The NSA is Commandeering the Internet
schneier.com
schneier.com
We're told this is to prevent the next 9/11, but there's a problem with that. It's very unlikely -- for basic political reasons -- that this will be used to investigate the rich and powerful.
Huh? I thought people in caves in Afghanistan attacked us cause they hated our freedom?
The cave dweller thing is probably the biggest lie about 9/11. Bin Laden was rich, from an even richer family, was financed by some of the richest people on Earth, and had state support.
The next Osama bin Laden probably owns stock in the companies that are acting as contractors for the NSA right now. Or if he doesn't, his supporters and financiers probably do.
Case in point:
So now the DEA is using it to bust drug dealers. Why isn't the SEC using it to bust criminals on Wall St.? Think about it. Who's richer? Who's more connected? Who's gonna lawyer up and bust your chops hard if you come after them? Who's got friends and family members who might actually sit on committees in Washington that oversee your project?
Edit:
Given the above, I also consider it a good possibility that systems like this could be used against us. Recall 9/11 again. They were our planes that were flown into our buildings, not someone else's. What's the probability that a well-connected rich state-linked international terrorist will use systems like this to gather intel against the United States itself in preparation for a terrorist attack.
Want to smuggle in a nuke? Wouldn't it be helpful to pull all the personal information and movement schedules for all the people who work security at the Port of Long Beach...? to give just one example. That could be made to look like a routine investigation quite easily, and if Snowden can exfiltrate so much data so can someone else-- especially someone with a higher level of expertise and sponsorship.
How many NSA analysts have access to these systems? How much does that job pay?
And do any of them have dangerous personality traits or ideological affiliations? Guerilla domestic terrorism from within is also a possibility. Remember this?
-Sir Thomas More, "Utopia", 1517
My thought for a long time has been that the most practical (as in achievable today in the real world) and best government for actual human beings who want to be free would be a very minimal non-invasive and efficient government with a negative income tax and possibly some kind of non-profit health cost sharing system. Other than the rest of the standard stuff, it would be minimal and stay out of things.
There is zero competition of ideas in political science. Mostly variations of the same thing happening in every country (big powerful state, mixed social/capitalist economies).
This was tried. It was called The United States of America. The 9th and 10th amendments to the constitution delegated an enormous amount of powers to the states to try their own experiments, with the federal government standing by to adjudicate interstate disputes and maintain standards of currency and commerce.
Then Lincoln came along.
If only our public schools taught kids the real meaning of the war of northern aggression.
1: The civil war was not, by definition, a civil war. The south never fought for control of the north. The definition of a civil war is both side fighting for control of the whole.
2: The states joined the union of their own volition, they weren't conquered. The "Civil War" changed the notion of free states. Now the states are subservient by force to the federal government.
3: Lincoln didn't free the slaves. The Emancipation Proclamation decreed that slaves in rebel states were free. Slave states loyal to the north got to keep their slaves. So, Lincoln freed slaves in lands he had no control over.
4: Lincoln oversaw the first national conscription law in which the government is allowed enslave citizens to war. You can't be a free country AND force people to their death.
Lincoln is popularly considered the angel of liberty to an enslaved people, but in reality he did more to enslave all of us to an all powerful federal government.
Are there any good books/films about the civil war that are recommended?
Some books have a different angle. Many books written generally about the history of liberty in the US will specifically cite the "Civil War" and it's negative consequences.
There's also a book called "The Real Lincoln". I haven't read it, but it might be one of the few books that casts a critical eye on the precedents Lincoln set.
Sorry, there's nothing specific that I've read, just a bunch of sources combined.
It's hard to compete when the government claims a monopoly on violence and will use it against non-violent citizens.
I think this is because political science, to me, seems like a lagging indicator of whats going on in the political sphere of the world (at least when it comes to "current issues").
It is also very telling that established powers feel very threatened by Nihilists, anarchists, activists, Lulzsec, Anonymous, twenty-somethings who haven’t talked to the opposite sex in five or six years, yet academics seem to not be able to clearly frame what is really going on (maybe to the benefit of those who are marginalized by the status quo for that knowledge will most assuredly be used against them).
