End the N.S.A. Dragnet, Now
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It always starts with a desire to be safe. And that comes from fear. It seems Americans today are afraid of more things than ever: pedophiles, guns, terrorists, lawsuits. Some news reports are ridiculous by foreign standards: teachers not being allowed to shake hands with students out of fear of sexual harassment allegations, boys suspended from school for drawing guns, bystanders not administering first-aid to accident victims out of fear of lawsuits, and of course the terrorism hysteria for which I have no words. I'm fortunate enough to have visited the US and have met mostly great people, but going by news reports the entire society seems paralyzed by fear.
I always thought of freedom as inversely proportional to safety. If you want to be perfectly safe, you'll never leave your house in case you catch a germ, get in a car accident or even slip on a banana peel. You'll never eat store bought food without first running it through a spectrometer. You'll want everything controlled, predictable, seen ahead of time so that nothing unexpected gets thrown your way.
I guess this is what surveillance is trying to do. Rather than accepting a level of risk as the price for being free and handling disasters when they do occur, we seem to be increasingly trying to avoid danger at all costs. And the cost seems to be freedom.
It's almost as if the author of the US national anthem knew this when he ended it with "land of the free and the home of the brave" (correct me if I got that wrong). Maybe he knew you couldn't have one without the other. I guess the brave isn't home anymore...
/disjointed philosophical rant
Additionally, one could argue that as our freedom grows the opportunities for surveillance increase. That is, if you use the same means of communication as available in 1776 you'll have just as much freedom as they did. But in 2013 you have much more freedom to communicate over various mediums. Your freedom has increased by a factor of x, but surveillance has decreased that freedom by a factor of y (where y is much less than x). The net gain is still positive, but less than unsurveilled access.
An interesting thought experiment is how well would an airline that does no security checks do versus one that does. Lets ignore the efficacy of security checks, and say that you're 10x more likely to die in the flight w/o security checks -- would most people be willing to endure the security checks (as they are today) for a 10x reduction in deaths (imagine the baseline is the number of deaths we see today). I think the answer is yes.
Likewise, I may well feel less free if there were no jails (maximizing actual physical freedom for prisoners) than if there is some.
Bravery doesn't equal stupidity. I'm not condoning the actions of the US government, but I think its unfair to assume increases in safety with an actual proportional decrease in freedom.
You are justifying massive spending and time-cost based on your own unsupported hypothetical. Why do that when we already have data regarding airline safety with simple metal detectors? We know how that performs, and we know current efficacy is low and the cost to society is high.
The idea of NSA surveillance is not to increase safety with only a marginal decrease in freedom. Otherwise they wouldn't have unconstitutionally fingered targets for the DEA to parallel construct evidence for.
Thanks for a false dichotomy between scanners and nothing, by the way. If there were an airport near me that did metal detectors again (and another on the return leg) I'd use that exclusively. Anyone able to get a truly dangerous weapon through a metal detector without being nailed by the FBI or CIA first could easily get one through the full-body scanner also. So yes I would prefer to not support an unethical jerk and I would prefer to have my privacy back.
First off, never give up all of your yours in the name of safety. If you do, then you better make sure it's very temporary in nature, and/or for very specific targets.
Second, it better be to save something like 1 million people a year, not like 100 people per year on average. Make sure that the compromise of giving up all of your rights (if you can even accept such a thing), is done for a very real and major cause. If you're going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year, and infringe on everyone's freedoms, it better not be just to save 100 lives that year. It better be tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands at least. Otherwise, it's clearly not worth it, and that money and effort could be better used in some other place (such as healthcare, education, etc) where the return on investment is many orders of magnitude greater.
But even if it's worth it money wise, you still have to counter-balance it with the power you're giving your own government, and how much that government is going to abuse that power. Sure, the government will protect you from "terrorism", but is that worth the cost of losing your freedom, and having the risk of being arrested for anything you dare say against the government?
Many people in the past decided that they'd rather die than lose their freedom, so it's definitely not a clear cut choice, even if the government does save you from certain death. But the government is abusing all of this power today, and all of this money, and they have much less to show for it, to the point where the clear cut choice is to not accept what the government is doing.
While it's wildly misquoted on the interblags, you can't read out the word "essential." The point of the quote isn't that no trade-offs between freedom and safety are appropriate, but rather that we shouldn't trade away those freedoms that are "essential." It is debatable whether monitoring of the internet, a technology that didn't even exist for most of American history, is a trading off "essential" liberty, or whether its an "inessential" liberty.
Ben Franklin, like the other framers, realized that freedom versus security was a trade-off. Remember, the Constitution itself was a reaction to the Articles of Confederation, which created a government that turned out to be too weak to protect peoples' safety, both from external threats (Indians, European powers) and internal threats (domestic insurgents). The Constitution draw the safety versus freedom line a little closer to "safety" by creating a more powerful, more centralized federal government.
This balancing is also why the 4th amendment uses the wiggle word "unreasonable." Searches and seizures are okay, just not "unreasonable" ones. Well how do you decide what is "reasonable" versus "unreasonable?" You figure out how to appropriately trade-off freedom versus security! If the founding fathers didn't intend for us to engage in such balancing, they would've left out the word "unreasonable." No searches and seizures, even if necessary to solve a murder or kidnapping. After all, that would maximize freedom at some cost to security.
The op-ed states: "So we offered amendments: One would end the bulk collection of Americans’ records, but still allow intelligence agencies to obtain information they legitimately needed for national security purposes by getting the approval of a judge, which could even be done after the fact in emergency situations. "
I think you are absolutely correct in stating that there needs to be a balance, but when the American people have no say in how that balance is defined, we have programs that watch us all and as far as I am concerned trample our rights (1st chilling effect, 4th privacy, however you want to frame it).
