What does a broken record sound like? Read the first line of the ruling: http://i.imgur.com/y8LZQUM.png
In short: it's a real accountability gap by the people that preach ostensible "accountability" and "transparency."
USG needs a 4th branch made of veterans, privacy and industry leaders (people that are both sharp and straight shooters) that have total access to surprise audit, defund and compel changes to any secret program. The only goal is to change behavior to "I probably shouldn't do [horrible thing] because [people more powerful than my CO/president] will find out." Even if it's just a phony whitehouse press release by the Yes Men.
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ubiquitous spying capabilities only bounded by technology limits, finding clearance-passable bodies to wade through mountain ranges of data, keeping the lies plausibly deniable in front of Congress and containing waste of a sprawling bureacracy
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modern, horrible pattern of exceptionalism: disregarding any sense of morality, decency and/or due-process
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USG executive branch's de-facto dominant power position
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I'd agree at least until a single corporation has a market cap > 100% USG FY budget and/or the USG runs out of credit. Both seem essentially inevitable. (beware when private edifices and "defensive" capabilities rival the state's)
The don't even need to do any fancy analytics. They have all your data served up on a platter.
As the poster noted, it's not as if the gov't is having to piece together data from thousands of sources. Almost all the metadata can be put together from a handful of sources.
There have been hundreds of cases discussed on this web site in which the the limitless security state has had a substantive impact on the lives of innocent people. Going beyond that, it is pretty clear that people change their behavior when they are being watched, and not for the better (https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=privacy%20nothin...).
Your liberties HAVE been reduced, you just haven't bumped into one of the new walls yet, or you didn't notice if you have.
Even so I don't like this quote. The notion that some people don't deserve safety because of their poor valuation of liberty, is so obviously wrong...
the Great Depression showed us how important it is to have an insurance on personal bank accounts, to disincentive bank runs. While one might counter that there have been other economic crises and bank runs, there have also been many other terrorist attacks aimed at US interests and allies. We still cite the great depression all the time because it was kind of a big deal.
I don't want to comment on how its being used in this policy decision but acting like 9/11 isn't somehow a big deal is strange.
Because it's a reactionary and not derived in principle? How exactly do you counter "I know what's best for you based on a single event"?
The actual damage done by the attack itself was not all that significant in the grand scheme of things. Yes, it was a massive tragedy, but neither the lives lost nor the property destroyed are noticeable on a national scale.
Most of the damage by far was the reaction to the attack, not the attack itself. It was the national equivalent of an allergic reaction.
Imagine if people were in charge of your immune system and they decided that the immune system must react strongly to bee stings. In defending their policy on bee stings, they bring up the last time you got stung by a bee, when it put you in the hospital. What makes it a problem is that they put you in the hospital themselves, not the bee sting by itself. The bee sting would have hurt, but wouldn't have required medical attention if it weren't for the allergic reaction to it.
The mention of a dirty bomb rather reinforces my point, I think. A dirty bomb isn't much more destructive than a regular bomb. Yet, we consider it to be a vastly greater threat. Why? Because we'd vastly overreact to it. Why? Because we consider it to be a huge threat. And so on in circles.
Again, none of this means that the reactions were smart - but the idea that there needs to be some reaction is not a priori stupid, and to try to characterize it as such weakens your argument (imho).
Yes, despite all that it was unexpected. However, I have no sympathy for your "what ridiculous fantasy will be true in 10 years time?" argument. It's a complete non sequitur. There was a failure of imagination before in which terrorists were more capable than we thought, therefore we're doing the same thing now? I would argue that currently the exact opposite is happening. 9/11 seems to be the peak of their capabilities. Now, while we're imagining apocalyptic scenarios in which terrorists destroy entire cities, their actual capabilities seem to be limited to badly-constructed IEDs.
The point is that there was precedent for 9/11, even if people didn't realize it. There is no precedent for the sort of vastly worse attack you posit, nor is there any other reason to think that such a thing could be carried out in a way that makes it vastly worse than previous attacks. (The Aum Shinrikyo nerve gas attack does provide precedent for terrorist attacks involving chemical weapons, but it also demonstrates that such attacks aren't really all that severe. Again, they are worse because we react to them more strongly, and we react to them more strongly because they are worse.)
I'm not saying that all reaction would be stupid, only that it should be proportional. A normal human body does react to a bee sting, but it does so appropriately, by eliminating the poison and handling foreign substances. Likewise, a sane reaction to 9/11 involving tracking down those responsible and bringing them to justice would have been wise. What's stupid is not any reaction, but a massive overreaction, and then justifying the overreaction by pointing to the massive damage done, when that damage was mostly done by the overreaction.
I have been extremely critical of that reaction in the past, along much of the same lines you state. I haven't changed my mind on that, but I have also come to realise that it's actually really hard to calibrate risk in this situation - in the case of car accidents or lightning strikes, say, we can forecast expected outcomes very accurately, and the variance of those outcomes is relatively low. The threat model for an intelligent opponent is very different - history is a poor guide and the variance of potential outcomes is very high.
I am not trying to justify the reaction to 9/11, but using it as a reference point seems fine, just like the berlin wall being torn down is not in itself the event that ended the cold war, but is a turning point for things.
But your point about it being self-referentially important seems pretty valid.
Bee stings aren't all that harmful in normal people. But some people's immune systems decide to treat bee stings as if they were extremely dangerous, life-threatening events, and in those people, the reaction itself becomes an extremely dangerous, life-threatening event. If (and this is a huge if, of course) you could simply convince the immune system not to react so strongly to a bee sting, the threat would be gone. But instead, in this analogy, you have the people running the immune system arguing for a stronger reaction to bee stings, citing the terrible consequences of the last one as the reason for it.
Because it's irrational and doesn't represent the real probability of an event happening again. The argument is therefore that we are shaping policy (with ramifications on economics, privacy and politics) based on poor statistical analysis. I'd recommend reading Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow if you're interested in understanding how irrational our minds are. http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/...
Anyway, I still can't believe we're trade partners with Japan. I mean, after all, Pearl Harbor?
The first sentence is a reference to getting old.