I came to say the same thing. The secret courts and even the administrative agency courts should not exist. They are a violation of our rights. Any court where the prosecution, judge and jury are all government employees is a gross abuse of authority.
The 6th Amendment was written to prevent secret courts. The English Star Chamber was frequently secret and you could be put on trial without knowing what evidence/testimony was brought against you. The Star Chamber was also why the 5th Amendment exists.
A secret court is arguably not even a court. It provides no legitimacy whatsoever. It's a bunch of people in a room making a decision. I don't understand why they even bother. Just conduct your dictatorship over a Zoom meeting.
It's a word game. By calling it a court, legitimacy is implied. Most personalized TV channels are called "social media" even though they're really "personal TV" because the former sounds like it connects you with your friends. The NSA isn't a "surveillance state", it's "intelligence gathering". It's not a war, it's a special military operation. And so on.
> Most personalized TV channels are called "social media" even though they're really "personal TV" because the former sounds like it connects you with your friends.
This is clearly untrue; they're called "social media" because they developed inside other things that were already called "social media".
Reddit is undoubtedly “social media” and never had anything to do with connecting to your friends.
It’s basically synonymous with user-generated content site. It’s why TikTok is social media and Netflix isn’t, and PineDrama is somewhere in the middle because even though it’s studio content there’s still emphasis on the comments and whatnot.
This is a distraction from the problem, they are courts because they function as courts in providing binding precedent on how laws are interpreted. The people making the decision (FISA judges) are Article III federal judges (i.e. nominated by the President, confirmed by Senate), picked by SCOTUS Chief Justice, and continuously vetted for security clearance by exec branch. Public interest importance of their decisions are supposed to be released (for legislators to be able to preform their legislative function) within 180 days.
That is the problem -- if legislators aren't informed how the laws they wrote are interpreted / used by the executive, they cannot reason about how to legislate next.
There ain't nobody 'looking up' to US these days, where does this fairy tale idea come from? People around the world are not dumb, whole world is completely fed up to the brim with direct and indirect attacks from US in past 2 years, sowing chaos, conflict and death. We just wan to be left alone, and thats it. Not something US can do but one can always dream right.
There are many places which are more democratic and free than US ever was, its not a secret information but you won't hear about it in latest hollywood flick or fox/cnn. One only needs to travel a bit outside US bubble with open mind.
US system of 2 parties is pretty dumb if you think about it, artificial in pretty bad ways and not really transferable elsewhere. Constitution and laws which are less than toilet paper when power is taken by sufficiently motivated bad actor, 0 working checks and balances. It could have been worse of course if thats how we want to rank it, but we are not even in the half of it and something tells me we haven't seen the worst of it yet.
"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security.”
- They Thought They Were Free
The Germans, 1933-45
Milton Mayer
"Wyden has also warned about a classified interpretation of Section 702 that he says multiple administrations have relied on and refused to declassify. “When it is eventually declassified,” he said in March, “the American people are going to be stunned that it took so long and that Congress had been debating this authority with insufficient information.”"
Spying on American citizens is a bipartisan point of agreement.
That's Wyden as Wyden, not because he is a Democrat. Some of the strongest proponents of these intelligence authorities, and in many cases the literal authors of bills expanding these powers, have been leading Democrats e.g. Feinstein.
There is no credible version of history where Democrats as a party are not enthusiastic supporters of these surveillance powers. They've been actively complicit the entire time.
There’s still a sizable portion of the party as of right now that is against surveillance powers in a way that doesn’t really exist on the other side.
The Republican Party doesn’t really have an equivalent to a progressive caucus. AOC and Bernie Sanders are highly influential Democratic caucus members on record against state surveillance, with one of those two being a top candidate for the 2028 presidential elections. There is no such dynamic in the Republican Party.
May I suggest tweaking your mental model. Mike Johnson was THE MOST vocal opponent of mass surveillance, he was supposed to be the one to whip a republican congress to finally end Section 702.
Then he was made Speaker and literally overnight, flipped. In his words "I went to the SCIF and got the confidential briefing from sort of the other perspective on that, to understand the necessity of Section 702 of FISA and how important it is for national security. And it gave me a different perspective."
What his "briefing" was we can only guess. But there is a pattern on BOTH sides of the aisle they people are against mass surveillance, until they are put into positions of power and access to compartmentalized, classified info - and then they aren't. (for the record please dont interpret this as defense of anyone aforementioned, if you think that you're misreading me)
> What his "briefing" was we can only guess. But there is a pattern on BOTH sides of the aisle they people are against mass surveillance, until they are put into positions of power and access to compartmentalized, classified info - and then they aren't.
It seems like there are two plausible explanations for this.
The first is that they have a list of atrocities allegedly prevented by the system and most politicians are too witless or spineless to ask the question of whether they could also have been prevented in a variety of other ways.
The second is that they're using the system to e.g. influence public opinion / elections and then once they feast their eyes on the one ring most politicians aren't inclined to throw it into the volcano.
The cynical (wizened) part of me has to wonder how much of Feinstein's support for surveillance maps back to how many of her constituents see the intelligence community as an addressable market.
To that point, she was on the Committee for Intelligence, so of course she was going to lean the direction of giving Intelligence Community what they wanted. I'd expect someone on Government Oversight to be the one to try to reign it back in, but doubtful any in modern times have the moral fortitude to push back especially under Comer's leadership.
Voting for the lesser of two evils is still voting for evil. The good people simply aren't attracted to power or acting as representatives. The good people don't step forward to try and move the levers of the system, because when they do they learn very very quickly that they're not up to "playing the game". Because they usually aren't sociopaths.
Voting is not a thing God created and said you must never vote for evil. Voting is just a thing you can do that has outcomes. Sometimes voting one way results in a better expected outcome than voting the other way or not voting. In these cases you should do it.
It literally is both sides though. Congress, courts, and executive all love spying, have for decades. Do you have evidence that the Democrats have tried to curtail anything?
> Spying on American citizens is a bipartisan point of agreement
Has been. Make it a priority in primaries. It hasn’t been to date—the overlap of privacy concerned Americans and the lazy and nihilistic who reject the political process is almost a union.
To add to this, it's completely dumb to think that any party is necessarily the same over decades. Look around. Most of what you see today is reactionary. Hold on to party views from 10 or 50 years ago, and you won't get elected today. Both parties are in turmoil in terms of public support.
Historical "bipartisan did X" means nothing today. The time is always right now to define what a future party should be. It's a great time to destroy the old and reimagine the new.
I seem to remember that Senator Wyden's public warnings (over a decade ago) that the government was spying on Americans was the reason for President Obama to go on national TV and lie to Americans.
Senator Wyden has a long history of warning the public on surveillance abuses.
Why is this downvoted? OP is simply suggesting to give up, ignoring many intermediate victories in the war for privacy. Consider supporting https://www.eff.org/issues/privacy instead.
You can't say this. We have no idea. There is nothing about (s/the law of physics/US history) that pushes (s/cancer cure/the right to privacy) a long time away.
Don't mind me, just repurposing one of your old comments to save time.
Can please someone explain the concept of a 'classified interpretation' to me like I'm 5? I know the concept exists, but I don't really understand how it can be in any way justified in any country that's even pretending to be a democracy?
Imagine, for example, a case is about someone disclosing the location of nuclear arms to their spouse. Maybe even accidentally. If they are brought up on charges about this, national security doesn't want the fact that a case is about nuclear weapons to be public information. They further don't want it disclosed who was told about them (as the spouse wouldn't be subject to charges). That's basically where a secret interpretation and ruling would ultimately enter. The courts can't disclose what the ruling was nor what the case was even fully about.
Because it's very hard to stop accidental or incidental information leaks. For an opinion to be rendered, generally they also attach the case facts which lead to that ruling. Heavy redaction means it becomes almost impossible to use that ruling as precedent but also runs a real risk of exposing state secrets. For example, which judge made the ruling? Well if you get that you can start pulling information about the days the judge was active and a short list of the people the judge was hearing cases for.
All it takes is 1 accidental redaction or someone who did something silly like using a black highlighter on a PDF and now where the nukes are stored is public information.
There's also simply information that can be gleaned just based on the location that the hearing is taking place. This came from x court in x district, well then it's likely a nuclear silo is roughly in that county or surrounding counties.
I’ll assume that there’s some fake district we can create in the system to attribute such things to, since normally the courts are in districts which may be too specific on their own.
But the resulting material would be like, (XXXX meaning redactions)
XXXX was accused of XXXX
Tried before judge XXXX in XXXX District court
The evidence was XXXX XXXX XXXX
The witnesses were XXXX XXXX XXXX
They were found (not) guilty
If anything could be unredacted it could potentially (?) be the bare fact that it was about nuclear secrets but you can’t really reveal anything else without giving majorly risky facts to bad actors.
The redactions of every document could require many full-time very security-cleared clerks (or take years to do if understaffed) and is of the highest importance since a single failure to redact, or operational error, may reveal the whole secret thing. Mostly, all the things need redacting, so either whole documents, or everything but the prepositions and articles is redacted.
Since it sounds like the concern here is about the public’s interest in monitoring to make sure no abuses are taking place (which is a value I do share), what part of this aim would be served by a redacted report like this?
Sounds like if one desperately wants some sort of excuse, this can be shoehorned to anything and everything. Exactly what 3 letter agencies would say to keep doing whatever nasty dirty unlawful and unconstitutional things they are doing on whims of current set of people in power.
Its still pretty lame and shows vast incompetence on all levels. Maybe I am a bit naive but correct solution is to tackle underlying problems, not just give up because thats what you basically suggest.
ok, so put a disclosure time on ruling. how how much time should pass so that information is non risk anymore? So you know that nukes locations got leaked, so what do you do? do you relocate the base? if not how sure can you be that this information is not accuired by enemies? So if you do not realocate the base you accept that this is acceptable risk. So might be that publishing the ruling is also acceptable?
> Because it's very hard to stop accidental or incidental information leaks.
It's really hard if it is in your interest not to stop accidental information leaks, because it is easier to bulk classify everything and blame this difficulty. There is no incentive to stop accidental leaks if you can always hide everything.
A federal court tried to conceal the identity of a judge who has been reprimanded.
Claude was able to work out who it was in less than 10min based on stringing together facts that remained and seemed irrelevant. Journalists uncovered the identity independently using different means. (The ability of Claude to do this was not revealed until the other journalists had gone public and confirmed the identity.)
2 parties bring up what they believe is the legal justification for their position in dispute and a judge rules on which is the correct position. If a party thinks the judge got the ruling wrong (interpreted the law wrong), they object and appeal.
> Imagine, for example, a case is about someone disclosing the location of nuclear arms to their spouse.
The location of most US nuclear weapons are public. Moreover, if you suspect that the location of some you intend to be secret may have been compromised then the obvious sensible response is "move them" rather than "keep even the legal theory of the case a secret forever".
This is why the primary ones whose location is intended to be a secret are on submarines -- submarines are easy to move around.
If you look at the history of secret interpretations / rulings, they are more like "retention of communications by the government is a pre-interception act". No specifics, very broad legal definitions of what it means for everyone's communications to be retained (and in this case, probably analyzed by AI systems for risk).