Alternatively, the Supreme Court could invent a right,of privacy out of thin air. That might very well happen in time, but the tech community is undermining attempts to lay the groundwork for that. There must be a consensus that privacy is the rule online, rather than the exception. No such consensus will emerge if the tech community continues to condition people to accept invasions of their privacy in the name of advertising. Ordinary people do not have a particular distrust of government. To get to "its not okay for the government to read my email" you have to get rid of the notion that "its okay for Google to read my email."
No, you don't. You opt-in to Google reading your mail by using their free service. You can't (easily) opt-out of the government reading everything you do.
You have a choice with Google and any other private firm.
In this context, the social norm you're trying to establish is that internet communications are to be kept private, even sacrosanct. The idea of someone reading their e-mail should give people the same feeling as the idea of someone looking into their bathroom window.
You can't rest such a social norm on fine distinctions between the government and private companies. Ordinary people do not hold the government in a unique position of mistrust, and so are not likely to find compelling a norm that only the government must observe. As soon as you say: "well, Google can read my e-mail because I can always choose to use a different provider," you open yourself up to the counter that "well, unlike Google the government has a unique obligation to protect us from terrorists, so it needs to be able to read our e-mail too!"
When it comes to the establishment of a new social norm, it's irrelevant that people are theoretically free to choose a provider that does not violate their privacy. As long as the vast majority of the popular services leverage private data, the social norm that will emerge is that online communications are not something that should be held sacrosanct. As long as people are conditioned to accept Googles' reading their e-mails to target advertising, they will not think of e-mail as a deeply private thing that must be protected, even from the government.
[1] Whether you think Roe v. Wade was correctly decided or not, it's hard to argue that the result was plainly in the text of the Constitution. In Griswold, Justice Douglas didn't rely on "penumbras" and "emanations" despite having clear Constitutional text to hang his hat on!
I do think that unlike Roe there is some room in the Fourth Amendment for finding that bulk storage of all electronic communications, regardless if they are being investigated for content or not, results in an unreasonable search. The Fourth Amendment has been found since Katz to cover more than just physical searches.
Firstly, there is a question akin to informed consent. People do use these services and voluntarily give up a lot of privacy, but is that an informed decision, or is it because they don't understand the significance of what they are doing? Although many people share much information with organisations like Facebook and Google, there have been significant popular backlashes against a number of changes they have made, particularly those that have resulted in information being disclosed to people that the users who supplied it didn't expect.
To extend your bathroom window analogy, there is an argument here akin to sharing certain normally private behaviour with your doctor. This is something you do by choice, in your own interests, and with a clear understanding that the information is sensitive and not to be disclosed to anyone else or used for any other purpose. This is fundamental to medical ethics, and in many places it is protected explicitly by law, so doctors can't be pressured to disclose that kind of sensitive information, even by the police. Lawyers themselves are of course familiar with a similar argument, again establishing attorney-client privilege or the equivalent as a matter of universal professional ethics and protected by force of law.
Secondly, modern technologies like computers and the Internet are part of a very young and fast-evolving industry that is changing our normal expectations in many aspects of life. In many contexts, the overall effect is positive, but there can be serious negative consequences in some cases. I think it would be unwise for the courts to attempt to reinterpret major constitutional or human rights laws based only on the fact that this week X out of Y people were happy to share something with a specific web site. It takes longer than that for social norms to develop, and as always the law should reflect our ethics rather than try to dictate how things should be.
I do think privacy is going to be a big issue over perhaps the next decade or so, as we collectively work through the implications of modern technologies and decide what is acceptable behaviour and what isn't. I also think you're right that dedicated laws are going to be needed, rather than merely trying to adapt laws written for a time before the kinds of implications we are now seeing and starting to understand. I wonder whether this won't be a generational issue, as digital natives who consider things like being on-line and having mobile devices to be basic and universal facilities start to assert their independence, while the political dinosaurs who clearly don't understand even the basics of how this technology works and its implications are replaced by the generation in between who are perhaps both more open-minded on these subjects and less willing to trust the government by default.
Between the originalists and the existing problems with rights that have been found in the penumbrae of other rights, I cant see that happening. But then a consittutional amendment likely isn't on the cards any time soon either.
(I'm tied up for the rest of the day and most of the week with family stuff, but have wanted to chat with you about this for a while, would you mind shooting me an email so we can pick it up later?)
Actually it shouldn't. U.S. Constitution, Amendment 9:
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." [1]
If this had had a good-faith interpretation in US constitutional law, many decisions would have been more favorable to individual citizens.
It's not the words that are decisive, it's the cultural willingness to honor them.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninth_Amendment_to_the_United_...
Really, "Preserving security imposes constraints. Preserving freedom imposes constraints. Sometimes those constraints are at odds, at which point we must trade one against the other or against still other constraints."
Which, as a full picture, people on every side seem to gloss over pretty often.
The danger of mass surveillance is not due to some abstract need for privacy, but rather because of the immense power the government has. The founding fathers acutely understood the dangers of government overreach, and the constitution of the USA was designed to keep it in check. However these days, the very principles that the country was founded on are used as a shield to lull the well-fed and entertained population into a false sense of security about the benevolence of the government. Ironically people in oppressive third-world regimes would hold no such illusions, but in the English-speaking world we get "meh, what do I have to hide?". The insidious thing about this is that history's lessons on the subject can not be cited without sounding like a crackpot.
I don't think these principles are used as a shield, I think they have been redefined and given the euphemism of "national security" to hide what the new definitions are, if there even are definitions beyond 'whatever we want to do'.
What I meant to say is that the government rhetoric about freedom and American principles is convincing because it is based on actual enlightened thought which makes it all the easier for evil men and well-meaning busybodies and bureaucrats to utterly subvert these principles until they are nothing more than the empty political slogans and propaganda used by totalitarian regimes everywhere.
