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.
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.
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.
Far more likely that the NSA would eliminate him.
They'd try, but it's ok. Captain America wouldn't stand for that anymore than he stood for SHIELD's bullshit.
I mean, if we're going to talk about the fictional pop-culture portrayal of the NSA, Captain America is fair game, right?
Look, I don't like what they're doing anymore than you do. They're way exceeding their authority, they shouldn't be allowed to collect any data domestically. But they're not fucking assassinating political candidates or office holders. If we start using that type of hyperbole, we stop getting taken seriously when we complain about the shit they ARE doing.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
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.
But they're not fucking assassinating political candidates or office holders.
Of course not, GP has mistakenly associated to the NSA what actually is a CIA job.
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.
NSA people work in big office buildings, in a corporate-like environment; they're tightly controlled. It's not like the CIA used to be where you were in a field office somewhere and your superiors weren't always 100% sure what you were doing.
The
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:
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
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
It's unlikely. Big, powerful, nearly-unaccountable organizations like the NSA would prefer someone a little more... politically entrenched. Trump, unlike a career politician, would actually be capable of saying "fuck these three-letter agencies, tear them all down". Don't take that as me saying he actually would, but he's capable of doing it, and the NSA knows it. ... I can't believe I just said something positive about Trump. Ugh. Our political climate is a fecal monsoon.
Actually, what positive thing you just said about Trump is the very reason he is as popular as he is now. The man is a self-funded, non-politician and that is what makes him so popular. Like him or not, voting for Trump sends a message to the government that "hey, all you politicians fucked up so bad we'd rather have THIS guy" Trump already has more than enough money and power, which makes him less susceptible to bribery. He has little to gain from being the president other than the chance to, well, "Make America Great Again".
Almost no actual Trump voters agree with everything he says, or even most of it. They do however think that the good Trump offers will outweigh the bad he might do.
What you're talking about is the Republican Liberty Caucus. Small l-libertarian, as opposed to the Libertarian Party. Actually has Congressional supporters, etc..., as opposed to only a couple of local school board members and a dog catcher or something like that.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
So, when they found out that their superiors had been lying to Congress, what did they do about that? I'm guessing that they acted in a manner that would ensure self-preservation in a situation where their superiors are always 100% sure what the subordinate employees are doing. If they call their bosses on nefarious bullshit, they will get told that they, themselves, are a threat to national security, and that's how they will be treated if the behavior persists. The individuals can be really conscientious, but the structure of their organization can prevent that from making any difference.
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.