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Employee Morale Is Suffering At the NSA
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Ellen Nakashima reports at the Washington Post that morale has taken a hit at the National Security Agency in the wake of controversy over the agency's surveillance activities and officials are dismayed that President Obama has not visited the agency to show his support. 'It is not clear whether or when Obama might travel the 23 miles up the Baltimore-Washington Parkway to visit Fort Meade, the NSA's headquarters in Maryland,' writes Nakashima, 'but agency employees are privately voicing frustration at what they perceive as White House ambivalence amid the pounding the agency has taken from critics.' Though Obama has asserted that the NSA's collection of virtually all Americans' phone records is lawful and has saved lives, the administration has not endorsed legislation that would codify it. And his recent statements suggest Obama thinks some of the NSA's activities should be constrained. 'The agency, from top to bottom, leadership to rank and file, feels that it is had no support from the White House even though it's been carrying out publicly approved intelligence missions,' says Joel Brenner, NSA inspector general from 2002 to 2006. 'They feel they've been hung out to dry, and they're right.' Former officials note how President George W. Bush paid a visit to the NSA in January 2006, in the wake of revelations by the New York Times that the agency engaged in a counterterrorism program of warrantless surveillance on U.S. soil beginning after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. 'Bush came out and spoke to the workforce, and the effect on morale was tremendous,' Brenner said. 'There's been nothing like that from this White House.' Morale is 'bad overall' says another former NSA official. 'It's become very public and very personal. Literally, neighbors are asking people, 'Why are you spying on Grandma?'"
That Snowden got all the attention, maybe others were planing on blowing some whistles
Morale is shit throughout the federal government. It is a combination of the shutdown, constant anxiety about budget cuts, vilification in the media and by politicians (on both sides, sadly), and the fact that many agencies offer little discretion or authority to even professional (ie legal, medical) employees but rather chose to micromanage every aspect of their employees workload.
The scum should be made to squirm even more.
I would say these are exactly the sorts of questions we should be asking, and they should be able to answer.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
n/t
That Obama would condemn and stop being ambivalent, but I suppose letting them stew is enough.
Silence is a state of mime.
Well, I sure missed *that* call.
Literally, neighbors are asking people, 'Why are you spying on Grandma?'
So, they're hoping that the public approval of the president will keep them from having to come up with an answer to that question?
I guess nothing alleviates the need for thoughtful introspection like a big pat on the head from the master.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
The problem is, no one has a clue what the NSA is doing. Even if they are the kind of people who would normally support spying for defense purposes, it's not even clear what defensive purposes the NSA is serving.
When Obama defends the NSA spying programs, he says, "If we're gonna do a good job preventing a terrorist attack in this country, a weapon of mass destruction getting on the New York subway system, et cetera, we do want to keep eyes on some bad actors."
OK, but that's not very convincing, especially when a few months ago Obama was saying the war on terror is over.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
to the employees who have worked there tens of year knowing what they are doing. Now one man opened his mouth, and the rest of the cattle is feeling bad.
Bou hou. Cry me a river.
wvmbe wbpzm mnwcz nqdma qfamd mvmqo pbvqv mbmvm tmdmv bemtd
Dave Barnes 9 breweries within walking distance of my house
You must have a spine.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Violating the constitution SHOULD make you feel like shit.
Hint to NSA minions who want to redeem themselves: there is no apology more sincere than hara-kiri. Spill your guts, and we might forgive you.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I retired a couple of years ago from a near-30 year career with the Internal Revenue Service.
People tried to kill me on more than one occasion. Dogs were set on me more times than I can remember. A man once openly threatened to kill me, in front of witnesses, while we were standing in a courthouse hallway, on a break, during a jury selection.
People comitted suicide from dealing with us even when doing so made no sense; they simply let their ignorant fears of the Big Bad put them in a bad place, mentally.
When a parade of kooks and idiots testified to Congress in 1998 that we were all baby-eating monsters, NO ONE stood up for us. Horrific legislation that left the agency permanently hamstrung resulted.
Over the last 3 decades, the IRS has actually deserved about 1% of the vitriol poured out on it. Morale is a thing of the past.
Yet, still, no one stands up for the IRS. Those of us who worked there had to adapt. It's possible.
To those at the NSA who are just awakening to the new reality that people are, now and forevermore, going to hate you whether you deserve it or not, I can only say "Welcome to my world. Learn to deal with it. It'll drive you nuts if you don't."
Sure, Obama should take the heat, and certainly he is standing up for them in my experience.
But it's hard to buy the narrative of NSA employees and leadership as innocent victims. They are following poilcy, but Obama doesn't personally design and approve all activities of the million person, trillion dollar executive branch. Much of their activity is of their own design and initiative.
They may be unhappy but they need to stop targeting it at someone else. They are responsible. Perhaps they should feel a little guilty that Snowdon was the only one with the nerve to act responsibly.
How dare they feel like a bunch of assholes for behaving like a bunch of assholes.
IMO, Obama should let this woe that only exists so long as they believe bullshit. If it's going to make these assholes feel disenfranchized, great. It's exactly how everyone else is feeling right now.
You don't want to be a punching bag? Don't fucking spy on everyone and pretend you're doing us a favor.
And wanting Dear Leader to come and lift your spirits? The lapdogs are feeling bad about behaving like assholes, so they need Dear Leader to stand up and tell everyone it's OK. As if that magically makes it so.
Well cry a little tear for the NSA.
Washington Post:
"Last month, we reported on LOVEINT, the facetious term used to describe NSA analysts who misuse their surveillance powers to spy on romantic interests instead of terrorists. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) asked the NSA to get more specific about the misconduct the NSA had uncovered. So the NSA sent Grassley a letter with details of the 12 LOVEINT incidents it has uncovered since 2003.
The incidents have a number of things in common. Almost all of them involved spying on foreigners outside of the United States (one man targeted his American girlfriend, and a few others spied on communications involving both Americans and foreigners). In seven of the 12 cases, the misbehaving employee resigned while the disciplinary process was ongoing. The rest received letters of reprimand, got demoted, lost pay, were denied security clearances or faced other punishments. None of the individuals were prosecuted for their actions."
"Not prosecuted"? No wonder they're not getting any support. (amongst many, many, many other reasons)
'It's become very public and very personal. Literally, neighbors are asking people, 'Why are you spying on Grandma?'"
Were they my neighbors, I would be asking the same thing.
Were they my friends, I would shun them.
Were they my significant other, I would leave them.
The notion in the USA that the minions are innocent and "just following orders" is ridiculous. Unless conscripted (which these people are not), they are as complicit as their masters. These people are damaging the USA in profound ways. They deserve it to be uncomfortable every step of the way.
While they MAY have been working within the law, nothing about the NSA is public.
The reason that the NSA is currently suffering from a "pounding" is that the public that they serve has been apprised of the scope and methods that they have been employing to violate our constitutional right. Rule making by congress does not invalidate the constitution (unless we amend the constitution)
I understand that the NSA simply fills the requests of the agencies that they serve, but it seems the each party has assumed that the other was responsible for determining whether the request was within the law. Add to that the belief of those charged with over seeing the NSA (congress) that they where not bound by the constitution to limit activities of the NSA and you have a recipe for an agency that will go to any length to fill its request. Add a few decades of being praised for their product with no questions about how they developed it and you have a culture that believes that doing no wrong and are in fact "publicly approved"
Have they been hung out to dry? Maybe. I see them more as a barking dog who get ignored until he bites someone. They're confused as why they're being kicked.
Learn to deal with it indeed. It won't be changing anytime soon. It's part of the price you pay for a sweet government gig.
but agency employees are privately voicing frustration at what they perceive...
Jeez, of all people, you'd think the ones working at the NSA realize that this can't be!
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
Nuff said.
... It kind of happens when you are found out for conspiracy against the people you are meant to serve and protect.
It's called having a conscience. Or lack of, since morale is only suffering after you've been caught.
Perhaps they could check with colleagues from older agencies that used to do the same kind of work.
I wonder what the Stasi and the Gestapo did to bolster employee morale.
While I know there are some crazies out there, I think more than 1% of the scorn heaped on you guys is deserved. I don't know about you personally, but the IRS is responsible for ruining people's lives and lacking proper accountability and due process for the individual taxpayer.
Here's an amusing anecdote about power-tripping IRS agents that luckily didn't end up ruining anyone financially:
I have a friend who got audited one time; the IRS found a minor problem and my friend simply offered to pay the penalty on the spot (it was very minor, like a couple hundred dollars for an improper deduction or something). The IRS auditor told him to sit down and shut up so that he could berate him. My friend wasn't going to have any of that and simply left the IRS office. He never heard from them again about the supposed improper deduction and wasn't asked to pay.
You know what this sounds like? "Aw shucks, people don't like me because they caught me peeping in their windows and jerking off. Don't they know I'm helping to keep them safe? What's wrong with them?"
It sounds like a lot of them are sad people don't like them, not that they were unwittingly helping to ruin America. They need a big ol' whack across the head with a cluebat.
However maybe some of them actually have souls. I'd feel like crap too if I was a party to trampling all over the constitution and promoting a police state. Maybe we'll see another one with a brain and a conscience grow a pair and do something about it. It's hard to do when you have people you love who depend on you but that's life. Life isn't fair. Shit needs to get better and it requires sacrifice. If you can't handle that then you're a crappy patriot.
Especially when the US didn't accept such logic in the Nuremberg Trials. "Just following orders" does not excuse things.
It's really a pain to get a letter from the IRS, informing you have a fine, but not explaining the fine and also not telling you how to challenge the fine.
And that's just the beginning.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The rule of thumb that the person who is attacked by both sides is the one who is doing the right thing. By that standard, I guess I should say congratulations to Obama. I'm pissed at him for supporting the NSA, the snoops are pissed at him for not supporting the NSA. Whatever he's doing must be the wise middle ground.
I have a friend who got audited one time; the IRS found a minor problem and my friend simply offered to pay the penalty on the spot (it was very minor, like a couple hundred dollars for an improper deduction or something). The IRS auditor told him to sit down and shut up so that he could berate him. My friend wasn't going to have any of that and simply left the IRS office. He never heard from them again about the supposed improper deduction and wasn't asked to pay.
They are just biding their time until the penalties compound enough for them to simultaneously garnish his wages and seize his house.
The feelings of the people who routinely and vigourously violate our rights and mock our freedom in the name of security is very, very important.
People comitted suicide from dealing with us even when doing so made no sense; they simply let their ignorant fears of the Big Bad put them in a bad place, mentally.
And you don't see that as a problem that the agency has a responsibility to deal with in some manner?
When a parade of kooks and idiots testified to Congress in 1998 that we were all baby-eating monsters
If you want to appear truly candid and unbiased then stick to facts instead of injecting crap like that.
'The agency, from top to bottom, leadership to rank and file, feels that it is had no support from the White House even though it's been carrying out publicly approved intelligence missions,' says Joel Brenner, NSA inspector general from 2002 to 2006.
Maybe you haven't been listening to the reaction Joel, but NOBODY APPROVES of your stupid fucking agency and the stupid fucking things they do. Except perhaps your authoritarian, imperialist, warmonger friends in Congress (Feinstein and the like).
You probably won't realize why this is happening until you figure out how to admit how utterly fucking wrong you are. It's YOUR FAULT that your agency (and all other intelligence agencies) are hated because you decided to run out of control without a single shred of oversight. Don't blame this embarrassing atrocity on any one else.
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
they should stop harming the country.
Like everything else Obama has done in the last 5 years, he's "gathering consensus" which he's never going to get, and will eventually present a half-assed compromise that preserves the worst parts of the status quo while accomplishing none of its public goals. Have you *looked* at that prolonged mess in the middle east?
I think you are being a bit mean, but you do have a point. There are systems of taxation where it is impossible for most folks to be in arrears, where filing returns is not necessary, and which don't require such a large bureaucracy. The IRS - at least in its current form - is probably unnecessary. You don't hear this kind of vitriol directed towards state sales tax officials.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Although the IRS can be costly, brutal, and offensive to those who do not deserve to be harassed, the functionality of the IRS is arguably necessary. On the other hand, the NSA spying on every innocent citizen of the U.S. (and the world), is NOT not necessary; and to civic-minded individuals it is pure evil. Such actions by the NSA are 1000x worse than the collective mistakes made by the IRS.
There are plenty of other opportunities in the American job market today, right?
You deserved it.
I remember this really old adage that my mom used to tell me... Something about reaping or sowing or some shit. Been a while since I heard that one.
I will help supply it.
Those guards meant to do good. They didn't mean to do anything wrong.
What they were doing was "making justice" and the bad guys deserved it - they are after all "bad". (think extraordinary rendition)
But now the guards find out they are unpopular, so what do they do?
They want a pat on the back from the warden. That makes children feel better, right - daddy telling them something their conscience does not.
Whether or not they "broke the letter" of the law they radically transgressed the fundamentals of freedom as the world understands it and million and millions of people are offended by this offensive behavior.
The important thing isn't about congratulating guards. It is to establish guidelines for "good" and for "evil" that are valid, that are universal, and then the guards who live by them don't need pats on the back. It will also keep you from actually spying on all the grandma's in the world in order to find a non-grandma terrorist. Grandma actually has a right to not be spied on, or permanently recorded, without judicial protections. Maybe someone needs to tell the NSA that they shouldn't be spying on Grandma. Seriously.
"Oh God, I feel so terrible about being the kind of gestapo/stasi/kgb instrument of opression that I was taught to despise when I was growing up. Not so terrible that I did anything to prevent it, or alert the people I was supposed to be protecting, or leave, or stop taking the money, but pretty terrible anyways."
NSA employees operate in a strictly compartmentalised environment where the need to know is enforced. Some people are in positions of extreme trust, but the vast majority are not. We all need to understand that the revelations coming from Snowden's leaks are just as surprising to the vast majority of NSA employees as they are to the public at large. A good number of these people will be equally dismayed at the actions of their employer. We don't need to hound the individuals. The organisation is fair game though.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
Everyone is seizing on this "why are you spying on grandma?" line and saying 'Damn right they should be ashamed and demoralized, stupid jackboots!'
Except the NSA has something like 30,000 people. It's hardly as though every one of them are involved in monitoring US civilian communications. Maybe, just maybe, some of them are demoralized because they have not a damn thing to do with anything in the news, yet they're being treated like demons.
They're not the KKK, they're not the Westboro Baptist Church. The agency has redeeming qualities, and being a security organization there are probably *thousands* of them who know nothing more about these surveillance programs than we know. I'd be upset, too, if people were asking me to answer for something I knew absolutely nothing about simply because a huge division of my company two floors down were assholes.
Stop lumping them all together as one giant boogeyman. Look for the people responsible rather than naming the entire agency an inscrutible, invisible hand with nefarious intentions.
...why ARE you spying on Grandma?
Perhaps we should be more concerned with their morals (Or lack of it)
Wow. Progress. Maybe next they'll start thinking about what they've been doing all these years.
dare I say it: working at _commercial_ spying places should also be met with the same hatred.
I'm looking at you, google. and others, but google is the current poster child of unwanted tracking and spying and is the definition of 'power, out of control'. and yet, people are still lining up to go work there. even full well knowing what they are doing.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Yeah, most concentration camp guards thought they were blameless too.
Good. That's because we hate you.
The Country got by OK before the 16th Amendment. Don't expect sympathy for enforcing the Fed's use of the American people as collateral for its funny money.
Just because it's legal doesn't mean you're not an enemy of the People.
No wonder cold fjord hasn't been seen around here lately. His morale is low. Here he's been working really hard to justify that shit that was going down and Obama hasn't offered him any support.
The bastards got caught, and the poor little dears are upset..
