Again? We should never have trusted them in the first place. You should never trust anyone until they've proven themselves trustworthy, and trusting a company is just over the top.
The amount of trust we grant these people and companies in the first place may not be the root of the problems we're facing lately, but our collective naivete about other people's motivations and scruples has most certainly contributed to the lengths at which our rights and privacy can readily be violated by both the people we're throwing our data at and the governments that want access.
I mean, didn't he take someone else's idea and turn it into a billion-dollar company for himself while cutting them out? Multiple reasons not to trust him!
Wrong. They were accused of giving direct access to the government. They in fact aren't doing that. All they do is provide information when legally required to do so.
What exactly do you think Facebook and Google have done wrong?
From what I understand PRISM splits the fiber coming out of the companies implicated on it's way to the backbone. This does not require the knowledge of the companies implicated. Since it's actually splitting the light inside the fiber, PRISM is a cute name.
That is basically a continuation of the Room 641A concept.
There are a few problems with that theory when you consider that these companies are using SSL now. They cannot MiTM data from a beam splitter and we know they are not actively MiTM'ing traffic from a spliced cable with their own private key signed by a cooperating CA (doing this would be noticed quickly if they tried it en masse). If they have the companies private keys then they could be passively decrypting the traffic, unless DHE/ECDHE were being used. If that was the case then they would need the companies private key and the ability to do an active MiTM.
I don't doubt that they are doing something, but I don't think we have enough information yet to say what. Hopefully further releases will shed more light on this.
Add on top of that the PRISM program only costs $20m/year. There is just no way a massive nationwide clandestine fiber tap collecting data from companies moving petabytes a day between datacenters can cost a mere $20m/year.
The thing that is most frustrating about this leak is we only get 4 slides out of a 41 slide deck, and are left to fill the gaps with paranoid worst-case assumptions. And the Internet is a great echo chamber of paranoid assumptions.
Well, we also don't know if PRISM is piggybacking on another, possibly far more expensive system (the hypothetical hardware could already be in place, and under the budget of another far more expensive program).
Really, we just don't know. We don't know anything, except that it sure seems that something is going on. The documents are not getting the same treatment as the fabricated documents of a raving lunatic anonymous coward on Slashdot.
It seems fairly prudent to assume the worse case scenario, better safe than sorry, but it is important to not confuse that assumption with knowledge.
Dr. Charlie Miller, former NSA global network exploitation analyst, @0xcharlie: While I was at the NSA (2000-2005) we were told it was against the law to spy on Americans and if you did it you'd be terminated. In retrospect, it was going on even then. I'm not surprised the heads there lie to Americans, but I'm surprised they lied even to their own employees.
They realize the instant most people around the world realize storing stuff on "the cloud" is equivalent to forwarding a copy to the CIA, their business is SOL internationally.
Imagine if I was sending copies of everything (emails, internet uploads, photos, videos, skype recordings, aws server snapshots) to China's Ministry of State Security... I'd have the FBI at my doorstep in no time.
There's no proof to suggest they knew otherwise. Anything stated thus far is speculation. All that's been shown as "evidence" is a slide with company logos on it and some statements from the NSA which claims to collect "Facebook" data, which could really mean anything. Plus Google openly submitted a request to allow them to publicly disclose the number, type, and scope of NSLs it receives. I have more reason to doubt the Govt than these other companies.
Also, given the name "PRISM," isn't it pretty obvious how this program worked? Think about it... What does a prism do?
Meanwhile, Verizon and ATT have been completely silent and government representatives are making up new definitions for the term perjury.
They always seem to love clever acronyms that are tangentially related to whatever it deals with, like USAPATRIOT Act is actually about how to not be a good US patriot.
I'm very interested in whether writing to Congresspeople actually does anything.
Have there been any studies done that show any correlation between number of calls/letters a politician's office receives, and how they actually vote on bills proposed?
So I guess it's up to us non Americans to convince Google that it is in it's own interest to not be a direct conduit if private information to Governments
In my experience, no, it really does not. Go ahead and try it anyway, though, you may find the process enlightening. There's nothing quite like writing a careful and reasoned argument only to receive an instant canned response that patronizingly talks down to you and simultaneously supports all possible views on an issue.
