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UN Report Finds NSA Mass Surveillance Likely Violated Human Rights
An anonymous reader writes A top United Nations human rights official released a report Wednesday that blasts the United States' mass surveillance programs for potentially violating human rights on a worldwide scale. U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay also praised whistleblower Edward Snowden and condemned U.S. efforts to prosecute him. "Those who disclose human rights violations should be protected," she said. "We need them."
In particular, the surveillance programs violate Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
does that mean I'm no longer an extremist for demanding my Constitutional rights be respected?
The single greatest evil that mankind ever unleashed upon the world was a corrupt government.
We need more people like Snowden. And when they pop up, we should step up and defend them.
(Of course, all *I* am brave enough to do is post an AC comment on a geek forum....but....maybe somebody else will be brave enough to do what needs to be done).
I can understand very well why the UN might not have done this earlier - the US government would want to quash any positive PR for a man they consider to be a traitor, and I'm sure they can exert enough force on the UN to ensure this happens. I would not be at all surprised if that was why this report hadn't come out until now.
The question is, though, what made them decide to release it?
In 1948, the United States voted for that declaration.
"n 10 December 1948, the Universal Declaration was adopted by the General Assembly by a vote of 48 in favor, none against"
This was the West announcing their idea of human rights.
(see Wikipedia)
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
Now if only the UN were a realistically competent and non-laughable organization this might actually matter in some way.
The first 10 or so are noble, a rough analog of US rights. After that, it starts turning into this bizarre amalgam of a socialist wish list and rules deliberately violating the first 10 fir the purpose of preserving the status quo of those in power.
This item 12 is itself a great example, stating a right not to have one's reputation harmed. Intention: censorship of things which are true but which embarrass politicians, a concept foreign in a land with free speech.
Before downmodding me in quasi-censorship of censorship talk, go look up many examples...from nominally free democracies, forget about dictatorships.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
No shit....
It looks like Ivan just violated the human rights of about 300 people by blowing up their airliner.
http://www.reuters.com/article...
Ah, the typical asshole American response.
The US helped form the UN. The US alternates between using the UN to further own ends, and decrying the UN if people refuse to blindly follow what the US wants.
Face it, the US has actively become the enemies of human rights and liberties over the last bunch of years.
The fact that you're a bunch of whiny, self-entitled cock-suckers who think you run the world is your problem.
The UN is a framework for countries to try to resolve issues diplomatically. Yes, it can be ineffective as blocs of countries drag their heels on stuff. But it's all we've got.
The US talks about international justice, but refuses to be a signatory to the ICC -- so that they can continue to commit war crimes and answer to nobody.
Fuck America. Fuck you.
You've become a banana republic with delusions of being the champions of rights and freedoms.
What a deluded bunch of assholes.
Just wait until they get bobbles.
Cheap storage VM.
Well, to be fair, Kissinger inside a Doonesbury strip said, "I'm sick and tired of people asking about human rights. What do you want: human rights or world peace?"
harrumph
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
In a legal sense, I agree with you 100%. In the sense of the perception of the average person, I don't think what you said applies in the least.
Let's take a look at the membership of the UN Human Rights Commission-
China
Kuwait
Pakistan
Russia
Saudi Arabia
UAE
Venezuela
Clearly these folks are qualified to tell other people about how important civil rights are.
Become? Read your history. The federal govt was a force for good during a four year period 1942-45. Every other point in our history we have been bad guys. And even at our height of valor we nuked two cities.
It does. It routinely condemns it.
Except you don't run your country. He's angry at the people who do and I can't say that I blame him too much.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
It's not that they're not doing it - it's that they haven't been caught. Or at least, not caught on the same scale.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
And at the same time, the NSA is the most useless organisation when it comes to fight domestic terrorism, as the only fact related to domestic terrorism they ever uncovered was a money transfer by a San Diego cab driver to a charity in Somalia which is considered a front to a terrorist organisation.
U.N., what a joke...
In the future they'll just turn it into low rent housing anyway.
Article 12:
"No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks."
it says we are free from attacks to our reputation not that we are free from having our reputation harmed by ourselves and then reported by someone else. harming ones own reputation and then having someone else report on what the individual has done is not an attack on their reputation. Article 12 references the ability for people not to be unjustly attacked not to be able to censor the world from their own mistakes. but i see how some people could interpret it the way you have.
its simply the difference between reporting events and libel. The truth is not an attack, it is the truth! it is the constant corruption that has been going on for generations that lead people to think backwards on this one.