I can get the idea that for some cases it can be in the public's interest if specific court hearings are closed, or if it's secret that certain court hearings or entire cases even exist. There is a lot of potential of abuse (and a documented history of abuse), but at least the idea makes sense
But I can't see a public benefit to keeping the principles such a court uses secret
From warrantless wiretapping to extra judicial renditions, the US government has been a rogue state for sometime. Now they just have low-grade criminals and racists running the show, buddied up with media owners, O&G and the mic.
It’s a pretty obvious outcome. Attorney-client privilege applies to the executive branch of the government as much as it applies to anyone else, and not just in national security matters.
I am the first generation out of a dictatorship, the belief some folks have in their democratic processes always amazes, there is no law when secret courts and secret warrants are a thing.
Yet for some strange reason folks think secret agencies are bound by the same laws as regular police officers.
At least in nazi Germany, the state was explicitly designed like that. Most people should never come into contact with the prerogative state and spend their lives in the normative state, as capitalism doesn't work well in a prerogative state. You need to believe that punishment doesn't come arbitrarily in order to follow the rules.
But of course, things are very different in the prerogative state, where actions have unclear consequences.
It's not justified and it can never be. Keeping information secret is only justified if releasing it would put a person in serious danger or compromise a police/military operation. And even then it must be balanced against the public interest in transparency, strictly time limited and narrow scoped (no blacking out whole documents).
I don't see how releasing an interpretation of a law could ever compromise law enforcement. Or actually I know how, it's because it would prove the way they do mass surveillance is illegal.
The problem is modern America doesn't see it that way. Any time the government does something evil they just say it's for "national security" and no one questions them. It's like a Winter Soldier password that makes courts go blank and say yes to anything.
> Keeping information secret is only justified if releasing it would put a person in serious danger or compromise a police/military operation.
Sure, but the obvious pro-government response is “revealing that the government is doing bad things reflects badly on the government and damages its reputation at home and abroad.”
> “revealing that the government is doing bad things reflects badly on the government and damages its reputation at home and abroad.”
This is -incidentally- how the ancient English "state secrets privilege" got introduced into US law.
In the 1940's, godawful maintenance resulted in the crash of a bomber over US soil and the death of all three of the civilians on board the plane. The widows of the dead civilians sued the government and demanded the accident report. The government refused to provide the report, claiming the privilege because "national security", and courts all the way up to the Supreme Court agreed.
In the early 2000s, the accident report was declassified. Inspection revealed that the only real reason to refuse to release it was to both prevent government embarrassment and to avoid having to pay out -IIRC- nearly a quarter million in 1940's USD to the widows.
Given its enormous potential for unchecked abuse, along with the fact that the first ever invocation of it was abusive, courts should refuse to permit its use.
There is also a genuine case for National security in that - during the Second World War - releasing that information would (IMO) let the enemy know what maintenance was being held back, in bombers.
I feel the role of the Press is to root out these stories and publish them.
To me the defining moment of the Press abdicating their job was when the NYTs reported the second gulf war. This was the end of me reading it. The Sunday times was staple reading growing up.
> Keeping information secret is only justified if releasing it would put a person in serious danger or compromise a police/military operation.
I think that’s A reason to keep information secret. The other is if it would reveal sensitive sources and methods (e.g., capabilities that it known, would impact the ability to use those methods).
Not saying the legal interpretation falls under that, but just mentioning it.
Really what it is is they had a lawyer say, "We can justify massive spying on citizens via [long long list of arguments and precedents]", the security apparatus would like to keep the veneer of legality that provides and knows if what they were doing there would be massive backlash and the law would be changed to make it more clearly illegal so they keep that interpretation secret. Basically going on the logic that they don't have to tell Congress or the Courts how they screwed up the 4th Amendment and it's not their job to fix it.
different countries have different platforms or mechanisms where interpretations of law are discussed, in Belgium for example there are "rondzendbrieven" by which say judges discuss how to collectively misinterpret the law.
from a US perspective, isn't this diametrically opposed to the concept of "void for vagueness"? : the moment the interpretation of ostensibly non-vague law is under discussion by professionals is the moment said law is invalidated.
Any government side stepping law by interpreting law in any different manner than how it is written is breaking that law. In my opinion laws should not be interpreted at all and parliament should make any bug fixes rather than allowing courts or administration to interpret laws in any other way other than how its written down in the law.
I get why that may reflexively seem right but such a blanket proscription would go off the rails and lead to unintended consequences you definitely don't want. It's simply not possible to write a law both specific enough yet broad enough to cover all cases. You or I can read a plainly worded law and think "There's no way this can be misconstrued, gamed or subverted" and, sadly, we'd be wrong.
> parliament should make any bug fixes rather than allowing courts or administration to interpret laws in any other way other than how its written down in the law.
It's certainly possible to theory-craft completely new and different governance, legal and justice systems from scratch which have different sets of constraints and trade-offs, but then it's a long conversation and unrelated to the existing U.S. system. If we limit ourselves to starting from what the existing U.S. system is and proposing modifications which are actually both constitutionally and logistically possible, then forcing all interpretation and clarification to be passed by congress would require monthly revisions, immediately breaking an already dysfunctional congressional system.
I think it's worth mentioning that in the U.S. system, judges interpreting application of laws passed by elected representatives is a feature not a bug. The U.S. system was designed to be adaptive and self-gating, so each of the three branches of the government have built-in checks and balances on the other two. Setting aside current politics, on a long time-horizon like the last ~50 years, I think the U.S. justice system, as imperfect as it is, is actually serving its designed purpose far better than the other two.
Usa is a common law based system where court judgements also serve as precedent rulings. It is more or less regarded as law even though its not passed by parliament/legislature.
There is another system, civil law based systems where law is passed by parliament and doesn't depend on any court precedents or court interpretation.
Might as well have just courts and call it as adaptive system instead of acknowledging that is isn't a good enough system. Europe has done better in this regard. Checks and balances hardly works in usa. Plenty of news on subverting various constitutional guarantees is example that it failed to work.
Proper democracy needs properly functioning non-lazy legislature. Making vague laws and calling it a day and leaving it for judges and lawyers to interpret based on whichever way the wind is blowing isn't democracy.
Legislature can also work 40 hours a week. Things can be more functional rather than dysfunctional. Active democracy and direct democracy where people can veto laws if necessary, in case representatives collude to pass draconian laws, would be the best kind of democracy. Only that can prevent erosion of rights.
You wrote "All laws are interpreted". If I put an asterisk on "interpreted" that can change the meaning you actually intended. Laws should not be interpreted. People need to learn how to properly use words with its actual meaning and write laws that are non-ambigous. Its not hard or impossible to write proper law in simple and easy to understand way. Feel free to interpret any law with its original meaning of the word and sentence structure. If it leaves room for interpretation, it is a vague law and not a good law.
> that can change the meaning you actually intended
Laws aren't made by one person. When everyone votes on them, they agree on the language because of how they interpret the words on the paper. The meaning is what the words on the paper say, which is interpreted by different people to mean different things before they even become law.
May be start attaching dictionary too as an appendix to law so that words are not interpreted the wrong way. Not having to explain meaning used to be common sense before double speak. But I guess now we need to idiot proof laws.
Usa has constitution and its government more or less side steps it. Might as well have no constitution. Usa is a jungle for practical intends and purposes compared to europe or any functional democracy. This is the problem with allowing interpretation of law rather than taking law as it is written. Someone somewhere can interpret it in completely twisted way and throw away the spirit of the law.
> I don't really understand how it can be in any way justified in any country that's even pretending to be a democracy?
You're not misunderstanding. It really is against everything most Americans think their government is allowed to do. To your question, the 'classified' part is what you think it is: secret. 'Interpretation' is the tricky part.
Unfortunately, laws and regulations aren't exactly clear and over time situations change so one important role of the court system is interpreting how, when and whether the words in a law apply in a specific context. Courts at different levels do this all the time as cases with unique situations arise. Sometimes it's as simple as deciding if a horse counts as a vehicle in a state law which says "no vehicles on this type of road." Assuming that ruling survives appeals without being overturned, the judge will have justified the basis and, hopefully, some clear reasoning for why a horse does or doesn't counts a vehicle in the context of that law. That judge's ruling then becomes part of the "precedent" (aka 'body of case law') attached to that law. In effect, such precedents become part of the law since they can clarify if and how the law applies in certain situations.
So whether some action is or isn't against a law can't solely be determined by just reading the law. You have to do some interpretation, which includes looking up any relevant precedents and weighing them. A single ruling from one local municipal court has low precedential weight. The main job of the Supreme Court is resolving conflicting precedents set by lower courts, so a SCOTUS ruling has a lot of weight and multiple SCOTUS rulings over time, each successively refining and narrowing (or occasionally reversing) their prior interpretations, carry maximum weight. All of this happens in the open and, in the long run, I think SCOTUS manages to eventually get most things, if not perfect, pretty close to right.
Hence, the answer to "Is this legal" can be a bit tricky because it inevitably depends on context and interpretation. When there aren't handy decades of SCOTUS rulings to refer to, lawyers need to do some research and assess how SCOTUS would rule on a situation. That's called "a formal opinion", is provided in writing and usually includes some justifications like citations to existing case law as well as legal reasoning supporting the opinion. Anyone can hire a lawyer to research and assess if X action violates Y law (but if you get sued for relying on their opinion, they won't be on the hook, you will). It's called an opinion because that's what it is.
When a govt agency wants to know if they're allowed to do X under Y law, they ask the justice dept to assess and provide a formal opinion just like any company might ask their corporate counsel to. This is often routine but can be very consequential. Where this can go horribly wrong is when these govt lawyer opinions are classified top secret. For example, we all know torturing prisoners is against U.S. law, so in the 2000s the military and CIA asked the Bush Justice Dept to provide a secret formal opinion interpreting whether certain 'enhanced interrogation' techniques met the legal definition of torture. And they got what they wanted, a written legal opinion that waterboarding isn't torture. The Obama Justice Dept issued a then-secret legal opinion that droning a teenaged American citizen in Somalia, who posed no exigent threat (but had the wrong Dad), did not meet the legal definition of murder. That Senator Rand Paul was the only politician willing to stand on the floor of the senate and say it was in fact first degree murder authorized by a sitting U.S. President is... frightening.
That's why Senator Ron Wyden is agitated and worried. He's on the Senate intelligence committee and he's saying the U.S. govt is relying on a legal opinion (a...
To add a little bit to your comment, the US invented the term "enemy combatant" to evade the Geneva Convention rules about prisoners of war. And it also gave itself the right to designate whoever it wants as an enemy combatant.
You have the law, you have precedent, best not to get on the naughty list.
Inventing the term "enemy combatants" as a label for people who don't wear uniforms isn't the problem. The problem is not even affording them the rights guaranteed to prisoners of war.
> The problem is not even affording them the rights guaranteed to prisoners of war.
I agree. There are really two separate issues.
Circa WWII, the term 'enemy combatants' was created to solve a definitional issue around military 'terms of engagement' (a concept which evolved with the rise of the professional military). There were "enemy soldiers" and "civilians" with separate rules of engagement for each (at least in theory, as the rules weren't always applied uniformly).
