As I like to point out liberals and libertarians used to be allies when it came to personal (non-economic) freedoms. Back in the 80s. Maybe early 90s. At least that's how I remember it. Was it 9/11 that changed that? The police state seems to truly have bipartisan support now.
You seem to be confusing things that sometimes happen in the US with things that always happen in the US.
I don't recall claiming that any of my points always happen. They do however happen with sufficient frequency that it is a fair criticism of freedom in the US.
1. I've seen a dui roadblock once in the US (another one in Canada). The officer asked a couple questions ("had I been drinking?" "no") then let me on my way. It's not like the Iraqi style checkpoints where the whole vehicle gets searched over.
You were simply lucky and you probably were willing to be interrogated. I am not willing to be interrogated by them when I have done nothing wrong.
2. That's a generalization. Some airports just have metal detectors. If you're flying on a private plane you won't see any of that. Pretty much the same in other countries.
They are fair generalizations. It is true that some of the time you are allowed to simply go through a metal detector, but not all of the time. Many people have been abused due to this insane system that no other country has had. And I wasn't referring to private planes. I was referring to commercial air travel which is what the vast majority of people use to travel long distances.
3. That may be true for some police officers (the ones you see on youtube), but you're not going to read about the millions of friendly interactions that happen.
Again I didn't mean to imply that 100% of police officers are abusive sociopaths, but I do think that in the US the majority of them are.
I bet you could find similar bad apple officers in other countries.
Not nearly as often. At least that has been my experience. I have never actually met a (male) police officer in the US that did not have that sort of angry, aggressive, bully kind of personality. In other countries I have found that such people are the exception rather than the rule. And youtube seems to bear this out. Search for "police brutality" and see how many of the resulting videos took place in the US.
As for an American freedom most countries don't have - out first amendment rights are a great example.
I don't think this is true. You may think you have more free speech rights on paper, but in the real world you do not.
In the US we have may have free speech compared to China or Cuba or Russia, but not compared to most Western European countries. There is a long list of countries with equivalant free speech rights to ours. We are not so special in this regard. As someone has pointed out probably the only freedom we have that is unique to the US is our freedom to own a gun in certain states.
You seem to think that there are all these perfect countries outside of the US, but failed to list a single one of them (aside from the ones with friendly police - Cuba, Laos, Columbia, and Malaysia)
There are no perfect countries and I never claimed there were. It's generally only Americans who think their own country is more or less perfect. Compared to the US, Cuba, Laos, Colombia, and Malaysia all have police who tend to be relatively normal human beings who don't have an aggressive mililtary war-like mentality toward citizens. This is based on my personal experience living in these countries and interacting with actual police officers on occassion compared to my experiences with US police.
You seem to think that there are all these perfect countries outside of the US, but failed to list a single one of them
I haven't listed a single one because I don't think there are any perfect countries. Most countries overall are just as bad as the US when it comes to freedom overall. I wasn't arguing that there existed some great free society that we could all move to. It doesn't exist. Some
It is also practically, or effectively, impossible to own a handgun and use it for it's intended purpose - defense of one's person - in Canada, and most of the world.
The right to own a gun is pretty feeble in a number of US states. Where I live it is almost impossible, although a lot depends on the specific town you live in. Basically you have to give the chief of police in your town a very, very good reason and "I want to be able to defend myself" is not considered one.
OTOH there are states like Wyoming and Vermont where you don't even need a permit to buy a gun. There is no need to get permission. The second amendment is the only permit you need. It's stuff like that that makes me want to move to Wyoming. Admittedly this sort of thing is probably unique to the US, although to only a few states. I'm not sure foreigners appreciate how much gun laws vary by state. In New York for instance firearms and any other defensive weapon like mace or pepper spray or stun guns are effectively illegal. Even fake guns are illegal there.
telling us operational details of classified programs we knew existed in 2006
Since he didn't reveal anything that wasn't already known for 7 years I guess he hasn't harmed the US in any way and is not guilty of any crime. Releasing classified material that is already well known is an absurd charge to make. It means that he is 100% innocent of the crime he is accused of.
Imagine, for a moment, what it'd be like if all the excitable zealots clamoring to overthrow our government had their way?
Uh. I am one of those people. I believe that the only way to stop sliding down this slippery slope into tyrannical police state misery is to start forming a rebel army and maybe in 50 years or so start a second civil war. This time the slaves that we want to free are ourselves. I'd settle for say Wyoming and Montana and maybe Alaska seceding from the union and resetting the timer back to 1776 and resetting the version number of The Freedom Experiment to 2.0. It would be nice if we could get Oregon or Washington State so that the new country within a country would not be landlocked.