Fuck 'em.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
and many of those slobs also have to live in the People's Republik of Maryland, pay high taxes and deal with lousy interstate commutes...
my heart pumps purple you-know-what
I took an english class in college on the "rhetoric of intimidation". that is, how to write in order to intimidate. Not surprisingly, example #1 was the IRS. the professor had spent years studying with them and working with them. One of her favorite stories was when she learned that the majority of the time, an audit occurred because the IRS's records on you didn't match, and rather than figure it out they audit you to make you figure it out.
My best friend works with a lot of self-employed people. One of them had several (3 or 4) years in a row where his tax refund would have been miniscule, something like $10 or $20 in the black, so he didn't even bother sending in the forms. He figured he'd just let the government keep the money. The IRS responded by sending him a bill for roughly $10,000 owed, because they figured that was a nice round number to make up.
I'm sure everybody here has anecdotes like this. That "1%" of bad eggs you talk about must have been terribly terribly busy.
The function of the IRS is largely only necessary in a society that collects income taxes.
Systems such as apt-tax would render it meaningless largely to private systems, with only companies and corps having to deal with them.
And before I'm told that's undoable, the US had no income tax before 1913. When that was enacted, it was on the premise as relief to tariffs on goods and would only affect the superrich who would pay it and that it would max out on 1%. That proved a complete lie just 4 short years later, in WW1, when many more than the supperich had to pay rates far in excess of 1%.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrOZllbNarw
(notice how much hasn't changed in 15 years)
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
They could do what Edward Snowden did. I bet he can look himself in the mirror each morning when he gets up.
Although the IRS can be costly, brutal, and offensive to those who do not deserve to be harassed, the functionality of the IRS is arguably necessary.
Then how did the country do without it until 1913?
I know this isn't a popular belief, but I actually am willing to buy into the idea that most of them had no idea this sort of stuff was going on. You gotta figure that with it being a compartmentalized intelligence agency, the right hand may not know what the left is doing in many cases, particularly for the rank-and-file employees. And by all indications, most of the things we're hearing about really were the result of initiatives being pushed through by top people who had a couple of small teams of developers willing to do their dirty work.
For instance, one of PRISM's selling points was that it was low-budget on account of it only having a few developers. Considering the budget the agency has, I'm guessing they employ a LOT of people, yet we're mostly hearing about programs that only need a handful of people at most. Seems to me that it's entirely plausible that the vast majority of NSA workers actually are decent people doing legitimate (and legal) work, and for them, it's a shame what's happened. By no means am I excusing the ones directly responsible for this stuff, nor the ones who had awareness of it, but I'm willing to bet that quite a few of the rank-and-file are just as outraged as we are, but know that abandoning their mission would only make things worse, since the work that those people are doing is still necessary.
But if acknowledging such a thing is too difficult for most of us here, let's go ahead and believe that every last one of them is irredeemable scum who deserve to die a slow death. Because none of us here have ever been in a situation where people we were associated with did bad, perhaps even unconscionable, things without us having a say in it. Right?
Ah, the "we're just misunderstood good guys" school of thought. The most popular self delusion of those who routinely ruin the lives of others throughout history.
(grumpycat.jpg)
Got Milgram? According to very famous, peer reviewed, and reproduced research. Most people just follow orders. I don't understand why we as a society continue to ignore an unfortunate idiosynchrosy of human behavior that has been known about for half a century.
I don't know how you missed this while working there, but the IRS deliberately cultivates that reputation. They WANT to be known as baby-eating killers, they want people to fear dealing with them so much that they don't even risk anything which could result in an audit even if it's 100% legal. The IRS has been doing government by terrorism for a very long time now, and it's quite effective.
Every so often the people get uppity, so the IRS has to pull something like holding day care students hostage until the parents pay the school's taxes. That usually works.
Vast amounts of effort put in to dodge taxes apparently resulted in to a lot of complexity to remove loopholes. Each state has less tax dodgers to deal with. Blame people like the Scientologists playing very extreme games (up to and including breakign and entering) to avoid tax and not those that have to put in new rules to cover such escalation.
Fine print: "Ticket not to be taken internally"
Homer: "They wrote that on there because of me!"
Tell that to my friend and former boss, who-- admittedly stupidly-- exercised below-market rate stock options and didn't sell, and rode the stock down to zero. He didn't make a dollar on the transaction (actually, he lost quite a bit), and found himself subject to a multi-million dollar AMT bill. There's supposed to be a waiver process, etc; he and his counsel tried everything-- nope. You guys have systematically liquidated almost all of his stuff and he's in his 70s working to support himself at a subsistence level.
This intelligence agency is not very intelligent if they expect Obama to support them.
He cares only about himself and will throw anyone and anything under the proverbial bus, to save his worthless skin.
Snowdon's vast collection of stuff very strongly argues otherwise. The LOVEINT thing argues otherwise.
When a contractor in Hawaii can get hold of all this stuff it shows that there is a lack of "need to know".
Our founders provided for no IRS and no federal taxes on the incomes of individuals. Our founders funded the VERY limited federal government on tariffs on imports. Under THAT system, as trade increased, the people profiting from the trade payed the taxes that funded the larger military and state department activities that the increased foreign entanglements required. THAT system encouraged American companies to hire Americans and use American resources. THAT system did not encourage oppression everywhere in the world by effectively subsidizing the slave/prison/child labor and environmental plunder of third world countries and their tyrants. An America built that way would have been naturally more eco-friendly because it would have to live with all the environmental damage done during resource acquisition (probably would have become more "green" a century earlier).
The combination of politicians wanting to meddle around the world and fund wars, and businessmen wanting to profit greatly from foreign workers and products without being taxed, lead to an amendment to the constitution that shifted the tax burden to the average American citizen (where most money is, because there are so many of us) via the income tax and the required enforcement agency: the IRS. All that "free trade" talk that wormed its way into both political parties thanks to the rich businessmen funding BOTH parties and the chant about "Smoot-Hawley" (the lie that it lead to depression/war) that arises when anybody mentions shifting even a tiny portion of the tax burden back onto importers/exporters is designed to keep the tax burden on the average citizen via the IRS (something our founders NEVER intended and would have gone to war to prevent)
In order for the IRS to function, it must violate the most basic Constitutional rights of millions of Americans (who are no longer secure in their effects and papers, and who are presumed guilty) but the entire federal government (including the courts) go along with this because they all need the money (massive conflict of interest). There is simply no compatibility between the IRS and a free people and our Constitution, nor is there any way for a civilized and moral person to work for the IRS
It'll get worse for the IRS, now that it is enmeshed in partisan politics. President* Obama should be noted with an asterisk from here on out.
*Obama was re-elected in 2012 while the IRS was actively suppressing opposing groups, while rubber stamping liberal political action committees.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
I'm surprised to find myself feeling conflicted in thinking about this situation from that point of view. On the one hand, the people making decisions at the NSAare acting like spoiled brats whining that Daddy doesn't love them anymore because he showed displeasure at their misbehavior.
On the other, our fucked-up economy has left a lot of people desperate enough to hold onto their jobs (especially if they have dependents to support) that I can easily see an average employee letting themselves believe their superiors' reassurance that their orders were legal/necessary or that their role is so minor that it didn't make a big difference. It's also very possible that many employees were chosen specifically based on a lack of knowledge about our rights, so they didn't even realize they were doing bad things. Either way, after all of those years of reassurance, having their leader turn his back on them to save his own ass when they're under attack would suck beyond belief -- and Ican only feel disgust for that behavior on his part.
We all like to believe that we wouldn't be as 'weak' as the people that violated the Constitution/Bill of Rights as part of following orders, that we'd stand up to our boss/superior or maybe even pull a Snowden... But we also all like to believe we wouldn't cause horrible harm to others through abusing power or following orders, and virtually all of us are wrong.
Now mostly at Usenet:comp.misc & SoylentNews.org (it's made of people!)
To the disgruntled NSA employees: you feel this way because you know what you're doing would have our founding fathers rolling in their graves! Take a stand, dammit. While easier for me to say than you to do, quit your job if it sounds wrong and send a clear message that this violation of privacy and more is wrong and you won't have any party of it. I bet then you could sleep better at night about your professional life, but maybe not as far as paying your bills.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
So your argument is that the NSA is jealous because they wanted to blow the whistle on themselves?! What is your damage?
I give my information to Google willingly. The NSA, on the other hand, takes my information from me without recourse. The gap between the two entities is wide enough that I feel vastly more animosity towards the NSA.
I welcome our new 99% overlords.
Address it to: ...well, if we want the NSA to see it, I guess it really doesn't matter who it's addressed to, does it?
NASA is even closer to the White House than NSA and no president has visited in the 15 years I've worked there.
He only met with the head of the healthcare exchange ONCE over all these years. The man really is not hands on with anyone.
I suspect its a calculated attempt to preserve deniability. Note that every time a scandal breaks his first statement is that he knew nothing about it. Which is easy to claim if you have no direct contact with anyone.
NSA should get used to be ignored. They're an embarrassment. Obumbles only associates with people that make him look good.
Remember Solyndra? He said they were the best company in America... then they went broke and he's basically forgotten they exist.
Go through his record. He's an empty suit. Do not look to him for leadership.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
As long as the federal government (run by politicians of BOTH parties) leaves the borders wide open and allows anybody to simply walk across the border carrying drugs, weapons, etc there can be no true national security. If they are not willing to actually secure the actual physical country, then they are not truly interested in security at all and anything they do at the NSA is for some other, highly illegitimate, reason. Any of the people at the NSA who are looking into the private matters of even one single American citizen without a specific warrant taken out under sworn oath is violating the plain text of the U.S. Constitution and ought to be tried for treason and punished to the maximum extent possible. Oh, and "just following orders" is NOT an excuse... the U.S. government EXECUTED German soldiers who tried to use that claim at the end of WWII... every citizen is REQUIRED to obey the most basic laws even when their superiors tell them to do otherwise. We USED to drum this idea into our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines (yeah, occasionally you got a "bad apple" who ignored this, but most "got it" and this is part of why the American people can generally trust their military not to oppress them) but apparently nobody told anybody in the US spy agencies that there was a "rule of law"....
Oh, and as a conservative, let me say: George W Bush was a dirtbag and he never should have boosted the morale of these people. Had he been a true conservative, he would have aimed the spy agencies at EXTERNAL THREATS and he would have secured our borders.... he would NEVER have created the agencies that spy-on and grope the American people....
Well they sure as hell know now, so their continued employment makes the complicit. Anyone who does not leave an organisation on discovering that it is behaving badly becomes complicit.
"publicly approved intelligence missions"
I don't know about the publicly approved bit. I think there may be a cognitive mixup between politically approved and publicly approved. Does the political class care about your rights provided theirs is protected? No. Does Joe Shmoo care? Just so long as he doesn't know how few rights he has. What the leaks have done is laid bare the disconnect between government and the governed. That an institutionally paranoid branch of government would feel threatened by the populace waking up to reality doesn't come as a surprise. That people still work at said paranoid branch of government comes as a bit of surprise.
of the decade.
Some doctors are upset for not getting support after they helped torturing detained suspects.
In both cases, that maybe shows that very deep inside them, there is still a human being trying to confess the crimes that even they realize that are doing. "I was just following orders" don't cut the pain anymore.
Unless conscripted (which these people are not), they are as complicit as their masters.
I disagree. Conscripts are also just as complicit as their superiors.
This is nothing more than a plea for sympathy and distraction.
Dirt/mud roads, very limited services such as a sewer/water system, privately owned major infrastructure such as railroads.
They've been upset for a long time, about doing secret, unapproved missions. It's a snowden LEAK that make their discontent ... public knowledge.
Meh. I disagree - I think most NSA employees love that they get to do something really james-bond-ish, get a blank-check budget, and have essentially unlimited power over everyone else. There is no doubt a strong voyeuristic angle to the whole thing. They're also, by and large, getting paid obscene amounts of money.
I've met a number of people who work government jobs with clearances and they all act so goddamn smug about it, I've wanted to punch them in the mouth.
I think they were all quite happy nobody knew the power they had; they were "getting away with it." Now that we do, they're demoralized because they don't get to lord over us with the mystique. Plus, robbing the cookie jar isn't fun when everyone sees you do it.
Fuck 'em. I hope the place becomes a miserable place to work and the whole thing falls apart at the seams.
Please help metamoderate.
Obama, it would be wise not to make an enemy of the one organization that KNOWS where all the bodies are buried.
It appears from your lack of disclosure of your past, you have alot to be afraid of...
Yet, still, no one stands up for the IRS.
It took me a few years in customer support to grasp this. Customer support, doctors, police, the IRS -- none of them set rules or policy. In the case of the police and IRS, from the top down, they're just executing an accumulating tangle of non-expiring laws that others have put in place.
Other than really large-scale easily-understandable malfeasance, only the actions of the customer-facing employees see these kinds of results of the public's anger and disrespect. You won't have that kind of understanding unless you've worked in a position like that.
But it sounds like the NSA non-customer-facing rank-and-file are experiencing the fallout of the malfeasance. I don't know if they can suck it up or pass the buck, but the end result might be the same.
you meet a guy at a bar who says he works for the NSA...before he would have looked like some mysterious spy who does important stuff, now he just looks like a creep who snoops your email.
Posting anonymously for obvious reasons...
They knew what was going on. My grad school was funded by the NSA. I never had clearance, but did visit Ft. Meade a few times. Based in the public stuff they were funding (*cough* GNU Radio *cough*) and the types of projects we did, it was very obvious what the applications were.
Everyone I met there was very smart (way smarter than me). If I could figure it out 8 years ago from some funding and vague conversations, they definitely could.
I turned down the offer to work there for ethical reasons. Too creepy even without knowing everything.
The reason everyone hates the IRS is because it shouldn't exits.
Income tax was sold as a wartime temporary thing and decades later it's still here.
Why the fuck?
To those at the NSA who are just awakening to the new reality that people are, now and forevermore, going to hate you whether you deserve it or not, I can only say "Welcome to my world. Learn to deal with it. It'll drive you nuts if you don't."
Or they could find honest work that betters society. It's hard to feel sorry for them when you read about how much more they make than the rest of the US.
Morale should be low, "the public" doesn't want them to do what they're doing. They are a threat to democracy. The US has long been a threat to any Democratic Government that doesn't favor it, just read about the "Other 9/11".
The fact of the matter is, they are pawns to non-Democratic interests that do nothing to serve the American People as a whole. They serve big monied interest, mega corporations and conglomerates protecting their entrenched positions and bottom lines. Concepts like "freedom," and "liberty" are merely espoused to make the rank and file feel warm and fuzzy about their unconstitutional work, which is ironically the biggest threat to "freedom" and "liberty" that we face today. Higher ups get corrupted by the power. All the rank and file should know, the moment you expose any sort of inconvenient truth, the full weight and force of the apparatus you served will be turned on you and you yourself can be labelled a "domestic terrorist." Just look at the case of Julia Davis which has open court records that backup such facts.
When you job helps create and maintain a system where ordinary citizens can be assassinated and political discourse controlled in the most un-democratic of manners, you -should- feel bad. But hey, if you're working through a contracting firm, I bet that big tax-payer funded pay check will go a long way to making you feel better.
Anyway, it's hard to believe the NSA isn't adept at finding the sociopaths focused purely on career advancement and power gain that it needs. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe there is some big boogie man we need to be worried about, but if there is, they've done a really bad job of informing the public as to what actual danger, besides inconvenient truths and things that worry big MegaCorp, they are protecting against. Maybe if we didn't focus on fucking with the rest of the world so much people wouldn't want to strike at us.
Literally, neighbors are asking people, 'Why are you spying on Grandma?'
And they should. The employees should be asking themselves that question. Why are they spying on everyone? Who benefits? Not the American people, that's for sure.
Removing loop holes would be very easy.
Just remove all the stupid rules that reduce your taxes.
Every one just pays a well defined amount of taxes in some sort of tiered percentage.
No tax cuts for planting trees, or donating money, or whatever.