As you said, not affording "enemy combatants" any rights is the problem. The only slightly positive sign in all this is the U.S. military is clearly aware U.S. courts won't let them get away with defining a category of human that doesn't have any rights, forcing the military into temporary workarounds like Gitmo. When U.S. courts have been able to establish jurisdiction over enemy combatants, the rulings have not generally gone favorably for the military.
Usa is functioning in a way that is not how it is supposed to function in a democracy. There should not be anything hidden from any elected representatives as long as they are a citizen.
Civil law based systems are a more sane alternative to common law based system that relies on precedents. Law should be discussed in legislature and legislature must oversee and fix the law appropriately rather than make vague laws and leaving it to judges or others for interpretation. Due to not relying on precedents, the law is also easy to understand and apply and follow and enforce in civil law based systems. Cases also takes less time overall compared to common law based justice system.
Elected representatives are the authors or developers of law. Everyone else is users of law. Users cannot be allowed to change interpretation of law as anything other than how it is written.
Law made for horses and then vehicles got invented and law needs more clarity? Ask legislature to discuss and add new law for vehicles or modify existing law to also handle vehicles.
> The perverse thing is that the pretense for keeping it secret is to prevent 'foreign adversary governments' from knowing what it is, but it's clearly about domestic spying on U.S. citizens - and Russia and China probably already know exactly what it is
I think you're trying to hard to dismiss the justification here. There are certainly techniques for monitoring communications that use justifiably classified technologies that were probably developed to monitor communications of adversaries.
Imagine the use of which is helping keep American spies in Iran safe and the knowledge of the technique could help Iran identify those people. That's a perfectly reasonable classification of the technique.
What makes the interpretation of the law secret is that it mentions this hypothetical technology.
Imagine they have the technology to hear speech through walls passively using your WiFi signal. That technology is classified and they have the legal opinion that this doesn't violate the fourth amendment.
Wyden being concerned about whatever this is isn't surprising really but he's always on the extreme end of these interpretations, which I usually agree with, but judges typically don't agree with him.
I think it's probably generous to say the legal justification they are using has just as much chance of being legal as illegal. It would be nice to know what it was though because it can probably be defeated.
> There are certainly techniques for monitoring communications that use justifiably classified technologies
Wyden and others who are privy to what this is have made clear this is NOT about means or methods. This isn't about how the spying is done, it's about whether it's legal for the NSA to ever spy on U.S. citizens by ANY means. Existing law is very clear, it's absolutely not ever okay - no exceptions. It's completely irrelevant whether they're steaming open envelopes to read your junk mail or using a secret orbital mind-reading satellite to read your deepest private thoughts.
Experts like lawyers from the ACLU think it's something like a legal opinion which re-interprets the "absolute, no bulk spying on U.S. citizens ever" rule by claiming "it's not 'spying' if the govt pays a third-party commercial data collection service to put give the the data voluntarily." That opens a backdoor for the govt to now back-link metadata and build one composite profile that includes all the private info the federal, state and local govt has ever had on you since birth (tax, employment, DMV, voting, school, govt assistance, Medicare, social security, etc) with everything any bank, credit card, or store knows about you, with every phone call, text, email and cell phone location ping you've had since 2014, with every bit of behavioral data Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc have about you. To be clear, this is not "with probable cause they could get a warrant from a judge to send a supoena to each of those providers." This is "they already have all that data in one place but without this new secret legal opinion as soon as they knew it was a U.S. citizen they could not look at it. Now they can sit in a chair, and with just your phone number, email addr, license plate, or a facial ID match from a store camera, instantly search for every single person you've communicated with in the past 3 years and every person they've communicated with and have an AI examine all that data from all 17,000 of those people and have a full report on-screen in 15 seconds. No judge, no warrant, (and according to several recent reports), no record it ever happened, who did the search or under what pretext.
I guess when you have secret courts, it's something that starts to make sense.
I still can't understand how a government can work with some courts where everything is secret. That's something almost literally lifted out of The Process, but the Kafka book is an allegory for a kind of madness, not something that works.
A good faith answer to the question; classification hinges on damage done to the United States if it is released. So for example, a law might constraint or enforce the usage of a capability against an enemy, and this, of course would hang on some sort of spectrum also probably defined in law or in an agency interpretation. The agency interpretation is also probably classified and so as you start applying that spectrum, you enter gray areas and niches, and extremes, and so you have to ask a lawyer to disambiguate. And so this lawyer's interpretation is now the fulcrum on which employment of classified US capabilities is based. So therefore, teleologically this lawyer's interpretation has to be classified because it all goes back to whether public knowledge of this capability will damage the United States interest. if you know what the lawyer's interpretation is then you know the spectrum if you know the spectrum then you know the capability then you can damage the United States.
There are a couple of people with sober takes on this article and you’re one of them. The rest seem to have decided long ago that the entire military is full of mustachio-twirling evildoers, and building their whole mental model of what’s going on with that as the foundation of it.
The facts of the matter are probably much closer to what you’re saying, but some people have become so radicalized (including those who got that way due to Trump-era buffoonery) that they can’t accept even the possibility that most of the actors are operating to protect our collective legitimate best interests.
Most of the people in government and the military are not political appointees, are not political hacks, and are doing tough and sometimes high-risk jobs, from a motivation other than evil. On the other hand, many politicians are motivated mainly by political partisanship and will do anything to try to score political points, including trying to cause outrage about what’s being kept secret, even if it’s been explained to them why it must remain secret.
There are whole laws that are classified and cannot be discussed in open court. Ignorance of the law is no defense when you are charged with violating a law and that’s still true in the USA even if the law is classified and you are not authorized to know what it says.
The Wikipedia article is poor, but I cannot not edit it as I attended parts of the trial and in fact discussed the suit with john before he filed it so by Wikipedia’s rules I can’t edit it. Anyway a lawyer would be a better person.
John’s appeal is online. Section [10] of the decision discussion describes being subject to a law he cannot have access to. The judge saw it but could not discuss it in court, with the plaintiff (John Gilmore) or even his lawyer. Also the orders (law) are agreed by the court to be arbitrary, changing day by day and being arbitrarily different between airports. But since the Airport personnel knew them tht was good enough for the court.
And though the discussion mentioned that he could take a bus or walk, the conclusion, [21], said that his rights were not violated at all, both the bus precedent and the legality of being subject to unknown law. The brief Wikipedia page mentions only the former, though the latter was the primary factor of the complaint.
Depends on the business. You cannot have a bar or restaurant behaving like that with some racist/xenophobic/whatever shit like that, you would get your license revoked rather quickly.
Not sure if airliners are regulated like that, but 'free business' is not anarchy by any means, unlike you suggest.
Whether they can do that or not, in this case it was due to acknewledgedly arbitrary and capricious secret rules dictated by government personnel to the airlines, not decisions by the airlines themselves.
Unless your position is that one of the legally legitimate principles of free business is whether to follow the law or not.
lol “we don’t feel like following the law so we just picked some fresh dog poop and yelled about bad things that were unrelated and then did whatever we want and invented these funny little games with paper thin jokes everyone is going to pretend is valid so we could do whatever we wanted to anyway lol”.
No one is giving the real answer to this question which is that these laws touch on the legality of capabilities the US does not want to acknowledge it has, and so it won't. Secret information in the US is like glitter - if you touch it, it spreads to you too.
It's not just "here's this law about spying in the abstract," which can be talked about in the open; it's "we're using the MIND READER 5000 under Title XVII powers delegated by the President to the Mind Reading Organization to conduct mind reading on persons X, Y, and Z." The legal briefings and rulings on the facts will by necessity reveal the nature of the technology or technique in question, and so, they are classified. If I recall correctly it was a big deal for the ACLU to get a lawyer a security clearance so they could interact with these courts, but I could be misremembering.
The real problem here is that if someone files a claim against the government and the government wants to keep the facts of the case a secret, you still need the case to have an outcome, and then you have two options.
The first is that you assume whatever is being kept a secret is something that doesn't favor the government, and then the government loses the case by default. This is the more reasonable option, because it mitigates the perverse incentive for the government to declare something a secret whenever it makes them look bad. But it has the obvious problem that then the government would lose some cases it should have won if the information could be published.
The second is that you assume whatever is being kept a secret is something that favors the government, and then the government wins the case by default. But that doesn't solve the problem -- you then have members of the public losing cases they should have won if the information could be published. And doing this makes the perverse incentive worse.
So why do we accept the first one instead of the second one?
Oftentimes the government drops the case. When people get convicted for things they did on Tor, and don't settle, the government often drops the case so they don't have to reveal how they got information about activities on Tor.
That's when the government is the one bringing the case to begin with. The issue is, if the government e.g. kills your spouse, why should the perpetrators get off scott free because the perpetrators want to keep something a secret?
Imagine the public tried to do that. Sorry, IRS/DoJ, the defendant is refusing discovery because it's a secret and without that you can't prosecute them.
You’re government agency, and you ask your lawyers about how the law operates given a particular set of circumstances.
In response, the lawyers provide you with advice about how they think the law applies to this situation, and what findings they think a court would make given the evidence etc available.
Information subject to attorney-client privilege (as this information would be) is exempt from release under FOIA anyway. Dropping a security classification on top adds some additional protections against release.
Sometimes there are good reasons for this, such as to protect particular technical capabilities that are easily circumvented if adversaries know that they exist, or to protect human sources who might end up dead if found out. Other times, there are no good reasons to do this.
To really blow your mind, there is an entire system of classified patents. Some technology is too important to publish but corporations still need to patent it. But when Lockheed wants to sue Boeing over infringement of a classified patent they need to go to a classified court were the patent can be litigated without anything being revealed publicly.
I thought patents had to be published for anyone to read? Isn't that the tradeoff of our freedoms, in exchange for a "limited" time monopoly on the idea, you have to publish the idea.
I think the most charitable argument for keeping it secret is: “it would expose capabilities and methods that if made public would allow our adversaries to avoid detection / change their methods”
I don’t agree with this rationale. On the other hand there is a tension between operating effective counter intelligence operations against nation state actors operating against your interests within your borders and free and open society. I’m not sure where the line is but my perception is we’re way beyond it.
Gonna take a wild guess that this has to do with the purchase of privately (and lawfully) collected bulk data for the purposes of mass surveillance. Who needs PRISM or xKeyscore when people willingly purchase TVs and install weather apps that spy on them 24/7? The open legal question has been whether the government is free to do whatever it wants with the data it purchases.
> Spying on American citizens is a bipartisan point of agreement.
Not an American, but I can totally understand the need of governments to spy on its citizens that it has EVIDENCE of being involved in behaviour or activities that threaten the nation.
For example - if it had evidence that certain citizens were involved in espionage of their country, and they were thus passing on serious information to actors or other states that were intent on using that information to harm the nation, I would most definitely want those citizens to be spied upon.
Such evidence could be:
Engaging in, or communicating with, known extremist organisations or forums known to be frequented by such individuals.
The distinction I suspect is targeted spying vs mass spying. I don’t think anyone is going to get upset bout a target counter espionage operation, but spying on the public at large with no evidence of suspicion of wrongdoing is another matter.