Do you see now how you can draw no straight-forward conclusions from that slide? And do you understand how all this excitement in absence of knowledge may generate misguided action?
Actually I'm now convinced that your protest is not genuine. I suspect you of being either a shill or otherwise having an agenda. Those slides are so obvious. They are not in the least bit ambiguous. Either you believe them or you don't, but their meaning is quite clear.
You are told, upfront, they can and will cut you into pieces and leave you in a ditch with no identifying marks (or worse, and to your family too)
Seriously? Do they actually say this sort of thing? Your family too? Sounds like joining the mafia or some kind of organized crime group. Of course I would imagine that people who join the NSA because they read a lot of cold war spy thrillers will eat this stuff up and ask for seconds.
He could consider moving to the Tunguska meteor site living off of fish from Lake Cheko and living in some abandoned cabins in the area. Or he could consider the Russian Far East. Maybe the area north of Lake Baikal where the ruins of some WWII era gulags still exist. Maybe Olekminsk or Yakutsk. There are plenty of interesting places to live in Russia. But it may be less safe for Snowden to move to a remote area. From time to time he's going to want to ride his reindeer into town for supplies and an American in that neck of the woods is bound to draw attention. If he ends up in the news, he could be an easy target for the CIA. they could shoot him and bury him somewhre so remote that no one would ever find his bones. Plus he'd have to learn Russian fairly well before he could really do any of it and Russian is not easy.
The Heritage Foundation is based in the US. That doesn't prove anything. And Singapore is rated 8 steps above the US. Singapore, which has an actual dictator and all kinds of crazy laws. And Chile beats the US in terms of freedom? Well at least they are not aiming high. In any case your whole post is basically an Argument from Authority. You are saying, "This is what the Heritage Foundation thinks." Try actually making a real argument to support the view that the US is "one of the most free countries in the world by a pretty long shot".
I am asking for an interpretation of specific data on specific slides, leaked by Snowden, that demonstrate, unequivocally, the NSA are committing egregious acts.
Demanding unequivocal, indisputable proof of a top secret government operation is not reasonable. Surprisingly the NSA, after an initial period of denying everything, has actually admitted to some of it. Their dilemma is that if Snowden is just making it all up then he hasn't broken any US law and their attempts to extradite him are just harrassment.
Check the PRISM slides. Did you just find out about this mess today or are you part of the US propaganda army trying to spread as much disinformation as possible?
Or would you rather have a dictatorship, a monarchy?
I was thinking about this question. I think a true democracy would be better than what we have now. Much better. At least then we will be directly responsible for the laws that are passed or not repealed. We could still have a constitution. Not that it matters since it is mostly ignored or reinterpreted anyway.
And speaking of repealing laws we should have a portion of government dedicated solely to that purpose with the same authority that the passing laws section has. If this sounds familiar it is because something like it was mentioned in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
The situation is not terrible and the fact that Americans still believe they are free and believe in freedom is actually a cause for hope
The fact that many Americans still believe they are free is anything but encouraging. To me it seems to imply that no matter how much of their freedom they lose they will still believe they are not only free, but the freest country in the world. It means that many Americans simply don't understand what the word 'freedom' means. If you start talking about John Locke or 'Natural Rights' you might then get some honest answers about how much these Americans still believe in actual freedom, as opposed to the pseudo-freedom thing that they seem to have in their heads. Maybe they are thinking freedom is about being able to wave a flag with red and white and blue?
The US is still one of the most free countries in the world by a pretty long shot
I am willing to bet that you have never spent more than a month living outside of the US. Otherwise you wouldn't say such stupid things. Let me list some of the things that many of those other countries don't have.
1. Suspicionless roadblocks/checkpoints on many major highways and secondary roads where you are guilty until proven innocent and must submit to interrogations or arbitrary testing to prove your innocence. If you try to stand up for your so called "rights" or so much as look at the thugs the wrong way you end up some combination of injured, dead, and/or in jail with serious contempt of cop charges against you.
2. Strip searches, electronic or real, and genital fondling and/or sexual molestation must be submitted to in order for the government to grant you the privilege of flying. In most other countries flying is treated as more of a right whatever they might call it on paper. In the US most rights have been converted to privileges kindly granted by daddy government. Even the supreme court refers to them as privileges now.
