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Global Mass Surveillance – The Fourteen Eyes

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Re: Global Mass Surveillance – The Fourteen Eyes

#111

Post by RonanTheGrey »

vkou wrote: post #107
cgriswald wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not true in the United States, unless you conflate all the governments within the United States as "the government" and ignore the federal system. In the United States, either Congress or the States may adopt a proposed amendment with a 2/3 vote. However, and importantly, only the States can ratify the amendment with a 3/4 vote. This means that, in the United States, at least, "the government" itself cannot r…

State, federal, it's still the government.

The difference is that in the US, while the common man's ability to influence the federal government is basically zero, their ability to influence state and local governments is much stronger. Much of California's social, economic and political landscape is a result of political activism over the past few decades (setting aside whether one agrees with those policies, my point is how they came about).

Which means that for things like amendments, people have alot more power than they do even over Congress.

Re: Global Mass Surveillance – The Fourteen Eyes

#112

Post by RonanTheGrey »

whatshisface wrote: post #81
baxtr wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m almost at a point where I think a well programmed robot would do a better job using known heuristics and a method to test legislation for effectiveness.

All of the effort that goes in to exploiting the humans would turn to exploiting the heuristics.

This is why I remain a proponent of OP's original statement, "don't give governments the power to do it in the first place."

Humans will always always always descend into abuse of power. Always. We basically suck.

Re: Global Mass Surveillance – The Fourteen Eyes

#113

Post by CyberDildonics »

remedialhedge wrote: post #105
chrisco255 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No they can't. It's incredibly hard to amend the Constitution of the United States. That's by design. You need 2/3 vote in both the House and the Senate and 3/4 of all states to ratify an amendment in order to change it. You can't be deemed "a dangerous criminal" without having actually been convicted in a court of law by a jury of your peers. And even then, there's appeals, pardons, etc. > What good does the right t…

Why is it that your comment is greyed out, yet the green accounts willfully misunderstanding US institutions and spreading whataboutism are not?

[flagged]

Re: Global Mass Surveillance – The Fourteen Eyes

#114

Post by RonanTheGrey »

justanotheranon wrote: post #90

there is no techinical solution to mass surveillance. Pandora's Box can never be closed and the average person will never throw away their cell phone and stop giving their Patterns of Life data to various Internet megacorps. Likewise, there is no political solution. Given the Patriot Act was so well designed to deceive is about mass surveillance, which we never would have voted for if we the governed were asked for o…

> to trigger a "Sum of All Fears" scale event, a spying scandal that eclipses all prior scandals, and which outrages hundreds of millions of people like never before

Yep. I've spent most of my life searching for solutions that don't require that level of excess, but the problem is, it is a feature of human cognition that we don't learn until we are forced to (more precisely, we do not fix social, economic and political problems until something so extreme comes along that we can't ignore them anymore, usually due to some version of a threat to survival). E.g. - consequences.

The alternative is the boiled frog, and yet another feature of human cognition is the ability to normalize our conditions. If something goes on long enough, it'll simply become "the way things are" and go unchallenged. You avoid this by flashing quickly to the worst outcome so people realize that it exists.

This is a long way of saying "Humans perceive consequences on short timescales, not long ones" and it really, really sucks.

Re: Global Mass Surveillance – The Fourteen Eyes

#115

Post by chrisco255 »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #103
chrisco255 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No they can't. It's incredibly hard to amend the Constitution of the United States. That's by design. You need 2/3 vote in both the House and the Senate and 3/4 of all states to ratify an amendment in order to change it. You can't be deemed "a dangerous criminal" without having actually been convicted in a court of law by a jury of your peers. And even then, there's appeals, pardons, etc. > What good does the right t…

>You can't be deemed "a dangerous criminal" without having actually been convicted in a court of law by a jury of your peers. And even then, there's appeals, pardons, etc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki

"On August 31, 2006, al-Awlaki was arrested with four others on charges of kidnapping a Shiite teenager for ransom, and participating in an al-Qaeda plot to kidnap a U.S. military attaché.[50][80] He was imprisoned in 2006 and 2007.[56] He was interviewed around September 2007 by two FBI agents with regard to the 9/11 attacks and other subjects. John Negroponte, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, told Yemeni officials he did not object to al-Awlaki's detention."

"n December 2008, al-Awlaki sent a communique to the Somali terrorist group, al-Shabaab, congratulating them."

"In March 2010, a tape featuring al-Awlaki was released in which he urged Muslims residing in the United States to attack their country of residence."

Look I'm no fan of drone strikes in general, but if you leave the United States to go join a terrorist organization and incite violence against the U.S. and other innocent people in other countries like Somalia..you clearly have lost Constitutional protection. We don't give trials for foreign terrorists or armies, that's a given.

