When is this 'refreshing the tree of liberty' thing going to happen? Never?... letting people have guns is apparently less of a threat to power than losing votes due to further restricting them.
You basically provide the answer. The government still changes by means of election, and the politicians still are concerned about what the voters will do when they vote. The Republic endures.
What makes the fictional dystopias featuring surveillance states interesting isn't simply the fact that they conduct surveillance, but rather what they do with the information. In the fictional dystopias is it to engage in various sorts of general repression against the population, sometimes subtly, sometimes in a heavy handed and cruel fashion. How many of them involve actions by the state to genuinely protect the citizenry except in an Orwellian fashion? Moving from fiction to history and current events reveals that the difference between free societies using surveillance to protect themselves is in marked contrast to unfree societies. Nobody went to prison for 10 years at hard labor for simply calling George Bush, "Chimpy McHitler," while he was President, but plenty of people went to the Gulag for 10 years for telling a joke about Stalin, and far from all of the people sent to the Gulag survived. There may need to be refinement and more oversight over the activities of the intelligence services of Western governments, but getting it wrong will ultimately lead to harsh feedback of another sort.
That "legal" interpretation is the one that exists only in the minds of certain government lawyers.
Legal interpretations and doctrines don't just exist in people's heads, they exist on paper. That is the accumulated case law and legal precedents from 220+ years of jurisprudence. There are many situations in which it isn't clear how either the law or the Constitution applies until it is tried in court. Different courts across the country often have varying degrees of difference in their interpretations. The entire understanding of a law can change based on a Supreme Court decision. That is before you even get into the question of deciding how competing claims from different parts of the Constitution interact in a particular situation, under a particular body of law.* And make no mistake, there are many different bodies of law, including some that people either pretend don't exists, or wish didn't exist, such as the Law of War and national security law. They are distinct from ordinary criminal law.
You are making bold declarations while standing on sand.
*Example: Article II powers of the president versus the 4ths Amendment involving national security law, rather than criminal law.
Well, what's wrong with actually having anything to hide?
As a general matter maybe nothing, at least as far as simple privacy goes. The problem comes in when what is being hidden results in something like this or that . Those show the rights of American citizens being violated. Sadly, few people on Slashdot seem to think there is anything wrong with that, but some are at least willing to bid them to die well.
Another lost piece of wisdom from the Revolution:
We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately. -- Benjamin Franklin
On the other hand, defense of the nation is a Constitutional responsibility of the Federal government. Lose enough security and your liberty will follow.
The whole idea of "secret courts" is, in and of itself, ludicrous. Keeping "national security" information from the nation's public whose security is at stake ensures that only those who want to and can do harm will get the information.
I see. Will you and 10,000,000 other Americans be the ones we trust this week with the nuclear launch codes? Do you and the other 10,000,000 promise to keep them secret and out of the hands of the Chinese?
Next week you and that same 10,000,000 people are in the rotation to keep the secret list of which Russian and Chinese spies the FBI will be tracking, and who the informants are. Do you and the other 10,000,000 promise to keep them secret and out of the hands of the Chinese and Russians?
You aren't really thinking this through in any real way. Either that or you are trolling. I hate to use the word, but really, that is stupid.
The FISA court isn't a secret court. It is a court that handles secrets. The main purpose of the court is to handle warrant requests, which is a one sided process in other courts as well, and done in confidence.
Since the government didn't call any witnesses or file any documents, essentially offering no real defense, it is easy to get the impression that they are throwing the case, as they have in other cases. Looks like community organizing going on from within the government again.
....also noting that the United States government "did not call any witnesses, submit any documentary evidence or file any declarations" in the case, and that "the government was unwilling or unable to state that these plaintiffs would not be subject to indefinite detention under [Section] 1021," putting them at risk.[38]
Based on the merits of the case I doubt they would succeed if the government had really chosen to defend since the plaintiffs only really offer hypotheticals for harm, and the courts generally dislike those. They also seem to be trying to establish a right to directly communicate with terrorist groups. Yet another subtle bit of lawfare.
Please reread my post, and answer this simple question: If they keep attacking, what are you going to do? Stop defending the lives of Americans and American allies? Just let them be killed? Surrender?
I think it is just fine to live in a country that defends it citizens.
The US isn't at war with Eurasia. It is at war with al Qaida.