That means no loop holes
Even though it's so close to DC.
which should be pursued by newspapers... who don't care if their phones are tapped. The question is who decided not to prosecute - and then invite a court to overule that decision. The criminal would then be offered a plea bargain to rat on some of the other illegal things they knew about - and so the prosecutions would spread... Well it's a nice dream!
The reason the NSA metastasized into what it is now is because that is what the American people wanted. After (and before) the 9/11 attacks they wanted government protection from the big bad world. Why did the Bush administration go nuts after 9/11 (Gitmo, rendition, etc)? -- it's because they knew they could stand the heat from the pundits and legal beagles who said a lot of it was illegal. And they also knew that the Bush administration would not have survived another 9/11 style attack. Same for the Obama administration -- they cannot tolerate a big attack on Americans as long as the Republicans will claim it was "lax vigilance" which allowed it (look at the insanity over Benghazi and that was only four Americans in a foreign country!). So the rational actor in that case errs all the way on the side of preventing another terrorist incident no matter the legality or cost to civil liberties. Same for the NSA now -- if the US suffers another big attack then there will be 290 million (out of about 300 million) Americans blaming the NSA for letting it happen and demanding that the NSA do "whatever it takes" to prevent another. This is irregardless of the facts of the situation. That is just the way it is. You won't fix that anytime soon. As time goes on without an attack we can get some more oversight of the NSA, perhaps, but in the big scheme of things it's not going to change until the American public gets a lot better at risk estimation, which they never will. If you don't like it -- tough, and no place else in the world is any better -- the foreigners don't have any better governments and for most of them it's a lot worse. Life isn't fair -- you were born to live in the 21st century, not the paradise of liberty which the 18th and 19th centuries were (yeah right!); or you can try living completely off the grid like it was the 18th century, for a fun time. Or you can accept that (in the Democracies, at least) the jack booted thugs aren't likely to kick your door in tonight and try to get policies changed over time, through voting and persuasion of others in the public and your government.
...won't visit the NSA to show support, because doing so would show acknowledgement that he is in charge of their actions. He prefers to remain at a distance, so he can politically separate himself from their actions to the maximum extent possible. Judging how few comments there are here blaming him for their activities, it appears to be working well.
'The agency, from top to bottom, leadership to rank and file, feels that it is had no support from the White House even though it's been carrying out publicly approved intelligence missions,' says Joel Brenner, NSA inspector general from 2002 to 2006.
Which "public" was that? Spying on foreign leaders, collecting unlimited data on US citizens, tracking cell phones...I think I'm seeing the problem. They know they're doing wrong and still feel justified. Now they want the president to make them feel better.
It's like the phone companies wanting retroactive immunity for cooperating with spying. They want Congress to pass new laws making everything they've done legal.
Nevermind all the spying didn't stop the Boston Marathon bombers or the Sandy Hook shooter or any of the more common threats.
Maybe they deserve to feel bad.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
The NSA's job is to spy on foreign countries. All of them. Same as my foreign intelligence service, and the bloody Germans, french, Panamanians. All of them.
They work for an agency that violates the rights of the people. so fuck them.
I'd think that there was a similar morale drop in the 1970's, but the NSA has managed to survive that decade unscathed. Once Snowden is finally stopped (not an if, but when), the morale will eventually go back up like it did in the 1980s.
Some people aren't fit to have a security clearance. For some people, they learn that when they learn that they can't get a clearance. Others learn that when they break the rules and lose their clearance. Snowden was one of the latter and thinks that he's more special than anyone else than releases secrets - just because he contains PR-friendly ones.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Indeed.. and I have no problem liquidating your existence to pay for it.
I have gotten fines from the IRS, and it was always because I missed something and it was my fault. Sometimes it took a little work to figure out what the problem was, and even called them up when I was trying to figure it out. The people were never rude and always helpful.
Was I happy with it? No, who really wants to admit they made a mistake and have to pay to fix it? No many people, but you know what? I sucked up my ego, which all it really was, and admitted my mistake and paid up.
For all the scorn people heap on the IRS, they do a very good job, especially considering all the crap they get from anyone who seems them as an easy dog to kick.
Most likely he thought the IRS would somehow magically figure out all the same deductions and credits he thought he qualified for. If you don't claim it, it doesn't apply, and you'll end up owing. Self employed people usually have a long list of things like home office, the self employment tax (soc sec and medicare employer portion), insurance premiums, telecom, wining and dining, etc.. that they must file to take care of. Missing out on the benefits negates them, and you'll be paying what your original liability would have been plus penalties and interest.
My gosh, the Agency has taken a pounding for spying on American citizens? Why?
If the NSA wants to do these deeds, all I ask as an American citizen, is that it get written approval from the current incumbent President. That's all.
Everyone wins!
Mark
Tacoma, WA
...He comes from the future.
Here's my "Are You Fucking Kidding Me"(tm) list.
1) Employees at the agency that is chartered to be the most secretive agency the US government has is telling the press they aren't happy?
2) They want the President to visit because they've been doing their jobs, and it made the news?
3) They want a pitty party because a contractor has been leaking information? The fucking NSA? Let a contractor leak anything? They let a contractor walk away with classified documents? How is he still alive?
4) Are they not being paid for their jobs?
5) Were they under some insane misconception about what their job would be when they were hired? It's one of the largest intelligence agencies in the world. What did they think they were getting hired for? Play solitaire and collect paychecks?
This story makes me think that next week we'll be hearing about massive layoffs, and new openings with the agency.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Yet, still, no one stands up for the IRS...
WTF? You are seriously programmed. The IRS is bullshit and is just one of the sad icons of this age of raping and pillaging the people.
Go read some other documentation than your training manuals. Try some real history and a bit about sovereignty in the U.S. and foreign corporations.
Wow.
When I was 18 years old, I did an amazing amount of research in order to invest my life savings: just over $9000. I invested it in a company called Raster Graphics, who were doing some amazing things in large format printing (1997-ish). I spoke with many people at the company and, being naive, invested all of my money at a strategic point in the earnings calendar - doubling down with margin.
As it turned out, the company deliberately ran themselves into the ground so that another company could buy their tech for pennies on the dollar. I lost everything. While the lawyers were able to get back most of my money over the next few years, they took 74 percent. So I only got back $1800.
Since I was suicidal and didn't understand the tax code, I decided to leave well enough alone and forget about the "writeoff". Sound good? Nope - the IRS demanded that I pay taxes on all of my sales of the stock that year. I explained the situation and tried to get statements from etrade (this is the mid 1990s and etrade had nothing) but this wasn't good enough for the fucks like you at the IRS.
I paid over $6000 in taxes on the loss of my life savings.
Go Fuck Yourself you Whore
What are a conscripts options again? They can choose prison/death or obey? Remember that the powers that be will label the disobedient conscript as a $BOOGEYMAN and most won't question. So prison or death to not change anything? I don't think so.
One - I'm now downloading Good Will Hunting to watch it all over again.
Two - If you are smart and have a conscience you won't work for them in the first place.
Three - If you are lacking the first quality in number two, you will and we end up where we are.
The employees of the NSA deserve to be heckled. Maybe they will start to challenge their superiors, quit, make different decisions if they are in charge, or listen to that little voice in their head that says this is wrong and try to help like Snowden did.
This interesting item may help them understand. Nice to have mad NSA crypto skilz, but if you can count on telco's and ISP's to bug customers' routers for you, why go to all that trouble, much less seek warrants or observe due process?
They should be ashamed of themselves, they should know deep in their bones that they are a stain on America, they should be on a public registry the way sex offenders are on a registry, they should have their kids taken by CPS to live with foster families, they should know in their hearts that every history book written from this point onward will cite them as a reason for America's loss of moral standing in international affairs, they should be required to pay back $3 for every dollar they received in salary for doing what they did, they should just.....
Before 1913 the Federal government collected duties on good entering the country and tariffs on certain goods. However the amount of collected is very small and easily avoided by any person choosing to vote against Federal policies by not buying dutiable goods.
The nation had few taxes in its early history. From 1791 to 1802, the United States government was supported by internal taxes on distilled spirits, carriages, refined sugar, tobacco and snuff, property sold at auction, corporate bonds, and slaves. The high cost of the War of 1812 brought about the nation's first sales taxes on gold, silverware, jewelry, and watches. In 1817, however, Congress did away with all internal taxes, relying on tariffs on imported goods to provide sufficient funds for running the government.
Read more: History of the Income Tax in the United States | Infoplease.com http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005921.html#ixzz2mwDj6t23
Under some circumstances the Federal income was collected from the individual States, such as:
The direct tax of 1798 imposed taxes on “lands, houses and slaves” totaling $2 million over the next two years, apportioned to states in amounts according to representation (as measured in the U.S. census).
http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/history/item/14268-before-the-income-tax
States placed taxes on real property some of this money was apportioned to the Federal government based on the population of State, hence the need for the census. Along with the money collected each State was represented by two seats in the US Senate. It is important to note that before 1913 these Senators were chosen by each States elected body not necessarily by general election. While congress has always been directly elected and always the origination of bills of appropriations.
The people are taxed and in return the people ask for stuff. The State which took the money with difficulty attempts to limit spending via the Senate which can only approve or deny an appropriations bill. Hence money collected with difficultly and spent with difficultly designed to naturally limit unnecessary spending.
Before 1913 taxes on Income (or any direct tax) was seen as unconstitutional because the Founders felt it was important for people to have a way to protest a government in the only meaningful way: deprive the government of income.
In addition the Founders were distinctly against a privately held central bank such as the Federal Reserve which was also approved in 1913. This has additionally provided the Federal government an essentially unlimited supply of money with which it can enforce any position without any realistic opposition of the individual States.
Post 1913 we can clearly see what happens in a democracy with the effective restraint on spending removed.
Or should I say poor little treasonous babies. You actively participate in the desecration of the Constitution and then you feel all pouty that America is unhappy when it finds out?
Guess what, bitches, America doesn't need your uber algorithms, satellites, or any other fancy toys. You (the intel community) has demonstrated that you can't handle HUMAN INT (see: 9/11, boston bombers) so stop claiming you need this geek starship of SIGINT to protect us little lambs. Losers.
Although overall that was a very enjoyable film, that particular section is an unserious polemic consistent with the fawning over Chomsky* in the film.
As to your comment about nothing changing in the last 15 years, do you mean terrorists trying to attack the US? I'll guess not, I'm not sure that concern is one you'd have even though Bin Laden issued his fatwa declaring war against the US the year before it came out and attacked two US embassies in Africa causing a large loss of life and limb the year after.
* There's a certain irony in this since the monologue is regarding a purely rhetorical bombing of a village whereas Chomsky was a denier of the Cambodian genocide and associated with Holocaust deniers.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Good. You want a new sense of "morale"???
Fucking quit.
All of you. En masse. Find a real job, and move on.
Now if only we could get people to treat the TSA the same. At least I, for one, can take personal credit for a public shunning... But no one else seems to care.
Baaaaah!
I made a $3 mistake on my income tax return (Scottrade updated my tax info *after* I'd sent mine in, but they didn't notify me).
The IRS apparently took that as an excuse to torment me for most of a year. I got audit for the above $3 claim, as well as for "falsely claiming that I was due a tax deduction for student loans" (I took some night classes at the local community college). Apparently that $3 claim was justification for a fishing expedition.
First time, I take an entire day off to redo my taxes, discover that I have made a $3 error, cut them a $3 check, and sent them the 1098-T from the college to prove that the other claim is false.
Couple months later, they send me the exact same form. I again take another day off to recompute my taxes (I was correct), and again send them the same 1098-T info that they requested.
Third time, I told that I will be taken to court because I haven't provided the proof required. I take yet *another* day off to go to the local IRS office in Nashville and sit down with a lady to explain that I've already sent the 1098-T form in.
She logs into her computer, turns it toward me, and starts hitting page-down. "We don't have any record that you sent it in." I see it flash by and tap on the screen. "Yes you did, it was just on your screen a second ago." She pages up and stares at it in silence for 2-3 minutes. "Well I just don't understand that."
Great. So now that the IRS knows I've sent it in, we can put this whole misunderstanding behind us, right? "I'm sorry, but there's nothing I can do to fix this". My choices were pay it off, send an appeal to the IRS, and hope that suddenly grow a brain after the **4th** time, or go to tax court, lose yet another day's salary, and hope the judge was smarter than the IRS. So I paid.
The IRS's excruciatingly, devastatingly, mind-numbing incompetence cost me roughly $1000 in lost salary for a $3 difference. And the whole collective IRS can go pleasure itself with a saguaro cactus.
"Today I mourn for two things: for the fate of those millions of people who were murdered by the National Socialists. And for the girl Traudl Humps who lacked the self-confidence and good sense to speak out against them at the right moment." -- Gertraud "Traudl Humps" Junge, Adolf Hitler's secretary.
She was pardoned at the Nureberg trials. "She was young, she couldn't have known any better. She was only guilty of consistently going along with what her society demanded. She was not the one who had brought death to Europe and the East, and in fact was ignorant of the Nazi's crimes as they were being committed."
Later in life, she said:
"It was no excuse to be young. It would have been possible to find things out."
http://www.viruscomix.com/page474.html
Ignorance among the rank-and-file is not an excuse. Collaborating with evil is evil.
Not a sentence!
"'It's become very public and very personal. Literally, neighbors are asking people, 'Why are you spying on Grandma?'"
If you see something, say something.
We did, and we did.
but let me finish that with stating the obvious, when obvious needs stating: ...and if you can't answer with an waterproof convincing answer then you have to stop doing what it is you're doing.
But what you don't do is whine about how ungrateful people are for the work you do when you've abused power. Can't really blame all on the NSA though - power will always be abused so it should not be given and instead processes to prevent it engineered.
A blog I run for the wealth
you need to sabotage your workplace
do it discreetly, covertly, however you see fit
because your employer defiles founding principles this country was founded on
and you don't want to think of yourself as a vile goon working for a paycheck, right?
you have principles and you love your country, right?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writ_of_assistance#In_colonial_America
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The government needs competent, moral people. If the only people working for the government are the kind who either blow off all responsibility or enjoy doing the wrong thing, we'll simply see more of this kind of crap.
That was why I worked for the government for a few years. There are people in the civil service (NSA is part of that) who want to do the right thing, want to work hard and want to spend tax money responsibly. Unfortunately, the bureaucracy is set up to punish those people with extra work and extra scrutiny with not very much to feel good about.
Most of us ended up spending time on projects we don't feel good about because they were well funded or high profile. Things we wanted to work on got pushed back and compromises with management became simply doing what management said to do because the alternative was losing any influence we'd already built up.
That's part of why I left government service. If these NSA guys don't like what they're doing, they should leave too. Yes, the government needs good workers, but sometimes the only way a good worker can get heard (and stay a good worker) is by respectfully leaving.
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Then they should be as pissed off as the rest of us, and raising hell internally, threatening to quit, or quitting, not bemoaning how misunderstood they are.
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A suimilar outfit, East German Stasi, lasted a long time. Presumably the less-dedicated sort moved elsewhere, but you can always find people with that mentality.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
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I think you are forgetting that reportedly after 9/11 they started sharing everything so to not make mistakes again. And prism is one of their programs, but there were many others that the analysts could use, have a look on all of their programs that have been published so far. And the fact that they are being published in a slideshow format, those slideshows were meant for teaching the employees about the programs. There is no way most of them were unaware of their crimes. Even with compartmentalization, there is enough on Wikileaks to make any honest man leave that criminal organization.
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To those at the NSA who are just awakening to the new reality that people are, now and forevermore, going to hate you whether you deserve it or not, I can only say "Welcome to my world. Learn to deal with it. It'll drive you nuts if you don't."
