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FBI Is Building a Watchlist That Gives Companies Real Time Updates on Employees

theintercept.com

221–230 of 321 posts

Re: FBI Is Building a Watchlist That Gives Companies Real Time Updates on Employees

#221
"including arrests at protests and charges that do not end up in convictions"

I'm not sure what is, but I am sure that secret arrests and secret trials are not the answer. My first thought was to argue due process but typing it out made this contradiction inescapable.

Re: FBI Is Building a Watchlist That Gives Companies Real Time Updates on Employees

#222
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've watched a lot of them, but you've never seen or heard of "kettling"? Odd. I have seen it and experienced it. (I'm also curious what instances of protests-turned-riot you're referring to. The US hasn't had many riots, in any meaningful sense, recently. Do you mean someone smashing a window?)

There was one a couple of days ago at Berkeley where 150 or so masked people smashed windows and set things on fire in an attempt to block a conservative from speaking there. Causing $100k in damage to private property in order to curtail other's free speech isn't something that should be glossed over or minimized by calling it protesting. There's the riot at NYU where more violent agitators showed up to prevent Gavi…

Kettling is very typically used for mass arrests, even if charges are not filed against everyone arrested. This has happened in Oakland, where I live, multiple times in the last five years. And the fact that an arrest without a conviction can be reported to employers under this FBI program is one of the problems noted in the article.

Terrorism is quite a word for a situation in which nobody was seriously injured, as far as I know. And terrorism of the variety that involves killing people is already less likely to kill someone in the U.S. than a lightning strike. Picking the black bloc as the "very real problem... to focus on", in that context and with everything else going on in the world--including the serious damage done to many thousands of people by cruel and violent policies justified by reference to the threat of terrorism--strikes me as a very poor choice of priorities.

Re: FBI Is Building a Watchlist That Gives Companies Real Time Updates on Employees

#223
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've watched a lot of them, but you've never seen or heard of "kettling"? Odd. I have seen it and experienced it. (I'm also curious what instances of protests-turned-riot you're referring to. The US hasn't had many riots, in any meaningful sense, recently. Do you mean someone smashing a window?)

There was one a couple of days ago at Berkeley where 150 or so masked people smashed windows and set things on fire in an attempt to block a conservative from speaking there. Causing $100k in damage to private property in order to curtail other's free speech isn't something that should be glossed over or minimized by calling it protesting. There's the riot at NYU where more violent agitators showed up to prevent Gavi…

I was at that protest in Berkeley and your claims are exaggerated. I've written here extensively on what was objectionable about the speaker's visit there and why I think the protests were justified. You should consider that a supporter of that speaker shot someone at a similar event only days earlier. If you are concerned about violence as you claim then I think rather outranks some broken windows and a burnt-out generator.

http://q13fox.com/2017/01/24/shooter-sent-facebook-message-t...

Re: FBI Is Building a Watchlist That Gives Companies Real Time Updates on Employees

#224
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shrink the state = let rich & corporations get loose. You want to replace kind of power that you got influence on and some expectations about public information access with totally "private" power that you got no control about. That is special kind of stupid. Thank you but no thank you.

> let rich & corporations get loose This belief only causes the state to grow. It inflates politicians to the point where they are worth buying, so they are bought. They then make laws that hurt their competition and help their corporation. They make laws that make it extremely difficult to ever start a business to compete to begin with. So the corporations get bigger, and have more to buy the politicians with. And t…

HN is not a place for this sort of ideological rant, so please don't post like this here.

Re: FBI Is Building a Watchlist That Gives Companies Real Time Updates on Employees

#225

There is a group who have proposed a solution to this problem for decades: Shrink the state. Until people stop believing that any effort to do so will result in everyone literally dying in the street, the state will grow. Until people's first impulse towards someone doing something they don't like ceases to be "there ought to be a law", the state will grow. Until people stop demanding that laws must affect the entire…

Please don't take threads here on generic ideological tangents. Those are predictable and therefore uninteresting by the standard we're trying for here.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13570278 and marked it off-topic.

Re: FBI Is Building a Watchlist That Gives Companies Real Time Updates on Employees

#226
We have watched this country destroy other countries one after the other, prop up the main global ideological and financial sponsors of terrorism and then diabolically spend billions of dollars building a surveillance state at home in response while pretending to be the good guy.

How can any responsible citizen let their own country do this to other countries, allow a surveillance state to be built in the first place inspite of all the revelations at great personal cost and allow the unencumbered growth of a war mongering military industrial complex at home?

The business as usual tones of these discussions in the media and the constant judging of others like China or Russia for authoritarianism reflects a troubling dissonance and denial about the real consequences of our actions both at home and abroad. We are not just destroying these countries, we are killing hundreds of thousands of people, disrupting millions of families for generations, decimating their infrastruture and way of life and putting them back decades. These is the definition of crimes against humanity. Can we really afford to be blase and unconcerned anymore.

Anyone can guess the inevitable consequence of trillions of dollars of spend and adding millions of employees co-opted into the surveillance state. Responsible citizens and anyone who believes in freedom, democracy and peace cannot let this slide any longer.

Re: FBI Is Building a Watchlist That Gives Companies Real Time Updates on Employees

#227
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shrink the state = let rich & corporations get loose. You want to replace kind of power that you got influence on and some expectations about public information access with totally "private" power that you got no control about. That is special kind of stupid. Thank you but no thank you.

>That is special kind of stupid. Very thoughtful and well reasoned. Take that trash elsewhere.

Please don't reply to a comment that breaks HN's guidelines by breaking the guidelines yourself. That only weakens them, and the community, further.

Re: FBI Is Building a Watchlist That Gives Companies Real Time Updates on Employees

#229
post #225

There is a group who have proposed a solution to this problem for decades: Shrink the state. Until people stop believing that any effort to do so will result in everyone literally dying in the street, the state will grow. Until people's first impulse towards someone doing something they don't like ceases to be "there ought to be a law", the state will grow. Until people stop demanding that laws must affect the entire…

Please don't take threads here on generic ideological tangents. Those are predictable and therefore uninteresting by the standard we're trying for here. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13570278 and marked it off-topic.

Call your ideological adversaries "fascists" and "brownshirts." Just fine by Dang. So much for "light touches." The mask slips, sir.

Re: FBI Is Building a Watchlist That Gives Companies Real Time Updates on Employees

#230
post #122

If it's leftist terrorist groups like BLM and Antifa being kettled to be subjugated then I absolutely want to live in that world.

HN is not a place for partisan or ideological battle. Commenters here need to swerve away from such flames, not straight into them.

Edit: it looks like you've been using HN primarily for political arguments. That's an abuse of this site and we eventually ban accounts that do it (regardless of the politics they espouse) so please don't do that.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13570725 and marked it off-topic.

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