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Today Is One of the Biggest Surveillance Votes. Will the FBI Stop Spying?

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Re: Today Is One of the Biggest Surveillance Votes. Will the FBI Stop Spying?

#181

you mean spying on American citizens without a warrant?

That is NOT what 702 provides. 702 prohibits US citizens from being targeted (see: https://www.dni.gov/files/icotr/Section702-Basics-Infographi... )

In the old days hackers knew about Echelon and how the five-eyes traded data back and forth so they both didn't "technically" break their own domestic spying laws.

Re: Today Is One of the Biggest Surveillance Votes. Will the FBI Stop Spying?

#182

The FBI has become little more than the enforcement arm of the organized white-collar crime system run out of Wall Street offices with the active support of the White House and the Congress. This is why, despite the FBI's sweeping surveillance powers, no coordinated prosecution targeting the subprime mortgage fraudsters who brought down the economy in 2008-2009 was conducted - instead, they were all bailed out with t…

Trump's mentor Roy Cohn was directly involved in the Lansky gang and their blackmail of Hoover. FBI repeatedly ignored and covered up Epstein victim reports and countless other similar blackmail rings. It's about control, not safety, and phones just made it scale.

Re: Today Is One of the Biggest Surveillance Votes. Will the FBI Stop Spying?

#183

The FBI director straight up admits that they violate the 4th amendment routinely, and then begs Congress to not ruin their precious workaround. And yet they will face no punishment whatsoever. Like another commenter said, many people were probably unconstitutionally charged via parallel construction thanks to this crap.

What ever protections the constitution may have provided in the past have been eroded away to nothing starting with the Massive Expansion of the federal government powers from the Wickard case, everything is down hill from that time period. We no longer have a Government subservient to the people, we have a people subservient to an unelected bureaucracy. Free Speech is the next target and it is well on it way to erro…

I'd argue the Federal government saw some of its greatest expansions during the civil war, and immediately following. Seconded only by the early 1900s. Ever since the civil war, OG America hasn't existed. The Confederacy was the more original of the two in spirit. But of course, all of the good aspects of the south are clouded by the false claim that the war was over slavery. I'm not pro-slavery, but I'm also not pro-north.

Re: Today Is One of the Biggest Surveillance Votes. Will the FBI Stop Spying?

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not how Scrum, Agile, or metrics work. Incompetent management doesn't need to be generalized into some sort of indictment of things beyond incompetent management.

That’s how every response to this sort of criticism: when people criticize capitalism, response is “that’s not a true capitalism”. When people criticize policies of communist regimes, defenders of communism say that these regimes are not instances of real communism. When majority instances are not supposedly true instances of whatever-is-in-dispute, then one should stop coming up with it-is-not-true-X.

Well when what you're criticizing is a caricature and a strawman, it's perfectly reasonable to point out that you're in fact criticizing a caricature and a strawman.

Re: Today Is One of the Biggest Surveillance Votes. Will the FBI Stop Spying?

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not how Scrum, Agile, or metrics work. Incompetent management doesn't need to be generalized into some sort of indictment of things beyond incompetent management.

That’s how every response to this sort of criticism: when people criticize capitalism, response is “that’s not a true capitalism”. When people criticize policies of communist regimes, defenders of communism say that these regimes are not instances of real communism. When majority instances are not supposedly true instances of whatever-is-in-dispute, then one should stop coming up with it-is-not-true-X.

Specifically, this is the no-true-scotsman fallacy. It should be noted a fallacious argument doesn't mean that a non-fallacious argument doesn't exist for the same claim.

Re: Today Is One of the Biggest Surveillance Votes. Will the FBI Stop Spying?

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's to stop them from just making up numbers?

this was a plot point of The Wire, where the mayor ran on a campaign of reducing murders. The murder rate dropped--but a zillion other stats came up, because the officers were fudging the classifications of the crimes to try and achieve the metric goal. Fictional, but it makes a poignant point about needing to deeply understand how metrics are collected and recorded to be confident in the conclusions drawn from them.

David Simon discusses this point specifically in a 2008 lecture at UC Berkeley titled "The Audacity of Despair":

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=nRt46W3k-qw>

The statistics discussion begins at about 8 minutes, and continues for much of the discussion and Q&A.

I'd seen that long before watching The Wire itself, and in fact the lecture was a large part of the reason I wanted to watch the series.

(Poor quality audio and a very distracting speaking manner. Still very much worth listening to.)

Re: Today Is One of the Biggest Surveillance Votes. Will the FBI Stop Spying?

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2023, more than 160 people on the terror watch list have been caught illegally crossing US borders: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/number-pe... Given that there are 600,000 who were observed entering but got away in 2023 alone, and more were likely crossing unobserved, there's very good odds that they are already here.

And yet we still only have the handful of incidents from foreigners, most of which come over legally anyway. Right wingers have been fearmingering about foreigners for decades. Are they just using illegal entry now when they didn't before and waiting a really long time? You do know domestic terrorism is just as common as foreign terrorism in the US, right?

Sure, but how many of them are “I can trace my lineage to the mayflower” domestic terrorists and how many are citizens of immigrant/non-citizen parents?

Re: Today Is One of the Biggest Surveillance Votes. Will the FBI Stop Spying?

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does revoking a previous ruling really count as giving up power? The government had the power to say this is banned. They still have the power to say this isnt banned. It doesnt seem like any power has been lost. They just decided to use it in another way. They could change the decision tomorrow. That wouldnt be any more or less power. They are still using it to enforce their rulings.

Yes, removing a limitation counts as giving up power.

But they havnt given anything up. They changed their ruling. They can change it again and have that, “power” again.

The power isnt the limitation. It's the ability to implement or remove a limitation. They havnt given that up.

Re: Today Is One of the Biggest Surveillance Votes. Will the FBI Stop Spying?

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

American Exceptionalism means the power is derived from being able to make exceptions to the rules.

That’s clever wording but I think it isn’t right? I thought American Exceptionalism was the belief that the US is an exception to the rules. Actually, the idea that being an exception to the rules and having the ability to make an exception to the rules are the same, or one implies the other, is pretty interesting and might be worth elaborating on.

Power is generally defined by the ability to make exception to the rules. Anyone can make a rule, but are you above being punished for breaking it?

Important Americans are protected from being tried for war crimes. We have the Hague invasion act. We said out loud "we will kill you if you try to hold us accountable for our actions." If the United States was a moral country that would not do war crimes on purpose, this law wouldn't exist.

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