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> Yeah, the notion that this is a bad thing to do *during* an emergency is a bit hard to swallow. Exigent circumstances are when we want these dragnets used. ... except that there is no conceivable way to identify who is a terrorist and who is not, from just where their phone happens to be at the time.

At the very best, the FBI could match the phones in the area to people who are on the "watch lists", and pretty much only after the fact. You know how much information we're talking about, right? We're not talking real-time analysis here.

And you also know that the FBI and CIA are not above putting people on the "no fly list" to pressure them or their family members to ... do some spying for them, You think the No Fly List won't be used in that "looking for terrorists" analysis you're in favor of?

And I note you've said nothing about how long the information gained from these "exigent circumstances" should be retained. Yay, you're labeled a security risk because you happened to be shopping not far from a terrorist act and your phone number went on a list and nobody thought to take it off.

Lastly, information gained illegally is thrown out of court. (And thus, parallel construction to avoid having to tell the court you were using a Stingray without a warrant.

So what I see being advocated is: actions that don't actually make people safer at the time, can't be used in prosecutions, harm innocents incidentally near the scene, and are in fact illegal. But it's okay because Terrorists!

You will pardon me if I do not subscribe to the same view.

NSA-provided data has not been — and can not be, not by itself, anyway — used to frame an innocent person.

You say that like innocent people aren't coerced into taking plea bargains or coerced into becoming government informants all the time.

An innocent person who has the means to get good lawyers can't be sent to prison based on NSA-provided data by itself. If you're willing to spend the time and lose a large chunk of your life in the process, you can probably make it go away eventually. Being sent to prison is hardly the only way that a government agency can harass you.

Remember the FBI's hamfisted attempt to blackmail MLK? He wasn't guilty of a crime, but that didn't matter.

Oh, and this:

https://ccrjustice.org/home/pr...

Not exactly a case of falsifying physical evidence, but very analogous. The FBI placed four law-abiding US citizens (who happened to be Muslim) on the "No Fly List", preventing them from travelling outside the USA to visit family and friends, and making it seriously inconvenient to travel inside the USA. This action was taken in 2010, after all four men had refused repeated requests by the FBI to act as spies or provocateurs against fellow Muslims. This year, after five years of being banned from flying, the FBI took them off the list shortly before the lawsuit they had brought was due to be heard. The court then ruled that the FBI agents had done nothing illegal.

I disagree with nearly everything you wrote, conclusions, causes, effects, etc. But especially this one:

> 1. It isn't about "immigration reform", it's about amnesty

No. It is about H1B.

Everything else is just window dressing designed to appeal to the stereotypes of the parties - amnesty for democrats and "employment verification" and "border security" for republicans.

One last point - "employment verification" ought to be abhorrent to EVERYONE. They are using fear of immigrants to change our entire economy into a permission culture - you can't work if you don't get permission from the government (nominally the executive branch). If you are a republican imagine having to get permission from Obama in order to feed your family, same thing for democrats imagine getting permission from Bush.

A system like this will be used to extra-judicially abuse people that the powerful don't like. They may not be able to put you in jail, but they will be able to keep you from supporting yourself and your family just by putting your name on a list in the bowels of a computer somewhere. Just look at all the abuses of the no-fly list and less than 1% of the population flies in any given week, but 70%+ has to work every week. People never think it will happen to them, until it does.

I'd call it torture. Do it to your dog and people will say you are torturing it.

Solitary Confinement is Torture:

The devastating psychological and physical effects of prolonged solitary confinement are well documented by social scientists: prolonged solitary confinement causes prisoners significant mental harm and places them at grave risk of even more devastating future psychological harm.

Researchers have demonstrated that prolonged solitary confinement causes a persistent and heightened state of anxiety and nervousness, headaches, insomnia, lethargy or chronic tiredness, nightmares, heart palpitations, and fear of impending nervous breakdowns. Other documented effects include obsessive ruminations, confused thought processes, an oversensitivity to stimuli, irrational anger, social withdrawal, hallucinations, violent fantasies, emotional flatness, mood swings, chronic depression, feelings of overall deterioration, as well as suicidal ideation

Like a first date, AT&T fell in love with "counterterrorism investigations", such a clean and respectable sounding type. Turns out it is little more than organizing illegal kidnappings, torture, assassinations - outside the rule of law, anyones law, anywhere... and forget the constitution.

I dispute that these vigilantes should decide what should be "declassified" or what isn't.... I just strongly object to the methods being used by the anti-secrecy crowd, and I don't trust their motivations at all.