3. Angry, sociopathic, sadistic police who are just itching to beat you, strangle you, taze you, or even shoot you and kill you. These people have no oversight and are 100% above the law. They effectively even have a license to kill. This is far worse than nearly any country on the planet. I can personally vouch for the fact that it is far worse than Cuba (that's right), Laos, Colombia, or Malaysia. In most countries police are more like normal people just doing a job to get paid and have nothing to prove and are not so much like violent criminals with a badge.
Since the police are the most likely point of contact between citizens and a government representative the fact that the police are dangerous and see citizens as their sworn enemy and see themselves as above any law makes the US seem far less free than virtually any country I have lived or traveled in.
4. Harmless hacking as a major "crime". Ask Aaron Swartz about how free we are compared to other countries. Not many countries go after victimless hacking the way the US does. In the US you can go to jail for many years just for violating the TOS of a web site. Yup. Keep telling yourself how free you are. Ask the innocent people convicted of crimes with no victim being abused by sadistic prison guards and raped by fellow inmates how free they are.
In addition to that we have many harsh prison sentences for what are very minor, harmless acts where not a single person has been harmed. I mention this separately, because many other countries have the same problem. But we are no better than most of them in this respect. I think part of the problem is that Americans are such enthusiastic punishers. We love revenge more than most other cultures I think.
The fact is the US isn't all that free anymore. There is very little real freedom left around here. It has been reinterpreted and just plain stomped out of existence. Perhaps the most important point is that the actual people, the voters, do not value freedom even slightly more than most other countries. Given that none of the loss of our freedom is really very surprising.
Can you give even a single example of a freedom that Americans have that most other countries don't? Or better yet a single freedom that is unique in the world? In the US all of our freedom is on paper. Other countries may fewer paper rights, but more freedoms in real life. I would go so far as to say that most countries feel more free and on a day to day basis are more free than the US is now. A century ago it would have been a very different story, but that was before the government and the American people shat on the constitution, the bill of rights, and everything that the founders of our country believed in.
The point is that the People elect representatives to Congress to, gosh, represent their interests, because, well, the People can't sit around all day every day parked out on Pennsylvania Avenue keeping an eye on the White House.
Could it be any more clear that this system does not work? I think we need to dump our pseudo-democratic system and implement actual democracy. Direct voting on laws and other issues. The public should have a direct veto of any law just like the president. The public should also be able to repeal a law by direct vote. Wouldn't it be great if the Patriot Act were put to a popular vote now? Once that law was repealed what the NSA was doing would be blatantly illegal.
I believe his point was that every time someone uses the word "marijuana" or "weed" or "silk road" in a telephone conversation, email, IM, or god forbid on facebook they could have DEA agents at their door with a search warrant and drug sniffing dogs ready to throw them in a concrete cell for a few days without food, water, or a toilet. All the NSA would really have to do is routinely send 'digests', the results of certain keyword searches, to all branches of law enforcement who might find that information interesting. This will provide more than enough prisoners to fill prisons as fast as they can build them.
In the past it was difficult to use that information in court because it would raise questions as to how law enforcement could possibly have known the exact wording of say a cell phone conversation without having engaged in surveillance witthout a warrant. Now that the veil on their activities has been lifted they have no reason to be cautious about using the results of their surveillance dragnet for anything they wish. Although it would be interesting to see whether evidence gathered by the NSA without a warrant would be admissible in court. Even if the NSA evidence isn't admissible it might be enough evidence for a judge to grant a warrant for room audio and telephone surveillance.
Stop being such a frightened coward. Be a man and accept that there are risks in life. You simply cannot stop suicide bombers. Most of them don't have a Facebook page for your friends to monitor. They may not have an internet connection at all and certainly don't have a smartphone.
Some of us value liberty, value not being watched by law enforcement agents every second of our lives to see if we might be breaking some law or might secretly be planning to blow up the white house. Do you have no understanding of the sort of freedom this country was founded on?
I understand that at first glance this looks like overreach
It is far worse than that. It is our worst dystopian nightmares made real. It is 1984 in 2013. Our government is behaving in a way that is indistinguishable from the very worst surveillance police states.
But the NSA does not do law enforcement, they do threat detection.
I see. So the terrorist suspects they find don't have anything to worry about do they? Since all they do is detection. If you or I get caught in their dragnet we won't have anything to worry about either because they just do detection. Thank you for explaining that. And here I thought the government could actually do something with their information. Silly me.
Imposing a suspicion-based, after-the-fact scheme
In other words treating people as criminals only after they have done something suspicious.
would mean terror cells could (and probably already do) host their own encrypted SMTP servers with no archive, thus thwarting any attempt to trace messages sent before a target is identified.