I've contacted my state and national representatives dozens of times over the years and have found that methods of contact seems to get noticed by the staffers (who are in most cases the only ones who will ever know that you contacted the office) in the following order:
Email - generally ignored or deleted, may or may not even get a canned response. I've heard state legislature staffers claim that they can get upwards of 10K emails a day about certain issues - there is simple no way they have the capacity to sort through them even if they wanted to.
Letter - a little better as someone actually has to open the letter and stick the form letter response into the envelope. At least the politician's staff get an idea of how many people are for or against an issue this way.
Phone call - even better. You talk to someone and are an actual person to them. In most cases they will claim to actually record a position (for or against) to be tallied for the politician.
In-person visit - best of all. Nothing gets the point across like crowding their office with bodies. In my experience you are unlikely to get to speak with the actual politician, who often will hide away from their office when contentious issues are up for vote so as not to interface with the public. Some are better than others here, obviously.
This is my experience only, perhaps you're politicians behave differently. But I am quite sure about one thing - sending email is a waste of time and gives you an easy excuse to think you've done your share. If you care enough to want to get in touch, at the very minimum pick up the phone and call.
ETA: I've also typically seen that regardless of the amount of pressure applied by the public for one side of an issue, nearly every politician will simply vote the party line anyways. They know where their bread is buttered, and won't go against party leadership. I've watched legislators look over at a senior party member and be signalled which way to vote when their turn comes up. I don't think anything I've done or said to my representatives has had the slightest impact on their opinion or voting record. That's just how the game is played.
IME:
email is worthless. canned letters / faxes go in the garbage. A polite phone call may accomplish something. Better yet if you donated or voted for that politician. Even better if you phone banked.
I called my representatives and told them they got $2700 plus several days phone banking from me last election cycle. If they don't get right on this, they're getting $0 next time; I'm not going to have to work too hard to figure out something fun to waste a saved $3k on.
Oh, and if the above bothers you, support public funding of elections. He who pays the bills calls the shots, and all those companies profiting off surveilling the world make a lot of donations.
I was an intern for a congressman. My job was to answer and return constituent emails and calls. We took the feedback, searched for the proper prewritten form letter, printed it out and sent it back with a stamp of the congressman's signature. He never got a single bit of the feedback himself.
While I understand the cynical sentiment (and mostly agree with it) -- I can assure you an email to your congressperson will get a response. Wife used to be a staffer several years ago for her district's rep and would look for trends in emails and then pass those off to the rep and his writer to handle responses.
Sure, an email might not seem like much, but enough of them will at least require some sort of consideration.
To apply for a government job you merely speak slowly and clearly into the nearest light fixture. Please include the job number for which you are applying for.
Amash has been a great representative for Michigan. I'm extremely lucky to have him as my house representative. He campaigned on complete transparency and posts writeups and explanations for every single decision or vote he makes. I'm not completely sold on his libertarian views, but these days I value a politician who doesn't lie to me over their political ideology.
As a Michigan resident I second this. I don't support his politics really, but he is the perfect example of what a politician is supposed to do for his constituents. I often visit his FB page to see what he has been up to. He always has very thorough summaries of what he voted on and why he voted the way he did. Simply fantastic. I can't imagine how he deals with his slithering counterparts on a day to day basis.
A few more are taking on the phone record issue directly:
> H.R. 2014, the Telephone Records Protection Act, was introduced by Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.) and Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.) and would require court approval for the government to demand phone records from service providers.
The moment the "House of Representative" changed from representing the people to representing just a few we should have realized our Democracy is changing to an Oligarchy.
So let's stop pretending and stop using "Democracy" in our conversation.
A curious distinction. To me it appears as if the US is a constitutional democratic republic and an indirect democracy. The two terms are not in opposition.
There is no "the power" in a system of divided government. That's the whole point of a system of divided government. Power is distributed. The people have some, their representatives have some, the judiciary has some, the executive has some, the press has some, etc. Ideally, the distribution is designed in a way that maintains a stable set of checks and balances between the various centers.
More to the point, "Democracy" has a fairly broad meaning, and encompasses a range of systems and traditions. You'd have to be exceedingly pedantic to insist that using it to describe any form aside from a pure, direct democracy is a misuse of language.
Anyone can argue all day over the semantics of "where the power actually lies." I would say that it lies in the hands of people who frequently use physical weapons to harm and threaten to harm others, which for the most part is government.
Which "democracy" isn't a republic? I don't think any country actually has direct/pure democracy. They are all republics and have representatives and Parliaments.
