The Washington Post sat on the Collateral Murder video. [1,2] The New York Times sat on the warrantless wiretapping scandal at the request of the White House. [3] CBS sat on the Abu Ghraib torture scandal at the request of the Pentagon. [4]
Your point is generally valid, if a bit tinfoiled, but their hand was particularly forced this time by Snowden. If you'll recall the recent history, Snowden was spooked by his interaction with Gellman -- particularly regarding publishing timeline -- and went to Greenwald instead [1]. There's some debate about the exact sequence of events, but regardless, Greenwald put the story out first, and the Post had no choice but to follow suit. NYT was left red-faced and could only -- shamelessly -- ask Snowden why he didn't choose them [2].
I think Snowden inadvertently demonstrated the only effective way to get media to publish leaks: Send them to multiple outlets in different countries. Doing so provides publishers with both impetus and cover.
I think the GP meant that the demonstration was inadvertent. As in, Snowden intended to use the strategy himself, but he didn't intend to teach the strategy through his actions.
I don't see it as "whining" as much as a reminder of the "what we see is all there is" bias. We may never know what's being hidden from us, but it's worth remembering that we can be near-certain of the existence of unknown-unknowns. The point is that all of this may be the tip of the iceberg. It's intellectually interesting to think about, with potentially grave consequences for day-to-day life.
It's dozens of orders of magnitude less of a fucking joke than Twitter and the blogosphere as far as journalistic quality. Quality control is hard and when a newsroom full of full-time professionals fails, it's not as if *.blogspot.com was really going to do better.
I reckon it might be more that internet news is much cheaper. More people than ever before are reading articles from the mainstream print media, it is just that they are doing it on their websites rather than buying the print edition.
The NSA is under pressure from the public, less so from the intelligence and defense communities. If anything Snowden has caused those areas of government to close ranks even tighter. There's nothing a leader wants more than a highly visible enemy to unite his or her people. There are orders of magnitude more people who hate General Alexander now than there were two years ago. But his own people love him even harder.
The NSA may or may not lose some funding in the coming years. It will probably just transfer over to the NRO or the Office of Intelligence and Analysis or one of the dozen other agencies that we haven't come to know and hate yet. If there's one thing government is good at, it's maintaining the status quo. Public support has never meant much to the intelligence community. These are people who signed up to serve in secret, who have dedicated their lives to what they believe to be just causes. They won't pay a thought to a year or so of bad press.
Snowden's future is unclear. He'll probably be in russia for several more years, if he doesn't overstay his welcome. It's possible that some future president will see pardoning him as a free goodwill card. Or perhaps he'll be able to start a life as an overseas media personality, reaping the benefits of what many see as a heroic action. One thing is for certain: US intelligence agencies will continue business as usual.
Edward Snowden has shown the light, and his work is indeed done. It's up to us to effect real change and shape our government in our own image. Maybe things will change, maybe they won't. But those who dislike what he has revealed have their work cut out for them.
The major change that I am seeing is that cases previously dismissed due to "national security" or other factors due to classification are now being heard in public courts. This allows the judicial system to perform its job properly and for Americans to bring their grievances formally to effect change. This is a big move forward, and will catalyze a great deal of change as court rulings can sometimes move faster than legislation.
> "This is a big move forward, and will catalyze a great deal of change as court rulings can sometimes move faster than legislation."
Please let's not confuse the responsibilities of the courts and the responsibilities of the legislature. They're different for very good reason.
There's little to legislate here, anyway. What Snowden's revelations are targeted to doing is bringing the Government's actual behavior in line with the law, (in this case the 4th amendment of the Constitution). That's strictly the purview of the courts.
The bits that will require legislation (like "Data collected by the GCHQ on Americans should be treated the same as if it were collected on american soil") are loopholes in the wording of the law that the Government has exploited to do whatever it wanted to do. Closing technical loopholes like that may require legislation.
Agreed - they definitely have different roles, however if something is legislated and cannot be argued against in court as constitutional that complicates matters. I was thinking more along the lines of PATRIOT Act rewrites coming up in the next year and the awareness of oversight bodies in the legislature such as the intelligence committee that would be providing guidance and funding to agencies.
And it's when change doesn't happen with court rulings, or are hidden further, and then found out to be still true - then when does shit hit the fan? I could see this cycle occurring many times.
There have actually been positive developments recently. Last week a federal judge found that the NSA's phone surveillance program violated the Fourth Amendment. Also last week the Obama administration issued a report that was more critical of the NSA than anyone expected and recommended ending direct government oversight of surveillance data. And there will be more revelations fueling public outrage (Greenwald has said that the worst is yet to come). So nothing conclusive but momentum is on the side of some kind of major change.
