Why would he, when he authorized it? Not only did he strengthen Bush's anti-constitutional policies, he enacted new ones, like the NDAA which spits in the face of the constitution.
Because he has a new perspective on what unbridled data collection can render, not only with the hindsight of the Snowden debacle, but also because I am around 100% sure he didn't posit Mr. Trump as the future Head of State.
Maybe we should remember the words written in the founding document that precluded our noble country's separation from the English State:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men/women (language added by me) are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men/Women (same semantic addition), deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness
If one's right to privacy is being infringed upon, we are bound by this document to remind the powers that be that they are beyond their right to govern.
I think the initial thought is incredibly prescient, as Trump seems far more laissez-faire when it comes to moral governance than President Obama is and has been. Let's not put the cart before the horse, but let's also make sure the toys are all child proof before we hand them down, n'est-ce pas?
The program was in place before the current administration, and if there was a problem to solve from their perspective, it should have been solved long ago.
Not to you or your comment, but to the President that if he shuts down NSA programs in the final hour, then it would be arrogant indeed to have let them run for 8 years.
> Maybe we should remember the words written in the founding document that precluded our noble country's separation from the English State:
> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men/women (language added by me) are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Maybe we should also remember that most of the people who signed this document owned slaves.
It's whataboutism to remember - in response to a post about the "freedom" of the nascent and noble USA (that politicians these days of course just walk all over) - the historical reality that even some of the people who signed the Declaration Of Independence did not live by or rule by the ideals within the document?
It's pretty laughable, actually, that some people here are so thin skinned as to take issue with or dismiss actual facts, because they fly in the face of the fantasy version of history they want to believe.
I am simply saying while the chef who has been cooking with gas for the last eight years is still on the clock, why not ask him to write the prep list for the next shift?
I never defended mass surveillance, or advocated for any defense of it other than to cite how we are protected by the 4th amendment and our "unalienable" right to liberty as defined by the Dec.
Would you care to elaborate or are you simply trolling?
edit: I presume from the downvote that the latter is true. Oh well, so much for spirited debate.
Abuse of the downvote is commonplace here from people who lack the ability to form cogent rebuttals and/or lack the maturity to tolerate opinions or arguments they don't like or maybe just don't understand.
And apparently abuse of flagging happens here too. Flagging a post that simply stated a historical fact they want to pretend never happened, because it had so many upvotes it couldn't be buried in downvotes.
Fascism was all over the country a long time before recent events. I'm not a Trump supporter but assuming that this problem is something that should be of people's concern only now is just childish.
I've seen this comment in various guises over the last few days, and I struggle to understand what it's intended to accomplish.
If you think the problem is old news, that doesn't make it any less urgent to fix. It's like seeing firefighters arrive and tell them not to bother, because the house started burning hours ago.
I share your frustration, but the fact that people have waited too long makes it more urgent to get the work done now. Antagonizing the recently convinced doesn't help that goal.
It is a good a idea to reduce the damage surface now.
Conversely, that damage surface would be significantly smaller, and less of it would remain now that it can only be shut down in haste, had it been reduced back when the administration in charge was one that gave SV warm fuzzies.
This is absolutely true, but let us remember that the creepiest pervasive surveillance entity in SV is probably Palantir. I am sure that Obama did not give Peter Thiel warm fuzzies (based on his position on the Trump transition team) and yet they showed no sign of abatement during Obama's presidency.
I think it is foolish to think all of SV are allies of the people.
I think this might have been a hypothetical question on your part, but one name does stand out to me, and that's Tim Cook.
Consider that Trump was openly hostile toward Apple on the campaign trail, and that Tim Cook himself is gay, and the GOP establishment wants to roll back protections for LGBT+ individuals.
And consider Apple's vast war chest, which could really make a difference assuming Citizens United isn't overturned.
Wait, so unaccountable billionaires pouring money into politics is now a good thing all of a sudden? Between this and the 180 on surveillance I am getting serious whiplash.
No, billionaires pouring money into politics is not a good thing, but it is the status quo. As long as it's the status quo, I'd like to see that money being used to oppose autocracy. But I'd be happier to see money out of politics entirely.
And I really don't think there's been a 180 on surveillance. I think the only people who were supporting the surveillance apparatus were the same people of an authoritarian bent who are now supporting Trump.
You are seeing ideological inconsistency where there is none in an effort to make your political opponents appear as hypocrites.
It's intended to make people wake the fuck up and deal with problem(s) (next time) before it is too late, like it is now for this issue.
The saying goes "they went after group 'A' I didn't like, then after group 'B', now they're after me and I care. Well maybe if you 'A', and 'B' worked together against your common enemy instead of being selfish, short-sighted and stupid you wouldn't be fucked right now"
We are idiots and deserve everything that happens next 4 years.
Obama supporters were all for mass surveillance when it was their guy doing it. So it's more like the firefighters showed up hours ago and you told them not to put out the fire because it was only burning someone else's room.
> Obama supporters were all for mass surveillance when it was their guy doing it.
Not many of the Obama supporters I know.
Of course they were more willing to forgive it! That's going to be the case. Partly because humans don't like admitting they were wrong. Partly because it's legitimate to trade off issues against each other. Partly because we're introducing selection bias - if it's enough to turn you off Obama entirely, you're not an "Obama supporter".
But there's miles between overly generous forgiveness and support. It was commonly named as an area where they were disappointed in Obama.
And yet that disappointment didn't translate into voting for other candidates -- and I'm not talking about voting for Romney or Trump, there were plenty of other options the whole time -- so in the end it is of no value.
There are exactly 2 choices that are possible for any first-past-the-post voting system.
Change that (which I support) and we can talk 3rd parties.
I supported Sanders 2016 primary and his 2012 primary threat to Obama, after having voted for Obama in 2008. Once the options became Obama (and now Clinton), I voted for those simply because the alternative means more coal, less regulations, and more religious right.
No, that is to say they were not presented with the option to cast a meaningful vote for or against the surveillance state (in a general election) and so chose to use their vote to speak about other things.
No, the reason a third-party isn't a meaningful vote is because we have a voting system that means any vote for any but the two most-likely-to-win candidates has a basically zero chance of affecting the outcome. The reason these particular parties' candidates are the two most likely to win is, certainly, because everyone understands them to be the two most likely to win... but we don't fix that by simply pretending it's not the case.
This has always been one of my biggest fears as well.
IMHO this was the one thing that allowed the Nazis to create the kind of power structure they had. They spied on themselves to no end, bugging their own officers, hitler youth teaching children to spy and report on their parents.. everyone was afraid to speak out or step out of line no matter how bad it got.
It would be terrible to see these systems used as a method of control.
The Nazis were allowed to gain as much power as they did because they had a charismatic leader exploiting partisanship and economic insecurity with a unifying message blaming all ills on minorities.
It amazes me that journalists publish things like this with a straight face, then don't understand why nobody trusts the media.
"Well, sure, unconstitutional power grabs are tolerable when someone I like is in power, but this new guy is bad!" Yes, that's how it always works. That's explicitly the reason our government was designed the way it was. Why do educated people forget this every time "their guy" gets into power?
It's amazing how many articles I've seen in the last week by people suddenly finding limited-government religion.
When people campaign against the expansion of government powers, it's not because we're afraid that the Good Guys are going to abuse them, it's because we know that eventually the Bad Guys will.
I can point to 44, all of whom had the title "President of the United States of America." That's one of the fundamental reasons separation of powers was built into the constitution. The assumption was (correctly) that all people are corrupt and will abuse their power if left unchecked by other self-interested people who have equal power and opposing agendas.
So in addition to those 44, there are all the people who have had the titles "Representative," "Senator," and "Justice." Not a popular view today, I realize.
Please don't pretend that limited government is the same as checks and balances.
You can have a police state and limited government (a government that does little for its citizens) at the same time. And you can have an expansive welfare state with clear separation of powers (think Sweden).
It's not just journalists. I've had multiple, extended conversation with Ivy League educated, highly compensated, otherwise rational people about how burning it all down now for sure is preferable to potentially burning part of it down later.
There is a sickness in this country, and it is called partisanship. Its destructive power is more frightening than anything Trump could hope to do.
Its much more serious then partisanship. There is no real civilizational Ethose in America at this point.
Many of us tried to stop the growth of Neo consrvatism on the Right and now Identity politics on the Left because they are both reactionary civilizrtional poison.
But the hemlock was to sweet not to drink and everyone drunk.
Huh. Can you elaborate or point to something that talks about this culture shift away from "civilizational ethos" in detail? Obviously I'm familiar with what identity politics and neo conservatism are, but I'd like to read more about the point you're making.
I'm not a Political Scientist or even particularly well read on the subject. But 'The Clash of civilizations', by Huntington Is a fairly standard big picture view.
America is unfortunately now immersed in tribalism. Those who should be trying to reverse the trend such as the media and Intellectuals have embraced tribalism as much as the rest. There is no civilisation that can withstand the forces of tribalism.
The breakup of Yugoslavia is an informative example of how a state collapses when ethos is replaced with tribalism.
I've been hearing very good things about The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (https://www.amazon.com/dp/0374533229/) by Fukuyama (yes, I know, I know, but I guess he learned something after The End of History). It and Clash of Civilizations are on my near term to read list.
But note that this majority is being told in triumphant terms that they will be a minority within their children's lives, and that's already true of live births.
So why not join the game of identity politics now?
It's not a game. It's a serious problem of centuries of oppression, the worst things the United States has done.
Issues of discrimination against minorities are not about a zero-sum competition between teams identified by their skin color, but about reducing centuries-long oppression and physical brutality, from society to the job market to law enforcement, against certain groups.
The majority has the institutions of government to protect it: They can call the police, sue, and vote out politicians they don't like. They can get into colleges, get jobs in SV or in the Senate.
The experiences aren't perfect, but to conceive of it as a competition between races is deceitful and inflammatory of our most dangerous instincts -- instincts that have a clear track record of slavery, lynching, and very widespread oppression. Frankly, it is encouraging evil.
There are scope issues, e.g. one thing almost all hold to not be acknowledged as an inalienable right in the 2nd Amendment is possession of weapons of mass destruction.
Compare to the implicit scopes of the 4th Amendment, which I'll quote in full:
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.
Many have argued that these pervasive dragnet surveillance systems axiomatically violate the 4th Amendment by their scope alone ("particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized"), which akin to the much, much greater scope of WMDs vs. the arms of infantrymen.
Although this domain is a lot more nuanced, e.g. metadata is pretty universally held not to be protected like data, but what about mass collection of metadata?
I whole-heartedly agree. I wasn't making a serious argument either for preserving the domestic surveillance or against the second amendment. I just found the wording amusing, and I wanted to get people thinking about the distinctions you spell out.
You say that, but I'm not sure what gives a government organization the agency to own and maintain such weapons, either. It all seems to come down to "might makes right" and we know that isn't true. So the whole argument goes right out the window, then.
What makes the US Government so special that it should be armed with world-ending nuclear weapons? How is a large bureaucracy somehow better than say a private corporation or even an individual in that regard? There is no answer...
How about starting with something like "The Constitution is not a suicide pact"?
It's certainly a serious argument for a strong, in this domain, serious central government. I don't think anything in federalism besides the usual political stuff applies.