Oh boy, where do I begin? Prior to 1990, the IRS was a terrorist organization with virtually unlimited power. Senators and upper level administration folks were terrified of you. You guys would seize millions of dollars of property, lock all bank accounts, and freeze all assets over trivial amounts of disputed payments which left the victim no chance to defend themselves. Fuck you if you think you did not deserve the hatred you received. You were plain fucking evil. I saw the trail of devastation and shattered lives you guys left behind.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
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Yeah, yeah. Blow it out your ass and kill yourself. The IRS deserves every iota of scorn it gets. Guilty until proven innocent is your tag line. Fuck you and every single person you worked with.
Please share all of the times you found taxes to be inappropriate and let the citizens off the hook for paying the taxes. Please share all of the times that you ignored the programs and policies of superiors in the I.R.S. and defended the citizens.
Or did you just go along with everything you were told to do?
yes, because its so easy to drop a $60k+/yr job on principle. everyone is hiring ex-NSA analysts and whatever else because their government-work skillsets are in such high demand in the public sector, they could get a job with no problem! /sarcasm
Snowden is a hero and took and the read-only info he could.
The next hero will put a worm in NSA that deletes all their precious data (our data) and collection programs.
There is probably too much data to have a backup.
And please publish all the metadata on our congress/executive branch. After all they should have no expectations of privacy either!
You're a pig. And so are the people working for the NSA.
>they're just executing an accumulating tangle of non-expiring laws that others have put in place.
"Just following orders." Where have I heard that before? It's right on the tip of my tongue...
What are a conscripts options again? They can choose prison/death or obey?
If they obey, they also face death. But really, I think those are valid options when I consider that opposing conscription is opposing the idea that the government owns you and can send you off to die somewhere. I don't think any free country should be conscripting anyone.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Sometimes it took a little work to figure out what the problem was, and even called them up when I was trying to figure it out.
This is a real problem.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
And his recent statements suggest Obama thinks some of the NSA's activities should be constrained.
Gosh, if only Obama were their boss and could order them to obey the law!
Oh, wait. Who am I kidding?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Many people seem to be missing the fact that most leaks are educational slideshows. This means that many people were being taught on how to use the leaked programs. So no, they were not in a so compartmentalized institution that most or many of them didn't know about their crimes. What would be the use of the programs if people weren't using them?
And many people seems to be missing also the fact that monitoring US civilian communications is not the only crime they've committed. Spying on friendly nations, on journalists, fighting against freedom of speech and supporting self-censorship, supporting criminal organizations and mass murder abroad (like in Syria here for hightlights or in Somalia, Dirty Wars is an ok documentary), commercial espionage that has nothing to do with national security, not preventing the US invasion of Iraq under the WMD tale and therefore the deaths of over 115.000 Iraqis and over 4000 American soldiers are just the beginning of the list.
Fuck their employee morale.
I am not an American citizen, nor do I live there, nor have any family ties to anyone who lives there. I have no malice towards America, but neither do I have any reason to care about their national security. If the NSA were to be disbanded tomorrow, I would feel it's a good thing for the people who it was unjustly spying on. I don't believe the loss of the NSA would bring the country down.
If anything, it seems like the country is on its way down anyway, and the NSA is at best not able to do anything to prevent that and at worst one of the factors actively (though not deliberately) contributing.
May all who work at the NSA rot. They are enablers of tyranny and oppression.
Morale has been suffering at the NSA and the military, and the intelligence community in general for a long time, I'm thinking, for anyone with the wit to think for themselves and remove the blinders. Especially since 9/11 and the very curious creation and rise of DHS. I can see it at least back to the formation of the DEA, myself.
Now, Binney, Drake, numerous others, did the right things but nothing much came of it other than personal harrasment and persecution. Were any of these massive dragnet operations curtailed? No, instead we get CIA directors involved in lurid tabloid soap operas to divert attention from questionable government policies and wars, extending back through to past administrations, not just the present, inarguably corrupt and two-faced wrecking crew.
"A Clear and Present Danger". The founders were prescient, and Mr. Clancy an optimist. Thus we have, by whatever means, Manning, Snowden, et al., for better or worse. There's no more plausible deniability, no more excuse. Time for complaints is over, NSA dudes. Time to make choices and act accordingly, instead. Try to think of something beyond your retirement funds, though. What are you going to retire to? An underground bunker?
NSA guys will have to do some soul searching. Hopefully the U.S. will have a long, reasonable discussion about how much 1984 surveillance is really needed and healthy, and give the NSA new (more limited ) orders.
You mean things handled by local governments and private businesses and not the federal government?
How sad, no one likes the jack-booted thugs.
I suggest you look into 1913 and the treason that you've enabled in this country by working for a treasonous arm of the federal reserve.
There's very good reason why no one would ever stand up for your treasonous acts which you blindly execute without questioning the motive of your masters' wishes.
Yet just like the NSA, dumb sheeple fucks work at the IRS justifying similarly to the NSA's old adage: "because they stop the terrorists!". except the with the IRS it's some more patriotic contrived bullshit, - when in reality private shareholders who are non-US citizens reap all of the benefits of the IRS.
they want people to fear dealing with them so much that they don't even risk anything which could result in an audit even if it's 100% legal. The IRS has been doing government by terrorism for a very long time now, and it's quite effective.
That works up to a point, but there is a danger in making enemies of everyone and ruling through fear. When the people finally do revolt and demand blood there won't be any disagreement about who's head should be on the block first.
If you're doing something wrong, you shouldn't feel good about it. You should stop.
If you're working for an organization that's doing something wrong, even if you're not personally doing it, you shouldn't feel good about it. You should make it stop or leave the organization.
I've had two "interactions" with the IRS.
One was online with an employee of the IRS (not verified) as he was whining about how people didn't like the IRS, and how all of the internal controls "guaranteed" that there would be no abuse, and all this nonsense about accountability was stupid and wasteful. The mindset was that people should trust the IRS because the IRS tells everyone that it has promised that it wouldn't abuse that trust, and that asking for external controls or verification is an indication that people didn't trust the IRS, which was bad for morale, and hindered the internal policing. Pointing out that this was just "ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies" and indistinguishable from the policies that an agency rife with abuse would demand resulted in some impressive frothing-at-the-mouth verbal abuse.
Amazingly enough, nobody involved in that discussion ran afoul of the IRS in the next few years (that I knew of).
My other interaction was when the company I was with screwed up their bookkeeping, and we had to refile three years of taxes. I acted promptly, was honest and upfront about what was going on, provided as much information I could, and the IRS agents cheerfully waived the penalties for me. Some of my coworkers tried to game the system, and did not have their penalties waived, and to this day talk shit about how oppressive the IRS is.
From this, my perception of the IRS as an organization is that it quite professional and willing to work with you so long as you're willing to work with them. (On the phone, they're more pleasant and helpful than any private-sector corporation that I've ever dealt with.) If you're trying to game the system, or otherwise weasel out of the tax obligation, they'll not be so helpful, which is as it should be.
But I still think that external oversight is a good thing.
Few government gigs sound sweet to me. I'd much rather be in a small, medium, fairly stable (5 years) private sector job than work for the government. The only people who get rich are the contracting company execs.
Because they should be being asked this. And wondering about this. And even at times saying 'no, this is too far'.
No! It's a *SIG*. Keep the Special Interest Groups away! (Con joke!)
You forgot to mention that the NSA has been funneling information to the IRS, where the IRS was told to not mention where it was coming from. Just like the NSA did with the DEA. In fact it was part of the same program, and some reporters found mention of it in an older online IRS auditors manual.
So as an entity, the IRS does deserve all the disrespect it gets, and then some.
Are the intelligence missions the public approved of the ones they had no knowledge of? Irrefutable logic, that. Clearly if no one vocally objects, they must tacitly approve.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
after reading white house staff emails/facebook/IMs and realizing the president wasn't planning to visit the agency.
-- A change is as good as a reboot.
What more is there to say? Maybe morale will get SO bad that everyone will just quite and this shit can finally be stopped 'cause our fearless leader sure as shit isn't going to do the right thing here. I suspect morale wouldn't have taken a hit if everyone there REALLY thought they were doing the right thing... sure sounds to me like guilty consciences getting the better of them. I get that many of them are just work-a-day Joe's that just HAPPEN to work in intelligence, but oh well- you took the job, deal with the consequences now.
I love the NSA. Every country is spying and trying to stop foreign spies. I happen to live in the USA, so my future welfare (economy, safety, etc.) is made more secure by a successful NSA. They're the home team.
I only wish they'd do more economic spying. Other countries (China, Cuba, France...) are shameless about this. The NSA is hurt by stupid regulations.
The price I paid for my sweet government gig was being paid less than half what comparable private sector employees earned. I once consulted with a group of 16 employees who worked a project for 3 years that netted the government just over $16B.
That's billion, with a "b".
Their average pay was about $60K/year plus benefits. They got no bonus for bringing in that staggering sum. That sort of treatment was normal.
My sweet gig will only pay off if I live for quite a while more, since the only advantage I have over the private sector is that I earned a small pension and decent health insurance, both of which are unlikely to be threatened because my employer goes into bankruptcy.
I had to spend 30 years behind the earnings curve to get where I am now; I wouldn't call that a "sweet gig". It was a trade-off I made with my eyes open and if I live another 20 years, it'll turn out to have been the right choice, but please disabuse yourself of the notion that there are more than a small handful of federal jobs that can accurately be termed "sweet gigs." They just don't exist.
The story of your friend needs some more details.
If a final report from a Tax Compliance Officer (the people who audit you in the office) is for a net tax increase and the taxpayer doesn't wait around, it will be mailed out for a signature. Thus, I doubt your friend; his story is very low-percentage.
Of course, there is that low percentage. If the amount is low enough, the TCO and their manager may decide to close the case with no further work (called a "Survey"; there are several sub-types) which means that they just dump it back into the central files because the cost of processing the new assessment is more than the IRS could collect.
That power-tripping you referred to? People who screw up on their taxes and get a lecture along the lines of "You did this wrong. Please don't do it again." will frequently perceive that as a power trip. The IRS looks at it as an educational opportunity.
I suspect the real truth of this story is somewhere in between.
How about doing the fucking right thing for once and stop spying on the entire world to go after less than one percent of one percent of the people? We'd praise you enough to give you more morale than John Holmes in Deep Throat.
By statutory requirement, all such letters contain an explanation. The explanation is frequently a reference to a code section and, admittedly, to most people that may make no sense. However, the explanation is always present.
Call up and ask for an explanation. Most of the people who work the phones are pretty good at turning a letter full of legal jargon into plain English. They do it all day long.
Pro-tip: Tell the person who answers the phone the form number on the bottom of the letter. There are limited number of boilerplate paragraphs that go into each numbered letter and if they know the form number, they can help you zero in on your problem double-quick.
That's a valid way of characterizing an audit. I see nothing wrong with that. If the records are screwed up, the IRS is going to have to ask you for help figuring out why the records don't seem to be in order. That's an audit.
I don't see why anybody would consider that a problem. How else would the problem get fixed? Would you prefer the IRS just guess why the records don't match up?
That person was an idiot. If they don't claim their deductions, they don't get them. How would the IRS know they deserved those deductions? Would you like the IRS to just guess?
Hmmmm...considering the top quote in my reply, maybe that is what you had in mind. If so, it doesn't work very well, as your anecdote makes clear.
Yeah -- the country becomes the wealthiest and most powerful in the world.
...even though it's been carrying out publicly approved intelligence missions...
The "public approval" has come though a representative government that has single digit approval ratings. That were gerrymandered into being allowed to keep office. That most progressives have railed against the President for his failures to keep even some of his basic promises, even his 2nd term promises, about transparency and trying to respect civil liberties.
Ok...deep breaths.
If you continue to lie to us we will call you out on that. What you just said is a lie. It might be not a direct lie but it is a lie of omission. Stop fucking doing that. I could start talking about how your director should be in federal prison for doing exactly that but I'm going to stop right now.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
Yep, some employees get off on that crap. We hate those guys. They make the papers in unflattering ways that reflect on all of us.
By shortly after the beginning of this century, most of them had retired or been put on a short leash. Things are changing now...and not for the better, I'm afraid.
Technically, that's not what happened. However, that's how it was perceived.
(What actually happened was that when parents came in to pick up their kids and drop off their payments to the school, the IRS Revenue Officer present asked them to wait while he prepared a form for each of them seizing the checks. There was a delay for anyone who cooperated which meant they were delayed in being reunited with their kids. There was nothing to stop any of them from simply saying "Get stuffed. Mail it to me. I'm taking my kid and leaving." other than their fear of authority.)
In the aftermath of that incident, every single Revenue Officer at the IRS got a special training session on "This is how you screw up public relations. Don't do anything this stupid!" That case study is actually a part of the formal training for new Officers now, along with a strong admonition that any Officer who makes the Bureau look that bad in public again is committing career suicide.
But, yeah, a lead Revenue Officer on a seizure really screwed up one time. I don't think that justifies condemning the whole agency.
If you can find a way to change the tax system to make it easier where more people automatically comply, the loudest cheers you'll get will be from the folks at the IRS. They have to deal with the complexity of the Internal Revenue Code every day and they hate it more than anybody else.
Over the last 3 decades, the IRS has actually deserved about 1% of the vitriol poured out on it
You're getting a lot of "1% stories". Here's mine. I'm American and my wife is German. Before we moved to Germany, we proactively called the IRS to ask what special things we needed to do to make sure we paid our taxes properly before we moved to Germany. Should have been pretty simple stuff, actually. We were escalated several times and finally got someone who knew the answers to many of our questions, but he said there was no answer to our big one: How should we split up the taxes between paying the U.S. and paying Germany since we were not moving on December 31st. He couldn't answer that simple question. I said we couldn't be the first couple in this scenario. He said there no good rules we could follow and we were on our own.
Tax programs couldn't accommodate us either. Our scenario was too complex for Turbo Tax and H and R Block. Basically, we had to guess our way through, hope the IRS is happy, and hope we don't get audited for trying to do the right thing. We'll have this hanging over our heads for a long time.
There all fixed for you.
As an NSA contractor, I will confirm this. The vast majority of the people who work for the NSA do important stuff like figure out who is spying on us and what they know. The revelations due to Snowden came as just as much a surprise to them as to everybody else. You wouldn't believe how much training I have to go through every year about just what information we're not allowed to collect -- and that includes pretty much any info related to US citizens.
Unfortunately, there's not much they can do about it. Go to your supervisor and tell him how you feel? First, you're not even supposed to be reading that classified material even if it's been released to the public. Second, now you're going to be very closely scrutinized under the fear that you're going to release information two.
Want to quit your job? Yeah right. The job market is tough enough right now without having "I worked for the NSA and can't tell you what I did" on your resume. I've got a family to feed, and even though the public (especially Slashdot!) likes to paint every employee of the NSA with the same brush, the vast majority of them are not actually involved in any domestic spying programs. Most people aren't willing to let their families starve just because public perception of them is negative.
Oh, and if you do quit, rest assured that the agency is going to want to know why you quit. When it comes up that you don't feel morally comfortable with the agency's actions, expect to get put on every watch list imaginable.
What else can you do other than stay quiet and hope that the people in positions of power fix things?
Yes, I see suicides as a problem. The agency is rocked every time it happens.
At the first seizure I worked on as a trainee, the couple involved committed suicide. Three of their four grown children came into the office and went over the case, in excruciating detail, with our management. They realized we did absolutely nothing wrong except add another stressor to a family situation that was already right on the edge of disaster, a situation we knew nothing about.
The fourth grown son went on Geraldo and told the world how the IRS murdered his parents.
So, yeah, I understand that suicides are a problem. That's why we had yearly suicide awareness seminars after that. That's why every phone has a form on the table next to it, one side for what to do if someone calls in a bomb threat and the other side with instructions on how to talk to someone who sounds suicidal or threatens suicide.
The IRS recognizes a responsibility and takes it very seriously. While our actual response scenarios to these cases are not made public to prevent people from gaming the system, they have been successful. AFAIK, there have been no taxpayer suicides even tangentially blamed on the IRS for over a decade.