I mean he has Congressional privilege, he literally cannot be touched for reading anything he wants into the Congressional record. I wonder why more lawmakers talk about things instead of just revealing The Thing and leaning on their special rights as elected legislators.
The debate about reapproval of section 702 is all theater. Does anyone genuinely believe the government would stop surveilling us if the authorization expired?
I guess that depends, do you think that an administration would be willing to prosecute its predecessors for doing it if it were against the law? Maybe you don't because of mutually assured destruction, but lately there's been a lot more appetite for prosecuting people in the other party (with some charges being extremely trumped up, if you'll pardon the pun), so I don't know that this is a given anymore.
Elected administrations should notbbe deciding who is or is not prosecuted, period. We have three branches of government for a reason, its up to the judicial to decide what cases will or won't be tried, and they should be basing that on evidence alone.
> We have three branches of government for a reason, its up to the judicial to decide what cases will or won't be tried, and they should be basing that on evidence alone.
The judicial branch does not decide who to prosecute. They're supposed to ensure that the law is applied consistently, but prosecutorial discretion is entirely up to the DoJ and at least nominally is part of the executive branch (for federal crimes). They also don't directly decide whether someone is convicted in most cases; a judge can throw out a meritless case or in rare cases vacate a jury verdict, but the jury verdict itself is outside of any of the three branches by design.
In any case though, this is isn't super relevant to my comment you replied to. The parent comment claimed that the debate about the law was purely theater, and I argued that it might not be because someone could get prosecuted for it if the law isn't on the books. Whether the DoJ should try to prosecute someone for something is not the same as whether they will try to, which I think is pretty apparent recently (even if in many cases they fail).
> The Trump administration has until November 6 to answer the senators.
How convenient that this is right after the midterm elections. If they maintain control, the republicans can simply decide to ignore this requirement without penalty.
The difference is willingness to act on said spying. Luckily, despite the massive surveillance capabilities the U.S. "Intelligence" Community has, they don't seem to really mess with regular citizens all that much. This gives some credence to the "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about" point of view, but only if you can guarantee you have nothing to hide (which can change drastically depending on who is in power, hence why I don't believe in this - the classic example being that hiding one's religion in and around Germany in the 1930s and early 40s was not seen as important until it was really important).
China and Russia (and to some extent, the UK now) will absolutely act on the spying they do. Or just act and say they had a good reason. China and Russia are dictatorships. One of them has a very competent and hard-working population which succeeds in spite of the dictator, the other is a gas station with nukes that survives solely because of said nukes.
Well your assumption is that they are not using it; they weren't able to use it all before.. Times are changing; Now they can use and use it a lot.. military Ai infrastructure that is to connected political arm will read and process everything and they can target their apposition... its just matter of time. Absolute power = absolute corruption.
> they don't seem to really mess with regular citizens all that much.
Except they do. The NSA has been handing over intel over a decade ago:
> A former federal agent in the northeastern United States who received such tips from SOD described the process. “You’d be told only, ‘Be at a certain truck stop at a certain time and look for a certain vehicle.’ And so we’d alert the state police to find an excuse to stop that vehicle, and then have a drug dog search it,” the agent said. [1]
Sure these were criminals, but who knows how many “undesirables” were prosecuted or targeted for some crime anybody commits?
Your position only makes sense if you think that the groups the US gov operates against aren't "regular citizens".
The US gov is acting on intel against its citiczens all the time, regular or not.
Personally, I don't like the right wing groups it's infiltrated, but I still think that is a reasonable example.
For me, more pressingly, there are current investigations going on in Minnesota from the US gov's "Puppetmaster" operation that actively infiltrated and monitored a highly diverse set of anti-ICE groups.
Historically this is nothing new; the US has been infiltrating "anti-government" groups for decades. AIM, the panthers, ELF, ALF, labor unions, MOVE, etc are all easy examples of domestic groups that the US gov has broken at some point or other.
Your position only work if you classify folks such as the Minnesota 15 as "terrorists" or some such. Which, hey, folks like the US Gov try to do. But at that point the point is kind of tautological: if you have "something to hide" then you are a legit target of government sanctioning.
That's not very satisfying to me, but plenty of folks in the US find it to be a just-fine principle.
> Section 702 only permits the targeting of non-United States persons who are reasonably believed to be located outside the United States. United States persons and anyone in the United States may not be targeted under Section 702.
Under the Israel-US agreement for surveillance, that section was circumvented, as the NSA and other agencies are feeding raw unminimized tappings directly to the ELINT/SIGINT agencies and getting relayed back. [1]
This was also true for Five Eyes/EU sharing too, even though with this year's legislation some EU countries have offered Israel a direct access to INT feeds.
Yes, the "fourteen eyes" group. It used to be five (basically all the English speaking countries) but they coerced more European countries to join and now it's fourteen.
That's pretty much what "intel sharing" is. They get other countries to spy on Americans and receive that data. In return they give their spy data on citizens of that country to that country.
I meant while the original five eyes are sharing raw sigint (we can also disagree on the level of sharing proportions), Israel gets also access to raw sigint intended as 3rd-country -> US.
The integration in the cyber domain is a different tier compared to the default the US has with other eyes.
This is an example of a thought-stopping cliche. It is a slogan to prevent the listener from thinking. Or at the least, to divert the listener's thoughts back to a more politically acceptable (to the speaker) rightthink.
Not exactly a democratic country, but came across these instructions what to do in China when police has detected a VPN in your household, or you have posted something
The process that's described (appear cooperative but deny everything) is the same thing you should do in the US if the police come to your door and accuse you of drug possession. Every country does this violation of freedom, they just use different excuses.
The US doesn't have the most freedom. There's precisely zero evidence that people in the US are the most free, except for the fact that its government tells them they are. But North Korea tells its people that even harder.
I disagree. The US has the 1st and 2nd amendments, which gives us protection from tyranny in the government, and which lets us criticize the government without repercussion. No other country grants its citizens those rights, and you can see the effects of that worldwide, where despite it all, we still have our free speech!
You just described the mechanism by which they did. Sure, they didn't make it illegal nationwide permanently, because what serious country would do that and hope to maintain control? The real threat is in the vague exceptions for specific cases, which they have now used.
It’s more akin to “stand your ground” laws (whether you’re for or against them). In situations where you reasonably fear for your life, like surrounded by an angry mob of people in the street busting up your car.
It’s not a blank check to run over people holding signs you don’t like as you drive home from work.
How does the 2nd amendment protect you? Are you allowed automatic weapons, grenades? You're not even allowed swords. And if you call for violence, which is what the 2nd amendment might enable, you won't find protection via the 1st amendment.
Many jurisdictions have laws against carrying blades longer than X (it varies) and any reasonable definition of a sword would fall under that category.
In the US at least automatic weapons are nominally legal at the federal level after hefty tax stamps and background checks but states / local jurisdictions can and do regulate more / outright ban them.
That's just moving the goalposts. Nothing in there says it's illegal to own any of those things. You just might not be able to carry a sword (there are carve outs for reenactments in most places btw) and you might have to move or pay more for automatic weapons.
Carrying arms is another word for bearing then. According to the constitution, this right shall not be infringed. If it's illegal to carry an arm then the constitution is being infringed.
The 2nd amendment was designed to protect the 1st amendment. As for how, it was supposed to give citizens teeth against their government if it ever turned tyrannical one day. Armed citizens were one of the factors that made the American Revolution successful, which probably why so many Americans hold onto the idea.
IMO This is an even more naive (and dare I say intentionally malicious) bad-faith misinterpretation of the facts.
His death had nothing to do with the Constitution, it was because of a trigger-happy, confused cop who had his back to the guy, then noticed a gun next to him (that another officer previously put there). The US government had no part in that situation at all.
I don't understand the issue since no law can physically prevent people from breaking it.
Of course cops are the government, but they're also humans that make mistakes and commit crimes themselves. But this isn't actually related to some greater constitutional crisis or anything, unless you have some evidence that suggests they were instructed to act the way they did... but I've never seen anyone come forward with that yet.
> In the United States, the right to petition is enumerated in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which specifically prohibits Congress from abridging "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances".
I think the key point is that it allows this "petitioning" of the government in the first place, that's what it's good for. But you still have to go through the court system to right any wrongs, which includes misbehaving police who may be breaking the law themselves.
The Constitution is not a judge, jury or executioner, so in a way it was always "limited" in what it can do if it's not actually respected.
If you can't exercise your rights without being murdered by a state sanctioned thug, then it's not really a right. Also, has he been indicted yet? charged?
The constitution is just some rules people wrote up generations ago. It's not a magic spell that has power by itself, it is only effective as a social contract as long as power structures agree to follow it.
If armed government enforcers break it with impunity, what good is it?
Whatever one may think of gun control, it's clear the 2nd Amendment is on a much poorer footing.
In a number of states, you need to take a safety course before you're allowed to purchase a gun.
Compare that with the 1st amendment. If they passed laws saying "You can say whatever you want in public, but only after you've taken this course that informs you on what is acceptable and unacceptable to say in public", would you say there is free speech.
Or "You are free to practice any religion, but only after you've taken a course that ..."?
The colonies were expected to defend themselves. In reality that meant every man possessed and drilled with arms whether the were part of a formal militia or not. If there was an attack people would be "called up" to the militia. There is no requirement of belonging to a formal militia in the 2nd amendment. While times have changed, it was expectated that you were proficient with arms in the case that a formal militia was required to be formed.
> The First Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting Congress from abridging the right to assemble and petition, was not intended to limit the action of the State governments in respect to their own citizens, but to operate upon the National Government alone.
> No other country grants its citizens those rights
I'm genuinely curious about who makes these kinds of statements so confidently. Why don't you do a bit of research? it doesn't take much to find this is completely wrong.
In the choice between being allowed to carry a gun (and having people with guns all around me) versus being offered free healthcare (and having healthier people all around me) I know not just which one I'd choose, but also which one I'd call more free.
You don’t know what the rules are in a dictatorship either. Laws and regulations exist but they get selectively enforced based on a lot of factors. Take repressions in the early Soviet Union. There’s just a bureaucratic top down edict that this many “enemies of the people” must be found, so they are found.
Turns out letting monopoly capital control your government policy leads to short term gains at the expense of long term viability. Maybe the VCs can make some money off government surveillance and defense contracts before being completely eclipsed?
Make a joke about immigrants on twitter in the UK and you get arrested. Meanwhile there are more heat deaths in Europe than gun deaths in America. Most of Europe can't be called a free country anymore.
>Meanwhile there are more heat deaths in Europe than gun deaths in America.
This is a weird metric of freedom. It seems more like a reflexive, zeitgeist based response than any actual freedom metric.
In my experience the country with the most freedom is Canada. I have never seen anything like it. It's just so easy to do business there. Even if it wasn't that the laws enable it (they do) but even the way people operate. Being able to have a discussion with a customer without 12 rounds of a solicitor trying to insert dumb loopholes into a contract, costing the potential customer more in billable hours to their solicitor than the cost of the contract.
The USA is just junk. States that want to be Feds, Feds that want to be States, and when you cut through all the red tape you still have to deal with Litigious, ignorant Americans. Oh and if you want to import or export something just forget it.
