Members of Congress denied access to basic information about NSA
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
These folks need to suck it up and go out on just a bit of a limb for the sake of our democracy. That is the oath they took and they bear much of the responsibility for allowing things to reach this point in the first place. If a 29 year old can risk his life and give up any chance of seeing home again to do the right thing, these supposed representatives of our interests can take a much, much smaller risk and do the same.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/20/russ-tice-nsa-obama...
What happens when the sea of democracy recedes and all that's left are naked, stinking husks that were once called "congressional oversight" and "judicial oversight"?
My comment may the height of hyperbole and scaremongering, but it's difficult to ignore the opportunity to express myself in such a colorful manner.
And you don't even have to win -- just force her to stop being complacent and change her outrageous positions in order to mitigate the risk of losing.
Not if they win.
And I don't see why you need a party insider in any event. What you need is someone who can fund their own primary campaign, or who can get enough donations from real people to do it, i.e. someone who is famous or rich or both.
>Schwarznegger could possibly have beaten her, but a) he had a sleazy sex scandal and b) CA Republicans seem to dislike him even more than democrats because he has the temerity to take things like global warming seriously.
Schwarzenneger could possibly have beaten her because he's rich and famous, but he's not the only one with those characteristics.
Ditto Barbara Boxer.
The power of incumbency does not come from citizens believing their rep does a great job, it comes from money putting that rep in the public eye. People in general will vote for who is put in front of their face the most. "I've heard of this guy, never heard of that other guy so much, so this guy it is. Now home to the TV."
If people couldn't vote for lower offices simply because they showed up for presidential votes, but rather had to show up to vote on another date for other elections, then only people who actually cared about lower offices would vote for those. I think that might make it a lot harder to keep incumbents in power.
Local elections, whenever they're held, are a real problem; unless I have real knowledge about a candidate I don't vote. My parents and I all pool our information together (e.g. my father knows which county commissioner is an idiot, and I, oh, research judges) and even then there are a lot of offices we don't vote on. And some run unopposed, e.g. our county clerk is very competent.
But that doesn't mean this is all a generally useless exercise, if an abusive public administrator, or a sheriff who doesn't play well with others is up for reelection, at least where I live they will be sent back home to spend more time with their families, or eventually to Federal prison in the case of the administrator.
A great quantitative example of this is in the (somewhat dry) "Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party" by Michael Holt. While it talks about a very different time, the demonstration that the party that got the most of its voters to vote always won was pretty convincing.
We become very glad that, outside of the fortunately rare hellholes of NYC and D.C., and to a lessor extent Massachusetts and New Jersey, we've retained the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. Puts a ceiling on the tyranny the state can exercise, and any attempt to confiscate the people's arms is a clear signal to turn our cold civil war into a hot one.
ADDED: various formulations list the following "boxes", soap box, ballot box, jury box, and bullet box. We still retain the other 3 even if the ballot box becomes an effective nullity, and in our Federal system it won't likely be so at the state level. Much can be done in our system there, including calling a constitutional convention and ratifying new amendments to the Constitution. Which is essentially what happened the last time we had a impossible central government.
1) The army sides with the people. In this case, the right to keep and bear arms is basically irrelevant as you have the backing of the world's most powerful army.
2) The army sides with the government. In this case, even the militia types with huge munitions caches don't stand a chance against the world's most powerful army. This is not 1776, it wouldn't be musket vs. musket.
The relatively recent militarization of various police forces is evidence of that, and, much like the USG exerted pressure over west European allied countries to ground Bolivia's presidential plane, they will exert similar control over state and local police forces through "greater cooperation" policies.
(arguably the one area in which citizen-owned firearms have actively affected the history of US civil liberty is in carrying out the occasional assassination of people adjudged to have been bit too keen on civil liberties)
As for strike-breaking and all that, while it's not an area I've studied, it's well established that both sides were armed and used their guns.
I'm saying they were, and people got oppressed in a far more direct, blatant and universal manner than anything that is likely to emerge from PRISM or the present US government's policy goals. Citizen-owned firearms might have been handy in the odd skirmish, but they didn't cause legislators or law enforcement to back down. Black people sat in the back of the bus and grudgingly accepted there wasn't much they could do about their neighbour getting lynched. Strikes were bust in a blaze of gunfire and millions of other members of the trade union movement went to work as normal the next day. Even as determined a revolutionary as John Brown failed where the Union military succeeded a year later.
Concern that the oppressed could potentially gain access to firearms neither dissuaded administrations from enacting oppressive laws nor accelerated the pace of their removal.