I highly recommend the book "Crisis and Leviathan", by Robert Higgs.
Everyone knows that government has continually grown in size and scope during this past century, but how and why has it done so? Is this growth inherent in the nature of government or because of some greater social needs, or are there other causes? In Crisis and Leviathan, Robert Higgs shows that the main reason lies in government’s responses to national “crises” (real or imagined), including economic upheavals (e.g., the Great Depression) and especially war (e.g., World Wars I and II, Cold War, etc.). The result is ever increasing government power which endures long after each crisis has passed, impinging on both civil and economic liberties and fostering extensive corporate welfare and pork. As government power grows, writes Higgs, it achieves a form of autonomy, making it ever more difficult to decrease its size and scope, and to resist its further efforts to increase its reach, so long as the citizenry remain uninformed of its true effects. One of the most important books ever written on the nature of government power, Crisis and Leviathan is a potent book whose message becomes more trenchant with every passing day. -- http://www.onpower.org/about.html
The only way to "solve" the problem is to spread awareness of it. Political authority is the idea that a small group of people "has the right" to impose their will on everyone else.
In reality though, they obviously do not. Everyone has the exact same rights (and they don't include coercing other people), and you can't delegate rights you do not have. But the belief in political authority is the root cause of practically all problems in today's world. Once the "Authority Religion" unravels, so does mankind's enslavement: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngpsJKQR_ZE
And there aren't ways to ramp up that fear? I'm not going to venture into conspiracy land here but I believe it's safe to say that there are ways to manipulate or stimulate certain means in order to accomplish goals (the ends).
It'll take about 5 years I'm guessing. My experience is that's how long it takes for the general population to get the information filtered through to them and realize what it means. (And have that translate to pressure on politicians.)
I would say being aware of the problem and its scale is a massive achievement. Awareness of the nature and scale of problem is the first step towards solution.
Yes, this is really huge! People who have been in denial or assumed they would never be able to pull this off (like me) are now aware. Naivety is no longer an option.
"There's nothing a leader wants more than a highly visible enemy to unite his or her people."
This is a fair point. Though does that mean US citizens are now highly visible enemies that unite the US military?
A friend of mine participated in a GoRuck challenge in Portland. The team my friend participated in were mostly military or former military, trudging along in one of the most liberal, anti-military cities around. There were folks throwing out taunts (weirdly, most of them were on the top floors of buildings and other relatively inaccessible places). She said it was the first time she felt like kind of resentment and hate the military feels from civilians. She watched her teammates bear with it stoically, focusing on the mission. It was a sort of honor and duty servicemen feel when they stake their lives and sacrifice their innocence, dirty their hands to protect folks back home, even when those same folks don't appreciate it, can't understand it.
There's honor in that. Sadly, there are often agendas that abuses this. And there's always that nagging bit, that maybe all the stuff you've seen and done was for nothing.
The real change, I think, isn't a reform of the NSA. It's a greater and greater openness and awareness of the insanity of war and conflict. The root of the problem here isn't that the NSA are spying on ordinary people, it's that we've created enmity and now we're having trouble getting disengaging from conflicts. It comes from ordinary people demanding security, it's not something that can be pinned exclusively on the military.
There might be a few bad actors, but all in all, folks in the NSA, and the military in general, actually think they are defending America from enemies. They are not far from wrong. There are actually some significant conflicts around the world, a lot more dirty stuff than what you hear from the Snowden disclosures. We American civilians are generally pretty sheltered from all of that. We actually think we're the good guys.
So the root of the problem is that we have conflicts at the world stage. If there were no conflicts, there would be no need for the military or intelligence agencies. It is that simple.
That might sound outlandishly impractical. Of course everyone has conflict. That's a given, right? Fighting over limited resources. Ideology. Unending cycles of revenge. These are rooted in human nature and emotions, stuff that can change, stuff that every single human has to deal with and learn how to handle. These concerns on privacy, while disturbing, are a distraction -- at best, a stepping stone for each of us to deal with the real issue: human nature.
Not much. The only positive change here is that people are now widely aware that they're being spied on in everything they do online, so now there's less resistance to "conspiracy theories" (ie. "reality"). On the other hand, that very same awareness serves to advance "the chilling effect", so it's unclear if it's even a net positive.
