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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

#201

Post by rayiner »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #199
rayiner wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The text of the US constitution explicitly talks about the rights of people, not citizens - so I would argue that the constitution itself has always prohibited this. No, it talks about "the people." As in the preamble: "We the People of the United States." > However, there is a long history of interpreting 'people' to mean specific groups - from only white people to only citizens. Playing with the interpretation of…

>As in the preamble: "We the People of the United States." The preamble is discussing who is creating the constitution and why. It does not say it only applies to certain individuals. I don't see how you can use that to argue that the government is free to infringe upon the rights of noncitizens.

As a grammatical matter, the phrase “the people” must refer to an antecedent. Even standing alone, “the people” clearly refers to certain people, not “all people.” The term isn’t read as applying only to citizens, because certain provisions of the constitution specifically require citizenship. It encompasses citizens and non-citizen residents, and to some extent people present on US soil. But it’s hard to read “the people” to mean “people in other countries.”

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

#202

Post by dmix »

TheTester wrote: post #83
tpmx wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the extreme asshattery history of Assange, it seems just as probable that he was mostly trying to get some attention with guesses and then later claimed that it was a deliberate disinformation campaign.

Unless you are quite rich and powerful, saying that what Assange has done is mostly "asshattery" is dishonest, yes he has had flukes but consider the mental state of someone being prosecuted and hunted by the most powerful and corrupt people in our planet, mostly what Assange has done s good and denying and calling him an asshat is dishonest and shows a clear bias on your part

We don't expect public figures to be humans anymore. You're never allowed to make mistakes and some video of you from 2-yrs ago in college can be a reputation killer.

This is a very irrational mindset and we'd have no great minds of history because they were immature at a young age.

People constantly grow, learn, and improve themselves. They also make mistakes or act emotionally.

I feel like we've entered a social media era where only the flawless and speaking within socially acceptable Overton window are given a chance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

This is the death of radical aka experimental thought.

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

#203

Post by maybelsyrup »

xinniethepooh wrote: post #96
maybelsyrup wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you believe that it's alright for the NSA to conduct surveillance on foreign threats? I like this question, but I think there's a better one: "do you believe it's alright for the NSA to exist ?"

I like this question, but I think there's a better one: "do you think there is no legitimate threat that the NSA addresses?"

With their charter (scope of their power), and with their budget, and with their actual (not nominal) level of accountability? Sincerely, no, I don't think so, and I want to make sure you know that I'm taking your question seriously. It's a good one, and a difficult one.

This is debatable, of course, but in my view secret services ("intelligence agencies") and secret police (the FBI) are a deal with the devil for societies in general: in the long run much, much more harmful and costly than beneficial. You're taking human beings -- brutally fallible and power-mad like we all have the capacity to be -- and telling them "here, you have a special hall pass to cheat, lie, steal, and kill, but promise to only do it to those guys over there, okay?" Can we really be shocked when, a few years down the line, they forget everything after "but"? Note, too, that this hall pass is both legal and moral, couched as it is in the language of patriotism ("national security"): it's wrong to kill, but this is for your country, so you're good. (Incidentally, things like this really show that Ian Fleming was a pretty good satirist - "license to kill" is much more macabre and darkly funny when you realize that it's real.)

It may sound naive or even callous to say that nothing the NSA does is or can be legitimate - yes, al qaeda could kill Americans if the NSA doesn't spy on them or if the CIA doesn't lob a Hellfire missile at their daughter's birthday party. But we citizens make these kinds of decisions all the time, explicitly or implicitly.

Take automobiles as an example, or the legal status of alcohol - we've decided that we're okay with hundreds of thousands of people dying every decade in return for using those things. That's on all our heads, as I see it. I'm not certain, but I'd put money that there's no threat the NSA looks out for that, absent the NSA, could wreak as much havoc on the US as car crashes and whiskey (and that's not even counting the interaction of cars and whiskey, heh). And if there was, it'd probably be attributable in whole or in part to how the US has behaved out there beyond our shores. In fact I'm shocked sometimes that the rest of the planet hasn't been more out for our blood given what we did in the 2nd half of the 20th century alone. This isn't to be a mouth-foaming hater, by the way - I love this country very much. But a lot of ugly shit goes down on our dime, and in our names.