And that "usual political stuff" is where this government gets it moral legitimacy, which partly addresses your point, especially when we strip away ludicrous hyperbole like "world-ending" (maybe your world would end, but things would remain largely unchanged for perhaps half the world's population, and not severely changed for a very large fraction of the rest; the world is big, and we are small).
And while "might makes right" might not settle well with your moral tastes, operationally, might rules. Otherwise, you might be counting yourself lucky to be speaking Russian. But not needing to speak Punic.
Did the media or Time in particular ever advocate mass surveillance? Pretty sure they've been railing against it for years. We wouldn't even know about it without the NY Times exposing Bush's Stellar Wind. They're just placing a new urgency on it now that our President-elect has promised to grossly abuse it.
No, they are placing an urgency on it now that a candidate they do not approve of will be assuming power. If Hillary had won I seriously doubt you would see one article about it except from sources derided as right wing.
So the NY Times went after it under Bush, maybe this country just needs Republican Administrations just so the press will do their damn job. They certainly got silent for most of eight years.
maybe this country just needs Republican Administrations just so the press will do their damn job
Many people have been making the point that for this reason, for the foreseeable future the Presidency must be limited to white male Republicans ^_^.
Seriously, for more than a generation pretty much all capital and lower case 'c' constitutional checks and balances utterly fail if that's not the case.
> So the NY Times went after it under Bush ... They certainly got silent for most of eight years.
The evidence does not bear this out. The NY Times also 'went after it' under Obama, publishing Snowden's and Manning's leaks for example. They also broke the story on Clinton's email server, which probably cost her the election eventually.
If I were more ambitious, I'd love to see meta-analyses investigating questions like this. Given the tools we now have available, it's likely more a question of figuring out how to design the experiments. Might even be useful for the organizations themselves.
I'm not so naive as to think anyone is free of bias. Best we can do is be aware of them and build processes that guard against our biases from negatively influencing our desired goals. This might be one tool in that tool box.
This isn't a journalist. It's an opinion piece written by an activist.
Please show where this activist writes in support of the NSA programs in the past.
Even if there were such a thing as homogenous left: I believe the number of people from the left defending these programs has been pretty short for as long as I can remember.
Please show where I said anything about "support of the NSA programs in the past."
Please show where I said anything about the "left".
This is a problem that both democrats and republicans suffer from. Remember when the PATRIOT Act was proposed and enacted? Most democrats thought it was an unbelievably unconstitutional overreach that would be the end of the world, and republicans mostly saw it as a necessary tool that didn't even really have any constitutional concerns worth mentioning. Magically these perspectives flipped when Obama got into power. This happens every single time.
*I would also note that journalists' "tolerance" for the NSA programs over the last 8 years is essentially tacit support. Nearly all of the network media's coverage of the NSA issues over the last few years has been centered on whether the effectiveness of the programs justify their existence. There has been virtually no network condemnation of these programs based on their illegality and unconstitutionality, whereas that was a major focus from 2001 to 2007.
> Magically these perspectives flipped when Obama got into power.
Can you provide evidence of this? I know a lot of Democrats, and I don't remember any of them ever saying a positive word about the PATRIOT Act. Certainly, those actually in power are always reluctant to give it up. But I haven't seen that applying to their supporters in the particular example you cite.
How about this from none less than Senator Feinstein of California. She also happens to have been the head of the senate intelligence committee which is supposed to hold the intelligence departments accountable. They (CIA, NSA, FBI, etc.) always ask for more powers, it's her job (and the job of the entire committee) to protect Americans and their privacy and protection under the law.
Feinstein voted to support the initial passage of the PATRIOT Act, and voted to reauthorize in 2006. She's been on the same (IMO wrong, but YMMV) side of this since the get-go.
You and I must have been living in alternate realities. The furor over the Snowden leaks was extreme. The calls for President Obama to shut down the NSA were primarily from the far left. The article count of NSA-critical articles from NYT and the Washington Post vastly outnumbered those from conservative news organizations, such as Fox News and the Drudge Report (admittedly an aggregator).
If you perform an internet search for "Pardon Snowden", the vast majority of these articles arise from publications traditionally associated with Democratic Party support.
I remember some milquetoast grumbling about the USA-PATRIOT Act from various publications on both the right and the left, but the quantity of outrage was far greater after the Snowden leaks.
In the top 10 results, you'll see various "MSM" news sources. The sole defender of the NSA programs comes from The National Review, a (high-quality) conservative newspaper.
I'm not trying to use "gotcha!" commenting, but I think it is grossly misstates the position of most left-wing folks to push this flip-flop theory.
I will readily admit that flip-flopping happens all the time about other matters but I have not witnessed it at all with this one.
On the matter of NSA surveillance being abused by President-elect Trump, I consider it extremely unlikely. I consider the left's fear to be based off of a failure by the government to communicate the programs effectively to the press.
I just read the the first 5 results of your google link. There isn't any outrage in any of them. They are actually fairly unbiased news reports about court rulings on the illegality of various NSA programs, not opinion pieces criticizing the programs. The post that we're discussing is an opinion piece, and my comments were about opinion pieces. There is no dispute that there has been an incredible amount of news coverage of state surveillance since the Assange, Manning, and Snowden leaks.
Frankly, given how news is now consumed, it's very possible we're living in alternate realities. The PATRIOT outrage I was referring to was circa 2002. Where I lived, the media reported vociferous outrage from democrats and nonchalance from republicans. Since "Obama" has wielded--and greatly expanded--the state's surveillance powers, I have not heard anywhere near the same objection from democrats. (Note that I say "Obama" because I have no idea whether and to what extent he has actually overseen the NSA's actions; its entirely possible much of these programs have been hidden from the executive branch for decades, which is frankly much more worrisome).
The few polls i just looked at seem to back up this flip-flop:
[1] http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jun/12/news/la-pn-republica... ["With President Obama in the White House, Democrats stand in support of the NSA’s methods, 49% to 40% in the Gallup survey. Republicans were opposed 63% to 32%. When President George W. Bush was in office, Republicans were supportive of government surveillance efforts and Democrats opposed."]
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/06/12/poll-... ["Interestingly, the most intense opposition to the programs comes from the political right. Republicans disapprove of the program by almost a 2 to 1 margin. Independents disapprove, 56 to 34 percent. But 49 percent of Democrats approve of the program, compared with 40 percent who disapprove."]
I don't share your believe that Trump won't seek to use surveillance for his own purposes. Not because I think he's a horrible person, but simply because people use the tools at their disposal, especially in times of stress or emergency. Of course, the president of the U.S. deals with nothing but stress and emergencies.
Finally, I don't think anyone's fear is based off a failure to communicate the programs effectively. If the programs were wildly successful, those successes would be publicized by now. The NSA needs some good publicity. By the way, negative publicity the NSA can't avoid is largely its own fault. It's current slogan is "Your Data: If You Have Nothing to Hide, You Have Nothing to Fear" https://nsa.gov1.info/data/ I'm not sure you could come up with a more Orwellian slogan if you tried.
It was long enough for the Democratic president to be comfortable to keep running them and for the Democratic candidate to make no mention I've heard of to change them.
And it won't change until the tune changes from "we need to keep all-powerful government from the hands of people who disagree with us" to "we need to have less of all-powerful government, no matter who runs it".
One reason is that for a substantial subset of these people, they imagine they'll be one of the commissars, instead of one of the anonymous bodies in a ditch.
Evan and FFTF have been actively working against NSA spying under the Obama administration.
The EFF and EPIC, which have been around longer, has worked against NSA spying under the Obama, Bush II, Clinton, and Bush I organizations; the ACLU, all of the above and more.
I love however how the left suddenly rediscovers the dangers of unlimited government power and benefits of limited government powers. Too bad it won't last.
When it was possibly used against the people they did not like then it was acceptable. Now when it may become after them has it suddenly become a problem. How pathetic.
I also can not say that many have not warned against this scenario. Something, something about not standing up.
It was never acceptable to many of us. But the threat of unbridled autocracy was less present under Obama than it will be under Trump, for the reasons stated in the article. It is possible to oppose these programs with some but not utmost urgency, and then be catapulted into utmost urgency by an event such as a minority of the voters electing a fascist.
> But the threat of unbridled autocracy was less present under Obama than it will be under Trump.
The creation of the laws is the creation of the autocratic power. The temperment of who ever is in power at a particular point is irrelivent. By creating the law you automatically open the door to use those laws.
Agreed, and I opposed the Bush expansion of executive powers and the Obama expansion of executive powers. Perhaps not everyone has been ideologically consistent throughout this process but there are those of us who have.
And as you have pointed out, the major difference is temperament. Obama has not exhibited a temperament that has led me to believe he would use these powers to round up run-of-the-mill opposition. Trump's opposition to protests and potential unwillingness to concede an electoral loss leads me to believe he would mobilize the executive apparatus into dictatorship, unlike Obama or Bush before him.
Good, there are not many who have evaded the grips of the partisan blob.
Each side takes credit for the same national security policy wrapped in different language and each side pushes the policy a little father. The perfection of the total surveillance state with unlimited Presidential power is truly the bipartisan crown jewel that the Washington consensus wants.
Its a dramatic picture but maybe people need to be scared out of there apathy at this point.
> The creation of the laws is the creation of the autocratic power
That isn't true in the U.S. system: Laws are created democratically, are subject to other laws (in the Constitution, conflicting laws, court rulings), and the actor's (e.g. the President's) power is limited by the law itself, other laws, institutions, and other branches of government. Furthermore, many laws remove or constrain power, such as those in the Bill of Rights.
Ah, but it is acceptable to the majority for Apple & Google, and now, with a vengance, MS. Or the ISPs and telecoms. Or the IoTs. But not for the guv, unless a 'good guy' is in charge.
I think the majority doesn't think of this at all. And for many of us, it was never acceptable for Apple, Google, MS, the telecoms, or IoT products to do this either. That's why many of us use FOSS and encrypt everything and use VPNs to mitigate these companies' access to our data.
You, like many others in this thread, are trying to point out hypocrisy and ideological inconsistencies where there are none, as some sort of "gotcha" so you can justify the belief that your political opponents are somehow worse than you are.
I apologize, my post was out-of-line and misdirected. I too participate in the FOSS community, recently upgraded my N900 to a N4 w/ CM rom and retired from moonlighting as a PC tech 2 years back b/c Apple's geniuses will fix it for free & I could no longer protect my Windows customers' interests from data thieves(IMO) like Apple, Google, every SaaS under the sun... Windows was fairly easy to harden & idiot-proof until MS jumped on the spyware wagon w/ a vengence... cannot fix what is broken at the core.
To explain my chagrin, the problem I have witnessed over the last 15 years is there are huge inconsistencies in peoples' daily choices and the providers know all the right buttons to push to increase adoption and use highly specialized marketing, over-verbose ToS's and NDA's to evade scrutiny. Lobbyists and "Privacy Committes" make new laws to make previously illegal practices now legal.Your willingness to curtail noe or be less concerned based on whom is currently collecting is a perfect example(IMO) of rationalizing choices. Every(sic) service provider now treats data collection as a part of any standard business model. Ever read Gmail's ToS? As far as I have seen, it is the only ToS that states plainly in the first paragraphs exactly what they are doing. And yet, informed people rationalize that choice for a variety of reasons.
