That's not the same as claiming that "he claims to know all about China's and Russia's intelligence". He was saying that they didn't get the documents from him since he didn't have them after turning them over.
Re-read the quote. It said nothing about Russia.
What it said was that he knew the Chinese could not have gotten his document cache while he had it in Hong Kong because he knew exactly what they could do. Which means that even if he doesn't have an electronic copy of the document that told him how to beat the People's Republic's security, he has that info in his head somewhere.
I suspect he actually wants to to talk about that, but can't because the Russians probably made not talking about anybody's secrets condition #1. And Putin doesn't have a lot of checks on his power.
The National Security Agency (NSA ) of United States hacked into the Mexican president's public email account and gained deep insight into policymaking
OK, seriously? From his public email? Even Obama has a "public email" you can send shit to. Little old ladies and bent out of shape whack jobs pounding away at their keyboard send stuff to El Presidente's"public email".
Next...
Of course the Russian Foreign Service Security guy who hacks Obama's public email would write that he "gained deep insight" into Obama's secret thoughts this way. Otherwise he'd be deemed useless and have his budget cut.
From a non-American point-of-view you could probably gain a lot of little insights from the Obama admin's responses to their public email. You would know what Obama's dealing with at a grassroots level, for example. A very common way for countries to not make a concession is for them to politely say that if they do that their publics will freak out. Reading Obama's email would let Putin know when Obama was lying about that shit. You would not know much more about Obama's actual positions then he tells you himself because he's got to know it's trivial for a foreign agent to register john.smith@yahoo.com and shoot Obama an email, but you'd get real insights into the political constraints Obama had to deal with.
I can say nobody is surprised this happened. President Calderón would have been silly not to assume something like this.
Mexicans understand the world beyond Latin America a lot better then the rest of Latin America does. The US spies on everybody, everybody spies on the US, when anybody gets caught there's a lot of pretentious bitching because a the electorate doesn't understand this, but nobody takes it very seriously. Thus France's initial response to the NSA allegations was an extremely self-righteous defense of the Right to Privacy, and it was immediately followed by everyone who has ever met France going "WTF? You're a million times worse the NSA could ever hope to be." There's actually probably more spying between friends then enemies. Latvia got burned really badly back when Hitler (the supposed anti-Communist Crusader) sold them out to Stalin, so they'd be fools if they don't have plenty of ways to verify their current anti-Russian protector (aka: Barrack Hussein Obama) isn't doing it to them.
OTOH everyone else in Latin Amer4ica is acting like the entire world lied to them by stealing their email. Which is technically true, but it's also technically true that part of being a grown-up real nation is knowing that they will always steal your secrets.
Cool, secret courts who answer to no one! I AM THE LAW!
Re-read the post.
They answer to a specific Appellate Court, which answers to the Supremes. EPIC is trying to appeal straight to the Supremes, which the Supremes are not supposed to allow.
If they think there's a massive Constitutional issue at stake, and that an immediate Supreme Court ruling is the only thing that can solve the problem, they can ignore that. But they don't do that often. For example they didn't do it during the battle over ObamaCare. The last time they did it was probably Bush vs. Gore, which had to be decided by early January so we could have a President.
I doubt EPIC will convince the Supremes to make then the second case like that, because the world really won;t end if the NSA has 2 years of your email or 2.5, but it's worth a shot.
The NSA not only has the capability to violate client attorney privilege at every point in the course, and to threaten judges, lawyers and everyone up and down the line, they have demonstrated the will to ignore the courts already by ignoring the FISA courts rulings.
Not only should the supreme court rule on this before any lower court can, it should invalidate the entire domestic spying apparatus.
And that's likely just what will happen given the circumstances. Judges do not like their power being questioned.
Anti-NSA Activists are like Anti-Gun Control Activists. In principle I don't disagree with them that much, but their paranoia and self-righteous BS just piss the fuck out of me.
In this case I have to point that the police have guns. This gives them the practical ability to kill your ass with no warning. However unless you are a black male, or suffer untreated mental illness, they do not do that shit; so it's highly illogical to demand all cops be disarmed because lest they start shooting random perfectly sane white people.
By the same token the NSA is not likely to start blackmailing people anytime soon. If they tried to use somebody's weed habit against them all they'd have to do is take a road trip to Canada, upload a tearful video to Youtube, and roll in the dough as the first sane, white, non-Muslim oppressed by the evil NSA.
You don't pay much attention to the Courts. "Standing" is something that gets argued all the time, and it is solely about jurisdiction.
In this case the issue is that the Supremes almost never take cases without them being adjudicated at a lower level. Generally exceptions are extremely exceptionable -- think Bush vs. Gore, which actually includes a clause that it should not be referenced in future court rulings -- and involve cases where a definitive ruling is needed Right This Very Minute or Bad Things Happen.
If the Supremes think NSA data collection is really bad they might rule today, which is what EPIC wants. If they think it's less important then preventing the election of Al Gore they'll side with the administration.
Korea is smaller then either four individual countries in the EU. It's 1/10 the population of the EU. It's economy is based on exporting shit.
The Koreans do not win a tariff battle with the EU. The US and Japan might be able to force a draw in a tariff battle with the EU. But nobody else could win a tariff battle with the EU. It is a bigger economic bloc then the US.
The patents they're taking about are "Standards Essential patents." Samsung long-ago agreed to license those patents on very good terms to anyone wanted to use them. This was a way to get their tech in pretty much every phone built. Then they realized their phones were such close copies of iPhone that they cou7ld not sell them, and they decided to sue Apple on the basis of these patents.
In other words they were NEVER allowed to sue anyone using these patents as long as that company paid the Standard fees. They are not going to be able to jack up the price, or suddenly sue people in five years because if they did they'd be forced into another one of these agreements.
Strictly speaking it's not a new price. It's the old price they have always been legally required to charge their competitors for these particular patents.
The entire issue here is that they agreed to license these patents on very liberal terms as a way to get everyone using their tech, and then when they realized that one of their competitors had better tech then them (Apple) they tried to take that deal away from that competitor.
You've actually just made the case against Samsung.
Samsung did some really good technical work, which almost everyone wanted to copy, so they agreed that the patents involved were "Standards Essential Patents" which would be licensed to everyone cheap. Changing their minds and saying "OK, everybody bat Apple can use those patents," was simply something they agreed they weren't allowed to do when they agreed to have the patents declared standards. Basically they were trying to force their #1 competitor out of their #1 market, and the legal system is not supposed to tolerate that shit. Just look at Apple and it's conviction for eBook price-fixing.