Other than that, everything keeps changing for the worse, of course. The police are increasingly militarized, secret courts keep doing their thing, and people keep losing their liberties. The only possible "solution" to this insanity is spreading awareness of the fact that governments are inherently immoral. They're based on taxation, and taxation itself is based on coercion. The way it works is that people are punished for attempting to keep their property. Does it make sense to punish you for keeping your computer? No? -Okay then, does it make sense to punish you for keeping your money? .. Well no. No it doesn't. Yet, that's exactly how taxation is forced upon everyone. If you do not pay taxes, you will be punished for attempting to keep your property. Something is wrong here.
Well IMO it's kind of silly to care about the government snooping through my data when huge corporations are the ones who actually own the fiber and can siphon all the traffic they want -- then sell it. You're basically choosing between the US government or a combination of Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and Deutsche Telekom.
No, a corporation will do anything to increase its profits - or more accurately, dominance of its market. Anyone that can pay will get. With an added bonus of obscurity.
As an aside, when you think of corporations try not to think about the imagery they bathe you in. Think of a serial killer sidling up next to you all smiles and compliments. That would be more accurate.
I'm assuming that you work for a corporation. That corporation is made up of you, and a heap of other folks quite similar to you.
It's true that lots of corporations do unethical things, but you also should keep in mind that at its heart, it's people like you and I that are doing it. They respond to incentives like the rest of us, they (mostly) have a conscience, and generally try to do the right thing.
They're not always successful, but I don't think that your caricature is generally accurate.
No, I do not. I did work for several in the past and only one of those would I say operated "with conscience". They were overcome - overwhelmed by more "sinister" competition (of some reknown, wildly successful still). You need to see their operations as algorithms, and put numbers to actions. Ethical behavior often has a cost - and the counter unethical behavior can yield great gains - exposure may have a risk of a cost, but that may be mitigated with proxy agents, or marketing and relationship management. Someone has this all worked out, monte carloed through the gamut, including things that you might consider to be greatly evil.
And you usually have a choice with corporations. You can see in ToS how they plan to use your data and they often let you opt out. You don't get that with government agencies. Often you don't even know your data is taken since they're monitoring as much as they can see.
oh agreed -- less harm. And when the government do it, we the people pay tax to enable it. US Taxpayers are paying for these buildings, mega-data centers, and contractors.
In the current political climate you might have to wait no longer than about a decade for that to happen. Several countries already started out-sourcing prison guards and/or other security relevant jobs to companies like G4S
Do you think law enforcement aren't included in there customers? I know for a fact in the UK at least that they are.
As for being arrested by a corporation - that will change. The UK government for one are beginning a process of outsourcing some elements of front line policing.
Interesting thought, I can imagine an ad campaign on Facebook targeting marijuana growers, and then the government using the profile information of those that click through to investigate them.
This is less targeted - simply using the usage information many large commercial organisations are gathering, the stuff people are giving up without thinking.
At present it's anonymised and is being used for broad profiling of areas, but I can see that changing over time.
Well, when Google/Verizon/etc has the authority to imprison me ill be more worried. In the meantime, this is an issue that can be addressed with data protection laws.
Actually that is not true. When companies do it, laws can be passed to stop such behaviour but when government does it, you have to change governance which is more difficult. Also commercial entities cannot siphon people's data under the title of security.
You seem to be responding to the title of the article, which takes Snowden's statement out of context. He was talking about his mission, which was to hand over the documents to journalists.
I do not know if I would vote for him necessarily (not knowing much about the rest of his views), but a candidate who promised to pardon Snowden would receive a couple "get-out-of-terrible-policy-suggestion free cards" in my book.
Well, that depends, particularly for Snowden. "Under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, no person who swore an oath to support the Constitution, and later rebelled against the United States, can become president. However, this disqualification can be lifted by a two-thirds vote of each house of Congress."
That was Jesus' big shtick. He defected from the "governments" to the "people". Broadening the possibility of salvation from the Jews to the Gentiles, transitioning the focus of spirituality from the Roman material world to the heavenly next. By simply sharing information.
It's no different from what Snowden has done. You want to know why the US wants to crucify him? That's why.
If the majority have accepted surveillance, it's probably because very few people, if any, have articulated the harms of surveillance in a personal, visceral way.
Privacy as an abstract concept is meaningless to most Americans -- thanks in part to pervasive data mining and targeted advertising by Google, Facebook, credit card companies, and so forth. That's not to say privacy doesn't matter to them. Children often want to keep things private from their parents. LGBT persons often want to keep their sexual orientation private from less tolerant members of society. But that's because the consequences of such a violation of privacy are immediate and visceral. In contrast, the automatic mass collection of data by the NSA doesn't have any more of a tangible impact on most people's lives than does Google's or Facebook's.