"Oh but we have guns" is basically the exception that proves the rule, in a country where people get detained for such crimes as "Being beloved childrens author Mem Fox" or "Said naughty things on reddit" or "Working while waiting for Immigration to sort their status out".
It is a common misconception, partly intentionally perpetuated by the UK right-wing press, that people are arrested and jailed for making jokes or otherwise casually chatting on social media. If you dig deeper you'll generally find that people jailed for Twitter or Facebook posts went vastly beyond “telling a joke” or “saying something inappropriate”. The UK quite meaningfully prosecutes hate speech, death threats and similar felonies, and I for one don't want to live in a place that condones or even actively protects it. Downplaying it as “a joke about immigrants” plays right into the hands of the xenophobic right.
Here is one of the latest cases, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gz1qy30v5o
Here is another one:
"West Midlands Police arrested a 15-year-old boy named Fraser on August 3, 2026, after he published Facebook posts mocking Conservative Wolverhampton City Council member Simon Bennett."
...after posting an image of a politician with the bunny ears.
One suggestion - don't travel much around the world and certainly avoid backpacking and interacting with locals and understanding things like history or culture, you may eventually lose those... beautiful opinions of yours
The rate of incarceration in the US is extremely high, far beyond most developed countries in the world. If the US has the most freedom, this has to be a very specific definition of the word.
well i am chinese, we do cannot post Winnie the Pooh meme(with ugly xi image), the origin carton figure is fine.(we also have a show about it in shanghai disney i think)
what troubles me is why 'humor' is the most important thing? shouldn't be the action/output of the gov? i mean, you vote someone, he promise something, he cannot do it, he breaks the law, then nothing happens, you make fun of him. then after 4 yeras, you select another person. and go on. Biden didn't get punised for what he has not achieved. So will Trump.
how does that improve your life? how can people live like this? how is that 'democray'? its very hard for our people to understand.
our neighbor counties like Mongoel and Philippines, they have a system like USA, and the popeople can make fun of their leaders all the time, i can see that from reddit. but they basiclly live in a shit hole, with a small populartion and vast resources, and they are poor than average chinese. i never understand the deulusion of them.
Suppression of humour is a canary in the coal mine. If you can’t make fun of the politicians, it implies multiple things:
1. There’s no freedom of speech;
2. Which implies there’s no freedom of thought;
3. There’s no separation of powers. Meaning, there’s really no “politicians”, just the ruling nomenclature;
Which is fine-ish as long as the nomenclature is benign and competent enough. It becomes problematic when (not if) the nomenclature stops being competent. This can happen naturally because people age, still cling to power, and/or they care about their children, so they try to push them into plush nomenclature jobs regardless of how dense their offspring might be. This is btw happening in China right now as far as I know.
When that happens, because of 1. and 2., as well as the “repression muscle” that the government has, change becomes near impossible, as you have no leverage for change outside the system, but the system resists it. Then you start stagnating and/or getting pulled into pointless wars that the nomenclature starts to “rally the flag”.
Does that means the us gov, not only the president,but also thr congress, speak for the people in USA, supoorts go with war with Iran, supoort the genocide in GAZA, support tariff on every country ,threatens Canada, Greenland... and ICE shooting people in the street?
Like I said, he's straining the system. But if the people punish Trump in November by removing the senators and representatives who've supported him, then I think it means the people explicitly don't support what he's done.
Genuine question: So anecdotally which country is the most free? Hard evidence can be difficult to obtain, but often speaking to locals and/or living in different countries does give a comparative sense of freedoms.
They know that Kim doesn't shit ice cream like they're told, it's a loyalty test. Americans tend to never even consider that they are being lied to because their idea of propaganda is about as nuanced as a cartoon. You should do some reading on the topic.
When you stop judging systems by their design intent and instead by their outcomes, it makes perfect sense. Democracies inexorably diffuse responsibility until its component entities are distant enough from punishment that hiding power levers becomes an easy advantage to grab for, whether the justification is internal or external conflict. All that's needed is for the necessary overseers to be rubber stamps.
Democracies that are real democracy also exists and they don't have systemic corruption such as hiding behind complexity or interpretations or misinterpretations, or repeatedly pushing to pass draconian laws. Number of real democratic sovereign countries can be easily counted in one hand and may be it can extend upto two hands. Countries with monarch who has any power are not exactly democratic, uk for example even though it has democracy like parliament. Transparency and real oversight by citizens is required in a democracy. What if representatives make draconian laws? People need to be able to veto it. What if representatives refuse to make a law people want? They need to be able to make it directly. Systems can be designed to make these happen regardless of the size of the country or its population count.
Most of those countries have not been democracies for very long. The United States used to have many of those checks and balances, all of which were systematically ripped out by the relentless political machine. Give it another century, and even with proportional voting or citizen's veto's, things will still probably end up in a similar state.
There are also countries that are real democratic countries that are older than usa. They have not been corrupted like usa, because they have proper discourse and discussions by its citizens, which doesn't happen in usa. Even usa can be reformed to be a proper democratic country within 1 or 2 years or even as short as 6 months, if proper consensus can be formed by people. Institutions doesn't matter as much as people and real democracy isn't hard to implement if there is political will for it. Current usa is an anti-example of what a democracy should not be.
Democracy itself is young concept. So there is no point looking beyond a certain time period as they were all monarchies before that. However even during earlier times there are examples of democracy like monarchies where citizens were not ignored by monarch, and they ruled for the people.
I will take that as a complement. I don't believe in building stale systems that can drift into corrupt forms of democracy. Where is the proper discourse and philosophy that is necessary in usa's democracy? Continuous feedback loop and active political discourse that are not controlled or hijacked via media narratives are some of the fundamental aspects of healthy democracy. When you analyse usa from first principles, its bad. At the same time I am extremely happy that some real democratic countries exist in the world even if I am not a direct beneficiary.
He would most likely not be chosen for the intelligence committee anymore if he did that, it would only be worth before retiring or for something really huge
That only protects him from non-Senate consequences. He could certainly be ejected from the Senate. Can the Senate try and convict him of breaking national security secrecy laws?
How it is done, everybody knows how.. backdoors in servers, back door in communication equipment, decryption method for of all that goes through fiber in entire world.. Massive data storage to store everything. How is not an issue; every node and communication, hardware and software has a backdoor.
Do they have the right to tap into world communication as well as their own is the issue? They are not challenged by apposing parties and their own population or people have given up.
Perhaps there will be a disaster is waiting with all these backdoors and Ai supremacy.
> Perhaps there will be a disaster is waiting with all these backdoors and Ai supremacy.
Absolutely. AI only needs to bring the keys, and everything else will be waiting for it on a silver platter. And AI is really good at making spare keys.
This capability virtually guarantees that the next generation of Nelson Mandellas, Julian Assanges, <insert national activist of your choice>, etc. gets nipped in the bud long before they become an actual headache to the ruling class. This is why the owners of every country come together to support these technologies, without exception and regardless of political coalition membership.
Going all the way back to lenin these guys were often controlled by third party states anyhow with the goal of destabilizing power structures. Almost like a virus you unleash. That is why lenin was shipped via railcar by germany to the russian empire in 1917 at the height of war. The plan worked and the third rome fell apart shortly thereafter.
He was akin to a molotov cocktail they could toss at any oppressed populace in europe and have non small odds of civil war. It might be more fair to say they controlled him the same way an incendiary bomber controls fire.
You're right, a genuine activist used by the state for cynical motives is called a Useful Idiot. Ironically, this turn of phrase was traditionally said to be coined by Lenin, although modern scholarship no longer espouses this view.
> This capability virtually guarantees that the next generation of Nelson Mandellas [..] gets nipped in the bud long before they become an actual headache to the ruling class.
They are way ahead of you. The intent is not just to monitor, it's also to predict/preempt and to shape.
The whole sales pitch of Palantir is effectively marketing talk for pre-crime. And if we see what the russians and the chinese are doing online to shape our opinions I can only imagine what the US capabilities are in this realm.
This is not just about stopping the next Mandela. This is about knowing who the next Mandela is before future Mandela even knows it. And this about shaping the opinion of all potential future Mandela's into a neutered state.
I'm increasingly of the opinion that state secret classification of our law enforcement systems should only exist for a year max. We've abused the system to shield evil people from accountability and to hide evil actions by our government, and that has to change.
I would go much further. Almost nothing that a government does, should be classified. The government is there to serve the people. If it cannot do so in daylight, then it is doing something wrong.
Exceptions should be rare. Honestly, I cannot imagine any exceptions outside of protecting military secrets from foreign powers.
Yeah, I’d say the only thing that deserves classification would be weapon technical designs (but not existence/purpose), and maybe short term operational details for law enforcement or military planned actions.
Think about this some more. It would be horrendous for individual privacy if your neighbors could see what you paid in taxes, all your medicare claims, which of your family members are imprisoned, your kids public school grades. Many things the government does should not be public record.
The article could have been interesting but by fundamentally misrepresenting the structure of the American federal government they made it impossible to take seriously.
what was always remarkable about surveillance is that given these immense intrusive powers and a total panopticon, this is still the best they can do.
fentanyl epidemic, mass illegal migration and trafficking, networks of terrible abuse, flagrant public corruption, infiltration of schools and academia, conspiracies to demolish the entire western world, and yet even with total information awareness or some variant, these crimes occur in the open.
the scandal isnt that they are spying, its what they have explicitly chooseb to allow and enable.
You are assuming they are trying to do the best for citizens or best to abide by the constitution. They are not. In fact they actively try to side step the laws and constitution, and have these kind of secret interpretations ready. Would also like to remind you that no democratic country would allow smuggling of drugs by its own government apparatus but the usa has done that, so the drug epidemic isn't that shocking outcome.
I had a dream last night that the government had a database that corps sent in "opt-out" info from people. Anytime someone opted out of a surveillance system (e.g. ad tracking, etc...) that info got sent to the government as a signal that the person is sus. They took the "if you have nothing to hide" logic to its full conclusion.
The only good thing is that at least under capitalism (not a system I'm a fan of) this is difficult to do (well as long as the owners of said companies weren't sheep), and like most conspiracies is very hard to enforce, there would be a leakage in a program so broad as this.
But it was a disturbing concept. Merely by signalling you didn't want to be watched made you more watched.
Isn't that what all the hype about National Security Letters (and related events from those years) were all about? I never thought any of that went away, the media just stopped reporting on it. We had Lavabit and Snowden showing us how unhinged these things can get.
Even more unhinged once you realize that trust fund kids are regularly placed in three-letter agencies because those role provide literal immunity. Much better than just a simple diplomatic passport from some micro nation.
It's not only about assassinations or intelligence, things like organizing beauty pageants or producing snuff porn are valid duties for secret police. And this does not even touch the whole KKK thing. Those are the people writing the NSLs.
If that were true, he wouldn't have had a second term. Americans are finally experiencing his fuckery first hand with fuel prices, which is why he is going to lose. The lies weren't much of a concern. Fox News is still I believe the biggest cable channel in the country.
> Fox News is still I believe the biggest cable channel in the country.
