having to do with deeply held suspicion of government power.
But also with the nature of the social contract between government and the people.
In Sweden, you have government intrusion to a point many Americans would find unacceptable, but you also have a welfare state that truly cares for the people - world class medical care, housing, education, etc. You trade off privacy for some real benefits.
In the US we do not have that social contract.
We are losing our privacy to government intrusion, but we are not gaining any real benefits from it. It is a strictly one-sided transaction, that benefits the government entirely and the people not at all.
"Hillarycare" would represent a right wing alternative to their existing health care system. Most advanced countries would have to reduce the scope of government involvement (including subtantial privitization) in their health care systems to match what Hillary has proposed. Since almost all of these countries have longer lifespans, lower infant mortality, etc. than the USA, they are unlikely to adopt a health care plan as right-wing as Hillary's
And "it takes a village" would represent common sense consensus among most societies (apart from the US). Someone who proposed the common US view of "I'm looking out for number one everyone else can go die for all I care" would be thought a dangerous sociopath. A country based on "looking out for number one" would be viewed as a threat to world stability.
The poor can and will always be better served through individual actions than through government programs.
Comparing poverty rates in advanced countries, and looking at those with comprehensive welfare states and those without leads one to the opposite conclusion. I would hazard a guess that a simlar relationship holds within the US. Those states with the most beggarly welfare systems have the highest poverty rates (in general).
I can easily find some statistics to back up my statement.
Do you have anything other than right-wing libertarian rhetoric to back up yours?
Let's look at empirical evidence to test this claim:
According to the CIA factbook ( https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2102rank.html ) the United States ranks 29th in overall life expectancy, ahead of Cyprus and behind Bosnia and Herzegovina. Major countries toppping the list include Japan, Sweden, Switzerland, Australia and France. All these countries have government-sponsored healthcare of some sort with near-universal coverage.
Again from the CIA factbook, infant mortality numbers tell a similar story. The US ranks slightly below South Korea and above Croatia in the rankings. Sweden, Japan, Iceland, France, Finland, and Norway have the lowest rates among major countries.
Other health statistics tell a similar story. Among major industrialized countries, those with comprehensive government health coverage have better population-wide metrics than the USA.
The conclusion I reach is that privatized health care only makes it worse.
And finally, this is all private surveillance instead of government so there's nothing wrong with it.
The laws in many jurisdictions do not support this assertion. Labor codes do restrict the ability of employers to control their employees' off-hour activities.
As a general statement of law, you are wrong.
I think what you meant to say was something like:
It gives me a great thrill to be able to control my employees' entire life. I enjoy being a slavemaster. To me, freedom means absolute control over anyone unfortunate enough to work for me. I have even adopted a pseudo-libertarian idelogoy to justify this control as part of the nature of society.
A society where I can be fired for expressing a political opinion is not a society where I would feel free to express ANY opinion.
In their more advanced stages, the dictatorships of Eastern Europe relied more on the types of sanction you support than on over repression to maintain control of the population.
If you expressed the "wrong" opinion to the wrong person, you may find your career ended, you housing yanked, or your child's chances of college vanish.
The fact that your corporations are "free" to subject me to this treatment does not make me any more "free" than if it were the government doing so. In either case I am unemployed, homeless, or without a future for my family. All you have done is outsource the repressive functions of the government to private entities.
Your "freedom" for corporations to penalize people for their off-hour political opinions is granting an abstract economic entity the right to supress an individual's freedom of expression.
Freedom is something that people exercise - it is not a power delegated to private corporations to restrict people's individual rights. Corporate "personhood" is a myth created in the late 19th century designed for this specific purpose.
In order to effectively restrict economic retaliation against free speech, you would have to remove most all freedom from commerce (Yes, you must buy the soup made by Nazi-commie Satanist Pedophiles, because they have the freedom to be that way.), and that ends up stifling a whole lot more freedom of a whole lot more people.
All that is necessary is a labor code that restricts the ability of emplerys to retaliate against employees' off-hours activities, along with some mechanism to enforce this provision.
It is well within the rights of governments in capitalist nations to determine what is or is not enforceable in a contract. A contract is ultimately created by the state and enforced by the mechanisms of the state (leaving aside the "contracts" enforced by private thugs and organized crime).