That being said, US could use a whole lot more "democracy" into its system. I don't think the delegate system works very well. Gerrymandering has also been abused for decades.
Calling the US a "Democracy" suggests the power lies with the people. It doesn't.
It's supposed to, and if it doesn't, that only tells us that things have gone very wrong. But you don't have to have direct democracy (as opposed to representative democracy) to adhere to the idea that the ultimate political power rests in the hands of the people.
Supposed to, according to whom? In the original constitution, members of the Senate were chosen by State legislatures; the president was chosen by the members of the Electoral College who were not simply tokens, but really had the choice. The vote was restricted to white male landowners.
Most importantly, the point of having a constitutional republic is the constitution protects the minority from the tyranny of the majority.
Actually, calling the US a republic suggests the power lies with the people. That's what "republic" means, and is why the last six letters of the word are "public."
Many European democracies, such as Sweden, Denmark, and of course United Kingdom, are monarchies. We don't have presidents, but kings and queens. Not that it matters that much, since the monarchs have very little real power, and usually the prime ministers have more of the same role as the US president. One difference is of course that the prime ministers are elected by the parliaments and not directly by the people.
Sadly that's not always a strictly pedantic point. Even besides Bush v. Gore, it also has led to the concept of "Battleground States" which I find abhorrent to a proper republic.
You're always going to have "battleground regions" unless you can guarantee a uniform population density and uniform distribution of political tendencies across the entire nation.
The way the head of state is chosen doesn’t really matter with regards to whether the state is a republic or a monarchy. Monarchies have crowned head of states, republics don’t. For example, the Holy Roman Empire (aka this bundle of German states existing in the middle ages) was a monarchy, but the emperor was elected (by a set of dukes and such), whereas the UK is a monarchy while the queen isn’t elected.
No. It's a federal parliamentary republic (just like the USA), but allows citizen-initiated referendums to challenge all laws passed by the parliament, or even to change the constitution.
No, but it's probably as close as you can practically come at scale. A real direct democracy would have all relevant decisions made by citizens collectively, not just potentially challenged.
Many countries that are, like the US, representative democracies are, unlike the US, not republics (an obvious example is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, which is a constitutional monarchy rather than a republic, but nevertheless also a representative democracy.)
Well if you're going to be pedantic than so am I. The US is a "representative democracy" in that we collectively vote on those people who make decisions, the idea being that average citizen is a better judge of character than of policy.
So yeah, still technically a democracy, just not a direct democracy.
We said the following in grade school on a daily basis, long ago.
"I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."
Finding democracy is an exercise left to the reader.
Would you mind precisely defining what you mean by "republic"? Growing up in the UK, I was taught that a republic is a country with a non-hereditary head of state. Under that definition, the USA would be a republic, as would China and Russia, whereas countries like the UK, Spain and Thailand would not. However, it sounds like it has a subtly different meaning in this and other online discussions and I'd be very grateful for help in understanding that meaning.
A republic is usually defined in positive terms: any government that is determined somehow by the public. That's basically equivalent to your definition that it is any government that is not private property to be handed down by heredity.
Some people use the term "republic" to imply "merely a republic" in the sense that the country in question is not a direct democracy. I am not sure whether this betrays that they think of government as having one dimension of variety from hereditary monarchs to direct democracy, whether they think that republics and democracies are incompatible forms of government, or whether they realize that democracy is merely one form of a republic and choose to simplify for effect when they say things like "The USA is not a democracy, it is a republic."
As usual, wikipedia is pretty good on the subject:
It's loose use of language, but given that we are a democratically elected representative republic, which has Enlightenment ideals baked right into the founding documents, I think using "Democracy" to refer to the US is "correct enough" in most contexts. Certainly we aspire, at least nominally, to "liberal, democratic ideals" where "liberal" refers to the "classical liberal" mindset, not what passes for liberalism today.
It's a moot argument since we do not live in the past. The context has changed, technology has advanced, and we don't have to replicate strictly identically the structures of the past.
And have the majority voting for what ever is pushed on Fox news?
Direct democracy can only ever work when a significant majority of the population is well educated and engaged in the process of government. Anything else and they will vote for what every makes their immediate lives more palatable.
It is very rare for somebody to make a decision that will make life more difficult in the short term in anticipation of the greater good in the long term.
