What do Republicans have to do with this? Trying to change the subject? I'm not at all convinced that Obama is at all better than Putin. Nor do I think that a Republican would be any better either. Although I don't particularly want to imagine someone worse than Obama when it comes to being an enthusiastic Police Stater and Orwellianist. I'm already frightented enough to want to flee the country as soon as possible. I find Obama genuinely scary. I have no illusions that whoever replaces Obama will not be just as bad, but that doesn't get him off the hook for being a fascist prick doing his best to turn the whole US into one big prison camp.
Why should we care about what motivates Putin? Don't actions speak louder than words? Putin is not a good guy, but at the moment he is doing a good thing. Saving a guys life. Give him some credit for not being a total dick 100% of the time. I wish we could say the same for Obama, but he's been pretty consistent.
First, the United States would not seek the death penalty for Mr. Snowden should he return to the United States.
Translation: We will not "seek" it, but we don't guarantee that he won't get it. It's up to the judge who does the actual sentencing.
The charges he faces do not carry that possibility, and the United States would not seek the death penalty even if Mr. Snowden were charged with additional, death penalty-eligible crimes
Translation: We haven't yet charged him with treason for "aiding the enemy" yet, as we did with Manning, but we will. However when he is charged with treason it's up to the judge to sentence him to death. The prosecutor doesn't do the actual sentencing.
He did plan everything in advance. He just planned badly. Releasing the documents and claiming responsibility from a country with a US extradition treaty? That wasn't a smart move if he cared at all about self-preservation. When I first heard the news I assumed that he just didnt' care about his own fate. That he was simply resigned to life in prison or execution.
The NSA has not caught a single terrorist ever. Not a single one. Not even once. Although if they really wanted to catch one all they would have to do is look in the mirror.
Actually their secret successes are due to NSA's ant-terrorist rock. Prove me wrong. Secret successes are so convenient aren't they? The NSA wishes they could tell us all about the evil 5 year old terrorists they have blown up. We would all be so proud.
The NSA should be dissolved. Your imaginary terrorist bogeymen are not the ones turning this country into an Orwellian police state. You and your friends can take all the credit for that. Congratulations on destroying a once great country due to your own pathetic cowardice.
You want support? Stop the racist comments and come down hard on anybody who makes any
Not a big believer in freedom of speech I see.
Also you are doing the same thing that you are accusing Americans of doing. You are making use of tribal thinking. You are making an unwarranted generalization. Even if 70% of the population believes that foreigners are dirty scum with no rights you are forgetting about the other 30%. Or whatever percentage it may actually be.
Our dept is now 16.7 trillion. It has not gone down to any significant degree. I believe the treasury paid down something like 35 billion. A drop in the bucket and virtually meaningless.
And don't you lose sight of the fact that we hardly manufacture anything of our own anymore and rely almost exclusively on imports, mostly from China. In a trade war with China we would be hurt more than they would. They have plenty of other people to sell to. We'd have stores with row after row of empty shelves.
Any site that requires javascript to view text is inherently suspicious IMO and should be avoided by anyone who cares about security. And you do realize that disabling javascript is what NoScript does, right? It's default deny.
But of course! France is well known for their love of dumb blockbuster action films with lots of car chases and explosions and little else. While here in the US we refuse to watch anything that is not a character study art film, ideally with subtitles. Hollywood knows that the shit they squeeze out is only useful abroad. Here in the US people are way too intelligent and sophisticated for mindless wild-ride fun which requires you to completely turn off your brain for a couple of hours. Clearly you are very familiar with the film industry in France.
Flying on an aircrift is a right. Or more to the point preventing people from flying on an aircraft is a right that the government does not possess. Or can you point out the part of the constitution that grants the government that right? You cannot because it doesn't exist and not just because aircraft didn't exist. Because they would have considered the idea of preventing people from traveling within the borders of their own country to be tyranny almost beyond their ability to imagine. To them it would have been like asking the government permission to breathe.
Although I disagree that the government has any right to my property just because the majority says it does I do agree that information cannot be owned. Once the information is out there it is out there. The only way to own information is to keep it a secret.
The government is sticking its nose where it doesn't belong. They have no right to do the monitoring they do not only because of the 4th amendment but because of the 9th and because the constitution does not give them explicit permission to do so. Depending on your ethical views it might also be immoral.
But the reason that the government should not be storing data from every email, phone call, and private mesasge in the world is not because the information is private property. It's because the surveillance involved to get that information is unethical, unconstitutional, and tends to lead to dystopian societies in practice (think STASI).
Even if that is all true it does not change the fact that private industry does not have the (legal) power to directly imprison you based on something you've said. In any society that has a government only the government is allowed to do such things.