Though Hayden hinted about it, there are some fundamental things going on here that stand in the way of such analysis, after all one cannot truly fight that of which one does not understand…
Peasants, the vast majority, to me, seem far too distracted with the machinations of the corporate state, which allow cover for ghosts to move within the machine…
This is definitely not true.
> Mostly variations of the same thing happening in every country (big powerful state, mixed social/capitalist economies).
That's politcoeconomic engineering, not political science. And its not the same thing going on everywhere -- you see lots of things that don't meet that in the world, as well as a pretty broad range of "socialist/capitalist" mixes with pretty divergent poles -- its just that the succesful ones look pretty similar.
But then, that's true of successful designs in many engineering domains.
Might be a stretch, but take Cuba for an example.
How about: you do what you think is good for people and I do what I think is good for people. And we don't try to force each other to change our opinions. If you have something to say, put your gun down and make your arguments. Like we do here, over the internet.
Edit: if you propose some tax system, who do you think should execute it? Who should carry a gun to force people to give money? Who will watch the people who carry guns? Who will decide when the force was applied incorrectly? Will you have a moral system when 50%+1 majority can switch morality of murder by 180 degrees?
"The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians." -George Orwell, 1948
Because of the debasement of language, "libertarian" can now mean "creepy rightwingy person" or "antigovernment nutjob", depending on which flavor of Statism one prefers.
I believe by some sort of Rule of Discussions I am required to mention that Orwell was a socialist, to the point of picking up arms in Catalonia.
Makes me chuckle every time I see a Republican quote 1984.
First of all, capitalism is not a synonym for 'trade.' Trade between people has existed since forever, capitalism has only been around for a few hundred years.
Secondly, capitalism relies on more than two entities; it also relies on someone to actually enforce property relations. So your explanation is far too simple to actually describe the situation. Your simplification hides the authority: the final arbiter and enforcer of private property. This is generally a state. It's also quite authoritarian.
This is the kind of authority that socialists mean when they talk about authoritarian social relations. There's more to it than that, but that's the simplest introduction.
Sure, lets. It would be a waste of time to just spin definitions in a way that makes us inherently right about whatever it is we're talking about without reference to a common agreed set of terms.
When advocates for free markets or anarcho capitalists are talking about capitalism, they most decidedly are talking precisely about free trade. I am not sure where you're getting this other definition of capitalism that only exists as a subset of the westphalian nation state, that sounds a lot more like corporatism to me, where limited liability shells are set up with explicit protectionist policies and almost purchased legal protections supporting their manufactured business models from a nation state.
Just to be clear where are you getting this definition of capitalism as a creation of the state and something that cannot exist without it, completely divorced from the free market? How would you describe markets which exist outside the control and sanction of the state and without any participatory enforcement by the state, frequently enough actually even actively opposed by the state? The "means of production" and the control of that means is not necessarily within the hands of "the workers" in the marxist sense in those situations, so how is this not a direct example of capitalism without the state?
My description does not attempt to hide the authority, the seller is responsible for their security as is the buyer, they are both free to make whatever arrangements they choose with whatever other parties they choose in order to ensure the security of those products. Vendors might buy security cameras or other theft and violence deterrents. Buyers might buy insurance against defects or also be customers of third party organisations which have a vested interest in being trustworthy sources of information about the quality of products available at vendors a-z, and so on, and so forth. It is absolutely not implicitly necessary that security for both parties be provided by a nation state or its legislative, judicial and executive branches.
If socialist criticisms of capitalism entirely rely upon classifying capitalism as a sub branch of the nation state, it seems an awfully big hole to not acknowledge that trade and markets can exist entirely divorced from nation states?
Further on the subject of socialism; I don't see how it's actually possible for socialism to exist without states? Having a centralised body which exercises violent authority to which all parties must submit and participate in is pretty much the definition of a state, How can socialists criticise free market approaches for defacto use of state enforcement mechanisms because they are what is available rather than the only way free market participants may enforce their terms and conditions when the very nature of socialism is to rely on that exact same state but in a more direct way and with no alternative mechanism for enforcement at all? A political entity which dispenses edicts amongst a population which is entirely free to ignore them is little more than a church, of what consequence is a socialist platform without a monopoly on force to compel adherence to the edicts and forcibly finance the policies of the political entity through taxation?