The founding fathers weren't exactly the pillars of individual freedom you seem to think they were. They were an American centric elite and plutocracy trying to displace a Britsh centric elite and plutocracy, mostly so they could have a bigger cut of America's growing wealth.
You can tell because most of those constitutional protections and the Bill of Rights didn't apply to people who weren't affluent(i.e. who didn't own land), women, native American's, blacks/slaves and indentured whites. They applied mostly to white men who had wealth (at least enough to own land).
They actively prevented people who were not white, male and affluent from voting or holding office. They were mostly slave owners themselves, and they were for the most part very affluent and owners of very large real estate holdings. They were all 1%'ers.
The Declaration of Independence and Constitution were carefully designed to inspire support from enough people in the colonies for their Revolution to succeed, and to create the illusion of freedom, but they had no intention of relinquishing their power and control over the levers of government when it their Revolution did succeed. That plutocracy has never relinquished that control in the more than 200 years since.
The NSA along with the DHS, FBI, ATF and IRS are means for maintaining that control.
The Internet let a genie out of a bottle and created dangerous potentential for the rest of us to organize and try to win some of that power and control back.
When faced with the twin crises, and excuses, that were 9/11 and the 2008 crash it was nearly inevitable that The Powers That Be in the U.S. and U.K. would exploit every tool at their disposal, mainly computers and networks, to try to put a lid back on their control of their increasingly restless and networked homelands and to try to maintain their domination of the world as a whole in the face of increasing challenges.
The 2008 crash in particular resulted in widespread global disillusionment with the fact economies and governments are rigged to benefit the ruling elite and screw everyone else. When ruling elites start feeling that heat they trot out their police states, always have, always will.
@de_machina
the US has actively become the enemies of human rights and liberties over the last bunch of years.
Every government is the enemy of human rights and liberties.
... the UN will continue to be inconsequential in any affairs other than sucking funds from wealthy countries and offering crazy world leaders a place to get publicity.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
- said by Abraham Lincoln on the afternoon of Thursday, November 19, 1863, at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
First of all I'm not American, so much for assuming. Secondly, I just stated my feeling since how else is one suppose to feel about U.N. when they are essentially useless, I mean look at everything going on in places such as Gaza, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Ukraine. I would love to believe that U.N. is some benevolent entity that punishes evil and fights for justice and equality, but that's just not the case.
Read your history, they intentionally bled their allies out of all cash to become economic super power after the war and were pissed off they even have to join in 1942 because of the damn public opinion. Even so they delayed any serious military action until 1944, when it was basically over and they just came in the prevent Russia from taking over too much of Europe and protect their own interest and get a free piece of Germany. Not such a good guys the way I see it.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
Fuck you and your excuses. It's not us, it's them. Fuck you. Do something about it. It is done in your name so either accept the blame or make a change.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
*Sigh* Yes the founding fathers were perfect beings being created with infinite wisdom, absolute faith, the ability to see the future and cover every situation in the future of mankind with a terse text.
Or maybe not. But it is easier to simply worship the above idea, right?
Fuck America. Fuck you.
You mean "Team America, fuck yeah!"
I'm just trying to add some levity; we know we suck.
Bullshit. Good or bad is just a point of view. Nazis thought they were the divine force of good doing their historic duty to build civilizations and conquering the untermenchen that was created to serve as slave labor.
Both before, during and after the US (as well as all other states) did things most would now consider good and other things people now would consider outright evil.
two words: Im Peach. Impeach! Time to get rid of this unconstitutional autocratic president.
Yes, yes, we all know, they established an aristocracy and rights were only really for first-class citizens like themselves and not women, the poor and blacks. However, the government has since been modified to include supposedly everyone in the first-class citizen pool.
The founders had a remarkably good set of rules deciding what the government could and could not do to first-class citizens, and that's what we respect them for.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Thank you for quoting the text. I've never seen this before.
it says we are free from attacks to our reputation not that we are free from having our reputation harmed by ourselves and then reported by someone else.
If it said that then there might be more agreement. But that isn't what the words you quoted say. It has no such caveat. The only caveat at all is the word "arbitrary" which is a legislative weasel word. If it said "libelous" or "untrue" or something to that effect then it would not be debatable. It simply looks like it is poorly written, even if it is intended to mean what you say it is.
Not "all" cash of course, but yes, they provided arms and men to allies.
