41–50 of 96 posts
That is the power of fear for you. Terror in it's self.
"The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0430484/
Seems fear, ignorance and apathy is still working out just fine unfortunately.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
All federal courts are (basically) free from public accountability. That is literally one of the objectives of the design of the Judicial Branch; complain to the founding fathers.
It's not quite the same thing though. Yes, judges are appointed for life, and can't (usually) be removed from office, etc. But with the "regular" federal court system, at least we know who the judges are, who appointed them, and we can see / read / review the actual decisions and what-not. To me, that's a pretty marked difference from the FISA courts. Nonetheless, I do agree with your basic point. When I get my hands…
(Crazy that anyone would have modded you down; did my part to try to fix).
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I get the sense that this doesn't surprise you. My question is: why would it surprise anyone? It's not just that most Americans don't believe they have anything to hide from NSA. It's that they don't have anything to hide from NSA. I'm not invoking the fallacious "nothing to hide" argument; I have stuff I need to keep hidden. But most people really don't , and especially not from NSA.
"It's not just that most Americans don't believe they have anything to hide from NSA. It's that they don't have anything to hide from NSA." I'm not so sure about that. Roughly 90% of Americans use illegal drugs at some point in their lives[1], and supposedly the average American commits 3 felonies per day.[2] [1] http://www.monitoringthefuture.org/pubs/monographs/vol2_2009... [2] http://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
All federal courts are (basically) free from public accountability. That is literally one of the objectives of the design of the Judicial Branch; complain to the founding fathers.
It's not quite the same thing though. Yes, judges are appointed for life, and can't (usually) be removed from office, etc. But with the "regular" federal court system, at least we know who the judges are, who appointed them, and we can see / read / review the actual decisions and what-not. To me, that's a pretty marked difference from the FISA courts. Nonetheless, I do agree with your basic point. When I get my hands…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But most people really don't, and especially not from NSA. How can we say that though, when we don't really know what the NSA is collecting, what they are doing with it, who they are sharing it with, etc.? The actual data collection per-se aside, one of the biggest problems with this whole setup is that we have allowed the development of a "shadow government" (not in the conspiracy theory sense, mind you) that lacks…
Well, stick me at the place on the Venn diagram of Americans who: * Have a problem with the NSA getting wholesale access to telephonic metadata for all domestic phone calls. * Generally do not believe NSA is using that metadata for purposes other than nonproliferation and counterterrorism, where "counterterrorism" means "pursuit of groups with active plans to kill American citizens". * Agree that the shortcut NSA app…
Who knows, maybe the political winds shift in, say, 5 years, and it becomes very dangerous to have certain ideological beliefs, or to have said certain things. I'm not crazy about making it easy for these guys (doing the whole "we were just following orders" thing, possibly) to go on a wholesale fishing expedition to find people to start giving the "yellow star" treatment.
I know, I know... way hypothetical, and you could argue "paranoid". Unlikely, even. But just because something seems incredible or unlikely doesn't seem, to me, to be a good argument for making it any easier for that scenario to come to pass. :-)
I think I would vote for allowing call logs to be trackable by the NSA. Maybe other things like that, with some checks in place (mostly to prevent this data getting out of their hands). But I want to know about these trade-offs, and I don't care if that makes them less effective. There's no way NSA should be looking at private email, phone, VOIP, social networking communication en masse.
> I think I would vote for allowing call logs to be trackable by the NSA Why? Someone looking to do harm doesn't use phones (maybe Burners) or other communication methods where they know they'd be easily tracked.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not quite the same thing though. Yes, judges are appointed for life, and can't (usually) be removed from office, etc. But with the "regular" federal court system, at least we know who the judges are, who appointed them, and we can see / read / review the actual decisions and what-not. To me, that's a pretty marked difference from the FISA courts. Nonetheless, I do agree with your basic point. When I get my hands…
We do know who appointed them. They are 11 federal judges who are appointed to 7 year terms by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. At least 3 must live within 20 miles of Washington, DC, they can only serve one term, and none can be sitting on the Court of Review.
Edit: Also, for anyone more interested in details of the FISC (some of which I obviously misremembered), here's a good resource:
Keep in mind many Americans have never traveled outside the country, they are fed a constant diet of bullshit by our media alternating between frantic fear-mongering and gushing American paternalism, and simply don't stop to think about what is actually going on. I would call them complete morons but that is unkind. Incurious and ignorant and perhaps far too trusting is perhaps more polite.
What's the polite word for elitist?
I think we need to make a choice as a society where the line is drawn. We chose to allow privilege for religious, medical, and legal conversations. Sure, in individual cases, it would be better to get the data from someone's confession, but overall, it's better for society (or people decided) to allow those conversations to encourage religious confession. Maybe there needs to be special protection for certain classes…
The bit that really bothers me is the total lack of transparency and accountability.