But are you sure the country you live in is the US? When I was young and idealistic I joined the Libertarian party, put a bumper sticker on my car to show my support, called in (or attempted to) to talk radio to argue my pro-freedom views to large audiences, argued with people I knew to try to convert them to more freedom friendly views and guess what? I don't see any more freedom in this country than before. In fact there is far less freedom now. So what did I do wrong? What more could I have done? Run as a Libertarian candidate myself? I don't have the charisma or social skills for that. Just tell me what I can do that would plausibly have some effect and which doesn't involve violence and I will do it. Not that I would be against violence in principle, but it would require a large army to have any chance of throwing out the current corrupt regime.
But you do have control over how you behave in public and what you tell people who you do not trust. If I had a friend who posted inappropriate things about me on Facebook they would not remain a friend for very long. If I had a friend who was just a blabbermouth, and I still wanted to remain friends I just wouldn't tell him anything I didn't want posted on Facebook for the whole world to see. You don't need to control evey person you have ever met. You just need a bit of self-control over what you tell people and how you act in public.
Sure you can. You can opt out of the government any time you want. Renounce your citizenship and move somewhere else. Well, that's backwards, move somewhere else, then renounce your citizenship.
Now, you may not _want_ to do that, but you _can_ do that.
I think you are missing the point. You don't have to leave the country of your birth and remain in exile for the rest of your life to opt out of Facebook. And of course Facebook does not have the power to send armed men to your home to take all your stuff, shoot your dog, and throw you in a cage for the rest of your life. Or even just kill you if you show even the slightest form of resistance, are rude to them in any way, or they are just in the mood for a little fun. The government has a whole army of people with guns who can use them against you with impunity. Facebook doesn't. Do you understand the difference now?
Are you trying to argue that the Bhopal accident was intentional? An oil spill? It is difficult to take such arguments seriously. Accidents happen. If a private corporation were to start executing or imprisoning people the police would probably go after them and if they didn't that would again become a government problem.
If corporations started acting like drug dealers and were routinely gunning down their competition or started massacring anyone who bought goods from their competition our world would be a very different place. It is to prevent stuff like that that people want a government which is allowed to enforce reasonable laws through a very limited use of force. But when those governments get out of control like the US government clearly has then it becomes far worse than mere shootouts in the street between corporate officers of competing companies. It becomes a true dystopian nightmare as portrayed in A Brave New World, 1984, or V for Vendetta.
The problem isn't really that governments themselves are inherently evil while private companies are always angelic. The problem is that people are inherently evil as demonstrated by the Stanford Prison Experiment and The Milgrim Experiment and when you combine that problem with Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? you end up with a true nightmare. When the government themselves does bad things there is no one around to stop them.
The problem is that governments control the laws and courts and they do not have to punish themselves. So there is no limit to their actions. A few years ago someone in my state was pulled over at a suspicionless police roadblock checking for drunk drivers. The driver wasn't drunk, but he did apparently have a small quanity of marijuana in his car. Or at least that's the story. Instead of arresting him for marijuana possession the police simply beat him to death. End of story. No one was ever prosecuted or even sent on paid leave. Cops will not testify against each other. They protect their own. This is just the smallest possible example. Something similar happened to me except that I wasn't beaten all the way to death. The angry cop was pulled off of me before he could finish strangling me. I was lucky that there was a cop on the scene who did have a conscience and thought murder was wrong. That's the only limit to government power: the hope that at least a few people (i.e. Snowden) inside the system still have a conscience and are willing to act on it.
We have the government to protect us against private concentration of power and evil individuals. It may not always work, but at least it exists. There is nothing to protect us against government power except for the pathetic power of the 2nd amendment. And things would have to get pretty bad indeed for that power to be exercised. I'm guessing even more dystopian than the government in V for Vendetta.
What about shutting down the entire company until and unless the government stops trying to use you as an informant? Perhaps they can force you to do business with a particular customer with whom you would prefer not to associate with, but can they really prevent you from simply giving all of your employees 6-12 months unpaid leave and shutting down all of your customers every time you get such a request? That is what I would do before violating the trust and privacy of my customers and becoming a willing FBI informant. Before doing my part to help put innocent people in prison. You can't put a price on a clear conscience. Does literally no one have principles that they stand by anymore?
Alternatively one could flee to a country without an extradition treaty with the US and then just email everyone who is being monitored from disposable webmail accounts opened in overseas internet cafes using a Tor browser. Then they would have no proof that you were the one who warned them and they could not even really try to prosecute you until and unless you returned to the US. And even in that case they might have a tough time proving to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that you were the source of the leaks.