To put this another way, very few Americans have altered their behavior because of Snowden's revelations. And it's largely because the government hasn't given them any reason to. The NSA can read my e-mail, but I can safely say "Fuck the NSA" without consequence. In contrast, when I was in China, attempting to visit a prohibited website would result in my Internet connection being blocked for up to an hour. Or to pick an example in the U.S., making an illegal turn in front of a traffic camera would result in my getting a ticket. Absent that sort of "feedback" from the NSA's surveillance, the harms of mass surveillance simply don't click with a lot of people.
That's not to say such very real harms don't exist. The NSA's data collection is tied in various ways to the no-fly list, the war on drugs, and targeted assassinations, each of which result in visceral, immediate harm to real people. But from my perspective, the surveillance aspect of these stories have not been told particularly well.
The weird invasive thought I keep having is if Snowden could, if at all, be a limited hang-out-OP/MISO (PsyOp) to gauge just how much the public would accept.
There have been enough revelations to see that the NSA got to keep what it is in entirety; mission accomplished.
This is definitely tinfoil hat territory. Some very high level people in the intelligence community may lose their jobs or (if things go very well) face charges in the next year or two. If the whole Snowden affair is an inside job then those high level people must have been ignorant of it since they would never accept the personal risk of the shitstorm that has resulted.
Yeah, I mean just look how afraid Clapper was of lying, completely knowingly, to the Senate under oath. He must really be afraid of putting himself out there as the threat to his personal freedom is far too great.
Tinfoil hat territory was granted statehood a while back, in case you weren't paying attention. I don't understand your willingness to underestimate our government's abilities to mislead the public.
That's one of the most thought-provoking comments I've seen in some time. Some of the revelations involving spying on allies seem pretty harmful...Either a lot of nations were in on the operation or a big risk was taken in conducting it the first place. Further, why would they include information on spying on allies if they just wanted to gauge the reaction on domestic surveillance?
The government could have used Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) to keep the Snowden documents out of the papers in the USA, sending the Secret Service round to collect any 'inappropriate' documents.
With a 'D-Notice' to effect the same in the UK and coupled with the usual soft measures - threaten to take away press passes from journalists (and their papers) - the whole lot could have been kept out of the papers.
The fact that these measures have not been used means that this was a limited hang out - or - that the Obama administration just does not know how to use the law as well as the Bush administration.
Much in the way that the NSA can bend the law to collect everything, the government can bend the law to use SAMs for whatever they want. You could say that any of the NSA revelations could affect some on-going case that has yet to be brought to court in Guantanamo, e.g. knowledge that a given prisoner's communications being intercepted could prejudice the case. The details of exactly how that might work out could be kept secret under terms of the SAM.
It's still pretty unclear what you're suggesting, but: if the federal government starts trying to bend the rules against the papers the old saying about making an enemy out of someone who buys ink by the barrelful becomes highly relevant.
Most of us concerned with civil liberties feel like those sorts of court cases and issues go underreported. Start sending federal agents to reporters in order to "collect any inappropriate documents" and kill stories and things will get messy quick.
If you're the administration and you are aware of something you don't want the papers to have, you take them to court. (which is messy enough)
From context it seemed as though he were using the phrase as a euphemism for extrajudicial procedures.
(read: black bag jobs, rubber hose decryption, and even piscine sleep therapy)
The fact is that the Obama administration seems to have been kept out of the compartment on a number of programs; which is not surprising, but very naughty.
Or, more cynically, that Snowden is a plot to eradicate expectation of privacy everywhere.
From Smith V. Maryland.
"If the Government were suddenly to announce on nationwide television that all homes henceforth would be subject to warrantless entry, individuals thereafter might not in fact entertain any actual expectation of privacy regarding their homes, papers, and effects."
FYI: Smith V. Maryland is the justification the FISA courts have used to argue surveillance is legal. It argues, in a nutshell, that when you route phone calls through a telecom you are forfeiting your expectation of privacy, and therefore your fourth amendment rights.
I am concerned that the surveillance industry may be trying to establish the legal precedent that because everyone knows about the surveillance, it is legal. This is a paradoxical argument: the logic would effectively be that if they told everyone they were doing it ahead of time, it would be illegal, but since they told everyone after the fact it is legal.
Now, I'm not a lawyer. This is my laymans understanding of the issue and I don't really have the body of knowledge regarding expectation of privacy to adequately discuss this. These are just the things that, as a layman, I am currently afraid of.
"We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we're going to be successful."