Not only is this true, but most of the legacy media landscape also shifted hard to the right (in large part due to massive corporate consolidation) over the past decade, so Fox isn't even especially unique anymore in terms of being extremely right-partisan.
What else could have been expected when this fake imitation America started creating the FISA courts and created the treasonous 5-eyes network of circumventing the Constitution like traitors do.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 34.0 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Chamber
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights
This is clearly untrue; they're called "social media" because they developed inside other things that were already called "social media".
It’s basically synonymous with user-generated content site. It’s why TikTok is social media and Netflix isn’t, and PineDrama is somewhere in the middle because even though it’s studio content there’s still emphasis on the comments and whatnot.
That is the problem -- if legislators aren't informed how the laws they wrote are interpreted / used by the executive, they cannot reason about how to legislate next.
There are many places which are more democratic and free than US ever was, its not a secret information but you won't hear about it in latest hollywood flick or fox/cnn. One only needs to travel a bit outside US bubble with open mind.
US system of 2 parties is pretty dumb if you think about it, artificial in pretty bad ways and not really transferable elsewhere. Constitution and laws which are less than toilet paper when power is taken by sufficiently motivated bad actor, 0 working checks and balances. It could have been worse of course if thats how we want to rank it, but we are not even in the half of it and something tells me we haven't seen the worst of it yet.
- They Thought They Were Free The Germans, 1933-45 Milton Mayer
Spying on American citizens is a bipartisan point of agreement.
There is no credible version of history where Democrats as a party are not enthusiastic supporters of these surveillance powers. They've been actively complicit the entire time.
The Republican Party doesn’t really have an equivalent to a progressive caucus. AOC and Bernie Sanders are highly influential Democratic caucus members on record against state surveillance, with one of those two being a top candidate for the 2028 presidential elections. There is no such dynamic in the Republican Party.
Then he was made Speaker and literally overnight, flipped. In his words "I went to the SCIF and got the confidential briefing from sort of the other perspective on that, to understand the necessity of Section 702 of FISA and how important it is for national security. And it gave me a different perspective."
What his "briefing" was we can only guess. But there is a pattern on BOTH sides of the aisle they people are against mass surveillance, until they are put into positions of power and access to compartmentalized, classified info - and then they aren't. (for the record please dont interpret this as defense of anyone aforementioned, if you think that you're misreading me)
If there is widespread illegal spying, any current or future public figure would have to be a priority.
It seems like there are two plausible explanations for this.
The first is that they have a list of atrocities allegedly prevented by the system and most politicians are too witless or spineless to ask the question of whether they could also have been prevented in a variety of other ways.
The second is that they're using the system to e.g. influence public opinion / elections and then once they feast their eyes on the one ring most politicians aren't inclined to throw it into the volcano.
So is Wyden.
One party is a little more willing to allow working class candidates to succeed, but both major parties are known for engaging in ratfucking.
Has been. Make it a priority in primaries. It hasn’t been to date—the overlap of privacy concerned Americans and the lazy and nihilistic who reject the political process is almost a union.
Historical "bipartisan did X" means nothing today. The time is always right now to define what a future party should be. It's a great time to destroy the old and reimagine the new.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/08/06/209692380...
I seem to remember that Senator Wyden's public warnings (over a decade ago) that the government was spying on Americans was the reason for President Obama to go on national TV and lie to Americans.
Senator Wyden has a long history of warning the public on surveillance abuses.
lol what primaries?
Imagine, for example, a case is about someone disclosing the location of nuclear arms to their spouse. Maybe even accidentally. If they are brought up on charges about this, national security doesn't want the fact that a case is about nuclear weapons to be public information. They further don't want it disclosed who was told about them (as the spouse wouldn't be subject to charges). That's basically where a secret interpretation and ruling would ultimately enter. The courts can't disclose what the ruling was nor what the case was even fully about.
All it takes is 1 accidental redaction or someone who did something silly like using a black highlighter on a PDF and now where the nukes are stored is public information.
There's also simply information that can be gleaned just based on the location that the hearing is taking place. This came from x court in x district, well then it's likely a nuclear silo is roughly in that county or surrounding counties.
The specific location of the court, and even identity if the judge, can be redacted. We don't have to use the case as precedent.
But the resulting material would be like, (XXXX meaning redactions)
XXXX was accused of XXXX
Tried before judge XXXX in XXXX District court
The evidence was XXXX XXXX XXXX
The witnesses were XXXX XXXX XXXX
They were found (not) guilty
If anything could be unredacted it could potentially (?) be the bare fact that it was about nuclear secrets but you can’t really reveal anything else without giving majorly risky facts to bad actors.
The redactions of every document could require many full-time very security-cleared clerks (or take years to do if understaffed) and is of the highest importance since a single failure to redact, or operational error, may reveal the whole secret thing. Mostly, all the things need redacting, so either whole documents, or everything but the prepositions and articles is redacted.
Since it sounds like the concern here is about the public’s interest in monitoring to make sure no abuses are taking place (which is a value I do share), what part of this aim would be served by a redacted report like this?
Its still pretty lame and shows vast incompetence on all levels. Maybe I am a bit naive but correct solution is to tackle underlying problems, not just give up because thats what you basically suggest.
It's really hard if it is in your interest not to stop accidental information leaks, because it is easier to bulk classify everything and blame this difficulty. There is no incentive to stop accidental leaks if you can always hide everything.
Claude was able to work out who it was in less than 10min based on stringing together facts that remained and seemed irrelevant. Journalists uncovered the identity independently using different means. (The ability of Claude to do this was not revealed until the other journalists had gone public and confirmed the identity.)
2 parties bring up what they believe is the legal justification for their position in dispute and a judge rules on which is the correct position. If a party thinks the judge got the ruling wrong (interpreted the law wrong), they object and appeal.
The location of most US nuclear weapons are public. Moreover, if you suspect that the location of some you intend to be secret may have been compromised then the obvious sensible response is "move them" rather than "keep even the legal theory of the case a secret forever".
This is why the primary ones whose location is intended to be a secret are on submarines -- submarines are easy to move around.
But I can't see a public benefit to keeping the principles such a court uses secret
Yet for some strange reason folks think secret agencies are bound by the same laws as regular police officers.
At least in nazi Germany, the state was explicitly designed like that. Most people should never come into contact with the prerogative state and spend their lives in the normative state, as capitalism doesn't work well in a prerogative state. You need to believe that punishment doesn't come arbitrarily in order to follow the rules.
But of course, things are very different in the prerogative state, where actions have unclear consequences.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dual_State
I don't see how releasing an interpretation of a law could ever compromise law enforcement. Or actually I know how, it's because it would prove the way they do mass surveillance is illegal.
The problem is modern America doesn't see it that way. Any time the government does something evil they just say it's for "national security" and no one questions them. It's like a Winter Soldier password that makes courts go blank and say yes to anything.
Sure, but the obvious pro-government response is “revealing that the government is doing bad things reflects badly on the government and damages its reputation at home and abroad.”
Which is true, of course!
So how did such a law ever survive scrutiny?
It seems like a blanket ban on exposure of nearly all possible wrongdoing.
And a proportional increase in power goes with that ban on exposing wrongdoing. Which is absolutely the goal of secrecy in government.
This is -incidentally- how the ancient English "state secrets privilege" got introduced into US law.
In the 1940's, godawful maintenance resulted in the crash of a bomber over US soil and the death of all three of the civilians on board the plane. The widows of the dead civilians sued the government and demanded the accident report. The government refused to provide the report, claiming the privilege because "national security", and courts all the way up to the Supreme Court agreed.
In the early 2000s, the accident report was declassified. Inspection revealed that the only real reason to refuse to release it was to both prevent government embarrassment and to avoid having to pay out -IIRC- nearly a quarter million in 1940's USD to the widows.
Given its enormous potential for unchecked abuse, along with the fact that the first ever invocation of it was abusive, courts should refuse to permit its use.
To me the defining moment of the Press abdicating their job was when the NYTs reported the second gulf war. This was the end of me reading it. The Sunday times was staple reading growing up.
https://newrepublic.com/article/146481/new-york-times-bury-s...
https://fair.org/home/20-years-later-nyt-still-cant-face-its...
I think that’s A reason to keep information secret. The other is if it would reveal sensitive sources and methods (e.g., capabilities that it known, would impact the ability to use those methods).
Not saying the legal interpretation falls under that, but just mentioning it.
The chief justice also appoints the court FISA appeals go to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_Justice_of_the_United_St...
from a US perspective, isn't this diametrically opposed to the concept of "void for vagueness"? : the moment the interpretation of ostensibly non-vague law is under discussion by professionals is the moment said law is invalidated.
I get why that may reflexively seem right but such a blanket proscription would go off the rails and lead to unintended consequences you definitely don't want. It's simply not possible to write a law both specific enough yet broad enough to cover all cases. You or I can read a plainly worded law and think "There's no way this can be misconstrued, gamed or subverted" and, sadly, we'd be wrong.
> parliament should make any bug fixes rather than allowing courts or administration to interpret laws in any other way other than how its written down in the law.
It's certainly possible to theory-craft completely new and different governance, legal and justice systems from scratch which have different sets of constraints and trade-offs, but then it's a long conversation and unrelated to the existing U.S. system. If we limit ourselves to starting from what the existing U.S. system is and proposing modifications which are actually both constitutionally and logistically possible, then forcing all interpretation and clarification to be passed by congress would require monthly revisions, immediately breaking an already dysfunctional congressional system.
I think it's worth mentioning that in the U.S. system, judges interpreting application of laws passed by elected representatives is a feature not a bug. The U.S. system was designed to be adaptive and self-gating, so each of the three branches of the government have built-in checks and balances on the other two. Setting aside current politics, on a long time-horizon like the last ~50 years, I think the U.S. justice system, as imperfect as it is, is actually serving its designed purpose far better than the other two.
There is another system, civil law based systems where law is passed by parliament and doesn't depend on any court precedents or court interpretation.
Might as well have just courts and call it as adaptive system instead of acknowledging that is isn't a good enough system. Europe has done better in this regard. Checks and balances hardly works in usa. Plenty of news on subverting various constitutional guarantees is example that it failed to work.
Proper democracy needs properly functioning non-lazy legislature. Making vague laws and calling it a day and leaving it for judges and lawyers to interpret based on whichever way the wind is blowing isn't democracy.
Legislature can also work 40 hours a week. Things can be more functional rather than dysfunctional. Active democracy and direct democracy where people can veto laws if necessary, in case representatives collude to pass draconian laws, would be the best kind of democracy. Only that can prevent erosion of rights.
Laws aren't made by one person. When everyone votes on them, they agree on the language because of how they interpret the words on the paper. The meaning is what the words on the paper say, which is interpreted by different people to mean different things before they even become law.
You're not misunderstanding. It really is against everything most Americans think their government is allowed to do. To your question, the 'classified' part is what you think it is: secret. 'Interpretation' is the tricky part.