Good. Stopping one or two suicide bombers every decade is not worth giving up our privacy from government intrusion. If I had to decide between the terrorists and the NSA I'd choose the terrorists. They are far less harmful to us than than the NSA. So fuck Big Brother and fuck you.
So even if a judge finds probable cause and some kind of targeted hack/trace could be established, it would be too late to look at data created before the warrant was issued. Why would we hobble our first line of defense against real, plausible threats in order to avoid theoretical abuses?
Because freedom from tyranny requires it. Once the government itself becomes the true enemy of its people then I for one will be cheering for the terrorists. Let them blow up the white house and the pentagon. I'd vote for whoever did it.
Wouldn't it make more sense to keep the programs intact and ensure safeguards against abuse?
Abuse is their SOP. Abuse is what they do. I don't think it is realistic to believe that the NSA will ever give up the universal surveillance system they have created. The only way to stop them would be to get rid of the NSA entirely or at least disable it during times of peace.
It wouldn't surprise me if the NSA had a timeline that included every aspect of surveillance that Orwell wrote about in his novel. Monitoring all online forms of communication and cell phones and landlines is just a start.
Of course there are many (actually just some, but they like to think they are many) who believe the US is already some kind of fascist state, but I would suggest you talk to people living in places like Russia or China before establishing a "Big Brother" standard against which to compare the US.
I have lived in Cuba, and I still think the US is somewhat fascist and things are accelerating in a nonlinear fashion toward complete totalitarianism. These new revelations about our 1984-ish surrveillance state is even more evidence that this is so.
The Constitution protects citizens from illegal search and seizure. It does not protect non-citizens.
Please point out the relevant section of the constitution where it states that only American citizens have human rights and that the US government is free to enslave or murder or otherwise mistreat any non-US citizen simply because they weren't born here. I'll wait.
According to this leak (and common sense when you consider the sheer volume of data we're talking about), the NSA is not keeping this information for more than a few days.
That may have been true when those slides were first made (something like 5 years ago?), but it is unlikely to be true now. And when that Utah Data Center goes online this September it will add exabyt
we KNOW everything we do on the net is visible to anyone who cares
Just like in the real world there are forms of communication that don't involve any expectation of privacy and forms of communication that do have an expectation of privacy. Email, IM, and Skype are some examples that did have an expectation of privacy. Obviously not anymore. Facebook has very little expectation of privacy which is one reason I don't have a Facebook page. We always used to joke that it was actually founded and run by the NSA or FBI. That turned out to be more true than we realized. I don't think Twitter has any expectation of privacy. And web forums are the equivalent of billboards. I have no problem with the NSA reading this post. It is intended to be a form of public communication. I do have a problem with them reading my emails or IMs. That is intended as private communication and just because it is trivial for them to monitor and record does not make it moral or legal to do so.
As for defending our privacy against government intrusion, we should definitely attempt to do so. I'm not sure if it is practical or possible at this point, but we should at least try some technological solutions. Nevertheless it is important to keep in mind what is right and what is wrong. A government that spies on its own citizens is an important component of tyranny. The first step to controlling all of your citizen-slaves is to monitor everything they say and do.
I disagree that internet communication is public. There is an expectation of privacy. Just because the government can monitor every internet communication doesn't mean they should. Besides, it isn't only internet communication that they are monitoring. They also monitor telephone calls. Probably the only reason they don't monitor room audio from our homes is that it is just too expensive to plant and monitor all those bugs. What they are doing is abusive and wrong. Human beings require at least some privacy. It is a basic human need that the NSA seems intent on stomping out of existence. I'd like to find the address of every NSA employee and plant audio and video bugs in every room of their home and upload it all to the internet so that they could know what it feels like to be constantly monitored and observed.
Should the Internet be hands off for our government?
Of course. They've already mostly destroyed the internet as a means of communication. How can we communicate if we know that Big Brother is just over our shoulder looking for any hints of illegal activity of any kind? Of course they also tap phones. So the only form of communication that is still safe from routine government eavesdropping is meatspace person to person conversation. Putting audio/video bugs in every home would be expensive and very difficult to do without getting caught.
If you propose violence in the face of someone merely _knowing_ too much, what does that make you?
A revolutionary? A freedom fighter? Someone willing to sacrifice their life in order to try to stop this slide into an Orwellian dystopia? Something like that I suppose.
Slashdot Mirror
I had the impression that the comment was not intended to be taken seriously.
As I like to point out liberals and libertarians used to be allies when it came to personal (non-economic) freedoms. Back in the 80s. Maybe early 90s. At least that's how I remember it. Was it 9/11 that changed that? The police state seems to truly have bipartisan support now.
