And they can just pass all these laws with no public debate and can bypass an open judicial process and congress.
Why bother having separation of government branches with checks and balances if this can be done apparently now? The usual law making process / judicial review process has been circumvented. The US feds seem out of control and to be pushing this through unilaterally, and the elections right now seem to indicate most people are ignorant of it and/or don't care.
Interesting times. I feel bad for the American public.
Technically, the executive branch isn't passing laws - it's always been legal for them to do this (Congress did not forbid it in FISA & Co.). They just never exercised that right up until now.
> Technically, the executive branch isn't passing laws - it's always been legal for them to do this (Congress did not forbid it in FISA & Co.). They just never exercised that right up until now.
True. But to look deeper, for an underlying cause, I think this is due in large part to Congress handing over their responsibility of law-making to bureaucrats in the Executive Branch. This has been evidence in multiple areas, including envrionmental law, healthcare, and likely financial law. Laws are passed to (de-)regulate, but the actual implementation is left up to the relevant departments in the Executive Branch.
There used to be a legal principle called the nondelegation doctrine which essentially said that the Constitution allocated the legislative power to Congress and that Congress couldn't abdicate that responsibility by delegating it to the executive branch. Like a lot of other such things it all but died in the confrontation between FDR and the Court over the New Deal.
As a practical matter I'm not sure Congress could do all the rule making that the executive branch does. At least not as it is currently organized. It just doesn't have the institutional capacity. But one could imagine a government with legislative agencies paralleling the executive agencies responsible for rulemaking with oversight / ratification done by congress.
> As a practical matter I'm not sure Congress could do all the rule making that the executive branch does. At least not as it is currently organized. It just doesn't have the institutional capacity. But one could imagine a government with legislative agencies paralleling the executive agencies responsible for rulemaking with oversight / ratification done by congress.
I agree with you that Congress doesn't have the capacity to make all the rules as needed by the current laws. My general lean is towards smaller government, so my knee-jerk reaction is that it means the government is trying to do too much, or to do things too quickly. We have some poorly thought-out legislation (PATRIOT act, for example) and it's fairly often that laws are passed without a good understanding of how they will actually work (e.g., the "we need to pass it so we can see what's in it" comments about the Healthcare reform). Not trying to do as much and/or taking a slower, more thoughtful approach would be good.
>and the elections right now seem to indicate most people are ignorant of it and/or don't care.
>Interesting times. I feel bad for the American public.
I don't. As you pointed out, most Americans are happily voting for politicians who push these policies, so we can assume that most Americans are in agreement with these policies. If they didn't agree, they would vote for candidates who don't support these policies (and there are such candidates available). Americans are getting the government they deserve, as usual.
People are too easily manipulated for this to be a convincing indictment. The authorities manipulate majorities to control minorities. There is no root of power at the people, it's a feedback loop with the powerful cranking it to full volume.
In my own state (and even at work) I see powerful interests suppressing ideas and news on a fairly regular basis. This is not just the people "getting the government they deserve".
Maybe, but I see no lack of political discussion in this society at all. Internet blogs and forums like this one are absolutely full of comments from people discussing the candidates, the issues, etc. There is no shortage of people voicing support for the pro-surveillance establishment candidates like Hillary and Rubio.
I haven't read this book, but from what I've read about it, the ideas in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent would show that a manipulated population might still be having lots of discussion. The discussion will just not be complete.
It seems like this comment is meant to be funny, but it actually hits at the root of the problem. The "Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists" (AUMF) was passed in 2001 and is still in effect. The AUMF allows the executive branch broad use of its military and surveillance powers without much congressional or legislative oversight.
The AUMF has also been cited by the Department of Justice as authority for engaging in electronic surveillance in ACLU v. NSA without obtaining a warrant of the special Court as required by the constitution.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Milit...
You do realize the American public is probably (a tiny bit) more sheltered from the abuses of NSA/CIA/(insert your favorite alphabet agency) surveillance that non US citizens, right?
Also, the legislative process is just as opaque and undemocratic everywhere else... (TTIP anyone?)
> In 2002, for example, it won permission, then secret, from the intelligence court permitting the C.I.A., the F.B.I. and the N.S.A. to share raw FISA wiretap information. The government did not disclose that change, which was first reported in a 2014 New York Times article based on documents disclosed by Mr. Snowden.
They are going to increase the number of human-related attack vectors with this and that pot of gold is going to end up getting exposed and/or sold.
The fact Snowden was able to do what he did is proof they aren't competent enough to be trusted to handle the human side of things competently.
