I work in the travel industry as a programmer (god only knows for how much longer) - I can tell you that Sabre and other GDS's are only used if you go through a travel agent or use some online reservation systems. If you book through the airline's systems or on online reservation systems they likely use the airline's systems to track travel instead of GDS since the GDS wants to take a big cut of every ticket sale. And obviously only legacy travel companies like Hertz and Mariott integrate with GDS's, new travel companies Uber and Airbnb likely don't have any relationship with Sabre.
You're only likely to be in a Sabre system if you've been booked by your company through a travel agent and rent using legacy car/hotel companies also through your company's travel agent.
I used to work for Sabre, they do a lot more than just bookings, they provide all the software to run an airline basically. I worked in the area for scheduling air crew. But also crossed over into all the flight tracking. Their systems hold a lot of data, though the airlines own and host that data in secure facilities.
Fun Facts, when I worked there, you could fly for free on American Airlines ( the company got split out from AA ). They claimed to employ the most PhDs at one time ( lots of operations research). Also claimed to invent database transactions for the problem of people trying to book the same seat on airplanes at the same time (early 60s I believe)
The industry is moving to a being able to purchase products instead of complete PSS/GDS solutions. As an airline you'll be able to buy an inventory management system from Amadeus, a pricing system from Sabre, a support system from TravelSky, and a website from Travelport.
The best example I can think of is American. They have Amadeus running their international website. Their ticketing system is internal. And all their inventory is managed in Sabre.
Southwest was similar, for a while Amadeus ran their international site while Southwest ran an outdated internal system for domestic travel that didnt support flights leaving and arriving on different days. They eventually had Amadeus move into running their domestic stuff a few years ago and now they have red-eyes.
Delta runs all their own stuff on a mainframe and from the outside it looked like a slow moving disaster. I know Amadeus sees all their inventory and looks at each passenger.
> They eventually had Amadeus move into running their domestic stuff a few years ago and now they have red-eyes.
Heh. I remember thinking years back that it was odd that Southwest never had any overnight flights, especially transcontinental. Just assumed it was the way they did business and some sort of cost cutting measure. Didn't think it'd be due to a software limitation!
Not true. They upsell things like "early bird", since 2009 for example. And they charged for bicycle boxes as long ago as the early 90's. Charging for bags would use the same setup.
They do have some notable historical challenges though. Like foreign currency. They still cannot do that, despite flying to Costa Rica, Mexico, etc.
Bags aren’t managed in the same way as other ancillaries, because the prices are not linear. Indeed they allowed some special bags , but agents would have to manually check the aircraft was not over subscribed and organise handovers...
Regarding foreign currency, it’s a strategy choice on their behalf, they don’t want to own sales offices outside the USA
Trust me, I know a lot about this particular topic :)
They already "handle bags" in the sense that they are tracked to the PNR, issue tags, etc. They just don't charge for them. My examples show that they can charge for ancillaries. In fact, they charge for a 3rd bag or overweight today. It's not a technical limitation.
Also a travel industry programmer. Same feelings about for how much longer, heh.
> If you book through the airline's systems or on online reservation systems they likely use the airline's systems to track travel instead of GDS since the GDS wants to take a big cut of every ticket sale.
But in my experience, the airline backend and pricing is usually outsourced to Sabre or Amadeus. Frontier and Southwest are the only big players I know of that handle that sort of thing themselves, and Frontier has a teeny-tiny routelist compared to the others.
"But in my experience, the airline backend and pricing is usually outsourced to Sabre or Amadeus"
True, but that doesn't make the reservations visible in the GDS. If Sabre or Amadeus is running your "CRS (Central Res System)", they aren't allowed to do anything with the data that you haven't asked them to.
You think US intelligence doesn't have access to other major airlines' back end databases, or things like major hotels' reward programs, airbnb, uber, lyft?
As someone who has worked on security for said systems, and who is somewhat familiar with the types of requests that are serviced to LEAs and TLAs, I do think that they don’t have access to back end databases.
What, you think we set up a VPN for them so their SQL client in Fort Meade can just query as they please? Or do you think they hack us?
If you work for a useful target yes they probably have hacked you. They've certainly hacked google in the past for example - see below. These agencies are lawless and motivated. I imagine knowing where targets stay/travel in advance could be very useful.
"Reports that NSA taps into Google and Yahoo data hubs infuriate tech giants"
Files obtained from Edward Snowden suggest NSA can collect information sent by fibre optic cable between Google and Yahoo data hubs 'at will'...
Citing documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and interviews with officials, the Washington Post claimed the agency could collect information "at will" from among hundreds of millions of user accounts.
The documents suggest that the NSA, in partnership with its British counterpart GCHQ, is copying large amounts of data as it flows across fiber-optic cables that carry information between the worldwide data centers of the Silicon Valley giants. The intelligence activities of the NSA outside the US are subject to fewer legal constraints than its domestic actions.
What is domestic and what is not? Is a company with assets abroad domestic or fair game abroad? You are aware these agencies share most data across borders aren't you?
Tempora is domestic hacking, Stellar Wind is domestic hacking (sweeping up data from all Americans), and these agencies share data extensively, so domestic vs foreign has very little meaning to them at least.
No, interception and wiretapping (especially with permission of the service provider) are not the same thing as hacking a company to maintain persistent access and surreptitiously using their assets to exfiltrate data. These are very different things and the distinction matters.
I’m familiar with what kinds of things they do, and I don’t agree that they should be doing a lot of what they do. It’s just that rooting american assets isn’t one of those.
A reasonable question. There are many answers. My first one would be for leverage. E.g. To solve a crime, they want information from someone who is not under formal investigation. That someone may not voluntarily cooperate, so they use information for leverage. E.g. threaten to leak information about a pending business deal to others in the transaction. It's not very effective for Joe Sixpack, but it is for organized crime of all kinds.
>They've certainly hacked google in the past for example - see below.
You've referenced proof they couldn't hack Google and instead they had to use alternative measures.
>Google is understood to be working on "forward encryption" for its private network so that communications even over its private leased lines would be unintelligible to anyone without the "keys" to decrypt it.
That's basically the reason it was even possible. Such surveillance is not a hack.
Of course they claimed after being exposed that these programs are legal, but I think lawless is apt as these agencies don't consider the law as a boundary they need to respect.
I was asked for an example of the organization being lawless, I gave a concrete example of the organization failing the most basic of accountability measures: Being asked under oath about their processes. The leader of the organization lied. I think that's a decent indictment of the organization.
What are you trying to say with the second picture? Getting access to a GFE gets you access to what's going through it? What does that have to do with the FBI hacking into the backend of a airline company?
The FBI (and NSA for that matter) are a lot more constrained by the law than HN seems to think, they can't just shell anyone they want especially if the target is a third party that has done nothing wrong.
Pretty much that, and also tapping any traffic that's in their internal networks, since that's not encrypted either.
> What does that have to do with the FBI hacking into the backend of a airline company?
That's one possible attack that the FBI could be carrying out. ie. sabre doesn't encrypt its communications in their internal network, and that's being tapped similar to how the NSA tapped google's internal networks.
> they can't just shell anyone they want especially if the target is a third party that has done nothing wrong.
The reality is not that clear. A lot of what governs what these agencies can and can't do comes from executive branch policies. There is a lot of gray around what is "legal" and congress likes it that way because it keeps responsibility for allowing to much or not enough surveillance far away from them.
What's more, you cannot adjudicate what you don't know about and a lot of the secrecy in programs like this is just as much about keeping away civil libertarian attorneys as it is about confounding "the enemy". There's a reason the FISA court rules nearly 100% of the time with the state. Responding attorneys are rarely involved and when they are they are often hamstrung due to a lack of knowledge that prevents them from filing any kind of useful motion or raising serious opposition.
Sure, NSA can't directly query against whatever database gmail uses to store your email, but they still have all your emails, photos, and login history. As far as your privacy is concerned, there isn't really any meaningful difference.
>Suppose I sent an email yesterday from my Gmail to a friend's Gmail, are you saying the text of this email is stored on an NSA machine?
Maybe not today, but during its heyday must certainly.
>Internal NSA presentation slides included in the various media disclosures show that the NSA could unilaterally access data and perform "extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information" with examples including email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice-over-IP chats (such as Skype), file transfers, and social networking details.[2] Snowden summarized that "in general, the reality is this: if an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc. analyst has access to query raw SIGINT [signals intelligence] databases, they can enter and get results for anything they want."
>[Glenn Greenwald] added that the NSA databank, with its years of collected communications, allows analysts to search that database and listen "to the calls or read the emails of everything that the NSA has stored, or look at the browsing histories or Google search terms that you've entered, and it also alerts them to any further activity that people connected to that email address or that IP address do in the future."[44] Greenwald was referring in the context of the foregoing quotes to the NSA program X-Keyscore.[45]
But let's suppose they don't have your emails stored in their datacenters. Instead, it's still stored on google's servers but they can access your emails via automated requests to google, via search terms or by providing your user handle. Is that a meaningful difference, in terms of privacy?
So essentially, no, they do not have "all my emails".
> "Instead, it's still stored on google's servers but they can access your emails via automated requests to google, via search terms or by providing your user handle"
You just said previously the exact opposite! That they can't query Google, but they have the data themselves.
> "Is that a meaningful difference, in terms of privacy?"
Yes, because it means Google are aware of what data they are being requested, and what they are sending in return.
The transparency reports for these companies show that the total number of requests is in the region of 10k/year - a lot in some senses, but nowhere near the level of surveillance many people seem to believe.
No, they in fact cannot query my emails via automated requests to Google. I actually do know how that process works, and there is a human involved, so please stop making things up.
We can discuss the problems with it, but only if we start from a point of truth.
> The second one does not refer to domestic hacking. They don’t do that.
What do you believe is happening in that second image?
One could argue semantics as to whether a fiber tap is "hacking" or not, or whether tapping a domestic company's network from an international transit link counts as "domestic hacking"... but there is ample evidence that US intelligence agencies do target domestic companies and their networks.
There's also ample evidence that various companies choose to cooperate with the intelligence community for a variety of reasons. AT&T has made a healthy living off .gov, but I'm not sure Western Union was ever compensated for giving CIA decades' worth of international telegrams, and it appears their recent cooperation with the Agency regarding international money transfers was spurred by patriotism.
Since the links are likely compromised, ubiquitous encryption is your friend.
I don't imagine they have raw sql access but you probably have an API that takes a name or social or other identifier and returns relevant results. This access may have been granted to an account that is not described as "FBI" it's probably another sub-contractor or analytics provider.
You are incorrect. None of the companies we are talking about would build this backdoor interface and grant access like that to a shell company or contractor. If they wouldn’t do it for the TLAs directly, why on earth would they do it for a third party?
I once had a rep at an airline email me PDF's containing full instructions on how to connect to their developer VPN, connect to their dev and prod databases, a Java code sample, and full credentials for all. It was meant for a new developer but got sent to me (contractor working outside the company).
I haven't ever tried connecting to it, but I'll tell you when I alerted their security team there was no urgency about it, and the password was so simple I bet you could guess it within 10 tries.
Is that data encrypted in transit? If so, what encryption was used? The ones "suggested" that NSA knows how to decrypt? Also, do you know what agreements have been made that are "above your pay grade"? Do you know what every piece of equipment in your data center does? What about what equipment is installed at the ISP level?
Don't be so quick to say "you" are not actively having data taken. "You" just might not be aware of it.
Don’t be so quick to assume you have any idea how these things actually work, and what is or isn’t possible. None of the examples that you are running through would facilitate this type of thing.
In some ways that actually makes it a lot easier for the NSA doing its role as sigint agency against anything "foreign", which doesn't have any US legal protection related to the 4th amendment.
Would that surprise anyone? Governments are known to stockpile and exploit vulnerabilities in targeted computers in order to obtain access. The US government even came up with an euphemism for this malware: network investigative techniques.
This is largely a moot point. All names of departures and international arrivals are sent to the Department of Homeland Security via the Secure Flight/APIS data pipeline. This returns to the airline authorization to board, select for additional screening (SSSS on boarding pass), or inhibit boarding (unless overridden by a TSA call center), as well as, for international flights, authorization for who can even overfly the country.
Intelligence agencies are also highly interested in things that don't involve the DHS or have a flight involving a destination in the USA. Such as obtaining PNRs for people who buy flights from Dubai to Mogadishu.
Of course it's laughable to think you could get away with doing anything on a plane in a post-9/11 USA - they're obviously going to have data on every citizen's and foreigner's flights. Beyond that I wouldn't know.
All I can say is you're very likely not a point in Sabre's private data mining set.
Definitely depends on the airline. The big US carriers all have their own systems, but the vast majority of foreign carriers use a GDS on their backend. It's just not worth building in-house unless you're at very large scale.
Old non-US airlines definitely have their own systems. I know Scandinavian Airlines have their own, and it looks like Lufthansa and KLM-Air France do too.[0]
I would be surprised if say British Airways didn't.
Nope, they all use Amadeus, except for Scandinavian Airlines. Actually Lufthansa and Air France CREATED Amadeus to consolidate their GDS operations. They're now pissed because Amadeus takes a piece of the cake and plays weird pricing shenanigans, but they're still there.
These guys do use Amadeus on the backend to manage their ticket inventory. Specifically Amadeus Altea - though you are correct that they try very hard to avoid paying GDS distribution fees for selling tickets through the GDS third party sales channels (which is what that article is discussing).
not true.
