Slashdot Mirror
The NSA Would Be Eliminated Under President Gary Johnson (thehill.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson says he'd sign an executive order eliminating America's National Security Agency if he wins the 2016 election. And he's also forcefully arguing that domestic surveillance of internet activity and phone calls in the United States is worse than in China. Johnson took issue with an interviewer at The Daily Beast who pointed out that China monitors political dissidents, saying "What do you call the NSA and the satellites that are trained on us and the fact that 110 million Verizon users are having everything we do on our cell phones being data-collected?"
Johnson also wants to abolish the Internal Revenue Service, replacing both income taxes and corporate taxes with a single federal consumption tax, and says he'd be willing to sign legislation eliminating the Department of Education, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Department of Commerce, which he says fuels "crony capitalism". "I'll sign legislation to eliminate any federal agency that they present me with."
Johnson has also said that if he were elected President, he'd pardon Edward Snowden.
Johnson also wants to abolish the Internal Revenue Service, replacing both income taxes and corporate taxes with a single federal consumption tax, and says he'd be willing to sign legislation eliminating the Department of Education, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Department of Commerce, which he says fuels "crony capitalism". "I'll sign legislation to eliminate any federal agency that they present me with."
Johnson has also said that if he were elected President, he'd pardon Edward Snowden.
Far more likely that the NSA would eliminate him.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
And he still sounds better than Trump and Clinton.
He knows, we know, he will never have to make good on any of his campaign promises or boasts. He is 100% certain to lose the election.
He can promise anything he wants and it's meaningless. So why not go for the big ones: abolish the IRS but bring a efficient and fair tax enforcement, dismantle the Fed and have a strong monetary policy, kill off Wall Street and at the same time promote free enterprise, yadda, yadda.
Singling out only the universally unpopular NSA ist what a coward would do.
Personal point:
keeping the secret agencies in check & under control = good/wise
abolishing everything = idiotic
bolstering secret agencies further = equally idiot as abolishing them
Hint:
Never choose an extreme, because you can certainly be sure that you are wrong even when you are right.
Eh I dunno, I think it's probably best to just look at a political candidate for what they can do rather than what they say they'll do. For example, he can't abolish either the NSA or the IRS; the former is within the domain of the senate, and the later is within the domain of congress. He can pardon Edward Snowden however, which is basically the only sane thing I've heard out of any of the major candidates for this election year.
If on the one hand we have a giant douche, and on the other we have a turd sandwich, I think a third party candidate could succeed if he's a tic-tac.
...and thus loses the lunatic libertarian vote.
I'm libertarian and drivers license requirements are acceptable given the current state of things and the two other candidates. An ideal libertarian world isn't going to just pop into existence.
Right now, Juan Perón and Ferdinand Marcos could run and I couldn't say if they'd be the worst choice.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If this guy actually got elected. We all hate the status quo, but give us something thats not going to throw everything up in the air, and ruin the country. None of the candidates are any good. How bout Bones for President?
Still, voting for him could be the "sensible" thing to do. Especially if you're a in a state where it's already more or less a given how the election will end.
If you're in a red|blue state where the outcome is roughly 70/30 in every election, it doesn't really matter whether you cast your vote for Hillary|Trump. It doesn't even matter whether the state is for or against the candidate you're for or against. Your vote simply does not matter.
You now essentially have three choices. Either you can say "fuck this shit" and stay at home, knowing that it doesn't matter anyway. You can participate in the circus and vote for Hillary|Trump. Or you can show that yes, you would've gone there, you wanted to participate but neither of the two clowns is good enough for your vote, but there is someone who voices your concerns, and he got your vote because of this.
No, this will not change anything. At the very least not immediately. The most you could hope for is that in further elections politicians will try to gain votes and check what agendas moved people. If you can get 5% more votes by catering to the anti-surveillance crowd, they'll go for this.
But then again, since your vote is for the toilet anyway, why not be creative with it?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There is no "capitalism" under "libertarianism". Without government to enforce laws, it all devolves into "strong man with big stick takes everything".
He can't abolish the IRS, but he most certainly can abolish the NSA and the Departments of Ed, HUD, and Commerce. All of those operate under the authority of the executive branch, and as long as the president doesn't want to spend more money, he can effectively do whatever the hell he wants within his own domain.
The headline makes it sound a bit more radical than it is.
First his beef with the NSA is domestic spying. He says he'd still have "the sattelites" but make sure they were outward looking not domestic. By "sattelites" I am fairly sure he's using that as a proxy for all the NSA does in scooping domestic intelligence. And after all isn't that exactly what gets slashdotter's all uppity. The things that Snowden pointed out? So really for slashdot this is bowling a strike.
Second, a federal consumption tax. Now normally a consumption tax is regressive: if you spend your whole pay check, as a poor person, then you are paying a greater share of the tax. That's not quite as bad as it sounds. Even if you have a progressive income tax, Where people richer than you or corporations pay income taxes they want higher wages or higher margins and so it drives up the cost of the poor person's consumables. You can make a consumption tax somewhat anti-regressive by making any residual income taxes more progressive. I don't know if Johnston is planning such compensation. I'd like to see his numbers. But I'm not going to flatly reject it.