Their entire worldview seemed to be framed on a false choice though - you can either have security and safety or you can be free of government intrusion. I fundamentally disagree with this, total government intrusion and surveillance is not security, nor is it safety, you simply move the danger from 'terrorists' to 'government agents'. Either way (to steal a line from the libertarians) men with guns and bombs might show up and ruin or end your life.
That would imply that the relationship is much more linear than reality. Particular measures have individual costs and benefits that are not necessarily closely related and some actions may cost privacy and may even be counterproductive. Sometimes adding freedom may add security e.g. not interning people without trial as that can drive support for terrorists and prevent suspicions being reported.
"I guess this is what surveillance is trying to do. Rather than accepting a level of risk as the price for being free and handling disasters when they do occur, we seem to be increasingly trying to avoid danger at all costs."
Surveillance doesn't try to reduce the risk or anything like that. Surveillance institutions treat the whole population as suspects.
Fear has become patriotic.
Before I say more, I'll say that I am not a fan of patriotism, I think it is a mild form of bigotry, but I recognize the positive connotations it has to the population at large. I think that patriotism has also traditionally been associated with traits that are seen as positive. Traits like self assurance, confidence, pride, and bravery.
You might be afraid that Hitler is going to cross the channel, but you are going to put on a hard face and proudly declare that the RAF will continue to kick ass and take names. That is how you make yourself look patriotic.
That has changed slightly though. Now, if you want to present yourself as a patriot, you must present yourself as a coward who fears the enemy first and foremost, even if you really don't. That's why you get nonsense like this prefacing editorials: "Our first priority is to keep Americans safe from the threat of terrorism." You think that terrorists are going to implement Sharia Law in your podunk town in Kansas? A wildly irrational fear. So is that cowardice? No, it is patriotism! Advertise this fear to the world with a giant decal on your pickup truck; show your neighbors just how damn patriotic you really are.
I have my doubts that it was ever the way you described it. But given these discussions are often rhetorical I don't think that detracts all that much from the concept.
It's like a feller can't even write a serious editorial in support of American liberty without kowtowing to irrational fear-mongering anymore.
The battle to keep us jumping at shadows has been won so conclusively that no one even bothers to stand up and say anything like:
You are safe. Your family is safe. You are safer now than you would have been at nearly any other time in American history. Your children will probably view these years of The Terrorist Menace in much the same way we view McCarthyism and the excesses of J. Edgar Hoover - a humiliating betrayal of everything that was supposed to make America different from the rest of the world.
There is nothing patriotic about being afraid all the time.
But that won't sell, and the Senators who wrote this know it. I don't fault their judgement, but it makes me really sad.
But terrorism? Not even close. The fear of it has already caused damage on us far in excess to what the pissant terrorists have accomplished. All we really should have feared was fear itself. Perhaps one can still make the claim that we are not descended from fearful men, but it will be quite a bit less true should our children try to claim it.
Conventional wisdom says the Cold War was between the doctrines of Capitalism and Communism and that the doctrine of Capitalism won.
It doesn't look like that view was right.
The doctrine of the KGB and Stasi is winning over both of them.
The basic distinction is your data versus data that's about you. If I own a store, and make a note that 001sky came in to buy a box of cookies at 2:00pm on January 23, 2005, that's my paper. It's not your paper. I can claim 4th amendment protection if the FBI breaks into my store and takes that note, but you can't. That's the legally relevant distinction between data and metadata.
I'm not sure this is logically possible. The metadata retention by the telco's is an artifact of their business process (minimize fraudulent billing liability)[1]. A similar process did not exist for mail until the government mandated and paid for it. Now, every piece of mail is photgraphed ("to collect the 'metadata' ")and the images are recorded. That notwithstanding, the entire notion of such meta-data is strictly an artifact of technology. There is no analogue in pure verbal speech, in other words.
[1] There is no need for them to retain it or to otherwise "posess" it in an-other-than-temporary-like-snapchat-way.
> That notwithstanding, the entire notion of such meta-data is strictly an artifact of technology. There is no analogue in pure verbal speech, in other words.
Sure there is! Before mail was scanned for delivery purposes, you could always have called a postal worker to testify about what he read on the outside of the envelope. Before store cameras, you could have always called a store worker to testify about when he saw 001sky enter and leave the store and what he saw 001sky buy. Before automated call tracking, you could always have called a phone operator to testify about when 001sky placed a call. Technology makes it easier to collect metadata, but it does not turn "data" into "metadata."
(1) That doesn't change the essential characteristic of whether it's your data, or data about you. The datacard in my FLIR camera is (a) my data; and (b) about you. Neither of these qualifications are insurmountable. The courts have not tripped over this technicality, because the <purpose> of using the FLIR instrument is not considered a reasonable use of technology, when it has the impact of making surveilance <unavoidable> per-se.
(2) The post office example. This raises two issues: (a) technology; and (b) scale. Mail by post is distinct from verbal speech and generates metadata because of the need to address an envelope. Its low technology, but this is an artifact of the technology. With respect to scale, what is 'reasonably' to collect is a function of resource expenditure. As the cost of collection decreases, the amount of data 'reasonably' collected <increases>. But that is beside the point of where my <reasonable expectation of privacy> has changed or stayed the same.
(3) Scale, generally speaking. eg: Technology makes it easier to collect metadata, but it does not turn "data" into "metadata." The express purpose of the meta-data programs is to turn <meta> data into <data>. This is sort of the fundamental question at the heart of the matter, from a constitutional perspective. The purpose of these systems is to surveil beyond the scope of what would normally be perceived as reasonable. In that regard, it is aking to using FLIR to make surveilance <unavoidable per-se>. Or at least that is an argument which should be ajudicated. Perhaps by legislation, as well, once a more coherent framework has been set forth by the courts. In otherwords, now that these 'edge cases' are being swept up into the norm.
