Comment by jnbiche | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jnbiche | Hacker News Reader

The stunning thing to me is that Gen. Alexander clearly sees this at least partially as a left/right issue, or at least that was his game at this dinner. In fact, most of the left-leaning people I know, with the exception of the civil libertarian leftist, have been averting their eyes from the whole surveillance issue now that Obama is in office. The left and right are hand-in-hand together in this. The only people opposing it are the civil libertarians on the left and the libertarians on the right, both with equal conviction.

So the fact that he attributes her concern to being "to the left of Sen. Wyden" is very interesting and tell me a lot about his worldview. And yet so many Democrat leftist have been defending this program (or at least ignoring it) and going after Greenwald with an energy unseen from the right. Some thinking Democrats may be finally waking up to the threat this poses to our democracy, regardless of who is now in office, but the majority of them still are standing behind Obama (see recent vote on defunding the NSA surveilance program).

The easy explanation here is that both the Democrats and the Republicans in the United States are 'right of center', America at present does not have a functional 'left', just the illusion of one.

No, this issue neither falls on the "left" or "right"; it is better framed as the tension between central authority vs personal liberty. Both progressives on the left and conservatives on the right ask the government to regulate and control different aspects of society.َ†

George Washington was widely praised for disbanding the Continental Army after dispelling the British, and also declined a third term as President despite unflagging adoration from the public.

Times have changed, and some of this idealism has perhaps been lost to pragmatism over the years, but this is the golden legacy that the General and the other officers of the Executive are willfully squandering in the pursuit of a few terrorists.

† Hence the old joke that progressives want the government in their business but out of their bedroom, and conservatives want government out of their business, but in their bedroom.

Indeed, this is far different than just a left/right thing.

Assange, for instance, has been pushing a lot of these disclosures but he is not a leftist. He denies climate change, opposes unions (and social entitlements in general) and says the best politicians in the U.S. Congress are in the libertarian wing of the G.O.P.

Note that I'm not trying to denigrate his political views... just agreeing with you that it's not as simple as left-wing/right-wing. Just because you believe in 'no secrets' doesn't mean you believe in the workers controlling the means of production.

Similarly, I'm surprised that I haven't heard about much overlap between 2nd Amendment groups and those concerned about NSA surveillance. What's the use is your stockpile of assault rifles if all your communications are tapped?

I am a state-level leader in a firearms education group that the SPLC characterizes as a militia. Every individual instructor I've worked with has spoken out against this overreach.

Now I'm curious, which group gets this honor?

It's called Project Appleseed. There certainly are some people involved with whom I disagree, but the stated goals of civic engagement, firearms safety, and political neutrality are things I can get behind.

Uh, wtf. That's approximately as threatening a group as the Boy Scouts. SPLC is crazy, now I have to question the rest of their work.

As dragonwriter points out, I mislead you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6263959

Ah, makes sense. I guess I'm sensitive on the militia issue, because I think it would be awesome to set up a militia to provide the non-combat military services (communications, medical, maintenance, operating airfields, water, etc.) in a post disaster environment -- and doing it in a way with organic security, so you could go in directly to a place like Haiti or even Somalia without delay.

The "light infantry fighting in the woods" militia is dumb, though.

>The "light infantry fighting in the woods" militia is dumb, though.

Tell me about it.

The organization you identify later in the thread (Project Appleseed) does not appear to be on any list of militias, "patriot groups", or hate groups published by the SPLC that I can find [2].

The closest evidence thing I can find to anyone from the SPLC identifying Project Appleseed as a militia is a 2010 New York Times article [1] about Project Appleseed in which the article (not the SPLC) spends some time discussing Appleseed in the context of militia and Tea Party movements, and someone from the SPLC -- not labeling Appleseed a militia -- is quoted referring to the possibility that someone from an extremist group would come to Appleseed and learn to be a sniper in a paragraph about that being a threat to (not from) Appleseed.

I do find lots of links to that article on right-wing, pro-gun blogs pointing to this article referring to it being the NY Times and/or SPLC and/or the Jews supposedly behind either or both of those organizations targetting Appleseed, but I don't see any evidence that the SPLC has actually labelled Appleseed a militia.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/magazine/01Appleseed-t.htm...

[2] Particularly, its not on this list of Patriot groups (of which militias are subset): http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/br...

I stand corrected. My information came secondhand from a Border Patrol agent, who asserted that we were part of a list he'd seen, and from conversation with some of those folks who are posting on the forums you mentioned. I should've sourced it myself before speaking, and I apologize for my failure to do so.

My point was not to impugn the SPLC specifically, but rather to indicate that a group that draws some criticism for its firearms association includes a whole lot of people who are very angry about NSA surveillance.

Old tech is (currently) still much harder to ubiquitously surveil. See the US Millenium Challenge wargame[1] for some ideas.

Widely deployed domestic drone surveillance, automatic license-plate scanning cameras, and facial/object recognition could change that over the next decade or two though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002

An easier explanation is that most Americans are incredibly tribal in their thinking and how they evaluate the ethics of a particular situation. The left trusts Obama, and didn't trust Bush, and therefore surveillance that would have yielded passionate protest under the latter is A-OK under the former.

Much the same situation in the UK - left and right are remarkably quiet on the issue. Any political party that has held the reins for a term or two has ridden close enough to the devil to know the deal they must make.

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