Now, you object to a couple of my word choices. Fair enough.
I called the people who testified before the Congressional committee that had some responsibility for the Revenue Reconciliation Act of 1998 "kooks and idiots". You object to that.
I say you don't remember those hearings. They brought in anyone who wanted to speak. One panel included a guy who spent quite a while telling Congress that the CIA was using weather-control machines to create droughts. Of the people who testified directly about the IRS, one specifically alleged that the IRS conducted a raid that sounded like something out of Farenheit 451. After the fact-checkers got through with him, it turned out that he was testifying about a raid that occurred at his business while he was out of the country and he was just repeating what he had been told by his family...all the while representing that he was present and exaggerating wildly.
Yeah. Kooks and idiots. I'll stand by those words.
As for "baby-eating monsters", the use of hyperbolic phrases to characterize an emotional state (i.e., people react so emotionally towards the IRS, it's as if they think we're baby-eating monsters) is a completely valid way of communicating.
I think I'll stand by that one, too.
If, on the other hand, you thought I was being literal...then I hate to break the news to you but much of that stuff you see at the movies is fiction. It didn't really happen. Likewise, people at the IRS don't really eat babies. I know that telling the difference between using literary devices to communicate the essence of a situation and making documentaries can be hard for some people, but we're willing to cut you some slack on the issue.
Oh, and by "cut you some slack", I don't mean we actually wield knives. I mean...well...Oh, I give up.
Obama will squeeze the NSA dry to achieve his regime's political goal ... The destruction of the U.S.A. which he hates to the last man, woman, child and dog, esp. the dogs that Michael (Michel, after the sex change operations) loves.
The NSA "God" General Keith Alexander hates every employee of the NSA greater than Obama hates dogs, and will butt-fuck every employee to get his political agenda accomplished ... absolute power and a $250k per month retirement payed for by NATO and Putin.
NSA employees are caught between a rock and a hard place ... or rather ... they are the broken condom on Alexander's penis up Obama's shitty ass.
AMT is evil. Most of the Revenue Agents at the IRS would agree.
I assume your friend had adequate counsel and that an Offer In Compromise based on inability to pay with a public policy addendum failed.
I hope he gets political and gets attention with his case. Most IRS employees would love to see the AMT go away.
There was always an IRS, they just didn't always collect income taxes. They collected import duties, taxes on liquor, and that sort of thing. When income taxes came along, they started collecting that too.
dom
I spent several years as a Revenue Officer. It was within my authority to recommend that assessed taxes be temporarily or permanently forgiven. I made exactly those sorts of recommendations hundreds of times. I can't remember a single time when my recommendation was not accepted.
I am most proud of my work with folks with HIV/AIDS. I was an Officer back in the '80s when it was a death sentence. No one reaching the end of their life in that situation deserves to have to deal with the IRS. I was personally responsible for outreach to the community and case processing for AIDS patients who owed money. I cannot remember the number of times I sat next to the bed of a dying man for hours, slowly asking all the questions needed to fill out a few forms so that I could make the letters from the IRS stop.
I can't share all the times I "ignored the programs and policies" because I didn't have to. There are programs and policies to help people who can't pay. No one goes to jail for not paying. And no one needs to feel that they're oppressed. All my taxpayers had to do was talk to me. It was my job to help them get past their problems, not make their lives miserable.
Should I tell you about the best Revenue Officer I ever knew who got cookies and Christmas presents every year from delinquent taxpayers that she had guided back to solvency? Should I tell you about the lady who pretty much hugged that RO to unconsciousness after the RO seized and sold her business because, for the first time in decades, the emotional burden of trying to make a profit from a family business that should have been shuttered long ago was lifted from her?
No Revenue Officer worth their salt just goes along with everything they are told to do. They are hired for their judgement and they're not shy about telling management when a directive "just isn't right." I've seen it more times than I can remember.
Let me reach out to you and say: FUCK YOU !
You don't go after "bad guys", you do dragnet surveillance and you collect as much as you can so that everybody can be hit if he or she ever seriously questions the state of affairs. Meanwhile the banksters can freely fuck the economy. Your Ex-Navy pilot man Richard Fuld is an excellent example.
Again: FUCK YOU.
In other news, the SS guards in the concentration camps suffer from depression.
Just out of curiosity, who would stand up for you [the IRS]? It's certainly hard for me to imagine any situation where the IRS is in any way helpful or positive. I mean, is there anybody who can say, "My wife left me, she kicked me out of my house, and I got fired just before Christmas -- but the compassionate IRS agent understood and was helpfully able to forgive my debt"? I'm guessing not.
Odds are you're lucky if you can find people to say "I got my refund processed immediately!" or "I could fill out the form online without having to call my lawyer or accountant!".
dom
Wait till they drag you to current river and put on their little show depending on how far the investigation gets.....
this goes both ways if anything ever comes my way i will find away to throw this shit back in their face.
The multi-dozen-billion-dollar budget of NSA goes mainly towards contractors like Raytheon, E-Sytems, L3 communications and the like. NSA is a Pork Transport Vehicle like the rest of the military. And they have shown to pull off False Flag wars.
So all your "honor" stuff - stick it somewhere.
As a nice example, have a look at the "Thin Thread" NSA dissidents whom they wanted to destroy. Because they voiced their anger at Michael Hayden shovelling billions to his MIC friends and abusing the data of millions in the process.
Maybe you check up on a Mr Herbert Yardley. He would be called "NSA director" today. And he actually kind of "Snowdened" with his book "American Black Chamber".
They collected ALL telegrams they could get hold of then.
But if acknowledging such a thing is too difficult for most of us here, let's go ahead and believe that every last one of them is irredeemable scum who deserve to die a slow death.
Where are Snowden #2 and Snowden #3?
I say you are paid $hill working for a MIC Information Operation to induce sympathy for NSA.
They wont be hurting for work, since they have proven themselves by getting hired by the NSA - not an easy task. Those people would provide another entity a competitive advantage for their knowledge and skillsets. They wouldnt have to bother with people that would discount competence just for being associated with the government.
The Snowden types, on the other hand, would have trouble due to their recorded disloyalty to their employer overriding any technical competence. They would represent a risk to an employer that is exemplified by action at an employer, not presumption by association with the NSA.
I wouldnt discount someone that worked at the NSA, but would welcome them.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
http://www.transparency.org/cpi2013/results
Turns out, Jimbo, quite a few of them "furriners" actually do have better governments ...
For all its servers and software, Google does not have an Army or a Navy.
May the Maths Be with you!
Before him there were several people:
+ Herbert Yardley (he's the most impressive one, because he was the DIRECTOR of the pre-NSA outfit)
+ Two guys defecting to Moscow
+ A guy defecting to the GDR over WW3 wargames
+ Several NSA engineers going public over the ThinThread thing
You would, apparently, be surprised.
I have personally recommended the forgiveness or suspension of debt for hundreds of people. It happens hundreds of times a day.
Are you due a big refund that's been held up for unknown reasons but you've got a huge medical bill or you're about to lose your house? I've seen case workers move heaven and earth to process transactions and get refund checks manually cut and personally delivered to people in need.
Your post is near the bottom of the list, so I'll just put this here. I've seen a bunch of responses from people who had problems. That's to be expected. The tax system is complex and screwups happen.
But I am shocked that so few people understand that the IRS reaches out to communities and prepares tax returns for free, forgives or suspends debts when people are in a bad way, and sometimes goes to extraordinary lengths to use their great power to alleviate suffering.
I could go on and on. I have, already, up-thread. But I get the feeling I'll never make a dent.
Maybe the IRS needs a better PR department more than it needs anything else.
OK, that was a joke. The truth is that the IRS does lots of wonderful things for people but is prohibited by law from talking about them. We have Disclosure Officers whose entire job is making sure nobody talks about anything they're not supposed to. We're simply not allowed to adequately defend ourselves when we're attacked in the press; it's illegal to do so.
Ultimately, then, it's the IRS that's screwed when it comes to public perception and there's nothing they can do about it.
No wonder morale is non-existent. As proud as I am of my service to my country, I'm actually glad I've retired.
I hear morale in the Stasi was pretty low immediately after the wall came down and revelations about exactly how pervasive their surveillance had been began leaking out too..
The only incentive I can think of to simplify the tax system is to require all elected officials to personally fill out their own tax returns - no paid preparers allowed, no advice allowed.
I actually think this should be required across all government agencies. We might see a different attitude towards the structure of the government if members of congress had to wait in line at the post office, the passport office or the immigration checkpoints.
The IRS is filled with humans as employees. The government has created a tax system that is overly complex which makes it easy to find simple errors in any complex return. Combine the potential for abuse with the scale of the system and it doesn't become too hard to find a large number of people who have had negative experiences.
You'll never reach 100% honesty on either side of the equation and in a system as large as ours it doesn't take a large percentage to correspond to a large number of individuals.
We can all suffer together under the Patriot Act!
This is really heart wrenching, but not so much as it is, as what it over all has done to US economy...
This doesn't bode well for any sense of social psychology they might have.
For example, here's a good discussion of some the adverse effects surveillance has on society: http://digbysblog.blogspot.com.br/2013/12/why-privacy-power-of-mind-over-mind.html?m=1
When Bush43 (evil) handed-off to Obama the U.S. was 9+ Trillion in debt. After only five years of Obama we are now $17 Trillion in debt. By what POSSIBLE fevered hallucination does being the biggest debtor in the history of planet Earth make you the "wealthiest" nation in the world???????
Obamabots are frequently amusing in their childlike delusions, but this is REAL MONEY! American citizens will be paying this off for GENERATIONS to come! Interest rates are at an all-time low and yet we are spending $200 Billion/year in interest on the debt (MORE THAN 10 TIMES THE BUDGET OF THE SPACE PROGRAM) Just IMAGINE the interest payment when rates go up (which they MUST, according to basic economics, as a way to pull all the funny money Obama's Fed has been printing back out of the economy... something that must be done to prevent hyper-inflation if the economy every recovers)
You, Your kids, and your grandkids will all live worse-off than your parents and grandparents as you pay higher taxes and things like healthcare get increasingly rationed and you are a fool if you do not "get it". The only reason you are not panicking is that you do not understand the situation we are being driven into
No, it doesn't. The justice system does not operate on guilt by association, and thank God for that. To be complicit, you need to be a party to the crime, either through action (e.g. active participant) or inaction (e.g. saying nothing when you had knowledge of the crime).
But, in this case, many of them gained an awareness of the crimes at the same time that the public did. So in what sense could they be considered complicit? And if these crimes really are the actions of the few, as opposed to the many, and the mission of the agency truly is a valid one with the majority of the people there pursuing it as it was intended, then why should they be expected to quit a well-paying job that's doing work that needs to be done just because you want to lump them in with the people responsible for trampling the Constitution?
The fact is, we could probably go down the list of Fortune 500 companies and find utterly atrocious things that nearly each and every one of them have done at some point or are doing right now, yet we don't hold each and every one of their employees accountable for the actions of the few who were directly involved with those crimes. Unless we're talking about something like a criminal organization (e.g. the mafia), the way we deal with stuff like this is by firing, prosecuting, or otherwise dealing with the bad apples, while allowing the rest of the business to carry on as normal.
The only way I can see your statement about them being complicit making any sense is if you'd consider the NSA to be a criminal organization, that is, one whose entire purpose is illegal. If that's the case, then sure, you'd have reason for believing each of the employees was complicit, since they couldn't be a part of the organization without understanding what it was and its nature. But if their mission is a valid one, then there's no reason why the bad apples shouldn't be ousted while everyone else gets back to work on the stuff they're supposed to be doing. Everyone here seems to be advocating for throwing the baby out with the (extremely filthy and loathsome) bathwater.
Posting anonymously for obvious reasons...
They knew what was going on. My grad school was funded by the NSA. I never had clearance, but did visit Ft. Meade a few times ...
You understand the NSA programs, but you think posting as AC will protect you?
Snowden blew the whistle on stuff that he was aware of. I'm talking about the folks who DIDN'T know what was going on, whom we have every reason to believe make up the majority of employees at the agency. To repeat what I said in my last comment, I am by no means excusing the folks who had an awareness of this stuff and did nothing about it.
But, to put a little wrinkle on what I said, Snowden accumulated his evidence over an extended period of time, and then sat on it for quite awhile as he got everything lined up. Who's to say that others aren't doing the same? Or else waiting to see if he'll reveal the things they have knowledge of and thus spare them from having to make the same personal sacrifices he's made? In the latter example, I'm not excusing those people for their inaction, but I do offer that line of reasoning as a rationalization for why they haven't taken action and reported their knowledge of criminal activity.
Until you see American in action you dont know what large loss of life and limb is...
You should submit this for publishing in the biggest newspapers. Rupert Murdoch should approve!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
You're anynomous and the NSA isn't monitoring this, right?
Let's suppose you are a reasonably intelligent and resourceful individual.
How much are you making as an NSA contractor and how much would be enough to keep your family from "starving"? (Before Snowden's revelations, contractors were openly boasting about their awesome pay packages, fwiw)
And the fear of the Agency coming after you if you were to leave? For real?
Yeah it's all too damn inconvenient so why rock the boat? After all, you're just a cog in the machine and "just following orders". All of you.
All the rationalizing and self-justifying notwithstanding, you must realize that there are reasons why your employers are somewhat less than well-liked by people in your own country, not to mention by the billions of "targets" living outside your borders?
Basically every institutionalized injustice in the history of mankind has *depended* on men like yourself to remain quiet and do nothing except complete the tasks assigned to them. Some just file papers while others have more hands-on tasks to undertake. And how is all of this funded? Well the machine also controls the taxes of course.
And here you are, the land of the free, the land of opportunity, fearful of your own government agency whom you work for and fearful of starving if you were to leave that current secure and comfortable position you've landed yourself in.
In China. In Russia. In North Korea. Under all the other control-obsessed regimes embracing the possibilities of this new era of limitless surveillance of subjects and now in the USA as well, the machine depends on a convenient status quo.
But why bother with the fears and vain rationalizing at all? Just wrap it all under the banner of heroic patriotism and all is truly well. For you and your family at least.
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
by the Bush administration, if they knew something was going on (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,266291,00.html http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/France _knew_of_and_told_CIA_about_al-Qaeda_hijack_plans_prior_to_9/11) why did try to hide the fact, they knew something was going on prior to 9/11 (lost papers as i heard), and what have they done to prevent it ?
without any serious answer to this question, you can still reasonably think they may have well take a blind eye on radical islamist activities prior to 9/11 to promote the war on Iraq, at the first blast.
If you also read Clinton's book "my life", he also mentioned he warned bush, of alqaeda when leaving white house. And if he has been sued for a private affair, he hasn't been sued for this comment on his book.
Hence when mention Bush as some sort of good guy, supporting the NSA in time of trouble, when others do not, there may still things to discover about this supposedly 'good guy'.
Arguably its driven you sociopathic if you do.
I am completely pissed off!!!
So as long some rape goes unreported, we shouldn't worry about prosecuting the rape that is?
You purport to know the other steps the guy has taken in addition to posting AC because..........? Oh right, you don't and can't! Thanks for that, then.
This is a real problem.
So tell Congress to order the IRS to not work that way. Right now, they're obviously not obligated to explain their decisions, but that's entirely changeable.
Doesn't mean that you will get out of paying your taxes though, and challenging a decision can in some cases make your tax situation worse overall, and that's with the IRS just enforcing the laws and regulations exactly as written. (Really. See an expert if you've got any real complexity. I know of a case where someone who insisted on getting a tax break of a quarter million ended up getting an extra tax bill of three quarters of a million because of it. Absolutely classic piece of causing trouble for oneself.)
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
"Maybe the IRS needs a better PR department more than it needs anything else."
That's you, and you just did a better job of it.
