screw it, i'll repost my comment here too. I know i'll get the down-vote brigade but meh:
Here's what bugs me about all the people chiming in about how messed up this all is. It's like you all think we live in some sort of utopia whereby we are the only ones doing this sort of surveillance.
Every single sophisticated foreign intelligence is doing this back at us, their citizens and their enemies - probably with more resources and state sponsorship. China, Russia, Israel, Iran, etc. Why wouldn't we continue to push the boundaries and try and have a leg up on this? Should we bury our heads in the sand and hope that China doesn't pwn our entire national electric grid? (google it)
Additionally, these actors are directly targeting and stealing intellectual property, reverse engineering and compromising state secrets in order to gain military & intelligence advantages directly from US based companies (see Boeing - google it).
State actors are embedding backdoor trojans into US destined products (example: look at the wikipedia page on Huawei)
Fundamental extremists do exist and want to destroy Americans at any cost (including their lives). Why wouldn't we surveil their cell phones, email and IM accounts?
Before every gets up in arms about this, consider the world in which we live first.
> Fundamental extremists do exist and want to destroy Americans at any cost (including their lives). Why wouldn't we surveil their cell phones, email and IM accounts?
They should. Ever heard of the practice of getting a warrant before surveilling someone's communications? (google it). At this point this seems to be a foreign concept to so many people because one side is suggesting no spying at all, while the other side is suggesting they're okay with the NSA spying on everyone. There's a middle ground, and it's called getting a warrant.
So external threats are real. Granted. How does turning on your own population, and people who are not a threat and wish you no ill worldwide, help here? Being a better baddie is not the only way to deal with baddies, the bit in Team America about assholes, dicks and pussies is stupid bullshit, and the fact that so many people are eating it up doesn't make it less bullshit. Simply consider that everything you just said, "they" tell their people, too, and use it to keep them in line and under control. This kind of thinking is aiding the very things it claims to fight. E.g. War profiteers and mullahs sending people on suicide missions are of the same class, not opposing poles.
How do you know the difference between a person who is a threat, and a person who is not a threat, before you look at that person a little to determine they are not a threat?
How much looking is needed to determine "Not a Threat" and put them in the ignore pile?
How long before you should look a little again to make sure they're still not a threat?
There is still a difference between checking someone out, and treating them essentially as second-class people. Or, say, torturing people then declaring said torture "classified becuz national security".
Also, how does this not doubly so go for certain agencies and politicians? The transparency mostly goes one way, doesn't it? How deeply does the public need to be able to inspect these agencies before they can be sure they're not a threat? How long before it needs to look again?
What is that difference? Please be as precise as you can. Because in the popular usage today, saying people (how many, and who?) are being treated as "second-class people" carries a very derogatory connotation. And if the difference is very small, it feels like an inappropriate statement to make.
Re: your second sentence, my mind asks: "How many people have been tortured?"
My gut tells me that the percent of people alive today who have been tortured by the US intelligence community is nil. I don't even know how to guess. A few hundred? Divided by 6 billion? 5 X 10^-6 percent of the world's population, maybe?
Is the outrage is equal to the hazard in the situation, or is the outrage is artificially high compared to that hazard?
I am not arguing torture is good or bad, I'm specifically saying it as a supporting argument feels like a distraction.
Politicians live in the public eye. This has been shown time and again, in the US and elsewhere, that especially in the Internet age they get all the oversight needed. Obviously the same is becoming true for agencies, given the prevalence of leaks and whistle-blowing.
Second-class? What about people in Gitmo, people without security clearances, people not in the NSA? Sorry, classified. On principle. Outsiders are not guilty until proven innocent, they are guilty, period. Insiders are innocent, period. That's how I see it when I max out the contrast. That China or other countries are that way is no excuse to do the same, it is even more reason to be not like that. The US is not the only country doing it, but it's the most powerful and it has the people in it that are used more than any to freedom. If the US falls too deep, the world would get real dark real quick, that's how I see it.
This blob of classified is, to those without clearance, just one, big, and in parts kind black, blob. It seems to like to snatch up things and return them 50 years later. Anything connected to that blob is by default important to me.