OTOH Apple did a bunch of decent technical work, and some truly mind-blowing design work. Then they sued people on the basis of the design patents. Since they never agreed not to do that, and it was trivial for Samsung to design it's way around said patents once they realized that courts enforce design patents, Samsung got it's ass reamed in court and nobody is worried that Samsung will be forced out of the smartphone market.
If you're going to explain to me how we can survive without SigInt you might actually have to do that.
Easily, and I shouldn't have to explain. It is a possibility.
You're making a positive claim, you do indeed have to explain.
No US Army since Grant's day has been without SigInt capability. that means that to get rid of the NSA, and all NSA-like agencies, you'd have to roll the US Military's entire electronic capability back to what it was in the 1850s. South Korea is not gonna stay allied to that. The Balts allied with a country that can protect them from Russia. US Grant cannot do that. The Israelis need allies who can decode encrypted radio messages for them. US Grant doesn't have radio. If all those folks switch to the Russians or Chinese they aren't going to become freer countries. Most of them would probably follow the example of Finland in the Cold War, and not be unfree but be kinda in the unfree camp; but I'm sure nobody would take advantage of the fact that the Chinese don't bitch about free elections.
I'm not saying your freedom is less important these alliances. But I am saying they exist, and "getting rid of the NSA or anything like the NSA" would change us from a country with a world-wide alliance network into a nuetral power.
And now the guy who doesn't read people's posts resorts to ad hominem
If you mean that I insulted you, then I definitely did. I also read your post, though.
Really?
You implicitly claim we can magically keep our status as everyone's ally without technology Grant had, then call me a fool for pointing out that won't work; and you still claim you read my posts?
Sometimes further comment is pointless.
Moreover he's conflating "warrants" with freedom.
A government that blatantly violates the constitution is a threat to our freedom.
We live in a country that has voter id laws that have already disenfranchised me, engages in stop-and-frisk, but the threat to American freedom is that some asshole can read your email using a warrant you disagree with? There has never been a time in the history of these United States when we weren't blatantly violating someone's rights. It always happens, 24/7. Hell, we had actual slavery in this country. And somehow we survived.
And you're convinced that freedom is dying because the Courts issued a warrant that inconveniences millions of middle-class white people. No shit those millions think the warrant's BS. I happen to agree with them. But the implication that one bad warrant spells an end to freedom is incredibly arrogant, especially given that you don't seem to care about the other ways which the government is actually oppressing people today.
And no, the fact they know who you talk to on the phone is not less important then my right to vote.
Warrants are a tool that promotes freedom. They are not the freedom itself.
I think you're just looking to score points here. Congrats.
arresting a Judge for improperly granting a warrant is, indeed insane.
We didn't arrest people before... so we shouldn't now? I don't really understand.
More importantly blatantly Unconsitutional. There's no statute you could use, so you'd have to pass a new law, which would be an law.
Yes... and? That's pretty much what I propose. We need new constitutional amendments and laws. I don't expect it to happen, since our government is completely corrupt, but it definitely needs to happen.
We made ex post facto statutes unconstitutional for a reason: They make it really easy to arrest people that piss Congress off.
Crab fishermen protesting some change to fishing quotas? *bam* the quota was actually zero starting the day before last crab fishing season and everyone's going to j
Oh, I understand what it is, but to say that it's impossible for a country to exist without it is blatantly absurd.
In other words, just because you haven't bothered to learn anything about the NSA from anyone who actually knows what it does
That's not the problem; the problem is that you don't understand what I'm saying.
If you're going to explain to me how we can survive without SigInt you might actually have to do that.
It might also help if you'd read what I said. Re-read my posts. They don't apply to Denmark. They don't apply to the isolationist US of the 20s. They just apply to the current, which we live in, and is formally allied to something like a fifth of the human race.
You really don't get the point of warrants.
It seems that you don't get the point of freedom. Judges should not be signing such reaching, disgusting warrants to begin with, you fool.
And now the guy who doesn't read people's posts resorts to ad hominem How shocking. Moreover he's conflating "warrants" with freedom.
Dude, you do realize that in several countries that Democracies they have no warrants?
Warrants are a tool that promotes freedom. They are not the freedom itself.
As for prosecuting the Judge, do you have any idea how crazy that is?
The idea that he should be prosecuted is not crazy.
I'm not claiming that the NSA should not be reined in, but in a country that practiced slavery, Jim Crow, the Japanese Internement, etc. and arrested approximately zero of the enslavers, Jim Crow Sheriffs, Interners, etc. arresting a Judge for improperly granting a warrant is, indeed insane.
More importantly blatantly Unconsitutional. There's no statute you could use, so you'd have to pass a new law, which would be an law.
This is People's Tribunal-level law. And you will note that People's Tribunal's are a lot more anti-freedom then improperly granting a warrant.
As a country with alliances all over the world the US cannot be without signals intelligence.
It's completely possible.
I don't think you understand what Sig Int is. You know the guy listening to North Korean military radio? He's Signals Intelligence. You know the guy who put the bug on that ginormous Eagle Soviet Schoolchildren gave the US Ambassador in the 50s? He's Soviet signals intelligence. The guy who found the bug? Our signals intelligence. If you think the US Government can actually maintain it's massive system of world-wide alliances without access to ANY signals intelligence data you are simply mistaken. The South Koreans are not gonna stay allied to a country that refuses to listen to North Korean radio traffic because "a bunch of guys on the internet realized this other program we were doing, that had nothing to do with spying on North Korea, infringed their freedom."
Yeah we could probably do it with a different agency. But that agency would still be a SigInt agency, and therefore would be like the NSA.
In other words, just because you haven't bothered to learn anything about the NSA from anyone who actually knows what it does, that does not imply that it does nothing.
He's decided that since one Judge, with one set of rules from politicians, allows the government to keep a list of people he's called on his cell phone; no judges can ever be trusted. Moreover he's demanding the judge be prosecuted.
It's clearly more than just one judge. I have zero faith in the intelligence of the general public, but at the very minimum, there needs to be public oversight. What do we get with the NSA? Government thugs rubberstamping warrants for other government thugs.
As for prosecuting the judge, that makes complete sense. These people should be protecting people's constitutional rights, but they have knowingly and utterly failed to do so, even if they refuse to admit it.
Dude,
You really don't get the point of warrants. The point of a warrant is to document what the cops thought so that it can be challenged later at trial. In other words the bit of the Constitution that protects you from illicit searches and seizures is not, in practical terms, the Fourth Amendment. It's the Sixth Amendment. That's why almost no jurisdiction approves less then 99.9% of it's warrant requests.