NSA surveillance, while terrible, is also kind of a red herring.
The bigger risk to people is the enormous pile of data at large Internet companies and ISPs which any government would find useful in implementing a policy of mass deportation or "extreme vetting".
NSA has legal and institutional barriers on domestic surveillance. These are damaged, but still exist. What private industry collects is completely unregulated and far broader in scope.
Those institutional barriers are less effective in the face of those who do not respect them, and/or feel that disregarding them serves greater ideological goals. Couple this with both of the other branches of government being in the hands of political allies, and the normal system of checks and balances is no longer present.
It is a fearful recipe. The calculus pre-Trump wherein corporations were considered threats as you described has changed: now the government is far, far more dangerous.
You know, I think the danger in partisan labels is that we are labeling ourselves. When that happens, we shut down big pieces of our brains and morality.
But that's ok, because those other people did it in days gone by. Such hypocrites, they. What I do today is just a response, and I'm better than them.
Do you see the world so narrowly? Which "they" is it you speak of? The voices that have protested these programs are many and loud. The separate existence of partisans does not change that.
Again I ask: who are you talking about? Just because someone supports a candidate does not mean that they support all of what that candidate believes. Frequently, they even oppose those stances, and actively work to change them. Not everyone is a partisan.
If you're going to support the candidate no matter what, why should the candidate care what your opinions are? They have your vote already. Candidates will only care about your opinion on surveillance if you're willing to deny them your vote over the issue.
I suspect that it is this (somewhat cynical) line of thinking that cost Hillary the election. Successful politics is about coalition building. Maintaining and expanding those coalitions means following through on those promises.
Or she didn't realize that what had worked for Obama, who's often cross that he even had to deal with the Congress, even when it was Democratic, and very famously went for a narrow but very deep Get Out The Vote (GOTV) strategy, wouldn't necessarily work for her.
I voted for Clinton. I would have been very concerned by mass surveillance still if she were President-elect now, and I would have advocated major reforms or removal of domestic surveillance programs just the same. Stop making things so black and white. Mass domestic surveillance is bad, whoever is doing it.
Liberals have always spoken out against these programs. One example is Apple under Tim Cook's leadership actually getting into legal fights with the federal government.
And you know who exploited that episode for his own gain, called for a boycott of and criminal prosecution of Apple? Yeah, that guy.
You know, libertarians have been saying for a long time that it's best to keep government as local as possible, so you could choose how you wanted to live, and live that way to the greatest extent possible, without having to worry about what happened in other states or in the federal election. You decide how you want to live and others can decide how they want to live.
Liberals responded with a policy of moving as much power to Washington as possible, explicitly to enforce a policy of, No, we will decide how everyone lives, and enforce it federally to minimize others' ability to escape our reach.
Libertarians have been saying that judges should do their best to interpret the meaning of the legislators, so that whatever laws we had would be those written by legislators elected by the people. Liberals said, No, we want judges to interpret laws to mean what they ought to have said if they people had done as we wanted, so that the laws will be what the political elite want them to be, regardless of what the know-nothing rabble choose for themselves. So now, we have the precedent established and argued for for years from the left that the law is what the court wants it to be, not what the people said. Nice work.
All along, those promoting local government rather than central, unescapable authority have been derided as fascists by liberals. Now the chickens come home to roost. Do you think now that maximizing and centralizing and moving out of reach as much power as possible was a good idea? No? Want to change it? Why didn't you in all the years you were in power and advocated the opposite, because now you've turned that power over to another group. It didn't have to be this way, but you wouldn't stop. Probably still won't and will instead just fight to regain control.
For starters, there is no united group known as "liberals" whom either of us can speak on behalf of, but I will indulge you and also speak in generalizations.
Liberals do not arbitrarily support "moving as much power to Washington as possible". Rather, they believe strongly that human rights should be dispensed equally to everyone in the country. If abortion is a right, then being born in Texas shouldn't deprive a woman of that right any more than being born in the south in the 19th century should've deprived blacks of their freedom. Similar arguments can be made for gay marriage, miscegenation laws, female suffrage, the availability of healthcare for the poor, quality education, etc.
There's nothing whatsoever baked into the liberal ideology that supports things like domestic spying and warrantless wiretaps. Rather, the better explanation is any branch of government (in this case the executive branch) is incentivized to increase its own power, and people tend to be biased in favor of their party's presidents. But I've met countless pro-Snowden liberals, and I think you've really mischaracterized the essence of what makes liberals liberal.
You're skirting around his point. American liberals don't just believe in human rights for everyone in the country--they have embraced using a strong centralized government and its court system as the way of enforcing those rights. But the side-effect of that is taking away autonomy and independence from the states, which leaves states less capable of opposing centralized surveillance.
Liberals may not want surveillance, but they helped create the power structure that enables surveillance as a byproduct of pursing end goals they do want. I think the benefits of that approach far outweigh the drawbacks, but it's important to acknowledge the drawbacks. If you give the central government more power so it can achieve X, you have to be aware of the possibility that it will use its power to also do Y.
Both parties have been complicit in creating the power structure that enables surveillance - it's certainly is not something new. It has been growing ever since WWII and supported by both parties. Neither party wants to be seen as anti-military, and a lot of the technology used for domestic spying originated in the military (or as off shoots of the military). Saying that liberals created that power structure is disingenuous.
Exactly. It's totally inaccurate to blame our domestic spying apparatus on liberal initiatives to protect human rights. It's the inevitable result of fearful citizens on both sides of the aisle ceding their rights in response to war, terrorism, and foreign enemies.
I fail to see how civil rights legislation or Loving v Virginia allowed the creation of the NSA.
It appears that most surveillance programs are operated under the foreign intelligence and/or defense umbrella, a part of government that has been centralized longer than the country itself exists.
I'd also like to see a few examples of states vigorously opposing these programs. I mean – so many of them are willing to overstep their authority when it comes to hot-button issues such as the widespread voter fraud that some must have tried to get creative to stop surveillance, right?
Point taken. But I'm not sure that liberals (myself included) embraced centralized government for its own sake. It could have been a simple matter of opportunism: If your state won't budge on rights, and the central government will, then the central government becomes the way to expand rights.
Likewise, I'm not sure conservatives really care so much about decentralized government, but are opportunistic about the effectiveness of influencing state and local governments.
An interesting aside is that in my state, the (nominally) conservative state government is enacting laws saying what kinds of ordinances the cities are not allowed to pass. A piece of land not far from my house was declared by the state to be exempt from local zoning.
So I think the preference for central or local government power is a matter of opportunism that is chosen on a situational basis.
The continued use of the term "Liberals" is problematic to my agreeing with some of your otherwise valid points.
If you split the Left-wing into the authoritarian (Clinton/DLC and unfortunately, Obama) and libertarian (ie, Sanders/Warren), you'll see why most of your complaints irk those of us who agree with right-libertarians on lots of points.
There are many good 2-dimension alignment indicators and tests, but the one you linked to is not one of them. It was very obviously written by someone who considers themselves 'left libertarian', and most of the questions (and answers) are written with implicit biases. They use words like 'rights' and 'trust' to construct what some (myself included) consider false choices.
What is a court system for, if not enforcing a party's rights? Why would you chose fifty long, hard fights over one long, hard fight?
Ironically, libertarians seem pretty happy to stay in the US despite all their wailing and gnashing of teeth, and despite there being a variety of places with low centralised government in the world (some of them are quite nice).
> Liberals may not want surveillance, but they helped create the power structure
Ah, they 'helped' create it. Not 'created' it, but merely 'helped'. Even though you can't even say that they did it themselves, you're more than willing to just blame them for it. It's bizarre how 'liberal' is a derogatory term in the US.
Some of what you outlined aren't rights. Some are really issues of equal protection under the law. Sometimes political groups try to mischaracterize these issue as rights but they are overextending.
I absolutely agree with this premise philosophically, but history speaks against it sometimes.
Civil rights are a great example. Minorities living in the south during Jim Crow were always legally allowed to move north to freer states that wouldn't discriminate against them. But they didn't. Mostly because they were economically and informatively suppressed to the point where they no longer possessed free movement - either they could not afford the cost, or did not know the option existed through intentional disinformation.
The same applies today, for everything from legalized cannabis, to right to die, to bathroom law, to abortion availability and rights, to gay marriage before the supreme court decision. People who are oppressed by hostile local legislation still choose to stay, often because they don't have a choice.
But that is fairly black and white, and reality really isn't. The more interesting, and I think where the liberal argument gets its support more than anything, is in those who have the choice but have to weigh their options. It is an awful situation to be in to decide between gaining rights and leaving everything you know behind. People really resist leaving their homes, in all definitions of the term. There is resistance to leaving your parents house. To leaving your hometown. To leaving your home culture. And that resistance often defeats people who would, objectively, and purely analytically, be better served just leaving.
But that is 20/20 hindsight showing itself. At the time, these people do not know what might happen. They have to weigh the risks. And there is a tremendous natural human aversion to risk. It drives millions of people who would be more prosperous - economically, personally, etc - to stay where they are and not take what they perceive and weigh as unnecessary risk.
A lot of this is a problem of the times. The more opportunity you have in your destination the lower the risk of moving there. Opportunity, in aggregate, is at generational lows today in the US. It suppresses mobility, and that generational lack of opportunity and thus promotion of conservative decisions regarding your own prosperity and rights creates the environment for top-down policy to centralize authority over the whole, to use a wide brush to direct ideology than letting people chose their own. Because in practice, many people cannot make that choice, objectively or as a product of their own uncertainty, and the liberal wing that pushes centralized power to assert their beliefs see that people suffer in conditions they wouldn't need to if they had perfect information and had no emotional baggage holding them back from seizing opportunity.
Distributing power, localizing governance, and making it as democratic as possible in the process is the path to maximal liberty and happiness. But it requires that people actually take advantage of that opportunity. If you build it, how are they to come if they don't know its there?
> Minorities living in the south during Jim Crow were always legally allowed to move north
Rights are not services sold in the free market, matched up by supply and demand. They are universal and inalienable. Whether they move or not, those people were 100% entitled to their rights and to a government that protected them. That's why governments are instituted among men and women.
It is important to note that RIGHTS differ from POWER; I as an individual whom has a libertarian philosophy say "limit the federal government, not the people" and I know what that implies; A federal government of which its power is limited to adherence of the US Constitution, Article 1 Section 8; Dr. King fought for a uniformity of African-American Civil Rights through out the united states, so he is a perfect example of the power individuals have when it comes to RIGHTS: Now we get in more gray areas like abortion maybe it can become a right to abort through out the united states, or maybe not, but that is not to say that states cannot deal with the issue; it gets messy when government starts to PAY for such programs through the POWER it has from taxing people that it becomes messy; if that is the case states have the right to both make it a RIGHT and to use its POWER to pay for such programs; now for the federal government, whether it goes through the legislative branch, or not, it becomes UNCONSTITUTIONAL if and only when the POWER to TAX is used to pay for such programs (back to Article 1 Section 8), but if it simply becomes a RIGHT to abort without imposing state sponsored programs (which would be abuse at this point) then it is not unconstitutional.
Long live the constitution!
I really ought to know better by now, but I'll bite.