There also was something recently about something like this on HN, but I couldn't find the link since the exact title escaped me. IIRC the defense attorney mentioned the plaintiff had been waterboarded 118 times, and the judge called him to order, because torture is classified. The question is, are some things mistakes just mistakes made in good faith, or does this structure of power consider itself beyond accusation out of principle?
> I don't even know how to guess. A few hundred? Divided by 6 billion? 5 X 10^-6 percent of the world's population, maybe?
It would not be 0.00something of some imaginary unnamed unit, it would not be a pure number in a vacuum, it would hundreds of people, each of them indivisible. And the severity matters, too. Don't forget the drone strikes; being killed and then first responders getting hit with a second, delayed strike, is "just" one event, but for how much torture does it count? Why can't honest mistakes not be acknowledged, and maybe even explained? Why can't there be consequences for mistakes out of neglect or other reasons? Because everybody else has to go first? Then we're fucked, because everybody else says that, too.
I would love for US media and citizens to expose such shortcomings in my country and all, nothing could be more helpful and welcome. It's not about pointing fingers because others aren't as bad as the US, not to mention worse, or because anyone could claim to sit on a high horse, it's about everybody else being that bad or worse, and the US being so immensely powerful and influential. In my mind, the US should be the best bet against such things, not the country that does them the best.
And to me a deep, continuous concern is not "outrage", either. Declaring something "too much outrage" is not a valid argument for something, and a useless argument against something. It's really kind of a red herring.
How total has control to become before you start worrying about it falling into the wrong hands, into real deep shit at some point down the road? How would total control be safeguarded? Would even honestly striving for total control for the sake of "good" not be an argument for all other states to completey controlling their own territory, too? How would you try to ensure that you'd a.) always stay "two-tiered but good" and b.) never loose the race against the other fascist systems?
So, assuming the answer is "you really can't, you just have to hope and work hard and what not", how is the race itself not bad and crazy? Then why play with such kind of fires? Because it's like a social nuclear bomb and we can't even comprehend the scope before we detonated a few, a chain reaction with states that are just interacting with each other and all have more scapegoats than things to excuse? Why can't the information age not be the age of being well informed, instead of being well informed on?
> Politicians live in the public eye.
Are you serious? In their private lives maybe, but these power structures are decisively not (trying to be) in the public eye, and as far as individuals are in the public eye.. if almost all things they say are soundbites, and if the public stops adding all those little soundbites and actions together, and has hardly any long-term memory, then the systems the "visible" individuals work for and enforce on others still becomes effectively invisible and untouchable.
> This has been shown time and again, in the US and elsewhere, that especially in the Internet age they get all the oversight needed.
Please, take me to that planet, I just don't see it sorry :/ The internet tells me more and more about how much oversight is lacking, am I holding it the wrong way or something?
> Obviously the same is becoming true for agencies, given the prevalence of leaks and whistle-blowing.
Yeah, and given how those are being treated and mostly ignored, up until Snowden anyway. In reaction to which the NSA said they'd cut down on employed engineering a bit and use more machines, and effectively you're saying this is getting better, well enough fast enough, so nobody should worry about this particular thing - because there was this one guy with this one set of documents, and because you're sure there will be more?
The thing is, the worse stuff like this gets, the harder blowing the whistle on it will be. How much change did whistlebowers achieve so far? Any, at all? And do you think it made secret police in general more transparent, or more opaque?
> What about people in Gitmo, people without security clearances, people not in the NSA?
Do I understand then that the US government is, in this definition, treats everyone like second-class citizens? I'm not quite sure what the punishment has been.
> it would hundreds of people,
A few people are people, a million people are a statistic. Quite true.
> And to me a deep, continuous concern is not "outrage", either. Declaring something "too much outrage" is not a valid argument for something, and a useless argument against something. It's really kind of a red herring.
The hazard/outrage measurement is not a red herring, it's an established risk communication methodology, developed academically in the late 70s (published in the early 90s) to aid environmental activist groups, corporations and governments alike in eliciting effective, responsible actions from corporations or the public, respectively.
> Please, take me to that planet, I just don't see it sorry :/ The internet tells me more and more about how much oversight is lacking, am I holding it the wrong way or something?
Not knowing the scope of our ignorance is a reflection of less oversight, not more. If you know more and more the breadth of what we don't know, oversight is increasing.
> Are you serious?