As for prosecuting the Judge, do you have any idea how crazy that is? Basically what happened was simple: AQ attacked, and the American people freaked out, leading their elected representatives top create PRISM and make it secret. Then the American heard about PRISM, and freaked out again, leading to the low-level Judge who signed off on PRISM being sent to prison.
Hell, given that no Judge is gonna convict another Judge for following the law as it was understood at the time, how you gonna nail this guy? An extra-constitutional citizen's tribunal followed by a quick hanging?
1) How the fuck do you propose to run a government WITHOUT spying?
A government without something along the lines of the NSA could easily exist. Remember that freedom is more important than safety, and the government clearly can't be trusted to provide oversight for itself.
For one thing, the literal meaning of your statements is false, at least for the US. The NSA's job is Signals Intelligence. As a country with alliances all over the world the US cannot be without signals intelligence. I know you're using NSA as a synecdoche for abusive spying, but a) that little imprecision is a pet peeve of mine, and b) it's incredibly dumb tactics. If you convince the masses that the NSA is bad spying, and Obama transfers all NSA staff to other agencies you'll have a devil of a time convincing the masses not to declare victory and go home.
As to what you meant: According to the OP we can't trust anyone with any spying capability because the Judges/politicians won't stop them from becoming a new NSA.
If he was arguing for more oversight, or different oversight, or even making a somewhat intelligent case about which spying we should restrict I would consider being somewhat nice to him. But he's not. He's decided that since one Judge, with one set of rules from politicians, allows the government to keep a list of people he's called on his cell phone; no judges can ever be trusted. Moreover he's demanding the judge be prosecuted.
Who said "suitable" was part of the definition of frontrunner? Fucking Dubya was the frontrunner for years.
Hillary is the prohibitive favorite to win the Democratic primary. Given the GOP's inability to appeal to anyone who isn;t white and above the age of 50 this makes her the prohibitive favorite to win the White House.
1) How the fuck do you propose to run a government WITHOUT spying?
All criminal investigations are spy-operations. Most foreign countries expect you to spy on them, and furthermore expect that the more you claim to never spy on anyone (read: Brazil and France) the more you spy. More importantly we are actually fighting a fucking war. No spying period means no spying on the Taliban.
You could rationally make a policy that spies should be reined in by someone, but the simple fact is that no government can happen at all unless it has access to some data people want to keep secret. That is, spying. We can argue over whether the current level of NSA spying is excessive, we can argue about the practical uses of storing everyone's email forever vs. the importance of privacy rights. We can't keep a government and not have it ever spy on anyone.
And getting rid of the government is probably the most anti-freedom thing you can do. No government does not magically lead to a utopia of everyone being nice. It leads to the KKK forcibly reducing the black population of the former Confederacy by 20 points.
2) Most people don't like NSA spying. But to most people the NSA is issue number four at best. The government shutdown, ObamaCare, and the approaching Debt Ceiling debacle are much more important.
Terrorism is a real thing, fighting it is worth doing. We are fighting a hot war in Afghanistan. Innocent people in other countries are frequently attacked by groups funded in the US like Al Shabab. Most people agree you need somebody spying on the terrorists to prevent them from acting. OTOH it's really hard to tell who should be spied upon. That's why the American people thought the Courts were picking which numbers the NSA got info on.
If Hillary can come up with a plan that sounds like it will cut down on the data-from-random-people the NSA currently gets, without making it impossible for the NSA to access data on everyone else; most Americans will be quite happy with her.
Sorry to have to say that. But the UK are a Constitutional Monarchy. She didnt frequented the Geopolitical classes?
Apparently all you learned about government you learned from computer games.
As long as actual political power is held by elected officials, and basic freedoms are respected, the country is considered a democracy. Constitutional Monarchies are almost always Democracies, because if the Constitution isn't Democratic the Monarch is almost always in charge. Republics are iffy, because all a "Republic" is a country with no hereditary head of state. That could be Hitler, or it could be Obama.
The state department doesn't order the NSA around. It doesn't order the CIA around. It feeds the CIA intel, partly in the form of reports from State Department staff and partly in the form of reports from the governments they're working with; and uses Intel and tools from both, but it doesn't have any control over FISA.
Head in the sand? At least my sand is American. You seem to be living in a country where political parties are highly centralized organizations that truly have distinct points of view. We don't live in Canada. There is no guy in DC who has the power to over-ride a local party's selection for candidates. There is no guy in Columbus who does that for Ohio. This is not Norway or Sweden. There is no centrally-controlled list of candidates, giving the central controllers the right to determine who actually makes it into Parliament.
What we do have is a bunch of assholes who have a platform that kinda-sorta-maybe fits together without contradicting itself, and manages to bribe enough special interest groups that they get 45% of the vote with no work at all. Then we have another bunch of assholes whose done the same damn thing with another 45%. Nobody leaves the assholes because if you vote for a non-asshole candidate you don't get a non-asshole elected official. You get the wrong asshole, and then you get screwed.
It's clear that the American system, and the American people, do not actually want a bunch of centrally-controlled ideological options on their ballots. If they did they wouldn't vote for the generic assholes, they'd vote for one third parties where everything is decided at a small Convention.
If you want to change that system you have two sensible options:
1) Join the assholes.
2) Change the legal framework so that a party with a strictly ideological point-of-view and a much more centralized decision-making structure (like the Libertarians or Greens) has a shot at getting seats. Single member districts won't work. Multi-member districts could be useful, but if they're two or three-candidate districts the Big 2 will still dominate due to math.
Option 3, use your ballot line to run for the exact same offices the big parties are running for, doesn't really work.
You're misinterpreting what you do as political party work. It's definitely work, but it's not the work a political party is supposed to do in the American system. It's the work a small NGO is supposed to do. What political parties do is create massive coalitions capable of protecting the interest groups that support them, and vetting candidates so that Organic farmers with poor hygiene don't literally stink up the debate. It doesn't work perfectly, and it can only be called "clean" after comparing it to pretty much every other system, but it has managed to not destroy the Republic for 200-250 odd years. And, given how argumentative Americans are, that's a pretty big accomplishment.
Re: debates: who cares what you deserve? I have a Masters degree in Management. I think I deserve a job with $40k and benefits. Unfortunately the people who give out such jobs disagree, therefore I'm stuck at $19k in retail. Until you win races the GOP and Dems ain't gonna bother showing up to a debate that includes you, which means nobody will watch such a debate, which means you don't invites.
Now if you tell me you've got a plan to create an MMP system in the Ohio Statehouse, and one of those famous Libertarian billionaires has given you the funds to actually make this happen, I'll be impressed. You'll probably get a couple actual elected officials out of the deal, and it would be much harder to disinvite a serving State Rep. If you tell me you're giving up your ballot line to focus on that I'll be more impressed. It's not like the ballot line's doing you any good.
