Ninth Circuit rules NSA's bulk collection of Americans' call records was illegal

>How would you define the ability to vote, as only going to select white men? Land owners of a certain acreage, looks like only 6% of the population fit that bill [1].

Aristocratic comes with way more baggage than what you describe; and you only have to look at jolly old England to see that. To be an Aristocrat. You had to be landed, but you also had to fit somewhere in the Peerage or established Nobility. That whole system of class stratification? That came with an entire Parliamentry House in the form of the House of Lords.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Lords

Where you ended up with the privilege 0f being a 0art of it being determined entirely on whether you were born in "aristocratic class".

That was quite literally considered the norm in most European countries at the time. Nobility was mum. Some Men just had a better lot in life. You got born into it, and it came with an entirely different social scene, responsibilities, perks, culture etc from 80 to 90% of the rest of the population. That was normal. If you were in, you had weight in policymaking far beyond the common man, you were Nobility. You could read, you could count, your family had proved their mettle, you were a treasure "revered" by your National edifice by definition, because you were noticed.

Then this crazy colonial bunch of States pops up, and all you have to do to have a say. Or participate in a major way in running the place is to get some land (cheap, and basically free in the sense you won it with sweat equity in those days), not be a slave to the regional authorities, and be able to show up to your communities meetings. That's it. If you were literate, you could end up getting picked to hoof it off to Congress, which at that time didn't pay anywhere near as generously as it does now, and would have to leave your life in the hands of your family, for weeks at a time. This was revolutionary at the time. Was there racism? Yes, absolutely, but there was no Aristocracy. There was no hard division of the classes of citizen like you'd get elsewhere. The landholding requirement was not onerous like it is now, and in fact, our history is filled with dead National Banks in part because people realized that they tended to disrupt the egalitarian baseline since financial institutions like such tend to end up being resource consolidation points away from the individual Citizen. Jeffersonian Democrats were particularly sensitive toward this issue. Even Hamilton at his worst imagined not an official Nobility, but that events would inevitably conspire to generate a class of "Merchant Princes" in America whose wealth allowed the to devote resources to exercising an oversized influence in the operation of Government, a reality we are arguably seeing, but has actively been fought against at other times in our history. We've had 100% tax rates in the United States.

The whole "no blacks" arose not out of a formal Aristocracy, but out of the set of compromises that kept the country operating as a single unit. The South needed it to stay functioning. And even then, for the time, it was revolutionary as wide a swath of the population had as recognizable a chunk of input as they did. Over time, things have only gotten more accessible, but they had to start somewhere. From the standpoint of a fledgling bunch of ex-colonies banding together, that made sense.

Get land? Cool, you aren't going anywhere, enjoy your vote. You didn't have phones for pools, mails and mass printing for distribution of campaign materials, and you had to have your affairs in order enough to have the "leisure time" to meaningfully participate. They basically wrote down as a requirement as broad a se f ignition of voting base as wasn't unworkable controversial at the time.

> The CIA has deep ties to the American upper classes

That’s hardly unique to the US. Other nations’ intelligence agencies tend to attract the aristocracy, e.g. all the Oxbridge alum at MI6/GCHQ.

> Now, if you believe that these agencies have amassed and hoarded enough of the money they've already been given that they now have an endowment that can perpetually fund their activities, then yes, that would mean you really can't stop them. But I'd find it hard to believe that's the case; what they do is not cheap, and I'd be surprised if there's all that much left over after they spend their yearly budget on regular operations.

What do you think In-Q-Tel[1] is for? It's about ensuring that the TLAs will exist in perpetuity regardless of Congress.

1. http://www.iqt.org

That doesn’t sound like fear but acceptance.

Although, what country doesn’t have the ability to dig through your luggage? In my personal experience, Europe is the only place that I’ve seen armed officers dig through 100% of the bags on a flight while the entire airport watched.

>> because there's no higher authority to appeal to for enforcement

> Technically, that higher authority is the people themselves. Bear in mind that the Constitution was written in a context where the governed people successfully held their government accountable at the business end of their hunting rifles.

I should have probably said "there's no higher institutional authority to appeal to for enforcement." When you're talking about jail-time penalties, I think you're talking about something that's institutionally enforced.

At this point, the only check is the people via elections; but I don't think unconstitutional laws are passed for some private purpose, but rather to satisfy some popular political demand (like "never again"). Such esoteric concepts like the unconstitutionality of some particular law aren't often at the top of voters minds, either.

At least in the current climate, with the level of disunity and polarization, any attempt at a revolution would be a civil war where (in the end) half the country loses a good chunk of their civil rights.