Cool, this is not going to be productive, I will respectfully bow out. Thanks!
I linked a page in your sibling where both your and I's side in this argument gets played out, just continue on there. ;)
The concept of the arrangements between the strong and the weak which socialists paint as being oppressive in each system being entered into by mutual consent was often a feature of the justification of many implementations of both feudal and capitalist systems.
From Wikipedia:
Democrat: is a proponent of democracy
Republican: An advocate of a republic, a form of government that is not a monarchy or dictatorship
Libertarianism: a set of related political philosophies that uphold liberty as the highest political end.
All of them sound pretty great to me, to the point I could easily choose to be a republican libertarian democrat. Heck you could even probably be a republican libertarian democratic anarchist.
"Worker control of the means of production" sounds an awful lot like classical marxist communism and all the associated implications. And thus the off in the reeds tangential strangeness associated with private vs personal property, ad et al.
> How exactly does that work?
It depends on what kind of socialist you're talking about, and at what scale. For example, the Mondragon corporation is a form of socialism. It's a worker co-operative with 80,000 employees. Another example of socialism at a larger scale is revolutionary Catalonia, where Orwell fought. For three years, the entire region was run in a socialist manner. Most industries operated under trade federations, and the rural areas also collectivised. Unfortunately, due to some squabbling between communists and anarchists, when the fascists showed up they got steamrolled.
> "Worker control of the means of production" sounds an awful lot like classical marxist communism and all the associated implications
You're close but wrong. There are two main forms of socialism: utopian and scientific. Marxism is the 'scientific' form, but communism is a classless, stateless, moneyless (maybe) society. In the Marxist framework, socialism is a step on the path to communism, not the same thing.
But regardless of which kind you're talking about, workers run things rather than capitalists.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_corporation
At the smaller scale; Intriguing stuff, but from reading this it sounds a whole lot like just another company with an interesting incentive scheme for employees and shareholders? From reading through that it seems to be just another market participant rather than some top down re-organisation of the entire market system itself.
On the subject of revolutionary catalonia, it sure does sound more like what my initial perception of socialism really is, people being forcibly compelled to toe the communist party line with threats of death, ad et al. Against that backdrop I suppose it is unsurprising that the anarchists and communists were squabbling, and this is what I was aiming at with my initial criticism of socialism as a necessarily "political" entity rather than just another voluntary participant subject to the same market forces as all the other voluntary participants. And thus vulnerable to both poor market performance relative to the competition and also the negative externalities of being focused on politics rather than actual material results.
> workers run things rather than capitalists.
Doesn't that once again reduce to "workers control the means of production" and then you're left with workers councils figuring out what's personal vs private property and all the political nonsense that goes along with that, munging the entire thing once again at scale into a necessarily authoritarian and political entity?
This is absolutely true. It's a socialist entity acting within a broader capitalist economy. That's how it starts.
By the way, with your focus on markets, you might enjoy Kevin Carson and mutualism.
> And thus vulnerable to both poor market performance relative to the competition
Ehhh, the USSR went from a backwards farm country to being the first country to putting someone in space in the span of 80 years. Don't forget that imperialism played a huge factor, and has in other cases as well.
> with workers councils figuring out what's personal vs private property
There isn't really a need for anyone to 'figure out' what's personal vs. private property. It's not as if you must stand before a worker's council to defend your right to keep your toothbrush. It's simply that without an organization (the police) upholding private property law, absentee ownership is impossible.
If we build a server farm and use it for staging and then push that environment to production and we're not actively using staging for the next month, is it OK to appropriate that? If you spend many years of labour constructing your own home and all associated facilities, is it acceptable that when you go on holiday to some remote location, it should instantly be up for grabs?