If you tell me you've got the same petition drive this year as last year, and your plan is still to hope the Two Parties piss everyone off at the same time, I'll give you the definition of insanity.
You've got causality backwards. Good candidates don't create votes by sheer force of will, they maximize the votes available from their partisan coalition while persuading some statistically fraction of the 5-10% of swing voters to go their way. Candidate recruitment is very important for third parties in the rare cases where a third party candidate truly maximizing his vote can get 35%. Thus both Nader and Johnson did much better then generic Green or Libertarian would be expected to do, but neither came close to hitting their 5% goal.
Which means if Libertarian people want to influence public policy they have to be voters first, and candidates second. They have to show up to most primaries, and be active members of their local parties. Some are trying this. They do that and all of a sudden the People a Congressman Must Fear are libertarians. The people who decide who gets the local party endorsement for the State Senate seat -- a religious right type, or a half-Libertarian similar to Paul Ryan -- are Libertarians. It doesn;t work on the short-term two-year timescale most people think of, but then politics in a country that spans a continent isn't supposed to turn 180 degrees just because some schmuck gave a kick-ass speech.
One of my guiding principles in politics is that you can accomplish damn near anything if you don't want the credit. It's really easy to get laws passed when a) you're doing all the work, but b) you're letting the partisan sleazebags who actually win elections take the credit on TV. Third parties actually do the opposite. They do very little actual work because they don't have a relationship with most voters, and they demand lots of credit (ie: positive TV Time in terms of debate slots and public financing of elections).
My point on GitMo and taxes was precisely that the Dems didn't insist Bush change those policies or else. They decided they'd lost that fight because he had a veto, therefore they didn't fight the fight. They voted to continue the Appropriations for GitMo, and didn't hold the entire budget hostage to tax demands.
I understand the GOP's political logic. I even understand how a principled person could come to the conclusion that fighting ObamaCare is worth closing the government for weeks.
What terrifies the fuck out of me is that the way our government is designed there are lots of opportunities for a principled person to bring everything to a halt. If the principled thing to do when you disagree with the President is halt everything then everything is gonna halt a whole lot of the time. Frequently our legislature gets compared to the Polish Sejm of the late 18th century, where all decisions had to be unanimous, any decision could be overturned by one guy changing his mind, and the inevitable result was that strong Poland dominating Central Europe of the 1630s was gone by 1800.
Northeastern Conservatives say that, but there's nothing stopping them from forming a third party. Legally it's pretty easy in that region. Lieberman made his own party on like two weeks notice after he lost the Democratic primary, Maine has a fairly successful third party movement, the Senator from Vermont is technically independent (altho he caucuses with Democrats and refers to himself as a Socialist), and New York State has that weird system where everyone is the nominee of at least three parties. Northeastern Republicans'd rather be relevant in DC, as Obama's gettable Republican vote, then win state-wide elections.
In Michigan and Ohio third parties tend to be equally weird. You get a lot of people who want the prestige of being the Gubernatorial candidate, but don't want to put in years of work building relationships with thousands of party activists. You get a lot of people who can't mentally subordinate their personal goals to the goals of an organization, and therefore prefer a Party that's so small they are the entire party in their town to a party that has a couple people regularly show up at meetings. You also get people who won't moderate themselves at all, for any reason.
Did you mean to imply there's some guy in DC picking drone targets at random?
They're picking drone targets on "behaviour" now. They don't even know who they're bombing - they just bomb people who "smell wrong".
That's not unusual in wartime. It's not like the League of Nations had a massive website listing all legitimate combatants that everyone could access on two seconds notice. It's true uniforms simplified that situation in Europe, but in the Pacific I sincerely doubt anybody of the wrong race got within 100 feet of a sensitive military installation while carrying a weapon.
In a non-conventional war this gets more complicated because nobody's wearing a uniform and you can't just shoot a guy for looking Uzbek in Pashto territory anymore. But the procedure here seems sound. If they know you're talking to known terrorists on the phone, and meeting with known terrorists, you get on the known terrorists list and they blow you up.
It's probable they screwed up on somebody, and blew up some terrorists pacifist cousin; but the alternative to drone warfare isn't that the UN sends in a Sheriff. It's a) ground troops, who have a real motive to shoot first (because if they don't and the target turns to mean harm, some of their buddies die), or b) piloted aircraft (which, in many cases, HAVE to drop their bombs on something or their fuel can't carry them all the way home).
Or that drone warfare has substantially more civilian casualties then any other form of warfare?
It seems that doing things at a distance has taken some limits off that used to exist. The "double tap" attacks are the use of tactics that we always claimed were abhorrent when "terrorists" did them.
Every war you start off saying everything the other side does is evil, and you end up doing some of it yourself. Most prominent is probably WW2, where prior to the war everyone argued that Imperial Germany's U-Boats were an unforgivable war crime, during the war everyone complained that Hitler's U-Boats were one of his major crimes, and after the War Nuremberg had to let Dönitz off because the Allies had been doing the exact same thing to Japan.
I'd agree the double-taps are troubling, but the problem with double-taps is they blow paramedics who have nothing to do with the war effort. To my knowledge Pakistan has not actually managed to implement any sort of health system in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. In fact everyone who lives there seems to be part of a paramilitary clan-like structure. This suggests to me that it's likely "first responders" are largely made up of the clan and paramilitary allies of the target, not dedicated health personnel, thus if the original attack was on a valid target the secondary attacks would largely hit valid targets.
Regardless, when the primary source of complaints about these tactics is unfair to the US Military that he's claiming you have to know the name of the dude carrying an RPG around Bin Laden's compound to claim he wasn't a civilian it's pretty hard to take the claims seriously.
Regardless, I didn't say everything the US Military has ever done is necessary for the world as a whole. I said there are things that need to be done, and only the US can do,
So, how about an example then?
I thought I gave one: Syria.
If we don't have the military capacity to turn the Syrian Air Force into slag on two minutes notice Assad doesn't agree to Putin's deal. Assad is allied with Hezbollah, which attacks Israeli civilians; while simultaneously using chemical weapons on his own civilians. If you're Israel, and you have an unwritten policy of appearing crazy aggressive, you can't allow that. You really can't stop it, but you have to try something. The something is not gonna be buy 1,000,000 puppies for Syrian refugees.
Or take Libya. If we don't intervene it turns into
Slashdot Mirror
That's not the same as claiming that "he claims to know all about China's and Russia's intelligence". He was saying that they didn't get the documents from him since he didn't have them after turning them over.