> libertarians have been saying for a long time that it's best to keep government as local as possible, so you could choose how you wanted to live
... and maximize the reach of the market, which is more global than any government on Earth, and in practice works in the opposite way: organize your life around making yourself useful to those with money, fast, or you will starve. If that means uprooting your family and moving someplace where you can work yourself to an early grave in the coal mines, so be it. If that means neglecting your duty as sherriff and looking the other way while the company machine-guns striking workers, so be it. If that means giving blowjobs to strangers on the street, So. Be. It. Such liberty! Very freedom.
> Libertarians have been saying that judges should do their best to interpret the meaning of the legislators
... unless they're striking down regulations that are a result of government overreach, which is quite OK.
Every corner of the political spectrum accuses judges of judicial activism precisely when the rulings don't go their way. It's like complaining about the referee in sports, except easier, because laws for society are much more complicated than the rules for sports, which are complicated enough. Yesterday's legislators and their laws agreed with each other about as well as today's legislators and their laws, which is to say "not at all," so everyone has a claim to the judicial activism argument and everyone uses it when they want to sound insightful but don't want to expose themselves to the risks of talking specifics. Yawn.
> All along, those promoting local government rather than central, unescapable authority have been derided as fascists by liberals.
That usually happens when local government is being especially asinine -- buying their police department tanks, targeting minorities, making poverty illegal, making protests illegal, etc. Local != benevolent. Local != escapable, either, because opinions and incentives tend to be highly correlated between communities, so even if it is worth it to up and move you'll find that every other "local" government is doing the same damn thing. Options without choice. Something that should be all too familiar to free-marketeers ;)
> Now the chickens come home to roost. Do you think now that maximizing and centralizing and moving out of reach as much power as possible was a good idea?
Even if we wanted, an option to federate power was never really on the ballot. All parties want power, that's why they seek it. Everyone thinks they are right, or else they would change their opinion, and everyone wants (reasonably) to fight for what is right. Show me a politician who wants to devolve power and I'll show you a liar. They may not know it yet, especially if they've never won power, but it's true.
When a reporter drives out into what they think of as "hicksville" looking for a quote that can be ginned up into a big story[0], that is one thing. When the subject of the story has to close up shop due to death threats for holding a position on gay marriage held by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton circa 2009, now we're shading into that "will decide how everyone lives" territory.
> libertarians have been saying for a long time that it's best to keep government as local as possible
Libertarians have in practice spent far more time trying to remove as much power from government as possible and handing it to corporations[1]. This strategy is either very naive or based on self interest, because it doesn't actually address the concentration of power; it only moves it to a different group of people.
The way to manage power is to spread it out as much as possible, subject to as many self interest based checks and balances as possible. Neither governments or corporations[2] can be allowed to "win", because it is the struggle itself that keeps power restrained to a necessary minimum. The system fails without both: corporations need to use their money and influence to push back against government overreach, and governments need to use their various powers to regulate the corporate world.
> those written by legislators elected by the people
That's what the judges are addressing, because it isn't always clear what those laws actually say, especially in ambiguous situations that didn't exist when the law was written.
> we want judges to interpret laws to mean what they ought to have said
Yes, which is necessary because the law isn't magically unambiguous. How else do you think we should interpret the law in ambiguous or unforeseen situations? Also, remember that the legislature - the people that were elected by the people - can simply override judicial interpretation at any time.
> the laws will be what the political elite want them to be
That problem happens anyway. The branch of government used is simply whichever is currently convenient. This is an orthogonal problem (that needs to be addressed).
> Liberals responded with a policy of moving as much power to Washington as possible
You are seeing what you want to see, which seems to have led to some very creative misinterpretations of how government works.
Instead of following the politics of fear and blaming a very large group of your fellow citizens, I suggest trying to find ways we can work together to dilute power away from "the political elite". A lot of people will try to distract from this idea with suggestions that prey on fear and ignorance to simply move power around, so this will require a lot of effort, vigilance, and sometimes a sacrifice. That cost, unfortunately, is the price of liberty, but it's a manageable cost if it keeps power form concentrating in the hands of the few.
[1] and the people, but most of the time the capital to actually take advantage of the power vacuum is usually held by corporations.
[2] the people (and things that serve the people directly like trade unions and civil rights orgs) are, of course, also involved as a check on the other two groups.
Ah, yes, those evil liberals and their centralising ways. Never mind that conservatives have, in actuality, done more centralising than liberals have.
Also, can you give some examples of "deciding how everyone lives"? What have liberals actually put in place in the US that curtail what people can do, that isn't in the name of freeing up part of the population (such as anti-discrimination law). What are some actual examples of federal liberal enforced monoculture in the US?
There is something to be said about how this went past "urgent" into "emergency response / recovery" sometime before the Snowden leaks (prompting the Snowden leaks). Odd that there is an attitude surrounding this akin to (not just telling firefighters not to bother as you said elsewhere in thread) but, "The house is already on fire, clearly that means we shouldn't care about putting it out. If it was a real priority to not have a building on fire why is it clearly on fire? Also let's build some very flammable houses next door."
People's lives have already been ruined by the inability of the government to secure the sensitive data it collects (see: OPM breach). That's pretty much the end-of-the-line in terms of damage assessment. Let's just try to do it better.
This was one of the reasons why Hillary lost. It WASN'T ok that Obama got, expanded and strengthened it. Still today come to light uses and misuses of it under current administration. And Hillary would had kept that trend for sure. It is one of the things that should change, and for sure she wouldn't do that.
Yes, Trump could make things even worse, or not. Is not the same people that actually set things as it was in the last years, unless the people behind both sides on this is the same, of course.
In any case, shutting down/disabling/destroying all dangerous things that US may have in stock or running now (nuclear, cyber, biological, foreign interventionism/destabilization and so on) that the narrative on Trump could misuse could finally give some meaning to Obama's Nobel prize.
I extremely doubtful that an "on the way out" president would be able/allowed to do that. Hell he can't even get a SCOTUS nomination appointed, a constitutional power.
It's the same reason you don't keep a loaded gun in your night-stand when you've got a 5 year old. Immense power to defend your home is a good thing... but that's probably not what's going to happen.
We're having a close call. We just caught the child peeking into the drawer and got a quick education on why certain powers should be kept safely locked up by the constitution. Even if it makes them a bit harder to use when we "really need them".
Like Calexit, this proposal is so unrealistic as to be unserious and not worth discussing.
What is needed now are technologies of resistance. We need the private sector companies who essentially built this monster to give us the tools to render it nugatory. Not only is that the only way forward, but they owe us that.
Unbelievable hypocrites. It was fine during Obama but somehow he needs to shut it down because they all despise Trump ? no it was shameful back then and it should have never existed.
HN really does have a soft spot for scathing denunciations of the SIGINT Enterprise written by people who have absolutely no clue what the Enterprise does, how it does it, why it does it, and the results consistently delivered.
It's very interesting to me. I get that this is an EFF-friendly crowd, and attitudes here skew hard toward the maximalist end of civil liberties. But the fact that articles like this continually get upvotes is a bit embarrassing to our community, isn't it?
I second your parent comment's request for you to write that here. (please take the 4 point karma hit, as it will be downvoted.)
This place is as good as any. If you're really worried about the backlash (from HN) you (or 'someone') could reply under a throwaway, detailing those thoughts and arguments.
>Why don't you present an actual argument in support of "SIGINT Enterprise" instead?
I guess the short version would be that it provides the overwhelming majority of the actionable intelligence that drives both national strategy and tactical decision-making. Also that virtually all "domestic collection" is collection on foreign adversaries whose comms include at least some American selectors, which is a very, very different proposition from using national-level SIGINT platforms to engage domestic targets.
I can't provide tangible examples to people who aren't read-in, and thus my argument ultimately rests on a very annoying appeal to authority, i.e., "If you were privy to what I know, you'd agree with me." I get how problematic that argument is, but in this case I think it actually is true. I wish there were a way that I could get around this quandary, but there really isn't.
Sorry -- I know that the above is probably not convincing to >90% of the HN community. But it's my honest opinion.
How can I get myself blacklisted from intelligence work so that I can be my normal weird self without being read into anything, ever? Also while retaining the right and ability to be extremely critical on forums like this one, while using all of the actually-public information (i.e. what has been published by the New York Times.)
I'm artistic and write and do lots of stuff under all sorts of pseudonyms, I travel, I want to directly engage the Chinese government on better IP laws, I want to directly do all sorts of stuff that would be way too suspicious or off limits if I had anything to do with intelligence - all without meeting your qualification for what are "comms with at least some Americans" or whatever. I just want to stay on the free side. I'm an American and foreign dual citizen.
I get the argument for why people who work with intelligence need to be held to a different standard and arguably have fewer freedoms than people outside of it. I just want to stay on the other, civilian or outsider side of that line. How do I do that (other than not agreeing to that work)?
This is an issue that is coming up for me and I am seriously thinking of paying some psychologist to say that I have some kind of specific tourrette's syndrome where if I'm recruited for any kind of conspiracy/intelligence "community"/whatever is on the other side of that curtain, I spasm out, and then just going ahead and pretending to do that if it ever happens.
Please give me specific actionable steps I can take. I don't want to change my attitude or habits. By the way, when intelligence agencies (don't know which ones, may not even be US) read my writing or what I'm doing, they have actually physically gotten the wrong idea. Which is fine, I don't care - they didn't bother me. It's their job to stay invisible and out of civilians' hair.
but I am not going to change my attitude or behavior. I'm an American as well and I think I certainly have the freedom not to participate in any institution I didn't sign up for explicitly. America isn't a police state. I don't have to watch what I say, certainly privately or anonymously, in case some bureaucrat gets the wrong idea.
I don't want to live in an Orwellian nightmare. I wanted to show you another commenter who raise a similar concern, but couldn't find it. He talked about how stifling and restrictive it was to work on some generic (not even secret) government contract, where they couldn't even do basic things like travel without announcing it exactly etc etc.
Anyway in this comment I am asking specifically how I can disqualify myself. What would keep someone from being read into anything, ever, or joining the intelligence "community". (Obviously this is just speculation, I'm just interested in your idea.)
I think you're safe, friend -- you don't get read into anything without making the proactive decision to join the intelligence community. Not really something that happens inadvertently.
haha, all right. Hey if I get killed for going to some dictatorship on my own and not belonging to the intelligence community but somebody thinks I am, I'll have that on my tombstone, and it'll be your fault, ya jerk. :)
Thanks for helping me make my point. It's really unfortunate that such a large part of the HN community responds this way against anyone who dares stray from the "Snowden is a hero" party line.
You've failed to argue your point completely. All you can say is that your infringements of the Constitution are very, very important, and you know this because you yourself are very, very important. Acknowledging that you've committed a fallacy doesn't mean anyone should believe you.
You seem to know a lot about US SIGINT. Please excuse my assumption. Let me guess: your actual employer and title are too important for the plebeians to know?
I don't understand all of the fighting in this thread. I don't understand why people are acting like every liberal was on board with these policies until the election. It's simply not accurate.
Two groups of people who completely agree that mass surveillance is a bad thing will go at each other's throats about _when_ the other speaks up about it needing to be dismantled. You're on the same fucking side and chances are, if you actually believe that mass surveillance is bad, you've both been at least mildly against it the whole time.