If it's just a case of being unable to enforce absentee ownership for any given interval, I think this is both a terrible failure of imagination on the part of mutualists as well as an undeserved tip of the hat to that old "might makes right" chestnut. We can take your property, therefore it is not yours anymore.
I'll admit there are problems with the concept of ancap homesteading also; the mutualist criticism of "rearranging a few twigs on a parcel of land not entitling the arranger to title in perpetuity" is not without basis, natural resources and real property are quite thorny and difficult to disentangle concepts by nature. This is why the original suggestion of a thousand competing political systems flourishing is even more appealing to me then just every space on earth appropriating the ancap model as laid out in "the machinery of freedom".
Through competition and the market, we can see how things play out in the real world and what people end up preferring. I have no problem with any political philosophy insofar as they keep to themselves and do not attempt to enforce their ideas on those that are unable to choose an alternative, which unfortunately as the status quo stands is almost no place on the planet.
Marxism is form of socialism (as are its descendants Leninism, et al.), so, yes, they include at least reference to "worker control of the means of production". The difference between authoritarian socialisms like Leninism (I'm going to leave out "Marxism" because there are problems with categorizing it -- libertarian socialist often see the roots of libertarian socialism in Marx and see Lenin, et al., as diverging from Marx in important ways -- which make it non-helpful in this context) and libertarian socialism is that authoritarian socialism uses the state as the vehicle for worker control of the means of production in a top down manner, and libertarian socialism prefers more direct, decentralized worker control (different strands of libertarian socialism have different particular programs, but one form is worker control by "worker's councils" or labor cooperatives controlling the particular factories or firms.)
Libertarian socialists often criticize authoritarian "socialist" regimes, particularly Leninist-style Communist ones, as creating state capitalism, because you end up with a party elite that controls the means of production which ends up with the same kind of oppressive power relationship with the powerless common worker that socialist critics of traditional capitalism criticized in capital, stemming from the same source (narrow control of power over the means of production.)
I expect the answer is "yes", so I'm assuming that for the remainder of this response - if the answer is "no" then let me know and I'll respond to that.
I would contend that the reason you would be okay with responding to theft with (ultimately) violence is because it violates a social agreement (property rights) that our society has predominately agreed to adhere to. I do not see any inherent philosophical reason that violation of other aspects of our social compact (taxation) is different - if you believe it is, either inherently or as a matter of practicality - please explain your reasoning.
One might argue that now it's different, people have access to much more information than before, and that given enough time to educate the public enough on these matters of government, the Anarchist or Libertarian movements could gain critical mass and truly work.
I think not, simply because that would do nothing to change human nature. Most people, no matter how rational they can be in their everyday life, have emotions and desires, which aren't rational. Thus my impression that organized groups of people would always strive to control the masses.
So the solution is to preemptively install an organization of thugs to control the masses?
I don't think your assessment of human nature is fair. At some point in history, having a king was an improvement upon existing social conditions. Going from constantly warring tribal society to one united under a king meant safety and relative prosperity and was in fact a social gain, though we tend to think of kings only in a negative context at this point. The autocrat pilferers.
However, we inevitable evolved past the need for kings. With wider spread literacy, trade, communication, etc… individuals became more capable of guiding their own society, thus democracy emerged. Your average 6th century peasant had as much use for voting as they would've for string theory.
I'm not saying we're there yet, but to say there's never to be a time when we evolve past the need to make decisions for our societies via government, even a "democratic" one, is foolish, I think.
One day I think we will look back on democracy as we do upon kings now.
Yup. Personally, I think tolerance and total pacifism would be needed in this next evolutionary step, so it'll probably take a few wars for us to be tired of conflict...
I can already see many young people being disillusioned by politics, war, and nationalism. But many still adhere to those ideologies as well.
AKA "Government".
Anarchy is about order without a state. Not chaos. It will take work, and probably incremental evolution rather than revolution, to get to that state. The goal is to become more free. Living under the boot of oppression -- whether from the government itself or a mafia-like criminal gang -- is not freedom.
It's fairly non biased, and explains what you're asking. Its position is more on anarcho-capitalism (what most of the world/our day to day consists of) while most anarchists will believe in collective labour and possession only property.