You seem to be confusing things that sometimes happen in the US with things that always happen in the US.
I don't recall claiming that any of my points always happen. They do however happen with sufficient frequency that it is a fair criticism of freedom in the US.
1. I've seen a dui roadblock once in the US (another one in Canada). The officer asked a couple questions ("had I been drinking?" "no") then let me on my way. It's not like the Iraqi style checkpoints where the whole vehicle gets searched over.
You were simply lucky and you probably were willing to be interrogated. I am not willing to be interrogated by them when I have done nothing wrong.
2. That's a generalization. Some airports just have metal detectors. If you're flying on a private plane you won't see any of that. Pretty much the same in other countries.
They are fair generalizations. It is true that some of the time you are allowed to simply go through a metal detector, but not all of the time. Many people have been abused due to this insane system that no other country has had. And I wasn't referring to private planes. I was referring to commercial air travel which is what the vast majority of people use to travel long distances.
3. That may be true for some police officers (the ones you see on youtube), but you're not going to read about the millions of friendly interactions that happen.
Again I didn't mean to imply that 100% of police officers are abusive sociopaths, but I do think that in the US the majority of them are.
I bet you could find similar bad apple officers in other countries.
Not nearly as often. At least that has been my experience. I have never actually met a (male) police officer in the US that did not have that sort of angry, aggressive, bully kind of personality. In other countries I have found that such people are the exception rather than the rule. And youtube seems to bear this out. Search for "police brutality" and see how many of the resulting videos took place in the US.
As for an American freedom most countries don't have - out first amendment rights are a great example.
I don't think this is true. You may think you have more free speech rights on paper, but in the real world you do not.
In the US we have may have free speech compared to China or Cuba or Russia, but not compared to most Western European countries. There is a long list of countries with equivalant free speech rights to ours. We are not so special in this regard. As someone has pointed out probably the only freedom we have that is unique to the US is our freedom to own a gun in certain states.
You seem to think that there are all these perfect countries outside of the US, but failed to list a single one of them (aside from the ones with friendly police - Cuba, Laos, Columbia, and Malaysia)
There are no perfect countries and I never claimed there were. It's generally only Americans who think their own country is more or less perfect. Compared to the US, Cuba, Laos, Colombia, and Malaysia all have police who tend to be relatively normal human beings who don't have an aggressive mililtary war-like mentality toward citizens. This is based on my personal experience living in these countries and interacting with actual police officers on occassion compared to my experiences with US police.
You seem to think that there are all these perfect countries outside of the US, but failed to list a single one of them
I haven't listed a single one because I don't think there are any perfect countries. Most countries overall are just as bad as the US when it comes to freedom overall. I wasn't arguing that there existed some great free society that we could all move to. It doesn't exist. Some
Speech has exceptions here.. lots of them.
We are no better.
It is also practically, or effectively, impossible to own a handgun and use it for it's intended purpose - defense of one's person - in Canada, and most of the world.
The right to own a gun is pretty feeble in a number of US states. Where I live it is almost impossible, although a lot depends on the specific town you live in. Basically you have to give the chief of police in your town a very, very good reason and "I want to be able to defend myself" is not considered one.
OTOH there are states like Wyoming and Vermont where you don't even need a permit to buy a gun. There is no need to get permission. The second amendment is the only permit you need. It's stuff like that that makes me want to move to Wyoming. Admittedly this sort of thing is probably unique to the US, although to only a few states. I'm not sure foreigners appreciate how much gun laws vary by state. In New York for instance firearms and any other defensive weapon like mace or pepper spray or stun guns are effectively illegal. Even fake guns are illegal there.
telling us operational details of classified programs we knew existed in 2006
Since he didn't reveal anything that wasn't already known for 7 years I guess he hasn't harmed the US in any way and is not guilty of any crime. Releasing classified material that is already well known is an absurd charge to make. It means that he is 100% innocent of the crime he is accused of.
Imagine, for a moment, what it'd be like if all the excitable zealots clamoring to overthrow our government had their way?
Uh. I am one of those people. I believe that the only way to stop sliding down this slippery slope into tyrannical police state misery is to start forming a rebel army and maybe in 50 years or so start a second civil war. This time the slaves that we want to free are ourselves. I'd settle for say Wyoming and Montana and maybe Alaska seceding from the union and resetting the timer back to 1776 and resetting the version number of The Freedom Experiment to 2.0. It would be nice if we could get Oregon or Washington State so that the new country within a country would not be landlocked.
Do you see now how you can draw no straight-forward conclusions from that slide? And do you understand how all this excitement in absence of knowledge may generate misguided action?