It would be dicey. In affect you are violating the Gag order by writing a contract clause that gives you an indirect means of notifying the customer or preventing the monitoring. I am no lawyer but that too me sounds like a whole boat load of legal trouble to invite on themselves.
I was thinking about the librarian that someone linked to. I thought her response was pretty clever. Maybe upon receiving a FISA order you could contact the customer and tell them that the FBI/NSA is not going to be monitoring their communications starting on Monday. That you have not received a FISA order which you are not allowed to tell them about. Etc. Could they really get you just for reassuring the customer that his privacy is being looked after and he has nothing to worry about. Hell. You're helping them do their jobs. Just being a good and loyal citizenbot. Maybe you could even be a bit more vague and send them a notice that, although you are forced to comply with all lawful government surveillance requests, you take customer privacy very seriously. If this sort of thing doesn't work then essentially the gag order forbids any form of nonroutine communication whatsoever. Maybe if you so much as wave to the customer while they are walking their dog you get prosecuted for violating the gag order.
Unless you're willing to be the guinea pig who runs it through to the SCOTUS, it's perfectly 'legal' until SCOTUS says otherwise.
This was precisely the sort of thing The Founders were afraid of. This is why there is a ninth amendment. I don't know how they could have made it any more clear that this is exactly how they did not want things to work.
The terrorists won on September 11, 2001, although not in the way they planned.
More like not in the specific way that they had hoped. IIRC they hoped to get the US military out of Saudi Arabia. But the sort of stuff in the news now is also the kind of thing they were hoping for. A rather nice consolation prize. It is certainly a revenge of sorts. The entire country has been punished. Countless generations of Americans will be forced to live in an Orwellian dystopia. They could not have done it without help from our own politicians, but nevertheless it is undeniably a very real victory for Bin Laden's group. No honest person can continue to call the US free and there is no going back.
time based gag orders combined with warrants are not a violation of free speech
I'd love to know if you were typiing this with a straight face. I cannot think of anything that is more of a violation of "free" speech. Perhaps you mean free as in beer.
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Then don't vote. Or vote for a third party or a write-in. Voting for Bad just adds legitimacy to his actions when he starts doing Bad Things.
What do Republicans have to do with this? Trying to change the subject? I'm not at all convinced that Obama is at all better than Putin. Nor do I think that a Republican would be any better either. Although I don't particularly want to imagine someone worse than Obama when it comes to being an enthusiastic Police Stater and Orwellianist. I'm already frightented enough to want to flee the country as soon as possible. I find Obama genuinely scary. I have no illusions that whoever replaces Obama will not be just as bad, but that doesn't get him off the hook for being a fascist prick doing his best to turn the whole US into one big prison camp.
Why should we care about what motivates Putin? Don't actions speak louder than words? Putin is not a good guy, but at the moment he is doing a good thing. Saving a guys life. Give him some credit for not being a total dick 100% of the time. I wish we could say the same for Obama, but he's been pretty consistent.
First, the United States would not seek the death penalty for Mr. Snowden should he return to the United States.
Translation: We will not "seek" it, but we don't guarantee that he won't get it. It's up to the judge who does the actual sentencing.
The charges he faces do not carry that possibility, and the United States would not seek the death penalty even if Mr. Snowden were charged with additional, death penalty-eligible crimes
Translation: We haven't yet charged him with treason for "aiding the enemy" yet, as we did with Manning, but we will. However when he is charged with treason it's up to the judge to sentence him to death. The prosecutor doesn't do the actual sentencing.
He did plan everything in advance. He just planned badly. Releasing the documents and claiming responsibility from a country with a US extradition treaty? That wasn't a smart move if he cared at all about self-preservation. When I first heard the news I assumed that he just didnt' care about his own fate. That he was simply resigned to life in prison or execution.
The NSA has not caught a single terrorist ever. Not a single one. Not even once. Although if they really wanted to catch one all they would have to do is look in the mirror.
Actually their secret successes are due to NSA's ant-terrorist rock. Prove me wrong. Secret successes are so convenient aren't they? The NSA wishes they could tell us all about the evil 5 year old terrorists they have blown up. We would all be so proud.
The NSA should be dissolved. Your imaginary terrorist bogeymen are not the ones turning this country into an Orwellian police state. You and your friends can take all the credit for that. Congratulations on destroying a once great country due to your own pathetic cowardice.
You want support? Stop the racist comments and come down hard on anybody who makes any
Not a big believer in freedom of speech I see.