Thanks to the manufacturing support they provided until then. And even this ignores battles such as the Battle of the Coral Sea (1942), the Battle of Midway (1942), and so on.
bullshit. big money / big corp is, but in the US's case, that's the same. And they're infecting the EU and its members as well now.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Does the US Constitution specifically grant the government the power to interfere in X? If not then doing so is unconstitutional, because the constitution explicitly states (repeatedly, in several different ways) that the federal government has *only* those powers granted to it by the constitution. Which is why something as simple as banning alcohol required a constitutional amendment. You can thank legal gymnasts and an apathetic population for the steady expansion of federal powers beyond what has been explicitly granted. For example: despite the fact that Prohibition required a constitutional amendment to implement, the Supreme Court held that a similar ban on on marijuana was constitutional because it could theoretically be sold across state lines, and thus the federal government's legitimately granted power to regulate interstate commerce could be applied, even against individuals growing small quantities for their own consumption. You really want to tell me that's not a load of power-mongering BS? That line of reasoning gives the federal government control over *all* commerce within the US, completely gutting the initial restriction of only regulating interstate commerce without ever having to get a pesky constitutional amendment passed to expand it's powers.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I suggest reading REAL history. Since 2009, criticizing the US government has been confirmation that you're a racist. Have you checked your privilege lately? But since you brought it up:
As late as surrender time-even after the A-bombs had been dropped-a staff lieutenant colonel, related to the War Minister himself, was fervently convinced that even if the whole Japanese race were all but wiped out, its determination to preserve the National Polity would be forever recorded in the annals of man; whereas a people who sacrificed their will upon the altar of physical existence could never deserve resurrection. It would be useless for the people to survive the war, anyhow, if the structure of the State itself were destroyed. It was better to die than to seek ignominious "safety".
At a climactic last Imperial Conference, War Minister Anami was still talking about going on with the war, of meting out a terrible blow to the enemy and achieving a good opportunity to end the war. Japan must press forward courageously, seeking Life in Death: certain victory was not assured, but neither was utter defeat. The terrain was working in favor of the defenders, and so was the inflexible national unity. But just in case a massive blow against the enemy proved not possible, it seemed appropriate for the name of Nippon to be inscribed forever in history by the annihilation of her 100 million loyal subjects, etc., etc. And tears welled into the eyes of the earnest War Minister.
When the Emperor, by a thrilling act of personal courage, opted for peace-and surrender-he too was weeping. He reminded his stunned auditors that ever since the outbreak of the war there had been frequent cases when Army and Navy actions differed from plans. Now the armed forces were preparing for decisive battle in the homeland and were claiming that the prospects of victory were satisfactory.
He was profoundly troubled, continued the Emperor. What would happen if Japan plunged into decisive battle under such circumstances? The entire race would be obliterated, and this would be a betrayal of the trust of ancestors and the duty toward posterity, lest Japan never again rise. Continuation of the war, then, could only serve to cripple Japan, extinguish civilization, and bring misfortune to mankind.
The Japanese Emperor's decision to end the war, under enormous external and internal pressure, obviated the American landings and the hemorrhage that was bound to occur soon on the beaches of Miyazaki, Satsuma, and Ariake. Not only would five US ground divisions, etc., be saved from the destruction at sea which the Japanese resolutely promised them, but untold thousands of Japanese would not die either-such as squadrons of kamikaze pilots and sailors with one way tickets to the shrine of heroes at Yasukuni; or the women and children clutching pitiful staves and bamboo spears.
-- Dr. Alan C. Coox, "Olympic vs. Ketsu-Go", Marine Corps Gazette, August 1965, Vol. 49, No. 8.
August 5, 1963
Dear Kup:
I appreciated most highly your column of July 30th, a copy of which you sent me.
I have been rather careful not to comment on the articles that have been written on the dropping of the bomb for the simple reason that the dropping of the bomb was completely and thoroughly explained in my Memoirs, and it was done to save 125,000 youngsters on the American side and 125,000 on the Japanese side from getting killed and that is what it did. It probably also saved a half million youngsters on both sides from being maimed for life.
You must always remember that people forget, as you said in your column, that the bombing of Pearl Harbor was done while we were at peace with Japan and trying our best to negotiate a treaty with them.
All you have to do is to go out and stand on the keel of the Battleship in Pearl Harbor with the 3,000 youngsters underneath it who had no chance whatever of saving their lives. That is true of two or three other battleships that were sunk in Pearl Ha
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Well, that's one interpretation.