Not really, its still the persons, houses, papers, or effects of "the people" no matter which of the people it belongs to.
There's this weird idea which seems to have emerged from the use of the exclusionary rule as the main (and pretty much exclusive) remedy for violations of the Fourth Amendment that the Fourth Amendment only applies when the person about whom information is sought is the person whose person, houses, papers, or effects are being searched or seized, but there is nothing in the text of any reasonable context of the Constitutional language itself to support that, its simply a byproduct of an inadequate remedy (which, in fact, that aspect reveals to be inadequate) that seems to have worked its way back into the way that the language is read.
Second, ("th[e] weird idea... that the Fourth Amendment only applies when the person about whom information is sought is the person whose person, houses, papers, or effects are being searched or seized") doesn't stem from the exclusionary rule, but rather the subpoena power. The subpoena duces tecum (subpoena for the production of documents) predates the 4th amendment by quite a bit, appearing in England in its modern form sometime in the 1600's. While an overly broad or abusive subpoena can be a 4th amendment violation (but against the person at whom the subpoena is directed, not against the subject of the documents sought), they are presumptively reasonable.
Outrage doesn't make you right; at this point it's just making hn boring.
boorish.
You'd think all these experts would have bothered to read up just a little bit on SCOTUS cases like Smith v Maryland, etc, but I guess it's just easier to grunt Freedom.
I actually disagree...common sense is in fact an argument...in fact it is a 4th Amendment legal argument. When a Court hears whether a search and seizure was reasonable common sense arguments often prevail. For example, you have reasonable expectations of privacy if you were in an old school public phone booth, but not on your cell phone in public...you have a reasonable expectation of privacy in your trash, that is until it hits the curb then the government can seize it (without a warrant) and use it against you in trial.
As interesting as Rayiner's points are, even if he is citing case law/legal precedent it does not make him right. At the end of the day it only matters what 9 people think, and guess what more often than not those 9 people are at odds with one another, and often to the tune of 5-4 - nevertheless what the majority/plurality of those 9 opine becomes the law of the land, still that does not make any of them right either.
One of the more interesting 4th Amendment issues is that it only applies to the Government, so the Government can not simply have a private citizen seize evidence without a warrant and use it as evidence, but they can use unlawfully obtained evidence so long as they did not direct the individual who originally obtained it...think how the Government used the photos hacked by Anonymous in the Stubenville Rape case. Ironically I think this could be one of the strongest arguments is that telecoms are actually working on behalf of the Government to obtain evidence they could otherwise not get without a warrant - in fact I would go so far as to say the Government is paying telecom companies to do this on their behalf.
The text of the amendment does not clearly support your position. Indeed, the focus is clearly on personal things (house, person), not things possessed by third parties.
Those microphones and cameras in public places are there for your protection. We'll never abuse that, trust us. Oh never never never.
("Hey, this guy voted Replubricatic last election, stick him on the list, too. Hey, he gave money to my opponent!")
Wiretaps and documents hosted on the "cloud" are somewhere in-between. The first time the Supreme Court considered the Constitutionality of warrantless wire taps, it found that they were not protected by the 4th amendment. In the 1960's they overturned that precedent, but using reasoning that really only makes sense in an analog context where your voice directly modulates signals on a wire, and there is no intermediate storage.
Call records are further removed still. They're not a recording of your voice. They are generated by the telco, for the telco's own purposes. They are never in your possession, and you don't even know their contents. It's a huge stretch to say that they are nonetheless "your" papers.
Finally, microphones and cameras in public are clearly Constitutional. Whether they can be abused is irrelevant. The 4th amendment is not a prohibition on anything that can be abused. It's a prohibition designed to protect peoples' physical persons and their property rights from government searches.
Do you have a property right in your Google Drive? Do you pay rent? Can you sue Google if they negligently lose the contents? Does Google have any obligations to give you say 30 days notice before they shut down your account? These reciprocal obligations are the difference between renting a garage to store your papers (which would fall within the 4th amendment), and simply leaving your papers in a friends' garage (which wouldn't).
"Secret court" and "All this stuff we've collected? We haven't actually collected it until we look at it" and oversight by people who are clearly invested in keeping things cozy. This is all madness. How did we get here?
I might not know enough to know where to draw the line, but I know enough to know that it's gone wrong, and that erring on the side of severely restricting this kind of behavior and shedding light on what has happened is probably the best course of action.
You need to understand the context. People did not store information about their private communications with third parties in 1776. Can you call AT&T and ask for someone else's records and get them? Why not? Things you wish to stay private do stay private unless a warrant is issued citing probable cause to violate your privacy.
People stored all sorts of private information with third parties in 1776. They had accountants and bookkeepers and suppliers and vendors, etc.
> Can you call AT&T and ask for someone else's records and get them?
Can you call up Ernst and Young and ask for someone else's accounting records? No, but the government can.
The test isn't "things you wish to stay private." It's "reasonable expectation of privacy." It's an objective test, not a subjective one. And I find it very difficult to understand how anyone could have a "reasonable expectation" of privacy in information generated by a third party for its own use, that's exposed to god knows how many engineers and system administrators.
But if you're going to argue that this objectively means "reasonable expectation that your privacy will be respected in this case" rather than "reasonable expectation that your privacy should be respected in this case" then you have reduced any protection to something meaningless through circular logic. By this kind of argument, anyone can violate your privacy, in any way, for any reason, and it's all OK as long as they make sure you know it's happening.
That's what the reasonable expectation of privacy test has always meant, so its not reducing it at all. Whether its meaningless or not, well, actual actions by government have been found to violate it, so its clearly not a null protection, even if it isn't what you'd prefer.