I think so, yes. I see regularly reports far and wide of misconduct by politicians. I feel like they're regularly being taken to task in their communities. How TMZ would you like it to be for them before you feel they're watched sufficiently?
On the whistleblowers, I really know so little about the topic it'd be dishonest for me to try and add anything on the subject.
You're more likely to die by lightning strike than terrorism.
You mean the police right? They kill drastically more innocent civilians every year in America than terrorists do. And that has been true on average for decades.
You mean automobiles? Drunk driving?
Diabetes and heart disease from high fructose corn syrup and smoking?
Yeah, it's the evil doers that we should be giving up all of our liberties to fight. Because they're a big bad threat - somewhere between the number of people that drown by putting their heads in buckets of water, and the number of people that die every year from 60" televisions crushing them.
In fact, the thing that would bring the best rest to my soul would be the expectation of my fellow citizens to pick up the next day where they left off.
You win by showing your opponent that whatever they do it does not matter. That's true strength.
You know how many rigs, refineries, and lives we've lost building our energy sector? How many times Galveston has gotten back after getting wiped off the map by hurricanes?
We're strong, we're stubborn, and we rebuild and recover from any disaster without giving into fear. That's the legacy I want to leave.
Is that the sort of scenario that keeps you up late at night? That isn't normal. Normal people do not spend their time worrying that Texas is going to get nuked. You should probably talk with somebody about that.
No. If your morals change because you're scared, they aren't morals are they! Laws should stem from values, not your worst fears. We shouldn't trade freedom for security, and especially not phony security.
Before every gets up in arms about this, consider the world in which we live first.
We live in a world where a foreign power invaded our soil, captured our capital and burnt it to the ground, and we did not suspend our Constitution to deal with the threat.
We live in a world where an internal faction, in rebellion, threatened to end our existence as a country, and we did not suspend our Constitution to deal with the threat*
We have increasingly abandoned that ideal in favor of "the Constitution is not a suicide pact", but we have faced existential threats before and survived them.
So I, personally, need a stronger argument than "there are threats out there".
* Lincoln did suspend habeas corpus, and legal scholars can argue over whether it was done in the proper form, but the Constitution does permit the suspension in times of rebellion.
> Lincoln did suspend habeas corpus, and legal scholars can argue over whether it was done in the proper form
There's not really much debate on the matter -- from the contemporary decision in Ex Parte Merryman and the numerous other district court and circuit court decisions finding against the suspension until it was abandoned up through a chain of decisions repeating its logic (the most notable recent example being Hamdi v. Rumsfeld), the pretty clear weight of decisions from the courts -- and there's not a whole lot of contrary scholarship -- has been that, to the extent that the writ can be suspended, it can't be suspended unilaterally by the executive branch.
> the Constitution does permit the suspension in times of rebellion.
Actually, the Constitution does not expressly permit the suspension of habeas corpus in any circumstances, it (in Art. I, Sec. 9, among limits on Congress' powers) prohibits the suspension of the writ of it with some exceptions to the prohibition.
Not one of those reasons, except the last, has anything to do with a vast majority of the revelations about what the NSA is doing that has people up in arms.
And the only legitimate argument about protecting against terrorism, people are starting to realize that the threat is miniscule and is amplified due to cognitive interpretations of data.
You did read that the NSA trains their people to shout "9/11!" when questioned about the need for what they do? Or did you not get the joke about the cow?
Here's what bugs me about all the people chiming in about how messed up this all is. It's like you all think we live in some sort of utopia whereby we are the only ones doing this sort of surveillance.
Every single sophisticated foreign intelligence is doing this back at us, their citizens and their enemies - probably with more resources and state sponsorship. China, Russia, Israel, Iran, etc. Why wouldn't we continue to push the boundaries and try and have a leg up on this? Should we bury our heads in the sand and hope that China doesn't pwn our entire national electric grid? (google it)
Additionally, these actors are directly targeting and stealing intellectual property, reverse engineering and compromising state secrets in order to gain military & intelligence advantages directly from US based companies (see Boeing - google it).
State actors are embedding backdoor trojans into US destined products (example: look at the wikipedia page on Huawei)
Fundamental extremists do exist and want to destroy Americans at any cost (including their lives). Why wouldn't we surveil their cell phones, email and IM accounts?
Before every gets up in arms about this, consider the world in which we live first.