(I've had only a few dealings directly with IRS; in the two doozies, someone there was able to slice through the crap, provide clear answers, and resolve the situations - in one I paid, in the other the Treasury did, no hard feelings. I do feel fortunate in that I know a few people who've had greater difficulties in getting things made right. (My own experience in dealing with almost every issue with almost any company or agency is that half the solution is to be found in finding the correct person to speak with.))
That is a stupid piece of anti-American bigotry. Why don't you start addressing your ignorance by researching how many people were killed or injured in those attacks.... assuming you are smart enough to find the information?
Anything from doing nothing to killing people can be claimed "saves lives". It's only a question where you draw the line.
There are hearings and there are hearings. Congress doesn't necessarily call hearings to get to the bottom of something (Daryl Issa's shows are cases in point).
I recently saw a hearing where the committee was grilling the head of EPA. The nasty side was the Republicans this time. The Democrats only lobbed softballs. Then they go to the Emeritus Chairman from Texas who was old when the dinosaurs were young. His line of questioning went:
Dino: "Did you stop beating your husband yet, yes or no?"
EPA Woman: "Congressman is isn't a simple yes or nor question...." (Ellipses are where the CongressDino interrupted her answer)
Dino: "Just answer the question, yes or no?"
EPA Woman: "Congressman, in all due respect, the research shows that..."
Dino: (now in apoplectic rage) "YES OR NO???"
EPA Woman: "Congressman, if you would turn to the research paper you asked us for..."
Dino: (now swinging from the rafters for the voters back home) "LET THE RECORD SHOW SHE REFUSES TO ANSWER A SIMPLE QUESTION!!!!!"
Honestly, if it had been me in the EPA administrator's position:
Dino: "Did you stop beating your wife yet, yes or no?"
EPA Me: "Are you really that stupid?"
Dino: "Just answer the question, yes or no?"
EPA Me: "Congressman, you are too stupid to understand a reasonable reply."
Dino: (now in apoplectic rage) "YES OR NO???"
EPA Me: "Congressman, respectfully, blow it out your Dinosaur Ass."
Dino: (now swinging from the rafters for the voters back home) "LET THE RECORD SHOW HE REFUSES TO ANSWER A SIMPLE QUESTION!!!!!"
And I'd get nailed for contempt of Congress, a charge I'd agree with.
We wouldn't get job security if we weren't, would we?
Literally, neighbors are asking people, 'Why are you spying on Grandma?'"
So do these depressed workers have an answer? Or not?
But no matter how you slice it, the question is valid.
See, they all know in their hearts that they are violating the pesky 4th Amendment with most of their actions every day.
It doesn't matter than recent courts have ruled these practices are "legal" - they still know in their hearts that is not true.
Spying without a legal warrant is wrong, morally wrong. NSA employees have morals and they know in their hearts their jobs are morally wrong.
And make it winning ACTUALLY DO SOMETHING.
Senators get to filibuster.
How about if None Of The Above wins, there has to be another election with a change of candidates required and until then, no government making, passing, ratifying or proposing laws. No salary. A shutdown like that the teabaggers put up to a large extent. But minimum wage only for salaries for the politicians, with receipted costs only.
At city level, this applies to the city governance.
At state level, this applies to the state government.
At federal level, this applies to the federal government.
No worry about the wrong lizard winning.
*teary-eyed* Leave the NSA alone!!! What did they ever do to you?!
Then maybe in future, more of them will do the right thing and say 'no, we should not do this!'
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
this:
"feels that it is had no support from the White House even though it's been carrying out publicly approved intelligence missions"
means
White House doesn't support it, but the public supports it
this:
Literally, neighbors are asking people, 'Why are you spying on Grandma?'"
means
the public doesn't support it
So, it looks like, NO ONE supports the NSA, except some power hungry rogue elements.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
> The justice system does not operate on guilt by association
Don't know US laws, but many states can declare something a "criminal" or "terrorist" organization, in which case simple membership can become a crime.
You fail to realize that as you worked for the IRS, you were responsible for literally stealing much of the people's income by state terrorism. None of the legal protections the US States have to apply to their tax collection applied to your efforts. You could seize bank accounts and assets on your authority and not have to sue in court like the states must do. You could impute income and claim stuff and have it be fact. The IRS is despite your insane lack of understanding of the other person's point of view, a terrorist organization loosed on the people of the USA. The fact you cannot see this is the problem.
I'm not sure why everyone is so upset with the NRA. After all, they only started doing this after we clamored for them to. We had people in the streets calling other Americans traitors for opposing the "Patriot Act" We DEMANDED that they spy on us, and now we are mad at them for doing so. Perhaps that is part of the reason why their morale is low.
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
Tax loopholes are there there deliberately, to benefit specific classes of tax dodgers. It's the kind of system one gets when you let lawyers write the laws in such a manner that only they can makes sense of them or how to take advantage of them.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Yeah, I did that for a few years, mainly because I knew I was getting a return, and I thought it was worth paying the IRS a bonus so I didn't have to do paperwork.
I got audited, luckily I had kept all the paperwork in boxes, after being stressed out and playing accountant for a month, I figured out that the IRS owed me $15,000+change. Most of that was due to the fact that I was paying single, but had been married at the time.
This is apparent on the appropriate forms...
So fuck the IRS for making me do work when they had the money, and the forms to prove that they had excess money. Oh, and fuck them again for making me pay taxes on the interest I made on the returns that they held.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
They should feel like pricks.
'The agency, from top to bottom, leadership to rank and file, feels that it is had no support from the White House even though it's been carrying out publicly approved intelligence missions,'
Well, golly! Maybe the agency should have looked a little harder at what they were slipping through the "public approval" process. I'm pretty sure *I* didn't vote for the PATRIOT act (which should have expired long ago...camel nose in the tent, though). But in some warped way, I'm sure the NSA feels wronged. Perhaps they need to stop and look carefully at how what they are doing is perceived by the average US citizen, and how that perception came about.
Fat chance of that ever happening...
They may have been "politician approved", but A) those politicians did not adequately consult the public, B) those approvals have been very creatively and questionably interpreted by the NSA, and C) someone, somewhere inside the NSA should have spoken up and said "This is wrong, or at the very least the public needs to be informed so we can have a conversation about where the line should be", long before it took a contractor breaking their oath to reveal it to the world.
I sympathize. I'm sure the NSA and other western intelligence agencies are doing the best job they can, and trying to do it within the law. That's the principle. The problem is, this is a game of "pass the buck" where the politicians sign a legislative blank check, then the intelligence agencies hire some lawyers to come up with the most creative interpretations possible, and then say "but we're within the law". Finally, the politicians now say "we had no idea they were going that far".
Well, the buck stops at the public, who should have been informed about this stuff a long time ago at its inception. The politicians and the intelligence agencies are *all* wrong. Don't like the blowback now? Let that be a lesson for keeping important questions about the balance between privacy and security secret from the public. Not sure where the line should be? Then !#%!^!ing ask the public about it before you act.
You're getting a lot of "1% stories". Here's mine. I'm American and my wife is German. Before we moved to Germany, we proactively called the IRS to ask what special things we needed to do to make sure we paid our taxes properly before we moved to Germany. [...]
Tax programs couldn't accommodate us either. Our scenario was too complex for Turbo Tax and H and R Block. Basically, we had to guess our way through, hope the IRS is happy, and hope we don't get audited for trying to do the right thing. We'll have this hanging over our heads for a long time.
Good thing your wife was able to deduct the cost for the licensed tax counselor that you hired to answer this question from your German taxes. Oh wait... you actually didn't seek qualified advice and instead relied on the recommendations (or leack thereof) of some one-size-fits-all software.
If you don't like the working conditions, then change jobs like the rest of us have to. Why would a visit from Obama change anything (pretty strange reason for improved job satisfaction anyway)? As an NSA employee, you should already know how the US feels about the concerns of it's military branches. Staying in a job you dislike does not make you like it more.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
"so he didn't even bother sending in the forms."
Of course that created a problem. You have to document the fact that you don't owe any taxes, otherwise they're going to ask "What's up?" And they'll keep at it until you explain why $0 owed is justified.
There are countries where it works the other way around. The taxation service sends you an end-of-year summary of what they think you owe based on the information they have from your employer(s). You can accept it as-is or revise it accordingly.
It is easy to see why Obama hasn't visited....
There is not a strong enough labor union presence and on government salaries the workers don't make enough to line Obama's pockets with worthwhile amounts.
captcha: shorted
Your personal account of being on the receiving end of hatred for the IRS does not necessarily legitimize the IRS
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
These people needed to be fitted up for criminal charges, not glad-handing from the president.
If you work @ NSA, grow up and just do your job. Seriously? Crying cause the president does not support you? Go work in any of the other 95% of US industries and you'll really find something to cry about.
a waahmbulance. Don't like being part of a unlawful secret police force? Quit.
how about this anecdote fuck twat.
a mom and pop and daughter tax prep service, who during the tax season, talk to the irs, every day, all day. the trio process several thousand tax returns. i've seen all of their assets. the parents live in a $60,000 house. the daughter has a $250,000 house, which took her 15 years to build and pay off, working her ass off.
the irs performed a daylight raid, with 30 plus armed agents, guns in faces, and enforcement vehicles lining the entire block, of the incredibly modest neighborhood.
after removing guns, money and computers from their home, they interrogated the family for hours on end.
after it was all said and done, they left, never told them what they were looking for, and told them to "KEEP YOUR MOUTHS SHUT. WE'LL BE WATCHING."
they went to a lawyer, who informed them, that several places had been raided in town, all lower income areas, and that if they left, it's because they couldn't find anything to exaggerate, nor could they find an opportunity to manufacture something.
there was no apology.
the attorney said, they will likely receive a fee or penalty of some kind in the tens of thousands, and that it's best to just pay it.
the family was stunned. the attorney said it happens all the time.
This is extremely simple - abolish the IRS entirely, remove income taxes, and go with a GAT. Done. Happy?
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Professor Hendrickson at the University of Maryland? I was in that class too!
it does not take an army or navy to make citizens 'clam up'.
but having inside info on them sure does!
which is the more powerful tool in order to fight your own people: bullets or words?
I'll let you think about that for a bit...
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
... develop cheap weaponry that hones in on the radios drones use to communicate with base.
They violate the Constitution, lie under oath, and basically hold the citizens of the United States in contempt and THEY are upset???? Cry me a freaking river. They should be glad we haven't had our own version of the Arab Spring and tried them all for Treason and High Crimes against the Constitution.
They have bad moral. really... REALLY????
But NSA surveillance based on one's social graph does.
That's why military types want to believe. The truth is, you can't have a complex system without the tech's figuring out what you are doing.
Ratchet it up.
Out them, shun them, ostracize them, publicly insult them, treat them like scum.
Everybody who's even suspected of being a TLA employee or contractor should get nothing but a cold shoulder and a middle finger.
Zero sympathy. Sorry. You picked spying on your countrymen as a job. We all have known what's going on. Now, it's time to live with the consequences.
Sucks, don't it?
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
Years ago, we used to tar and feather people like you.
It may happen yet again.
I wish the lot of them resign and find something productive to do.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
In addition the Founders were distinctly against a privately held central bank such as the Federal Reserve which was also approved in 1913.
Not quite. This was a central tenet of Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party. However, that was only one of two parties at the time, and the other (the Federalists and the Whigs after them), also populated by "founders", not only were for a big central bank, but felt it was essential to promote growth in the new nation.
You really need to quit fetishizing "the founders". They were flawed human beings who disagreed with each other over nearly everything. The effort required to keep looking at them as divinely inspired demigods is going to give you an aneurism one day.
The NSA is likely doing the best job it can with the resources at its disposal. Intelligence gathering aimed at our adversaries, competitors, allies and terrorists likely makes the world safer by allowing the president and key decision makers to make more informed decisions.
That said, the NSA has been used to cross too many constitutional lines. You can't have such massive unbridled spying on our own citizens without undermining a democratic form of government and a free society. We are losing our Freedom under these policies.
It just needs to stop, so the NSA and all of our government can again focus on protecting our rights, freedoms and lives instead of undermining them. Then we can all be proud of the work we do as a nation and as a free people.
If you don't like working for the US STASI, leave. Otherwise STFU and continue being Good Americans.
So tell Congress to order the IRS to not work that way. Right now, they're obviously not obligated to explain their decisions, but that's entirely changeable.
Is that supposed to make me like the IRS?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I was confused by your post until you said "lower income areas".
Tax prep services in lower income areas are often hives of scum and villiany, preparing thousands of returns falsely claiming refundable credits. Fraud is rampant in that business.
While I feel pretty sure your details are exaggerated for color, those places do get raided. I've been fortunate enough to be on a couple of those raids.
The worst part of the way those guys work is that their fraud ultimately falls on their customers who must pay back the refunded credits (that were usually stolen by the tax preparer, anyway) along with massive penalties.
The highest-percentage-likely explanation for the situation you've outlined is the only thing that brings out the IRS in that kind of force to that kind of business. If that's the really the case, that mom and pop and daughter tax service deserve whatever happens to them.
I guess as it were... If you don't want to be called a dumbass... don't do dumbass things.
While contemplating the Glory of God, it does make you wonder if any of anti-surveillance messages we sprinkle with little phrases, get their attention like ricin grains in letters to Obama?
Do these messages produce little red flags that make someone have to read them? Does the volume of hatred for their intrusion not blow up like semtex packages at the sears tower? Does it not infect them like a small pox release in the New York subway system?
Does it ever make them think? Why do I spy on grandma?
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Well that's what you get for supporting an engine of theft, i.e. taking people's money without them necessarily wanting to give it to you, with the threat of violence and jail time if they don't comply. As to whether this theft is ultimately beneficial for the country as a whole, that is another discussion.
remove income taxes, and go with a GAT.
No sign of the acronym 'GAT' that I can find, but it's probably one of these wonderfully fair-sounding schemes that ends up with the rich paying much less and the middle-classes much more (like the 'Flat tax' proposal).
"Post 1913 we can clearly see what happens in a democracy with the effective restraint on spending removed."
You become the richest most powerful country in the history of the world? Seriously, I can't imagine the US economy being even remotely as diverse and large as it is without 100 years of massive government spending on everything from a national road network to the development of computers.
So... the kids are crying that their moral responsibility to NOT do their "jobs" has been exposed?
Because that's the bedrock of all of this. NSA workers should not be able to hide behind the diffusion of responsibility in order to be OK with their jobs.
Nor... should they be able to hide behind an obedience to authority. Can we make Milgram's "Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View" required reading for all government authorities.
That's what this article is saying. They need a higher authority to take responsibility for their attacks on Liberty.
The NSA is spying on all corporations including financial firms. They can use the information they gain to invest and create more money for "off-the-books" projects that cannot be traced by either the Congress or the Executive. There are probably hundreds of "small businesses" (tnx to Eddie Murphy & his Salvation Army Santa) within the NSA that even the NSA doesn't authorize. There are probably tens of organized covert groups dedicated to financial investment to create unaudited funding for God-knows-what.
Who knows what the NSA is doing? Nobody.
Mentioned in article. Anyone know if she has a familial relationship to Gen. M. Hayden? Google didn't immediately return an answer.
Is that now I have to take all of the not-obviously-batshit conspiracy theories seriously.
Because I can, that's why!
By the way, should I tell your better half that you have another on the side and that those "calls from work" are you setting up your next rendezvous?
No? Then kindly shut up and go back to Obama bashing.
- NSA employee
NSA: Spying on Grandmas since 2001
Freedom isn't free. It costs lives and money. For a country to succeed it must be tolerant of new ideas, thus America has embraced both capitalistic and socialist methodologies and leveraged them to their benefit. When Americans consider the costs of the NSA relative to the lives they supposedly save, it is hard to agree to continue the program considering the threat. Falling down in the bathtub is a far greater threat than the "Terrorist Threat". More lives can be saved by giving away bathtub traction mats than by sponsoring a nation wide spying initiative. As a capitalist I would have to be a fool to spend so much taxes and give up so much privacy for such a little benefit.