Obviously I disagree with you and rayiner over how ambiguous that phrase is, but that doesn't really matter. This entire HN discussion is about a call to change the situation, in particular, the current behaviour of the US government and the laws that the US government argues permit such behaviour. Arguing that something is OK because it's what the law currently says doesn't seem to advance that debate in any useful way.
Most of the NSA programs that have been exposed to date are not "clear" violations of the law. They are attempts to operate at the boundaries of the law as currently understood, but they seem to reflect a genuine attempt to stay within those boundaries.
Distinctions that people on Hacker News dismiss because they have a broad-based ideological opposition to surveillance, like "metadata versus data" or "U.S. persons versus foreigners" are in fact the operative markers delineating the bounds of the law.
Merely following the law doesn't turn a bad idea into a good idea, or justify a program, but it does say something about whether people are acting in good faith. What doesn't advance the debate is saying that people in the government must be acting in bad faith because they are "clearly" violating the law, when in fact you just don't understand what the law is.
I think this is where we have slightly different points of view.
In the general situation we're discussing, i.e., state surveillance, the people who make the laws and the people who should be following them are the same, or at least closely related. In that context, to demonstrate good faith, I think you need to make good laws and then follow them.
There is an interesting wrinkle in the US that we don't have here in the UK because the US Constitution is theoretically out of reach of the current government. However, as usual actions speak louder than words, and as an outsider it doesn't appear that having a written constitution is a reliable safeguard any more (on many issues, not just the surveillance one). Again, the people who might be acting unconstitutionally and the people who would judge them are cut from the same cloth.
Because of these inherent conflicts of interest, I don't think that merely following the letter of the law is sufficient to demonstrate (or, equally, demonstrate the lack of) anything very interesting.
It was not only rhetoric that in the fight between USA and UDSSR, there was a fight between freedom and authority. But mainly, it was a fight between different ways to regulate the means of production. Capitalism won, but that does not mean that freedom, democracy and the rule of the law will survive that victory.
China shows that you can have a capitalst economy in a (not a real one, but wanting to be) communist country.
Wanting to be? I'm afraid that China would never want trying again in the current reign. China just has not yet figured out which model of heaven could be used to replace the communist one. It is really a tough job to propose for a egalitarian heaven in an age of quickly increasing rich-poor gap.
But there are other examples. Take Stalin, under his reign there was a limited (but successful) effort to produce food using a free economy, which he shot down. Which was tragic given the food was needed.
But that leads to far. I mainly meant that the existing systems claiming to be communist aren't, and some were able to use the tools of capitalism without becoming a western country, e.g. without becoming an indirect democracy - thus showing that capitalism is an economic model, not more.
If you consider large government bureaus (public, or "private" via regulation, like, say, Verizon) to define "capitalism" just because there are large amounts of money involved ("capital"), you are defining the term by non-essentials. There were also large amounts of money in the USSR.
Capitalism lost because of European intellectual influences in America; the existing defense of the ideas of the founding fathers was insufficient to stem the tide.
I love how libertarians redefine words to mean what they want!
What he's referring to in mainstream libertarian literature is called "anarcho-capitalism". This is well known in the libertarian sub-culture. A distinction the above commenter likely just doesn't know yet.
Very similar to how everyone seems to perceive socialism to be authoritarian-communism. Fallacies are everywhere, hardly unique to libertarians.
In fact, I know presiely what "anarcho-capitalism" is, and I totally reject it.
An actual system of freedom (which capitalism falls out of) requires people to be protected from the initiation of force by a government. Anarcho-capitalism is simply a power vacuum that will be filled (99% of the time, in a dangerous way).
Moreover, I am not a libertarian, I am an Objectivist (the philosophy the libertarians stole 10% of and started taking out of context when they started their modern movement).
To respond to your other point, the fundamental political axis is freedom on the one side, and authoritarianism on the other. It doesn't particularly matter if that is wrapped up as socialism, communism, fascism, or whatever.
Capitalism and free markets just "fall out of" a government that does not coerce people, and does not allow people to coerce people.
I already provided some evidence that my account is proper. I mentioned the issue of improperly defining things by non-essentials. I don't think you have presented a viable counter-argument.
Wrong. Capitalism is synonymous with free enterprise, not free markets. And free enterprise simply means that enterprises (rather than states) own the means of production.
IMO, we need to start talking about workplace democracy if we're going to continue to entertain the idea of corporate controlled society, so that the common person can at least get their vote back (indirectly, by choosing who leads the company which bribes officials...).
That said, many, many, people believe that most people are not competent, and need to be taken care of/controlled/limited.
Arguments I usually have to fight against are: What to do about crime. What to do about "evil" people. What to do about property rights. What to do about control in decisions.
There is a simple solution to all the problems you mention, which is to have a government that uses retaliatory force, but not initiatory force.
America had one for about a century, and now there is the intellectual machinery needed to go back to that system and to define and defend it much more vigorously. Unfortunately, a majority of "advocates for freedom" are mucking around with things like "libertarian socialism" and "anarcho-capitalism" which are contradictions in terms and won't work.
Unfortunately for you (until or unless you stop fighting the truth), objective knowledge is possible.
There is no such thing as a "free enterprise" without a "free market", and vice versa.
To the degree you do not have a "free market," you have government regulation. To the degree you have government regulation, successful enterprises are organs of the state.
Free markets == free enterprise == capitalism. Why? Because they all just fall out of "the government only uses force to stop other people from initiating force and retaliating against them when they do," which is a proper government. And, as a sidenote, this is what the US Founding Fathers set up, to the closest extent they could.
Your understanding of what is meant by "free enterprise" is false. Source: I have a degree in Economics and wrote my senior's thesis on this subject.