Actually I'm now convinced that your protest is not genuine. I suspect you of being either a shill or otherwise having an agenda. Those slides are so obvious. They are not in the least bit ambiguous. Either you believe them or you don't, but their meaning is quite clear.
You are told, upfront, they can and will cut you into pieces and leave you in a ditch with no identifying marks (or worse, and to your family too)
Seriously? Do they actually say this sort of thing? Your family too? Sounds like joining the mafia or some kind of organized crime group. Of course I would imagine that people who join the NSA because they read a lot of cold war spy thrillers will eat this stuff up and ask for seconds.
He could consider moving to the Tunguska meteor site living off of fish from Lake Cheko and living in some abandoned cabins in the area. Or he could consider the Russian Far East. Maybe the area north of Lake Baikal where the ruins of some WWII era gulags still exist. Maybe Olekminsk or Yakutsk. There are plenty of interesting places to live in Russia. But it may be less safe for Snowden to move to a remote area. From time to time he's going to want to ride his reindeer into town for supplies and an American in that neck of the woods is bound to draw attention. If he ends up in the news, he could be an easy target for the CIA. they could shoot him and bury him somewhre so remote that no one would ever find his bones. Plus he'd have to learn Russian fairly well before he could really do any of it and Russian is not easy.
The Heritage Foundation is based in the US. That doesn't prove anything. And Singapore is rated 8 steps above the US. Singapore, which has an actual dictator and all kinds of crazy laws. And Chile beats the US in terms of freedom? Well at least they are not aiming high. In any case your whole post is basically an Argument from Authority. You are saying, "This is what the Heritage Foundation thinks." Try actually making a real argument to support the view that the US is "one of the most free countries in the world by a pretty long shot".
I am asking for an interpretation of specific data on specific slides, leaked by Snowden, that demonstrate, unequivocally, the NSA are committing egregious acts.
Demanding unequivocal, indisputable proof of a top secret government operation is not reasonable. Surprisingly the NSA, after an initial period of denying everything, has actually admitted to some of it. Their dilemma is that if Snowden is just making it all up then he hasn't broken any US law and their attempts to extradite him are just harrassment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#Edward_Snowden
Some of the relevant PRISM slides are on the sidebar to the right. In particular take a look at the second one down.
Check the PRISM slides. Did you just find out about this mess today or are you part of the US propaganda army trying to spread as much disinformation as possible?
Or would you rather have a dictatorship, a monarchy?
I was thinking about this question. I think a true democracy would be better than what we have now. Much better. At least then we will be directly responsible for the laws that are passed or not repealed. We could still have a constitution. Not that it matters since it is mostly ignored or reinterpreted anyway.
And speaking of repealing laws we should have a portion of government dedicated solely to that purpose with the same authority that the passing laws section has. If this sounds familiar it is because something like it was mentioned in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Actually Iran/Persia has not attacked another country since 1798. Pretty impressive record of peace. Those Persians are definitely not war mongers.
The situation is not terrible and the fact that Americans still believe they are free and believe in freedom is actually a cause for hope
The fact that many Americans still believe they are free is anything but encouraging. To me it seems to imply that no matter how much of their freedom they lose they will still believe they are not only free, but the freest country in the world. It means that many Americans simply don't understand what the word 'freedom' means. If you start talking about John Locke or 'Natural Rights' you might then get some honest answers about how much these Americans still believe in actual freedom, as opposed to the pseudo-freedom thing that they seem to have in their heads. Maybe they are thinking freedom is about being able to wave a flag with red and white and blue?
The US is still one of the most free countries in the world by a pretty long shot
I am willing to bet that you have never spent more than a month living outside of the US. Otherwise you wouldn't say such stupid things. Let me list some of the things that many of those other countries don't have.
1. Suspicionless roadblocks/checkpoints on many major highways and secondary roads where you are guilty until proven innocent and must submit to interrogations or arbitrary testing to prove your innocence. If you try to stand up for your so called "rights" or so much as look at the thugs the wrong way you end up some combination of injured, dead, and/or in jail with serious contempt of cop charges against you.
2. Strip searches, electronic or real, and genital fondling and/or sexual molestation must be submitted to in order for the government to grant you the privilege of flying. In most other countries flying is treated as more of a right whatever they might call it on paper. In the US most rights have been converted to privileges kindly granted by daddy government. Even the supreme court refers to them as privileges now.