And, for the opposing view, also to think about the 2006 speech of then senator Obama:
"No President is above the law. I am voting against Mr. Hayden in the hope that he will be more humble before the great weight of responsibility that he has not only to protect our lives but to protect our democracy.
Americans fought a Revolution in part over the right to be free from unreasonable searches -- to ensure that our Government could not come knocking in the middle of the night for no reason. We need to find a way forward to make sure we can stop terrorists while protecting the privacy and liberty of innocent Americans. We have to find a way to give the President the power he needs to protect us, while making sure he does not abuse that power. It is possible to do that. We have done it before. We could do it again."
And as Snowden mentions, the oath the President makes is:
"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
> We need to find a way forward to make sure we can stop terrorists
Why is this such a trumping goal (or even a goal at all)? It's an impossible task without singnificant imposition on everyone's lives (we're no where close to being able to stop anything, and things are already leaning too far away from the people).
A disproportionate amount of time and resources are already being dedicated to "fighting" terrorism, with diminishing returns and uncountable atrocities done by our government.
I never understood this either. Aren't heart disease and obesity much bigger killers (statistically) within US borders? What if they flipped the medical and military budgets for just ONE term, what would happen…
>> We have to find a way to give the President the power he needs to protect us, while making sure he does not abuse that power.
Now if only he was interested in "protecting us". What you're suggesting is that we need to give a fox the power to protect the hen house, and to ensure it won't abuse that power. What do you think will happen? It's not about the president either, by the way. He's just a puppet for The Powers That Shouldn't Be.
His mission yes - giving up the comforts of a stable paying job in Hawaii and exposing himself to tremendous danger from a variety of nation-state level adversaries for life - in the bargain. Amazingly commendable - all for the sake of preserving core Liberty and Freedom as we know it.
What happens next ? Will things go back to businesses as usual?
I wonder if Snowden were aware when planning his mission that his actions would only yield some isolated populist outcrying, a few more people using Tor, some political awkwardness and pretty much nothing else, as appears to be case.
Jesus Christ some of the comments on that article. I wonder if there was some way to analyse what percentage of it is astro-turfing and what percentage is real red-blooded Americans just brainwashed into thinking government knows best. Americans you are lost. It's been nice knowing you.
A reasonable sample is a function of the size of the overall population. Assuming you're talking a few million visitors in some fixed period of time, at 500 comments, you're still a little ways off from a 95 percent confidence interval and a +/-3 margin of error.
For large populations it's not strongly a function of population size - a 500 sample is almost as good for a 100,000 population as it is for a 100,000,000 population (which is not very good at all).
I keep seeing on HN about how most Americans simply don't care about this issue and it being the reason there isn't more of an uproar. However, I have a different take: They have a different opinion than you. It's not that they don't care, are brainwashed, or "lost", it's just that they have a different opinion on the matter. Now I'm not saying they are right or wrong, but let's keep in mind that their opinion is just as valid as yours.
> It's not that they don't care, are brainwashed, or "lost", it's just that they have a different opinion on the matter.
Opinions don't magically drop down from heaven like mana. Just because an opinion is there doesn't mean we can't ponder how it got there.
> Now I'm not saying they are right or wrong, but let's keep in mind that their opinion is just as valid as yours.
"Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'" --- Isaac Asimov
They have a right to an opinion, but that does not necessarily mean that their opinion is valid. From Wikipedia on Validity: "an argument is valid if and only if its conclusion is logically entailed by its premises."
The implication of course being that these people got their opinion from a different set of premises. Which seems to be jonnybgood's point: some people are approaching this from a completely different starting position and direction, and it's not obviously invalid.
Personally I worry about how long this takes to resolve; if it takes too long, there might be enough social value drift no one will be upset by this sort of thing anymore. And that will be a much harder to fix starting point. Well, I would consider it a state worth fixing, at least.
It would make it an argument, which I guess you could say is a subset of opinion. A proof goes back to an argument and shows that its conclusions must follow from its premises.
> Americans you are lost. It's been nice knowing you.
I think this sentiment has been expressed since the 1800s. Same criticism applied to Rome... and all human civilization, really. We are a lost species, it would seem.
If you think this is scary checkout Facebook groups such as Patriot Nation. It's so bad that it almost looks like satire, and then you visit these peoples profile pages and see they are real. People like the ones posting there, are.actually.real. Wow.
Most Americans, and I'd wager most people in this world don't understand/care about privacy as much as is reflected on HN.
Given how pervasive surveillance is in most European countries, the only real difference between us "lost" Americans and the "found" European countries is that we didn't know it was going on.