"Free enterprise" in this context means the enterprise has internal freedom - i.e. it is owned and controlled by non-state actors, as in people like you and me. These non-state actors can do whatever they want. Yes, there are still rules and regulations they operate under, but this does not mean that they are not free.
The language "free enterprise" is specifically used to distinguish capitalism from communism, where the state controls the means of production, i.e. the enterprises (e.g. factories) are owned by the government, which typically exerts authoritarian control over them and determines what should be produced and how. The enterprises in communism have no internal freedom: they follow the government's orders. If the government says the factory should produce computers, that's what the factory produces. If the governments says it should produce tanks, that's what it produces. Whereas in capitalism, enterprises can produce whatever they want as long as they do it legally. They are still free.
Under rules and regulations, an enterprise is not free to allocate its capital at it desires, produce the products it desires, market them in the way it desires, and sell them to who it desires.
The degree to which that is true depends on the scope of the rules and regulations. If the only one is that there is a 5% income tax, the enterprise loses 5% of its freedom to allocate its capital. In reality, in our mixed economy, companies operate under many, many restrictions. In areas like finance and telecom, we have full-on regulatory monopolies: an enterprise has no freedom without permission, and new permissions are not being granted.
I am fully aware that academic economists consistently define things according to non-essentials, and the only thing I can do is reject that. A "free enterprise" must mean what the words "free" and "enterprise" mean in the English language. Anything else is a barrier to rational thinking.
If economists want a word for an enterprise that can "do whatever it wants, but still operates under rules and regulations," they (properly) have to make a new word for it, not re-use existing words that mean something different.
Actually, though, there already is a word for that: a "contradiction." An enterprise cannot be free and not-free.
Unfortunately, many academic economists want to "earn" their bread and butter by peddling contradictions to students and the public, and they deserve the very highest moral condemnation for it.
Why? Because that kind of behavior leads to recessions (such as the perma-recession we are currently in), depressions, and the rise of authoritarianism (fascism being one example from recent history). It leads to suffering and mass-killing.
Source: Reality.
To the degree that you are a victim of this, you should rethink your views. To the degree that you are a perpetrator (if at all), you should be ashamed of yourself.
Sorry, this is an extremely naive point of view. I'd even call it juvenile.
The mature way to look at it is this: the enterprise is paying 5% of its income as tax in order to have the freedom of using roads, having access to security (police, firefighters, etc.) and use all the infrastructure established by government.
>>A "free enterprise" must mean what the words "free" and "enterprise" mean in the English language. Anything else is a barrier to rational thinking.
In the very English language you speak of, context defines a lot of the meaning. And the context here is a discussion of economic terms. You can reject that all you want. The fact remains that "free enterprise" means what it means, not what you want it to mean.
I'm going to have to refrain from responding to the rest of your post, as it simply reads like a bunch of anti-intellectual nonsense.
> The fact remains that "free enterprise" means what it means, not what you want it to mean.
You have ignored my point that your definition is a contradiction in terms.
Moreover, our discussion is a discussion about politics and the economy, not an economics textbook or paper.
So why don't you just make your argument in plain English?
Because it relies on invalid definitions to get it to appear to make sense.
That would be an unsubstantiated allgeation if I had not shown that your term is contradictory. I did.
> I'm going to have to refrain from responding to the rest of your post, as it simply reads like a bunch of anti-intellectual nonsense.
I don't think people who peddle contradictory terms deserve the title "intellectual," so I don't think my comments were anti-intellectual.
If you actually see a contradiction between my analysis and reality, you should be able to state it simply. That you didn't point out such a contradiction, suggests to me that you don't actually see one.
As a sidenote, I have enough respect for some economists to find it hard to believe that they are all using the term in the way you say. Of course, many economists simply (and reasonably) stay away from any political topic.
Near as I can tell a purely capitalist system is likely to become a surveillance system, since it more effectively allows for the production of surveillance tools. Surveillance is the ultimate competitive advantage. Almost no one can win against you in the market if you have "total informational awareness", especially if you have no scruples with respect to how you use that information and people are largely unaware of how much that surveillance is costing them.
The person conducting the surveillance can see its benefits, but the victim can't fully grasp its harm. Surveillance is capitalism's way of boiling frogs for fun and profit.
“In this age, in this country, public sentiment is everything. With it, nothing can fail; against it, nothing can succeed. Whoever molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes, or pronounces judicial decisions.” -- Abraham Lincoln
When the axis powers threatened to plunge the world into 1000 years of darkness, the only thing we had to fear is fear itself, now - that's not good enough - we must fear the unending threat of terrorism. Letting the NSA run wild is a logical result from this mentality.
I'm wondering whether it was stated as the first priority of the Intelligence Committee rather than the first priority of the Senate. I realize members of the Intelligence Committee are expected to bridge those two roles - but it also wouldn't strike me as unusual for the Intelligence Committee to prioritize things differently than the rest of the Senate.
Maybe naively, but I would have imagined foreign policy reforms would be more effective, whilst eliminating the need for intrusive security.
Treating the symptom rather than the disease when the treatment is more harmful does not seem rational.
And herein lies the problem. Their job is not to keep us safe, it's to keep us free.
(I'm aware others in the thread have pointed this out, but less directly).
Uh, no. The first job of a good, decent government is protect the rights of its citizens. It now seems that the first job of a citizen is protect him/herself from the government.
bzzt!, oh, sorry, that's not the correct answer. The correct answer is set out in the oath that all US Senators take upon being sworn into office[1] which reads:
>"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God."
So no, sorry, the first priority is to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, which includes the NSA. Their oath says nothing about terrorism.
>"If government agencies identify a suspected terrorist, they should absolutely go to the relevant phone companies to get that person’s phone records."