Re-read the quote. It said nothing about Russia.
What it said was that he knew the Chinese could not have gotten his document cache while he had it in Hong Kong because he knew exactly what they could do. Which means that even if he doesn't have an electronic copy of the document that told him how to beat the People's Republic's security, he has that info in his head somewhere.
I suspect he actually wants to to talk about that, but can't because the Russians probably made not talking about anybody's secrets condition #1. And Putin doesn't have a lot of checks on his power.
The National Security Agency (NSA ) of United States hacked into the Mexican president's public email account and gained deep insight into policymaking
OK, seriously? From his public email? Even Obama has a "public email" you can send shit to. Little old ladies and bent out of shape whack jobs pounding away at their keyboard send stuff to El Presidente's "public email".
Next...
Of course the Russian Foreign Service Security guy who hacks Obama's public email would write that he "gained deep insight" into Obama's secret thoughts this way. Otherwise he'd be deemed useless and have his budget cut.
From a non-American point-of-view you could probably gain a lot of little insights from the Obama admin's responses to their public email. You would know what Obama's dealing with at a grassroots level, for example. A very common way for countries to not make a concession is for them to politely say that if they do that their publics will freak out. Reading Obama's email would let Putin know when Obama was lying about that shit. You would not know much more about Obama's actual positions then he tells you himself because he's got to know it's trivial for a foreign agent to register john.smith@yahoo.com and shoot Obama an email, but you'd get real insights into the political constraints Obama had to deal with.
I can say nobody is surprised this happened. President Calderón would have been silly not to assume something like this.
Mexicans understand the world beyond Latin America a lot better then the rest of Latin America does. The US spies on everybody, everybody spies on the US, when anybody gets caught there's a lot of pretentious bitching because a the electorate doesn't understand this, but nobody takes it very seriously. Thus France's initial response to the NSA allegations was an extremely self-righteous defense of the Right to Privacy, and it was immediately followed by everyone who has ever met France going "WTF? You're a million times worse the NSA could ever hope to be." There's actually probably more spying between friends then enemies. Latvia got burned really badly back when Hitler (the supposed anti-Communist Crusader) sold them out to Stalin, so they'd be fools if they don't have plenty of ways to verify their current anti-Russian protector (aka: Barrack Hussein Obama) isn't doing it to them.
OTOH everyone else in Latin Amer4ica is acting like the entire world lied to them by stealing their email. Which is technically true, but it's also technically true that part of being a grown-up real nation is knowing that they will always steal your secrets.
Cool, secret courts who answer to no one! I AM THE LAW!
Re-read the post.
They answer to a specific Appellate Court, which answers to the Supremes. EPIC is trying to appeal straight to the Supremes, which the Supremes are not supposed to allow.
If they think there's a massive Constitutional issue at stake, and that an immediate Supreme Court ruling is the only thing that can solve the problem, they can ignore that. But they don't do that often. For example they didn't do it during the battle over ObamaCare. The last time they did it was probably Bush vs. Gore, which had to be decided by early January so we could have a President.
I doubt EPIC will convince the Supremes to make then the second case like that, because the world really won;t end if the NSA has 2 years of your email or 2.5, but it's worth a shot.
The NSA not only has the capability to violate client attorney privilege at every point in the course, and to threaten judges, lawyers and everyone up and down the line, they have demonstrated the will to ignore the courts already by ignoring the FISA courts rulings.
Not only should the supreme court rule on this before any lower court can, it should invalidate the entire domestic spying apparatus.
And that's likely just what will happen given the circumstances. Judges do not like their power being questioned.
Anti-NSA Activists are like Anti-Gun Control Activists. In principle I don't disagree with them that much, but their paranoia and self-righteous BS just piss the fuck out of me.
In this case I have to point that the police have guns. This gives them the practical ability to kill your ass with no warning. However unless you are a black male, or suffer untreated mental illness, they do not do that shit; so it's highly illogical to demand all cops be disarmed because lest they start shooting random perfectly sane white people.
By the same token the NSA is not likely to start blackmailing people anytime soon. If they tried to use somebody's weed habit against them all they'd have to do is take a road trip to Canada, upload a tearful video to Youtube, and roll in the dough as the first sane, white, non-Muslim oppressed by the evil NSA.
You don't pay much attention to the Courts. "Standing" is something that gets argued all the time, and it is solely about jurisdiction.
In this case the issue is that the Supremes almost never take cases without them being adjudicated at a lower level. Generally exceptions are extremely exceptionable -- think Bush vs. Gore, which actually includes a clause that it should not be referenced in future court rulings -- and involve cases where a definitive ruling is needed Right This Very Minute or Bad Things Happen.
If the Supremes think NSA data collection is really bad they might rule today, which is what EPIC wants. If they think it's less important then preventing the election of Al Gore they'll side with the administration.
In theory.
In practice if you piss them ioff by suing them they counter-sue your ass even if you paid the SEP fee.
Korea is smaller then either four individual countries in the EU. It's 1/10 the population of the EU. It's economy is based on exporting shit.
The Koreans do not win a tariff battle with the EU. The US and Japan might be able to force a draw in a tariff battle with the EU. But nobody else could win a tariff battle with the EU. It is a bigger economic bloc then the US.
So many ACs who don't understand the issue.
The patents they're taking about are "Standards Essential patents." Samsung long-ago agreed to license those patents on very good terms to anyone wanted to use them. This was a way to get their tech in pretty much every phone built. Then they realized their phones were such close copies of iPhone that they cou7ld not sell them, and they decided to sue Apple on the basis of these patents.
In other words they were NEVER allowed to sue anyone using these patents as long as that company paid the Standard fees. They are not going to be able to jack up the price, or suddenly sue people in five years because if they did they'd be forced into another one of these agreements.
Strictly speaking it's not a new price. It's the old price they have always been legally required to charge their competitors for these particular patents.
The entire issue here is that they agreed to license these patents on very liberal terms as a way to get everyone using their tech, and then when they realized that one of their competitors had better tech then them (Apple) they tried to take that deal away from that competitor.
You've actually just made the case against Samsung.
Samsung did some really good technical work, which almost everyone wanted to copy, so they agreed that the patents involved were "Standards Essential Patents" which would be licensed to everyone cheap. Changing their minds and saying "OK, everybody bat Apple can use those patents," was simply something they agreed they weren't allowed to do when they agreed to have the patents declared standards. Basically they were trying to force their #1 competitor out of their #1 market, and the legal system is not supposed to tolerate that shit. Just look at Apple and it's conviction for eBook price-fixing.