Perhaps I need to better educate myself more about anarchy but I remain skeptical.
-Thomas Paine
Because the SEC is captured. [0]
What I'm fundamentally getting at in my OP is elite deviance:
http://www.amazon.com/Elite-Deviance-Edition-David-Simon/dp/...
The NSA will not protect us from the deviance of those with real power, because those with real power can fight back. Those with real power are also those who have the resources to execute a real worst-case-scenario attack-- exactly the kind of terrorist attack this is supposed to be protecting us from. If somebody nukes New York it will not be an anti-government windbag with an Internet connection who just got fired from their job and decided to search for "how to build an atomic bomb." It will be an elite deviant, supported by a network of elite deviants and powerful ideological sympathizers. Someone with the motive and the means to execute on such a thing.
This system might detect motive with some probability of success, but it will not be used against those with means because those people (and their supporters) will pull strings and hire million dollar attorneys. (Or turn agents, pay off managers at government contractors, etc.)
I also have serious doubts about whether it'll stop the next Boston bomber or Timothy McVeigh either, but for different reasons: small players easily vanish into an ocean of false positives. There are mathematical limits that come into play here-- it's why undirected fishing expeditions in seas of scientific data are rarely successful.
This project is a dangerous, politically and socially irresponsible pork-barrel boondoggle that creates far more opportunities for crime and corruption than it prevents. Limits to government power and requirements for judicial oversight (a.k.a. peer review) aren't arbitrary whims or kooky notions supported by paranoids. They're a lot like the OSHA rules put in place at factories and industrial facilities. They are there to keep people from getting hurt and to keep expensive, dangerous accidents from taking place.
Just a coincidence I suppose.
Totally agree with the rest of your posts.
[0] http://www.pogo.org/our-work/reports/sec-revolving-door.html
But with drugs I don't think it's the dealers we have to worry about. The dealers are the little fish. It's the financiers, the money launderers, the ones who profit. They -- if they are smart -- never touch the stuff. They invest in it like they'd invest in any other venture.
My suspicion is that a captured DEA would behave not as an actual facilitator of drug trafficking but as a selective turf war tool to take politically unconnected competitors' drugs off the street. All you need there is enough influence to ensure that the DEA targets the other guys, not your bread and butter. That also helps to support the price of drugs, increasing your margins.
Actually it could be even simpler than that. If you have enough spies in the DEA you could be one ahead of them, have intel about how they conduct searches, etc. Then the DEA would act for you like a passive turf enforcement army. With your advantage you could fly under the radar, allowing the DEA to mop up your competition and prop up your margins by creating scarcity. Spying on an organization is orders of magnitude easier than influencing it, and requires the compromise of lower-level personnel. There's far more field agents and mid-level paper pushers than there are higher-up agenda setters and they make less money, making them easier targets to flip.
This is why the drug war is so bad for democracy and why prohibition encourages corruption. Put simply it creates a massive financial incentive for every kind of political corruption imaginable, and in so doing begets a "corruption infrastructure" that can be used for other kinds of crimes.
I wouldn't be too surprised if this was happening at some level in the DEA, but is there any information pointing to it or is it pure conjecture?
Example: http://www.madcowprod.com/
It's not the way the media portrays them that causes me to be skeptical, but the fact that they're so small and independent. Investigation is hard, and good investigative journalism with proper vetting of all sources costs a lot of money. It is very easy to be misled by misinformation or by kooks with an agenda. On the flip side, a good way to keep something quiet from investigative journalists is to spread a lot of phony BS, wait, and then point out that it's phony in order to discredit them.
For example, Daniel Hopsicker of the above link believed and perpetuated the "Mohammed Atta's American Girlfriend" story. I strongly suspect this story was BS and that he was misled by a stripper with psychological issues.
But he does have some good and verifiable information on the intersection between drugs and high-level corruption, and he did uncover some links to the 9/11 highjackers that point to similar corruption. His work on drug planes and their ownership is very interesting, and those kinds of things are easier for an independent to vet.