The expansion of surveillance powers under Obama was probably _the most_ consistently cited dissatisfaction amongst HN contributors one, four, and six years ago. Threads critical of these policies were consistently on the home page during the Obama presidency. Security and privacy conscious individuals on the left and right agreed. The top thread at the moment mocks liberals: "Well, sure, unconstitutional power grabs are tolerable when someone I like is in power…" but that straw man simply isn't in line with reality, not on this forum at least.
More broadly, yes, masses of people have given up their privacy. Go talk to them, stop bitching at people who agree with you.
> I don't understand why people are acting like every liberal was on board with these policies until the election.
As a libertarian, I agree. Many liberals have opposed these policies. I think even Glenn Greenwald may have or may still identify as a liberal.
However, every person I know who self-identifies as a "Democrat" and not a "liberal", has supported "all" of Obama's policies (including mass surveillance), and has condemned Snowden in the strongest terms. There are a few of those on HN, but I agree that by far most HNers oppose mass surveillance (unless there's a large "hidden" segment as is apparently the case with Trump supporters, who have come out en masse on HN in the past few days).
I know a lot of people who identify as a "Democrat", few who can't find things to nitpick about any given candidate (including Obama). I'm surprised our experiences are as different as you describe. Probably presentation is different when discussing with people they view as allies versus those they view as opposition?
You're probably right, had I probed enough I probably could have found policy they disagreed with. But on surveillance/national security stuff, the self-identified Democrats I know have stood staunchly behind Obama, and view Snowden as a traitor. It's kind of odd how much like most Republicans they sound when talking about these issues (not counting pro-liberty Republicans like Rand Paul, who view these issues like a libertarian would).
Being against surveillance and considering Snowden a traitor are not mutually exclusive; one can be pro-privacy and liberty and still think of him as a traitor for seeking refuge in Russia and for having a deadman switch for example.
I'm not disagreeing but I think it can also be hard to trace it back and be absolutely 100% on this.
If Snowden hadn't committed the activities he did and revealed more information about the scope and breadth of the surveillance state, would that be good or bad? Did those activities help affirm your stance on surveillance? If so, can we truly consider them traitorous (outside of a legal standpoint)?
Now, you folks are probably far better at logic puzzles than but as someone that fits the bill of pro-privacy and liberty and still questioning how to classify him, I'm open to other ways of arguing for or against.
Most progressives despise Obama as well for exactly this, and for betraying progressive ideals. That's one of the factors that lead to Sanders' popularity and Clinton's loss.
I consider myself a liberal leaning person. I voted for Obama in 2008 with the hope that he would unwind the worst of Bush era policies. He failed to to this in my estimation, and doubled down on espionage prosecutions, so I did not vote for him in 2012. Rather I voted for a 3rd party candidate.
I have long warned friends that Obama's refusal to address the proliferation of technologies supporting a future turnkey totalitarian state was a huge risk to our future stability.
With Trump's ascension to the presidency I am dismayed to find myself perhaps proven correct. At the very best interpretation, Trump will not use these executive powers to target opposition. However his future potential use of these powers will cause a large segment of the population to mistrust everything he does.
While your general complaint is fine, "Does anyone here even know why we are bombing Yemen?" has some very good answers:
If you fire a missile at a US warship, you shouldn't be surprised if any assets used to do that get zapped in return.
Probably the 2nd biggest principle for our having a Navy, beside the obvious one of protecting the nation from attacks, is to keep the sea lanes open, so that's why we had warships offshore Yemen in the first place.
One of the reasons Yemen is a major area of contention, part of today's "Great Game", it that it's a great place to interdict sea traffic to and from the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. As I just measured it by eye from Google Maps, the initial straits vary in distance from Djibouti and Eritrea by 15 to 25 miles, less if you count an island in the narrowest chokepoint.
But, yes, as Peter Theil put it, "Just as much as is is about making America great, Trump's agenda is about making America a normal country.... A normal country does not fight five simultaneous undeclared wars."
The panic over trump is starting to get comical. Aren't you americans proud of your guns to protect you from power abuses? Dont you have probably the worlds best democracy that many would be jealous of?
Ah ha ha, the people panicking pretty much by definition haven't taken advantage of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (RKBA), in fact loathe the very concept and have been campaigning for decades to take them away from the people who do have guns, which I'm sure massively overlapped with those who voted for Trump.
Many even live in cities or states where it's impossible to own guns (NYC unless well connected, D.C.), or hard/decided by whim (e.g. Massachusetts), or where the types of arms that can be legally bought and owned are severely limited in a way that makes them less useful for this sort of thing (e.g. California, much of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic).
Me, when Obama was elected, I finally broke down and bought an Evil Black Rifle and ammo for it, but that was more a FU to someone I'd correctly pegged as a "gun grabber" than anything I was planning on making "serious social use" of (well, I'd bought those earlier). And I have a lot of company, for years, most every month, sales of guns through licenced dealers are greater than the same month in the previous year.
I'm not sure what you're talking about - there's been plenty of carving away at the bill of rights, and it's started well, well before Obama took office. And what have those passionate gun-owners done? Absolutely nothing but protect the second amendment. Where were the gun-toting constitutional defenders when the 'free speech zones' went up, for example?
The idea of a popular uprising against government overreach is a fiction. You even have the police shooting citizens dead in the street to the fury of their community, and the gun owners do...? Well, the ones you're describing, the Trump-loving RKBAing lot, decide not to fight against the government, but instead find excuses for the police's actions. The gulf between their 'talk' and their 'walk' is better described as a chasm.
Evidently this is a strange idea, but using lethal force as a first resort is not a part of America's gun culture.
And therefore whatever we're doing about those other issues is effectively anonymized, aside from things like supporting the NRA's fight against McCain-Feingold's censorship of core political speech.
As for "police shooting citizens dead in the street to the fury of their community", if the dead earned it, and we're much more able to analyze deadly force encounters than those who've never shot a gun, we only care when that "community" decides to rape and pillage innocents in return. And some of us are known to take action in such situations: http://bearingarms.com/bob-o/2014/11/25/armed-business-owner...
The vast majority of BLM protests are of this nature (in fact, while I think I'm forgetting 1 or 2 cases, this is true of all the ones I can think of), whereas true victims like Eric Garner ... well, yeah, you're right, all we've done about his murder at the hands of NYC's finest is talk about it, quite a bit. And buy more guns and ammo, and practice with them....
Nice. You don't care about the people being shot dead by the police, but you do care about when they get so angry they start to spread the shit around a bit. As long as they meekly take police abuse, you're just dandy with it.
You know how you all fantasize about rising up against an oppressive government? Well, those BLM riots are going to be what that looks like. You guys rabbit on about keeping an oppressive government in check, but do nothing to help your neighbours. And if you're not going to do anything for your neighbours, what hope in hell do you have when you finally rise up solo to defend your own stuff by yourself?
And seriously, the 'vast majority' (your emphasis) of BLM protests are not town-destroying rampages. You've painted a very bizarre and self-serving view of the world around you. Do you guys ever step back and wonder why there's no other first-world country where shop owners aren't expected to keep firearms to keep their stuff safe?
You don't care about the people being shot dead by the police
Yes, I don't care about them one tiny bit if their actions warranted a reply of lethal force.
As the Alt Right puts it, "We Don't Care."
But getting back to your points, that's because we don't score these events as police abuse. We score others, like Eric Garner's murder, as such. If you desire any proof, I can point you at some of the popular RKBA blogs I read that cover these, plus of course see Radley Balko.
You know how you all fantasize about rising up against an oppressive government? [...]
You don't understand us in the least, not surprising from someone who expects us to use lethal force as a first resort to non-immediate stuff, so that and the rest of your paragraph are simply not to the point.
As for "vast majority", sorry for my lack of clarity, I'm referring to the people who they choose to protest about, not the intensity of any particular protest. The people who, as I said above, as we see it legitimately earned a lethal force response.
Do you guys ever step back and wonder why there's no other first-world country where shop owners aren't expected to keep firearms to keep their stuff safe?
Oh, we "wonder" about this, and have our own set of answers, but they aren't germane to this discussion.
9/11 allowed all this, next time let's not be little scared kids that hand away our freedom so easily for security. They are hard to get back, probably even need revolutions to get that back.
A decade and a half and we still can't shake this overreaction. "They hate us for our freedoms", so our representatives went ahead and took away our freedoms.
Both parties are responsible and we need to start being American over The Party of your chosen type. If you like a one party system and vote in line with it every time go to China, you'd fit right in.
Snowden is a hero as is every other statesman that is left that puts country over party. It is time to start helping this country not your party.
You try opposing people that have all the blackmail material and power they need to ruin you or anyone you could ever love. Look what happened to Hillary with an incomplete email dump. They have every email anyone in this thread has ever sent, at least in the last decade. Anyone who's been elected in this country. Even encrypted ones which they may know how to read or may soon. So don't threaten them unless you're ready to be ruined or you somehow have a tremendous army.
Trump isn't even in office yet, and already he's done more to advance the libertarian agenda than 40-ish years of libertarians have managed.
Democrats are coming out in support of the Second Amendment, the right of secession, and limited government. They're now apparently opposed to the surveillance state and the expanding powers of the Executive.
Surveillance is not a Democrat belief. Most Democrats/all progressives are against surveillance. The problem is that Obama went against liberal ideals and enforced and extended Bush's policies, which is why Obama was generally hated by progressives.
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[ 353 ms ] story [ 1917 ms ] threadMaybe we should remember the words written in the founding document that precluded our noble country's separation from the English State:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men/women (language added by me) are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men/Women (same semantic addition), deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness
If one's right to privacy is being infringed upon, we are bound by this document to remind the powers that be that they are beyond their right to govern.
I think the initial thought is incredibly prescient, as Trump seems far more laissez-faire when it comes to moral governance than President Obama is and has been. Let's not put the cart before the horse, but let's also make sure the toys are all child proof before we hand them down, n'est-ce pas?
I referenced the fourth amendment, which seems not-so-sudden to my naive (read: full of hubris) self.
Methinks thou dost protest too much.
He as two months of an 8 year term remaining.
The program was in place before the current administration, and if there was a problem to solve from their perspective, it should have been solved long ago.
It isn't like I've been commenting every day on your blog or something and today decided to voice my opinion on the wiretapping, stingrays, etc.
> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men/women (language added by me) are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Maybe we should also remember that most of the people who signed this document owned slaves.
It's pretty laughable, actually, that some people here are so thin skinned as to take issue with or dismiss actual facts, because they fly in the face of the fantasy version of history they want to believe.
I am simply saying while the chef who has been cooking with gas for the last eight years is still on the clock, why not ask him to write the prep list for the next shift?
I never defended mass surveillance, or advocated for any defense of it other than to cite how we are protected by the 4th amendment and our "unalienable" right to liberty as defined by the Dec.
Would you care to elaborate or are you simply trolling?
edit: I presume from the downvote that the latter is true. Oh well, so much for spirited debate.
What a fucking joke some people are here.
I guess you might be referring to a particular provision from a particular year? You're going to have to be more specific.
If you think the problem is old news, that doesn't make it any less urgent to fix. It's like seeing firefighters arrive and tell them not to bother, because the house started burning hours ago.
I'm all in when it comes to privacy and I always agreed with encryption and everything people are suggesting to do now.