Unfortunately, laws and regulations aren't exactly clear and over time situations change so one important role of the court system is interpreting how, when and whether the words in a law apply in a specific context. Courts at different levels do this all the time as cases with unique situations arise. Sometimes it's as simple as deciding if a horse counts as a vehicle in a state law which says "no vehicles on this type of road." Assuming that ruling survives appeals without being overturned, the judge will have justified the basis and, hopefully, some clear reasoning for why a horse does or doesn't counts a vehicle in the context of that law. That judge's ruling then becomes part of the "precedent" (aka 'body of case law') attached to that law. In effect, such precedents become part of the law since they can clarify if and how the law applies in certain situations.
So whether some action is or isn't against a law can't solely be determined by just reading the law. You have to do some interpretation, which includes looking up any relevant precedents and weighing them. A single ruling from one local municipal court has low precedential weight. The main job of the Supreme Court is resolving conflicting precedents set by lower courts, so a SCOTUS ruling has a lot of weight and multiple SCOTUS rulings over time, each successively refining and narrowing (or occasionally reversing) their prior interpretations, carry maximum weight. All of this happens in the open and, in the long run, I think SCOTUS manages to eventually get most things, if not perfect, pretty close to right.
Hence, the answer to "Is this legal" can be a bit tricky because it inevitably depends on context and interpretation. When there aren't handy decades of SCOTUS rulings to refer to, lawyers need to do some research and assess how SCOTUS would rule on a situation. That's called "a formal opinion", is provided in writing and usually includes some justifications like citations to existing case law as well as legal reasoning supporting the opinion. Anyone can hire a lawyer to research and assess if X action violates Y law (but if you get sued for relying on their opinion, they won't be on the hook, you will). It's called an opinion because that's what it is.
When a govt agency wants to know if they're allowed to do X under Y law, they ask the justice dept to assess and provide a formal opinion just like any company might ask their corporate counsel to. This is often routine but can be very consequential. Where this can go horribly wrong is when these govt lawyer opinions are classified top secret. For example, we all know torturing prisoners is against U.S. law, so in the 2000s the military and CIA asked the Bush Justice Dept to provide a secret formal opinion interpreting whether certain 'enhanced interrogation' techniques met the legal definition of torture. And they got what they wanted, a written legal opinion that waterboarding isn't torture. The Obama Justice Dept issued a then-secret legal opinion that droning a teenaged American citizen in Somalia, who posed no exigent threat (but had the wrong Dad), did not meet the legal definition of murder. That Senator Rand Paul was the only politician willing to stand on the floor of the senate and say it was in fact first degree murder authorized by a sitting U.S. President is... frightening.
That's why Senator Ron Wyden is agitated and worried. He's on the Senate intelligence committee and he's saying the U.S. govt is relying on a legal opinion (a...
You have the law, you have precedent, best not to get on the naughty list.
There's a lot of stuff they do wrong but that isn't one of them. In this case, the Geneva convention was just written in a different time.
I agree. There are really two separate issues.
Circa WWII, the term 'enemy combatants' was created to solve a definitional issue around military 'terms of engagement' (a concept which evolved with the rise of the professional military). There were "enemy soldiers" and "civilians" with separate rules of engagement for each (at least in theory, as the rules weren't always applied uniformly).
As you said, not affording "enemy combatants" any rights is the problem. The only slightly positive sign in all this is the U.S. military is clearly aware U.S. courts won't let them get away with defining a category of human that doesn't have any rights, forcing the military into temporary workarounds like Gitmo. When U.S. courts have been able to establish jurisdiction over enemy combatants, the rulings have not generally gone favorably for the military.
Civil law based systems are a more sane alternative to common law based system that relies on precedents. Law should be discussed in legislature and legislature must oversee and fix the law appropriately rather than make vague laws and leaving it to judges or others for interpretation. Due to not relying on precedents, the law is also easy to understand and apply and follow and enforce in civil law based systems. Cases also takes less time overall compared to common law based justice system.
Elected representatives are the authors or developers of law. Everyone else is users of law. Users cannot be allowed to change interpretation of law as anything other than how it is written.
Law made for horses and then vehicles got invented and law needs more clarity? Ask legislature to discuss and add new law for vehicles or modify existing law to also handle vehicles.
I think you're trying to hard to dismiss the justification here. There are certainly techniques for monitoring communications that use justifiably classified technologies that were probably developed to monitor communications of adversaries.
Imagine the use of which is helping keep American spies in Iran safe and the knowledge of the technique could help Iran identify those people. That's a perfectly reasonable classification of the technique.
What makes the interpretation of the law secret is that it mentions this hypothetical technology.
Imagine they have the technology to hear speech through walls passively using your WiFi signal. That technology is classified and they have the legal opinion that this doesn't violate the fourth amendment.
Wyden being concerned about whatever this is isn't surprising really but he's always on the extreme end of these interpretations, which I usually agree with, but judges typically don't agree with him.
I think it's probably generous to say the legal justification they are using has just as much chance of being legal as illegal. It would be nice to know what it was though because it can probably be defeated.
Wyden and others who are privy to what this is have made clear this is NOT about means or methods. This isn't about how the spying is done, it's about whether it's legal for the NSA to ever spy on U.S. citizens by ANY means. Existing law is very clear, it's absolutely not ever okay - no exceptions. It's completely irrelevant whether they're steaming open envelopes to read your junk mail or using a secret orbital mind-reading satellite to read your deepest private thoughts.
Experts like lawyers from the ACLU think it's something like a legal opinion which re-interprets the "absolute, no bulk spying on U.S. citizens ever" rule by claiming "it's not 'spying' if the govt pays a third-party commercial data collection service to put give the the data voluntarily." That opens a backdoor for the govt to now back-link metadata and build one composite profile that includes all the private info the federal, state and local govt has ever had on you since birth (tax, employment, DMV, voting, school, govt assistance, Medicare, social security, etc) with everything any bank, credit card, or store knows about you, with every phone call, text, email and cell phone location ping you've had since 2014, with every bit of behavioral data Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc have about you. To be clear, this is not "with probable cause they could get a warrant from a judge to send a supoena to each of those providers." This is "they already have all that data in one place but without this new secret legal opinion as soon as they knew it was a U.S. citizen they could not look at it. Now they can sit in a chair, and with just your phone number, email addr, license plate, or a facial ID match from a store camera, instantly search for every single person you've communicated with in the past 3 years and every person they've communicated with and have an AI examine all that data from all 17,000 of those people and have a full report on-screen in 15 seconds. No judge, no warrant, (and according to several recent reports), no record it ever happened, who did the search or under what pretext.
It's about whether it's spying.
I still can't understand how a government can work with some courts where everything is secret. That's something almost literally lifted out of The Process, but the Kafka book is an allegory for a kind of madness, not something that works.
Something so heinous it would make who-shot-Kennedy a forgotten footnote? Everyone is going to cover that up.
The facts of the matter are probably much closer to what you’re saying, but some people have become so radicalized (including those who got that way due to Trump-era buffoonery) that they can’t accept even the possibility that most of the actors are operating to protect our collective legitimate best interests.
Most of the people in government and the military are not political appointees, are not political hacks, and are doing tough and sometimes high-risk jobs, from a motivation other than evil. On the other hand, many politicians are motivated mainly by political partisanship and will do anything to try to score political points, including trying to cause outrage about what’s being kept secret, even if it’s been explained to them why it must remain secret.
Check out Gilmore v Gonzales for an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilmore_v._Gonzales
John’s appeal is online. Section [10] of the decision discussion describes being subject to a law he cannot have access to. The judge saw it but could not discuss it in court, with the plaintiff (John Gilmore) or even his lawyer. Also the orders (law) are agreed by the court to be arbitrary, changing day by day and being arbitrarily different between airports. But since the Airport personnel knew them tht was good enough for the court.
And though the discussion mentioned that he could take a bus or walk, the conclusion, [21], said that his rights were not violated at all, both the bus precedent and the legality of being subject to unknown law. The brief Wikipedia page mentions only the former, though the latter was the primary factor of the complaint.
Not sure if airliners are regulated like that, but 'free business' is not anarchy by any means, unlike you suggest.
Unless your position is that one of the legally legitimate principles of free business is whether to follow the law or not.
It's not just "here's this law about spying in the abstract," which can be talked about in the open; it's "we're using the MIND READER 5000 under Title XVII powers delegated by the President to the Mind Reading Organization to conduct mind reading on persons X, Y, and Z." The legal briefings and rulings on the facts will by necessity reveal the nature of the technology or technique in question, and so, they are classified. If I recall correctly it was a big deal for the ACLU to get a lawyer a security clearance so they could interact with these courts, but I could be misremembering.
The first is that you assume whatever is being kept a secret is something that doesn't favor the government, and then the government loses the case by default. This is the more reasonable option, because it mitigates the perverse incentive for the government to declare something a secret whenever it makes them look bad. But it has the obvious problem that then the government would lose some cases it should have won if the information could be published.
The second is that you assume whatever is being kept a secret is something that favors the government, and then the government wins the case by default. But that doesn't solve the problem -- you then have members of the public losing cases they should have won if the information could be published. And doing this makes the perverse incentive worse.
So why do we accept the first one instead of the second one?
Imagine the public tried to do that. Sorry, IRS/DoJ, the defendant is refusing discovery because it's a secret and without that you can't prosecute them.
In response, the lawyers provide you with advice about how they think the law applies to this situation, and what findings they think a court would make given the evidence etc available.
Information subject to attorney-client privilege (as this information would be) is exempt from release under FOIA anyway. Dropping a security classification on top adds some additional protections against release.
Sometimes there are good reasons for this, such as to protect particular technical capabilities that are easily circumvented if adversaries know that they exist, or to protect human sources who might end up dead if found out. Other times, there are no good reasons to do this.
I don’t agree with this rationale. On the other hand there is a tension between operating effective counter intelligence operations against nation state actors operating against your interests within your borders and free and open society. I’m not sure where the line is but my perception is we’re way beyond it.
Inequality, price and state of healthcare system, huge polluters getting away, it all checks out.
Not an American, but I can totally understand the need of governments to spy on its citizens that it has EVIDENCE of being involved in behaviour or activities that threaten the nation.
For example - if it had evidence that certain citizens were involved in espionage of their country, and they were thus passing on serious information to actors or other states that were intent on using that information to harm the nation, I would most definitely want those citizens to be spied upon.
Such evidence could be: Engaging in, or communicating with, known extremist organisations or forums known to be frequented by such individuals.
The judicial branch does not decide who to prosecute. They're supposed to ensure that the law is applied consistently, but prosecutorial discretion is entirely up to the DoJ and at least nominally is part of the executive branch (for federal crimes). They also don't directly decide whether someone is convicted in most cases; a judge can throw out a meritless case or in rare cases vacate a jury verdict, but the jury verdict itself is outside of any of the three branches by design.
In any case though, this is isn't super relevant to my comment you replied to. The parent comment claimed that the debate about the law was purely theater, and I argued that it might not be because someone could get prosecuted for it if the law isn't on the books. Whether the DoJ should try to prosecute someone for something is not the same as whether they will try to, which I think is pretty apparent recently (even if in many cases they fail).
The FBI was founded.
Perhaps all the spying data should just be publicly accessible and easily accessible for all to use and abuse.
Would democratizing it all so there is never an expectation of privacy from the public vs a select few in power be better in the long run?
