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Pentagon surveilling Americans without a warrant, Senator Wyden reveals

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Re: Pentagon surveilling Americans without a warrant, Senator Wyden reveals

#171

Post by pmiller2 »

anaerobicover wrote: post #152
pmiller2 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except you have it backwards. The "War on Drugs" came about as a way for the state to exert power over youth and minorities. > “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday. > “You understand what I’m saying? We knew we c…

The original publication was at Harper's Magazine, not CNN, but this infamous quotation has dubious provenance and veracity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman#Drug_war_quote

I don't see what's dubious about it. There doesn't seem to be any evidence the quote was fabricated, and the effects of US drug policy are apparent to anyone who lifts their head out of the sand.

You don't think Nixon could have disliked blacks, hippies, and drugs, and just found a convenient way to tie them all together while at the same time being able to say "think of the children?" Nixon was many things, but dumb and politically naive are not among them.

Re: Pentagon surveilling Americans without a warrant, Senator Wyden reveals

#172

Post by nxc18 »

maybelsyrup wrote: post #30

The thing I still can't fathom, all these years after Bush II and then Snowden, is just how little human beings really care about mass surveillance. Yeah, the Snowden leaks made a splash, but the media cycle turned over a couple weeks later and everyone moved onto other things. 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 thi…

I’m of the age where I had a Kinect in my bedroom when I read 1984, and it was interesting to reflect on how basically everything was already happening IRL and it wasn’t that big a deal.

Do you remember when people freaked because the new Kinect would be on _all the time_ and (gasp) _always listening_? Obviously no parallels to future technologies.

Alexa, play Despacito.

Re: Pentagon surveilling Americans without a warrant, Senator Wyden reveals

#173

Post by sudosysgen »

SR2Z wrote: post #124
pmiller2 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Law is primarily about voluntary submission, not power. Let me know how that works out for you, k? I can assure you that although state power ultimately comes from the people, the state most definitely will enforce its laws against you, should you break them. That is, unless you're rich and powerful enough to afford the best lawyers and a handful of legislators.

The state is rarely capable of enforcing the law on more than a small minority of lawbreakers because enforcing the law is expensive. If there's a busy road where people are routinely speeding, the state is actually incapable of pulling every single speeder over and ticketing them. Instead, the state relies on setting reasonable speed limits and scaring drivers with the prospect of fines. This isn't a personal philos…

The state is definitely capable of detecting every single speeder and sending them a ticket. You just need some smart centralization, wire traffic cameras and doppler radars on every corner, program tracking algorithms and decode the license plates to match them with the owner and record a fine.

It chooses not to.

Re: Pentagon surveilling Americans without a warrant, Senator Wyden reveals

#174

Post by decasteve »

maybelsyrup wrote: post #30

The thing I still can't fathom, all these years after Bush II and then Snowden, is just how little human beings really care about mass surveillance. Yeah, the Snowden leaks made a splash, but the media cycle turned over a couple weeks later and everyone moved onto other things. 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 thi…

Brave New World becomes ever more prescient. Fahrenheit 451, too:

We're Mildreds too busy being consumed by the stories of our parlour walls (social media?). Or Fabers too cowardly to really speak up and stand up to it when we had the chance. Or Montags working in the system that slowly eats away at us until we wake up one day to what has been lost.

I think the "average" person is fine because they never have the pressing need to exercise a freedom, and when one comes to the occasion and finds that the freedom is gone, it might be too late to regain.

Re: Pentagon surveilling Americans without a warrant, Senator Wyden reveals

#175

Post by kelnos »

pope_meat wrote: post #103
treis wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bush II and then Snowden, is just how little human beings really care about mass surveillance. I'm struggling to think of a single negative thing that I can directly associate with mass surveillance in the US. Certainly nothing bad has happened to me personally or anyone that I know because of it. So no one cares because it doesn't impact anyone's lives.

Here's one negative thing you can now associate with mass surveillance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

I don't think most people think of that as negative. I believe most people would read that Wikipedia article, and think "great, law enforcement sometimes gets hamstrung in how it can collect evidence, and this lets them get the bad guys even when the legal process makes it difficult".