But if do something horrible and hide the evidence then my reputation is unharmed, but those muckrakers carrying on about "truth" and "evidence" are trying to harm my reputation - a clear attack if I ever saw one. Legitimate perhaps, but still an attack. It would have been easy enough to distinguish the two:
Article 12 (Posi-Earth edition)
"No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to *libelous* attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks."
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
You would be hard pressed to find a sane man arguing any genocide is good. I spoke only that from an outsider's point of view that the only war we can truly claim moral high ground in is WW2. The revolution could have been easily dealt with peacefully and while during the civil war fighting to free the slaves was noble, conquering the south to do it was not and we robbed their people of self-determination
Every government is the enemy of human rights and liberties.
Even if that were true there are no alternatives.
As his sentence said "after the war" I think they might be referring to the Bretton Woods System:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system
Or so you were told, anyway. Welcome to reality, third-class citizen.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
You forgot about the other 545 people we also need to impeach. (One vice president, 9 supreme court justices, 100 senators, and 435 representatives.)
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Try reading Zinn's A People's History of the United States. It will disillusion you of the comic book U.S. History taught in U.S. school where the founding fathers are all saints and geniuses.
They were mostly self serving and profiteering. Its fitting Andrew Jackson is on the $20 dollar bill because he was infamous for profiteering off the battles he won, mostly by seizing the lands he took and splitting it up between himself and his friends.
@de_machina
Yep, those damn plutocrats sure did their best that the rest of us would never have a leg up. /sarcasm
I suggest that you take some time to read the Federalist Papers. I think you'll discover things aren't quite as black and white as you believe.
Hey, we're not a BANANA republic.... Come on. Sheesh. :D
You say that, but I don't think it's necessarily true... There are a lot of governments that seem to do a much better job of respecting the rights of their citizens than the US does.
Meh. Start at the top. The NSA thing is clearly a violation of executive authority.
I should point out native americans are still largely unemployed, stuck in reservations on land white American's didn't want. One of their few rays of hope being the ubiquitous Indian Casino where they are exacting their revenge. Still they are second class citizens.
Blacks were still being massively discriminated against until the Civil Rights act which was around 180 years later. They are still second class citizens.
The poor, they are still second class citizens.
Women are the one group doing pretty well for themselves though they are still underrepresnted in government.
Look around the room at a State of the Union address. The room is still overwhelming full of affluent white men.
As for the founding fathers brilliant ideas on governence, it exploded in a bloody civil war in 80 years.
You need look no further than where the U.S. congress, courts and presidency are today. They are a smoldering ruin. They have never been the great institutions Americans are brainwashed in to thinking they are. Are they better than totalitarian dictatorships, sure. Are they models the rest of the world can aspire too, no, not really.
American governement is the best government money can buy.
@de_machina
That's irrelevant to whether or not he should be impeached.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
You do realize those rights at that point in time applied only to white male land owners, right?
@de_machina
Maybe for voting, I don't see your argument on the freedom of speech thing or the other ones.
And land was cheap and plentiful and plenty of trees to cut down and make log cabins.
Not many very apartment renters back then, as you seem to apply was going on.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
Life is not a Hollywood move, but there are good guys and bad guys. Not many of either, most are somewhere in between, and there are more good guys than bad guys, but one bad guy can do more damage than 100 good guys can repair. And the US feds seem to prefer to hire and promote badish guys...the worse, the stronger the preference.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Sorry, but there are points of view (currently unpopular) from which genocide is considered virtuous. The Romans would have had no problem with it, if they didn't need the slave labor. (But consider what they did to Carthage. The only work they preserved was a treatise on how to control slaves.)
It's difficult to come up with a moral code that is both absolute, and that preserves the values we consider proper. E.g., I generally consider lying a immoral action, but there are circumstances where I would consider a lie the lesser evil. You can't win this one by an appeal to natural law, either, because chimpanzees wage intentional war on other, weaker, groups of chimpanzees. Also some entire species of ant have evolved specifically to operate as slavers. You've got to win this one by an appeal to a "higher morality", which is damnably difficult to pin down as anything more than "This is what I feel is right." (or possibly "This is what god told me to do.").
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Of course most of them would have tolerated this as long as it was being used against loyalists or any of the sub-human types, read up on how the colonists who were not in favour of revolution were treated. Just like now, what they wouldn't tolerate was this being used on them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Every government is the enemy of human rights and liberties.