I love getting another perspective from European publications. However, I've come to discover that the comments section of ANY worldwide newspaper makes you lose faith in the local population.
If the "terrorists" are following this whole story, wouldn't now be a prime time for another attack?
This could have the effect of validating the NSA's activities in many Americans' eyes ("see, the NSA is unable to its job without invading our privacy") and we would see a whole new round of new laws capitalizing on Americans' fears of terrorists (which means their terrorism succeeded).
The NSA makes the lives of terrorists much harder than it would be otherwise. Terrorists undoubtedly welcome Snowden's revelations--both for revealing tactics, and for creating the possibility that the NSA will be constrained by public outrage.
That doesn't imply that what Snowden did was wrong, though. We trade security for freedom in a thousand ways in American culture, and now we have a chance to debate that tradeoff for digital data.
> We trade security for freedom in a thousand ways in American culture, and now we have a chance to debate that tradeoff for digital data.
This is something really important: it's not out-of-the-box obviously wrong (talk to people who aren't into civil liberties for this perspective) that our communications are monitored. But it is very important that, as US citizens, we have an understanding and a grasp of what is done and what could be done in our name, and that we regulate its activities based upon our choices, not that of shadowy figures telling us we don't have the capacity to understand. As a representative democracy, we have the right to be informed and to select representatives & leaders who take policies that we can agree (up to majority) on.
I disagree entirely. The genius behind the the US Constitution was its acceptance of the idea that power, no matter how just, will eventually corrupt, which is why our freedoms were supposed to be rather absolute. I think there are almost no sane reasons to infringe on a basic human right in general: the burden of proof should be on the government to do it selectively, and even then it should be treated with great scepticism.
Further, we have almost no power as a representative "democracy": the public can't recall a representative at all, for example, and it is only done by an internal chamber discussion (it has happened very few times in the history of the US).
Thus, we're really not supposed to "vote away" basic, sane axioms in the first place. The point of the US was to have those rights held firmly in place, and for its citizenry to use their right to bear arms to protect themselves against a government that tried to take them away. It's indicative of the US's culture at this point that stating this position (which is easily backed up by many of the founding fathers' writing) brands you as a "libertarian wingnut" or "on the fringe." Am I advocating violent revolt now? No, because most would not actually know what to revolt against (and probably don't perceive the corporate/government power structure in place in the US).
Then again, any attempt to do the aforementioned has failed in this country. A great example are the Alien and Sedition acts, which were passed conveniently around the time of the French Revolution.
It's Christmas Eve, and I'm enjoying my coffee and feel rather disinclined to get into a political argument, so I'll just toss a few thoughts around without intending to respond (I'll chat via email tho'). I agree that increasing power should be treated with great scepticism (But it isn't, honestly. And that's a shame).
Point: Police power is inherently a use of force on the citizenry. The Army is the same, loooosely.
Point: Taxing, coining, patenting are all applications of force.
Point: The 5th amendment clearly lines out uses of force.
Point: The 5th amendment also includes a key phrase, "due process of law", indicating that the government is limited. The 3rd amedment supports this as well, requiring a limitation on quartering in time of war via law.
Point: Law & regulations, period, are the application of the government's use of force to ensure a smooth governing (See Hobbes for a work known in the late 1700s).
Conclusion: The US founders designed the government to have power (Unverified statement based on recollections - but split in such a way that each arm of government was naturally incented to limit the power of the other arms).
Nit: The US is a republic, not a democracy. It's regrettable that a district can't recall its representative wholly on its own. Perhaps that would restrain certain foolishness in the system...
FYI, be careful what you post and respond to. I'm not sure if it was this comment, my many "Fuck the NSA" comments or something else, but it appears that all of my Internet traffic is now being routed through an EC2 instance in Ashburn, Virginia (which is very close to DC): http://i.imgur.com/IEcdqol.png
I noticed it while getting a bunch of inappropriate 403 responses on basically any website, and my location kept showing up as "Ashburn, Virginia" automatically on weather sites.
The problem is that public debate, for the majority of the US population, is basically dictated. There are six corporations that control 90% of media in the US (http://i.imgur.com/2ewvrzO.jpg). The small amount of legitimate debate on any political issue is usually narrowly framed which ensures status quo power structures are protected.
The people and corporations who benefit most from the current systems also happen to have the power and wealth to significantly influence the public channels of debate.
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....”
― Noam Chomsky, The Common Good
So how will the US plutocracy desire the debate of 'trading security for freedom' to go?