That is a fair enough opinion and nobody can argue with it, it is good to have a healthy dose of skepticism about any information that is presented to us via any channel. However what is more difficult to dispute is when a leaked document reveals heinous war crimes - should focusing on the messenger still be more important than a message of that significance? Also remember that Washington leaks information all the time (for example the Bin Laden operation) - why are leaks that expose crimes be worse than leaks that make the president look good? To most people that just reeks of hypocrisy.

The usual reply to this logic is "what war crimes, there were no war crimes exposed - but look over there - Assange is a narcicist and Manning is a traitor!!". However even a basic search and read of the documents they destroyed their lives to bring to us show that this claim is absolutely false:

Revelations from the Afghanistan and Iraq war logs detailed the use of paramilitary death squads, complicity in the torture of Iraqi citizens, the indiscriminate killing of civilians by private military contractors and many other abuses. Meanwhile, the leaked State Department cables brought to light scores of secret drone strikes in countries we are not even at war with, and uncovered the collusion between the U.S. and Yemini governments to lie about American responsibility for the massacre of 41 people in the Al-Majalah region. They also revealed U.S. interference with judicial efforts in Spain to investigate the Bush administration's torture practices. In Tunisia, leaks exposing the opulence and corruption of Ben Ali's government were a catalyst for the revolution that brought down the repressive regime and ignited other pro-democracy movements throughout the Arab world. The list could go on but the point is simple: it would have been a disservice to democracy to withhold this important information.

The US won't reach full blown civil war in our lifetimes, I think this is clear. That does not mean the US government won't become an oppressive, authoritarian regime that crushes dissent and fucks over the people.

When it does come, oppression will be strongly targeted against the few people who are trying to organize resistance. That "resistance" will not be based on guns because a small group of politically motivated people trying to use guns to make their point are simply labelled terrorists and killed as soon as possible, via the overwhelming technological might of the state. Owning an assault rifle is pointless if your opponents have drones. So you'd have to start by trying to undermine the government in some other way.

At that point you're going to run straight into the other tools of oppression governments have. For instance, perhaps you will be labelled as a terrorist and excluded from the economy. Think it's not possible, that your friends and family wouldn't go along with it? Think again! The US Treasury thought that guy, a US citizen resident in the USA, was a terrorist (working with Hamas) - but couldn't actually prove it. And when he finally got a chance to defend himself in court, he was acquitted. It made no difference. The Treasury added him to the list of "specially designated nationals" and that made anyone who traded with him a sanctions violator, punishable with prison. Did his countrymen refuse to turn on their fellow citizen at the behest of an out of control government, as you suggest they would? Fuck no. Far from it.

If mass oppression of dissent against the US government ever happens inside the USA (as opposed to outside where it is oppressed all the time), it won't look like the National Guard taking on an army clean shaven all American heroes. That's a fantasy. It will look like it did in the DDR - a massive secret police, a surveillance state, people who try to organize resistance to the state finding themselves blacklisted, reported on, spied on and undermined via whatever means possible. And it will be their neighbours doing it.

got any data to back up that blacks are being targeted, rather than just poor people or people who are dressed wrong?

Center for Constitutional Rights report, coming out of their case Floyd et al v. City of New York. The basic summary: roughly 10% of those stopped and frisked are white, 45% of New York residents are white. For blacks and Hispanics, it's 80% of stops compared to 50% of New Yorkers.

Call me a foil hat wearing lunatic but I say at this point we've seen more than enough evidence of close cooperation between the American government and America's large industries to call it a budding facism.

Consider: Pluralism has been steadily weakening as congress and the presidents sign law after law giving and allowing the president to take unprecedented power. The courts already lack any real ability to stop this trend.

New laws have made everyone a criminal. Those against whom the government chooses to enforce these laws are being imprisoned and harassed. It's no longer possible to be a law abiding citizen in America -- only on the ruling powers' good side or not. Police all over the US have an "us against them" mindset that has led to countless abuses to the extent that a police uniform is no longer a comforting site even for those who obey the law. It's now illegal in several states to even record these abuses and Americans everywhere are shutting up and keeping their heads down.

If these dangerous trends are not stopped the US will be a fascist police state very soon.

Um, you do realize that lots of people bashing your exalted Dear Leader Bush were harrassed by the FBI

Citation needed.

http://www.news8austin.com/content/headlines/?ArID=111986&SecID=2

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0513-11.htm

http://ccrjustice.org/ourcases/past-cases/united-states-v.-brett-bursey

http://www.blogd.com/archives/000743.html

Here are some more then.