Why would it be different next time round?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Labor_Relations_Act (the Wagner Act, even if moderated by things like the Taft–Hartley Act)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Board_of_Education http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-fourth_Amendment_to_the_... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harper_v._Virginia_Board_of_Ele...
And it's always struck me that the Civil Rights Memorial (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Memorial) is most remarkable because it only has 40 names on it.
(Just the highest of highlights, I'm leaving a lot out.)
However, I have yet to see anyone seriously suggest that the Civil Rights Act was introduced because the police were terrified that black people defying segregation laws might shoot them, or the Supreme Court ruled segregation in schools unconstitutional because it had proved unenforceable. For that matter, those Southern whites who thought their rights were being violated by "forced busing" proved equally reluctant to resort to armed confrontation. It wasn't a hot war, or even a cold war, it was a culture war.
The right to bear arms was orthogonal to the civil rights movement: it didn't prevent the original introduction of the tyranny off "Jim Crow" laws which were effectively enforced for decades, didn't influence the legislative and judicial rulings against them in the mid 20th century and couldn't even protect the movement's key figures.
One thing you're not factoring in when you compare this period to the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras is economics and technology. Everyone including blacks were much more able to afford small arms and ammo by the civil rights era, and guns were a lot more maintainable after we switched to non-corrosive primers and smokeless powder. And of course technological advances helped the economics by driving down the intrinsic costs of guns and ammo.
- Martin Luther King Jr. applied for a concealed carry permit after his house was bombed in 1956. After that he had armed supporters stand guard outside his house. King's house was described as "an arsenal."
- The co-founder of the Black Panthers found a law on the books allowing them to open carry in California. Blacks were getting no protection by the police so this was pretty pivotal. The Panthers started arming themselves and had a picnic outside the State's Capital building. After this happened the racist California legislature pushed through a law banning open carry. It was signed into law by Ronald Reagan. Funny enough, he was the first president endorsed by the NRA.
- "After losing the Civil War, Southern states quickly adopted the Black Codes, laws designed to reestablish white supremacy by dictating what the freedmen could and couldn’t do. One common provision barred blacks from possessing firearms. To enforce the gun ban, white men riding in posses began terrorizing black communities."
- "In the 1920s and ’30s, the NRA was at the forefront of legislative efforts to enact gun control"
[1] http://theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/the-secret-h...
ADDED: Every major party Presidential candidate after 1977 has been a gun grabber with the possible exception of Romney (details on request), the NRA's only been able to endorse the least worst, or in 1992 and 1996 endorse neither.
The bit about the "1920s and '30s" is more fair, but if you read the full text and know about all that the NRA didn't support, including the cited inclusion of handguns in the NFA of '34, "forefront" falls short of the mark. And of course per the Cincinnati Revolt that NRA isn't the modern NRA, which nowadays has done a 180 on concealed carry, the gravamen of this article's claim. Major NRA figure Marion Hammer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Hammer) was the leader in establishing Florida's 1987 shall issue law, which opened the floodgates so that today 42 states, soon to be 43 with Illinois, have shall issue regimes.
Circling back to MLK, today he wouldn't have much difficulty getting a concealed carry permit (or set of them) good in most of the nation, including all of the South.
Our armed forces are made of individuals. It would not be a boolean operation by any means.
Occupying a hostile United States could possibly be the quagmire to end all quagmires.
I'm confused by this outdated meme. A hypothetical modern totalitarian regime with the resources of the US isn't likely to be too intimidated by the large blustering egos of amateur militias and their (largely) civilian firearms.
Without the appropriate organization and infrastructure, simply having _guns_ isn't going to do anyone a whole lot of good. The government can still, at will, exercise control over the media and most channels of communication (including the internet, obviously). It can fairly easily win the war of public opinion if it really needs to. Any pockets of armed insurrection, at that point, merely constitute a series of aggravating nuisances.
Guns are just a tool, and one that will only become relatively less relevant and menacing in the modern age.
That's just one example of how widespread gun ownership can be a bit more than an "aggravating nuisance". Another is this classic from Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The GULAG Archipelago:
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?
Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?
After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria [Government limo] sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked.
The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!
If... if... We didn't love freedom enough. And even more — we had no awareness of the real situation. We spent ourselves in one unrestrained outburst in 1917, and then we hurried to submit. We submitted with pleasure!
:/
Yes, guns are powerful. So are four people with long knives. So are traps. So are the "half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, ...". The statement seems to be saying more about people's will to resist, not the necessity of firearms.
I suppose one might make the argument that guns increase people's willingness to resist, but this might not simply be because they make it easer ... in this case, the most ironically hilarious role that guns play is to provide a concrete freedom that guns, themselves, might be used to protect. That is, the best reason to have guns as a protected right might not be because they are a means by which to resist tyranny, but a right that's so painful to lose to so many that it motivates resistance.