How convenient that this is right after the midterm elections. If they maintain control, the republicans can simply decide to ignore this requirement without penalty.
both notorious for bragging about being the most free country on earth
China and Russia (and to some extent, the UK now) will absolutely act on the spying they do. Or just act and say they had a good reason. China and Russia are dictatorships. One of them has a very competent and hard-working population which succeeds in spite of the dictator, the other is a gas station with nukes that survives solely because of said nukes.
Except they do. The NSA has been handing over intel over a decade ago:
> A former federal agent in the northeastern United States who received such tips from SOD described the process. “You’d be told only, ‘Be at a certain truck stop at a certain time and look for a certain vehicle.’ And so we’d alert the state police to find an excuse to stop that vehicle, and then have a drug dog search it,” the agent said. [1]
Sure these were criminals, but who knows how many “undesirables” were prosecuted or targeted for some crime anybody commits?
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/us-drug-agency-g...
The US gov is acting on intel against its citiczens all the time, regular or not.
Personally, I don't like the right wing groups it's infiltrated, but I still think that is a reasonable example.
For me, more pressingly, there are current investigations going on in Minnesota from the US gov's "Puppetmaster" operation that actively infiltrated and monitored a highly diverse set of anti-ICE groups.
Historically this is nothing new; the US has been infiltrating "anti-government" groups for decades. AIM, the panthers, ELF, ALF, labor unions, MOVE, etc are all easy examples of domestic groups that the US gov has broken at some point or other.
Your position only work if you classify folks such as the Minnesota 15 as "terrorists" or some such. Which, hey, folks like the US Gov try to do. But at that point the point is kind of tautological: if you have "something to hide" then you are a legit target of government sanctioning.
That's not very satisfying to me, but plenty of folks in the US find it to be a just-fine principle.
> Section 702 only permits the targeting of non-United States persons who are reasonably believed to be located outside the United States. United States persons and anyone in the United States may not be targeted under Section 702.
https://www.intel.gov/foreign-intelligence-surveillance-act/...
This was also true for Five Eyes/EU sharing too, even though with this year's legislation some EU countries have offered Israel a direct access to INT feeds.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/sep/11/ns...
The integration in the cyber domain is a different tier compared to the default the US has with other eyes.
This is an example of a thought-stopping cliche. It is a slogan to prevent the listener from thinking. Or at the least, to divert the listener's thoughts back to a more politically acceptable (to the speaker) rightthink.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rightthink
https://x.com/hongguabg/status/2114213232454082869?s=20
We have some flexibility with freedom left, and let’s keep it that way.
That link you just posted is blocked for me because I don't have an X account. Here's an unblocker redirector - suspiciously like a HTTP VPN: https://xxcancel.com/hongguabg/status/2114213232454082869?s=...
The process that's described (appear cooperative but deny everything) is the same thing you should do in the US if the police come to your door and accuse you of drug possession. Every country does this violation of freedom, they just use different excuses.
...how did you come to this conclusion?
>> 但你确实做过的，而且白纸黑字的放在你面前，那就不要抵赖。
If it's something you did, and they put it in front of you in black and white, don't deny it.
Is 领导 not an incredibly subservient way to address someone? How do people normally address police officers in China?
It’s not a blank check to run over people holding signs you don’t like as you drive home from work.
See citizens and ICE.
Stop making stuff up.
In the US at least automatic weapons are nominally legal at the federal level after hefty tax stamps and background checks but states / local jurisdictions can and do regulate more / outright ban them.
They're still not illegal, as OP said.
You should ask Alex Pretti how he was able to criticize to criticize the government without repercussion.
His death had nothing to do with the Constitution, it was because of a trigger-happy, confused cop who had his back to the guy, then noticed a gun next to him (that another officer previously put there). The US government had no part in that situation at all.
[1]https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/26/us/alex-pretti-investigation-...
What are cops if they're not the government? Are they private corporations?
Of course cops are the government, but they're also humans that make mistakes and commit crimes themselves. But this isn't actually related to some greater constitutional crisis or anything, unless you have some evidence that suggests they were instructed to act the way they did... but I've never seen anyone come forward with that yet.
You have government officials tyranizing the population and now the argument is "of course it can't prevent that".
What good is it then?
I think the key point is that it allows this "petitioning" of the government in the first place, that's what it's good for. But you still have to go through the court system to right any wrongs, which includes misbehaving police who may be breaking the law themselves.
The Constitution is not a judge, jury or executioner, so in a way it was always "limited" in what it can do if it's not actually respected.
The constitution is just some rules people wrote up generations ago. It's not a magic spell that has power by itself, it is only effective as a social contract as long as power structures agree to follow it.
If armed government enforcers break it with impunity, what good is it?
In a number of states, you need to take a safety course before you're allowed to purchase a gun.
Compare that with the 1st amendment. If they passed laws saying "You can say whatever you want in public, but only after you've taken this course that informs you on what is acceptable and unacceptable to say in public", would you say there is free speech.
Or "You are free to practice any religion, but only after you've taken a course that ..."?
> The First Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting Congress from abridging the right to assemble and petition, was not intended to limit the action of the State governments in respect to their own citizens, but to operate upon the National Government alone.
I'm genuinely curious about who makes these kinds of statements so confidently. Why don't you do a bit of research? it doesn't take much to find this is completely wrong.
Lmao. Jim Tyranny has had what? 3 cracks at him? Hardly protection.
Funny how China leads in most tech areas now.
Turns out letting monopoly capital control your government policy leads to short term gains at the expense of long term viability. Maybe the VCs can make some money off government surveillance and defense contracts before being completely eclipsed?
https://www.aspi.org.au/news/aspis-critical-technology-track...
China calls its government a State Council, Russia calls theirs a Duma, and the USA calls its one Microsoft. (Or Oracle, or Disney, or S&P 500...)
2) The provided link does nothing to disprove the statement by GP.
This is a weird metric of freedom. It seems more like a reflexive, zeitgeist based response than any actual freedom metric.
In my experience the country with the most freedom is Canada. I have never seen anything like it. It's just so easy to do business there. Even if it wasn't that the laws enable it (they do) but even the way people operate. Being able to have a discussion with a customer without 12 rounds of a solicitor trying to insert dumb loopholes into a contract, costing the potential customer more in billable hours to their solicitor than the cost of the contract.
The USA is just junk. States that want to be Feds, Feds that want to be States, and when you cut through all the red tape you still have to deal with Litigious, ignorant Americans. Oh and if you want to import or export something just forget it.
"Oh but we have guns" is basically the exception that proves the rule, in a country where people get detained for such crimes as "Being beloved childrens author Mem Fox" or "Said naughty things on reddit" or "Working while waiting for Immigration to sort their status out".
But guns right. Guns. Woohoo freedom yeehaw guns.
You suggesting that in the name of freedom - everyone must have air conditioning and cool their homes to 60F?
Here is one of the latest cases, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gz1qy30v5o Here is another one: "West Midlands Police arrested a 15-year-old boy named Fraser on August 3, 2026, after he published Facebook posts mocking Conservative Wolverhampton City Council member Simon Bennett." ...after posting an image of a politician with the bunny ears.
One suggestion - don't travel much around the world and certainly avoid backpacking and interacting with locals and understanding things like history or culture, you may eventually lose those... beautiful opinions of yours
what troubles me is why 'humor' is the most important thing? shouldn't be the action/output of the gov? i mean, you vote someone, he promise something, he cannot do it, he breaks the law, then nothing happens, you make fun of him. then after 4 yeras, you select another person. and go on. Biden didn't get punised for what he has not achieved. So will Trump.
how does that improve your life? how can people live like this? how is that 'democray'? its very hard for our people to understand.
our neighbor counties like Mongoel and Philippines, they have a system like USA, and the popeople can make fun of their leaders all the time, i can see that from reddit. but they basiclly live in a shit hole, with a small populartion and vast resources, and they are poor than average chinese. i never understand the deulusion of them.
1. There’s no freedom of speech;
2. Which implies there’s no freedom of thought;
3. There’s no separation of powers. Meaning, there’s really no “politicians”, just the ruling nomenclature;
Which is fine-ish as long as the nomenclature is benign and competent enough. It becomes problematic when (not if) the nomenclature stops being competent. This can happen naturally because people age, still cling to power, and/or they care about their children, so they try to push them into plush nomenclature jobs regardless of how dense their offspring might be. This is btw happening in China right now as far as I know.
When that happens, because of 1. and 2., as well as the “repression muscle” that the government has, change becomes near impossible, as you have no leverage for change outside the system, but the system resists it. Then you start stagnating and/or getting pulled into pointless wars that the nomenclature starts to “rally the flag”.
> It’s fine-ish as long as the nomenklatura is benign and competent enough.
Then i have no respect for the people in USA
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/freedom-i...
Do they, though? Americans are more constantly propagandized than anyone else.
https://www.passportindex.org/de/byRank.php
CSIS and ASIS in Canada and Australia have far more powers than anything the CIA could ever do.
I owned more guns, got paid more, and had more vacation while working for a US company than I ever did in the Oz or Glorious Canukistan
https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/43535/do-other-...
closing as duplicate. (/joke)
Democracy itself is young concept. So there is no point looking beyond a certain time period as they were all monarchies before that. However even during earlier times there are examples of democracy like monarchies where citizens were not ignored by monarch, and they ruled for the people.
Do they have the right to tap into world communication as well as their own is the issue? They are not challenged by apposing parties and their own population or people have given up.
Perhaps there will be a disaster is waiting with all these backdoors and Ai supremacy.
Absolutely. AI only needs to bring the keys, and everything else will be waiting for it on a silver platter. And AI is really good at making spare keys.
They are way ahead of you. The intent is not just to monitor, it's also to predict/preempt and to shape.
The whole sales pitch of Palantir is effectively marketing talk for pre-crime. And if we see what the russians and the chinese are doing online to shape our opinions I can only imagine what the US capabilities are in this realm.
This is not just about stopping the next Mandela. This is about knowing who the next Mandela is before future Mandela even knows it. And this about shaping the opinion of all potential future Mandela's into a neutered state.
Exceptions should be rare. Honestly, I cannot imagine any exceptions outside of protecting military secrets from foreign powers.
fentanyl epidemic, mass illegal migration and trafficking, networks of terrible abuse, flagrant public corruption, infiltration of schools and academia, conspiracies to demolish the entire western world, and yet even with total information awareness or some variant, these crimes occur in the open.
the scandal isnt that they are spying, its what they have explicitly chooseb to allow and enable.
The only good thing is that at least under capitalism (not a system I'm a fan of) this is difficult to do (well as long as the owners of said companies weren't sheep), and like most conspiracies is very hard to enforce, there would be a leakage in a program so broad as this.
But it was a disturbing concept. Merely by signalling you didn't want to be watched made you more watched.
It's not only about assassinations or intelligence, things like organizing beauty pageants or producing snuff porn are valid duties for secret police. And this does not even touch the whole KKK thing. Those are the people writing the NSLs.
Not only is this true, but most of the legacy media landscape also shifted hard to the right (in large part due to massive corporate consolidation) over the past decade, so Fox isn't even especially unique anymore in terms of being extremely right-partisan.