The whole point of representative democracy is that our representatives are supposed to be wiser than the majority of the public, and therefore be able to make the difficult decisions on behalf of the people, whilst understanding that the people themselves may not, due to self interest, be able to make those decisions themselves.
Even in Ancient Greece, the bastion of all things democratic, only a very small part of the population were able to vote. You had to be a landholder with a fair amount of money. Sound familiar?
I would love to live in a world where individuals were able to take the long view and vote based on the greater good. Unfortunately we are a long way from that. What we have, whilst suffering form increasing influence from well funded interests, is the best that the world has seen.
Democracy is not an either/or label; it is a term that encompasses a range of different systems and cultures. For example, the US system is definitely more "democratic" than the Iranian system, although they both involve voting. Conversely, the Swiss system is arguably more democratic than either the US or Iran.
However, it is worth noting that attempting to rank systems by quantity-of-democracy-nature stops being useful pretty quickly, and it becomes helpful to introduce other terms/variables/factors/axes along which to measure and evaluate political systems.
Equally, once certain baselines are met, the exact mechanics of the system quickly stop being as important as less tangible factors such as civil society mechanisms and cultural biases:- Particularly the professional culture of the legislature:- Ability of legislators to set aside party politics to work in the national interest; To preserve the integrity of the political system from corruption, and maintain the ability to make decisions without bias in the face of attempts to lobby and influence behaviour.
I would contend[1] that the biggest problem is actually the Senate's not directly representing the states. This has caused quite a bit of foolishness from the Senate (particularly for regulation implementation). The House is more a problem of districting psychosis. I don't think the House was ever really that pure[2].
1) I'll skip the whole republic / democracy argument until there is an actual democracy in the world.
2) read some stuff from the early 1800's, some Representatives didn't have a good opinion of those they represented
The 17th amendment lessened the power of the state and allowed for the current regulatory environment. We have Senators who have no caring or knowledge of what their actions do to the states. It broke the balance of our government.
It didn't make the US more democratic, it increased the power of the two parties in Washington DC and allowed for them ignoring their local feelings. It concentrated power wonderfully.
I agree to a point[1]. The establishment Republicans will give the NSA a pass along with most Democrats (no waves for our guy). The younger Republicans are going after all three current scandals pretty hard (Benghazi[2], IRS, NSA). Plus, there is the distraction of the Immigration reform bill[3] to contend with.
1) although FBI Director Robert Mueller got some very nasty questions on NSA and IRS today (Jun-13-2013)
2) this is going to keep coming back until there is some clarity of the timeline
3) I wish the Senate was working on something to fix immigration instead of crafting a bill that won't pass the House and will give talking points for 2014
WTF is that! Synonymous with "No sir. Mostly." These weasel words are ridiculous, and the fact that they stand up in a congressional hearing, is mind-boggling.
If you ever think you can't be powerful, if even for a moment, remember this.
A highschool dropout has been, for a moment, more powerful than the DNI, the Director the NSA, the members of Congress who knew about this and the President. He's stirred the lords of nations and brought fear to the fear makers.
Was he right? I can't speak to that, but was he powerful? I can say yes.
In which Keith Alexander claims to have stopped "dozens" of terrorist attacks, and that too much disclosure will "cause" attacks. Mike Rogers (R-Mich) and Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md) then go on to confess to the world that the US hires lowly high school dropouts, and gives them high security top secret clearance; but in the next breath claims that you shouldn't believe anything Snowden says because he is a high school dropout who can't hold a job. Then they go on to imply that Snowden is working with the Chinese. Claim that whistleblower laws would've protected Snowden (I bet Thomas Drake and Bill Binney might beg to differ). The two congressmen sound more like used car salesmen to me, and tell what sounds like more lies, half-truths, and cute word games. Rogers claims "at least 10 terror attacks averted"
"Terrorist and black-hat hacker Duncan Bayne was arrested yesterday after posting his bombing plot on a forum for hackers. Lawmakers state that he never would have been caught without the aid of PRISM, and drafted new legislature allowing body scans at entrances to legacy systems. Next up: why gay marriage is going to destroy traditional families and why you should be concerned exclusively with preventing it and not care about, say, the Fourth Amendment."