Eliminatine the dept of education? Well as long as states can manage it, okay. I'm sure congress will tie the fed kickback to the states to educational standards so things won't go to hell in mississippi or texas.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
If the Libertarians wanted any real influence, they'd declare one of the primary parties candidates as theirs and support him/her. Then after the election if that candidate won and say 'we delivered x votes to put you over the top, you owe us, here's what we want you to support'. As it is, all they do is suck just enough votes away to swing the election from one primary party candidate to the other which just irritates the other parties and doesn't make any friends.
Because he's not a criminal or a raving nut. Sad but necessary.
Britney Spears or Pamela Anderson probably have.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
I have a lot of sympathy for libertarian ideas, but party leaders need to start thinking how to win elections in a democracy that includes voters with diverse political convictions. I can think of a platform that will appeal to a healthy fraction of Democrats and Republicans:
I've never regretted my third party votes. I don't look at me as being the problem, I look at everyone else who is too "scared" to vote third party despite the fact they loathe both mainstream candidates. If the worse of two evils wins, it's not because of me - it's because people voted for an evil (lesser or otherwise) instead of someone they actually liked.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Define rich. Is it living at a very high standard? Like having a garage full of Rolls Royces and Ferraris? Because a consumption tax will catch that. Is it having a very high income, but living in a upper middle class neighborhood and driving a Buick? Like Warren Buffett? Because he reinvests (and now gives away) the bulk of that income to support ventures that many other people derive benefit from. If it is this, then I'd rather tax him on his ranch house, Buick and occasional meals out at Burger King.
Have gnu, will travel.
To my mind SELinux's value comes from it being free software. The freedoms of free software allow us to vet, run, share, and modify SELinux and make sure it does what we need it to do. Coming from NSA is nice because I'm sure the NSA hires skilled programmers who worked on SELinux, but I'm not going to trust any non-free software coming from the NSA because non-free software (regardless of purpose or stated intent) is untrustworthy.
The drug war (the US's longest war?), which seems intimately tied to the Drug Enforcement Agency, certainly is a horror.
Digital Citizen
I live in a swing state (Ohio) and my vote is worthless too. The only way it truly matters is if my vote gives a candidate a plurality of the vote in my state AND my state's electoral votes are required for that candidate to win.
If I go out and vote for Hillary Clinton, the only thing that changes is that Hillary Clinton has one extra vote that she wouldn't have had if I did not vote for her.
What, like Guantanamo Bay was going to be closed under President Obama?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
If the laws violate the Constitution, then the Judiciary will point that out, and those bad laws will be invalidated
+5 Funny?
I think the problem here is that people don't have a good picture of what that 1% really are - they're generally picturing the 1%'ers of the 1%'ers.
The 1% includes athletes, doctors, professors, engineers, people at the top of their field who are very much still working for it.
You knock that down to the 0.01%, and now you're looking at the CEOs with golden parachutes, the winners in the speculation fund manager market, the inherited wealth crowd, etc...
I don't read AC A human right
Evinrude.
Now, that's a real runoff.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I don't think there is a law that says that there must be an NSA.
Wikipedia says that originally the NSA was via a National Security Council Intelligence Directive, which I believe was authorized under the National Security Act of 1947.
It looks like later the National Security Agency Act of 1959 gave official authorization for the President to keep running the NSA but it's all "is authorized to" or "may do this" and I don't see a whole lot that could be strictly interpreted as requiring an NSA.
I'm not a lawyer though. I could be very well be wrong. I think at worst the President would be required to maintain certain Director positions and a minimum amount of surveillance but, certainly, he wouldn't be required to have the NSA spying on everyone.
That's ok. When the jackboots you cheer for come for you, there will be no one left to give a shit.
This. Too many people still believe that just a change of President will make everything better. If the people don't effect a massive replacement of "establishment" politicians with true representatives of the people, any individual or few threats to the establishment will be dealt with as necessary. This is worth billions to a few people calling the shots, getting dirty is what they do.
The gooks are inside the wire people, it's time to call "broken arrow".
When the king heard the words of the Book of the Law he tore his robes.2Kings22:11
Retired AF intelligence officer here. Feeling like I'm touring Plato's Cave! Gary Johnson's proposal would not strip the military services of their SIGINT capability. He believes the military should have all the resources it needs to defend the country. As others have said, he wants to dismantle that part of the NSA structure that targets the USA, i.e., American citizens. Some discernment please. I saw that interview. The interviewer was unfairly painting Gary as an extremist. He's not. He's a patriot. This is America. Spying on our own citizens in un-American. I'm proud Gary is standing up for freedom.
About a million people voted for him four years ago. He's likely to be on the ballot for president in all 50 states. Do you know how hard it is to achieve that? Americans have been brainwashed into thinking the views of two parties are sufficient for getting a handle on the problems our country faces. Well, guess what....?! And, a lot of people happen to be disgusted with the RP & DP nominees. They deserve to know there is a viable alternative. One of the principles on which this country was founded is "no taxation without representation." Well, Gary Johnson represents the views of a lot of Americans. Maybe we should care about what people in other parties have to say. In the end, we're all Americans!