BA,LH,LX,OS,AF,KL,... all run on AMA
AA runs on Sabre
Its actually the other way around, some airlines have their own system, but most use some sort of GDS.
i.e. even when you make a booking directly with one of the airlines above mentioned, the entire PNR is still created and used in a GDS.
Even when you use Farelogix (for LH NDC bookings for example) the entire PNR also gets created in AMA. When you want to make changes in the LH PNR that FLX does not support yet, you still have to make the changes in the AMA PNR.
Both of them also have GDS integrations. I don't know exactly how much but I'd assume it's the bulk of their traffic.
As a general rule the large majority of anything you don't book directly with the airline/hotel (and for all I know, some of what you do) is very likely to be in a GDS somewhere.
They don't use a GDS on the front end, but doesn't all that data feed into a GDS somewhere on the backend? I don't know much about Sabre but I know Amadeus reaches pretty far across everything.
Travel agencies still like to use the frontend even though they're even less user friendly than VIM. This isn't the right time for it but once upon a time you could research what travel agencies use what GDS by the job requirements these agencies put out - usually you need like 5 years experience with Sabre/Apollo/whatever for any job here.
Once your travel details are in the GDS then the airline clerks, car rental sales person, hotel clerks, and your travel agent can check out or update your travel info for you just based on the PNR number on your airline ticket for convenience if you're just not into that weird smartphone thing. You can change a bunch of things during the trip like what car you drive and hotel amenities during your stay so after the trip ends we download your trip from Sabre and build reports for your boss or whatever.
I'm going to say that's probably a hard no. If you're not cleared then certain documents will just not exist or would come back saying that some information has been redacted for national security reasons. You can see some examples of such requests here if you search hard enough https://www.muckrock.com
Looking at their website they have GDPR forms for employees and for clients, but they don't have anything for Joe Public, not sure if this is because they don't 'own' the data themselves?
Corporate bigwig types (whether technical or otherwise) are generally not booking their own travel - that's what executive assistants are for. I'm a technologically literate corporate peon, and still booked >$15k in travel last year through SABRE via our online corporate booking system, and about $10k in bookings executed manually by our travel team.
The online bookings still routed through an internal travel agent for final approval and execution of the booking, but I never actually interacted with anyone. The manual bookings were the only time I ever spoke with an agent, and it was almost always to handle an itinerary that was too complex for the UI of the online booking system to accommodate.
Having travel agents for companies is actually a good idea, having someone work to set up travel for workers saves a crapload of time and money for everyone and better done if its outsourced to someone that knows travel.
Lots of board and CXX whigs book their vacations through their agent on their company's dime as a part of their benefits package which is actually a great deal for them. I'm more of a thrill seeker so I wouldn't use one but the average person who just wants a stable planned-out vacation that they only get once a year it's a really good idea.
At my old SP500 firm, Corp travel agents were always - and I mean ALWAYS - worse than what I could get from the airline directly.
Why? Internal accounting. Some part of HR got to count part of the "fee" as revenue, billed against my travel budget. Insane.
Once that became common knowledge, my coworkers and I were 'strongky encouraged' by our department head to buy travel with our Corp cards. This led to a strongly worded memo from the head of HR at FY end demanding we stop the process. That led to meetings, committees, more dueling memos.
Great use of everyone's time.
Yup, that's pretty common with legacy contracts. Internal accounting bullshit ruins all sorts of things.
I worked at a place where "thou shalt" use some stupid travel agent to buy intercity train tickets. You had to call the company and pick up the paper ticket in some inconvenient place between the hours of 10-3, closed from 12-1. The ticket cost ~$5-10 more than buying it at the train station, split between the travel agent and procurement group, unless you purchased it a month in advance, and could be used for 6 months.
The "hack" was that business units with lots of travel would buy 100 at a time every couple of months, and you'd need to find a secretary with a stash to get a paper ticket. I would ply them with my wife's baking to ensure a steady supply. Not surprisingly, many tickets were wasted unused (in pursuit of saving the $5), or people took unnecessary trips to avoid wasting money on tickets (and wasting 3x more in per diems, etc).
The next innovation was to declare that the trip was an emergency, and then you could buy the ticket from the conductor, in cash. The penance for less hassle is that you had to write a sad tale about why attending a training class met some standard for "emergency" travel.
My company used to be like that, but was acquired last year and the company that acquired us has such a refreshing travel process:
- Booking fees are itemized and stated up front. $3 for bookings handled 100% via the online reservation system, $25 if you ever have to talk to an actual agent.
- The online reservation system shows publicly listed rates as well as negotiated rates, and you're free to choose what you want within policy. The negotiated rates were virtually never the cheapest, but they also tended to come with a lot more flexibility (i.e. no change fees, refundable up to time of departure, 24 hour cancellation of hotel reservations, etc).
Those two aspects, combined with the fact that the travel would ultimately be booked to your card on file anyway (generally a corp card for anyone traveling frequently), pretty much negates any incentive to go outside of the official travel system. Depending on the trip and your travel budget, you can either go with the riskier but cheaper options or go with the more flexible but also more expensive options. The default booking fee is tiny enough to be understandable, and the incremental $22 fee ends up well worth it in the situations you need to call the travel team's 1-800 number to get you out of a bind.
The old system didn't bother me much as I was used to it being The Way Companies Are. But after being spoiled here, I dread the day I end up in another travel-heavy job and have to go back to the more typical Big Corp travel process.
A lot of companies also have special deals with preferred airlines, which gets the company a refund if a certain volume of money is spent. So you would see worse pricing upfront, but the company would spend a lot less after the discount numbers were reached.
Pretty sure they've also got feeds on everyone's credit card purchases, emails of itineraries, text message confirmations, your phone homing and roaming (from the cell networks), from scores of apps that wanted your location squealing to whoever wants to buy it, from face rec at airports, etc etc.
Your travel is certainly no mystery to the state without this one airline feed.
I am surprised that this is considered a secret anymore. If you travel anywhere and board a flight, stay a hotel or rent a car, you should assume that the government already knows about this. All companies have data sharing agreements with the government and judges are known to sign very broad data warrants that force companies to give data to governments for any suspicion of crime .
Basically today, everybody should assume that the government knows everything about you - where you live, where you work, what car you drive, where you travel, What property you own, lease , whom you call etc. Privacy exists in name only.
Given that this information is the companies own info, voluntarily shared as a private business, I wonder if we can make a comparison to free speech and the notion that free speech still exists despite most avenues of communication now being privatized and having control over what speech is allowed. Conceptually, if free speech can still be considered to exist in such a realm, cannot privacy? Yes, you may have to choose to note engage in companies that share their data if you want to keep your privacy, but that is much like what happens if you want to be able to speak without having to follow the limits those companies have in place. This is not to say the arguments are identical, but that there does seem to be similarity in their structure.
If one can takes the argument that you can keep your privacy by just refusing to use airlines, credit cards, hotels, etc. and says that being forced to give up so much to maintain privacy means that privacy is dead (or exists in name only), then shouldn't it also be possible to make the argument that you can keep your free speech as long as you avoid the growing list of companies who refuse to business with individuals who engage in certain forms of speech (especially who do so loudly) mean that free speech is also dead?
If instead the 'private businesses doing what they want' argument wins, then shouldn't it also apply in the case of privacy? That the company sharing whom they are offering a service to doesn't violate privacy because it is information you willingly gave them that they can then give others. (The case where the information is gathered through overly broad warrants stands out as an exception, being that it is forced by the government.)
They're also a target for APTs and foreign governments. Pretty much everyone wants to get their hand on travel data. Also fairly likely that other GDS such as Amadeus has similar issues. Speaking from personal experience, Sabre's code base is very outdated, and filled with tech debt and hacks. They haven't done a good job controlling bloat and many teams are skeleton crews that are consumed with ops and can barely fix bugs. I'm sure you don't need to "hack" anything.
Contrary to what some posters here seem to be saying, Sabre is very widely used in many parts of the travel industry.
Any old school travel agent can look up names and follow their travel history anyway? (No matter how it is booked btw)
You could call one up and ask if X has got on the flight and they can check. I've done it before to check if I wanted to know the persons flight was delayed and made it to the airport on time.
It is interesting because it lets you reflect on asine practices. If this level of distrust by government towards citizens is accepted and normalized because of terrorism and subjective security needs, don't cry if people think government wants to intentional feed lead to your kids.
It's more complicated than that. Most tickets aren't in a GDS, but only in an individual airline's CRS. And a travel agent wouldn't have broad SQL like ability to query. They would need at least 2 of name, record locator, or flight/date. And travel agents don't typically have access to every airline CRS and all GDS systems...some subset is more common.
Presumably there is some travel agent with access to the data. I think it's concerning that one company maintains so much information, but in terms of government access, if the FBI is going to go through the trouble of getting a court-issued order like this [1] (which is specific to one person for one particular six-month period), then finding the right travel agent to serve the order to doesn't seem like it'd slow things down much (it took at least three days to get the order since some "Judge Huff was not in chambers").
The travel industry (esp the airlines) are moving to puzzle piece style integrations -- I know that Hilton Uses Sabre for incoming GDS reservations, but, uses salesforce internally for managing a lot of the guest interactions (including bookings and customer support): AA (as mentioned previously in this thread) uses multiple commercial systems, and Marriott uses a mixture of FOSSE, MARSA (there might be an H in there, but, it's been a while since I've been at MI) that talk to their backend microservices for their .com system.
MI picked up a LOT of technical debt and a LOT of security bugs when transitioning SPG programs and properties into MI's portfolio (thankfully, I was off of that project at that point in time).
I don't think this is the case where the FBI or other conglomerates have direct SQL-style access into their systems, but, more-so where FBI has retired or plans internally to pull data from systems when requested: When it's hard as hell for employees with the proper need-to-know for their application to pull up data in a meaningful fashion, you know that it's next to impossible for Law Enforcement to have a nice little dashboard where they can just type "Ian Wilson" and get a list of every place I've ever stayed ever (unless they're working with VISA: that's something that I kinda expect, tho).
> No one really knows just how often or widely the government has used the All Writs Act to force companies into surveillance
Seeing how they used Sabre to prosecute a measly $5000 damage, we can surmise that they'll use this and similar systems for just about anything they can possibly be used for.
What's interesting is that names on international flights are already checked directly against several watchlists. So apparently that tool isn't sufficient.
GCHQ has a program called ROYALCONCIERGE, where they hack the reservation systems of hotels to watch for targets renting rooms. then GCHQ sends teams ahead of time to intercept the targets, preaumably to spy on them, or assassinate them or rendition them to a black site.
from another Snowden doc which i can no longer find, it was revealed that ROYAL CONCIERGE hacked hotels owned by Starwood, one of the biggest umbrella corps owning multiple global hotel chains.
you think NSA only went after Starwood hotels? remember NSA said their "Full Spectrum Domination" posture means "Collect It All."
you think if NSA/GCHQ are hacking into hotel reservation databases to exfiltrate the whole shebang, that Airline reservation systems are NOT a higher priority?
a commenter said it is ridiculous hypocracy how we blast China for forcing its tech companies to become appendages of their military/intelligence complex, while ignoring FBI/CIA/NSA do the very exact same thing under the rubric of NSLs and Bulk FISA Warrants and Business Records "All Tangible Things" and EO12333 get-out-of-jail-free cards to target anything loosely related to "understanding foreign intelligence."
there is zero difference between what China does and what the FVEYs do, except that our Overlords tell us they are not spying on us, while every peasant in China knows they are being spied on by their govt because the Chinese govt openly admits to it.
You took this thread into a huge, predictable, and off topic flamewar about China. That's exactly what the site guidelines ask you not to do. Please stick to the rules when posting here.
> there is zero difference between what China does and what the FVEYs do, except that our Overlords tell us they are not spying on us, while every peasant in China knows they are being spied on by their govt because the Chinese govt openly admits to it.
We can fight it by electing the correct people.
But more importantly, I won't be spirited away to a black site by speaking ill about the president. Nor can the government decide it doesn't want me as CEO of my company anymore. Or prevent me from funding the opposition party.
There's an enormous difference between the West and totalitarian dystopia China.
It's extremely unlikely if you are white, non-muslim and do exactly as they ask, which may give you some comfort, but the US or other Western states do engage in the things you listed too.
I agree China is a much worse state at present than the US say, but I wouldn't be too comfortable about defying the US government on something they care about - they have murdered, coerced and ruined lives too in the recent past.
> It's extremely unlikely if you are white, non-muslim and do exactly as they ask
True now, but that one poem will come up; First They Came (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...). If this keeps up, anyone who is more left / liberal leaning will be next, then the intellectuals, etc. It's happened before, pretty much exactly like this, it's just that the uniforms are different.
Why isn't the international community pulling on the emergency brakes? The UN was founded to prevent this exact shit. But the problem with the UN is that the perpetrators in this case all have a lot of influence there + veto powers, so it's basically powerless and useless.
Being convinced that complete victory over their enemies is essential to defend life, liberty, independence and religious freedom, and to preserve human rights and justice in their own lands as well as in other lands, and that they are now engaged in a common struggle against savage and brutal forces seeking to subjugate the world...
The Declaration does not name Nazism or Fascism specifically, but does describe the characteristics common to them and other authoritarian and aggressive forms of government.
"worse" perhaps based on whatever scale you're using.
Starting illegal wars and overthrowing governments to put in puppets tends to be quite atrocious, but I guess if you benefit from it, no problems then.
China has done this too and will continue to do so. They've also recently perpetrated genocide, ethnic cleansing and massive oppression of their population.
It's very hard to compare countries, and there are certainly major problems with civil rights in the US, but I'd rather live in the US than in China right now.
I was going to comment on just the recent use of unmarked federal agents in Portland. I never thought that within the single term of US president things could swing so far. I used to question how it happened in WWI/II, but now I see it first hand.
Your comment has me confused, because the previous comment seems to have argued that there wasn't a change--2013 was under the prior administration.
As for Portland, that appears to be an unusual use of Federal authority, but as far as I can tell, they actually do have relatively sweeping legal authority, even if it's not often exercised (see the lawfare blog for some analysis thereof) and everyone is being processed in the regular court system. So it's not exactly the case of being "disappeared" that some reports claimed.
> everyone is being processed in the regular court system. So it's not exactly the case of being "disappeared" that some reports claimed.
One article had an account of someone abducted, searched, and released, and then the authorities said they did not have records of arresting him. If there's no records, it's not the regular court system, even if it happened in the court building.
From what I've read, the Oregon AG alleged that they were released by the prison they were taken to without charges, so apparently they refused to book them for whatever they were accused of in the first place.
It's not clear to me what other records they would have in that case and again, this isn't exactly being "disappeared" given that they were turned over to the police for processing and then released without charges. Sounds more to me like some cops were lazy with the paperwork when they were going to release them anyhow.
The feds have wide-ranging authority to arrest people and always have, though:
Re: records it depends on the state DOJ. California will have a separate line item for each arrest, booking, arraignment, and release. I believe they also keep “administrative records” for each stop, but you dont get to see those when you request your own records. And yes, its possible to be arrested but then released when the duty sergeant/lieutenant refuses to book based on nonsense charges.
Courts can move pretty slowly - I've never been arrested, but having gotten a handful of minor tickets over the years, it frequently takes months before there is any record of it entered into the system. I would certainly hope people getting arrested would have records fully entered within hours of their arrest, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if it takes longer, especially if the person is released without any charges filed.
Please stop substituting “detained” or “arrested” with “abducted” for dramatic effect. This is like saying that ICE puts kids in “concentration camps”.
What do you call it when people in an unmarked van stop you on the street and force you to go with them without telling you who they are or why?
If that happened to someone you were walking with and they left you there, wouldn't you call police and report that your friend was abducted?
Also, the government officials have claimed the people weren't arrested, and my understanding (which could easily be wrong) is being detained by law enforcement means you're not permitted to leave, not that you must go with them, so I'm out of words.
Just saw the ruling from the judge in this case. Oregon lost and, in particular, was forced to concede that the police were identifiable as such by virtue of the evidence they themselves submitted to the court. See footnote #3 in the ruling:
It appears that the State has largely backed away from any argument that the federal agents were not at all identifiable as law enforcement. Mr. Pettibone acknowledges that their uniforms said “Police,” Pettibone Decl. [1-1] ¶ 3, and the video shows agents wearing clothing clearly marked as “Police.”
You call it an arrest if they're US Federal Agents and they take you to the police station, but you're arguing against something that was never claimed in most of this.
>it's that it doesn't really matter what the law says if Congress chooses not to enforce it
Congress...chooses not to enforce it? You're talking about Congress, commonly known as the executive branch of the triune government, which enforces the laws?
It's at times like these I'm reminded of the saying...that fog is a sign of merging timelines.
There are laws that apply to members of the executive branch, even though that branch is also responsible for enforcing the law. So how to handle the fact that that means they can break them with impunity?
The answer is that the Constitution give Congress abilities like impeachment specifically to give them the ability to apply pressure and "enforce" that the executive branch does what it is entrusted to do.
The exact same situation applies to police. Surely you understand that it is possible for police officers to break the law even though they are technically also the people responsible for enforcing it?
What you're looking at is the probability of the US Capitol being in a particular place. It's a common misconception that fog makes things look blurry, but you're seeing the effect of the average probability of it being there at all, given the many possibilities in alternate time tracks. It is blurry. Never mind what might be going on inside.
People who wander into fog often come out into a different world, but generally their memories adjust...not always though.
That was grandparent's point, poking fun at the post before that for discussing Congress enforcing the law when they're the legislative branch, rather than the executive.
Regarding your point that "I used to question how it happened in WWI/II, but now I see it first hand", not to say it is identical, but consider from: "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45" by Milton Mayer https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html
""What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap ... between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with... And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing. "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. ... "This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter. ... "To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no [patriotic citizen] could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head. How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice — ‘Resist the beginnings’ and ‘Consider the end.’ But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might have. And everyone counts on that might. ... And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident ... collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in — your nation, your people — is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way." ..."
One antidote to hate and fear is laughter and play; see for example Dutch historian and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga, author of "Homo Ludens" (who was eventually held in detention by the Nazis):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Ludens
And playfulness and laughter can be regained:
https://myshrink.com/dont-laugh-anymore/ "If your nervous system activation increases over your lifetime, chances are you'll lose your capacity for spontaneous laughter. Those folks who notice the difference in themselves might say they are "tapped out" or "I don't feel like myself". Indeed, there's some folks who've never had the ability for a good laugh to begin with. Don't despair. Just because you don't laugh anymore doesn't mean that can't be changed - it's temporary - unless you decide to do nothing about it."
I've started watching the original "The Prisoner" series again ( https://archive.org/details/The_Prisoner ) and reading comments on it. It is becoming clearer that ultimately, fifty years after that series first aired, we are all part of a global village now... For good or bad, we are part of that system -- and there is essentially no possibility of "escape" because that system in some form is everywhere.
And seeing the Prisoner series again decades later -- informed by some comments -- it is also clearer the series does not take an absolutist stand on one side or the other of the free-seeming individual or the structured-seeming community.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prisoner
"A major theme of the series is individualism, as represented by Number Six, versus collectivism, as represented by Number Two and the others in the Village. McGoohan stated that the series aimed to demonstrate a balance between the two points."
Number Six: You're just as much a prisoner as I am.
Number Two: Of course, I know too much - we're both lifers. I am an optimist. It doesn't matter who Number One is. It doesn't matter which side runs the Village. It's run by one side. But both sides are becoming identical. What has been created is an international community, a blueprint for world order. When both sides realise they're the same, they'll see this is the pattern for the future.
Number Six: The whole earth as the Village?
Number Two: That is my hope. What's yours?
Number Size: To be the first man on the moon.
As parts of that now essentially inescapable Global Village system built by all sides over the last half century, we can do what we can when we can to make it better somehow. As in the coincidentally written ~1932-1933 prayer by the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serenity_Prayer "Father, give us courage to change what must be altered, serenity to accept what cannot be helped, and the insight to know the one from the other."
For example, the Starship Enterprise in Star Trek is essentially a surveillance state where the computer knows everything everyone is doing all the time -- but somehow we don't see the series through that surveillance state lens. Perhaps that is in part because of the amazing opportunities that cheap energy, matter replicators, space travel, holographic simulations, and so on make possible through widespread abundance for all Federation citizens in that (still) fictional universe? Or perhaps also it is because the surveillance is somehow behind some sort of assumed legitimate authority of access and (virtual) privacy?
See also on the issue of surveillance and power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society
"The Transparent Society (1998) is a non-fiction book by the science-fiction author David Brin in which he forecasts social transparency and some degree of erosion of privacy, as it is overtaken by low-cost surveillance, communication and database technology, and proposes new institutions and practices that he believes would provide benefits that would more than compensate for lost privacy."
The recent unrest in the USA is emerging not from surveillance by the police of the citizenry but (via cell phones) from surveillance by the citizenry of the police (and what some specific police officers did to George Floyd).
A related touchstone by Manuel De Landa: "Meshworks, Hierachies, and Interfaces": http://netbase.org/delanda/meshwork.htm "To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice to save us."
It was my honor to read your argument. Thank you. Please feel free to not respond.
I suggest the only justified criterion of authority and rule of law emerges from a high-performance liquid democracy built on infrastructures owned by the people. Those in power have little egoistic reason to enable that thing to evolve. Spontaneous mass cooperation that radically leverages webs of epistemic trust toward maximizing the utility of the those at the bottom appears to be our only hope; I do not predict it.
You're welcome. One optimistic-ish sci-fi book I've re-read several times when I need a lift is "Voyage from Yesteryear" by James P. Hogan from around 1982: https://web.archive.org/web/20120713225646/http://www.jamesp...
"The fun begins when a generation ship housing a population of thousands arrives to "reclaim" the colony on behalf of the repressive, authoritarian regime that emerged following the crisis period. The Mayflower II brings with it all the tried and tested apparatus for bringing a recalcitrant population to heel: authority, with its power structure and symbolism, to impress; commercial institutions with the promise of wealth and possessions, to tempt and ensnare; a religious presence, to awe and instill duty and obedience; and if all else fails, armed military force to compel. But what happens when these methods encounter a population that has never been conditioned to respond? The book has an interesting corollary. Around about the mid eighties, I received a letter notifying me that the story had been serialized in an underground Polish s.f. magazine. They hadn't exactly "stolen" it, the publishers explained, but had credited zlotys to an account in my name there, so if I ever decided to take a holiday in Poland the expenses would be covered (there was no exchange mechanism with Western currencies at that time). Then the story started surfacing in other countries of Eastern Europe, by all accounts to an enthusiastic reception. What they liked there, apparently, was the updated "Ghandiesque" formula on how bring down an oppressive regime when it's got all the guns. And a couple of years later, they were all doing it!"
As is shown (fictionally) in Voyage from Yesteryear, if many people stop obeying like with a general strike (at least until full automation) or just by walking away to new opportunities in a different part of the system, then authority comes under pressure to respond (hopefully positively) or it will eventually will collapse. A similar point is made in the chapter on the "Ghands" in the 1962 sci-fi novel the The Great Explosion" by Eric Frank Russell who live by the adage "Freedom can say "I won't"".
The same has been true throughout human history as explained in Daniel Quinn's "Beyond Civilization: Humanity's Next Great Adventure" where he shows how centralized governance has collapsed many times in human history as whatever problems emerged in it (often from external pressures like droughts or plagues leading to systemic stress) caused most people to just walk away back to the wilderness to live off the land.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Civilization
For good or bad, walking away is not much of an option these days given large populations, global surveillance, and also WMDs like nukes and plagues and so on that could be unleashed accidentally or on purpose if power centers collapse.
Collapse of power centers in modern times is also often problematical regarding what comes next -- when most people can't walk away -- is usually the next-best organized group taking over. For example, students in Iran could eventually overthrow the US-installed Sha -- but then better-organized religious hardliners took over in the resulting power vacuum (which is probably not what most Iranian students had in mind for their future). Or, as other examples, the USA could relatively easily overthrow Saddam Hussein in Iraq or Muammar Gaddafi in Libya -- but the resulting power vacuums have created politician and humanitarian disasters which have been very costly to the USA (especially in Iraq, costing trillions of dollars to US taxpayers -- although as a bunch of defense companies have made billions that may have been part of why it went forward despite many people pointing out what was likely to happen: https://www.wanttoknow.info/warisaracket ).
Of course, power centers also tend to actively disrupt any possible other power centers. See the "Old Guy" Cybertank novels for some graphic sci-fi accounts of that in one.
Or for the real world, see for example Noam Chomsky's "The Threat of a Good Example": http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/ChomOdon_Example.h... "No country is exempt from U.S. intervention, no matter how unimportant. In fact, it's the weakest, poorest countries that often arouse the greatest hysteria. ... As far as American business is concerned, Nicaragua could disappear and nobody would notice. The same is true of El Salvador. But both have been subjected to murderous assaults by the US, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and many billions of dollars. There's a reason for that. The weaker and poorer a country is, the more dangerous it is as an example. If a tiny, poor country like Grenada can succeed in bringing about a better life for its people, some other place that has more resources will ask, "why not us?" "
As you say, people in power have little reason to embrace change -- since their power derives from the status quo. Related on "Orthodoxy" by G. K. Chesteron: https://www.ccel.org/ccel/chesterton/orthodoxy.x.html "We have remarked that one reason offered for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow better. But the only real reason for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow worse. The corruption in things is not only the best argument for being progressive; it is also the only argument against being conservative. The conservative theory would really be quite sweeping and unanswerable if it were not for this one fact. But all conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post. But this which is true even of inanimate things is in a quite special and terrible sense true of all human things. An almost unnatural vigilance is really required of the citizen because of the horrible rapidity with which human institutions grow old. It is the custom in passing romance and journalism to talk of men suffering under old tyrannies. But, as a fact, men have almost always suffered under new tyrannies; under tyrannies that had been public liberties hardly twenty years before. ..."
One can wonder how effective such classical organizing is anymore given tightly controlled (by money) major broadcast media. And even if that was somehow circumvented, then as with Bernie Sanders (twice), the establishment has other ways of preserving itself like by convincing candidates to drop out of the race.
Then there are other possible ways of disrupting such organizations vulnerable to things like, say, small plane crashes involving key organizers. Wellstone died in a small plane crash, which of course might have just been an accident despite suggestions to the contrary:
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/10/well-o29.html
"Wellstone’s death comes almost two years to the day after a similar plane crash killed another Democratic Senate hopeful locked in a tight election contest, Missouri Governor Mel Carnahan, on October 16, 2000. The American media duly noted the “eerie coincidence,” as though it was a statistical oddity, rather than suggesting a pattern. One might say, paraphrasing Oscar Wilde, that to lose one senator is a misfortune, but to lose two senators, the same way, is positively suspicious."