Hard to say. It was recognized after 9/11 that it would be a long conflict, in part because the problem of radical Islamism had been allowed to fester for so long. It could easily last 20-40 years, or more. If you find that objectionable in some way, how do you plan to influence the radical Islamists to stop attacking, recognizing that their ultimate goal is to install Islamic governments that control the entire earth. Yes - it is a very long term goal. Also keep in mind that in 30-50 years Europe will probably be caught up in a civil war of its own. If you want to just top defending the US and its allies, how many casualties per year do you find acceptable? Keep in mind that Al Qaida in Iraq killed something like 10,000 people a year. Iraq is the size of California. Part of the reason Al Qaida has been so weakened is due to constant pressure and the humiliating losses they took in Iraq, as well as the demonstration that they would be happy to kill Muslims as well. If they start showing that they can be effective in killing people besides Muslims, it will be likely that they draw more support to them.
So how do you think that the Constitution isn't being upheld, keeping in mind that Guantanamo holds prisoners of war of a certain class, and not ordinary criminals that are subject to the criminal justice system?
All right, what's all this then!? An "inch?" That is quite clearly a violation of the Metrification of Public Exclamations Act, and likely the EU Common Exclamation standard as well! Give some people a centimeter and they'll take a kilometer. Right, we'll see about that!
Depends on how they implement the filter controls. If they make the accessible through a web interface at the individual account level it may not be too bad.
WASHINGTON, June 29, 2005 – If you're a Muslim extremist captured while fighting your holy war against "infidels," avoid revealing information at all costs, don't give your real name and claim that you were mistreated or tortured during your detention. . .
Police in Manchester, England, discovered the manual, which has come to be known as the "Manchester document," in 2000 while searching computer files found in the home of a known al Qaeda member. The contents were introduced as evidence into the 2001 trial of terrorists who bombed the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998.
The FBI translated the document into English, and it is posted on the Justice Department's Web site.
The 18-chapter manual provides a detailed window into al Qaeda's network and its procedures for waging jihad - from conducting surveillance operations to carrying out assassinations to working with forged documents.
The closing chapter teaches al Qaeda operatives how to operate in a prison or detention center. It directs detainees to "insist on proving that torture was inflicted" and to "complain of mistreatment while in prison."
Chapter 17 instructs them to "be careful not to give the enemy any vital information" during interrogations. . ..
"These detainees are trained to lie, they're trained to say they were tortured, and the minute we release them or the minute they get a lawyer, very frequently they'll go out and they will announce that they've been tortured," Rumsfeld said.
The media jumps on these claims, reporting them as "another example of torture," the secretary said, "when in fact, (terrorists have) been trained to do that, and their training manual says so."
During a February 2004 Pentagon news conference, a DoD official said new information provided by detainees during questioning is analyzed to determine its reliability.
"Unfortunately, many detainees are deceptive and prefer to conceal their identifies and their actions," said Paul Butler, principal deputy assistant secretary for special operations and low-intensity conflict.
Butler said the Manchester document includes "a large section which teaches al Qaeda operatives counterinterrogation techniques: how to lie, how to minimize your role."
The document, he said, has surfaced in various locations, including Afghanistan.
The manual's preface offers a chilling reminder of the mentality that drives al Qaeda disciples and the lengths they will go to for their cause.
"The confrontation that we are calling for... does not know Socratic debates,... Platonic ideals... nor Aristotelian diplomacy," its opening pages read. "But it knows the dialogue of bullets, the ideals of assassination, bombing and destruction, and the diplomacy of the cannon and machine gun."
The proportion of militants released from detention at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay who subsequently were believed to have returned to the battlefield rose slightly over the last year, according to official figures released on Monday. In a summary report, the office of the Director of National Intelligence said that 27.9 percent of the 599 former detainees released from Guantanamo were either confirmed or suspected of later engaging in militant activity.
After WW2 when over a million ex German soldiers died in huge outdoor concentration camps that the treaty was sidestepped by using the designation of 'Surrendered Enemy Personnel'.
I'm afraid you've either confused the USSR for the USA, or you've got some history from a crank.