In another words the entire discourse is about rhetoric and not about truth, apparently because the public can't handle the truth and the terrorists will use the truth to destroy our civilization -- dozens of terrorists... You know as compared to the needs and rights of 300 million Americans, I think this is perfectly reasonable. They even through in a little Red hate mongering to justify their case.
My Grandfather (and Jonathan's great uncle I believe), who was US Attorney, would seriously approve of the questions Jonathan raises.
The way to move this forward is to put these folks on the spot with HR 2014 and other amendments which would curtail the powers that have been given to the Intelligence agencies under the guise of the war on terror.
OK, in light of the Snowden reveal, how is it that none of the press seemed to find this revelation and link it with everything else, and report it? A former FBI counter-terrorism guy went on CNN, and admitted that they have everything, including content, over a month ago.
> Our leaders have embraced that core view of Lenin that “A Lie told often enough becomes the truth.”
Excuse me, but core view? Injecting the supposed words of Lenin, sans any context or source attribution at all, from which one might be able to understand the purpose behind the words, and the author wants to throw this in at the end and call it Lenin's core view?
Bullshit. That's akin to saying Jesus' core view was "My god, my god, why have you forsaken me?"
Somewhat off topic, I'm trying to find a source for the supposed Lenin quotation ("A Lie told often enough becomes the truth") as I wanted to see the context. Anyone know what the source might be?
There are a slew of repeats of the quotation online, yet none of them appears to include a cite. I've tried searching various archives of Lenins works, and wider archives like marxists.org that might have included references to it by other authors but have come up empty.
It could very well be hard to find because the common wording of it is paraphrased, though.. But it would be rather hilariously ironic if it is misattributed, and so providing its own proof...
Please sign my petition to prosecute James R. Clapper Jr., director of national intelligence, for perjury in his denial of spying on Americans. http://wh.gov/l3gRA
127 comments
[ 0.31 ms ] story [ 193 ms ] threadWe can never trust them again.
The amount of trust we grant these people and companies in the first place may not be the root of the problems we're facing lately, but our collective naivete about other people's motivations and scruples has most certainly contributed to the lengths at which our rights and privacy can readily be violated by both the people we're throwing our data at and the governments that want access.
What exactly do you think Facebook and Google have done wrong?
There are a few problems with that theory when you consider that these companies are using SSL now. They cannot MiTM data from a beam splitter and we know they are not actively MiTM'ing traffic from a spliced cable with their own private key signed by a cooperating CA (doing this would be noticed quickly if they tried it en masse). If they have the companies private keys then they could be passively decrypting the traffic, unless DHE/ECDHE were being used. If that was the case then they would need the companies private key and the ability to do an active MiTM.
I don't doubt that they are doing something, but I don't think we have enough information yet to say what. Hopefully further releases will shed more light on this.
The thing that is most frustrating about this leak is we only get 4 slides out of a 41 slide deck, and are left to fill the gaps with paranoid worst-case assumptions. And the Internet is a great echo chamber of paranoid assumptions.
Really, we just don't know. We don't know anything, except that it sure seems that something is going on. The documents are not getting the same treatment as the fabricated documents of a raving lunatic anonymous coward on Slashdot.
It seems fairly prudent to assume the worse case scenario, better safe than sorry, but it is important to not confuse that assumption with knowledge.
Dr. Charlie Miller, former NSA global network exploitation analyst, @0xcharlie: While I was at the NSA (2000-2005) we were told it was against the law to spy on Americans and if you did it you'd be terminated. In retrospect, it was going on even then. I'm not surprised the heads there lie to Americans, but I'm surprised they lied even to their own employees.
Imagine if I was sending copies of everything (emails, internet uploads, photos, videos, skype recordings, aws server snapshots) to China's Ministry of State Security... I'd have the FBI at my doorstep in no time.
Also, given the name "PRISM," isn't it pretty obvious how this program worked? Think about it... What does a prism do?
Meanwhile, Verizon and ATT have been completely silent and government representatives are making up new definitions for the term perjury.
It's obvious a spy agency isn't trying to communicate how their program works to everyone who stumbles across their codename.
http://www.propublica.org/article/defenders-of-nsa-surveilla...
Have there been any studies done that show any correlation between number of calls/letters a politician's office receives, and how they actually vote on bills proposed?