Another idea other than "organizing" that fits with what you wrote on spontaneous mass cooperation is "quorum sensing": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorum_sensing "In biology, quorum sensing is the ability to detect and to respond to cell population density by gene regulation. As one example, quorum sensing (QS) enables bacteria to restrict the expression of specific genes to the high cell densities at which the resulting phenotypes will be most beneficial. Many species of bacteria use quorum sensing to coordinate gene expression according to the density of their local population. In a similar fashion, some social insects use quorum sensing to determine where to nest. Also, quorum sensing might be useful for cancer cell communications too. In addition to its function in biological systems, quorum sensing has several useful applications for computing and robotics. In general, quorum sensing can function as a decision-making process in any decentralized system in which the components have: (a) a means of assessing the number of other components they interact with and (b) a standard response once a threshold number of components is detected."
Ultimately, if systems of power refuse to negotiate new terms for support by the governed when circumstances change, either they will be successful at suppressing dissent by whatever means or they won't. But if centers of power are going to fail, the longer they fight change, often the worse the failure, and the less the existing power may have a say in the new order (for good or bad).
Still, in the past, some power centers (typically organized around control of a key resource like water) have lasted for thousands of years (such as the Egyptian Empire) -- so people in power can always hope they will be part of the next Ancient Egypt. As G. William Domhoff writes regarding "four main organizational networks -- ideological, economic, military, and political -- as the building blocks for power structures": https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/theory/four_networks.html
"Before civilizations emerged, there may have been "inverted power structures" in which the rank-and-file could discipline would-be dominators through gossip, scorn, shunning, and if need be, assassination (Boehm, 1999). Only where river flooding allowed the possibility of alluvial agriculture, in conjunction with close proximity to geographical areas that encouraged different but complementary networks, did the "caging" of populations make possible the development of the fixed power structures of domination and exploitation that have characterized all civilizations. The strong egalitarian tendencies that characterized pre-historic social groups were submerged when power seekers could build on a religious, economic, military, or political base to gain control of others."
I've been hopeful for a Universal Basic Income eventually to soften the worst extremes of the USA's current economic system for many people (as part of a healthy mix of subsistence, gift, exchange, and planned activities in society). But given that the obvious solution was not tried on an even temporary basis for the pandemic despite multiple congress people endorsing monthly payments for the duration, it seems like the USA is still not quite there yet -- even if closer than ever, given increased public awareness of the idea. For example Kamala Harris: https://twitter.com/KamalaHarris/status/1271151635549556736 "Roughly 44M Americans have filed for unemployment over the past 12 weeks. That’s why @BernieSanders, @EdMarkey & I introduced a bill to give $2,000 monthly payments to people throughout this crisis. Bills didn’t stop just because we’re in the middle of a pandemic."
G. William Domhoff has some other interesting thing to on his website, stuff sometimes many years old, like: https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/change/science_why.html
"Based on these findings, it seems likely that everyday people don't opt for social change in good part because they don't see any plausible way to accomplish their goals, and haven't heard any plans from anyone else that make sense to them. But why don't they just say "the hell with it" and head to the barricades? Why aren't they "fed up?" The answer is not in their false consciousness or a mere resigned acquiescence, as many leftists seem to believe, but in a very different set of factors. On the one hand, for all the injustices average Americans experience and perceive, there are many positive aspects to everyday life that make a regular day-to-day existence more attractive than a general strike or a commitment to building a revolutionary party. They have loved ones they like to be with, they have hobbies and sports they enjoy, and they have forms of entertainment they like to watch. In fact, many of them also report in surveys that they enjoy their jobs even though the jobs don't pay enough or have decent benefits. (And as of late 2005, 93% of individuals earning over $50,000 a year describe themselves as "doing well.") They also understand that they have some hard-won democratic rights and freedoms inherited from the past that are much more than people in many other countries have. They don't want to see those positive aspects messed up. On a less positive note, many ordinary white workers have priorities that they put ahead of economic issues. As all voting and field studies show, a large number of average white Americans do many things based on their skin color. They often vote Republican, for example, especially in the South. They protest against affirmative action programs. They live in segregated neighborhoods. White Americans also often vote their religion -- that is, the fundamentalist Protestants and conservative Catholics who vote Republican are members of non-college-educated blue-collar and white-collar families. In terms of their economic situation, and their need for unions, they should be for the Democrats, but many of them aren't. It is these alternative issues, both positive and negative, rooted in their own lives and experiences, not a false consciousness created by the capitalists' ideological hegemony, that explain why most Americans don't rebel -- or even vote their pocketbook -- most of the time. In short, the theorists of consciousness may be serious thinkers, and they work at a level that is very attractive to most leftists, but they are wrong when it comes to understanding why positive social change does not happen. They have misconstrued the problem, which has to do with structures of power and life circumstances and the compelling nature of everyday life, not the chains of consciousness. They have misunderstood everyday people, and in effect blamed them for the failures of the left, even though at the theoretical level it seems like they are blaming the overwhelming powers of the dominant class or power elite. They have made the people the problem instead of considering the possibility that what the left offers does not make any sense to most people."
Outrage and destruction resulting from unhappiness and stress is one thing; coherent collective action to some positive ends is another. Destruction is relatively easy compared to making things better. It's OK to be angry or sad as recent protesters in the USA must be feeling, but as Mr. Fred Rogers sings, "What do you do with the Mad that you feel?" And as Domhoff suggests, that can be a difficult question about how to change things to make them better for more people without making things worse for lots more other people.
That is a very charitable reply. Thank you. Even in possible disagreement, I admire why we might disagree.
If you ever drive south a few hours, and would be up for meeting for dinner, coffee, a beer, whatever, let me know. It would be my honor to meet you offline too.
I would like to know your dreams, your wild speculations, and your gut feelings about what the post-scarcity world should look like and how it might come to be.
I don’t think that’s our only hope. We could also go about our daily lives and appreciate that there isn’t any threat remotely like what we are pretending exists.
Communism doesn’t work. We have already found a better system. Do not introduce regressions.
This has to be a joke. Rioters were setting fire to federal buildings. Federal agents arrested them. That’s how things work. You really need a sobering look at history if you think this is anything close to the atrocities of WW2.
You have a really low bar for freedom if the destruction of property is all it takes for you to start justifying unmarked federal agents grabbing people off the street. Further the leadership in these states already have sufficient resources available to handle these protests if they decide it's gotten out of hand. People not from these neighborhoods are proclaiming these protests out of hand summarily.
The people protesting have been exceeding clear about what they are arguing for precisely. Holding police accountable is not some fringe political opinion and in fact the right, according to its own professed beliefs, should be natural allies in this movement. The further this continues the more evidence we have that these concerns about police in the United States acting with impunity are legitimate.
What is clear however, is that a significant portion of the people who have claimed themselves champions of freedom and states' rights always held the caveat that it be in the service of a particular group of people. It is interesting how people who in every other circumstance hold individual liberty as central to their beliefs now place law and order at the center of their arguments at the expense of individual liberty. Where in the Constitution are our rights subject to conditions on behavior? Fucking nowhere. The second amendment itself grants the people the right to violence against a tyrannical government so why then would "not destroying statues" in any way be considered some kind of pre-requisite for legitimite protest?
> The second amendment itself grants the people the right to violence against a tyrannical government
No, it grants them the right to keep and bear arms, it does not grant them the right to use them against the federal or state government, and in fact the Constitution specifically empowers the federal government to act against any who would do so.
Now, the Declaration of Independence appeals to a separate and independent of any human law right to rebel uncertain conditions, but the Second Amendment does not.
The first action of federal troops after the Revolutionary War ended was to suppress a regional rebellion of people who refused to pay their taxes. c.f. "The Whiskey Rebellion.". The US Constitution does not grant right to take up arms against the government, city state or federal. It may be the moral thing to do at some point, but the US Constitution doesn't make it legal.
> The Constitution was written by people that were willing to do exactly what you discuss.
It is at least as true to say that the Constitution was written by people who didn't view that as something that was or should be a legal right, and who were willing to violently repress others who tried to do it, both before and after their own Revolution.
>The second amendment itself grants the people the right to violence against a tyrannical government
Who believes this? Some people believe in a separate and pre-existing right to rebel, and some may not, at least legally, but I'm not aware that anyone believes the 2nd amendment grants the right. People commonly claim that the motivation for the 2nd amendment is to make rebellion possible, but that's not the same thing as granting the right.
Complete and utter nonsense. People absolutely should be arrested for arson. It doesn’t make it any less legitimate when you use scare words like “unmarked” and “abduction”. It doesn’t make their rioting any more legitimate when you call it protesting. There isn’t even anything to protest. Anarchists, who are overrepresented in Portland for some reason, enjoy destroying society and we should not tolerate it. There can be no liberty with anarchy.
CHAZ was subject to several murders already, so it's not merely "destruction of property" here.
I presume they changed the name to CHOP because someone told them that creating an "autonomous zone" sounded a lot like insurrection, which is also the kind of thing that feds normally involve themselves with, but it's not like the feds need that as an excuse given that they already have plenty of authority to enforce the law whether or not Portland wishes to do so.
> Where in the Constitution are our rights subject to conditions on behavior?
In the 13th amendment:
"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
And I'm on the other side of that. Why are you focusing on the protestors acting out angrily and violently but not focusing on the abundant evidence showing police doing the same?
What was the root cause of the protests? Have the people responsible for those root causes attempted to alleviate the root cause, or attempted to heap on more of the same?
Also: those are still Americans you're talking about, whether or not you agree with them. The whole point of our government is that those in power should be held to a higher standard, so the "so be it" argument is pretty stupid. Why don't the people in power do better? And for all this heat being thrown at the local politicians, aren't they the ones with their finger most on the pulse of their constituencies? Have you considered the protestors aren't behaving as badly as they're made out to be? Logic like yours makes me sick. You probably would have been OK with crucifying Jesus... "He should have followed the law!"
Sorry, no. Regardless of whether "something" needs to be done, that something cannot be "abduction by mute unmarked federal agents". I'm amazed that you accept and apparently condone this end-justifies-the-means thinking! The USG has its entire legal and military force at its disposal, and it has to resort to extrajudicial violence? This is abominable and inexcusable behavior.
Sorry, no. Anarchists trying to burn down our communities get arrested and go to jail. That’s the social contract. No extrajudicial violence. Rioting is abominable and inexcusable behavior. I’m amazed you’re surprised by this.
I live in Seattle and I don't see anyone trying to burn down our communities. Someone threw a candle at a cop. That's not a riot and you're being fed crap by whatever media you're watching.
Do you live here in Seattle, Larry? Some smashed windows and graffiti are not "trying to burn down the community". 12 officers got some bruises on their knuckles as they punched someone, and the media runs with it. Meanwhile hundreds of people have been beaten or gassed or hit with "non-lethal" weapons over the past few weeks. KOMO news won't spend time reporting on that because it doesn't fit their narrative.
I empathize, but you've been misled about the nature and extent of size of the protests. It so happens that I live two blocks away from where the feds were arresting people two nights ago. If the police were overwhelmed or were overlooking serious crime, I'd be right there with you.
How exactly do you know that only violent rioters are being forcibly taken?
And my comment was not about who they're targeting first, but about how that kind of logic is a slippery slope.
The reality is that most people lack empathy for those they do not know, and only become engaged when it affects them personally. It’s good to keep that in mind when taking dangerous stances like the above.
On the contrary, we know definitively that people who are not violent rioters have been kidnapped this way. And people who just don't want to care will still ignore it, because it's easier for them to assume that everyone being arrested is Bad and just lying about it.
A part of the HN crowd seems to have a strong opinion about this, it seems. You’d think that educated and technical folk would mostly understand why arbitrary arrests by federal agents is never a good thing...
I see the come up all the time and I can think is, maybe the HN crowd isn't as special an intelligent as it thinks it is. I enjoy it here, but let's not get too full of ourselves.
I don't want federal agents abducting people but I want a strict law enforcement that allows peaceful assembly enmasse but fines/detains and prosecutes people that destroy property.
BLM is a scape goat. The real issue is that poor are struggling in portland to feed themselves and COVID has caused them to not be able to afford rent, food and shelter. This is a civil unrest, BLM is an excuse.
What we should do is support these people financially, provide them shelter, get them gov jobs, and keep societal order.
At this rate, cities are getting destroyed and we are just on the sidelines debating about BLM/police.
I disagree with just about every claim you've made
a) the protests have gone beyond the realm of free speech
b) people who are violently angry cannot also be trying to enact change
c) something needs to be done
d) local politicians are abdicating their duty
d) if something needs to be done then anything is acceptable, including whatever unconstitutional fascism the admin wants to come up with
I will give you that China is still a lot worse. But that's like praising someone for not being Ted Bundy.
They were not unmarked federal agents, they were all wearing badges. The cars themselves were unmarked, but the people were fully marked and wearing badges. Please read the article before commenting.
> Nacchio was convicted by a jury of insider trading. I dont see how the NSA could have arranged that.
I'm not sure what part of identifying the jurors, finding pressure points, and covertly applying pressure you think would be beyond the capabilities of the NSA if they wanted to do it. Or doing the same to Nacchio and/or is counsel, to affect the case that got to the jury.
Not (even a little bit) suggesting that is what happened, just that suggesting it is plausible for the NSA to be able to influence that kind of outcome is not even a tiny stretch.
While in theory we could fight it via electing people, the fact is that these programs were built over the last three decades by elected administrations (both D and R), and this two-party setup doesn't seem to be changing any time soon.
Annoyed at both sides enabling surveilance? Time to advocate for STAR Voting and NPVIC, your cure to "lesser of two evils"! (not implying parent comment is both-siding, I am just trying to boost these ideas wherever it's relevant)
IRV has worldwide use – probably most heavily used in Australia, but also for some elections in Ireland, India, Papua New Guinea, and the United States (elections in Maine; also some local elections in a number of states).