Also you are doing the same thing that you are accusing Americans of doing. You are making use of tribal thinking. You are making an unwarranted generalization. Even if 70% of the population believes that foreigners are dirty scum with no rights you are forgetting about the other 30%. Or whatever percentage it may actually be.
You mean the deficit that's been reduced from 30-50% in the last 4 years depending on your numbers?
Citation needed desperately. Here are mine.
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-57400369-503544/national-debt-has-increased-more-under-obama-than-under-bush/
Our dept is now 16.7 trillion. It has not gone down to any significant degree. I believe the treasury paid down something like 35 billion. A drop in the bucket and virtually meaningless.
And don't you lose sight of the fact that we hardly manufacture anything of our own anymore and rely almost exclusively on imports, mostly from China. In a trade war with China we would be hurt more than they would. They have plenty of other people to sell to. We'd have stores with row after row of empty shelves.
Any site that requires javascript to view text is inherently suspicious IMO and should be avoided by anyone who cares about security. And you do realize that disabling javascript is what NoScript does, right? It's default deny.
But of course! France is well known for their love of dumb blockbuster action films with lots of car chases and explosions and little else. While here in the US we refuse to watch anything that is not a character study art film, ideally with subtitles. Hollywood knows that the shit they squeeze out is only useful abroad. Here in the US people are way too intelligent and sophisticated for mindless wild-ride fun which requires you to completely turn off your brain for a couple of hours. Clearly you are very familiar with the film industry in France.
OTOH terrorism committed by law enforcement is easier under a veil of secrecy.
Flying on an aircrift is a right. Or more to the point preventing people from flying on an aircraft is a right that the government does not possess. Or can you point out the part of the constitution that grants the government that right? You cannot because it doesn't exist and not just because aircraft didn't exist. Because they would have considered the idea of preventing people from traveling within the borders of their own country to be tyranny almost beyond their ability to imagine. To them it would have been like asking the government permission to breathe.
Although I disagree that the government has any right to my property just because the majority says it does I do agree that information cannot be owned. Once the information is out there it is out there. The only way to own information is to keep it a secret.
The government is sticking its nose where it doesn't belong. They have no right to do the monitoring they do not only because of the 4th amendment but because of the 9th and because the constitution does not give them explicit permission to do so. Depending on your ethical views it might also be immoral.
But the reason that the government should not be storing data from every email, phone call, and private mesasge in the world is not because the information is private property. It's because the surveillance involved to get that information is unethical, unconstitutional, and tends to lead to dystopian societies in practice (think STASI).
Even if that is all true it does not change the fact that private industry does not have the (legal) power to directly imprison you based on something you've said. In any society that has a government only the government is allowed to do such things.
But are you sure the country you live in is the US? When I was young and idealistic I joined the Libertarian party, put a bumper sticker on my car to show my support, called in (or attempted to) to talk radio to argue my pro-freedom views to large audiences, argued with people I knew to try to convert them to more freedom friendly views and guess what? I don't see any more freedom in this country than before. In fact there is far less freedom now. So what did I do wrong? What more could I have done? Run as a Libertarian candidate myself? I don't have the charisma or social skills for that. Just tell me what I can do that would plausibly have some effect and which doesn't involve violence and I will do it. Not that I would be against violence in principle, but it would require a large army to have any chance of throwing out the current corrupt regime.
But you do have control over how you behave in public and what you tell people who you do not trust. If I had a friend who posted inappropriate things about me on Facebook they would not remain a friend for very long. If I had a friend who was just a blabbermouth, and I still wanted to remain friends I just wouldn't tell him anything I didn't want posted on Facebook for the whole world to see. You don't need to control evey person you have ever met. You just need a bit of self-control over what you tell people and how you act in public.
Sure you can. You can opt out of the government any time you want. Renounce your citizenship and move somewhere else. Well, that's backwards, move somewhere else, then renounce your citizenship.
Now, you may not _want_ to do that, but you _can_ do that.
I think you are missing the point. You don't have to leave the country of your birth and remain in exile for the rest of your life to opt out of Facebook. And of course Facebook does not have the power to send armed men to your home to take all your stuff, shoot your dog, and throw you in a cage for the rest of your life. Or even just kill you if you show even the slightest form of resistance, are rude to them in any way, or they are just in the mood for a little fun. The government has a whole army of people with guns who can use them against you with impunity. Facebook doesn't. Do you understand the difference now?
Are you trying to argue that the Bhopal accident was intentional? An oil spill? It is difficult to take such arguments seriously. Accidents happen. If a private corporation were to start executing or imprisoning people the police would probably go after them and if they didn't that would again become a government problem.