You do not need to eliminate a free economy, you do not need state socialism, you do not need a centrally controlled economy to do this. Your argument to this effect is a classic "straw man".
The notion of a contract is central to capitalist economies. Enforcement of non-retaliation via regulation of contracts is consistent with the basis of free capitalism.
And BTW, states within the USA have the ability to set their own labor codes. Some states do in fact have provisions restricting the ability of employers to terminate or penalize employees for off-hours activities. California is one such state. These provisions have not lead these states to "remove most all freedom from commerce" (as opposed to states like Texas, with a near-feudal labor code).
They thought since gold was wealth, importing vast quantities of gold from their American colonies would make Spain vastly wealthy.
Instead it created massive price inflation.
More gold did not create more food nor any other useful products. These products are the true measure of wealth in an economy. Money is just a convenient measure of accounts.
The original concept of "Rockoons" was developed by Cmdr. Lee Lewis, Cmdr. G. Halvorson, S. F. Singer, and James A. Van Allen during the Aerobee rocket firing cruise of the U.S.S. Norton Sound on March 1, 1949....
As TIME reported in 1959, "Van Allen's 'Rockoons' could not be fired in Iowa for fear that the spent rockets would strike an Iowan or his house." So Van Allen convinced the U.S. Coast Guard to let him fire his rockoons from the icebreaker Eastwind that was bound for Greenland. "The first balloon rose properly to 70,000 ft., but the rocket hanging under it did not fire. The second Rockoon behaved in the same maddening way. On the theory that extreme cold at high altitude might have stopped the clockwork supposed to ignite the rockets, Van Allen heated cans of orange juice, snuggled them into the third Rockoon's gondola, and wrapped the whole business in insulation. The rocket fired."
As you stated, to ensure you cannot easily be influenced to divulge classified information.
Laws and social rules have side effects in addition to their state purposes. Sometimes these side effects are more significant than the original explicit reason for the rule.
The clearance process has some other side effects I think are useful to the powers that be:
1. They acclimate people to the nation that highly invasive reviews of personal habits by the government are not only acceptable, but are a good thing
2. They make folks with a clearance think twice about their private behavior, for concern that it might affect their clearance. Example was the case made elsewhere, where someone bought a truck "over their salary grade" and lost his clearance, being forced to play janitor. Suddenly "am I going too much in debt" or "should I befriend this non-US citizen" become concerns, even though these are both perfectly legal things to do.
This is similar in effect to much airline security - it slowly acclimates people to invasions of privacy, and discourages behavior and attitudes that may be perfectly legal but are considered "troublesome"
In short, it is creating a populace that is willing to accept diminishing privacy and is willing to curtain their private behavior for fear it will reflect badly on them in the future.
This is why clearances have been (and should be) restricted to cases where there is provable (not speculative) harm to national security from mishandling information.
This is why requiring clearances from increasing groups of individuals who do not handle this (explicitly labeled) information is bad.
For a Top Secret, you have to undergo a "lifestyle polygram". Nobody who has done this has told me exactly what the questions are, but they have suggested that they are extremely invasive.
Even for lesser clearances, they can (and will) interview neighbors, family and childhood friends.
This goes far beyond the public records and credit reports that private sector employers are demanding.
Also note that there are very high barriers-to-entry for both oil companies and for ISPs, at least for entities of any size as to provide customers with an alternative to the incumbents. The days when anyone with a fast data link and a closet full of modems could become an ISP are long gone.
High barriers to entry = an effective monopoly. The ability of the marketplace to regulate these entities is severely hampered. The traditional rememdy in the US is regulation. In other countries it have been nationalization.
The NSA stuff is very thorough, but keep in mind their basic security policy is very likely different from yours. In some cases you will want things tighter, in most other cases, you will be less stringent. A lot of NSA stuff is associated with the Common Criteria certification, specifically the descendendt-of-C2, the old military-style discretionary access control (DAC). DAC is a reasonable fit to certain types of commercial security. In some cases DAC is too strict - requiring a server to BSOD because the audit log is full is maybe a bit much. On the other hand, commercial DAC requires things military DAC may not - like being able to separate sys admin duties into separate roles.