OTOH Apple did a bunch of decent technical work, and some truly mind-blowing design work. Then they sued people on the basis of the design patents. Since they never agreed not to do that, and it was trivial for Samsung to design it's way around said patents once they realized that courts enforce design patents, Samsung got it's ass reamed in court and nobody is worried that Samsung will be forced out of the smartphone market.
If you're going to explain to me how we can survive without SigInt you might actually have to do that.
Easily, and I shouldn't have to explain. It is a possibility.
You're making a positive claim, you do indeed have to explain.
No US Army since Grant's day has been without SigInt capability. that means that to get rid of the NSA, and all NSA-like agencies, you'd have to roll the US Military's entire electronic capability back to what it was in the 1850s. South Korea is not gonna stay allied to that. The Balts allied with a country that can protect them from Russia. US Grant cannot do that. The Israelis need allies who can decode encrypted radio messages for them. US Grant doesn't have radio. If all those folks switch to the Russians or Chinese they aren't going to become freer countries. Most of them would probably follow the example of Finland in the Cold War, and not be unfree but be kinda in the unfree camp; but I'm sure nobody would take advantage of the fact that the Chinese don't bitch about free elections.
I'm not saying your freedom is less important these alliances. But I am saying they exist, and "getting rid of the NSA or anything like the NSA" would change us from a country with a world-wide alliance network into a nuetral power.
And now the guy who doesn't read people's posts resorts to ad hominem
If you mean that I insulted you, then I definitely did. I also read your post, though.
Really?
You implicitly claim we can magically keep our status as everyone's ally without technology Grant had, then call me a fool for pointing out that won't work; and you still claim you read my posts?
Sometimes further comment is pointless.
Moreover he's conflating "warrants" with freedom.
A government that blatantly violates the constitution is a threat to our freedom.
We live in a country that has voter id laws that have already disenfranchised me, engages in stop-and-frisk, but the threat to American freedom is that some asshole can read your email using a warrant you disagree with? There has never been a time in the history of these United States when we weren't blatantly violating someone's rights. It always happens, 24/7. Hell, we had actual slavery in this country. And somehow we survived.
And you're convinced that freedom is dying because the Courts issued a warrant that inconveniences millions of middle-class white people. No shit those millions think the warrant's BS. I happen to agree with them. But the implication that one bad warrant spells an end to freedom is incredibly arrogant, especially given that you don't seem to care about the other ways which the government is actually oppressing people today.
And no, the fact they know who you talk to on the phone is not less important then my right to vote.
Warrants are a tool that promotes freedom. They are not the freedom itself.
I think you're just looking to score points here. Congrats.
arresting a Judge for improperly granting a warrant is, indeed insane.
We didn't arrest people before... so we shouldn't now? I don't really understand.
More importantly blatantly Unconsitutional. There's no statute you could use, so you'd have to pass a new law, which would be an law.
Yes... and? That's pretty much what I propose. We need new constitutional amendments and laws. I don't expect it to happen, since our government is completely corrupt, but it definitely needs to happen.
We made ex post facto statutes unconstitutional for a reason:
They make it really easy to arrest people that piss Congress off.
Crab fishermen protesting some change to fishing quotas? *bam* the quota was actually zero starting the day before last crab fishing season and everyone's going to j
I don't think you understand what Sig Int is.
Oh, I understand what it is, but to say that it's impossible for a country to exist without it is blatantly absurd.
In other words, just because you haven't bothered to learn anything about the NSA from anyone who actually knows what it does
That's not the problem; the problem is that you don't understand what I'm saying.
If you're going to explain to me how we can survive without SigInt you might actually have to do that.
It might also help if you'd read what I said. Re-read my posts. They don't apply to Denmark. They don't apply to the isolationist US of the 20s. They just apply to the current, which we live in, and is formally allied to something like a fifth of the human race.
You really don't get the point of warrants.
It seems that you don't get the point of freedom. Judges should not be signing such reaching, disgusting warrants to begin with, you fool.
And now the guy who doesn't read people's posts resorts to ad hominem How shocking. Moreover he's conflating "warrants" with freedom.
Dude, you do realize that in several countries that Democracies they have no warrants?
Warrants are a tool that promotes freedom. They are not the freedom itself.
As for prosecuting the Judge, do you have any idea how crazy that is?
The idea that he should be prosecuted is not crazy.
I'm not claiming that the NSA should not be reined in, but in a country that practiced slavery, Jim Crow, the Japanese Internement, etc. and arrested approximately zero of the enslavers, Jim Crow Sheriffs, Interners, etc. arresting a Judge for improperly granting a warrant is, indeed insane.
More importantly blatantly Unconsitutional. There's no statute you could use, so you'd have to pass a new law, which would be an law.
This is People's Tribunal-level law. And you will note that People's Tribunal's are a lot more anti-freedom then improperly granting a warrant.
As a country with alliances all over the world the US cannot be without signals intelligence.
It's completely possible.
I don't think you understand what Sig Int is. You know the guy listening to North Korean military radio? He's Signals Intelligence. You know the guy who put the bug on that ginormous Eagle Soviet Schoolchildren gave the US Ambassador in the 50s? He's Soviet signals intelligence. The guy who found the bug? Our signals intelligence. If you think the US Government can actually maintain it's massive system of world-wide alliances without access to ANY signals intelligence data you are simply mistaken. The South Koreans are not gonna stay allied to a country that refuses to listen to North Korean radio traffic because "a bunch of guys on the internet realized this other program we were doing, that had nothing to do with spying on North Korea, infringed their freedom."
Yeah we could probably do it with a different agency. But that agency would still be a SigInt agency, and therefore would be like the NSA.
In other words, just because you haven't bothered to learn anything about the NSA from anyone who actually knows what it does, that does not imply that it does nothing.
He's decided that since one Judge, with one set of rules from politicians, allows the government to keep a list of people he's called on his cell phone; no judges can ever be trusted. Moreover he's demanding the judge be prosecuted.
It's clearly more than just one judge. I have zero faith in the intelligence of the general public, but at the very minimum, there needs to be public oversight. What do we get with the NSA? Government thugs rubberstamping warrants for other government thugs.
As for prosecuting the judge, that makes complete sense. These people should be protecting people's constitutional rights, but they have knowingly and utterly failed to do so, even if they refuse to admit it.
Dude,
You really don't get the point of warrants. The point of a warrant is to document what the cops thought so that it can be challenged later at trial. In other words the bit of the Constitution that protects you from illicit searches and seizures is not, in practical terms, the Fourth Amendment. It's the Sixth Amendment. That's why almost no jurisdiction approves less then 99.9% of it's warrant requests.