I've contacted my state and national representatives dozens of times over the years and have found that methods of contact seems to get noticed by the staffers (who are in most cases the only ones who will ever know that you contacted the office) in the following order:
Email - generally ignored or deleted, may or may not even get a canned response. I've heard state legislature staffers claim that they can get upwards of 10K emails a day about certain issues - there is simple no way they have the capacity to sort through them even if they wanted to.
Letter - a little better as someone actually has to open the letter and stick the form letter response into the envelope. At least the politician's staff get an idea of how many people are for or against an issue this way.
Phone call - even better. You talk to someone and are an actual person to them. In most cases they will claim to actually record a position (for or against) to be tallied for the politician.
In-person visit - best of all. Nothing gets the point across like crowding their office with bodies. In my experience you are unlikely to get to speak with the actual politician, who often will hide away from their office when contentious issues are up for vote so as not to interface with the public. Some are better than others here, obviously.
This is my experience only, perhaps you're politicians behave differently. But I am quite sure about one thing - sending email is a waste of time and gives you an easy excuse to think you've done your share. If you care enough to want to get in touch, at the very minimum pick up the phone and call.
ETA: I've also typically seen that regardless of the amount of pressure applied by the public for one side of an issue, nearly every politician will simply vote the party line anyways. They know where their bread is buttered, and won't go against party leadership. I've watched legislators look over at a senior party member and be signalled which way to vote when their turn comes up. I don't think anything I've done or said to my representatives has had the slightest impact on their opinion or voting record. That's just how the game is played.
I called my representatives and told them they got $2700 plus several days phone banking from me last election cycle. If they don't get right on this, they're getting $0 next time; I'm not going to have to work too hard to figure out something fun to waste a saved $3k on.
Oh, and if the above bothers you, support public funding of elections. He who pays the bills calls the shots, and all those companies profiting off surveilling the world make a lot of donations.
While I understand the cynical sentiment (and mostly agree with it) -- I can assure you an email to your congressperson will get a response. Wife used to be a staffer several years ago for her district's rep and would look for trends in emails and then pass those off to the rep and his writer to handle responses.
Sure, an email might not seem like much, but enough of them will at least require some sort of consideration.
"You can write an email to yourself."
AKA
They are going to read your personal email anyways...
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/06/12/amash-to-clapper-perju...
> H.R. 2014, the Telephone Records Protection Act, was introduced by Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.) and Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.) and would require court approval for the government to demand phone records from service providers.
It's also been fun to watch Jared Polis' tweets mocking the NSA: https://twitter.com/jaredpolis
For those not aware, Polis was an internet startup guy before going into politics.
I personally feel Mr. Clapper should face charges for perjury and be delt the full force of the law. An example needs to be set here.
You conflate those two things at your peril.
More to the point, "Democracy" has a fairly broad meaning, and encompasses a range of systems and traditions. You'd have to be exceedingly pedantic to insist that using it to describe any form aside from a pure, direct democracy is a misuse of language.
[1] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
That being said, US could use a whole lot more "democracy" into its system. I don't think the delegate system works very well. Gerrymandering has also been abused for decades.
It's supposed to, and if it doesn't, that only tells us that things have gone very wrong. But you don't have to have direct democracy (as opposed to representative democracy) to adhere to the idea that the ultimate political power rests in the hands of the people.
Most importantly, the point of having a constitutional republic is the constitution protects the minority from the tyranny of the majority.
Wouldn't you say that fits within the term "direct democracy"?
The state of California is closer than most I think. IIRC part of their budget troubles were because some issues require a referendum.
Many countries that are, like the US, representative democracies are, unlike the US, not republics (an obvious example is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, which is a constitutional monarchy rather than a republic, but nevertheless also a representative democracy.)
So yeah, still technically a democracy, just not a direct democracy.
"I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."
Finding democracy is an exercise left to the reader.
Some people use the term "republic" to imply "merely a republic" in the sense that the country in question is not a direct democracy. I am not sure whether this betrays that they think of government as having one dimension of variety from hereditary monarchs to direct democracy, whether they think that republics and democracies are incompatible forms of government, or whether they realize that democracy is merely one form of a republic and choose to simplify for effect when they say things like "The USA is not a democracy, it is a republic."
As usual, wikipedia is pretty good on the subject:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic
It's probably the only way out of the downward spiral we've found ourselves in.
Direct democracy can only ever work when a significant majority of the population is well educated and engaged in the process of government. Anything else and they will vote for what every makes their immediate lives more palatable.