Re: Global Mass Surveillance – The Fourteen Eyes

#116

Post by brisance »

mellow2020 wrote: post #51
craigsmansion wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but is the US that much better in terms of authoritarianism or surveillance? Who knows? The last guy who touched upon it had to hide in freedom-loving Russia afterwards. The PRC has it easy. They don't have to hide their actions behind contortions of "national security", which makes it difficult to compare the extent and pervasiveness of US and PRC surveillance.

> The last guy who touched upon it On the other hand, people like Chomsky aren't being persecuted. Though all in all, I would also say they get ignored very efficiently, Chomsky still isn't exactly unknown either. Is there a Chinese author and speaker with decades of real harsh criticism of their government under their belt, who is living in China with their works being translated in all sorts of languages and also a…

https://twitter.com/XinqiSu/status/1295211377259237378

Re: Global Mass Surveillance – The Fourteen Eyes

#117

Post by chrisco255 »

l332mn wrote: post #86
chrisco255 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all. No. The CCP will bend the law and the laws don't go nearly far enough to protect the individual. Obviously China is currently an authoritarian, uniparty state, so there's only one way to fight that: revolution. > It's not really a good sign as you think that people are winning legal battles against the state anywhere, because that's merely a symptom of the state abusing the law in the first place. Really?…

>Obviously when the CCP controls the law, they are free to re-interpret it or rewrite it to place themselves clearly in those bounds That's the case with every state. Every state has absolute power. Every state, as the union of the legislative, judicial and executive branch are free to re-interpret, rewrite and judge according to how the state apparatus best functions. You seem to be confusing the issue at hand with…

> That's the case with every state

No. No it's not.

Apparently you've never heard of the US Supreme Court.

Here's a list of the past 250 or so years of US Supreme Court rulings, which have a long history of protecting citizens rights against state and federal encroachments: https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-supreme-court

I suggest you read a few of them, get educated, then come back to me and we can have an intelligent discussion.

Re: Global Mass Surveillance – The Fourteen Eyes

#118

Post by tonyarkles »

bouchard wrote: post #38

> In Canada key disclosure is covered under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms section 11(c) which states "any person charged with an offence has the right not to be compelled to be a witness in proceedings against that person in respect of the offence;"[10] and protects the rights of individuals that are both citizens and non-citizens of Canada as long as they are physically present in Canada.[11] >In a 201…

I was wondering the same thing! I wonder if the Wikipedia article has changed (a quick glance at the history doesn’t seem to suggest that it was).

One part that isn’t mentioned in the article though is how the Canadian legal system would handle someone who has password-protected records about someone else. For example, you and I are friends, and I am on trial. Would the courts be able to subpoena your iMessage history with me? If you refused to provide your password, would you be charged with contempt? It’s not an 11(c) situation, because you’re not being compelled to be a witness against yourself.

Re: Global Mass Surveillance – The Fourteen Eyes

#119

Post by boomboomsubban »

chrisco255 wrote: post #115
boomboomsubban wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You can't be deemed "a dangerous criminal" without having actually been convicted in a court of law by a jury of your peers. And even then, there's appeals, pardons, etc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki

"On August 31, 2006, al-Awlaki was arrested with four others on charges of kidnapping a Shiite teenager for ransom, and participating in an al-Qaeda plot to kidnap a U.S. military attaché.[50][80] He was imprisoned in 2006 and 2007.[56] He was interviewed around September 2007 by two FBI agents with regard to the 9/11 attacks and other subjects. John Negroponte, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, told Yemeni…

>Look I'm no fan of drone strikes in general, but if you leave the United States to go join a terrorist organization and incite violence against the U.S. and other innocent people in other countries like Somalia..you clearly have lost Constitutional protection. We don't give trials for foreign terrorists or armies, that's a given.

So if I accuse you of a bad enough crime due process doesn't matter? Seems like a pretty easy loophole to exploit. And even if you can justify stripping al-Awlaki of his rights, it's pretty hard to justify killing his US citizen 16 year old son.

Re: Global Mass Surveillance – The Fourteen Eyes

#120

Post by vkou »

RonanTheGrey wrote: post #111
vkou wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

State, federal, it's still the government.

The difference is that in the US, while the common man's ability to influence the federal government is basically zero, their ability to influence state and local governments is much stronger. Much of California's social, economic and political landscape is a result of political activism over the past few decades (setting aside whether one agrees with those policies, my point is how they came about). Which means that…

A single Norwegian or Canadian has a lot more influence on their federal government than a single Californian on their state government.

And ease of influence is not actually the metric you want to optimize for in this sort of thing.

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