> The NSA makes the lives of terrorists much harder
What proof do you have that the NSA has any effect on terrorism? you may not remember but USA failed to prevent 9/11 precisely because it relied to much on technology and not enough on intelligence on the ground. You dont catch terrorists in a cave by wiretapping them.
Yeah because "terrorists" who hate America use Facebook and Skype to discuss their terroristy plans and the good old NSA was only wiretapping all those services to protect us.
And strengthening the NSA would directly cause the further fall of the USA. The cheapest way to to attack the USA as an institution is to attack the USA in way the gives the most radical factions power in the short term.
I don't disagree that that is how it would be portrayed by the media and viewed by the public. But a thinking man would argue otherwise, since it would mean that a terrorist attacked just when the NSA had the most amount of information available ever. A terrorist attack right now would show that dragnet surveillance on top of being Orwellian is also ineffective. When you're looking for more needles, collecting more hay without extremely powerful tools for hay processing is insanity.
I guess I'd be wondering how the NSA failed to prevent the attack, with all these NSA revelations coming out every few days. I already wonder why I'm still getting illegal telemarketers' calls, why the drug cartels still operate, why so much evil in this world continues with the omniscient NSA.
Yeah, I had the same thought about "Rachel from Card Servives" robo-calls. Apparently those go through more-or-less illegally obtained cut-outs, but the NSA is in a unique position to go after those Card Services jerks.
Then I thought, hey, it's just like bus transit: the rich folks don't ride buses, so that kind of utility gets no money. The NSA, uh, people, don't get robo-calls, so they don't see the problem.
Sorry, Ed, but we are nowhere near "mission accomplished".
This debate may have begun with worries about the risks posed by NSA overreach, but it does not end with them. As Bruce Schneier pointed out, the tools of today's spies are the same as the tools of tomorrow's criminals.
Whilst I am not exactly comfortable with the idea of persistent, intimate state surveillance, this discomfort fades into paltry insignificance when I consider the implications of criminal entities controlling the computing devices that I use to analyse and understand issues, make decisions and interact with the world.
I studied Artificial Intelligence as a student. I buy (somewhat) into Kurzweil's view of the future. Today, my computer may be a "bicycle for the mind", but tomorrow, we may have difficulty distinguishing between rider and vehicle.
The security of today's internet; today's computing devices, profoundly affects how securely, how effectively, and how independently I will be able to think in 20 or 30 years time.
We need to start talking more (much more) about the weaknesses and security vulnerabilities inherent in the architecture and design of our public communications and computing infrastructure. This debate has to get detailed and has to get technical. Fast.
> "Until you’ve got to pull the trigger, until you’ve had to bury your people, you don’t have a clue."
Falling to the "you don't know what it's like" argument is never a good sign. You're acting out of pain and so emotionally invested in justifying your actions that you're incapable of communicating an evidence based rationale to an outsider. You can't reach a reasoned resolution like that.
His mission is done, our mission isn't. He gave us the information we need to start banging on doors and saying to our elected representatives, 'is this right? Is this reasonable?'.
Some won't listen, some will, some won't rock the boat, some will. But unless you push you'll never know.
At the same time, this is exactly what we should expect of every American put in his position. And others were in his position before him, so you kind of have to shake your head that this wasn't disclosed sooner.
What I find admirable is the way he's gone about disclosing these documents in such a responsible and controlled manner.
Amazing that for so many decades under so many leaders, the American intelligence services have relied on the oath of allegiance to the Constitution to preserve secrecy. The Brits do it right by making people sign the Official Secrets Act which both binds the agent to keep secrets and educates them in full detail what that means.
I wish Snowden would roll up his sleeves and start working on the same problem in Russia, where he now lives, and in China, where he stayed briefly on his way to Russia. His mission has hardly begun.
By his revelations, Snowden made the NSA activities a matter of political debate. That was his mission. In both Russia and China, citizens are very well aware of shady government practices. Their problem is already political, not one of awareness.
The whole argument about Russia being way worse than the US, and Snowden staying there is ridiculous. He isn't staying there as some sort of celebrity endorsement for the tourism program. He's staying there because it is the only place he was able to reach in time, as Russia is one of the few countries too big to be invaded by the US military.
He's there because he's a coward with no backbone. If he is so sure of his innocence, he'd be facing the court instead of propping up a government with terrible human rights record.
First, Daniel Ellsberg on why Snowden made the right call [0].