Bottom line - NSA is good, thorough, and very professional, but keep in mind it is your company and your data, and the technical security needs to map to the organization's policies
Freedom of Speech does NOT mean Freedom from Consequences. Freedom of Speech is a right, but rights are not something to be used lightly. If you don't believe in your viewpoint enough to make sacrifices, then maybe you should reconsider whether you want to make your viewpoint public.
It was largely private methods that silenced dissent in the 1950's. Very very few individuals were actually prosecuted for their political affiliations (maybe a dozen were charged under the Smith Act).
For the most part it was private boycotts that prevented individuals with inconvenient political affiliations from finding employment or enjoying any sort of reasonable existance. Concerted private action effectively silenced dissent during this period.
If exercising "free speech" results in being unable to find a job, unable to find housing, having my children harassed at school, and my family being the recipient of anonymous threats, then very few people will feel "free" to speak out.
In a typical American fashion we find the private sector is much more efficient than the government at implementing all sorts of policies, including supressing expression.
Research is a small community of specialists. For a given research project there are probably only a few people in the world who have the ability and expertise to fulfil the research. And if these are abroad, what can you do about it?
In the US these days, you refuse to support the research. Better that the research is never done than some nefarious foreigner gets the benefit.
I hope the EU sees this as a golden opportunity to fund cutting edge research that US xenophobia forbids.
You might also wonder - particularly given the nature of the offence - just why a certain individual went from being a highly-regarded UN weapons inspector into being an ardent denier of the existence of WMD Because there aren't any WMD in Iraq?
You might also wonder - particularly given the nature of the offence - just why a certain individual went from being a highly-regarded UN weapons inspector into being an ardent denier of the existence of WMD in Iraq and one of the Iraqi regime's most strident supporters.
You might wonder if it had anything to do with, say, visits involving inspections at Iraqi childrens' prisons and orphanages.
You might Google for the sexual practices of family members of a certain Iraqi dictator.
You might wonder about the propensity of a certain Iraqi dictator to employ large armies of people to act as "Inspector Plods" and perform counterintelligence work in order to pre-emptively compromise any potential threats.
You might even conclude that a certain former UN Weapons Inspector's leaked arrest record answers more questions than it raises
You might wonder whether the above constitutes slander and libel.
If I am neither ashamed of the activity, nor it is illegal, how can it be used against me?
Too late... I've already done things that are illegal and that I am ashamed of. Of course this was quite a while ago, but still, I should really keep my opinions to myself from now on. Never know when someone might dig up something from 20 years ago.
Free speech is a right only for those who have nothing to hide.
Of course, this means very few folks now actually have the right to free speech....
Slashdot Mirror
When I was growing up in the 1960s, we were taught the US was the freeset country in the World.
Now apparently the standard is "We are not as bad as Iran"
Proof that if you lower your standards enough, anything can be made to look acceptable
having to do with deeply held suspicion of government power.
But also with the nature of the social contract between government and the people.
In Sweden, you have government intrusion to a point many Americans would find unacceptable, but you also have a welfare state that truly cares for the people - world class medical care, housing, education, etc. You trade off privacy for some real benefits.
In the US we do not have that social contract.
We are losing our privacy to government intrusion, but we are not gaining any real benefits from it. It is a strictly one-sided transaction, that benefits the government entirely and the people not at all.
"Hillarycare" would represent a right wing alternative to their existing health care system. Most advanced countries would have to reduce the scope of government involvement (including subtantial privitization) in their health care systems to match what Hillary has proposed. Since almost all of these countries have longer lifespans, lower infant mortality, etc. than the USA, they are unlikely to adopt a health care plan as right-wing as Hillary's
And "it takes a village" would represent common sense consensus among most societies (apart from the US). Someone who proposed the common US view of "I'm looking out for number one everyone else can go die for all I care" would be thought a dangerous sociopath. A country based on "looking out for number one" would be viewed as a threat to world stability.
The poor can and will always be better served through individual actions than through government programs.
Comparing poverty rates in advanced countries, and looking at those with comprehensive welfare states and those without leads one to the opposite conclusion. I would hazard a guess that a simlar relationship holds within the US. Those states with the most beggarly welfare systems have the highest poverty rates (in general).
I can easily find some statistics to back up my statement.
Do you have anything other than right-wing libertarian rhetoric to back up yours?
They can only make it worse.