It is very rare for somebody to make a decision that will make life more difficult in the short term in anticipation of the greater good in the long term.
The whole point of representative democracy is that our representatives are supposed to be wiser than the majority of the public, and therefore be able to make the difficult decisions on behalf of the people, whilst understanding that the people themselves may not, due to self interest, be able to make those decisions themselves.
Even in Ancient Greece, the bastion of all things democratic, only a very small part of the population were able to vote. You had to be a landholder with a fair amount of money. Sound familiar?
I would love to live in a world where individuals were able to take the long view and vote based on the greater good. Unfortunately we are a long way from that. What we have, whilst suffering form increasing influence from well funded interests, is the best that the world has seen.
However, it is worth noting that attempting to rank systems by quantity-of-democracy-nature stops being useful pretty quickly, and it becomes helpful to introduce other terms/variables/factors/axes along which to measure and evaluate political systems.
Equally, once certain baselines are met, the exact mechanics of the system quickly stop being as important as less tangible factors such as civil society mechanisms and cultural biases:- Particularly the professional culture of the legislature:- Ability of legislators to set aside party politics to work in the national interest; To preserve the integrity of the political system from corruption, and maintain the ability to make decisions without bias in the face of attempts to lobby and influence behaviour.
1) I'll skip the whole republic / democracy argument until there is an actual democracy in the world.
2) read some stuff from the early 1800's, some Representatives didn't have a good opinion of those they represented
The 17th amendment made this country more democratic, not less, and it hasn't hade too many ill effects on the Senate itself.
It didn't make the US more democratic, it increased the power of the two parties in Washington DC and allowed for them ignoring their local feelings. It concentrated power wonderfully.
1) although FBI Director Robert Mueller got some very nasty questions on NSA and IRS today (Jun-13-2013)
2) this is going to keep coming back until there is some clarity of the timeline
3) I wish the Senate was working on something to fix immigration instead of crafting a bill that won't pass the House and will give talking points for 2014
Doubleplus ungood.
WTF is that! Synonymous with "No sir. Mostly." These weasel words are ridiculous, and the fact that they stand up in a congressional hearing, is mind-boggling.
That sounds terrifyingly like something out of "1984".
A highschool dropout has been, for a moment, more powerful than the DNI, the Director the NSA, the members of Congress who knew about this and the President. He's stirred the lords of nations and brought fear to the fear makers.
Was he right? I can't speak to that, but was he powerful? I can say yes.
In which Keith Alexander claims to have stopped "dozens" of terrorist attacks, and that too much disclosure will "cause" attacks. Mike Rogers (R-Mich) and Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md) then go on to confess to the world that the US hires lowly high school dropouts, and gives them high security top secret clearance; but in the next breath claims that you shouldn't believe anything Snowden says because he is a high school dropout who can't hold a job. Then they go on to imply that Snowden is working with the Chinese. Claim that whistleblower laws would've protected Snowden (I bet Thomas Drake and Bill Binney might beg to differ). The two congressmen sound more like used car salesmen to me, and tell what sounds like more lies, half-truths, and cute word games. Rogers claims "at least 10 terror attacks averted"
1) Find some idiot talking about how he'd like to blow something up on his phone
2) Approach idiot, try to sell him explosives
3) If he's dumb enough to say "ok" out loud at any point, then slap on the cuffs, you foiled a terrorist attack, you're officially a hero.
It's a numbers game.
That could be me after a day of working with certain legacy systems.
The way to move this forward is to put these folks on the spot with HR 2014 and other amendments which would curtail the powers that have been given to the Intelligence agencies under the guise of the war on terror.
http://dailycaller.com/2013/06/13/do-americans-love-big-brot...
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
Excuse me, but core view? Injecting the supposed words of Lenin, sans any context or source attribution at all, from which one might be able to understand the purpose behind the words, and the author wants to throw this in at the end and call it Lenin's core view?
Bullshit. That's akin to saying Jesus' core view was "My god, my god, why have you forsaken me?"
We spy on you to keep you free.
There are a slew of repeats of the quotation online, yet none of them appears to include a cite. I've tried searching various archives of Lenins works, and wider archives like marxists.org that might have included references to it by other authors but have come up empty.
It could very well be hard to find because the common wording of it is paraphrased, though.. But it would be rather hilariously ironic if it is misattributed, and so providing its own proof...