IRV also has a long history – Australia has been using it at the federal level for over a century now (and at the state level for even longer than that).
By contrast, STAR doesn't appear to be used anywhere of any significance. There is a movement in Oregon to get it adopted, but thus far the movement hasn't had success. According to Wikipedia, the only people using it are Multnomah County Democratic Party for internal elections.
And that's unsurprising given how new it is – it was invented in 2014. Why prefer a system which was only invented six years ago, to a system which has over a century of significant real world use?
> IRV also has a long history – Australia has been using it at the federal level for over a century now (and at the state level for even longer than that).
If the goal is to prevent the two-party system, Australia has basically turned into that with two major parties i.e. Labor and Liberal with smaller parties choosing sides, and being negligible.
Although, IRV would generally be better than the current American system in a number of ways, but not necessarily something that would break the two-party hegemony.
> If the goal is to prevent the two-party system, Australia has basically turned into that with two major parties i.e. Labor and Liberal with smaller parties choosing sides, and being negligible.
I think minor parties and independents have played a far more important role in Australia's political history than your statements about "smaller parties choosing sides" and "being negligible" gives them credit. Consider for example, the 1999 decision of the Australian Democrats to support Howard's GST, or the role that the Democratic Labor Party (DLP) arguably played in helping to lock Labor out of the federal government between 1949 and 1972. (Although the Democrats role in supporting the GST was in the Senate, which uses STV not IRV.)
In the results of the 2010 federal election, Labor and the Liberal-National Coalition had 74 seats each, both two short of a majority. Labor managed to form government with the support of four of the six unaligned (independent or minor party) MPs. Two of the independents who supported Labor (Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor) came from a conservative political background, and they could have easily chosen to support the Liberal-National Coalition instead.
Even in strongly multi-party systems like Italy, Spain, Israel, etc, you still tend to end up with two broad coalitions anchored by the major parties of the Left and Right, plus a bunch of centrist parties that may switch between those two coalitions depending on what is on offer after each election. (And also sometimes a far-left / far-right fringe that gets locked out of government, but hopes for the day when the mainstream left/right are desperate enough to turn to them for support.)
A big obstacle that was born out of the Ross Perot "surprise" was the formation of the Committee on Presidential Debates[1]. A form of manufacturing consent.
The CPD was founded in 1987, but Ross Perot didn't run for President until 1992. How can the former be "born out of" the later, when the former happened five years before the later did?
Okay, sure, but “we can fix it by fundamentally changing the entire way we attempt to have representation in government” is something China could do as well.
Can you point to any candidate let alone party (that stands a snowballs chance in hell of being elected) that has "reduce surveillance" anywhere in their manifestos?
The last 70 years of Democrat and Republican rule would suggest not.
>Can you point to any candidate let alone party (that stands a snowballs chance in hell of being elected) that has "reduce surveillance" anywhere in their manifestos?
Every year for a long time there has been a senator named Paul who has complained about this stuff nonstop. Nobody has listened because it is not a partisan issue. If this were a partisan issue we'd have billions of dollars behind it on both sides and the pendulum would eventually swing one way or the other.
Ron Paul was not a Senator and his son just postures about such issues to get spotlight. I never see any action when it counts from Rand Paul. He seems to be just another enabler.
Shahid Buttar, running against Nancy Pelosi, has a strong record of anti-surveillance activism and seems willing to run on it. Anti-surveillance politicians are out there, if rare.
Disclaimer: I moved to US from China about 10 years ago.
"China knows they are being spied" -> Not sure govt public admitting spying and censorship is a good thing at all. It sets a vert bad example for the rest of the country to follow.
If it's OK for the central govt to do those shitty business (arguably backed by those so called national security rationals, whole another topic). Then how about local govt to use the same toolkits? How about powerful corporations, how about celebrities? Since the central govt sets a bad example, everyone else who's holding power are tend to think this is just OK. IMHO, that is what's causing much bigger damages.
Alright, next election cycle please tell me which of the two candidates is the correct one, and then tell me how I can be a part of the electoral college so that my vote actually counts.
My point isn’t that we are powerless, but that our secretly surveillance state is baked into the system, probably far beyond repair since we’ve long already chosen security over freedom.
We have have had at most two viable parties nationally, and in each state—though not always the same two—since the founding (with brief moments of only 1 nationally, and a lot more of only one in particular states) because of our FPTP election system for Congress and most state executive and legislative offices, and our even-more-hostile-to-minor-parties Presidential election system.
Points 2 and 3 seem like mischaracterizations of what they wrote. I'll try to paraphrase based on my interpretation. They seem to implicitly claim that Americans can change things in practice, but that the system can be changed to be made more representative. If someone doesn't believe in that future, they can leave because it's a defeatist view in which nothing they see as possible would really satisfy them. Neither of these points imply Americans can't in practice change things, or that people who don't like the present system should just leave.
i remember back around 2003, just after Bush invaded Iraq, when the bobbleheads on Faux and Toby Kieth were responding to critics of Bush's Global War on Terror by telling the critics "America, love it or leave it."
i also remember how this made the pundits on the Left very upset and reconfirmed in their minds that Bush and the Neocons who hijacked America were open Tyrants who eventually embrace stripping American dissidents of their citizenship and deporting them.
so when you say we are free to leave, it reminds me of that.
why should i leave the place where i was born and abandon my people after i conclude "there is no political solution"? that is PRECISELY the moment to stand and FIGHT. it's what George Washington and Jefferson and Madison and Franklin etc would do if they were us today.
i dont want to roll the life dice and pick another lesser country to escape to. what do we do when there is no political solution because the entire edifice of govt from Federal down to local is rotten and hopelessly unfixable?
we seize territory from that tyrannical govt and create a new country with a new govt, that's what we do.
that's also what the people in China ought to be doing too.
In theory - the reality is very different. In both the US and UK you effectively have only 2 political parties, and have done since forever. In both the US and UK, the foreign policies, stance on mass surveillance, and support for the defence and security services, are the same.
Ask yourself when the last time was that the US/UK weren't cosied up Saudi Arabia, or the last time when the US wasn't bombing other countries to hell in the name of freedom or stoppi g the boogeyman de-jour (with allies like the UK in tow, of course). It's been the same since forever, and I don't see how our political system will ever offer a way out, a way to become better nations.
back in 2003, after Bush's President's Surveillance Program (NSA STELLARWIND) had been up and running for 2 years, hoovering up all domestic phone calls, emails and web traffic, the whole program was so secret that you could count on your hands who outside of NSA knew it was happening.
guess who was the 9th person outside of NSA and the WH who was "read into the program" and told about NSA STELLARWIND?
House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi, that's who.
guess who was the 14th person read in?
Deputy AG James Comey.
guess who was the 17th person read in?
DOJ Criminal Division chief Chris Wray, who is now FBI Director.
every single Democrat leader who has been in DC for their entire career LOVES mass domestic surveillance. they have known about it all along and they never once blew the whistle or tried to stop it or simply resign their jobs in silent protest. they all went along with it, "just doing my job."
Can you? There are a few problems: firstly, the primaries are controlled by the parties, so you have a very limited menu to choose from when it comes to the actual elections. Secondly, the media is no longer independent. If you are not aligned with the status quo, you will get no exposure, or only very negative exposure. Finally, politicians consistently do the opposite of what they promise on such matters. Take Obama: a lot of people believed that he was the way to fight, that he was the "correct person". He promised to encourage whistle-blowing, and then he did the opposite. This is not a partisan observation, I pick this example because it is the most recent disappointment on such matters.
> But more importantly, I won't be spirited away to a black site by speaking ill about the president.
It is happening right now in Oregon.
> Nor can the government decide it doesn't want me as CEO of my company anymore.
Are you sure?
> Or prevent me from funding the opposition party.
Try funding a radical party and see what happens.
> There's an enormous difference between the West and totalitarian dystopia China.
I agree that there is, but it is scary to see that the difference is becoming smaller and most people seem ok with that. I worry that the future will not be a place worth living in.
How exactly does that happen when the two key entities have direct ties the the rest of the (surveillance) system? Those two enties control who gets to run, who is on the ballot. For example, look at Biden. He didn't win. The DNC put their thumb on the scale for him.
Any perception of being able to fight is an illusion, it's a ruse. As for the difference between East and West, that's true. That doesn't mean we're not in danger. Just because you can't see doesn't mean it's not there.
Maybe this is the key point here. We feel our system is less evil because we think we control it. While the evil CPP has no accountability to the population. I think the reality is both systems are really not under the control of the citizens (not really anyways. Call it 0% control in China and 10% in the US), but the illusion of control in the west gives a sense of comfort.
Cause the patriot act has been reconducted for 3 generations of presidents since 9/11, including obama, along with legalized mass surveillance, torture and deny of habeas corpus.
How many things have been aberrant and denounced, only to become the regrettable norm in the last few years?
When I was a child, the US wouldn't open admit to torture. It didn't have publicly known programs to ship prisoners to other jurisdictions so the U.S. rules of conduct could be bypassed. It didn't have a (publicly known) prison filled with non-U.S. people that were denied a civil trial. It didn't have a president that actively preached for or against public companies outside of criminal matters. When I was a child, a president openly violating ethics concerns WAS a matter of that president getting removed - with such certainty they'd step down to avoid the inevitable result.
I'm totally willing to believe that an aberrant behavior doesn't have to become the norm, but I won't believe that should be expected. I've been told all my life to expect that dramatic reactions and concerns are overstated and not the case, that we should all be calm and expect things to work out well, but if I look at the actual events of my life, I see the opposite lessons being taught: Unless we react strongly, clearly, and persistently, progress will not happen and things will slide for the worse.
It's not the lesson I want to learn, it's not a lesson I am comfortable with, but it does appear to be what I've seen in the last few decades.
> I'd say there is more transparency around unethical behavior by elected officials
And that's what worries me - note in my post above I was careful to talk about "public". Before there was a veil of deniability, the idea that at least a pretense of innocence had to be maintained.
Now it feels like there is little care to hide it. Sure, many of us are outraged, but that outrage has done nothing to translate into stopping the actions.
Your perspective really resonates with me, and it reminds me of the old quote "Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue". When people lie to cover up their misdeeds, it at least promotes the collective acknowledgement that we have certain values.
Go back a little more and you've got US concentration camps where they put in anyone Japanese or looking vaguely asian.
Go back a little more and you've got Mexicans at the border branded as dirty, forced to take bleach showers and have their clothes fumigated using Zyklon-B, inspiring the Germans to use it to mass-execute Jews. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1917_Bath_riots ).
Go back a little more and you've got slavery and states trying to segregate from the US to maintain the system.
Go back a little more and you've got immigrants genociding the native population using biological agents, bullets, and mass rape to conquer the land as their own.
The US has NEVER had the moral high ground; their best claim to fame is helping to liberate Europe from the Nazis, but other than that they've absolutely shit.
"denounced" is not good enough; this should make the government fall and trigger reelections, this should be the trigger that makes people exercise their 2nd amendment and form a militia for their own safety, because civilian are oppressed, murdered and abducted by the police and masked, unmarked militia.
But no, let's focus on the Karens who claim oppression because they need to wear a mask in Walmart instead.
Interestingly, another BLM (Bureau of Land Management) protest in Oregon did involve armed militia members and was widely denounced by partisans on the opposing spectrum.
I recall the racially loaded term "Vanilla ISIS" being used.
Seems like they were very critical of the previous administration. They're as partisan as any other network, but I don't see how "state sponsored" applies here.
They did the same thing during the Occupy Wall Street movement protests. There is a video of federal agents pulling protesters off the street and into an unmarked car, during that time. The federal response to these protests is far lighter than their response to that protest movement was, they've arrested a lot fewer people and have been far less physical with the protesters. They're using many of the same tactics though:
I seem to recall hearing similar claims made about Iraq War protests circa 2003. People said mysterious agents rounded up people in vans and released them without explanation. I have no mainstream sources that back that up, just a claim I heard made at the time and later, by partisans. Have no idea if it's true or not.
The 2003 protests were in a weird time. The Internet was a thing, yet the old media still controlled the image to a large extent. There were hundreds of thousands of protestors in large cities, but it was pretty consistently under-reported.
Today it would be impossible to ignore something that big, it would show up on social media.
To people arguing these are "arrests", well funny the arrested are just let go when they ask for a lawyer. It's an intimidation tactic. The rubberhosing and disappearing will come too, when that's deemed an acceptable intimidation tactic.
Can you link any evidence of federal agents pulling occupy protestors off the streets into unmarked cars? I cannot find any and the linked article does not discuss them.
You have to make the distinction between violent rioters (namely antifa) and genuine protestors. this is the 2nd high-profile time this attempted hijacking has happened. there is even a meme: look up "bike lock guy" (Internet Historian's video on YouTube is pretty funny). anyways the federal agents are not pulling out random genuine protestors (how would that make sense?). they are pulling out the violent ones.
'Antifa' and 'violent rioters' is absolutely not the same thing. Please don't conflate them. Some antifascists are indeed violent; most are not. There are also many violent rioters who are not antifascists in any way - there are groups of fascists trying to make things violent, and there are many people who simply want to take advantage of the riots to steal and fight for the 'fun' of it.
> anyways the federal agents are not pulling out random genuine protestors (how would that make sense?). they are pulling out the violent ones.
You are assuming that the federal agents are interested in the well-being of protestors. There is no proof of that. Much more likely, the federal agents have 2 goals: stop and deligitimize the protests, and protect federal or local property from the looting.
