21–30 of 265 posts
I knew before even reading that the senator would be Ron Wyden. He's a treasure and the most tech-literate politician I know of. Oregon is lucky to have him, and we could use a lot more like him.
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We gotta thank the Bush admin for this. Obama had the opp to make things right, but passed and instead gave them a wink. Trump was never going to act against these interests even if he’d wanted to given all the other aspects he was embroiled in. And now Biden. No way is he going to buck the establishment. Unfortunately Ron Paul nor anyone like him will make it into office to dismantle this surveillance-industrial com…
Don't you mean Ron Wyden and not Ron Paul? Otherwise you're pretty much spot on.
The larger confusion on the part of the parent is thinking the President is in charge of much of anything or has the power to dismantle any of these deep state perma structures that have been built up in the post WW2 era; these are structures that survive any given administration, regardless of political agenda, and which nobody really dares to challenge. That includes the always expanding spying systems and military industrial complex. Any President that tries it will be burned out of DC every which way possible. Instant lame duck, crippled by their own party, on the outs with the news media (which is entirely a pet of the deep state), lambasted coming and going, tripped up in staged scandals set up by deep state opponents in the FBI or CIA, probably get impeached a few times for relatively trivial things (vs, say, starting wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya that got a million plus people killed; you know, things you should actually get impeached for). The President is more of a token figurehead today than not.
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Can't watch because I am at work but the NSA conducts foreign surveillance. If a foreign target talks to a US citizen that's "unwittingly" surveiling a US citizen. Do you believe that it's alright for the NSA to conduct surveillance on foreign threats?
Under the 4th amendment NSA is forbidden from collecting the communications of US citizens without a warrant. Do you disagree or think the constitution should be amended to authorize that?
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Don't you mean Ron Wyden and not Ron Paul? Otherwise you're pretty much spot on.
They mean making it into the White House I believe. Ron Paul would certainly attempt to dismantle it, and he'd fail miserably (he'd never win election to begin with though). The larger confusion on the part of the parent is thinking the President is in charge of much of anything or has the power to dismantle any of these deep state perma structures that have been built up in the post WW2 era; these are structures tha…
How do you persevere in the face of this type of media blacklisting?
Unsurprising, but still disappointing. Actually I'm glad someone is trying to hold them accountable. It seems silly tho that we need to pass a law to uphold what's already written into the constitution. It highlights that the constitution only has teeth in some legal contexts, primarily where a court case is being heard on a citizen being prosecuted. Conditionality seems to not have any bearing on preventing agencies…
Law is enforced via power. When it meets a greater power then the law is contravened.
Look at the US and how it broke international law to force a plane down that it thought had Snowden.
"not wittingly" [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEh-l_G1Gcs
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Respectfully, the most tech-literate politician is without a doubt Thomas Massie, who went to MIT for both his undergrad in electrical engineering and his masters in mechanical engineering, who formed a decently successful startup working on novel computer input mechanisms. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Massie#Early_life,_educ...
And yet he is publicly against Net Neutrality and doesn't believe in climate change. Tribal affiliation takes priority over technical ability I guess.
I've met a lot of very smart people in my lifetime that are wrong about all sorts of prominent topics, despite being well-read on the topics in question. Pick nearly any subject and you can bet there are smart people on both sides that will disagree, and some of them will bring very potent arguments to the table even when they're wrong.
It's like, if you're of a certain age, you had to read 1984 or whatever in school. You'd think "well, no one would stand for that sort of thing in real life!" Okay, so we don't live in that society, exactly, but time after time, we're shown the breadth of government surveillance and the reaction from the broader public isn't to call for anyone's head on a pike -- it's not even to vote anyone out!
Outside of little communities like this one, people don't give much of a fuck. I guess that was Orwell's real point.