It is just a pain to listen to how this is being advertised now.
And before anyone starts complaining: 1. I'm not from the US and I don't live in the US 2. I'm against Trump and against Hillary
Conversely, that damage surface would be significantly smaller, and less of it would remain now that it can only be shut down in haste, had it been reduced back when the administration in charge was one that gave SV warm fuzzies.
I think it is foolish to think all of SV are allies of the people.
Consider that Trump was openly hostile toward Apple on the campaign trail, and that Tim Cook himself is gay, and the GOP establishment wants to roll back protections for LGBT+ individuals.
And consider Apple's vast war chest, which could really make a difference assuming Citizens United isn't overturned.
And I really don't think there's been a 180 on surveillance. I think the only people who were supporting the surveillance apparatus were the same people of an authoritarian bent who are now supporting Trump.
You are seeing ideological inconsistency where there is none in an effort to make your political opponents appear as hypocrites.
And the folks who voted and agitated for surveillance state champions Obama in '12 and Clinton in '16, of course.
The saying goes "they went after group 'A' I didn't like, then after group 'B', now they're after me and I care. Well maybe if you 'A', and 'B' worked together against your common enemy instead of being selfish, short-sighted and stupid you wouldn't be fucked right now"
We are idiots and deserve everything that happens next 4 years.
Not many of the Obama supporters I know.
Of course they were more willing to forgive it! That's going to be the case. Partly because humans don't like admitting they were wrong. Partly because it's legitimate to trade off issues against each other. Partly because we're introducing selection bias - if it's enough to turn you off Obama entirely, you're not an "Obama supporter".
But there's miles between overly generous forgiveness and support. It was commonly named as an area where they were disappointed in Obama.
Change that (which I support) and we can talk 3rd parties.
I supported Sanders 2016 primary and his 2012 primary threat to Obama, after having voted for Obama in 2008. Once the options became Obama (and now Clinton), I voted for those simply because the alternative means more coal, less regulations, and more religious right.
But even if what you say were true, it invalidates nothing.
IMHO this was the one thing that allowed the Nazis to create the kind of power structure they had. They spied on themselves to no end, bugging their own officers, hitler youth teaching children to spy and report on their parents.. everyone was afraid to speak out or step out of line no matter how bad it got.
It would be terrible to see these systems used as a method of control.
"Well, sure, unconstitutional power grabs are tolerable when someone I like is in power, but this new guy is bad!" Yes, that's how it always works. That's explicitly the reason our government was designed the way it was. Why do educated people forget this every time "their guy" gets into power?
When people campaign against the expansion of government powers, it's not because we're afraid that the Good Guys are going to abuse them, it's because we know that eventually the Bad Guys will.
So in addition to those 44, there are all the people who have had the titles "Representative," "Senator," and "Justice." Not a popular view today, I realize.
You can have a police state and limited government (a government that does little for its citizens) at the same time. And you can have an expansive welfare state with clear separation of powers (think Sweden).
There is a sickness in this country, and it is called partisanship. Its destructive power is more frightening than anything Trump could hope to do.
Many of us tried to stop the growth of Neo consrvatism on the Right and now Identity politics on the Left because they are both reactionary civilizrtional poison.
But the hemlock was to sweet not to drink and everyone drunk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clash_of_Civilizations
America is unfortunately now immersed in tribalism. Those who should be trying to reverse the trend such as the media and Intellectuals have embraced tribalism as much as the rest. There is no civilisation that can withstand the forces of tribalism.
The breakup of Yugoslavia is an informative example of how a state collapses when ethos is replaced with tribalism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugoslavia
So why not join the game of identity politics now?
It's not a game. It's a serious problem of centuries of oppression, the worst things the United States has done.
Issues of discrimination against minorities are not about a zero-sum competition between teams identified by their skin color, but about reducing centuries-long oppression and physical brutality, from society to the job market to law enforcement, against certain groups.
The majority has the institutions of government to protect it: They can call the police, sue, and vote out politicians they don't like. They can get into colleges, get jobs in SV or in the Senate.
The experiences aren't perfect, but to conceive of it as a competition between races is deceitful and inflammatory of our most dangerous instincts -- instincts that have a clear track record of slavery, lynching, and very widespread oppression. Frankly, it is encouraging evil.
Compare to the implicit scopes of the 4th Amendment, which I'll quote in full:
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.
Many have argued that these pervasive dragnet surveillance systems axiomatically violate the 4th Amendment by their scope alone ("particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized"), which akin to the much, much greater scope of WMDs vs. the arms of infantrymen.
Although this domain is a lot more nuanced, e.g. metadata is pretty universally held not to be protected like data, but what about mass collection of metadata?
What makes the US Government so special that it should be armed with world-ending nuclear weapons? How is a large bureaucracy somehow better than say a private corporation or even an individual in that regard? There is no answer...
It's certainly a serious argument for a strong, in this domain, serious central government. I don't think anything in federalism besides the usual political stuff applies.
And that "usual political stuff" is where this government gets it moral legitimacy, which partly addresses your point, especially when we strip away ludicrous hyperbole like "world-ending" (maybe your world would end, but things would remain largely unchanged for perhaps half the world's population, and not severely changed for a very large fraction of the rest; the world is big, and we are small).
And while "might makes right" might not settle well with your moral tastes, operationally, might rules. Otherwise, you might be counting yourself lucky to be speaking Russian. But not needing to speak Punic.
So the NY Times went after it under Bush, maybe this country just needs Republican Administrations just so the press will do their damn job. They certainly got silent for most of eight years.
Many people have been making the point that for this reason, for the foreseeable future the Presidency must be limited to white male Republicans ^_^.
Seriously, for more than a generation pretty much all capital and lower case 'c' constitutional checks and balances utterly fail if that's not the case.
The evidence does not bear this out. The NY Times also 'went after it' under Obama, publishing Snowden's and Manning's leaks for example. They also broke the story on Clinton's email server, which probably cost her the election eventually.
I'm not so naive as to think anyone is free of bias. Best we can do is be aware of them and build processes that guard against our biases from negatively influencing our desired goals. This might be one tool in that tool box.
Please show where this activist writes in support of the NSA programs in the past.
Even if there were such a thing as homogenous left: I believe the number of people from the left defending these programs has been pretty short for as long as I can remember.
It seems they have published thoughts about surveillance previously though.
http://nation.time.com/2013/10/04/what-happened-to-obamas-ns...
http://nation.time.com/surveillance-society/
Please show where I said anything about the "left".
This is a problem that both democrats and republicans suffer from. Remember when the PATRIOT Act was proposed and enacted? Most democrats thought it was an unbelievably unconstitutional overreach that would be the end of the world, and republicans mostly saw it as a necessary tool that didn't even really have any constitutional concerns worth mentioning. Magically these perspectives flipped when Obama got into power. This happens every single time.
*I would also note that journalists' "tolerance" for the NSA programs over the last 8 years is essentially tacit support. Nearly all of the network media's coverage of the NSA issues over the last few years has been centered on whether the effectiveness of the programs justify their existence. There has been virtually no network condemnation of these programs based on their illegality and unconstitutionality, whereas that was a major focus from 2001 to 2007.
Can you provide evidence of this? I know a lot of Democrats, and I don't remember any of them ever saying a positive word about the PATRIOT Act. Certainly, those actually in power are always reluctant to give it up. But I haven't seen that applying to their supporters in the particular example you cite.
Senator Dianne Feinstein Urges Senate Support for USA-Patriot Act Reauthorization http://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-relea...
If you perform an internet search for "Pardon Snowden", the vast majority of these articles arise from publications traditionally associated with Democratic Party support.
I remember some milquetoast grumbling about the USA-PATRIOT Act from various publications on both the right and the left, but the quantity of outrage was far greater after the Snowden leaks.
In case you need any convincing: https://www.google.com/search?espv=2&q=unconstitutional+nsa
In the top 10 results, you'll see various "MSM" news sources. The sole defender of the NSA programs comes from The National Review, a (high-quality) conservative newspaper.
I'm not trying to use "gotcha!" commenting, but I think it is grossly misstates the position of most left-wing folks to push this flip-flop theory.
I will readily admit that flip-flopping happens all the time about other matters but I have not witnessed it at all with this one.
On the matter of NSA surveillance being abused by President-elect Trump, I consider it extremely unlikely. I consider the left's fear to be based off of a failure by the government to communicate the programs effectively to the press.
Frankly, given how news is now consumed, it's very possible we're living in alternate realities. The PATRIOT outrage I was referring to was circa 2002. Where I lived, the media reported vociferous outrage from democrats and nonchalance from republicans. Since "Obama" has wielded--and greatly expanded--the state's surveillance powers, I have not heard anywhere near the same objection from democrats. (Note that I say "Obama" because I have no idea whether and to what extent he has actually overseen the NSA's actions; its entirely possible much of these programs have been hidden from the executive branch for decades, which is frankly much more worrisome).
The few polls i just looked at seem to back up this flip-flop:
[1] http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jun/12/news/la-pn-republica... ["With President Obama in the White House, Democrats stand in support of the NSA’s methods, 49% to 40% in the Gallup survey. Republicans were opposed 63% to 32%. When President George W. Bush was in office, Republicans were supportive of government surveillance efforts and Democrats opposed."]
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/06/12/poll-... ["Interestingly, the most intense opposition to the programs comes from the political right. Republicans disapprove of the program by almost a 2 to 1 margin. Independents disapprove, 56 to 34 percent. But 49 percent of Democrats approve of the program, compared with 40 percent who disapprove."]
I don't share your believe that Trump won't seek to use surveillance for his own purposes. Not because I think he's a horrible person, but simply because people use the tools at their disposal, especially in times of stress or emergency. Of course, the president of the U.S. deals with nothing but stress and emergencies.
Finally, I don't think anyone's fear is based off a failure to communicate the programs effectively. If the programs were wildly successful, those successes would be publicized by now. The NSA needs some good publicity. By the way, negative publicity the NSA can't avoid is largely its own fault. It's current slogan is "Your Data: If You Have Nothing to Hide, You Have Nothing to Fear" https://nsa.gov1.info/data/ I'm not sure you could come up with a more Orwellian slogan if you tried.
And it won't change until the tune changes from "we need to keep all-powerful government from the hands of people who disagree with us" to "we need to have less of all-powerful government, no matter who runs it".
The EFF and EPIC, which have been around longer, has worked against NSA spying under the Obama, Bush II, Clinton, and Bush I organizations; the ACLU, all of the above and more.
What about you?
I also can not say that many have not warned against this scenario. Something, something about not standing up.
The creation of the laws is the creation of the autocratic power. The temperment of who ever is in power at a particular point is irrelivent. By creating the law you automatically open the door to use those laws.
And as you have pointed out, the major difference is temperament. Obama has not exhibited a temperament that has led me to believe he would use these powers to round up run-of-the-mill opposition. Trump's opposition to protests and potential unwillingness to concede an electoral loss leads me to believe he would mobilize the executive apparatus into dictatorship, unlike Obama or Bush before him.
Each side takes credit for the same national security policy wrapped in different language and each side pushes the policy a little father. The perfection of the total surveillance state with unlimited Presidential power is truly the bipartisan crown jewel that the Washington consensus wants.
Its a dramatic picture but maybe people need to be scared out of there apathy at this point.