In early April 1945, the United States was responsible for 313,000 prisoners in Europe; by month's end this total had shot up to 2.1 million. After the fall of the Third Reich, the number rose to a staggering 5 million German and Axis POWs. Of those, an estimated 56,000, or about 1 percent, died—roughly equal to the mortality rate American POWs suffered in German hands. Those held in Soviet-occupied territory fared far worse. Officially, the Soviet Union took 2,388,000 Germans and 1,097,000 combatants from other European nations as prisoners during and just after the war. More than a million of the German captives died. The immense suffering Germany and her Axis partners had caused surely played a key role in the treatment of enemy POWs. "In 1945, in Soviet eyes it was time to pay," wrote British military historian Max Arthur. "For most Russian soldiers, any instinct for pity or mercy had died somewhere on a hundred battlefields between Moscow and Warsaw." - German POWs and the Art of Survival
I think you need to go back and read that post you replied to again, especially the first line: "The Authorization for Use of Military Force [gpo.gov] passed by the US Congress after 9/11... "
Not for Prisoners of War. They can be held till the end of the conflict for the simple act of participating in the war as an enemy combatant. War crimes charges are a separate issue.
German POWs were held in the UK as late in 1948, 3 years after the war ended. France held prisoners for forced labor for 4 years. The Soviet Union didn't release all of their prisoners until 12 years after the war ended.
You may be pleased to learn that the US held Combatant Status Review Tribunals to determine the status of individual prisoners.
It is not a trivial thing to go to war. Al Qaida only preaches the glory of martyrdom for Islam, not of capture and imprisonment. They at least get to keep their lives. Prisoners taken by al Qaida are often tortured in hideous ways, and/or beheaded.
Some of the high visibility mainline projects may be more prone to intolerance and abuse of, for want of a better phrase, newbie errors. You could try dipping your toes in the water in one of the useful if unglamorous projects that might be less harrowing. There are various orphan projects out there, others that get little attention, and some potentially useful but incomplete ones as well. Then there are projects designed for the newcomer. You might want to take a look at this:
Slashdot Mirror
When is this 'refreshing the tree of liberty' thing going to happen? Never? ... letting people have guns is apparently less of a threat to power than losing votes due to further restricting them.
You basically provide the answer. The government still changes by means of election, and the politicians still are concerned about what the voters will do when they vote. The Republic endures.
Where are the mass arrests?
What makes the fictional dystopias featuring surveillance states interesting isn't simply the fact that they conduct surveillance, but rather what they do with the information. In the fictional dystopias is it to engage in various sorts of general repression against the population, sometimes subtly, sometimes in a heavy handed and cruel fashion. How many of them involve actions by the state to genuinely protect the citizenry except in an Orwellian fashion? Moving from fiction to history and current events reveals that the difference between free societies using surveillance to protect themselves is in marked contrast to unfree societies. Nobody went to prison for 10 years at hard labor for simply calling George Bush, "Chimpy McHitler," while he was President, but plenty of people went to the Gulag for 10 years for telling a joke about Stalin, and far from all of the people sent to the Gulag survived. There may need to be refinement and more oversight over the activities of the intelligence services of Western governments, but getting it wrong will ultimately lead to harsh feedback of another sort.
Too true:(Listen for the joke at 1:40) Reagan tells Soviet jokes
That "legal" interpretation is the one that exists only in the minds of certain government lawyers.
Legal interpretations and doctrines don't just exist in people's heads, they exist on paper. That is the accumulated case law and legal precedents from 220+ years of jurisprudence. There are many situations in which it isn't clear how either the law or the Constitution applies until it is tried in court. Different courts across the country often have varying degrees of difference in their interpretations. The entire understanding of a law can change based on a Supreme Court decision. That is before you even get into the question of deciding how competing claims from different parts of the Constitution interact in a particular situation, under a particular body of law.* And make no mistake, there are many different bodies of law, including some that people either pretend don't exists, or wish didn't exist, such as the Law of War and national security law. They are distinct from ordinary criminal law.
You are making bold declarations while standing on sand.
*Example: Article II powers of the president versus the 4ths Amendment involving national security law, rather than criminal law.
That is wrong. It has been confirmed that the IRS was heavily weighting their actions against the Tea Party and other conservative groups.
The IRS Scandal, Day 64
it would still violate the 4th amendment.
If you make it to the Supreme Court and convince 4 other justices to vote with you, it might after the next case. It doesn't today.
Well, what's wrong with actually having anything to hide?
As a general matter maybe nothing, at least as far as simple privacy goes. The problem comes in when what is being hidden results in something like this or that . Those show the rights of American citizens being violated. Sadly, few people on Slashdot seem to think there is anything wrong with that, but some are at least willing to bid them to die well.