The DEA regulates legal distribution of controlled substances (part of which is investigating and enforcing rules about the illegal distribution of those substances.)
Regulatory capture of the DEA wouldn't be capture by "drug dealers" -- at least of the Pablo Escobar, et al., variety -- it would be capture by, e.g., pharmaceutical companies.
Different aspects of the operation of the pharmaceutical industry are regulated by the FDA (under the Food and Drug Act) and the DEA (under the Controlled Substances Act).
(Very loosely, the FDA regulates the manufacture/labeling of all drugs, the DEA regulates the distribution of controlled drugs.)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jennifergranick/2013/08/14/nsa-d...
Eventually, someone will actually get caught with their hand in the NSA's cookie jar.
To illustrate my point, here's a solid gold Mercedes: http://www.greenprophet.com/2010/03/white-gold-mercedes/
Kooks in caves with no connections. Yeah.
Damn nice looking though!
A hundred billion a year spent on fraudulent security theater.
I definitely think there's a pork angle to all this.
No it's not. We are technically in "wartime." Congress passed a law in late September 2001 that declared war with "those nations, organizations, or persons [the president] determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons" [1]. The mass-surveillance of the internet is being touted as one of the weapons in the fight against those entities [2]. As long as the AUMF is still law, the fight against terrorists, and all actions taken to prevent "any future acts of international terrorism against the United States," are governed by the rules of war.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Milita...
[2] http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/07/31/nsa-director-keith-ale...
Wasn't it helpful to have a "liberal" Democrat in the White House to make the final stroke of the pen and abolish the constitution? Could you imagine if Bush had done this? The outcry? But with Obama in there the left is largely silent, and the right are ever-obsessed with irrelevant "culture war" crap. Culture war dog-whistle terms distract Republicans like moving objects distract cats.
Not saying Bush was innocent of course. Just pointing out the continuity of the decay of America's ideals regardless of which party sits in power.
> Wasn't it helpful to have a "liberal" Democrat in the White House to make the final stroke of the pen and abolish the constitution?
I literally do not remember any president in my life who hasn't been accused of making the last stroke of the pen and abolishing the Constitution. And we've been in "permanent war" since, at least, the beginning of WWII (admittedly, you wouldn't notice it was anything other than normal war until well into the Cold War, but the "permanent war" isn't something that started with Obama, or even with Bush the Younger's "War on Terra".)
Vietname, Iraq I, Korea, etc. were declared but they were declared on specific enemies and thus had sunsets.
I do agree with your general point. We have been on this slippery slope for a very long time.
The closest thing to a declaration of war in Vietnam was the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which, while it mentioned Vietnam in its preamble, didn't mention any specific enemy in its operative clauses, and was, in fact, completely open-ended. The operative text of the resolution follows:
Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of
the United States of America in Congress assembled, That
the Congress approves and supports the determination of
the President, as Commander in Chief, to take all
necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the
forces of the United States and to prevent further
aggression.
Sec. 2. The United States regards as vital to its
national interest and to world peace the maintenance of
international peace and security in Southeast Asia.
Consonant with the Constitution of the United States
and the Charter of the United Nations and in accordance
with its obligations under the Southeast Asia Collective
Defense Treaty, the United States is, therefore,
prepared, as the President determines, to take all
necessary steps, including the use of armed force, to
assist any member or protocol state of the Southeast
Asia Collective Defense Treaty requesting assistance in
defense of its freedom.
Sec. 3. This resolution shall expire when the President
shall determine that the peace and security of the area
is reasonably assured by international conditions
created by action of the United Nations or otherwise,
except that it may be terminated earlier by concurrent
resolution of the Congress.Exactly. And, perhaps more importantly, neither was the Cold War used to justify so many actions that would only be allowable in actual war time.
Actually, it was. In fact, many of things that are happening now and are the focus of that complaint were also done during the Cold War, to the point when in one of the brief moments of reactions against those extremes at the end of the Nixon/Vietnam era where the Cold War excesses had reached a perceived (local, at least) maximum, attempts were made to put legal limits on them in. E.g., the War Powers Resolution and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Let's explicitly narrow it to domestic actions (i.e., the context of this discussion).