The first goal is best achieved by detaining and threatening non-violent protestors, especially their leaders, and journalists friendly to the cause. Violent protestors are already giving the protests a bad name, so they are helping the government's cause. Of course, some violent protestors also need to be stopped, to fulfill their second goal.
There is never, ever, ever any possible excuse for kidnapping people without due process. Ever, ever. Because there's no way to prove that they were violent rioters. They just as well could have been total innocents, and you'd have no way to know.
What you're calling kidnapping is actually referred to as arresting, and it is entirely possible to identify violent individuals with certainty. Every riot in Seattle has had multiple police helicopters circling the area; it isn't difficult to identify and track particularly violent participants.
Proving whether that person participated in the riot is a matter for the courts, all that's needed for an arrest is reasonable suspicion.
> There is never, ever, ever any possible excuse for kidnapping people without due process.
I don't know if you are a native speaker, but the word kidnap might not be the one you should be using. "Kidnap" has strong connotations, and while sime people will happily use that property of the word to create feelings I don't think it is appropriate here.
kidnap: abduct (someone) and hold them captive, typically to obtain a ransom.
There's a lot to be said about police, federal agents, TSA etc, but lets keep this serious.
I would guess this is some kind of a standard procedure for detaining people during a protest. And by detain I don't mean code-word for arrest, I mean the legal term for questioning people when police have reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed. Due to the presence of an unfriendly crowd, they presumably try to avoid escalation by grabbing the person quickly and having the discussion elsewhere. In the previous link someone gave, the police said as much. If this is the case, then other than the relocation they still shouldn't be able to go any farther than any other stop in terms of searching the person or anything.
Too many have come forward for that to be the entire explanation. Even if it were true, how is that not also horrible? Are we just accepting agent provocateurs as how things should be now?
And what they don’t mention is a group within the protestors tried to fire bomb a federal building. All bets are off when anarchy hits federal buildings like that. Wait for the details of this to come out in the coming weeks.
If 'all bets are off' when a group 'tries' to attack a government building, then you have a problem with democracy.
And 'waiting for the details to come out in a few weeks' is never justified. If the government has just cause, they should ideally show it before they do seemingly illegal actions, especially in the current climate; at the very least, once the governor of the state is suing to get federal agents to stop, any evidence of a just cause should be immediately made public.
Since neither has happened, people should act now, not later. Any data that comes to light weeks from now is going to be rightfully suspected of being manufactured anyway.
> And 'waiting for the details to come out in a few weeks' is never justified.
Given how distorted and contextless the politically relevant information we get is, waiting a few weeks for the details is almost always the right choice. This situation may be an exception but I doubt it.
Doing nothing is not a default position in this type of situation - it is an active choice. This is similar to the pandemic. If you stop and wait for more data, you're not taking a conservative approach, you're deciding based on the available data that the best course of action is to do nothing.
The CCP would state literally the exact same argument to justify their actions : "It's very disingenuous to imply that these people are being arrested for purely political reasons, they are causing social unrest and preventing harmony. They are not being targeted because of their identity, but because of their actions".
And it's just as bullshit when China says it and when the Feds say it. There is no justification for black-bagging people. When that happens, it is almost always for political reasons. If it wasn't, then they could use normal legal channels instead of violating the law.
By the way, civil disobedience is always illegal. That's what the "disobediance" means.
There is a very clear difference between "Arrested for disagreeing with Donald Trump" and "Arrested for participation in an illegal act". You know what the difference is. Everyone knows China's crackdown on dissidents is entirely different from people participating in the riot getting arrested by Federal agents in unmarked cars.
How do you know that they were participating in a riot?
By the way, in Oregon, Federal agents are not allowed to carry out such actions without registering beforehand with the State. So this was literally an illegal arrest made by agents of a completely unrelated agency being used in order to do what Donald Trump wants instead of following the process of the law.
China's crackdown on dissidents is very similar, they also use the tactic where they push peaceful protests into riots and then use that as an excuse to arrest everyone.
Federal agents can enforce federal law anywhere in the US. They don’t need the state’s permission to, for example, arrest someone for vandalizing a federal courthouse. What you’re referring to is federal agents enforcing state law, which is also allowed but requires registration in Oregon[1].
That’s not a defense of the current situation; we should be putting more limits on what federal agents can do (like requiring them to identify themselves during an arrest).
Yes. Federal crimes. Rioting, unless it is specifically vandalism on a federal building, is not enforceable by Federal agents, because it isn't a federal crime.
When I'll see the warrant signed by a federal judge against these people for a federal crime with probable cause, then maybe. But so far, no one was served with a warrant.
Federal officers can make warrantless arrests if they have probable cause to believe the individual has committed a crime, just like normal officers. It's hard to tell if these arrests meet that threshold, but it's at least possible that all laws are technically being following here.
Again, that's not to say this isn't a bad situation. I'm explicitly advocating for changing the laws that allow this to be even possibly legal in the first place.
In the video I’ve seen, there’s not enough context to tell whether they have probable cause. Which by the way does not require that they “just witnessed that a federal crime was committed”.
Xinjiang’s situation didn’t start in a day, and neither did Hong Kong’s. We’ve been watching HK boiling for the past year and things have finally overflowed. It’ll only get worse from here. America is following a similar course. Massive detention camps for citizens aren’t a problem yet because they haven’t been built. But people are being picked up and who knows what’s happening, journalists are being arrested just for reporting the facts, people are being shot and permanently injured or killed just for standing by the protests. And while not intended for citizens, America already has detention camps in use, but we’re exempt from them for the moment (although some citizens are being rounded up [1]). It’s not impossible or even difficult for the feds to decide to take problem A and solution B and say, hey, we can apply this method here.
There is no recent history of the US interning and torturing parts of their own population because of their religion or ethnicity. That is in a totally different category than foreign policy or stuff they did while Mao’s policies starved 20 million+ people to death or student protests were suppressed by rolling tanks over them.
No, people just get detained and disappeared in China, with families sent to labor camps if you're Uighur minority. That doesn't happen in the United States.
Does the United States have problems? Yes. Are those problems on the same level as China? No.
If we are going to allow law enforcement to behave like this, you don't really have a check on people being disappeared. Even if the secret police are absolutely perfectly 100% scrupulous in only taking "bad guys" off the street for good reason, anybody could impersonate them, because they don't have identification or keep records.
For the sake of argument, stipulate the US is not right now on the same level as some despotic states. What is going to tell us that we've arrived, next week or next year, if anonymous security forces can grab people off the street with no accountability? What sounds the alarm, that the feds are not doing things correctly, or that someone is pretending to be the feds, who kidnap people?
Sure, specifically detention of people in the US isn't as big of an issue as in the PRC.
However, the US has absolutely huge issues that are much worse than anything comparable in China. Such as, I don't know, fabricating intelligence and feeding it to propaga- I mean corporate media in order to justify a war to kill over a million innocents.
The US is not better than China as far as human rights. There are some things that the Chinese do much worse than America, such as due process, in general - not in extreme cases, where both don't hesitate to extraordinarily rendition you into a black site. However, China also doesn't have the habit of turning a few million innocents into pink mist every decade or so, so there's really no argument of moral superiority you can make here. US problems are certainly on the same level as China.
And as far as detention, the direction the US is going certainly isn't the right one, either.
China right now has little power projection ability, and invading anywhere would likely start a very costly war with the US. If China had the same global military dominance as the US does now, it would be much, much more aggressive. It openly wants to outright conquer Taiwan, just for starters. There's a whole Wikipedia category on Chinese border disputes:
Now we're getting somewhere. I agree, China likely isn't doing so because they lack the power. Same way, the USG isn't putting people into re-education camps largely because the people won't let it do so.
If you want to limit the ability of superpowers to kill millions with impunity, then really the best solution is to have a bipolar world.
It doesn't happen for entire families, but black people in the US are also detained in large numbers for minor charges and sent to prison where they become forced laborers. It's not as openly targeted, and it's happening to lots of non-black people as well, but it's not nothing. It is an important part of US manufacturing at this point.
I’ve been to some of the protests in Portland. It’s hardly a riot. There’s been some spray painting, but for the most part it’s cops beating the shit out of peaceful people.
Note that a riot is a really loosely defined term, literally any civil unrest or any gathering which the authorities don’t agree with can be labelled as “a riot”.
The actual charges given to people after a “riot” are usually unrelated (jaywalking, illegal lodging, etc.) and are mostly dropped before this goes through the courts.
I haven’t looked at the figures but I would be very surprised to find the percentage of protestors arrested for the Black Lives Matter cause that are guilty of rioting is more then a single percent. To reword: I claim (though I don’t know the figure) that less then 1% of people arrested during a “riot” are found guilty of rioting.
> If they were not involved in what is a violent and largely unlawful civil disobedience they would not be apprehended.
Civil disobedience is always unlawful, the clue is in the name. Also violence against property (protesters) is not the same as violence against people (police) though they are often deliberately conflated.
It's sometimes moral to break the law, that's how law gets changed; civil disobedience is good trouble, necessary trouble.
I am not supportive of the riots in Portland, but it makes me incredibly uncomfortable to have agents of the federal government a) there at all, when it should a local and state issue, b) grabbing protesters/rioters off the streets, searching them, intimidating them, and releasing them without charging them with anything.
That video is very disturbing, he was clearly standing still and making no aggressive actions and that cop just starts wailing on him with a baton the the other unloads the pepper spray inches from his eyes.
We can't take any video at face value anymore unfortunately - a video can be edited to make things look differently, or simply captured in a way to hide some elements out of the picture. It's been used by media before to push a specific narrative.
Not really sure what else to say, even if he had done something to provoke a response aside from shouting(you can read the multiple articles for details) he wasn't resisting arrest, was stationary and the federal agent broke his hand in two places[1].
I can't think of any situation where beating the shit out of someone who's standing still and not reacting is an appropriate response. Much less from someone who is expected to uphold the law and supposedly trained to deal with stressful situations.
Not respecting a lawful order to back away from a police perimeter will get the "shit beat out of you" (read: a few motivating, non-injurious taps to make you comply).
> So long as there is transparency and due process of law.
That's a key point, and my concern is that some reports suggest that some of the arrests are being made in a manner that's "off the record", no paperwork done, officially never happened. If that's true, then there's no transparency, no due process, no accountability.
Really? I saw it covered relentlessly until it was shut down.
> If the US Marshall are arresting people with either warrants or holding them with evidence/charges, I'm totally okay with that.
That is not what is being contested. There is video evidence of am incident where "masked federal agents in camouflage gear, with no badges identifying who they work for, arrested a man without telling him what he was being charged with or reading him his Miranda rights. They put him in an unmarked van and drove away." [0]
That's not illegal. So long as they have probable cause, and identify as LEO, the police don't have to tell them why they're being charged. That happens at arraignment. They don't even have to read the suspect their rights, so long as they don't ask them any questions (and if they have video evidence of the person doing something, they're not going to bother reading rights or asking questions at all. They're just going to wait until arraignment).
The person arrested can challenge that if there is no probably cause (with the right attorney, there is money to be had there) but most don't because ... there's usually probably cause.
It is of unclear legality whether a federal agent can arrest a someone for violating state law in Oregon. It is more likely that after the mayor and governor have said they don't want this to continue it is not legal.
What is the requirement in your mind and legally to identify as LEO? The feds in Portland allegedly have the word POLICE on their shirts and that's it. Is that sufficient? Would you follow orders from someone in tacticool gear with the word POLICE on it?
> The feds in Portland allegedly have the word POLICE on their shirts and that's it. Is that sufficient
Um, yes? That's literally the law. A police officer only has to identify AS an officer. They don't have to identify which branch (police, FBI, etc.) "Police" is enough. Ask any defense attorney.
> It is of unclear legality whether a federal agent can arrest a someone for violating state law
State law? They're literally destroying federal buildings. The federal agents are not enforcing ANY state laws. They are only enforcing federal laws:
You assert that they have only arrested people who have destroyed federal buildings? I assert they have arrested people who haven't destroyed a federal building. I assert they've arrested people who haven't violated federal law at all, and that no federal buildings have been destroyed.
Some have almost surely tried to vandalize federal buildings and others who've been arrested have protested peacefully, and still others have only violated state law. None have taken drastic action that would actually destroy a building. I don't care for hyperbole on such serious topics.
All that said I scrolled through your comments. I think at best we won't have a productive conversation on this topic, so I won't invest my time further in it.
If that is true - I can buy a POLICE Velcro badge on eBay, stick it on, and start detaining people? Genuinely, that’d be my fear. I recognize I’d then be impersonating a police officer - but without further identification, there is a huge gap in accountability, right? Someone swipes people off the street - and bystanders have zero recourse to identify and followup on the person detained - they have no idea what agency detained them. That’s how you disappear people.
What about this video did you find relevant? The case where one individual attacked a plywood barricade with a hammer and was stopped? (Surely not the Andy Ngo digression.) That's not the topic under discussion. People are concerned with federal officers arresting people off the street with no probable cause.
I saw a bumper sticker on a large diesel pickup truck the other day: "I identify as a Prius." If I say I "identify" as a policeman, is that good enough in your book?
If you’re arrested the Miranda rights do not need to be read to you. Only when you’re being questioned, if they’re not going to question you it doesn’t happen. Do you have images of the lack of badges? All the images/video I’ve seen show the patches on the arms and police insignia on the chest: https://youtu.be/Isuc5DHgE1M
These people are being arrested and released - doesn't sound like kidnapping to me. Sounds like law enforcement doing their job.