It isn't like the FBI is competent to screen their people either. They have enough agents willing to prostitute their integrity for money that their access is a problem as well.
From this, I'd expect parallel construction cases (circumvention of legal protections) to trickle down to the municipal level and become the new standard for policework, which is to say the new standard of policework would be extralegal. This change would happen via NSA sharing data with FBI, DEA, or DOJ, which typically have municipal or regional intelligence nexus centers where the federal and state governments collaborate.
So, what does this change look like in practice? For one, we'll move much closer to having the capacity for 100% enforcement, which would be even more disastrous than the over-enforcement that the USA has already suffered for the drug war years. Having the capacity for more enforcement doesn't mean that it will be exercised directly. Instead, I'd expect a lot of dossier-sharing in order to apprise local authorities about the intimate details of the people in their area.
From the dossiers and social networks, local authorities will have a very detailed view of the population they occupy, and will likely be able to directly infiltrate nearly any social group where strangers connect. This means that any kind of civil disobedience or political protests will be (further, more exhaustively) defused well before mattering. Additionally, it'll make harassment of police-accountability activists even easier once the federal level dossiers are handed down to the local police and paired with realtime facial recognition identification from the squad car.
TBH we suffered under a level of surveillance worse than Stasi or 1984 well before this change, so I guess it's not much worse to throw out the legal system's paltry protections known as due process. The bigger problem is the open acknowledgement from the federal government that the citizens have no agency and need to be controlled.
With my limited experience of talking with federal prosecutor interns in a bar in DC, they would be very excited at these prospects. The general feeling, was that anyone interacting with a federal prosecutor was guilty and that rules were part of a game to be manipulated for one thing, winning.
Both Trump and Clinton will support and expand these data sharing programs.
The issue is not that they can't be bothered - the NYT has quite a sophisticated tech team. The problem is that they're very reliant on advertising and some ad networks don't support HTTPS. The mixed content rules then mean that the entire site cannot be served over HTTPS.
Unfortunately, this is one of those times when idealism hits business and business requirements win. HTTPS for ad networks increases their costs and (possibly) impacts revenue due to slower loading (this might not be an issue these days). But the real issue is, they have no motivation to do it. Even just one or two ad networks that don't bother then has a ripple effect preventing every website that uses them from going secure. And that in turn reduces the incentives for other sites to do it, because now their tech staff can't say "look, we're the odd ones out".
The mixed content rules have good reasons for existing, but in many ways they directly reduce the amount of traffic going over SSL. As is so often the case, the fact that web browsers flag partially secure sites as worse than totally unsecure sites in their UI really drags everything down.
Theoretically, it's easy as pie. However, the whole way internet advertising works is that a website gives a link to a third-party domain where the advertising is served from, and that way the advertising network knows exactly how many hits it's gotten from the site, and then pays that site based on that number of hits.
If the site served ads directly, then the advertiser would have no real way of verifying how many hits it got; they'd have to trust their client to give them the correct number, and they don't trust their customers that way.
Also, it's even more complicated: the advertising network lets different advertisers bid on each ad in real-time (which is part of why it's so slow to load ad-laden sites), so it's unknown what ad will pop up when you load a page.
Now of course, with ad-blockers becoming so commonly used, this system might be forced to change.
Sure, but unless you're pulling ad stock from a secure source, that just obfuscates the issue. Is your network path to the client meaningfully less secure than your network path to the ad server?
This is why ads must die. We've always been subjected to crap but now that they're a primary malware vector and source of update friction it's really obvious how user-hostile the whole industry is.
If you're so paranoid, use a proxy or Tor Browser if they allow it. But why would you care if someone knew you read an article from one of the most well known papers in the US?
HTTPS can do more then hide the exact content you're looking at.
Given the domain name and size of reply(https) the exact content can be estimated.
But the user will be sure to be reading the contents without modification.
It's your civic responsibility to encrypt everything you can. Democracy everywhere is counting on it. We need to make it as ubiquitous and as difficult as possible to conduct mass surveillance.
The world is depending on all of us techies to get this right.
Probably the same thing that happened when the national security apparatus fell into the hands of Clinton, then Bush, then Obama: there was much wailing, gnashing of teeth and fear-mongering amongst those who didn't like them...and ultimately nothing really changed.
Why bother having separation of government branches with checks and balances if this can be done apparently now? The usual law making process / judicial review process has been circumvented. The US feds seem out of control and to be pushing this through unilaterally, and the elections right now seem to indicate most people are ignorant of it and/or don't care.
Interesting times. I feel bad for the American public.