Also, the phrase I used "so many actions".
That is, my post was not intended to assert that war powers had never been abused in the past.
You mean, like the use of the state of national threat to justify intrusive unrestrained domestic surveillance using the tools of foreign intelligence surveillance during the Cold War, to which the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was a response (a response whose partial undoing in the FISA Amendments Act is one of the focal points of outrage in the recent complaints about domestic abuses justified by the "permanent war".)
Yeah, GP is still true when you limit it to domestic actions.
> Also, the phrase I used "so many actions".
If you want to support your claim with specifics, go ahead, but right now all I see is waving around generalities, and responding to the specifics raised in opposition with more generalities.
How about you just start by reading the Patriot Act.
A law passed by Congress authorizing acts of war is, ipso facto, a declaration of war (in the sense of an exercise of the Constitutional power to declare war.)
The only effect of not using specific legal phrasing is that it may not trigger other effects under other statutes Congress has passed which require particular language in subsequent law to trigger their effects. This can be important, to be sure, but it doesn't make it any less a declared war.
Open-ended declarations of war are, of course, extremely problematic and open to abuse, which is one of the reasons the last notable one (the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution) was repealed.
I guess we get to learn the lessons of the Vietnam era all over again in this generation. Maybe this time they'll stick...
"While the AUMF did not officially declare war, the legislation provided the President with more authority upon which to exercise his constitutional powers as Commander in Chief."
The last "officially" declared war was WWII, I believe.
And why is the declaration so vague?
So USA will have to redefine the declaration, most probably.
So it can be forever.
This is an exceedingly well-framed point. Just because it's information and not "stuff" doesn't make it not commandeering. If you're a communications company, reputational damage and other indirect costs have real value, i.e. indirectly intercheangable with money, beyond just the costs of directly complying. It's commandeering.
I have one message to the executives of those companies: fight.
EDIT: All the Reddit ban is easy to find. here's some discussion on HN:
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4108929) mattobrien submits the same article twice, deliberately evading the dupefilter. The article was written by someone called Matthew O'Brien. Most of his submissions are to the Atlantic.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2013/01/1...
But I read a zillion of posts daily and thought that the author was another opinionated journalist. If I had been more interested I would have clicked in the submission and read it after recognizing the Schneier signature.
They don't need to cooperate. All their data is already there at the data center. Only the cloud provider needs to cooperate. So the question really to ask is: is Amazon, Linode, Digital Ocean, RackSpace, etc. cooperating?
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-se...
I use encryption for sensitive information but I want to also minimize the probability of interception and storage of my messages for unencrypted ones.
Today's crop of well-off tech execs now have a unique opportunity to do good -- take Schneier's challenge.
Although few could match Gates on financial scale, they have an opportunity to equal or exceed him on social impact.
I hope for the sake of the rest of us they do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows
"The Findings of Fact in the United States Microsoft antitrust case of 1998 established that "One of the ways Microsoft combats piracy is by advising OEMs that they will be charged a higher price for Windows unless they drastically limit the number of PCs that they sell without an operating system pre-installed. In 1998, all major OEMs agreed to this restriction."[5]"
Returning to the present situation: Execs who have made more money than they or their heirs will ever need, and who are starting to think about their legacy, have an opportunity here.
That said, the second sentence remains correct.
<edited for clarity>
I suppose the question business owners have to ask themselves is, do they feel that their country is at war in dire enough straights that they feel the need to surrender control of their businesses for the war effort?
Google wins massive points to me for asking questions at all. Granted it was a timid little hand raised in the classroom of a psychotic nun with a ruler in her hand, but it's something.
Is this Bruce saying "if one of your employees cannot tell you why he did X, then you should effectively seal them off from the company?"
You may also focus on the meaning and privileges -- and responsibilities -- of our current "ownership". However, that is invariable a social endeavour; worthwhile, but also subject to the desires -- and inattention -- of others. It presents sometimes great convenience, but no guarantees.