People are arrested and released because they haven't committed a crime. Arresting people who haven't done anything wrong is not the job of the police.
Haven't done anything wrong? It's all public info.[1]
The Portland Police are arresting people for disturbing the peace. So are the federal police, the only difference is the people they are arresting are being release because the Portland DA chooses not to press charges.
It's all political. I don't know about you, but I'd be more concerned about the Portland justice system being perverted just to stick it to Trump.
Disturbing the peace comes from the Anglo-Saxon common law breach of the (King’s) peace[1]. Certainly, it’s a very broad law that I have seen overused and abused by British police (as another disturbing example of police acting badly) but you’ll need a more specific complaint for it or its application to be used in the same breath as the behaviour of China’s government towards its citizens.
People arrested for disturbing the peace in the US won’t disappear or end up in a re-education camp where their organs may be harvested.[2] Hong Kongers are certainly fighting for the right to remain under common law, there’s a clear difference in theory and practice.
This. While it's sad that we wait till we can pin these activities on the other party, it's good to see us finally acknowledging the problem. I almost hope Trump wins the next election because if Biden does we'll all go back to ignoring these kinds of problems.
If they'd committed whatever crime 'disturbing the peace' is then they would be charged with that, not released. The fact they were released without charge is evidence enough that they shouldn't have been arrested in the first place.
I don't think people are trying to stick it to Trump. People have been angry about police brutality and police killing black civilians for a long time. The LA riots were 30 years ago, and things haven't really changed that much since then - there are still cases of the police killing people with far too much regularity. This is a political issue, but it's one that crosses party boundaries. People are only really angry about Trump because he's in office at the moment; if it was a different president they'd be angry at him.
The guy you're replying to states flat out that (he believes) the police are correct, and the Portland DA is refusing to press charges for political reasons unrelated to whether any crime actually took place.
In effect, he's arguing that rioting has been decriminalised in Portland without any popular vote and without any explicit decision ever having been made. If that's true it's unsurprising the police keep arresting people and they keep being released. The issue there wouldn't be the police. If Portland wants riots to be legal when the rioters support leftist causes, they should explicitly adjust the local laws to allow it.
That said, the link they provide states the guy was released "on own recognizance" which basically means he promised to turn up in court at a future date, albeit with no bail money paid. So it doesn't say charges were dropped.
> 1. Cops pull over people and arrest them all the time using unmarked cars - why is it an issue now?
Well, the entire context. The first is that they are barely marked, you mention this in point #2, but a badge that just says "police" with no further identification or badge number is basically anonymity. How do you report abuse in this situation?
In addition to this, you have a historical precedent where right wing groups have gone on patrols through the streets of Portland to beat up non-binary folks and where they've stopped to beat up people for flicking them off when they drive through with a trump flag. I gotta ask, who is stupid enough to not entertain the thought this is just another escalation? Especially in the moment.
Thirdly they're actively telling people that, if they're followed, they'll shoot them. That's pretty low in the accountability standards.
> 3. These people are being arrested and released - doesn't sound like kidnapping to me. Sounds like law enforcement doing their job.
Kidnapping doesn't entail being kept indefinitely, it means being whisked off the street at the threat of violence into a stranger's vehicle.
Every other time in history, this has been bad, but this is the one outlier, right? That's pretty convenient.
How do you know if you are arrested by an unmarked cop or kidnapped by for example a right wing militia member? If something illegal happened, how would you go to court for justice with unmarked law enforcement?
You misunderstand. Do not conflate protestors with violent rioters, who are taking advantage of the protests (as many protestors on the ground can attest). The state government has refused to do anything about violent rioters, even releasing those arrested for felony crimes. Federal agents are picking up where the state government has refused to take action.
Last night rioters broke into and set fire to the Portland Police Association offices.
Going all the way back to May 29th, protesting has morphed into rioting on a nightly basis. Rioters have fired guns and hit bystanders. "The rioters and looters shattered store windows and tagged buildings with graffiti that police say stretched for 20 blocks." "Demonstrators broke into and started a fire inside the Multnomah County Justice Center, home to hundreds of inmates." "Other protesters set fires throughout downtown, torching dumpsters, trash cans, cars and pallets." -- That was all May 29th.
Here is timeline of the first 12 days. It's much the same every night. [1]
I understand there were attempts to set up an autonomous zone in both cities, so I don't think that buys you much. And CHAZ "security" shot some of the people so the evidence here seems rather lacking.
People being shot by white people in tactical gear that nobody from the zone had seen before, around the same time you have people driving cars into protesters and people trying to shoot protesters with bows, and it's because I wish there was evidence.
I had to stop and think about why the, "can we?" argument annoys me. I feel that it reflects (at its most extreme) a belief that if the system isn't perfect and the candidates beyond question, that there's no benefit in making a choice. However, I feel that there's an opportunity cost to perfectionism. We (in Western democracies) have been able to make some progress in some areas (while clearly acknowledging things are far from perfect, or even completely broken in some areas), while we're "in" an imperfect system. Surely, there's some possible benefit to making a "least worst" choice, while that choice still exists? And if not, what's the alternative?
This is not about perfection, this is about not supporting a system the is explicitly designed to exploit wedge issues to avoid having to make an significant amount of change to a status quo that is completely broken in almost every way.
I live in Australia where voting is mandatory. My belief is that this tends to mitigate the appeal to extremes because a majority of the voting public tends to be relatively centrist on most issues, meaning that a strategy of appealing to the extremes, will lose you the valuable middle. It tends not be as much of a winning strategy here as it does in the US. Of course, the downside is that change is often very incremental. As I get older though, I'm finding that's not such a bad thing. Democracy can withstand small perturbations and stay relatively stable.
Centrism is inherently conservative, and will lean towards whatever the current system is. A “centrist” party in the Soviet Union would be just another communist party, and a centrist party in Australia is likewise just another capitalist party. Likewise a centrist party in the USA would be another run of the mill capitalist, pro-military, pro-police. pro-surveillance. It would basically just be the current Democratic party except it wouldn’t fight for immigration rights, abortion rights, nor gay rights. A lack of centrist parties is not what is wrong with American politics currently.
>It would basically just be the current Democratic party except it wouldn’t fight for immigration rights, abortion rights, nor gay rights. A lack of centrist parties is not what is wrong with American politics currently.
The reason the right has been so successful is because these policies have been made divisive in an ongoing culture war.
This is weakening the US as a whole.
To fix it, first dismantle the structures that are fueling the culture war. And the only way to do this is to co-op the middle.
The Soviet Union was not a multi-party democracy so I agree with you but it’s not relevant to the point I was making. With respect to the US, my guess is what‘s happened is both parties have drifted in the same direction, so the position of the “centre” (in the absence of mandatory voting defined as the median between the two parties rather than the median of the population) has moved too. Of course, I only have remote observer status - I’m not living it like most of those present in this discussion are.
Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time…
I am not suggesting to replace democracy... The thing is that we don't have a democracy in most countries. It's more like the government is throwing a bone to people. Real power comes through lobbying. So in a way, lobbyists have the actual power to elect, and therefore they are the actual electorate in our democracy. The "normal" person is simply just getting his bone as well to keep quiet. And looking at the fact that 40% of USA still support Trump, that may actually be a good thing.
Democracy can both be not perfect and also conducive to a surveillance state. That being said, the experiment is on-going so we can’t definitively say Democracy is the best system (unless of course you are a nationalist, in which case any system which is adopted by us is by definition the best system because we are in it).
The thing that is conducive to a surveillance state is the centralization of power and information. In some cases this is a strong federal government, but Facebook is as big a problem as Sabre is as big a problem as Amazon etc.
But democracy is not more prone to the development of centralized power than any other system.
The issue today is large corporations as well. When Take Two can send private investigators to intimidate a youtuber at his home there is no way to have people's rights be secure.
>That being said, the experiment is on-going so we can’t definitively say Democracy is the best system
Whoever said this? It's directly contradicting Churchill's quote, so not really part of a response to what I said.
Yep. The people who think that what’s happening here is equivalent to what has been going on in China are, at best, arguing from a position of ignorance.
The US, with all its flaws, is miles ahead of the human rights and privacy violations that China is committing on a daily basis.
> I won't be spirited away to a black site by speaking ill about the president.
Trump started doing that in Portland last week.
Earlier today, he said he plans to expand the program to New York, Chicago, Oakland, Detroit, and a bunch of cities with in blue states.
Apparently, the Chicago PD’s leadership is welcoming it because the mayor “makes them fight with kid gloves” and this will let them ignore state and local regulations.
They also say they’re planning to bypass the state courts because federal courts have harsher sentencing guidelines.
I'm outraged about Trump's use of Federal troops in Portland as well. But to date they are either letting people go after grabbing them(in gross violations of their constitutional rights), or they are being charged with crimes in a US court, with due process and lawyers and a normal level of transparency. Portland protestors aren't being whisked away to black sites...
I don't understand what this has to do with China. Can't they both be bad? How does the NSA spying on people make China doing it any better? If I've got five eyes spying on me I'm still not keen to add a sixth.
When I was at uni (in the 80's) we used to laugh about echelon, and ridicule the idea that everything was being recorded and stored under Cheyenne mountain, only the tin foil hat people would treat it seriously - who knew.
Similarly I remember reading a comment on Slashdot in the late 90s warning how much of a dystopia the Web would become. I also remember myself mostly dismissing the comment as buzz-kill.
It's important to remember that those posts are only relevant now because of hindsight bias. If the web had moved in a different direction, we would be looking back on posts with different predictions with the same hindsight bias.
Usually China is brought up in order to deflect and avoid discussing how much power our government has accumulated and how disturbing the parallels are.
This is one of the rare cases when China has been brought up in the opposite direction.
And just to be clear; in the normal case a local government is much more of a threat than a foreign government. The experience in the 20th century made it very clear - if a government causes you to die, it was probably your government. Not a foreign government.
The experience in the 21st century has thankfully been a little bit milder but (1) we're only 20 years in and (2) if you are going to be persecuted it is still far more likely to be by a local government than a foreign government.
> We’re not constantly told our own governments are ...
When I read these statements, I can't help to substitute these nouns with "a used car salesperson".
Of course a used car salesperson will talk up the cars on their lot and won't go out of their way to point out the defects or bad value. That's exactly why we should look for sources other than the salesperson and their allies. Look for data supplied by neutral third parties who have a slight adversarial stance. Also look for data from strong adversaries and evaluate the likelihood of truth versus pure propaganda.
> We’re not constantly told our own governments are a threat, and that forms the basis of propaganda and misinformation.
On the contrary I'd say a very notable feature the US culture is the adversarial view people have of the government. It's practically part of every major party's platform.
Please "remember that the community is divided on divisive topics and that the person disagreeing with you is probably not a spy, but just someone who disagrees with you." [1]
Also, specifically about astroturfing: "[T]he overwhelming majority of the insinuations and accusations [of astroturfing] that people come up with about it lead to precisely nothing when we investigate. It's like flipping a coin and having it come up tails a thousand times in a row: you start to look for simpler explanations, and there are clear, simple explanations for why this might be." [2]
I've spent countless hours looking into these things. I've found no evidence for what you're saying. Literally zero.
I'm not saying that to pick an argument—it's just the factual situation. Meanwhile, there's enormous evidence that people imagine things like astroturfing, shillage, foreign agents, etc., based on what they believe they see in internet threads. That's why the site guidelines ask you not to post such insinuations unless you have something objective to go on. The appearance of a comment getting upvoted doesn't count—that's simply an indication that people have different views.
Then why do I regularly see an anti-west china post pushed to the top (without even much to say). Typically it gets pushed out later but odd how often that happens.
Why does anything critical of china get met with downvotes rather than responses? - I've pointed this out before.
Why, if I try to argue with pro-china people does a pattern of rebuffing or denial occur followed by, when pushed into a corner, posting some nebululosty with little meaningful content followed by them going quiet?
If this is not government sponsored shilling, there are a bunch of people who are quite willing to behave against HN rules but don't get banned in a hurry - should I be flagging these more or something?
I have no problem with people being pro-china, it's a question of honesty.
You're probably running into the notice-dislike bias: you (not you personally, of course, but all of us) are more likely to notice the things you dislike and weight them more heavily, whereupon they become your dominant image of the site. People with the opposite preferences have the opposite image, I guarantee you.
We already find out a lot from the presence of exactly the opposite complaints by the opposite side. This happens on every single divisive topic. Moreover the feelings people have about their perceptions, the language they use to express them and so on, are identical, even when they're claiming opposite things.
This shows that these perceptions are not objective. That's the main point. Why such perceptions routinely arise, and why people are so intensely convinced of them, is an interesting question but a secondary one.
> exactly the opposite complaints by the opposite side > This happens reliably, even universally, on every single divisive topic > the language they use to express them and so on, are identical
I just don't see, or at least recognise, this type of behaviour elsewhere. See a post on guns or free speech and the flames that erupt amongst USAians, they have a very different character to the ones about china.
> This shows that these perceptions are not objective
Inevitably, but that does not in itself eliminate their being actual differences, and these being of a nature different from other flames ie. being backed not by ultranationalistic citizens of some country, but by a concerted centralised interference.
So again, how do we determine this, or disprove it, in an empirical way?
Is it so strange to think that not everyone buys into the anti-China propaganda that's relatively recently popped up in US media? It's only in the last few years that you see every other person on the internet go on a frenzy about China and it's not too crazy to think that there will be people skeptical of this frenzy.