Another lost piece of wisdom from the Revolution:
We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately. -- Benjamin Franklin
On the other hand, defense of the nation is a Constitutional responsibility of the Federal government. Lose enough security and your liberty will follow.
The whole idea of "secret courts" is, in and of itself, ludicrous. Keeping "national security" information from the nation's public whose security is at stake ensures that only those who want to and can do harm will get the information.
I see. Will you and 10,000,000 other Americans be the ones we trust this week with the nuclear launch codes? Do you and the other 10,000,000 promise to keep them secret and out of the hands of the Chinese?
Next week you and that same 10,000,000 people are in the rotation to keep the secret list of which Russian and Chinese spies the FBI will be tracking, and who the informants are. Do you and the other 10,000,000 promise to keep them secret and out of the hands of the Chinese and Russians?
You aren't really thinking this through in any real way. Either that or you are trolling. I hate to use the word, but really, that is stupid.
The FISA court isn't a secret court. It is a court that handles secrets. The main purpose of the court is to handle warrant requests, which is a one sided process in other courts as well, and done in confidence.
Since the government didn't call any witnesses or file any documents, essentially offering no real defense, it is easy to get the impression that they are throwing the case, as they have in other cases. Looks like community organizing going on from within the government again.
....also noting that the United States government "did not call any witnesses, submit any documentary evidence or file any declarations" in the case, and that "the government was unwilling or unable to state that these plaintiffs would not be subject to indefinite detention under [Section] 1021," putting them at risk.[38]
Based on the merits of the case I doubt they would succeed if the government had really chosen to defend since the plaintiffs only really offer hypotheticals for harm, and the courts generally dislike those. They also seem to be trying to establish a right to directly communicate with terrorist groups. Yet another subtle bit of lawfare.
The war against al Qaida was recognized as a long war. Iraq is unrelated.
Please reread my post, and answer this simple question: If they keep attacking, what are you going to do? Stop defending the lives of Americans and American allies? Just let them be killed? Surrender?
I think it is just fine to live in a country that defends it citizens.
The US isn't at war with Eurasia. It is at war with al Qaida.
Murder by Numbers
Hard to say. It was recognized after 9/11 that it would be a long conflict, in part because the problem of radical Islamism had been allowed to fester for so long. It could easily last 20-40 years, or more. If you find that objectionable in some way, how do you plan to influence the radical Islamists to stop attacking, recognizing that their ultimate goal is to install Islamic governments that control the entire earth. Yes - it is a very long term goal. Also keep in mind that in 30-50 years Europe will probably be caught up in a civil war of its own. If you want to just top defending the US and its allies, how many casualties per year do you find acceptable? Keep in mind that Al Qaida in Iraq killed something like 10,000 people a year. Iraq is the size of California. Part of the reason Al Qaida has been so weakened is due to constant pressure and the humiliating losses they took in Iraq, as well as the demonstration that they would be happy to kill Muslims as well. If they start showing that they can be effective in killing people besides Muslims, it will be likely that they draw more support to them.
So how do you think that the Constitution isn't being upheld, keeping in mind that Guantanamo holds prisoners of war of a certain class, and not ordinary criminals that are subject to the criminal justice system?
Give them an inch...
All right, what's all this then!? An "inch?"
That is quite clearly a violation of the Metrification of Public Exclamations Act, and likely the EU Common Exclamation standard as well! Give some people a centimeter and they'll take a kilometer. Right, we'll see about that!
Depends on how they implement the filter controls. If they make the accessible through a web interface at the individual account level it may not be too bad.
Better at what? And for which country?
Don't you know? They are all "innocent."
Al Qaeda Manual Drives Detainee Behavior at Guantanamo Bay
WASHINGTON, June 29, 2005 – If you're a Muslim extremist captured while fighting your holy war against "infidels," avoid revealing information at all costs, don't give your real name and claim that you were mistreated or tortured during your detention. . .
Police in Manchester, England, discovered the manual, which has come to be known as the "Manchester document," in 2000 while searching computer files found in the home of a known al Qaeda member. The contents were introduced as evidence into the 2001 trial of terrorists who bombed the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998.
The FBI translated the document into English, and it is posted on the Justice Department's Web site.
The 18-chapter manual provides a detailed window into al Qaeda's network and its procedures for waging jihad - from conducting surveillance operations to carrying out assassinations to working with forged documents.