Why on earth has the US issued a global terror alert? Is there some global terror network that can really hit 21 diplomatic facilities or is the threat more local focused than that?
The US is a scared, self-defensive beast. It fears anyone with a lathe.
Provide proof?
Blatant, open direct manipulation and punishment by the NSA is probably not here yet. Probably soon.
Their stated regulatory agencies, the House/Senate, aren't even allowed to read info about what is they're doing -- yet the House/Senate have to vote on NSA authorizations? This is what Congress is receiving:
"Thanks for your inquiry. The full Committee attends
Business Meetings. At our July 18, 2013 Business
Meeting, there were seven Democrat Members and nine
Republican Members in attendance. The transcript is
classified."
The Congressman received no response to any of his
requests. With a House vote looming on whether to
defund the NSA's bulk collection program - it was
scheduled for July 25 - he felt he needed the
information more urgently than ever. He recounted his
thinking to me: "How can I responsibly vote on a
program I know very little about?"
When I say black mail, simply knowing that one is routinely snooped on makes people more compliant. The implication can be enough. Had a few joints at college? Want to be a politician? Well, behave and be nice to security issues then, just in case... Very much the Soviet trick. Have every one assume they are spied on.
Not a US problem as such, one for the any relationship between security and politicians (and other powerful people), regardless of country or political system. And all because security insists on secrecy, which I am not convinced is required in a vast majority of cases.
To my mind, the lack of any real reaction to the NSA revelations, both in the US and here in the UK, increase my suspicion that this implied blackmail is rife, perhaps standard practice.
The threat is so clear and obvious it never needs to be expressed.
That's what the American doctrine of "patriotism" is all about, and it will remain that way until Americans start recognizing this is not just a word describing the normal love for ones own country most people around the world share, but an extremist ideology aimed at silencing dissent and enforcing conformity.
Also, blackmail isn't that easy. If something embarrassing is revealed about a politician who seemed to be critical of the NSA, you think people wouldn't start pointing fingers to the NSA and accusing them of blackmail?
As for your blackmail not easy point... no, its not. You are correct. But while there is this sort of hidden balance, out right blackmail and reveal threats are not necessary. If this is happening, it would be far more subtle and nuanced than a black and white situation. Heh, just like the situation we are all in now, a perception of all reaching surveillance leafs us to cowering fear. We are all, including politicians and NSA types, are human.
It doesn't need to be so one-sided, some Senate and House members may in fact be benefiting greatly from the NSA's spying (eg: manipulating the stock market by using their exclusive access to private information), and in exchange the NSA continues their work with impunity and without oversight. It's a symbiotic relationship where they're benefiting from each-other.
Yes we do know they do blackmail. Its one of the things we know very well. It is what happened through out the cold war. Blackmail is a tried and tested method, as old as it gets in intelligence and espionage.
BTW, have to ask. Would this have been your reply if a year ago I told you the NSA were spying in a comprehensive, industrial way on the American public? Would you have claimed it was fear mongering "bullshit", and banging on about mythical creatures?
And the "fear mongering bullshit" I referenced earlier has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the NSA is spying on US citizens, and everything to do with the fact that you're lying about having knowledge that the NSA is blackmailing congress.
Well, since we're having a merry old time stomping all over the Constitution, I suppose asking what ramifications could possibly befall this Representative, considering the "Speech and Debate" immunity provided under Article 1, Section 6 of our allegedly-cherished Constitution, is a moot point. This is why it's probably best that I'm not in Congress, since I'd like to think that my response would have been "so?", followed by my continuing to press the issue. Sens. Wyden and Udall didn't take such a course, so I assume the consequences would have been dramatic.
The House Intelligence Committee is part of the house, so they are allowed to penalize Congressmen for speech.
For the uninvolved citizen, they could visit the site and see that [something like] SOAP 2.0 is voted most important to watch. They could then cast their own disproving vote for the bill, which the site would track so that come election time a notice such as "Senator John votes in accordance with your votes 20% of the time."
The user could easily express their opinions, the site would remember their opinions, and would tell the user when their representatives did not represent them.
Personally, I don't know what bills are important, and even if I did I wouldn't remember how my Senator voted 5 years from now when he's up for reelection.
This is what political parties and eeeevil special interest groups that are powerful through the votes they influence do. In the case I'm most familiar with, the NRA's political lobbying arm (and eeeevil 501(c)(4)) grades politicians, and will send out alerts for the more important elections (as well as actions on bills). Many former politicians who were send back home to spend more time with their families in part due to NRA and general gun owner action can attest to the effectiveness of this.