Second, if he were being charged in the correct jurisdiction, i.e. Hawaii, where he committed his crimes, I would agree with this sentiment. But no, he's been charged with crimes in Virginia, the backyard of the intelligence community. His peers are the American people, not the intelligence community. The government had no business bringing charges against him in another jurisdiction than the one he committed the crimes in. Doing so, shows incredibly poor faith, and a clear intention to get a conviction and harsh sentence by any means necessary, even if it means subverting how our justice system is supposed to work.
Do you really believe the court system works to determine innocence? Do you believe he would be guaranteed a fair trial? Do you think Manning got a fair trial?
Do you believe that by taking refuge in Russia he's "propping up" their government? How?
Do you believe that giving up a 6-figure salary and life to expose violations of the US constitution is an act of a coward?
Are these opinions harbored by real people, or is this a troll?
How is Russia not giving fair trials relevant? You suggested he throw himself at the american system, which we both know won't give him a fair trial but will torture him and throw him to jail for the rest of his life whether he's guilty by law or not. And yet you suggest this should be his course of action. You realize this is ridiculous right?
Everyone understands Snowden is hiding in Russia to avoid torture by the US. Everyone also knows Russia does worse than NSA things. There is no contradiction, and trying top highlight a contradiction smells of dishonesty.
You believe he's paid but you have zero evidence for it. Russia gains virtually nothing from it, Snowden can't live a normal life for the rest of his life.
Would you be content with the NSA continuing illegal oversight and building a total surveillance society?
How? Just apply to one of their secret agencies and promise he will never ever leak anything? He doesn't have superpowers.
Even when it comes to the NSA, let's make the most of what Snowden did do -- he might be the last whistleblower we've seen in a while, seeing how the NSA said they would seek to replace as human system administrators with automation where possible.
I've been telling people about the problems in China for a very long time. The Chinese embassy staff may have been videotaping out the window when I joined a large public protest outside the embassy.
Oh so you're working on fixing China already then! Good. I'll handle Uganda, we'll find a Russian on here to take care of Russia and let's leave the US to Snowden then.. Deal.
Of course the Chinese embassy was videotaping you. The American embassy in Dublin does it, and Ireland is a political irrelevance from a US perspective.
The real problem with that wish is that neither of those gov'ts would trust him with any of their methods or secrets. The best you can hope for is that people in analogous positions within those countries' surveillance agencies are moved by his example and follow it.
In any event, he's mixed up in realpolitik but that was his only choice, if he wanted to avoid the domestic repercussions of his actions.
Is there a way to incubate people like Snowden? I suspect Snowden could be a spokesman or figurehead for movements in other countries, but I have a hard time thinking he could ever repeat another data dump without becoming a real spy. Could someone as public and recognizable be effective in getting inconvenient intelligence from other countries?
Doubt it, but we could incubate people like Greenwald in every country. Find someone articulate, savvy and train them in tradecraft so that people in every country have someone they can safely approach.
Citizens of many countries don't have the luxury of knowing which journalists they can approach with their leak.
Ok, but did you read the article? Snowden is talking about the mission of starting the conversation, which he has done.
“'For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission’s already accomplished,' he said. 'I already won. As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated. Because, remember, I didn’t want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself.'”
This was basically his stated goal when he started this whole thing: getting the public informed and starting the conversation about how much government intrusion into our private lives is too much.
The world, especially the intelligence world, is more than black and white. A myriad hues exist, some of them dark and dirty, some grey. Here is a portrait of a man who is color blind. Experiencing the world only through a computer, he lacks the judgement to jump to the right conclusions, and goes thermonuclear only to find that mainstream Americans don't share his disability. He wants to be another Assange, but in the end he is another Manning.
You cannot seriously believe that an NSA contractor would be morally colourblind. He was expecting those shades of grey but instead found an agency more focused on spying it's citizens than Stasi.
How in the world is it possible to post something as ridiculous as this? Is this what you kids truly believe? Snowden might be colour blind, but you sure are tone deaf.
>> only to find that mainstream Americans don't share his disability.
It looks like you just got down-voted by almost everybody that read your comment. I guess when you look at yourself you should now say "here is a man that went thermonuclear only to find nobody else shared their disability." (When a man makes one judgment upon another, he should keep the ability to judge himself likewise.)
FYI the article I read had him expecting to see grey and finding an ever blackening black - so in contrast to your own comment, you need to realise that you are communing with people that aren't color blind and believe that these shades of reality are complex and require discussion.
What is the Washington Post not telling us?
[1] https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/15617022129
[2] http://www.cjr.org/the_kicker/wapo_denies_allegation_it_sat....
[3] http://fair.org/take-action/action-alerts/the-scoop-that-got...
[4] http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports/article/100787/CBS-Let...