If corporations started acting like drug dealers and were routinely gunning down their competition or started massacring anyone who bought goods from their competition our world would be a very different place. It is to prevent stuff like that that people want a government which is allowed to enforce reasonable laws through a very limited use of force. But when those governments get out of control like the US government clearly has then it becomes far worse than mere shootouts in the street between corporate officers of competing companies. It becomes a true dystopian nightmare as portrayed in A Brave New World, 1984, or V for Vendetta.
The problem isn't really that governments themselves are inherently evil while private companies are always angelic. The problem is that people are inherently evil as demonstrated by the Stanford Prison Experiment and The Milgrim Experiment and when you combine that problem with Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? you end up with a true nightmare. When the government themselves does bad things there is no one around to stop them.
The problem is that governments control the laws and courts and they do not have to punish themselves. So there is no limit to their actions. A few years ago someone in my state was pulled over at a suspicionless police roadblock checking for drunk drivers. The driver wasn't drunk, but he did apparently have a small quanity of marijuana in his car. Or at least that's the story. Instead of arresting him for marijuana possession the police simply beat him to death. End of story. No one was ever prosecuted or even sent on paid leave. Cops will not testify against each other. They protect their own. This is just the smallest possible example. Something similar happened to me except that I wasn't beaten all the way to death. The angry cop was pulled off of me before he could finish strangling me. I was lucky that there was a cop on the scene who did have a conscience and thought murder was wrong. That's the only limit to government power: the hope that at least a few people (i.e. Snowden) inside the system still have a conscience and are willing to act on it.
We have the government to protect us against private concentration of power and evil individuals. It may not always work, but at least it exists. There is nothing to protect us against government power except for the pathetic power of the 2nd amendment. And things would have to get pretty bad indeed for that power to be exercised. I'm guessing even more dystopian than the government in V for Vendetta.
What about shutting down the entire company until and unless the government stops trying to use you as an informant? Perhaps they can force you to do business with a particular customer with whom you would prefer not to associate with, but can they really prevent you from simply giving all of your employees 6-12 months unpaid leave and shutting down all of your customers every time you get such a request? That is what I would do before violating the trust and privacy of my customers and becoming a willing FBI informant. Before doing my part to help put innocent people in prison. You can't put a price on a clear conscience. Does literally no one have principles that they stand by anymore?
Alternatively one could flee to a country without an extradition treaty with the US and then just email everyone who is being monitored from disposable webmail accounts opened in overseas internet cafes using a Tor browser. Then they would have no proof that you were the one who warned them and they could not even really try to prosecute you until and unless you returned to the US. And even in that case they might have a tough time proving to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that you were the source of the leaks.
It would be dicey. In affect you are violating the Gag order by writing a contract clause that gives you an indirect means of notifying the customer or preventing the monitoring. I am no lawyer but that too me sounds like a whole boat load of legal trouble to invite on themselves.
I was thinking about the librarian that someone linked to. I thought her response was pretty clever. Maybe upon receiving a FISA order you could contact the customer and tell them that the FBI/NSA is not going to be monitoring their communications starting on Monday. That you have not received a FISA order which you are not allowed to tell them about. Etc. Could they really get you just for reassuring the customer that his privacy is being looked after and he has nothing to worry about. Hell. You're helping them do their jobs. Just being a good and loyal citizenbot. Maybe you could even be a bit more vague and send them a notice that, although you are forced to comply with all lawful government surveillance requests, you take customer privacy very seriously. If this sort of thing doesn't work then essentially the gag order forbids any form of nonroutine communication whatsoever. Maybe if you so much as wave to the customer while they are walking their dog you get prosecuted for violating the gag order.
Unless you're willing to be the guinea pig who runs it through to the SCOTUS, it's perfectly 'legal' until SCOTUS says otherwise.
This was precisely the sort of thing The Founders were afraid of. This is why there is a ninth amendment. I don't know how they could have made it any more clear that this is exactly how they did not want things to work.
The terrorists won on September 11, 2001, although not in the way they planned.
More like not in the specific way that they had hoped. IIRC they hoped to get the US military out of Saudi Arabia. But the sort of stuff in the news now is also the kind of thing they were hoping for. A rather nice consolation prize. It is certainly a revenge of sorts. The entire country has been punished. Countless generations of Americans will be forced to live in an Orwellian dystopia. They could not have done it without help from our own politicians, but nevertheless it is undeniably a very real victory for Bin Laden's group. No honest person can continue to call the US free and there is no going back.
time based gag orders combined with warrants are not a violation of free speech
I'd love to know if you were typiing this with a straight face. I cannot think of anything that is more of a violation of "free" speech. Perhaps you mean free as in beer.