As for prosecuting the Judge, do you have any idea how crazy that is? Basically what happened was simple: AQ attacked, and the American people freaked out, leading their elected representatives top create PRISM and make it secret. Then the American heard about PRISM, and freaked out again, leading to the low-level Judge who signed off on PRISM being sent to prison.
Hell, given that no Judge is gonna convict another Judge for following the law as it was understood at the time, how you gonna nail this guy? An extra-constitutional citizen's tribunal followed by a quick hanging?
1) How the fuck do you propose to run a government WITHOUT spying?
A government without something along the lines of the NSA could easily exist. Remember that freedom is more important than safety, and the government clearly can't be trusted to provide oversight for itself.
For one thing, the literal meaning of your statements is false, at least for the US. The NSA's job is Signals Intelligence. As a country with alliances all over the world the US cannot be without signals intelligence. I know you're using NSA as a synecdoche for abusive spying, but a) that little imprecision is a pet peeve of mine, and b) it's incredibly dumb tactics. If you convince the masses that the NSA is bad spying, and Obama transfers all NSA staff to other agencies you'll have a devil of a time convincing the masses not to declare victory and go home.
As to what you meant:
According to the OP we can't trust anyone with any spying capability because the Judges/politicians won't stop them from becoming a new NSA.
If he was arguing for more oversight, or different oversight, or even making a somewhat intelligent case about which spying we should restrict I would consider being somewhat nice to him. But he's not. He's decided that since one Judge, with one set of rules from politicians, allows the government to keep a list of people he's called on his cell phone; no judges can ever be trusted. Moreover he's demanding the judge be prosecuted.
Who said "suitable" was part of the definition of frontrunner? Fucking Dubya was the frontrunner for years.
Hillary is the prohibitive favorite to win the Democratic primary. Given the GOP's inability to appeal to anyone who isn;t white and above the age of 50 this makes her the prohibitive favorite to win the White House.
A couple points:
1) How the fuck do you propose to run a government WITHOUT spying?
All criminal investigations are spy-operations. Most foreign countries expect you to spy on them, and furthermore expect that the more you claim to never spy on anyone (read: Brazil and France) the more you spy. More importantly we are actually fighting a fucking war. No spying period means no spying on the Taliban.
You could rationally make a policy that spies should be reined in by someone, but the simple fact is that no government can happen at all unless it has access to some data people want to keep secret. That is, spying. We can argue over whether the current level of NSA spying is excessive, we can argue about the practical uses of storing everyone's email forever vs. the importance of privacy rights. We can't keep a government and not have it ever spy on anyone.
And getting rid of the government is probably the most anti-freedom thing you can do. No government does not magically lead to a utopia of everyone being nice. It leads to the KKK forcibly reducing the black population of the former Confederacy by 20 points.
2) Most people don't like NSA spying. But to most people the NSA is issue number four at best. The government shutdown, ObamaCare, and the approaching Debt Ceiling debacle are much more important.
Terrorism is a real thing, fighting it is worth doing. We are fighting a hot war in Afghanistan. Innocent people in other countries are frequently attacked by groups funded in the US like Al Shabab. Most people agree you need somebody spying on the terrorists to prevent them from acting. OTOH it's really hard to tell who should be spied upon. That's why the American people thought the Courts were picking which numbers the NSA got info on.
If Hillary can come up with a plan that sounds like it will cut down on the data-from-random-people the NSA currently gets, without making it impossible for the NSA to access data on everyone else; most Americans will be quite happy with her.
Sorry to have to say that. But the UK are a Constitutional Monarchy. She didnt frequented the Geopolitical classes?
Apparently all you learned about government you learned from computer games.
As long as actual political power is held by elected officials, and basic freedoms are respected, the country is considered a democracy. Constitutional Monarchies are almost always Democracies, because if the Constitution isn't Democratic the Monarch is almost always in charge. Republics are iffy, because all a "Republic" is a country with no hereditary head of state. That could be Hitler, or it could be Obama.
Dude,
The state department doesn't order the NSA around. It doesn't order the CIA around. It feeds the CIA intel, partly in the form of reports from State Department staff and partly in the form of reports from the governments they're working with; and uses Intel and tools from both, but it doesn't have any control over FISA.
Head in the sand? At least my sand is American. You seem to be living in a country where political parties are highly centralized organizations that truly have distinct points of view. We don't live in Canada. There is no guy in DC who has the power to over-ride a local party's selection for candidates. There is no guy in Columbus who does that for Ohio. This is not Norway or Sweden. There is no centrally-controlled list of candidates, giving the central controllers the right to determine who actually makes it into Parliament.
What we do have is a bunch of assholes who have a platform that kinda-sorta-maybe fits together without contradicting itself, and manages to bribe enough special interest groups that they get 45% of the vote with no work at all. Then we have another bunch of assholes whose done the same damn thing with another 45%. Nobody leaves the assholes because if you vote for a non-asshole candidate you don't get a non-asshole elected official. You get the wrong asshole, and then you get screwed.
It's clear that the American system, and the American people, do not actually want a bunch of centrally-controlled ideological options on their ballots. If they did they wouldn't vote for the generic assholes, they'd vote for one third parties where everything is decided at a small Convention.
If you want to change that system you have two sensible options:
1) Join the assholes.
2) Change the legal framework so that a party with a strictly ideological point-of-view and a much more centralized decision-making structure (like the Libertarians or Greens) has a shot at getting seats. Single member districts won't work. Multi-member districts could be useful, but if they're two or three-candidate districts the Big 2 will still dominate due to math.
Option 3, use your ballot line to run for the exact same offices the big parties are running for, doesn't really work.
You're misinterpreting what you do as political party work. It's definitely work, but it's not the work a political party is supposed to do in the American system. It's the work a small NGO is supposed to do. What political parties do is create massive coalitions capable of protecting the interest groups that support them, and vetting candidates so that Organic farmers with poor hygiene don't literally stink up the debate. It doesn't work perfectly, and it can only be called "clean" after comparing it to pretty much every other system, but it has managed to not destroy the Republic for 200-250 odd years. And, given how argumentative Americans are, that's a pretty big accomplishment.
Re: debates: who cares what you deserve? I have a Masters degree in Management. I think I deserve a job with $40k and benefits. Unfortunately the people who give out such jobs disagree, therefore I'm stuck at $19k in retail. Until you win races the GOP and Dems ain't gonna bother showing up to a debate that includes you, which means nobody will watch such a debate, which means you don't invites.