Let's look at empirical evidence to test this claim:
According to the CIA factbook ( https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2102rank.html ) the United States ranks 29th in overall life expectancy, ahead of Cyprus and behind Bosnia and Herzegovina. Major countries toppping the list include Japan, Sweden, Switzerland, Australia and France. All these countries have government-sponsored healthcare of some sort with near-universal coverage.
Again from the CIA factbook, infant mortality numbers tell a similar story. The US ranks slightly below South Korea and above Croatia in the rankings. Sweden, Japan, Iceland, France, Finland, and Norway have the lowest rates among major countries.
Other health statistics tell a similar story. Among major industrialized countries, those with comprehensive government health coverage have better population-wide metrics than the USA.
The conclusion I reach is that privatized health care only makes it worse.
Yes, facts do have a well known liberal bias....
And finally, this is all private surveillance instead of government so there's nothing wrong with it.
The laws in many jurisdictions do not support this assertion. Labor codes do restrict the ability of employers to control their employees' off-hour activities.
As a general statement of law, you are wrong.
I think what you meant to say was something like:
It gives me a great thrill to be able to control my employees' entire life. I enjoy being a slavemaster. To me, freedom means absolute control over anyone unfortunate enough to work for me. I have even adopted a pseudo-libertarian idelogoy to justify this control as part of the nature of society.
A society where I can be fired for expressing a political opinion is not a society where I would feel free to express ANY opinion.
In their more advanced stages, the dictatorships of Eastern Europe relied more on the types of sanction you support than on over repression to maintain control of the population.
If you expressed the "wrong" opinion to the wrong person, you may find your career ended, you housing yanked, or your child's chances of college vanish.
The fact that your corporations are "free" to subject me to this treatment does not make me any more "free" than if it were the government doing so. In either case I am unemployed, homeless, or without a future for my family. All you have done is outsource the repressive functions of the government to private entities.
Your "freedom" for corporations to penalize people for their off-hour political opinions is granting an abstract economic entity the right to supress an individual's freedom of expression.
Freedom is something that people exercise - it is not a power delegated to private corporations to restrict people's individual rights. Corporate "personhood" is a myth created in the late 19th century designed for this specific purpose.
In order to effectively restrict economic retaliation against free speech, you would have to remove most all freedom from commerce (Yes, you must buy the soup made by Nazi-commie Satanist Pedophiles, because they have the freedom to be that way.), and that ends up stifling a whole lot more freedom of a whole lot more people.
All that is necessary is a labor code that restricts the ability of emplerys to retaliate against employees' off-hours activities, along with some mechanism to enforce this provision.
It is well within the rights of governments in capitalist nations to determine what is or is not enforceable in a contract. A contract is ultimately created by the state and enforced by the mechanisms of the state (leaving aside the "contracts" enforced by private thugs and organized crime).
You do not need to eliminate a free economy, you do not need state socialism, you do not need a centrally controlled economy to do this. Your argument to this effect is a classic "straw man".
The notion of a contract is central to capitalist economies. Enforcement of non-retaliation via regulation of contracts is consistent with the basis of free capitalism.
And BTW, states within the USA have the ability to set their own labor codes. Some states do in fact have provisions restricting the ability of employers to terminate or penalize employees for off-hours activities. California is one such state. These provisions have not lead these states to "remove most all freedom from commerce" (as opposed to states like Texas, with a near-feudal labor code).
They thought since gold was wealth, importing vast quantities of gold from their American colonies would make Spain vastly wealthy.
Instead it created massive price inflation.
More gold did not create more food nor any other useful products. These products are the true measure of wealth in an economy. Money is just a convenient measure of accounts.
When an engine fails at 35,000 feet, you start emptying your bank account
This reply illustrates how far the USA has fallen since I was a child in the 1960s.
It used to be that the USA could rightfully brag about how it was the most free country in the world.
Now we brag about being "better than Russia"
If you set the standard low enough, any atrocity can be justified.
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockoon
I think that particular nucleic acid sequence translates to:
"All your base are belong to us"
Power without ethics IS terrorism
As you stated, to ensure you cannot easily be influenced to divulge classified information.
Laws and social rules have side effects in addition to their state purposes. Sometimes these side effects are more significant than the original explicit reason for the rule.