3. Angry, sociopathic, sadistic police who are just itching to beat you, strangle you, taze you, or even shoot you and kill you. These people have no oversight and are 100% above the law. They effectively even have a license to kill. This is far worse than nearly any country on the planet. I can personally vouch for the fact that it is far worse than Cuba (that's right), Laos, Colombia, or Malaysia. In most countries police are more like normal people just doing a job to get paid and have nothing to prove and are not so much like violent criminals with a badge.
Since the police are the most likely point of contact between citizens and a government representative the fact that the police are dangerous and see citizens as their sworn enemy and see themselves as above any law makes the US seem far less free than virtually any country I have lived or traveled in.
4. Harmless hacking as a major "crime". Ask Aaron Swartz about how free we are compared to other countries. Not many countries go after victimless hacking the way the US does. In the US you can go to jail for many years just for violating the TOS of a web site. Yup. Keep telling yourself how free you are. Ask the innocent people convicted of crimes with no victim being abused by sadistic prison guards and raped by fellow inmates how free they are.
In addition to that we have many harsh prison sentences for what are very minor, harmless acts where not a single person has been harmed. I mention this separately, because many other countries have the same problem. But we are no better than most of them in this respect. I think part of the problem is that Americans are such enthusiastic punishers. We love revenge more than most other cultures I think.
The fact is the US isn't all that free anymore. There is very little real freedom left around here. It has been reinterpreted and just plain stomped out of existence. Perhaps the most important point is that the actual people, the voters, do not value freedom even slightly more than most other countries. Given that none of the loss of our freedom is really very surprising.
Can you give even a single example of a freedom that Americans have that most other countries don't? Or better yet a single freedom that is unique in the world? In the US all of our freedom is on paper. Other countries may fewer paper rights, but more freedoms in real life. I would go so far as to say that most countries feel more free and on a day to day basis are more free than the US is now. A century ago it would have been a very different story, but that was before the government and the American people shat on the constitution, the bill of rights, and everything that the founders of our country believed in.
The point is that the People elect representatives to Congress to, gosh, represent their interests, because, well, the People can't sit around all day every day parked out on Pennsylvania Avenue keeping an eye on the White House.
Could it be any more clear that this system does not work? I think we need to dump our pseudo-democratic system and implement actual democracy. Direct voting on laws and other issues. The public should have a direct veto of any law just like the president. The public should also be able to repeal a law by direct vote. Wouldn't it be great if the Patriot Act were put to a popular vote now? Once that law was repealed what the NSA was doing would be blatantly illegal.
I believe his point was that every time someone uses the word "marijuana" or "weed" or "silk road" in a telephone conversation, email, IM, or god forbid on facebook they could have DEA agents at their door with a search warrant and drug sniffing dogs ready to throw them in a concrete cell for a few days without food, water, or a toilet. All the NSA would really have to do is routinely send 'digests', the results of certain keyword searches, to all branches of law enforcement who might find that information interesting. This will provide more than enough prisoners to fill prisons as fast as they can build them.
In the past it was difficult to use that information in court because it would raise questions as to how law enforcement could possibly have known the exact wording of say a cell phone conversation without having engaged in surveillance witthout a warrant. Now that the veil on their activities has been lifted they have no reason to be cautious about using the results of their surveillance dragnet for anything they wish. Although it would be interesting to see whether evidence gathered by the NSA without a warrant would be admissible in court. Even if the NSA evidence isn't admissible it might be enough evidence for a judge to grant a warrant for room audio and telephone surveillance.
Stop being such a frightened coward. Be a man and accept that there are risks in life. You simply cannot stop suicide bombers. Most of them don't have a Facebook page for your friends to monitor. They may not have an internet connection at all and certainly don't have a smartphone.
Some of us value liberty, value not being watched by law enforcement agents every second of our lives to see if we might be breaking some law or might secretly be planning to blow up the white house. Do you have no understanding of the sort of freedom this country was founded on?
I understand that at first glance this looks like overreach
It is far worse than that. It is our worst dystopian nightmares made real. It is 1984 in 2013. Our government is behaving in a way that is indistinguishable from the very worst surveillance police states.
But the NSA does not do law enforcement, they do threat detection.
I see. So the terrorist suspects they find don't have anything to worry about do they? Since all they do is detection. If you or I get caught in their dragnet we won't have anything to worry about either because they just do detection. Thank you for explaining that. And here I thought the government could actually do something with their information. Silly me.
Imposing a suspicion-based, after-the-fact scheme
In other words treating people as criminals only after they have done something suspicious.
would mean terror cells could (and probably already do) host their own encrypted SMTP servers with no archive, thus thwarting any attempt to trace messages sent before a target is identified.