I don't see why the NSA would have to hack Starwood given the designated nationals checks of the State Dept. I know firsthand that about 15 years ago, every major US hotel chain (and possibly small ones, don't know) matched every guest (globally) against a rather large list of names supplied by the US Gov and reported back the matches. This was done daily for every guest. I do not know if it is still done or not. An aside, the first thing the team tasked with implementing this did was check their names against the list.
when the Snowden leaks came out, i was horrified. our worst nightmares about an Orwellian Dystopia far in the future had already happened 20 years ago in secret and we were only finding out.
but then i did some research into Starwood hotels.
when Snowden ran to HK in May/June 2013, he stayed at the Mira hotel, paying with his personal credit card.
guess who owns Mira?
Mira is a Starwood hotel.
i guess that ROYALCONCIERGE program didnt work too well LOL.
i now no longer fear NSA and the FVEYs the same way i did back in 2013.
NSA/FVEYs are not 1984 meets Skynet. NSA is the Cyber DMV. govt clerks punching a clock and squabbling with each other over internal turf wars. they are morons, just with a bigger budget and an invisibility cloak of TOP SECRET.
NSA/FVEYs have already crippled themselves by their spectacular success. they hacked everyone, they exfiltrated all data on Earth, but what good is it? they couldnt even find Snowden in their own hotel spy program?
i bet more sand falls through the cracks in NSA's hands than any finite number of grains they do manage to catch. there simply is no way to scale putting a human eyeball on every piece of SIGINT. the more SIGINT you collect, the more blind you become.
these days i am NSA's #1 cheerleader. i fervently hope they intercept and wiretap and collect everything. because one day poetic justice will knock NSA on their asses and blindside their hubris and they will never see it coming.
Exactly. The moment the US created a global network of cyber spying it gave the motivation for all other countries to do the same. After all why would anyone believe in the goodness of the US when it is already proven that they will use this data as a commercial advantage?
Airlines report flights booked directly to security agencies, including new, cancelled, and changed itineraries, with complete customer information. They don't need to hack airlines—the regulatory system has given them what they need.
For all we know, all major hotel chains could just be forced to comply with secret injunctions from FISA, and it would still be totally legal, and totally cool.
The US doesn't have concentration camps with hundreds of thousands of their own citizens.
At most there is Guantanamo and black sites abroad. And at least for Guantanamo the prisoners have a modicum of rights (see Boumedine, though I concede that the current scotus majority is limiting it as much as possible.)
This includes migrants who claim to be children, but who are actually 18 or older, as well as adults who falsely claim to be parents of minors they're traveling with, according to Brian Hastings, chief of law enforcement operations for Customs and Border Protection.
Now demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt, with vast supporting evidence, that most of those people shouldn't have been in prison for the crimes in question.
The NY Times and Washington Post routinely rail against our prison population and sentencing laws. Morally they're right, our sentences are too long. They never substantiate the premise that a large share of people in prison were wrongly convincted. In fact, to date, nobody has ever proven such an outlandish thing: because it's not true. The critics don't even attempt to prove that premise (at worst they'll point to a few select prominent cases). The problem with the US incarceration rate isn't that the US wrongly puts millions of people into prison, it's that the US puts people into prison with sentences that are too long.
> Now demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt, with vast supporting evidence, that most of those people shouldn't have been in prison for the crimes in question.
"Shouldn't have been" is a value judgment; by my values, anyone in prison for a non-violent drug "offense" should not be there.
Just did a quick search, and for federal crimes, looks like the drug-related prison population is a whopping 46% of the total, at just under 70k inmates. Not sure what the violent vs. non-violent breakdown is, but even if the violent ones are 75% of those, 17k people () is still a lot. If we assume that the federal prison population is composed similarly to all the state prisons, that's 250k inmates for non-violent drug crimes.
Yes, I know I made some guesses and assumptions around those numbers, and if anyone has some better figures, I'd be happy to correct myself, but there's 250k people should not be in prison in the US, based on my values.
>Guantanamo the prisoners have a modicum of rights
There are prisoners there that have never been even charged. They are being tortured, tapes and records are being destroyed. These people have no rights.
> The US doesn't have concentration camps with hundreds of thousands of their own citizens.
No, instead we have mass incarceration that is rife with corruption and mechanical to the point where prosecutors don't care if people are guilty, they just pile on whatever charges they can so they can pad their resume.
We literally have the world's largest prison population, millions of people in prison. We have private prisons and literally have had judges SELL KIDS to them.
Is the US more free than China in every dimension? Perhaps not. But generally, yes. There are societal reasons why the incarceration is higher (per-capita) in the US.
It's also worth noting that if you execute a criminal after a non-fair trial and send his parents the bill for the bullet, it saves some space in the jails, plus has somewhat of a deterrent effect on crime.
Yes, it's that clear-cut. Which also doesn't imply that the US is somehow perfect.
The US puts people in prison for too long for violent crimes due to minimum sentencing laws. That's the reason the prison population is so high (although it has been rapidly declining for the past decade), not because it's randomly putting a million people into prison. The US gets an immense amount of flak for its mandatory minimum sentencing laws and rightfully so.
As one example, everyone knows the US has a high murder rate compared to other affluent nations for example (typically five or higher per 100k). If you have half a million murders every 30 years, it stands to reason you're going to have a lot of people in prison just from that one category and all of its intertwined consequences and related crime.
China has zero human rights, the government can do anything it wants to, to anyone, at any time, with or without a reason. That's not an exaggeration, it's how their system works de facto. They don't apologize for that and they flex that power routinely. Their government is all-powerful, it assumes all rights by default (anything you're allowed to have is a privilege they're granting to you, and they may revoke it at any time).
Referencing US incarceration numbers isn't enough. You have to demonstrate to a very high degree that the people in prison didn't commit the crimes in question, such as armed robbery, rape, murder, and so on. You need to show that a very large percentage of those people didn't commit the crimes they're in prison for (and no, it's not good enough to reference a few cases, you have to show that it applies to hundreds of thousands of instances). The majority of people in prison in the US are there for violent crimes.
> there is zero difference between what China does and what the FVEYs do, except that our Overlords tell us they are not spying on us, while every peasant in China knows they are being spied on by their govt because the Chinese govt openly admits to it.
Zero difference ? Except that you don't have a totalitarian power on top for which laws are meaningless pieces of paper. Look at HK and ask them under which regime they would prefer to live in.
I can see your point for why China is not unlike the US in this regard. But where the two countries differ are the concentration camps, the huge restrictions on press and individual freedom, the imprisonment of political opponents and the massive censorship. Yes, the US does some bad things and may be moving in the wrong direction but you can't tell me that the degrees to which the two countries are bad are even remotely comparable.
There is a significant difference, the repercussions for expressing thoughts and opinions in China are much more significant.
I wouldn't argue that we should ignore or accept constant surveillance in our daily lives, but I would argue that I'd rather not have my travel rights revoked for expressing opinions against the state.
Two things afterwards having worked in intelligence:
- your examples are really child’s play, I have seen much more sneaky stuff. For example if you think NSA is interested in you, how would you acquire a new computer?
- The flip side is that there is still reasonable oversight that is adversarial. At least in the country I’m from. And different branches of government is a real difference from China, at least from now although the executive branch clearly has too much power in the US.
There is enormous difference between 'China' and the 'US' and frankly quite a bit between 'US' and 'Germany' and 'UK'.
Being able to hack into systems to hunt down individuals of interest to the state, is something totally different than everyone, everywhere, at all times surveyed, by everyone, even their neighbours, and then putting people in 'internment camps' because of their ethnicity.
You can't post like this here—the overwhelming majority of such accusations are completely bogus, and they're poison.
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
"I'm merely saying that the overwhelming majority of the insinuations and accusations that people come up with about it lead to precisely nothing when we investigate. It's like flipping a coin and having it come up tails a thousand times in a row: you start to look for simpler explanations, and there are clear, simple explanations for why this might be."
back in 2018, DOJ deputy AG Rod Rosenstein testified under oath to Congress that when he signed the authorization for the FISA warrant against Carter Page in 2017, that it was rock solid because every FISA warrant "package" is 250 pages long and is meticulously combed through by a small army of DOJ attorneys.
then last year winter 2019, after the DOJ OIG reported that every FISA warrant submitted by FBI dating back to 2013 was riddled with multiple legal errors that should have invalidated those warrants, Rod Rosenstein once again was summoned to explain himself to Congress.
Rosenstein told Congress the reason he signed the 4 FISA warrants extending NSA/FBI/CIA surveillance of Carter Page was because he didnt read the warrants, he just trusted DOJ and FBI and blindly signed away.
that is how America ends up just like China. we dont even question the system.
So you're saying that not every US search warrant received enough scrutiny?
What kind of warrant does the CCP have to get before they surveil someone? Since you think their system is equivalent, please explain why you think CCP warrants receive an equivalent amount of scrutiny.
I'm not saying the US is as bad as China, but I roll my eyes when people talk about China forcing its companies to serve the interests of the state. Our government does it all the time and it doesn't require a warrant.
People are right to criticize China for it and just as right to criticize the US for similar faults. We should behave better and encourage others to do the same.
In this case, per the order [1] referenced in the article, this is a normal writ, and does not seem to have anything to do with national security or national security letters. It is also very specific, asking for records on one person for a period of six months, and signed by a district court.
I think that, to keep government accountable, these sealed writs should have a clear date when they will be unsealed, and although it seems this one was eventually unsealed I don't see such a date. But I don't find the specificity or nature of this particular court order problematic.
Certainly national security letters have been shown to have concerning issues both in specificity and in transparency, but again, none of the orders referenced in the article seem to be national security letters. (EFF has more details on their concerns with NSLs at [2].)
Wondering how effective NSL's would be as a phishing technique for e.g. China.. Given the secrecy and non-disclosure aspects, it's generally harder for companies to know what 'looks right'.
Per [1] it seems national security letters are generally served in person by e.g. an FBI agent. So I don't think phishing by foreign governments is likely, unless the foreign government sends spies dressed as U.S. FBI/NSA/CIA agents to visit the company in person.
A state where the government always servers corporate interests becomes indistinguishable—in all functional matter—from a state where all corporations are state controlled.
Absolutely. The only thing that frustrates me about these topics is that only discussions about one of them tends to Get pummeled with whataboutism. We should condemn authoritarianism wherever it exists and not let authoritarianism elsewhere be a justification for authoritarianism anywhere.
While I suspect you are right, I've never seen an example of one and we don't have any proof that this is how they are used in practice. The same could have been said about FISA warrants, but both civil libertarians and Trump allies have been critical in how FISA warrants have been used in practice despite the way they were described as few and targeted by those "watchers" who were "watching themselves".
This is a "both sides"/whataboutism argument. China is absolutely worse than the US in this regard. Chinese military intelligence actually conducts offensive espionage on behalf of Chinese companies to steal IP from western companies.
The US has a court system that reviews National Security Letters, and can accept challenges to them, and while that court is secret, it's still bound by rules that are established by elected congressional officials. ...and perhaps most importantly, they are still somewhat rare.
Chinese companies on the other hand are required to cooperate on all requests, even international subsidiaries of any Chinese companies. No "letters" or court orders - you either do it or the CEO goes to jail, no trial, no judicial review.
It might seem like the results are similar, but having judicial and congressional oversight makes a world of difference in tempering how/when it can be used and, more importantly, rolling it back when it's no longer necessary.
Sorry I think you've drank the koolaid. There's no judicial oversight when it comes to national security. They'll always be able to find judges that are sympathetic to the FBI/CIA's cause
Re "no judicial review": that is one of the big concerns about national security letters though, the lack of judicial review; I read the Wikipedia page you linked and it says, even after the Doe v. Ashcroft case, "there is still no requirement to seek judicial approval for the FBI issuing an NSL". Per the EFF [1], the change was to give "technology companies a right to request judicial review of the gag orders accompanying NSLs", but companies must issue a reciprocal notice to trigger this procedure. The EFF advocates that the government should "bear the complete burden of going to court and proving the gag is truly necessary"; but currently that is not the case.
I agree that it is a night and day comparison, the fact that the legality of this process is even argued in the courts is evidence of that, but national security letters are today still deeply problematic.
If your metric is being "not as bad as China" regarding civil rights, you will loose many, many freedoms in the short to medium term. Because you can justify a lot of overreach, so exactly what was happening the last decade.
I don't agree with the impingements on rights done by China, the U.S. or any other country on this globe. Authoritarianism should be challenged where ever it appears and in whatever form it takes.
replying “Whataboutism” is just a reductive way to defend “hypocrisy” in a geopolitical context. which is worse? Not being aware of the similarity and replying “whataboutism”, or being aware of the similarity just gaslighting and deflecting with whoever pointed out the hypocrisy?
most of these observations are very valid
just because you coincidentally respect the due process that reaches a result, doesn’t mean that it is a functionally different or better. its only indoctrination and pure happenstance to whatever you were exposed to first.
It's hypocrisy when X criticizes Y for doing something that X also does. It's not hypocrisy for a third party to criticize party X for doing something they're not doing, even if they fail to bring up a criticism of Y in the same breath.
Yup. Whataboutism is only fallacious if you use it to claim moral superiority. Whataboutism is not fallacious if you're trying to draw an equivalent between two actors.
How is whataboutism even fallacious. You can be logically consistent and still do whataboutism. It's more like a distraction to an argument being made. There nothing that inherently makes it fallacious.
I can understand that argument, but some people do essentially use whataboutism as a tu quoque to completely dismiss an argument and treat it as obsolete. Obviously this is very rarely the case.
You're only likely to be in a Sabre system if you've been booked by your company through a travel agent and rent using legacy car/hotel companies also through your company's travel agent.