The clearance process has some other side effects I think are useful to the powers that be:
1. They acclimate people to the nation that highly invasive reviews of personal habits by the government are not only acceptable, but are a good thing
2. They make folks with a clearance think twice about their private behavior, for concern that it might affect their clearance. Example was the case made elsewhere, where someone bought a truck "over their salary grade" and lost his clearance, being forced to play janitor. Suddenly "am I going too much in debt" or "should I befriend this non-US citizen" become concerns, even though these are both perfectly legal things to do.
This is similar in effect to much airline security - it slowly acclimates people to invasions of privacy, and discourages behavior and attitudes that may be perfectly legal but are considered "troublesome"
In short, it is creating a populace that is willing to accept diminishing privacy and is willing to curtain their private behavior for fear it will reflect badly on them in the future.
This is why clearances have been (and should be) restricted to cases where there is provable (not speculative) harm to national security from mishandling information.
This is why requiring clearances from increasing groups of individuals who do not handle this (explicitly labeled) information is bad.
For a Top Secret, you have to undergo a "lifestyle polygram". Nobody who has done this has told me exactly what the questions are, but they have suggested that they are extremely invasive.
Even for lesser clearances, they can (and will) interview neighbors, family and childhood friends.
This goes far beyond the public records and credit reports that private sector employers are demanding.
People were beaten and killed to ensure that race would not be a factor in providing public accomodations.
The folks who found for civil rights had more actual physical courage than 99% of the posters on Slashdot ever will.
Also note that there are very high barriers-to-entry for both oil companies and for ISPs, at least for entities of any size as to provide customers with an alternative to the incumbents. The days when anyone with a fast data link and a closet full of modems could become an ISP are long gone.
High barriers to entry = an effective monopoly. The ability of the marketplace to regulate these entities is severely hampered. The traditional rememdy in the US is regulation. In other countries it have been nationalization.
Bottom line - NSA is good, thorough, and very professional, but keep in mind it is your company and your data, and the technical security needs to map to the organization's policies
It was largely private methods that silenced dissent in the 1950's. Very very few individuals were actually prosecuted for their political affiliations (maybe a dozen were charged under the Smith Act).
For the most part it was private boycotts that prevented individuals with inconvenient political affiliations from finding employment or enjoying any sort of reasonable existance. Concerted private action effectively silenced dissent during this period.
If exercising "free speech" results in being unable to find a job, unable to find housing, having my children harassed at school, and my family being the recipient of anonymous threats, then very few people will feel "free" to speak out.
In a typical American fashion we find the private sector is much more efficient than the government at implementing all sorts of policies, including supressing expression.
In the US these days, you refuse to support the research. Better that the research is never done than some nefarious foreigner gets the benefit.
I hope the EU sees this as a golden opportunity to fund cutting edge research that US xenophobia forbids.
Maybe it wasn't WHAT he said, but HOW he said it?
That he may have insulted the wrong DARPA official with an off-the-cuff remark?
Never assume devious political motives when the mechanations of government egos provides a simpler explanation.
"California Lawyer", June 1997, p 39-41 article entitled "Hacker's Secrets"
Kevin found FISA wiretaps to the Israeli, PRC, and South African enbassies. Also a bunch of lines going to the building housing the ACLU.
Because there aren't any WMD in Iraq?
You might also wonder - particularly given the nature of the offence - just why a certain individual went from being a highly-regarded UN weapons inspector into being an ardent denier of the existence of WMD in Iraq and one of the Iraqi regime's most strident supporters.
You might wonder if it had anything to do with, say, visits involving inspections at Iraqi childrens' prisons and orphanages.
You might Google for the sexual practices of family members of a certain Iraqi dictator.
You might wonder about the propensity of a certain Iraqi dictator to employ large armies of people to act as "Inspector Plods" and perform counterintelligence work in order to pre-emptively compromise any potential threats.
You might even conclude that a certain former UN Weapons Inspector's leaked arrest record answers more questions than it raises
You might wonder whether the above constitutes slander and libel.
Too late... I've already done things that are illegal and that I am ashamed of. Of course this was quite a while ago, but still, I should really keep my opinions to myself from now on. Never know when someone might dig up something from 20 years ago.
Free speech is a right only for those who have nothing to hide.
Of course, this means very few folks now actually have the right to free speech....