The same could happen in this area, the first vote on it was extremely encouraging.
I found it through their June 25th "Top 20" list, which shows no particular bias as far as I can tell: http://www.popvox.com/blog/2013/roundup-8-1-2013/
Their curated "Issue Spotlight: Firearms and Gun Control" looks honest to me: http://www.popvox.com/blog/2013/issue-spotlight-firearms-113...
Although, I was picturing something more "dumbed down" like StackOverflow. I didn't see any important issues mentioned on the front page. It took me a few tries before I could find a link to important issues. I ended up clicking the "Get Started" button which I expected to take me to a registration page asking for my personal information. The "Get Started" link did take me to important issues though. Upon closer inspection, I do like the site.
Can I just point something out here? This doesn't want to be a website. It wants to be a piece of software. You don't want to create a website that records everybody's preferences and creates a big database for the NSA to suck up over the wire and discover everyone who doesn't like them.
So do it the other way. Have a piece of software that downloads the public information (what the bills are and how your reps voted) but keep all the data about the user's preferences on the local machine. If you want to do statistics and publish them, look into homomorphic encryption and do it P2P. You can get aggregate numbers that way without revealing any individual's preferences.
* That it censored a congressman from discussing the contents of the Snowden leaks with other representatives (search for "sanctions")
* That this chairman allegedly made up a secret committee vote that didn't happen, and that in practice he can get away with this (search for "voice vote")
http://dailycaller.com/2013/07/31/greenwald-hearing-canceled...
> "If I can't get basic information about these programs, then I'm not able to do my job", Rep. Griffith told me.
Very similar to the judges who do not know enough about technology and make decisions about things they don't understand.
Of course, the proper, professional and legitimate response is to sit back and to let the democratic process run it's course. We all hope and trust that this is what will happen.
However, given the resources at their disposal, it is not too difficult to speculate about what they might do (or be tempted to do) to secure their budget and to maintain their surveillance capabilities.
Similarly, after the current round of outrage and media attention has died down, what do you think that they will do to prevent something like this from happening again?
Beyond measures to prevent further leaks (that we already know they are considering) ... how might the technology that underpins tools such as Prism and XKeyScore be used to manipulate public opinion, to neutralise or mitigate the impact of those espousing hostile opinions, and to promote and spread a friendly point of view?
I am specifically thinking of man-in-the-middle attacks to manipulate messages and web-pages in-flight, to implement a sort of third-party hell-ban attack on activists and commentators. Is this possible without the collusion of the publisher?
Congress is vaguely qualified to assess data collection techniques.
― Lysander Spooner
Simple as that. If Congress is truly serious about this, they should strip the NSA of its funding.
-Limiting exposure of the information already divulged
-Preventing further (especially unintentional) classified information spills
-Limiting adversaries collecting on what information and to what degree people are knowledgeable about
The fact is, if you're a legislator who is given compartmented access, you should know better than to propagate information that has been unintentionally released. For one, it promotes discussion of classified information in unclassified spaces. Secondly, it gives apparent validation to information that might not necessarily be true.
It's getting really tiresome reading these flavor-of-the-day NSA bashing articles, having worked at NSA and having eaten of the tree of knowledge. The intelligence community does not dictate foreign policy or collection policies. They serve at the direction of the federal government under the DNI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Director_of_National_Intelligen...), who is appointed by the president. They carry out the tasks that are given to them under the direction of the administration. There exists a feedback system which allows agencies to understand what information was vital in helping make decisions and what information wasn't important.
Here comes the tricky part: politicians clamor for more information in order to make better informed decisions -- just look at the situation with the possible use of chemical weapons in Syria. When intelligence agencies don't come up with anything actionable, politicians ask "Why not?", to which the agencies respond, "We don't have enough access to real time information.", or "You stated that X mission wasn't important so we stopped supporting it.". Then the politicians rewrite legislation in order to prevent further roadblocks to obtaining information in a timely manner with which they can make decisions.
All of that happens, and you want to blame an intelligence agency for doing its job at various levels of efficiency? In that entire process, the agency only gives feedback as to what its capabilities are and what it needs in order to increase its capabilities. The administration and legislators determine the scope of the work which the agencies function in.
There is no secret conspiracy, people. It's a very simple system: you vote in people and then tell them that you want the prevention of terrorist attacks prioritized above funding NASA. The public is then made aware to what degree the politicians were willing to go to in order to expand intelligence powers, so outrage ensued. Now, there is legislation being pushed forward (not successfully yet) in order to limit the powers. Is this not a representative democracy working to correct its mistakes and push towards a more perfect union?