Now if you tell me you've got a plan to create an MMP system in the Ohio Statehouse, and one of those famous Libertarian billionaires has given you the funds to actually make this happen, I'll be impressed. You'll probably get a couple actual elected officials out of the deal, and it would be much harder to disinvite a serving State Rep. If you tell me you're giving up your ballot line to focus on that I'll be more impressed. It's not like the ballot line's doing you any good.
If you tell me you've got the same petition drive this year as last year, and your plan is still to hope the Two Parties piss everyone off at the same time, I'll give you the definition of insanity.
You've got causality backwards. Good candidates don't create votes by sheer force of will, they maximize the votes available from their partisan coalition while persuading some statistically fraction of the 5-10% of swing voters to go their way. Candidate recruitment is very important for third parties in the rare cases where a third party candidate truly maximizing his vote can get 35%. Thus both Nader and Johnson did much better then generic Green or Libertarian would be expected to do, but neither came close to hitting their 5% goal.
Which means if Libertarian people want to influence public policy they have to be voters first, and candidates second. They have to show up to most primaries, and be active members of their local parties. Some are trying this. They do that and all of a sudden the People a Congressman Must Fear are libertarians. The people who decide who gets the local party endorsement for the State Senate seat -- a religious right type, or a half-Libertarian similar to Paul Ryan -- are Libertarians. It doesn;t work on the short-term two-year timescale most people think of, but then politics in a country that spans a continent isn't supposed to turn 180 degrees just because some schmuck gave a kick-ass speech.
One of my guiding principles in politics is that you can accomplish damn near anything if you don't want the credit. It's really easy to get laws passed when a) you're doing all the work, but b) you're letting the partisan sleazebags who actually win elections take the credit on TV. Third parties actually do the opposite. They do very little actual work because they don't have a relationship with most voters, and they demand lots of credit (ie: positive TV Time in terms of debate slots and public financing of elections).
My point on GitMo and taxes was precisely that the Dems didn't insist Bush change those policies or else. They decided they'd lost that fight because he had a veto, therefore they didn't fight the fight. They voted to continue the Appropriations for GitMo, and didn't hold the entire budget hostage to tax demands.
I understand the GOP's political logic. I even understand how a principled person could come to the conclusion that fighting ObamaCare is worth closing the government for weeks.
What terrifies the fuck out of me is that the way our government is designed there are lots of opportunities for a principled person to bring everything to a halt. If the principled thing to do when you disagree with the President is halt everything then everything is gonna halt a whole lot of the time. Frequently our legislature gets compared to the Polish Sejm of the late 18th century, where all decisions had to be unanimous, any decision could be overturned by one guy changing his mind, and the inevitable result was that strong Poland dominating Central Europe of the 1630s was gone by 1800.
Northeastern Conservatives say that, but there's nothing stopping them from forming a third party. Legally it's pretty easy in that region. Lieberman made his own party on like two weeks notice after he lost the Democratic primary, Maine has a fairly successful third party movement, the Senator from Vermont is technically independent (altho he caucuses with Democrats and refers to himself as a Socialist), and New York State has that weird system where everyone is the nominee of at least three parties. Northeastern Republicans'd rather be relevant in DC, as Obama's gettable Republican vote, then win state-wide elections.
In Michigan and Ohio third parties tend to be equally weird. You get a lot of people who want the prestige of being the Gubernatorial candidate, but don't want to put in years of work building relationships with thousands of party activists. You get a lot of people who can't mentally subordinate their personal goals to the goals of an organization, and therefore prefer a Party that's so small they are the entire party in their town to a party that has a couple people regularly show up at meetings. You also get people who won't moderate themselves at all, for any reason.
Did you mean to imply there's some guy in DC picking drone targets at random?
They're picking drone targets on "behaviour" now. They don't even know who they're bombing - they just bomb people who "smell wrong".
That's not unusual in wartime. It's not like the League of Nations had a massive website listing all legitimate combatants that everyone could access on two seconds notice. It's true uniforms simplified that situation in Europe, but in the Pacific I sincerely doubt anybody of the wrong race got within 100 feet of a sensitive military installation while carrying a weapon.
In a non-conventional war this gets more complicated because nobody's wearing a uniform and you can't just shoot a guy for looking Uzbek in Pashto territory anymore. But the procedure here seems sound. If they know you're talking to known terrorists on the phone, and meeting with known terrorists, you get on the known terrorists list and they blow you up.
It's probable they screwed up on somebody, and blew up some terrorists pacifist cousin; but the alternative to drone warfare isn't that the UN sends in a Sheriff. It's a) ground troops, who have a real motive to shoot first (because if they don't and the target turns to mean harm, some of their buddies die), or b) piloted aircraft (which, in many cases, HAVE to drop their bombs on something or their fuel can't carry them all the way home).
Or that drone warfare has substantially more civilian casualties then any other form of warfare?
It seems that doing things at a distance has taken some limits off that used to exist. The "double tap" attacks are the use of tactics that we always claimed were abhorrent when "terrorists" did them.
Every war you start off saying everything the other side does is evil, and you end up doing some of it yourself. Most prominent is probably WW2, where prior to the war everyone argued that Imperial Germany's U-Boats were an unforgivable war crime, during the war everyone complained that Hitler's U-Boats were one of his major crimes, and after the War Nuremberg had to let Dönitz off because the Allies had been doing the exact same thing to Japan.
I'd agree the double-taps are troubling, but the problem with double-taps is they blow paramedics who have nothing to do with the war effort. To my knowledge Pakistan has not actually managed to implement any sort of health system in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. In fact everyone who lives there seems to be part of a paramilitary clan-like structure. This suggests to me that it's likely "first responders" are largely made up of the clan and paramilitary allies of the target, not dedicated health personnel, thus if the original attack was on a valid target the secondary attacks would largely hit valid targets.
Regardless, when the primary source of complaints about these tactics is unfair to the US Military that he's claiming you have to know the name of the dude carrying an RPG around Bin Laden's compound to claim he wasn't a civilian it's pretty hard to take the claims seriously.
Regardless, I didn't say everything the US Military has ever done is necessary for the world as a whole. I said there are things that need to be done, and only the US can do,
So, how about an example then?
I thought I gave one:
Syria.
If we don't have the military capacity to turn the Syrian Air Force into slag on two minutes notice Assad doesn't agree to Putin's deal. Assad is allied with Hezbollah, which attacks Israeli civilians; while simultaneously using chemical weapons on his own civilians. If you're Israel, and you have an unwritten policy of appearing crazy aggressive, you can't allow that. You really can't stop it, but you have to try something. The something is not gonna be buy 1,000,000 puppies for Syrian refugees.
Or take Libya. If we don't intervene it turns into