. I am not
persuaded that they (NSA) have done more harm than good"
For better or worse, they are overwhelmingly in favor of it. The debate being precipitated here and in mainstream media is largely symbolic.
It is time for privacy advocates to leave their dens and organize formally ( as in politically ) to advance their agendas. Washington only understands political clout whether it is a PAC or a lobby group.
Grassroots organizations will always go the way of Occupy Wall Street without formal leadership and a political consensus - lots of Zuccotti drama and nothing to show for it except for your obligatory iconic pepper spray photo.
You can mobilize politically in formal ways or bask in the warm glow of all the emotional outrage being voiced now and get your iconic photo spread.
Guess what?
The riots in Brazil have one too:
http://25.media.tumblr.com/a3b0bc19184f467fb7a70a2df6ee81a5/...
and nothing will come off those riots either. Wanna wager a candy bar?
Let's check back 3 months from now and I bet things will have gone back to where they were without any concrete action taken and the crowds going back to their usual quotidian lives.
Source:
But either way, the point is that Clinton's opinion is going to be a decent bellwether as to the general opinion. I think spitx is right on target on how to advance change (or at least, what to avoid).
We on the other side mostly want to be left alone. Their side isn't willing to do that, which is why we're sliding towards a hot civil war.