Good. Stopping one or two suicide bombers every decade is not worth giving up our privacy from government intrusion. If I had to decide between the terrorists and the NSA I'd choose the terrorists. They are far less harmful to us than than the NSA. So fuck Big Brother and fuck you.
So even if a judge finds probable cause and some kind of targeted hack/trace could be established, it would be too late to look at data created before the warrant was issued. Why would we hobble our first line of defense against real, plausible threats in order to avoid theoretical abuses?
Because freedom from tyranny requires it. Once the government itself becomes the true enemy of its people then I for one will be cheering for the terrorists. Let them blow up the white house and the pentagon. I'd vote for whoever did it.
Wouldn't it make more sense to keep the programs intact and ensure safeguards against abuse?
Abuse is their SOP. Abuse is what they do. I don't think it is realistic to believe that the NSA will ever give up the universal surveillance system they have created. The only way to stop them would be to get rid of the NSA entirely or at least disable it during times of peace.
It wouldn't surprise me if the NSA had a timeline that included every aspect of surveillance that Orwell wrote about in his novel. Monitoring all online forms of communication and cell phones and landlines is just a start.
Of course there are many (actually just some, but they like to think they are many) who believe the US is already some kind of fascist state, but I would suggest you talk to people living in places like Russia or China before establishing a "Big Brother" standard against which to compare the US.
I have lived in Cuba, and I still think the US is somewhat fascist and things are accelerating in a nonlinear fashion toward complete totalitarianism. These new revelations about our 1984-ish surrveillance state is even more evidence that this is so.
The Constitution protects citizens from illegal search and seizure. It does not protect non-citizens.
Please point out the relevant section of the constitution where it states that only American citizens have human rights and that the US government is free to enslave or murder or otherwise mistreat any non-US citizen simply because they weren't born here. I'll wait.
According to this leak (and common sense when you consider the sheer volume of data we're talking about), the NSA is not keeping this information for more than a few days.
That may have been true when those slides were first made (something like 5 years ago?), but it is unlikely to be true now. And when that Utah Data Center goes online this September it will add exabyt
we KNOW everything we do on the net is visible to anyone who cares
Just like in the real world there are forms of communication that don't involve any expectation of privacy and forms of communication that do have an expectation of privacy. Email, IM, and Skype are some examples that did have an expectation of privacy. Obviously not anymore. Facebook has very little expectation of privacy which is one reason I don't have a Facebook page. We always used to joke that it was actually founded and run by the NSA or FBI. That turned out to be more true than we realized. I don't think Twitter has any expectation of privacy. And web forums are the equivalent of billboards. I have no problem with the NSA reading this post. It is intended to be a form of public communication. I do have a problem with them reading my emails or IMs. That is intended as private communication and just because it is trivial for them to monitor and record does not make it moral or legal to do so.
As for defending our privacy against government intrusion, we should definitely attempt to do so. I'm not sure if it is practical or possible at this point, but we should at least try some technological solutions. Nevertheless it is important to keep in mind what is right and what is wrong. A government that spies on its own citizens is an important component of tyranny. The first step to controlling all of your citizen-slaves is to monitor everything they say and do.
I disagree that internet communication is public. There is an expectation of privacy. Just because the government can monitor every internet communication doesn't mean they should. Besides, it isn't only internet communication that they are monitoring. They also monitor telephone calls. Probably the only reason they don't monitor room audio from our homes is that it is just too expensive to plant and monitor all those bugs. What they are doing is abusive and wrong. Human beings require at least some privacy. It is a basic human need that the NSA seems intent on stomping out of existence. I'd like to find the address of every NSA employee and plant audio and video bugs in every room of their home and upload it all to the internet so that they could know what it feels like to be constantly monitored and observed.
I ask slashdotter's what is the best way for a government to find threats to it's citizens in this digital age?
Look in a mirror.
Should the Internet be hands off for our government?
Of course. They've already mostly destroyed the internet as a means of communication. How can we communicate if we know that Big Brother is just over our shoulder looking for any hints of illegal activity of any kind? Of course they also tap phones. So the only form of communication that is still safe from routine government eavesdropping is meatspace person to person conversation. Putting audio/video bugs in every home would be expensive and very difficult to do without getting caught.
You shills are getting desparate I see. Grasping at straws. Snowden wouldn't have sacrificed his life just to release fake slides.
If you propose violence in the face of someone merely _knowing_ too much, what does that make you?
A revolutionary? A freedom fighter? Someone willing to sacrifice their life in order to try to stop this slide into an Orwellian dystopia? Something like that I suppose.