That isn't true in the U.S. system: Laws are created democratically, are subject to other laws (in the Constitution, conflicting laws, court rulings), and the actor's (e.g. the President's) power is limited by the law itself, other laws, institutions, and other branches of government. Furthermore, many laws remove or constrain power, such as those in the Bill of Rights.
Copy that.
You, like many others in this thread, are trying to point out hypocrisy and ideological inconsistencies where there are none, as some sort of "gotcha" so you can justify the belief that your political opponents are somehow worse than you are.
To explain my chagrin, the problem I have witnessed over the last 15 years is there are huge inconsistencies in peoples' daily choices and the providers know all the right buttons to push to increase adoption and use highly specialized marketing, over-verbose ToS's and NDA's to evade scrutiny. Lobbyists and "Privacy Committes" make new laws to make previously illegal practices now legal.Your willingness to curtail noe or be less concerned based on whom is currently collecting is a perfect example(IMO) of rationalizing choices. Every(sic) service provider now treats data collection as a part of any standard business model. Ever read Gmail's ToS? As far as I have seen, it is the only ToS that states plainly in the first paragraphs exactly what they are doing. And yet, informed people rationalize that choice for a variety of reasons.
Obama betrayed liberal ideals by enforcing and extending Bush's surveillance policies.
The bigger risk to people is the enormous pile of data at large Internet companies and ISPs which any government would find useful in implementing a policy of mass deportation or "extreme vetting".
NSA has legal and institutional barriers on domestic surveillance. These are damaged, but still exist. What private industry collects is completely unregulated and far broader in scope.
It is a fearful recipe. The calculus pre-Trump wherein corporations were considered threats as you described has changed: now the government is far, far more dangerous.
Gov't plus commercial is worse than either individually.
I didn't even realise the significance of the date until after I'd posted it.
https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/foKDxbyh...
But that's ok, because those other people did it in days gone by. Such hypocrites, they. What I do today is just a response, and I'm better than them.
And you know who exploited that episode for his own gain, called for a boycott of and criminal prosecution of Apple? Yeah, that guy.
Liberals responded with a policy of moving as much power to Washington as possible, explicitly to enforce a policy of, No, we will decide how everyone lives, and enforce it federally to minimize others' ability to escape our reach.
Libertarians have been saying that judges should do their best to interpret the meaning of the legislators, so that whatever laws we had would be those written by legislators elected by the people. Liberals said, No, we want judges to interpret laws to mean what they ought to have said if they people had done as we wanted, so that the laws will be what the political elite want them to be, regardless of what the know-nothing rabble choose for themselves. So now, we have the precedent established and argued for for years from the left that the law is what the court wants it to be, not what the people said. Nice work.
All along, those promoting local government rather than central, unescapable authority have been derided as fascists by liberals. Now the chickens come home to roost. Do you think now that maximizing and centralizing and moving out of reach as much power as possible was a good idea? No? Want to change it? Why didn't you in all the years you were in power and advocated the opposite, because now you've turned that power over to another group. It didn't have to be this way, but you wouldn't stop. Probably still won't and will instead just fight to regain control.
For starters, there is no united group known as "liberals" whom either of us can speak on behalf of, but I will indulge you and also speak in generalizations.
Liberals do not arbitrarily support "moving as much power to Washington as possible". Rather, they believe strongly that human rights should be dispensed equally to everyone in the country. If abortion is a right, then being born in Texas shouldn't deprive a woman of that right any more than being born in the south in the 19th century should've deprived blacks of their freedom. Similar arguments can be made for gay marriage, miscegenation laws, female suffrage, the availability of healthcare for the poor, quality education, etc.
There's nothing whatsoever baked into the liberal ideology that supports things like domestic spying and warrantless wiretaps. Rather, the better explanation is any branch of government (in this case the executive branch) is incentivized to increase its own power, and people tend to be biased in favor of their party's presidents. But I've met countless pro-Snowden liberals, and I think you've really mischaracterized the essence of what makes liberals liberal.
Liberals may not want surveillance, but they helped create the power structure that enables surveillance as a byproduct of pursing end goals they do want. I think the benefits of that approach far outweigh the drawbacks, but it's important to acknowledge the drawbacks. If you give the central government more power so it can achieve X, you have to be aware of the possibility that it will use its power to also do Y.
It appears that most surveillance programs are operated under the foreign intelligence and/or defense umbrella, a part of government that has been centralized longer than the country itself exists.
I'd also like to see a few examples of states vigorously opposing these programs. I mean – so many of them are willing to overstep their authority when it comes to hot-button issues such as the widespread voter fraud that some must have tried to get creative to stop surveillance, right?
Likewise, I'm not sure conservatives really care so much about decentralized government, but are opportunistic about the effectiveness of influencing state and local governments.
An interesting aside is that in my state, the (nominally) conservative state government is enacting laws saying what kinds of ordinances the cities are not allowed to pass. A piece of land not far from my house was declared by the state to be exempt from local zoning.
So I think the preference for central or local government power is a matter of opportunism that is chosen on a situational basis.
If you split the Left-wing into the authoritarian (Clinton/DLC and unfortunately, Obama) and libertarian (ie, Sanders/Warren), you'll see why most of your complaints irk those of us who agree with right-libertarians on lots of points.
Using a 2-dimentional compass to orient the political map is a lot more helpful: https://www.politicalcompass.org
Ironically, libertarians seem pretty happy to stay in the US despite all their wailing and gnashing of teeth, and despite there being a variety of places with low centralised government in the world (some of them are quite nice).
> Liberals may not want surveillance, but they helped create the power structure
Ah, they 'helped' create it. Not 'created' it, but merely 'helped'. Even though you can't even say that they did it themselves, you're more than willing to just blame them for it. It's bizarre how 'liberal' is a derogatory term in the US.
Civil rights are a great example. Minorities living in the south during Jim Crow were always legally allowed to move north to freer states that wouldn't discriminate against them. But they didn't. Mostly because they were economically and informatively suppressed to the point where they no longer possessed free movement - either they could not afford the cost, or did not know the option existed through intentional disinformation.
The same applies today, for everything from legalized cannabis, to right to die, to bathroom law, to abortion availability and rights, to gay marriage before the supreme court decision. People who are oppressed by hostile local legislation still choose to stay, often because they don't have a choice.
But that is fairly black and white, and reality really isn't. The more interesting, and I think where the liberal argument gets its support more than anything, is in those who have the choice but have to weigh their options. It is an awful situation to be in to decide between gaining rights and leaving everything you know behind. People really resist leaving their homes, in all definitions of the term. There is resistance to leaving your parents house. To leaving your hometown. To leaving your home culture. And that resistance often defeats people who would, objectively, and purely analytically, be better served just leaving.
But that is 20/20 hindsight showing itself. At the time, these people do not know what might happen. They have to weigh the risks. And there is a tremendous natural human aversion to risk. It drives millions of people who would be more prosperous - economically, personally, etc - to stay where they are and not take what they perceive and weigh as unnecessary risk.
A lot of this is a problem of the times. The more opportunity you have in your destination the lower the risk of moving there. Opportunity, in aggregate, is at generational lows today in the US. It suppresses mobility, and that generational lack of opportunity and thus promotion of conservative decisions regarding your own prosperity and rights creates the environment for top-down policy to centralize authority over the whole, to use a wide brush to direct ideology than letting people chose their own. Because in practice, many people cannot make that choice, objectively or as a product of their own uncertainty, and the liberal wing that pushes centralized power to assert their beliefs see that people suffer in conditions they wouldn't need to if they had perfect information and had no emotional baggage holding them back from seizing opportunity.
Distributing power, localizing governance, and making it as democratic as possible in the process is the path to maximal liberty and happiness. But it requires that people actually take advantage of that opportunity. If you build it, how are they to come if they don't know its there?
Rights are not services sold in the free market, matched up by supply and demand. They are universal and inalienable. Whether they move or not, those people were 100% entitled to their rights and to a government that protected them. That's why governments are instituted among men and women.
> libertarians have been saying for a long time that it's best to keep government as local as possible, so you could choose how you wanted to live
... and maximize the reach of the market, which is more global than any government on Earth, and in practice works in the opposite way: organize your life around making yourself useful to those with money, fast, or you will starve. If that means uprooting your family and moving someplace where you can work yourself to an early grave in the coal mines, so be it. If that means neglecting your duty as sherriff and looking the other way while the company machine-guns striking workers, so be it. If that means giving blowjobs to strangers on the street, So. Be. It. Such liberty! Very freedom.
> Libertarians have been saying that judges should do their best to interpret the meaning of the legislators
... unless they're striking down regulations that are a result of government overreach, which is quite OK.
Every corner of the political spectrum accuses judges of judicial activism precisely when the rulings don't go their way. It's like complaining about the referee in sports, except easier, because laws for society are much more complicated than the rules for sports, which are complicated enough. Yesterday's legislators and their laws agreed with each other about as well as today's legislators and their laws, which is to say "not at all," so everyone has a claim to the judicial activism argument and everyone uses it when they want to sound insightful but don't want to expose themselves to the risks of talking specifics. Yawn.
> All along, those promoting local government rather than central, unescapable authority have been derided as fascists by liberals.
That usually happens when local government is being especially asinine -- buying their police department tanks, targeting minorities, making poverty illegal, making protests illegal, etc. Local != benevolent. Local != escapable, either, because opinions and incentives tend to be highly correlated between communities, so even if it is worth it to up and move you'll find that every other "local" government is doing the same damn thing. Options without choice. Something that should be all too familiar to free-marketeers ;)
> Now the chickens come home to roost. Do you think now that maximizing and centralizing and moving out of reach as much power as possible was a good idea?
Even if we wanted, an option to federate power was never really on the ballot. All parties want power, that's why they seek it. Everyone thinks they are right, or else they would change their opinion, and everyone wants (reasonably) to fight for what is right. Show me a politician who wants to devolve power and I'll show you a liar. They may not know it yet, especially if they've never won power, but it's true.
everyone? Dial back the extremism for a minute. Get off Facebook.
[0] http://reason.com/blog/2015/04/02/was-memories-pizza-a-victi...
Libertarians have in practice spent far more time trying to remove as much power from government as possible and handing it to corporations[1]. This strategy is either very naive or based on self interest, because it doesn't actually address the concentration of power; it only moves it to a different group of people.
The way to manage power is to spread it out as much as possible, subject to as many self interest based checks and balances as possible. Neither governments or corporations[2] can be allowed to "win", because it is the struggle itself that keeps power restrained to a necessary minimum. The system fails without both: corporations need to use their money and influence to push back against government overreach, and governments need to use their various powers to regulate the corporate world.
> those written by legislators elected by the people
That's what the judges are addressing, because it isn't always clear what those laws actually say, especially in ambiguous situations that didn't exist when the law was written.
> we want judges to interpret laws to mean what they ought to have said
Yes, which is necessary because the law isn't magically unambiguous. How else do you think we should interpret the law in ambiguous or unforeseen situations? Also, remember that the legislature - the people that were elected by the people - can simply override judicial interpretation at any time.
> the laws will be what the political elite want them to be
That problem happens anyway. The branch of government used is simply whichever is currently convenient. This is an orthogonal problem (that needs to be addressed).