Security researchers have a name for things like the NSA: Single Point of Failure. If a contract employee like Snowden can get such data, then state sponsored enemy spies have likely infiltrated too. Thus, the NSA is actually a threat to national security -- They are helping our enemies far more than they help us. The NSA is now deserved of the term used for other invasive, expensive and yet ineffective "protection" schemes: Security Theater. See also: DHS.
Terrorists are a pathetic threat; It takes more bravery to bathe than to stand in solidarity against such attackers as the Boston Marathon Bombers -- An event whereby the NSA failed our nation and proved how worthless they are. Should we outlaw pressure cookers? No: Six times more people die every year from the Flu than a 9/11 scale attack. Every year Cars and Cheesburgers kill Four Hundred times more people than a 9/11 scale attack. Yet, if anyone tried to take away our freedom to drive fast cars or cook and eat fast food we will fight them off, not embrace the "protections"! On 9/11 the terrorists were reminded by the honorable passengers of Flight 93: Attack Americans and Americans fight back. The NSA would do well to remember this: We do not need or want their expensive and invasive erosion of privacy in the name of protection.
To the NSA agents who read statements such as mine as a part of their jobs, and decide whether they will use our porn preferences to discredit the "radicals" who speak out against you: It's no wonder your morale is so low. Your official stance is to lie to Congress. No one can now believe anything you say. No evidence you have ever collected can now be trusted. Your secrecy has become dishonesty and made your job worthless and without honor. How can you even look at yourself in the mirror? Don't like the low morale? Quit your un-American and unconstitutional job. Spineless treasonous traitors deserve far worse than just having low morale.
Sadly, this isn't just a story about the IRS.
This is a story about pretty much any organization that has too little oversight and accountability.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
it's just that the people in whom you won't make a dent are the ones that responded to you with their tales of woe and anger. You'll find that deep down, they're just angry, and want validation for the way they've been treated in the world. However, you did make a dent, because you got modded up in many of your comments and rebuttals. You did make a difference. May not seem like it, but you did.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
Learn to deal with it is the worst advice I've seen for a while.
How about the workers pay attention to what NSA is actually doing with the information that has been gathered and then make an informed decision whether or not to commit Hara-kiri or just resign from their job.
You do agree that NSA deserves to be hated right?
If they hadn't done the things they did, it would be a different story.
I'd only mind that if the villages in Fuckistan were not being used to host Jihadis hellbent on spreading mayhem worldwide just because the rest of the world is less Islamic than they are.
We weren't bombing anything in Fuckistan or Afuckanistan when 9/11 happened.
Thats because google doesn't try to hide the fact that they gather information. Plus google can be heavily persecuted if misusing the information they've gathered. The US government cannot.
NSA can do whatever the hell they want in secret, and when the public finds out they basically say "oh yeah we do spy on everyone. Fuck you very much and have a nice day."
I've never had an issue with the IRS but I did deal with a State tax office. I wasn't living in the state anymore but was still considered a resident. During one of those years there was a special income tax levy for just that year. The tax paper work that I got didn't say anything about it and so I didn't know about it or pay it. So a couple years later I started getting notices that I owed back taxes. It took two years of back and forth to get it sorted out. They could't or wouldn't tell me what my mistake was or how much it amounted to. Eventually they sent me a bill with explanatory letter showing that I had underpaid because of that levy and that they were now charging me that plus 100% for the labor of writing the letter. I happily paid it just to get it over with, it amounted to under $500 all told.
"Serial rapist upset at having his identity revealed, and activities detailed in the press; dejected that the President won't come and visit him and tell him he's doing a great job."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
No. I can't hate an entire agency that has at least some legitimate purpose.
I'll save my vitriol (hate is something I don't have time for) for the individuals who have made decisions and given orders to pervert the function of that agency. I think by now it's clear there are a few high-ranking people at the NSA who have violated their oaths and deserve jail time. Cut out that cancer (send them to jail) and the body of the agency will heal itself.
Incidentally, I feel the same way about the IRS. There have been a few (very few) folks who have done some very bad things at that agency. They should be in jail.
The IRS does police its own with some vigor. I've seen people walked out in handcuffs on more than one occasion. However, these were mostly low-level types who got caught for things like selling personal information to private investigators. The executives who make truly stupid, evil decisions always seem to skate. There aren't nearly as many of those executives at the IRS as many people seem to believe...but one is still too many and I hate seeing them drop in, do their damage, then go to work as a lobbyist. It's happened a few times I can remember.
LOL at your friend... "I'm just not going to send in a tax return because I don't owe anything..." What was he expecting to happen?
I wouldn't doubt the fear of reprissals, nor their reality. I've known people who had previous employers put holds on their clearance by saying they were investigating something or other. They old employer didn't have to provide any details about what they were investigating, but simply saying they were doing that can invalidate a security clearance until it is cleared up. And once you don't have a clearance anymore or it's suspended you are up shit creek without a paddle if you don't have an employer pushing for your clearance to be resolved it likely won't ever happen.
I would imagine the terror watch lists are even more fun because there is no process for getting your name removed or the reasons for it's addition to the list officially investigated.
So if any of that happened you could kiss working in most any government industry goodbye. And that is a lot of potential jobs to rule out. On top of all that if you lived near DC you will very likely have to relocate. That doesn't excuse sacrificing your morals but it is bound to be part of the equation.
By that definition, all taxes are theft. None can be collected, period, without violating basic human rights.
I find that position sufficiently extreme that I reject it outright. Governments must be able to collect some taxes.
We can all agree that the current system could be improved but to simply wave your hands and pronounce all taxes to be theft is not, by any stretch, a workable position. Are you really arguing that anarchy, the inevitable result of all government being denied the ability to collect any taxes until that government ceases to exist, is a viable social system?
Or are you saying that you'd be OK with a little theft, just enough to support the basic functions of government, thus allowing your to maintain your righteous hate of all evil government entities while still enjoying basic government services like a common defense and a court system? If that's your position, you must work up quite a sweat with all those moral and ethical contortions you've been practicing.
Should I tell you about the lady who pretty much hugged that RO to unconsciousness after the RO seized and sold her business because, for the first time in decades, the emotional burden of trying to make a profit from a family business that should have been shuttered long ago was lifted from her?
Is this supposed to be serious? If so, you are telling me that this lady just needed the ever-so-wise-business-consulting of the IRS to learn that she didn't have a viable business anymore?
Give me a break! Seriously, go fuck yourself with that nonsense. There is zero chance that your story is true because anyone who knows anything knows the IRS doesn't collect taxes from business unless the business is profitable. Trust me, we don't need the IRS expertise in this area. Just stick to collecting taxes and be done, please. Thank you.
P.s. And you guys want these assholes running healthcare? What could possibly go wrong?
And the NSA answer, "Because we can, there are no consequences and we need to justify all the funding we can in a non-confrontational, terrorist lacking USA. We have to protect the American people from these imaginary threats to make a living. You may think Osama Bin Laden is dead but he's everywhere we say he is." Quoted Chicken Little, Head of NSA fabrications.
Right - because comparing government employeeship in $GOVT_SECTOR vs non-govt employeeship in $GOVT_SECTOR is sooo completely like comparing $GOVT_SECTOR to $NON_GOVT_SECTOR ... Still a sweeter gig than many others, using the same skillset, in other economic sectors, I have no doubt, and still greater than those without the same skillset.
I specifically addressed criminal organizations later on in my comment.
Yet. Don't give them ideas!
Guns and Ammunition Tax?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Heh, that's easy:
1. What was your gross income last year?
2. Multiply that number by x.
3. Send money.
The problem is that politicians like to have all sorts of levers to pull. Thousands and thousands of pages worth of levers.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I do agree with what you're saying, but there's a big difference between an organization such as the Nazi party, which was engaged in widespread acts of evil at all levels of the organization and over an extended period of time, and the NSA, which has clearly overstepped its bounds, yet still has a valid mission and a majority of people working there who are pursuing that valid mission using legitimate means.
Put differently, there's a big difference between an organization that has a wholly corrupt nature and one that is significantly off-base in a few areas, but is in general doing work that is good and necessary.
Fair enough. I don't disagree.
I would travel that 23 miles, then give the NSA leaders a serious reaming for letting their secrets get revealed.
The NSA is one part. Guantanamo is another. The scale is smaller, but the acts are similar. The USA is torturing people and imprisoning them until they die. This is evil. The stated goal of the NSA's spying programs is to catch "terrorists" who are then sent to Guantanamo or other holding camps. To do this they violate the constitution of the US, then very thing they're supposed to be protecting.
A firefighter who goes on an axe-murder spree shouldn't be allowed to stay out of jail because most of the time he's not using the axe to kill people.
Not a sentence!
They are nothing but a bunch of criminals... A lot of people feel that way outside the USA... try selling Cisco equipment in Germany now
As to your comment about nothing changing in the last 15 years, do you mean terrorists trying to attack the US?
No, of course not - that sort of attack* is not preventable. No amount of infringement on freedoms can stop that. The FBI was informed that there were Saudi men taking flying lessons ($$$) who were completely unconcerned about landing or take-off, and the issue was buried within the FBI. The amount of intelligence is not the issue, it's the Feds' general incompetence that is (and always will be).
In fact, information theorists strongly warn that all of this extra "intelligence" makes things worse because it raises the noise floor significantly.
The NSA didn't stop the Boston bombings, and in Congressional testimony the NSA chief would admit that there were fewer than four potential events over a decade upon which all of their programs had any involvement in detecting, and in none of which was the NSA's intel required.
* asymmetrical, not 'airplanes as missiles' which hasn't been a viable strategy since 2004 when the last cockpit doors became hardened - the TSA is behavioral conditioning, not security.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Could you be fired with no cause whatsoever?
Was doing your job well absolutely central to your employment continuing, or were you civil service?
Did you have to be profitable to the IRS to stay employed?
How many times would you be friendly and smile as the general public dealt with you? Or did you get jaded, businesslike but robotic about your job, as most people I've dealt with at the IRS are? (Not angry, not mean, but in terms of private sector customer service standards, laughable.)
Were you ever concerned that you might be let go because your employer was concerned that they could no longer give you raises, so they'll kick you out before you can leave?
Do you need to be worried that you're past 50 and your employer may find a way to ditch you for a 20-something?
Do you have to worry that your federal pension will mysteriously disappear, or be suddenly reduced?
Sorry, public service *is* a sweet gig compared to the private sector. You may pay the price in reduced salary, but I'll stack up my job pressures against what yours were any day of the week.
captcha: echelon
I know this isn't a popular belief, but I actually am willing to buy into the idea that most of them had no idea this sort of stuff was going on. You gotta figure that with it being a compartmentalized intelligence agency, the right hand may not know what the left is doing in many cases, particularly for the rank-and-file employees. And by all indications, most of the things we're hearing about really were the result of initiatives being pushed through by top people who had a couple of small teams of developers willing to do their dirty work.
Isn't compartmentalization a big part of any terrorist organization structure? They want to keep the different parts unaware of what the other parts are doing. So it sounds like the NSA is just another terrorist organization that needs to be taken out with remote drones. In this case we have the proof that they are illegal and unconstitutional so I have no problems with drones or just armies of upset citizens storming their compound and taking them all out execution style. We need to take back our government from the illegal terrorists that have stolen it from us!
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
The powerful have a nightmare scenario that I suspect justifies large scale spying. They are terrified of a nuclear ransom scenario in which five or more nuclear bombs are hidden in various American cities. One is set off. Then an extremist religious organization makes ransom demands. The consequences of this would indeed be terrible. Does this threat justify such all pervasive spying? I am not sure.
Even if the leaders in our society have no intention to use these powers nefariously, I worry that the temptation to use these powers to limit dissent will be irresistable. It is a short step from using this surveillance to find Islamic suicide bombers to using it to study various political opposition groups. Environmental activists. Union activists. Anti-corporate activists. Anyone who doesn't tow the line on corporate power. Say the wrong thing on the phone or on ther internet and soon you have a suite of agents compiling a huge file on you. What will they do with that information? Well for one they will have an accurate and nearly complete picture of their opposition. They will know whether opposition ideas are gaining traction in society, and most perniciously they will be able to craft subtle propaganda to kill this opposition before it gains any real traction. They will have gone a long way to eliminating the possibility of having any sort of revolutionary change in power, even if that change in power occurs peacefully through the election of a leader who wants to change the power structure in the nation. The powerful will then be less afraid of those they rule. And ifthis happens, it cannot end well for those who are being ruled.
ts
Isn't compartmentalization a big part of any terrorist organization structure? [...] So it sounds like the NSA is just another terrorist organization [...]
Terrorists breathe too. *gasp* You must be a terrorist! And me too, since I just gasped! </sarcasm>
Repeat after me: correlation does not equal causation. Just because terrorists compartmentalize does not mean that everyone who does it is a terrorist organization. "$bad_thing does $something, so everyone that does $something must be bad too!" is an example of a logical fallacy.
Once again, just because a part of it may be bad does not mean that the whole thing is. Cull the bad, leave the good, and let the good guys get back to work.
If you're going to extend things out that far, then you're implicating everyone in government, essentially. After all, Congress cut off funds that would have been used to transfer or release prisoners, the judiciary slapped down executive orders Obama issued that would have helped address the situation, and Obama later reversed course and signed executive orders keeping the place open indefinitely. The way to fix the problem is by removing the responsible parties so that the remaining folks can clean things up and get them back on track, since both the government and the NSA serve valuable purposes that need to be fulfilled. Occasionally they get off track, sometimes far off track, and when that happens we need to assist them in cleaning out the bad apples, but we generally don't fix things by expecting everyone working in an organization or the government to quit, except in cases where something like a revolution is necessary.
During the first year of employment, yes. By then, management dumps the hiring mistakes. Yes, some people develop problems later, unfortunately.
Yes to both. Why on earth would you think the two questions are in opposition? Firing a civil service employee simply requires telling them what they're doing wrong, giving them a chance to fix it, and then firing them.
Most bosses are too busy dealing with underfunded programs to take time to fire people since the process is required to be fair and fairness takes time. However, it was *common* for underperforming employees to be moved to less-demanding jobs.
The federal government is not a for-profit business, so no. However, I spent a great deal of time as a Revenue Officer. We used to joke that if we were compensated based on our profitability to the government the same way people are compensated in private industry, we'd all have 1000-square-foot offices, 3 assistants, and 7-figure incomes.
Me? 100% of the time. I got sent to speak to conferences and teach seminars specifically because the degree to which I loved my job was both obvious and infectious. (Well, I'd say that was true for all but a half-dozen years of my career. There are bad times in all jobs.)
I got customer service kudos more numerous than I can remember, from every customer I served. Hell, when I first started as a low-level paper-processing clerk, I got a plaque from a group of Revenue Agents just because I actually paid attention to making them feel welcome as I processed a few boxes of paper that they needed expedited. (It was a big-dollar case and they were running up against statutory deadlines.)
I once lived in a hotel, training new people, for 7 months. An exec with the hotel tried to recruit me. He said my aptitude for customer service was "off the charts".
OK, I think on this question I'm a bit of an exception. I take your point.
Lemme throw you a bone: I have observed shit that drives me crazy. My pet peeve: If you're on break and can't serve the customers, get the hell out of their sight!
No and no.
Actually, yes. There are political animals out there who translate their irrational hatred of all federal employees into various actions, including proposals to screw over our pensions. Some of those political animals are in Congress. Some troll message boards.
We all make those decisions based on our own hierarchy of needs. I signed on knowing I'd get 3 decades of substandard pay in exchange for reasonable work rules and benefits.
If you prefer to work in a crappier environment under pressures that have an outsized impact on your happiness while being paid more - that's your choice.
Almost no one has a "sweet gig." I worked for a living. So do you. We may be different but we're more similar than you might think.