Are you done supplicating yourself fully before the police state? My copy of the Constitution (which does not contain the root password "thinkofthekids" or "terrorism") says you need not just suspicion, but probable cause for a warrant.
>"When the Bill of Rights was adopted, it established that Americans’ papers and effects should be seized only when there was specific evidence of suspicious activity."
bzzt!, again, so close! Let's look at what it really says[2], shall we (emphasis mine):
>The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Not only do you need suspicion, but you need probable cause for a warrant or the search needs to be reasonable some other way (border crossing, subject gave consent, search subject to arrest, etc).
>Our bill would prohibit the government from conducting warrantless “backdoor searches” of Americans’ communications — including emails, text messages and Internet use — under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Again, so close! Read the fourth amendment again. Nowhere does it say "The right of US Citizens". It says "The right of the people". That means all people - citizens and non-citizens, and that distinction is important. The protections afforded under this amendment apply to everyone in the country and extend to those parties being contacted by someone from this country, otherwise the wording would be different.
[1] http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/briefing/...
[2] http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/bill_of_rights_tra...
The House of Representatives is apportioned by population, and its job is to represent the interests of the people. A more populous state has more representatives so that (theoretically) each representative represents an equal portion of the American population. This is also why spending bills must originate in the House as the money spent is derived from the people.
Each state receives an equal number of Senators. The Senate is responsible for representing the interests of the states. That is why Senators were originally appointed by the state legislature [2] instead of directly elected. A federal republic, such as the United States, is built upon each state have its interests represented equally, and that is why each state receives an equal number of Senators.
I believe that the direct election of Senators undermines the original intent of the Senate and that the 17th Amendment should be repealed.
[1] http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxvii [2] http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articlei#section3
This has been true as long as there has been government, as far as I can tell.
I think we need to rethink some things:
1. In the short term, one of the biggest changes that has to be addressed is the current court doctrine that privacy has not been violated if no people are actually looking at the data. Given that much of the surveillance is directed by automation, we need to recast that doctrine to include some of the automated analysis of the data. It's a thorny question, and one that will take some time and effort to get right, but there's no time like now to start.
2. We need more forceful and more transparent oversight of surveillance. There is a risk that the surveilled might change their tactics based on lessons from oversight reporting, but it seems clear at this point that the trade off is necessary. To quote the editorial: "The usefulness of the bulk collection program has been greatly exaggerated. We have yet to see any proof that it provides real, unique value in protecting national security." Trade-offs are only worth making if you get something. Time to revisit the trade-off.
3. We need to address both the big piles of data in the government's hands and those in private hands. This is going to require rethinking ownership of the data, and probably moving the US more towards an EU-style privacy directive. Again, a longer process, but one that needs to start now.
4. As a country, we need to start toward a more rational view of terrorism risk. Plenty has been written about how disproportional our response has been. Time to rebalance the scales.
In the end, we're going to continue to have big piles of surveillance data as long as we continue our technology trajectory. We need to start figuring out how to work with it, rather than try to stop it.
Supposedly, "N.S.A." will not trigger HN's keyword penalty :)
[1] http://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-really...
== Why isn't this adressed to Dianne Feinstein?
Feinstein lives in an ivory tower, completely isolated from the needs of ordinary citizens in California. She gets six years in office with every election, and was just recently re-elected. She's totally safe, like those tea-party republicans in gerrymandered districts. California is too big of a state for a grassroots organization to challenge her in a primary and she placates enough of various groups with the funds to start an astroturf war and so they leave her alone. She's pretty much untouchable. She often starts on the wrong side of many issues, a notable exception being LGBT rights (good for her and us), and only with intense pressure from public opinion does she bow for appearances only. For example she was for SOPA, against meaningful health reform, and she's been a staunch defender of the NSA.
Senator Feinstein is a defender of the status quo. She's a conservative. Not a social conservative or neo-conservative, but someone who fights progress. Her office is in an actual giant tower right outside of the Montgomery Street Bart station and she wouldn't even come down to visit protestors and talk to them when we were there on behalf of OFA and there quite a few of us. It might as well have been built in ivory. That was the only protest I have ever taken part in. It wasn't even really a protest, just a show of support for Obama's health care plan.
Politicians like Feinstein make me cynical about politics. I feel helpless to be able to contribute change, so I just don't want to care anymore. Whatever, she's the boss. Great. Could be worse I guess.
2012 was last year.
As the face of hypocrisy, its (perhaps) actually worth rallying against her individually. Does she really represent you (or by extension CA, SF, SV...etc?). Human nature has very strong instinctual aversion to public demonstrations of hypocrisy of one's own activity. This is true because political power is power rested in delegated authority. That is rooted in trust. And duplicity and hypocrisy mark such an agent as untrustworththy. This reduces their eventual political tenebility. Its one of those experiments, ironically derived from cognitve science about why people don't <change their mind> on a publicly revealed preference or bet. In this case, it (perhaps) makes sense to use the result in a constructive way.
A ton of the "most Conservative" politicians in American politics aren't anything like "conservative" - changing a slew of things to the way they were 200 years ago, with no eye to the things that have changed technologically, demographically, &c, may still be the right thing to do, but it's not "conservative". I would even argue that opposition to abortion is ceasing to be a "conservative" position - it has been legal for longer than most of the population has been alive. That doesn't mean that people who oppose it on whatever grounds, and consider themselves conservative overall, are necessarily wrong or "hypocritical" to do so.
Many of her particular positions I consider a problem, but that has nothing to do with any discrepancy implied by "(conservative, Liberal)".
And now it's up to us, having failed to elect enough people who support the Constitution. Elections next year, and in 2016. Just sayin'.