> Liberals responded with a policy of moving as much power to Washington as possible
You are seeing what you want to see, which seems to have led to some very creative misinterpretations of how government works.
Instead of following the politics of fear and blaming a very large group of your fellow citizens, I suggest trying to find ways we can work together to dilute power away from "the political elite". A lot of people will try to distract from this idea with suggestions that prey on fear and ignorance to simply move power around, so this will require a lot of effort, vigilance, and sometimes a sacrifice. That cost, unfortunately, is the price of liberty, but it's a manageable cost if it keeps power form concentrating in the hands of the few.
[1] and the people, but most of the time the capital to actually take advantage of the power vacuum is usually held by corporations.
[2] the people (and things that serve the people directly like trade unions and civil rights orgs) are, of course, also involved as a check on the other two groups.
Also, can you give some examples of "deciding how everyone lives"? What have liberals actually put in place in the US that curtail what people can do, that isn't in the name of freeing up part of the population (such as anti-discrimination law). What are some actual examples of federal liberal enforced monoculture in the US?
People's lives have already been ruined by the inability of the government to secure the sensitive data it collects (see: OPM breach). That's pretty much the end-of-the-line in terms of damage assessment. Let's just try to do it better.
Yes, Trump could make things even worse, or not. Is not the same people that actually set things as it was in the last years, unless the people behind both sides on this is the same, of course.
In any case, shutting down/disabling/destroying all dangerous things that US may have in stock or running now (nuclear, cyber, biological, foreign interventionism/destabilization and so on) that the narrative on Trump could misuse could finally give some meaning to Obama's Nobel prize.
He could (and must) pardon Snowden.
To stop it from just continuing come January, it is well within his authority to instruct them to delete data.
We're having a close call. We just caught the child peeking into the drawer and got a quick education on why certain powers should be kept safely locked up by the constitution. Even if it makes them a bit harder to use when we "really need them".
What is needed now are technologies of resistance. We need the private sector companies who essentially built this monster to give us the tools to render it nugatory. Not only is that the only way forward, but they owe us that.
It's very interesting to me. I get that this is an EFF-friendly crowd, and attitudes here skew hard toward the maximalist end of civil liberties. But the fact that articles like this continually get upvotes is a bit embarrassing to our community, isn't it?
Why don't you present an actual argument in support of "SIGINT Enterprise" instead?
This place is as good as any. If you're really worried about the backlash (from HN) you (or 'someone') could reply under a throwaway, detailing those thoughts and arguments.
>Why don't you present an actual argument in support of "SIGINT Enterprise" instead?
I can't provide tangible examples to people who aren't read-in, and thus my argument ultimately rests on a very annoying appeal to authority, i.e., "If you were privy to what I know, you'd agree with me." I get how problematic that argument is, but in this case I think it actually is true. I wish there were a way that I could get around this quandary, but there really isn't.
Sorry -- I know that the above is probably not convincing to >90% of the HN community. But it's my honest opinion.
I'm artistic and write and do lots of stuff under all sorts of pseudonyms, I travel, I want to directly engage the Chinese government on better IP laws, I want to directly do all sorts of stuff that would be way too suspicious or off limits if I had anything to do with intelligence - all without meeting your qualification for what are "comms with at least some Americans" or whatever. I just want to stay on the free side. I'm an American and foreign dual citizen.
I get the argument for why people who work with intelligence need to be held to a different standard and arguably have fewer freedoms than people outside of it. I just want to stay on the other, civilian or outsider side of that line. How do I do that (other than not agreeing to that work)?
This is an issue that is coming up for me and I am seriously thinking of paying some psychologist to say that I have some kind of specific tourrette's syndrome where if I'm recruited for any kind of conspiracy/intelligence "community"/whatever is on the other side of that curtain, I spasm out, and then just going ahead and pretending to do that if it ever happens.
Please give me specific actionable steps I can take. I don't want to change my attitude or habits. By the way, when intelligence agencies (don't know which ones, may not even be US) read my writing or what I'm doing, they have actually physically gotten the wrong idea. Which is fine, I don't care - they didn't bother me. It's their job to stay invisible and out of civilians' hair.
but I am not going to change my attitude or behavior. I'm an American as well and I think I certainly have the freedom not to participate in any institution I didn't sign up for explicitly. America isn't a police state. I don't have to watch what I say, certainly privately or anonymously, in case some bureaucrat gets the wrong idea.
I don't want to live in an Orwellian nightmare. I wanted to show you another commenter who raise a similar concern, but couldn't find it. He talked about how stifling and restrictive it was to work on some generic (not even secret) government contract, where they couldn't even do basic things like travel without announcing it exactly etc etc.
Anyway in this comment I am asking specifically how I can disqualify myself. What would keep someone from being read into anything, ever, or joining the intelligence "community". (Obviously this is just speculation, I'm just interested in your idea.)
Two groups of people who completely agree that mass surveillance is a bad thing will go at each other's throats about _when_ the other speaks up about it needing to be dismantled. You're on the same fucking side and chances are, if you actually believe that mass surveillance is bad, you've both been at least mildly against it the whole time.
The expansion of surveillance powers under Obama was probably _the most_ consistently cited dissatisfaction amongst HN contributors one, four, and six years ago. Threads critical of these policies were consistently on the home page during the Obama presidency. Security and privacy conscious individuals on the left and right agreed. The top thread at the moment mocks liberals: "Well, sure, unconstitutional power grabs are tolerable when someone I like is in power…" but that straw man simply isn't in line with reality, not on this forum at least.
More broadly, yes, masses of people have given up their privacy. Go talk to them, stop bitching at people who agree with you.
As a libertarian, I agree. Many liberals have opposed these policies. I think even Glenn Greenwald may have or may still identify as a liberal.
However, every person I know who self-identifies as a "Democrat" and not a "liberal", has supported "all" of Obama's policies (including mass surveillance), and has condemned Snowden in the strongest terms. There are a few of those on HN, but I agree that by far most HNers oppose mass surveillance (unless there's a large "hidden" segment as is apparently the case with Trump supporters, who have come out en masse on HN in the past few days).
Stupid human psychology.
If Snowden hadn't committed the activities he did and revealed more information about the scope and breadth of the surveillance state, would that be good or bad? Did those activities help affirm your stance on surveillance? If so, can we truly consider them traitorous (outside of a legal standpoint)?
Now, you folks are probably far better at logic puzzles than but as someone that fits the bill of pro-privacy and liberty and still questioning how to classify him, I'm open to other ways of arguing for or against.
I have long warned friends that Obama's refusal to address the proliferation of technologies supporting a future turnkey totalitarian state was a huge risk to our future stability.
With Trump's ascension to the presidency I am dismayed to find myself perhaps proven correct. At the very best interpretation, Trump will not use these executive powers to target opposition. However his future potential use of these powers will cause a large segment of the population to mistrust everything he does.
What about the wars? Does anyone here even know why we are bombing Yemen?
If you fire a missile at a US warship, you shouldn't be surprised if any assets used to do that get zapped in return.
Probably the 2nd biggest principle for our having a Navy, beside the obvious one of protecting the nation from attacks, is to keep the sea lanes open, so that's why we had warships offshore Yemen in the first place.
One of the reasons Yemen is a major area of contention, part of today's "Great Game", it that it's a great place to interdict sea traffic to and from the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. As I just measured it by eye from Google Maps, the initial straits vary in distance from Djibouti and Eritrea by 15 to 25 miles, less if you count an island in the narrowest chokepoint.
But, yes, as Peter Theil put it, "Just as much as is is about making America great, Trump's agenda is about making America a normal country.... A normal country does not fight five simultaneous undeclared wars."
Many even live in cities or states where it's impossible to own guns (NYC unless well connected, D.C.), or hard/decided by whim (e.g. Massachusetts), or where the types of arms that can be legally bought and owned are severely limited in a way that makes them less useful for this sort of thing (e.g. California, much of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic).
Me, when Obama was elected, I finally broke down and bought an Evil Black Rifle and ammo for it, but that was more a FU to someone I'd correctly pegged as a "gun grabber" than anything I was planning on making "serious social use" of (well, I'd bought those earlier). And I have a lot of company, for years, most every month, sales of guns through licenced dealers are greater than the same month in the previous year.
The idea of a popular uprising against government overreach is a fiction. You even have the police shooting citizens dead in the street to the fury of their community, and the gun owners do...? Well, the ones you're describing, the Trump-loving RKBAing lot, decide not to fight against the government, but instead find excuses for the police's actions. The gulf between their 'talk' and their 'walk' is better described as a chasm.
And therefore whatever we're doing about those other issues is effectively anonymized, aside from things like supporting the NRA's fight against McCain-Feingold's censorship of core political speech.
As for "police shooting citizens dead in the street to the fury of their community", if the dead earned it, and we're much more able to analyze deadly force encounters than those who've never shot a gun, we only care when that "community" decides to rape and pillage innocents in return. And some of us are known to take action in such situations: http://bearingarms.com/bob-o/2014/11/25/armed-business-owner...
The vast majority of BLM protests are of this nature (in fact, while I think I'm forgetting 1 or 2 cases, this is true of all the ones I can think of), whereas true victims like Eric Garner ... well, yeah, you're right, all we've done about his murder at the hands of NYC's finest is talk about it, quite a bit. And buy more guns and ammo, and practice with them....
You know how you all fantasize about rising up against an oppressive government? Well, those BLM riots are going to be what that looks like. You guys rabbit on about keeping an oppressive government in check, but do nothing to help your neighbours. And if you're not going to do anything for your neighbours, what hope in hell do you have when you finally rise up solo to defend your own stuff by yourself?
And seriously, the 'vast majority' (your emphasis) of BLM protests are not town-destroying rampages. You've painted a very bizarre and self-serving view of the world around you. Do you guys ever step back and wonder why there's no other first-world country where shop owners aren't expected to keep firearms to keep their stuff safe?
Yes, I don't care about them one tiny bit if their actions warranted a reply of lethal force.
As the Alt Right puts it, "We Don't Care."
But getting back to your points, that's because we don't score these events as police abuse. We score others, like Eric Garner's murder, as such. If you desire any proof, I can point you at some of the popular RKBA blogs I read that cover these, plus of course see Radley Balko.
You know how you all fantasize about rising up against an oppressive government? [...]
You don't understand us in the least, not surprising from someone who expects us to use lethal force as a first resort to non-immediate stuff, so that and the rest of your paragraph are simply not to the point.
As for "vast majority", sorry for my lack of clarity, I'm referring to the people who they choose to protest about, not the intensity of any particular protest. The people who, as I said above, as we see it legitimately earned a lethal force response.
Do you guys ever step back and wonder why there's no other first-world country where shop owners aren't expected to keep firearms to keep their stuff safe?
Oh, we "wonder" about this, and have our own set of answers, but they aren't germane to this discussion.
A decade and a half and we still can't shake this overreaction. "They hate us for our freedoms", so our representatives went ahead and took away our freedoms.
Both parties are responsible and we need to start being American over The Party of your chosen type. If you like a one party system and vote in line with it every time go to China, you'd fit right in.
Snowden is a hero as is every other statesman that is left that puts country over party. It is time to start helping this country not your party.
Democrats are coming out in support of the Second Amendment, the right of secession, and limited government. They're now apparently opposed to the surveillance state and the expanding powers of the Executive.