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

#204

Post by seaourfreed »

parineum wrote: post #192
seaourfreed wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congress is corrupt (via lobbyist money) which causes this problem. The DoD tracks large scale threats to our nation. When the economy is rigged, then the establishment worries about the citizen base turning on the establishment. Congress corruption (via lobbyiests) happens by: a) Wall Street rigged economy HF front-running trades, b) Wall Street is rigged c) 2008 Mortgage crisis theft d) Pharma is rigged e) Medical…

What lobby is lobbying for warrantless surveillance?

DAVOS had the economic elites paranoid about a citizen uprising due to a rigged economy. The rigged economy would be fixed by congress (if they didn't sell out to lobbyists, to not fix it).

DoD doesn't do surveillance due to lobbying. They do it because they view a potential risk in citizen uprising due to the rigged economy. DoD and Davos attendees share a worry about a risk from the citizen base.

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

#205

Post by boomboomsubban »

rayiner wrote: post #201
boomboomsubban wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As in the preamble: "We the People of the United States." The preamble is discussing who is creating the constitution and why. It does not say it only applies to certain individuals. I don't see how you can use that to argue that the government is free to infringe upon the rights of noncitizens.

As a grammatical matter, the phrase “the people” must refer to an antecedent. Even standing alone, “the people” clearly refers to certain people, not “all people.” The term isn’t read as applying only to citizens, because certain provisions of the constitution specifically require citizenship. It encompasses citizens and non-citizen residents, and to some extent people present on US soil. But it’s hard to read “the p…

>But it’s hard to read “the people” to mean “people in other countries.”

The Constitution makes it clear that these rights are universal by saying that the government may not make laws that infringe upon them. They aren't granting rights, they are declaring which rights they must abide by. And with that, the use of "the people" in the part about free assembly should rely more on the context there then the preamble, where it clearly means "the people assembling" not "the citizens assembling."

Further on your "persons" point, the relevant Fourth Amendment makes it clear the terms are interchangeable.

>The right of the people to be secure in their persons...

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

#206

Post by loosetypes »

edoceo wrote: post #32
babesh wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Huh, TIL.. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incide...

This, among a few other nuggets of which I was unaware, are described in Snowden’s book Permanent Record (although briefly, it’s a biography first and foremost) which I enjoyed.

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

#207

Post by arminiusreturns »

jhayward wrote: post #142
TheTester wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you are quite rich and powerful, saying that what Assange has done is mostly "asshattery" is dishonest, yes he has had flukes but consider the mental state of someone being prosecuted and hunted by the most powerful and corrupt people in our planet, mostly what Assange has done s good and denying and calling him an asshat is dishonest and shows a clear bias on your part

> mostly what Assange has done s good No, colluding with the GRU to create false documents interfering with the US Presidential election, resulting in the disaster that was Trump's election can not, in any sense, be called 'good'.

    >colluding with the GRU to create false documents
[Citation Needed]

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

#208

Post by KMag »

dmix wrote: post #202
TheTester wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you are quite rich and powerful, saying that what Assange has done is mostly "asshattery" is dishonest, yes he has had flukes but consider the mental state of someone being prosecuted and hunted by the most powerful and corrupt people in our planet, mostly what Assange has done s good and denying and calling him an asshat is dishonest and shows a clear bias on your part

We don't expect public figures to be humans anymore. You're never allowed to make mistakes and some video of you from 2-yrs ago in college can be a reputation killer. This is a very irrational mindset and we'd have no great minds of history because they were immature at a young age. People constantly grow, learn, and improve themselves. They also make mistakes or act emotionally. I feel like we've entered a social me…

In the near future, only pseudonyms and fools will challenge the thoughts of the day.

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

#209

Post by lettergram »

tsimionescu wrote: post #74
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 think most people would oppose it if the media were really presenting it as an issue to keep in mind. However, most of the people in the media are very much supporters of such powers, as they are deep believers in the rightness of US institutions and their 'fundamentally benign' nature. If you look at the media, most are still in support of every single war America has ever been in, with the only opposition being o…

The people who started these programs are now contributors to CNN and MSNBC after trump fired them....
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