I argue that the weight of evidence says the opposite. First the "there is no question" bit is wrong, because clearly there is a huge question. Further, people that want power tend to be attracted to positions that give it to them. We see this in things like police, lawyers, and politicians.
Note that I do no mention the military, because in the US the military is largely about subservience and not about control.
There is also little evidence suggesting that the men and women working for the NSA are patriotic. I argue that they are not. Patriotism involves holding up the rights of citizens as defined by the Constitution, especially against those who would change or remove these rights. Further, patriotism involves defining new law, as needed, explicitly in the spirit of the Constitution. Under this definition, it is very unclear that the people working at the NSA have been remotely patriotic. Quite the opposite, in my view.
Last, I believe we are fundamentally less free and less safe now than we were 13 years ago. The erosion of freedom and safety is often a very gradual process. When I say we, I do not refer to We as in The United States. I refer to all the people living under it, both citizens and non-citizens alike.
I have to be more cautious of what I say at 33 than I did at 21. I seriously consider alternatives to flying during the holidays because "safety" has become a physical impediment to travel. I have to think twice about what I should pack in my luggage, for the certainty that someone will search my belongings.
When I see police, I do not feel safe. I get more nervous and afraid. These are people walking around with weapons who can hurt, imprison, and murder people almost at will and we as citizens have almost no recourse to defend ourselves without being further harassed and harangued.
That is not how someone should view their police departments. Yet I do, because in my short life I hear more about police brutality than stories of police helping people. My own experiences were particularly forged by being arrested at a peaceful protest (FTAA) and trying to watch the inauguration parade in DC in 2005. I stopped respecting police officers a long time ago, though I view them as a necessary evil.
So to wrap. We are less free and less safe now than before, the people working for the NSA are working towards their own ends or the ends of people wanting power, and there is nothing patriotic going on. We are in pot being slowly boiled.
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
Not unreasonably, people expect their governments to provide the same level of predictability. And, not unreasonably, the majority of those politicians who want to preserve their jobs go along with it.
So what can be done about it? If this was a flawless AI keeping us all safe like in Iain Bank's culture universe, I think we'd be all happy. The problem comes when it's not clear if those charged with curating this information have other agendas.
I think this is a historically unique time, when we have the chance to put in safeguards and oversight while we can still see the cameras and the window of debate is still available.
But in order to do that, I think the debate has to be reframed not as security vs liberty but as structured oversight vs tyranny.
My main issue is that this has not become a debate, it's still an order. And it's an order that violates our fourth amendment right. This right was part of handshake for a new system, and it cannot be violated save for some rare situation we could all agree is reasonable.
No one should think this is reasonable... security is lax, control of the data is lax ("corporate store"? Are you kidding me?). The situation is flipped here. Without leaks, we would actually be suffering more. Security clearance is not protecting us, it's using and abusing us. It's being used to hide things that would harm us more if they were never leaked. And FISA courts are used to give us some illusion that rules will be followed while having it waved in our face that we're lucky to have them. This is crazy.
Try to accommodate any warrantless surveillance in the fourth amendment's text without creating either a comical contradiction that violates its entire spirit or removes it entirely. We know that being ok with these citizen data programs amounts to being ok with not having this right, but we're still talking about it. I want to keep my right. And since the amendment was added in response to writs of assistance, unchecked delegation of authority so scarily similar to this reasonable articulable suspicion thing we are seeing today in both this and Stop and Frisk, i think we'd all be better suited to start with our right and add any exceptions as-needed, not have them added for us. I'm assigned a threat score even before i'm suspicious? To find out whether i'm suspicious? To then act on me because of this suspicion? All while making money off of me based on my actions? You want to buy my actions? Ok, name a price, i'll consider it.
I don't want to start this privacy war this gang wants me to. I'd rather we follow the law and consider those who don't criminal. Privacy is a buffer against abuse, not a place to hide dirty secrets. We can't predict or even see or notice all of the horrible loss of self control that might come about because of this collection. The chorus of "Nothing to Hide" in response rings eery in my ears.
If legislation were to declare that the names and numbers used to identify a computer on a network could not be legally used to identify either the physical location of the computer or the human that might have been using it, I think it likely that the number of VPN access points and Tor exit nodes would increase wildly overnight.
End-to-end encryption of all electronic traffic, everywhere, is the only reasonable solution.
If I were to run dragnet, I'd accept protecting the interest and privacy of all Americans back home, but strike a deal with GCHQ or some other Government agency and provide them with all the tools and tech to snoop on my fellow citizens. No legal hassles, no constitutional violation. Cost? Well that could be worked out given the advantage the data gives me to remain in power.
Ron Wyden of Oregon, Mark Udall of Colorado and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, all Democrats, are United States senators.
I also assume/hope that Google and Facebook etc. are not able to sniff any packets that are not meant for them.
This applies to Facebook, Twitter, AT&T, Verizon, Samsung, Snapchat, and so on. When these guys start trying to acquire their own domestic armies, then I'll get really concerned.
There seems to be a common gloss-over regarding the fact that it's the United States Military that is doing the domestic spying. They were tapping Obama's phones when he was a Senator; most likely they own everybody at this point. This isn't some fluffcake brigade; it's the US freakin' military. Slip, and you're knee deep in a military dictatorship very quickly.
You've also been in a conversation with me, and that makes you a person of interest in some very plausible future scenario. ... "So, we notice that you spent a lot of time on this Hacker News site. Tell us about that."
Having a banking system helps people buy houses and having a government helps literally everything a society does.
http://4closurefraud.org/2010/07/20/bank-of-america-confisca...
It's not that long ago black people were slaves/segregated, and women's suffrage is even fresher. And as much there is still to improve, some progress happened; instead of, say, there "always being one class of people considered subhuman", which no doubt some people have uttered in defeat back then, too.