How and why the government is stalking you

Post by logn » Fri, Mar 15, 2013, 11:04 PM UTC

b1daly wrote: post #29

anigbrowl wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Espionage and counter-espionage has always functioned in an ethical gray area, by necessity. I appreciate that this fails 'the honor code' in many peoples' eyes, but I think it's better than aggressive militarism in that its ultimately far less destructive.

Thank you for saying this. What the us has done with military action is just appalling. To the extent that the US has enemies, spying and information based action is much less destructive. I would also like to ask some of you who seem to take it as av given that any erosion of privacy, any knowledge about you by government is bad: outside of edge cases are we seeing big negative effects from the huge amount of data b…

I think the calamity comes when we re-define our objectives. For instance, right now the definition of 'terrorist' is fairly clear. But what if we start to consider drug lords terrorists (we probably already do)? Then what about the small dealers under them? Then what about considering the users they sell to terrorists (for funding them)? Then what about considering that drug user's spouse to be a terrorist, for harboring a terrorist? Then it could be fairly easy to imprison a great number of people. But the real danger is that instead of imprisoning everyone we pick and choose who we want to send away forever. Then when someone speaks out against the government in a way that's frowned upon, the government digs up some dirt which can categorize them as a 'terrorist' and they're locked away in a secret prison or executed.

This might sound absurd but I think it's plausible. And it's exactly this kind of worst-case-scenario preparation and fear which gave us the great documents and principles our country was founded upon.

Post by JVIDEL » Tue, Mar 19, 2013, 9:13 PM UTC

droopyEyelids wrote: post #40

JVIDEL wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That guy Jan supported plain anti-democratic dictatorships and the use of espionage and murder until surprise surprise! he fell out of favor and had to suffer the same ordeals he made others go through, hardly what could happen to the average guy living in a democracy. Put simply, he played with fired and got burned.

I'm not saying to empathize with Jan, instead empathize with all the moderate social democrats the Communists and Nazis fucked over, murdered, and destroyed.

Yeah you could say the same about the Nazis you know? not all of them were burning people 24/7 in the camps........but most of them did agree with it, same with communists in the west looking the other way while stalin and mao killed millions.

Re: How and why the government is stalking you

Re: How and why the government is stalking you