This is another example of Obama throwing anyone or group "under the bus" who is politically embarrassing to him, even though they are following his directives. It's no wonder this administration is the LEAST transparent of any administration in memory. They don't want anyone to know they are clueless about the directives they issue. Americans are not ignorant. Unfortunately, in electing this administration, the Public has shown themselves to be extremely gullible.
Quite frankly, you simply cannot defend the IRS. The IRS is the tax collection arm of the government. Tax collectors are always going to be seen as evil, because they are literally stealing from the people who are working hard for what little they already earn. Government itself is already evil, but the arm shaking down the citizens, and everyone involved in that arm, are the worst of the worst. I have no respect for you, and nothing you say will ever earn it. There is a special place in Hell for all tax collectors.
No, but I posted this on a laptop that I bought from eBay just for the post. I used a fake Paypal account I created just for that purpose, using one of those Visa cash/gift cards I purchased using cash at a convenience store in a town 50 miles away while using a disguise I purchased at a second-hand store paying cash. I had the laptop it shipped to a vacant house nearby, where I picked the laptop up in the cover of darkness, wearing all black, in an unregistered a car I found abandoned in a field out in the country that I managed to get running. I stole the plates off of a similar car in the long-term parking at the airport so I wouldn't get pulled over for expired tabs. I then drove across town and made the posting using someone else's wifi after breaking their lame WEP encryption. I then smashed the laptop, tossed the remains into the trash bin behind a random Taco Bell, and pushed the car into a lake. I then used a series of six buses and three taxis to get to a random house in the neighborhood, and walked the rest of the way home.
Hey, who's at the doo$%^ [CARRIER LOST]
One of her favorite stories was when she learned that the majority of the time, an audit occurred because the IRS's records on you didn't match, and rather than figure it out they audit you to make you figure it out.
I've made mistakes on my taxes a few times. Every time, they sent me a letter explaining my mistake, with either a check or an invoice for payment. I've never been audited and that includes the years I was running a money losing business for over a decade. The "horror" stories I hear about the IRS usually involve things that look remarkably like fraud.
I look forward to shaking hands with Matthew the Apostle when I get there.
By that definition, all taxes are theft. None can be collected, period, without violating basic human rights.
Correct.
I find that position sufficiently extreme that I reject it outright. Governments must be able to collect some taxes.
But why?
We can all agree that the current system could be improved but to simply wave your hands and pronounce all taxes to be theft is not, by any stretch, a workable position. Are you really arguing that anarchy, the inevitable result of all government being denied the ability to collect any taxes until that government ceases to exist, is a viable social system?
I'll admit I don't have all the answers. All I'm pointing out is that taxation is indeed theft, and by arguing that taxation is OK because it's required for the government to survive which then has X benefits, you are essentially arguing that theft is OK if it's done in a well-organized-enough manner and the people robbing you give you at least some of the money back in whatever form.
Or are you saying that you'd be OK with a little theft, just enough to support the basic functions of government, thus allowing your to maintain your righteous hate of all evil government entities while still enjoying basic government services like a common defense and a court system? If that's your position, you must work up quite a sweat with all those moral and ethical contortions you've been practicing.
I'm not OK with a little theft either. I'm just at the unsatisfactory point wherein I know the current system sucks and is fundamentally flawed but I don't have any better solutions.
Oh and hi NSA & the IRS, yes I do pay my taxes!
Gawd... I'm responding to an AC troll...
Good thing your wife was able to deduct the cost for the licensed tax counselor that you hired to answer this question from your German taxes. Oh wait... you actually didn't seek qualified advice and instead relied on the recommendations (or leack thereof) of some one-size-fits-all software.
No, not really. I was merely keeping the story simple. We went to tax people in America who couldn't figure out our taxes properly before our move. I'm not super happy with the one we're using in Germany either. Oh... and on both sides of the pond, they use either H and R Block or Turbo Tax. We tried bigger tax corporations too. They wanted a really complicated set up for my wife's business of one person. WTF? She didn't make that much money so we could afford all the complications of they things they were suggestion.
For a business of one person (only her), we shouldn't need qualified advice. No, the problem is with the IRS and the laws that Congress made. Period. End of story.
power corrupts people and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
politicians should volunteer themselves to 24x7 surveillance.
Casteism
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs
Casteism
I must agree and disagree.
You will I hope allow me to correct your phrasing, and say that "Weapons have a tendency to be used." I presume your understatement was for effect, but it is precisely the will to violence which is the crux of the issue. Violence is the basis for all political power, as Mao observed, and correspondingly one of the chief concerns of Law is to regulate the expression of that violence: "so that the strong should not harm the weak."
A weapon is that which magnifies your ability to harm your fellow man, and the man driving a n-ton war machine speaks with a great deal of very real authority. There is absolutely such thing as deterrent force, and it is at least half the point of the weapon. The other half, however, you have correctly diagnosed: not only are weapons meant to be used, in many circumstances they must be used, to prevent the decay of disuse. We must also supply trained professionals for their use.
The myth involved is that the US has ever been a nation interested in peace. The myth is that peaceful cohabitation is our natural state. A nation that outspends the world entire in military efforts is fundamentally opposed to peace. There is no difference between the possession of power and its exercise, only degrees of effect. The difference between peace and wartime as well is not a sharp divide, except as notions. The deployments and bases are hegemony, whether or not they are being used for destruction. That we also put these engines of destruction in the hands of fallible humans is indeed regrettable, but it is not only the loss of life which we seek to restrain. We wish to restrain the influence of this power on commerce and politics for its own ends. We have failed utterly to restrain the military-industrial-congressional complex, and war is the immediate result.
No, you should like them by default for providing a valuable public service, you misanthrope.
Senators and upper level administrators ought to be in fear of some higher power; it may as well be the IRS. I have no sympathy for rich, powerful white lawyers, nor anyone with more than a few lifetime's income.
Fair enough.
If you believe that all taxes are theft and you're not OK with any of that theft, then you must also believe that government is not necessary. After all, if it's not paid for, it won't exist.
There are folks with similar beliefs. Google for them and you'll find people who argue for radically small-scale human social groups that govern by consensus without formal mechanisms.
I think you'll find the record of success of such groups is pretty abysmal but you're clearly not alone in your feelings. There are people who have been there and done that.
Read up on them. You may find common ground with people who will become lifelong friends. Or you may be a bit disillusioned. Or maybe a bit of both. Whatever the outcome, don't just sit still in a state of "I don't have any better solutions"; that's not satisfying at all.
What bullshit. The IRS investigated all those fake nonprofits because there was a sudden crush of them and they didn't appear to be legitimate. And the investigators were right: many of them were straight-up electoral or lobbying organizations that don't qualify for tax-exempt status.
The right-wingers are screaming, yet again, because they got caught. It's not discrimination when you're the only ones trying to cheat.
If you believe that all taxes are theft [...]
It's not a belief, but rather, a fact. You haven't addressed the issue of why you don't consider taxation to be theft. In what manner is it fundamentally different from theft?
1) It is involuntary - if you don't pay it, then there are consequences, such as people taking your stuff away or imprisoning you. Even if there is a vote, direct or representative, on whether to enact a tax, it's still not voluntary, because if the vote passes you still have to pay it, even if you voted against.
2) It's not in exchange for services. If you don't use the services that taxation pays for, you still have to pay the taxes. This ties into #1.
I could go on but I'd rather address your specific arguments than try to guess at what they are.
[...] and you're not OK with any of that theft, then you must also believe that government is not necessary. After all, if it's not paid for, it won't exist.
This is really another issue. You wondered why the IRS was so vilified, and I pointed out that it's because it supports theft, so you can't expect people to like you no matter how nice you are about it.
There are folks with similar beliefs. Google for them and you'll find people who argue for radically small-scale human social groups that govern by consensus without formal mechanisms.
I think you'll find the record of success of such groups is pretty abysmal but you're clearly not alone in your feelings. There are people who have been there and done that.
None of that changes the fact that taxation is theft. Besides which, your comments are very intellectually lazy and incredibly vague.
Read up on them. You may find common ground with people who will become lifelong friends. Or you may be a bit disillusioned. Or maybe a bit of both. Whatever the outcome, don't just sit still in a state of "I don't have any better solutions"; that's not satisfying at all.
It's quite satisfying for me to know that I don't have all the answers. It's also satisfying for me to know that I won't have all the answers just by reading and discussing various belief systems with some folks. The most likely outcome of that is I won't have all the answers, but then I'll believe that I do, and thus perpetuate all sorts of nonsense like a tool. Besides which, I know that it's impossible to convince anybody by talking to them - the other has to be willing to listen and change their mind, and then it's them that changes their mind based on what I say, not me changing their mind. Further, I don't want to go into politics. So in conclusion, I don't see the point of spending too much effort on this.
My overarching theory though is that humanity's problems won't be solved by any system in particular, because humanity's problems lie deeper than that. It's in our animal nature, our instincts for fear, aggression, violence, domination, love, compassion, etc., that drive us to hurt each other and ourselves in all sorts of ways. Solving the latter issue (which can definitely not be done by any violent or coercive means) would then naturally lead into a system which works well given nobody is driven by some force to hurt each other or themselves. But the system in particular doesn't matter.
Until then, all I can do is point out various inconsistencies - like simultaneously having laws proscribing robbery and laws enforcing taxation - so that open-minded, reasonable people might be inspired to straighten out how their internal reasoning works.
Since you ask nicely, I suppose an answer is only polite.
I believe taxes are fundamentally different from theft because people, as a whole, are social animals who have rules about how to get along. Some call it a social contract, some call it common courtesy; the language is unimportant. The point is, we live in close proximity and get along with each other.
In order to do that without everyone just living on their own plot of land and being totally self-sufficient (which has never been the way tribes of any size existed), we divide labor and exchange our labor and goods with each other. This doesn't require a lot of complex rules but it does require a few.
Inevitably, there will be disputes about what's right and wrong. There will be times when some recognized authority must mediate. In a small tribe that might be the elders.
Also inevitably, because people are not just social but also occasionally covetous and violent, there will be times when groups come together and engage in the wholesale rejection of societal norms. They decide to live by violence, the threat of it, and plunder instead of societal norms. That recognized authority will then be called upon to marshall the collective resources of the group to restore order.
Now, scale that up to over 300 million people. Local tribal elders cannot handle, on a purely voluntary basis, the volume of problems that will arise. Some sort of organized group of folks will need to spend all their time working on, at minimum, the most basic tasks of staffing a justice system and providing for the common defense.
Those administrators are called "government". Courts and some sort of minimal military are administered by that government.
In short, we need a government. For one to exist, it must be paid for.
No one appreciates the need of a government until they personally need it, yet it can't exist without general contributions from everyone. People won't give to it like a charity, so it levies taxes.
Thus, taxes really are voluntary. Most people prefer paying taxes to the alternative which is anarchy. Nobody likes paying them but they recognize the necessity.
Also, taxes really are paid in exchange for something of value. Think of it as insurance; you pay your taxes and what you get is a court system and a defensive collective that will serve the common good when the need arises.
Since taxes need to be a shared burden or they don't work right, some sort of enforcement mechanism for bringing them in is required. Yes, that implies force (of some sort) used on those outliers who don't want to help out.
I find none of this objectionable or equivalent to theft. I find it merely the natural price of living in close proximity to others.
Now, I would not strongly dispute that taxes go to wasteful, unnecessary things. I would not argue with someone who says that taxes above a certain level necessary to sustain a minimal government are theft. That is an argument merely about where to draw the line.
But I do not accept that those initial taxes that pay for the most basic administration of a society are theft. They are, instead, self-evidently necessary, a state that removes them from any reasonable definition of theft.
Indeed it is. I agree completely.
Unfortunately, I consider that our animal nature is a given that cannot be changed su
[...] people, as a whole, are social animals who have rules about how to get along. Some call it a social contract, some call it common courtesy; the language is unimportant. The point is, we live in close proximity and get along with each other.
In order to do that without everyone just living on their own plot of land and being totally self-sufficient (which has never been the way tribes of any size existed), we divide labor and exchange our labor and goods with each other. This doesn't require a lot of complex rules but it does require a few.
Inevitably, there will be disputes about what's right and wrong. There will be times when some recognized authority must mediate. In a small tribe that might be the elders.
Also inevitably, because people are not just social but also occasionally covetous and violent, there will be times when groups come together and engage in the wholesale rejection of societal norms. They decide to live by violence, the threat of it, and plunder instead of societal norms. That recognized authority will then be called upon to marshall the collective resources of the group to restore order.
Agreed so far. I think the only solution will be when people aren't covetous and violent, but the fact of the matter currently is that they are, and we have to do something about it. Pacifism doesn't work because then you just get bowled over by the first violent gang to come your way.
Now, scale that up to over 300 million people. Local tribal elders cannot handle, on a purely voluntary basis, the volume of problems that will arise. Some sort of organized group of folks will need to spend all their time working on, at minimum, the most basic tasks of staffing a justice system and providing for the common defense.
Those administrators are called "government". Courts and some sort of minimal military are administered by that government.
In short, we need a government. For one to exist, it must be paid for.
No one appreciates the need of a government until they personally need it, yet it can't exist without general contributions from everyone. People won't give to it like a charity, so it levies taxes.
Thus, taxes really are voluntary.
Em, no, you haven't shown they are voluntary. You said it can't exist without general contributions from everyone, so the government has to levy (aka forcibly collect) it from everyone. If I don't want to pay taxes, I can't do that without consequences. This means it is not voluntary, but compulsory. Your arguments about the necessity of compulsory taxation don't change the fact that it is compulsory.
Most people prefer paying taxes to the alternative which is anarchy. Nobody likes paying them but they recognize the necessity.
If they preferred paying taxes alternative to anarachy, then there would be no need to force people to pay taxes. For example, people prefer housing to not having housing. Yet there is no need for an entity to force people to pay for housing - people do it voluntarily. The fact that the government can't exist without compulsory taxation shows that people don't think it brings enough value to warrant the amount they are required to pay. And this is really obvious when you consider just how enormous and overblown and wasteful the government is.
Also, taxes really are paid in exchange for something of value. Think of it as insurance; you pay your taxes and what you get is a court system and a defensive collective that will serve the common good when the need arises.
That would be fine, except that I cannot forgo paying taxes in exchange for not taking advantage of the services. Even if I move to another country, where I definitely don't benefit from the majority of what the US government provides, I'm still required to pay taxes. This is whatI mean when I say that they aren't paid in exchange for something of value. They are paid, and then
Yes, dirt/mud roads, very limited services, privately owned infrastructure. Death, starvation and servitude. All the good stuff.
60k a year is bad? I make 9 bucks an hour. I'm stunned you can't find sympathy.
60K a year is extremely poor, compared to any private sector group that small who brought in that much money. It's ridiculously poor.
BTW - Thanks for the post. You prompted me to go back and look at the numbers so I could do a quick calculation to illustrate how poor their pay was. I actually went back over some of my emails from when I was employed to look at the project results.
In fact, what I stated was in error. Those people didn't bring in as much money as I thought.
When I actually ran the numbers, I found that spreading the project results equally over time and the number of participants, those folks actually netted the government just under $50M per year per person.
Despite that error, I stand by my original statement. If your job brings in almost $50 million dollars per year (that would NOT have come in if you weren't on the job) and you're paid $60K (plus benefits, so call it $100K) per year, you are ridiculously underpaid.
Pretty much all reasonably professional government jobs are underpaid but that particular example was one of the two worst I've ever seen.
As for sympathy, everything is relative. Anyone, no matter their earnings, should understand the basic injustice being done to an employee who brings the organization $50M a year and gets pay that low. If you pointed out a way to save your employer $50M/year, even though you're just a $9/hr employee, wouldn't you expect a hell of a bonus?
If you don't, then you're willing to accept a level of self-defeating greed from your employer that staggers the imagination.