The closing chapter teaches al Qaeda operatives how to operate in a prison or detention center. It directs detainees to "insist on proving that torture was inflicted" and to "complain of mistreatment while in prison."
Chapter 17 instructs them to "be careful not to give the enemy any vital information" during interrogations. . . .
"These detainees are trained to lie, they're trained to say they were tortured, and the minute we release them or the minute they get a lawyer, very frequently they'll go out and they will announce that they've been tortured," Rumsfeld said.
The media jumps on these claims, reporting them as "another example of torture," the secretary said, "when in fact, (terrorists have) been trained to do that, and their training manual says so."
During a February 2004 Pentagon news conference, a DoD official said new information provided by detainees during questioning is analyzed to determine its reliability.
"Unfortunately, many detainees are deceptive and prefer to conceal their identifies and their actions," said Paul Butler, principal deputy assistant secretary for special operations and low-intensity conflict.
Butler said the Manchester document includes "a large section which teaches al Qaeda operatives counterinterrogation techniques: how to lie, how to minimize your role."
The document, he said, has surfaced in various locations, including Afghanistan.
The manual's preface offers a chilling reminder of the mentality that drives al Qaeda disciples and the lengths they will go to for their cause.
"The confrontation that we are calling for ... does not know Socratic debates, ... Platonic ideals ... nor Aristotelian diplomacy," its opening pages read. "But it knows the dialogue of bullets, the ideals of assassination, bombing and destruction, and the diplomacy of the cannon and machine gun."
Recidivism rises among released Guantanamo detainees
The proportion of militants released from detention at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay who subsequently were believed to have returned to the battlefield rose slightly over the last year, according to official figures released on Monday. In a summary report, the office of the Director of National Intelligence said that 27.9 percent of the 599 former detainees released from Guantanamo were either confirmed or suspected of later engaging in militant activity.
It's not the Olympics, it's war.
Rude Britannia!
Britannia on the net!
Children might still find bad things yet!
After WW2 when over a million ex German soldiers died in huge outdoor concentration camps that the treaty was sidestepped by using the designation of 'Surrendered Enemy Personnel'.
I'm afraid you've either confused the USSR for the USA, or you've got some history from a crank .
In early April 1945, the United States was responsible for 313,000 prisoners in Europe; by month's end this total had shot up to 2.1 million. After the fall of the Third Reich, the number rose to a staggering 5 million German and Axis POWs. Of those, an estimated 56,000, or about 1 percent, died—roughly equal to the mortality rate American POWs suffered in German hands. Those held in Soviet-occupied territory fared far worse. Officially, the Soviet Union took 2,388,000 Germans and 1,097,000 combatants from other European nations as prisoners during and just after the war. More than a million of the German captives died. The immense suffering Germany and her Axis partners had caused surely played a key role in the treatment of enemy POWs. "In 1945, in Soviet eyes it was time to pay," wrote British military historian Max Arthur. "For most Russian soldiers, any instinct for pity or mercy had died somewhere on a hundred battlefields between Moscow and Warsaw." - German POWs and the Art of Survival
The Soviets were not especially benign: The Soviet Story (2008)
I think you need to go back and read that post you replied to again, especially the first line: "The Authorization for Use of Military Force [gpo.gov] passed by the US Congress after 9/11... "
It is the Congress that sent the US to war.
The US leases the Guantanamo Bay naval base from Cuba.
Not for Prisoners of War. They can be held till the end of the conflict for the simple act of participating in the war as an enemy combatant. War crimes charges are a separate issue.
German POWs were held in the UK as late in 1948, 3 years after the war ended. France held prisoners for forced labor for 4 years. The Soviet Union didn't release all of their prisoners until 12 years after the war ended.
Forced labor of Germans after World War II
Life in Britain for German Prisoners of War
You may be pleased to learn that the US held Combatant Status Review Tribunals to determine the status of individual prisoners.
It is not a trivial thing to go to war. Al Qaida only preaches the glory of martyrdom for Islam, not of capture and imprisonment. They at least get to keep their lives. Prisoners taken by al Qaida are often tortured in hideous ways, and/or beheaded.
Some of the high visibility mainline projects may be more prone to intolerance and abuse of, for want of a better phrase, newbie errors. You could try dipping your toes in the water in one of the useful if unglamorous projects that might be less harrowing. There are various orphan projects out there, others that get little attention, and some potentially useful but incomplete ones as well. Then there are projects designed for the newcomer. You might want to take a look at this:
KernelJanitors