The bit that you seem to have missed in the parent post is that most people will not consider something bad unless that bad thing has directly negatively impacted them. Some people will go further and make excuses for the bad thing, even when it has negatively impacted them: "yeah, it's really bad that I got falsely accused because of this bad thing, but I think it's still a useful tool, and law enforcement just needs to be more careful using it so they only snare the real bad guys".

Most people seem to have no opinion on mass surveillance, or a positive one. They've done nothing bad, so they have nothing to hide, right? And even when someone gets caught up in it by mistake, the error rate is low enough such that we'll never get mass denouncements from regular people.

Re: Pentagon surveilling Americans without a warrant, Senator Wyden reveals

#176

Post by decasteve »

tsimionescu wrote: post #87
maybelsyrup wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is on point, and way underappreciated by the non-hard-right in the US. People who vote Democrat tend to think of "their" media institutions as objective or sincere, and they're quick to forgive the litany of examples of heinous shit the NYT or WP or CNN has pulled over the years - salivating and fully turgid support for endless wars being just the most obvious example.

This video of CNN host Brian Williams referring to 'The Beauty of our Weapons' has stuck with me as one of the most bizarre examples of the prevailing pro-war attitude in the 'left press': https://twitter.com/i/status/850204332758716420

I vowed never to watch CNN again after exclaiming how excited they were to be going back to Iraq for the 2nd war.

Re: Pentagon surveilling Americans without a warrant, Senator Wyden reveals

#177

Post by monocasa »

anaerobicover wrote: post #152
pmiller2 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except you have it backwards. The "War on Drugs" came about as a way for the state to exert power over youth and minorities. > “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday. > “You understand what I’m saying? We knew we c…

The original publication was at Harper's Magazine, not CNN, but this infamous quotation has dubious provenance and veracity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ehrlichman#Drug_war_quote

I'm not sure I'd accept the family's statement at face value. In fact that's the statement I'd expect out of them completely orthogonally to it's veracity.

Additionally I don't find the subsequent argument compelling. 'Sure Nixon hated hippies and blacks, but it wasn't an effective policy until workshopped by subsequent presidents, so targetting those groups couldn't have been the point" doesn't really hold a lot of weight for me.

On top of all of that, corroborating quotes seem to keep being removed from that wikipage, with an edit note that doesn't match the edit, pointing to brigading.

Re: Pentagon surveilling Americans without a warrant, Senator Wyden reveals

#178

Post by rpdillon »

sneak wrote: post #77

"We can't tell you if we are violating your constitutional rights or not, because that's classified on the basis of national security." When the preservation of the formerly supreme law of the land is made subordinate to the interests of the ruling military, I think it is safe to say the american experiment is over. I have long maintained that the US is basically a military dictatorship. There are many examples, like…

I fear that arguments like this lead to people devaluing what freedoms they have, since hey, we're already in a military dictatorship, so there's nothing left to lose.

I understand why you're saying this, but I think it's profoundly dismissive of those who have fought for what we have.

Re: Pentagon surveilling Americans without a warrant, Senator Wyden reveals

#179

Post by iammisc »

howenterprisey wrote: post #50
HideousKojima wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Trump was never going to act against these interests even if he’d wanted to given all the other aspects he was embroiled in. Yet another person completely unaware that Trump let the Patriot Act expire: https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/27/politics/house-vote-fisa/inde... Can't say I'm surprised, the left didn't want to make huge news about it because it made Trump look good (and the establishment left supports the Patriot…

Just in case anyone sees that and thinks it was due to any sort of principles or concerns about mass surveillance, a quote from the article: "Thank you to our GREAT Republican Congressmen & Congresswomen on your incredibly important blockage last night of a FISA Bill that would just perpetuate the abuse that produced the Greatest Political Crime In the History of the U.S., the Russian Witch-Hunt. Fantastic Job!"

Well good. The Russian Witch Hunt was an illegal spying against an American president, who is also an American citizen. While it's not the best look I guess, at some point, I guess the president himself will need to be affected by this shit before they finally get rid of it.

Re: Pentagon surveilling Americans without a warrant, Senator Wyden reveals

#180

Post by coolspot »

babesh wrote: post #27
billytetrud wrote: post #2

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…

Surveillance is a form of power. Power does not give up power. 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.

Obama won’t scramble jets for Snowden: https://youtu.be/-_mqzSbAPXM
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