Yes, that's true. But governments aren't the only enemies of human rights and liberties. And frequently governments are less vile enemies and act to keep those others in check. The problem in the US is that those other enemies of human rights and liberties have purchased the government. I don't think this is true everywhere. There are places where the government itself is the major enemy. There also are, or were, places where there is a kind of balance.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
If you call having to kill the land owners cheap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Not to mention the tiny little fact that the NSA broke computer crime laws in every country on the face of the planet. This after the US screamed about computer crime laws, sought to extradite all and sundry for the most minor computer crimes, spending millions on it whilst it itself was doing far, far, mind boggling, far worse. Double speak for USA crime is justice or computer hacking is only hacking when everyone else does it when the US does it we have a memo for that. Forget the constitution, forget the legislature, the US has memos that legalised everything and anything.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
To quote you,
His real point was that they wouldn't have tolerated this. They took action against a number of other rights violations that they knew of at the time, and general warrants were unconstitutional, so there's absolutely zero reason to think they would have let something this huge slide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
The rights of 'first class citizens" are still respected, I'm sure our rulers have exempted themselves from this shit. The problem is the whole idea of 'first class citizens'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Well, I agree with you there, but what does this have to do with the constitutional aspect of this? It's blatantly unconstitutional, which was the entire point of all this.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I probably misunderstood your parent comment, easy to do in a forum. Sorry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
I've read A People's History. I never claimed the founders were saints. All I'm saying is that, for the time, the constitution and the bill of rights were pretty damn enlightened. We could do better, but we could certainly do much, much worse.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
No, you have to start with Congress. Because they don't have term limits. The President will be gone soon regardless. Chop off the head, and a new one grows in its place. You gotta hit Congress, and SCOTUS.
scotus is on our side, albeit it's a slow moving ship. read the GPS ruling from 2012 (unanimous) and the cell phone ruling from 2014 (unanimous). they'll get to the right conclusion, it just may take them too long.
Nail on the head there.
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." - Voltaire
The let slavery slide for nearly a century. The founding fathers who were opposed to slavery from the getgo caved into the financial interests of the plantation owners and other slave owners.
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." - Voltaire
Well, since we can no longer impeach King George II, I suppose we should just strip him of his presidential perks, and toss him in jail along with, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, et. al. for getting us involved in an unjustified and misleading 13 year war in which thousands have been killed or maimed.
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." - Voltaire
The let slavery slide for nearly a century.
*sigh* Once again, no, the founders were not perfect. However, the rights of 'first-class citizens' were treated quite well. And also, the constitution took steps to prevent a number of other government abuses that the founders were aware of at the time, so again, there's no reason to think they wouldn't have similarly acted against NSA-style surveillance.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The US didn't start flat-out giving military equipment to Britain before it had run mostly out of its dollar reserves. The US helped the Brits to a war effort maybe 20% more powerful than they could have managed on their own, near as I can tell. The US gave stuff to the Soviet Union and various other countries. This wasn't entirely altruistic, but it wasn't a plan to deliberately drain the British economy, and the other major allies were basically broke anyway. What catapulted the US into a position as the economic superpower was that US industry was pretty well untouched by war, unlike in Europe and Japan.
The US was actually in the naval war against Germany from September 1941, although there was no formal declaration. I'm not sure who you're saying was pissed off, since the declarations of war were almost unanimous. People don't really want to go to war, but they will accept it if necessary (or if duped by leaders into thinking it's necessary).
The US was toeing off against the whole Japanese Navy in the first half of 1942, and by the end of the year had basically gutted it as a fighting force and had stopped Japanese expansion in the Pacific. In Europe, the US was hindered by a great deal of unpreparedness, the expansion of the US Army being quite comparable to the prewar expansion of the German Army. It did not engage in ground operations until the end of 1942, and did not seriously engage German ground forces until 1943. As of 1943, a combined US/British offensive had succeeded in knocking Italy out of the war and securing airbases in southern Italy. Also in 1943, US strategic air forces hit Germany pretty hard, causing a major diversion of German fighters from the actual battlefronts. It's really hard to see how, given the state of prewar US readiness and the Battle of the Atlantic, the US could have mounted what you call serious military action before 1944.
So, while the US record is hardly spotless, I'd have to consider the US one of the good guys.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I can imagine no government being successful. Heck, Marx did, government having withered away in his socialist utopia. L. Neil Smith wrote a series of novels about his libertarian utopia. Lots of people have imagined peaceful anarchies.
What I'm short on is examples where there has been a successful anarchy on any reasonable scale. Got some?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes