Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's why you have limited terms of service and randomly turn over membership.
Like politicians?
At least in Congress and many executive positions, they are neither term-limited nor randomly selected.
The FBI’s most controversial surveillance tool is under threat
91–100 of 129 posts
Re: The FBI’s most controversial surveillance tool is under threat
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
5 eyes as a concept is essentially institutionalized treason. There’s no such thing as a friendly foreign intelligence service, their goals are directly against the interest of the American public/civilian world (which in theory our intelligence services work for) A CIA officer conspiring with GCHQ to defraud the United States should result in lifetime imprisonment.
That is not a good take. There are many moral and political concerns with five eyes, but casting all international cooperation as “treason” discredits your position.
Allowing hostile foreign actors to spy on your civilians is not “international cooperation” any more than running drugs with the Mexican government would be.
It’s fundamentally a betrayal of your country.
The “bad take” is that these people are allowed to walk free because it’s just “cooperation”. Absurd.
Re: The FBI’s most controversial surveillance tool is under threat
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't have any experience in this area, but how would one know that the FISA courts are a rubber stamp, as opposed to the requests being brought to the court being only the most reasonable and well-defined ones? It seems like from the outside the observable effect would be the same (high warrant-granting rate), but the reality between the two is very different.
Two details: Only recently has FISA been expanded to allow an amici role for government-licensed attorneys to argue against certain requests. We’ve kind of had three phases of FISA: Church commission FISA rejected 4 out of 25,000 requests. And those were approved after re-submission. Numbers like that cannot refute rubber stamp allegations. Then, after 2001, submissions started getting wild. The rejection rate and pu…
[deleted]
Re: The FBI’s most controversial surveillance tool is under threat
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Casting spying as the only means of international cooperation is disingenuous.
Huh? The post I replied to said that agencies working with international counterparts is necessarily treason. Where in the world did you get that strange claim about what I said?
GCHQ is not a “counterpart” to NSA, it’s a hostile foreign agency that actively works to undermine the security and privacy of Americans.
Their employee should be sanctioned, and anyone on the gov payroll working with them should be treated just as if they worked with any other hostile group.
Mossad and FSB are functionally identical, even if one is from a supposedly “allied” state, the agency themselves still works against American civilians.
Re: The FBI’s most controversial surveillance tool is under threat
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like politicians?
At least in Congress and many executive positions, they are neither term-limited nor randomly selected.
Sure, term limits can be good in many ways, and random selection can reduce the people chosing it for the wrong reasons. But who is going to give up their career to be a citizen watcher for just a few years? Likewise, random selection may not yield a cohort with the correct capacity to properly administer the system.
I'd almost think the better solution is to use mini-juries to evaluate warrants so the judges aren't just rubber stamping. At least then the judge has to explain the situation and points of law, and aren't the only one making the decision.
Re: The FBI’s most controversial surveillance tool is under threat
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any group who becomes part of the system will then act to protect the system. I mean, judges are supposed to grant warrants for things already, yet we continually see stories of them just rubber stamping requests, or police lying to obtain them. I assume that system would suffer similar issues.
> Any group who becomes part of the system will then act to protect the system. As a True/False binary, sure, but the magnitude of the phenomenon is a function of the quality of the system. As flaws are realized, the system can be improved. Consider how many known flaws there are in our various systems, and then observe (in an as unbiased as possible frame of mind as possible) how we (everyone (including us here on H…
"As flaws are realized, the system can be improved."
One man's "flaw" is another man's "tool". The people in power exploiting the flaw are unlikely to fix it.
Re: The FBI’s most controversial surveillance tool is under threat
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't have any experience in this area, but how would one know that the FISA courts are a rubber stamp, as opposed to the requests being brought to the court being only the most reasonable and well-defined ones? It seems like from the outside the observable effect would be the same (high warrant-granting rate), but the reality between the two is very different.
Two details: Only recently has FISA been expanded to allow an amici role for government-licensed attorneys to argue against certain requests. We’ve kind of had three phases of FISA: Church commission FISA rejected 4 out of 25,000 requests. And those were approved after re-submission. Numbers like that cannot refute rubber stamp allegations. Then, after 2001, submissions started getting wild. The rejection rate and pu…
Ah, this is super interesting, thanks for the insight!
Re: The FBI’s most controversial surveillance tool is under threat
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huh? The post I replied to said that agencies working with international counterparts is necessarily treason. Where in the world did you get that strange claim about what I said?
GCHQ is not a “counterpart” to NSA, it’s a hostile foreign agency that actively works to undermine the security and privacy of Americans. Their employee should be sanctioned, and anyone on the gov payroll working with them should be treated just as if they worked with any other hostile group. Mossad and FSB are functionally identical, even if one is from a supposedly “allied” state, the agency themselves still works…
TIL the U.K. and USA have literally no common interests.
It’s a very naive worldview that says you never work with someone whose interests are not perfectly aligned with your own.
Re: The FBI’s most controversial surveillance tool is under threat
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Blue-collar actions are found to be criminal. White-collar actions are found to be unlawful and stopped. Government or politician actions are found to be unlawful and continue.
It's so weird to me that everyone assumes the NSA simply stopped recording all American phone calls because they were caught doing it and it was actually illegal.
whether they're recording or not is one question
whether they can find a needle in a lake sized haystack is another
Re: The FBI’s most controversial surveillance tool is under threat
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea of "Checks and Balances" was coined by Montesquieu in his "The Spirit of the Laws" treatise, where it is justified as "balanced forces of equal leverage amongst one another having an embedded tension against each other". The problem is, despite the Founding Fathers' near-fetishization of Montesquieu's work, and the fact that Checks and Balances are a genuinely good idea, the Founding Fathers weren't true to…
> Congress itself is THE delegate to assigning the President of the Executive Subject to the certification only procedure outlined in the Constitution, as was recently vividly demonstrated. (Originally, under Article II, Section 1, Clause 3; since 1804, under the 12th Amendment) There's a reason the states transmit their electors' votes to Congress, rather than meeting in DC. Furthermore, current case law is that sta…
> Subject to the certification only procedure outlined in the Constitution, as was recently vividly demonstrated. (Originally, under Article II, Section 1, Clause 3; since 1804, under the 12th Amendment)
This stance is nonsense. Bush v Gore, Jackson v Adams, and Hayes v Tilden prove it wrong by vesting in Congress, through prior case law, the power to choose Presidential appointment and nullifying both individual state Electors AND collective certification (depending on which of the three you're pointing at).
Congress itself dictates who is President and Supreme Court Justices through a de-facto oligarchy. Further, the 17th amendment mandated a popular election for Senators in 1913, so to say that States run their elections as they see fit is - generous. Plus, need we mention the upcoming conflict of independent state legislature theory? We'll see how that cooks up.
Also, people make the mistake of believing that direct-democratic elections for members of Congress means that such a superior-leveraged branch of the government is still technically structured as a republic in political theory. This position is scrutinized when considering that the democratically-elected members of Congress conspire to derive additional power amongst each other by sitting the utmost authorities in the branches of government that are also intended to be chosen, by the people, as a check and balance to the very members of Congress they voted in. It's a very complex edifice, but it sure isn't what it's advertised as.