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Block NSA funding for collecting the call records of all Americans

defundthensa.com

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Re: Block NSA funding for collecting the call records of all Americans

#81

Post by BCM43 »

chernevik wrote: post #65
oleganza wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, it is not something real or tangible. I'm all for defunding NSA, but it's not like a regular business which you can boycott by not giving them money. You have to go and ask permission from the government to not give the money (which they previously extracted from you by force for the "good of society") to some of the government agencies. It's pretty much like going to NSA itself and ask them to defund the…

If you make this a choice between the surveillance super state and anarchy, you'll get the super state. Everyone knows we need some kind of government. It's definitely hard to imagine the NSA being defunded, but that is rooted in a culture that is less concerned with government compliance with law and more with "reasonable" outcomes. The inability to control institutions, and the establishment of those institutions a…

Everyone knows we need some kind of government.

That depends on either your definition of government or everyone.

Re: Block NSA funding for collecting the call records of all Americans

#82

Post by mcherm »

brown9-2 wrote: post #75

Instead of voting to block funding for programs, why not repeal the laws that enable those programs in the first place? I don't understand this logic.

The laws do NOT enable the programs. The laws had specific clauses stating that they could not be used for this sort of widespread surveillance of innocent citizens. But the administration has an "interpretation" of the laws which apparently is at odds with the plain text of the law. I can't say HOW they came by this interpretation, because the interpretation of the law is secret. (Yeah... really.)

So maybe the power of the purse will still be effective. We can hope.

Re: Block NSA funding for collecting the call records of all Americans

#83

Post by synctext »

glesica wrote: post #76
[deleted] wrote: post #36

[deleted]

The stock market doesn't get hacked? Are you kidding? Did I miss a /sarcasam tag? The stock market is a hack. If the stock market doesn't get technologically "hacked" it's only because it's so easy for the well-connected to hack already. And you want to make our government itself exactly that easy to hack? The vast majority of Americans don't care about most issues. In fact, I would go so far as to speculate that the…

No need to bring in the stock market. The issue at vote is clear: "Ends authority for the blanket collection of records under the Patriot Act."

This is politics, they now make it explicitly illegal to do this. Clearly NSA and FISA need to alter their procedures IF this vote makes it.

Re: Block NSA funding for collecting the call records of all Americans

#84

Post by jacobrobbins »

keithpeter wrote: post #16
icantthinkofone wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah! That'll work! Just like the Occupy movement. Will there be beer?

Well now, I live in the UK. We don't have a written constitution, so the Powers That Be don't have to hack the legal system in quite the same way as as they do in the US (secret courts, secret injunctions, requirements for industry leaders to deny activity &c). However, we have absolutely no oversight and no way to gain oversight of the agencies that purport to be acting for our protection. It is difficult even to fi…

Saying you have absolutely no oversight in the UK is not true. I recently read David Omand's "Securing the State" which is the most informative book I have found on how to integrate secret intelligence into a democratic society. Most of the analysis in the book focuses on the UK system as he is a longtime member of the UK intelligence community. There is a detailed discussion of how to meet the challenges of keeping a secret intelligence system accountable while maintaining its secrecy. Specifically see your JIC (Joint Intelligence Committee) and its history of post-portem analysis after notable incidents such as the Iraq WMD misread. That was about political influence into the workings of intelligence, scope overreach is of course the issue of the day but presumably they could take a crack at it.

In fact I have come to believe that your system is more well-managed than ours here in the US partially because it is a smaller country and hence easier to keep track of. See the Washington Post's article (before Snowden's revelations) on the mushrooming growth of myriad, largely redundant secret intelligence groups dispersed throughout various US agencies: http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articl...

Re: Block NSA funding for collecting the call records of all Americans

#85

Post by nakedrobot2 »

lrem wrote: post #54
[deleted] wrote: post #36

[deleted]

The problem is that ignorant masses can be easily tricked into voting particular way. Some would say that direct democracy simply would not work. But, well, look at Switzerland...

In the case of Obama, half of the population was tricked. And lots of us weren't ignorant - only HOPEful that he wasn't a complete and utter liar.

Re: Block NSA funding for collecting the call records of all Americans

#86

Post by alan_cx »

infinity0 wrote: post #25
rb2e wrote: post #19

The NSA is the heart of the intelligence gathering apparatus of the US Military Industrial Complex. Like it or not, this bill will pass either tomorrow or another day, tacked on to another bill. It is strategic to the military and the country. There is no way in hell, this bill will not pass. You can scream, occupy the streets, protest, do whatever but it will not change a thing. It will go through. The US military I…

Your post accomplishes nothing except to persuade people to give up the fight for civil liberties. You propose no solution or do you give any additional insight into developing a solution. Regardless of your actual intentions, you might as well be performing psychological propaganda. It's not helpful.

Just a thought:

If people give up, the situation should get worse, and then people will act. It strikes me that we are not at enough of a tipping point yet. Giving up will get us to that tipping point quicker. People seem to tolerate a lot, until it gets excessive, well ,has an effect in their day to day lives. Right now, while what is happening is bad news, it doesn't touch most people's lives in a significant way, or a way they care about. Let the government run rampant, and we'll get to a tipping point quicker, then the majority will demand change.

Also, the government sees some decent, so it will slightly change things to bring the heat down a degree or two, but not fundamentally change anything at all. So it plays a game of whack a mole to keep the over all heat manageable, and this can go on for decades. All the time people are just tinkering at the edges keeping various groups vaguely happy. So no one really pushed for fundamental change.

So, why not just stand back and let the government hang it's self?

Yes, people will suffer, but world history tells us that nothing substantial changes with out some suffering.

Like I said, just a thought.

Re: Block NSA funding for collecting the call records of all Americans

#87

Post by andyakb »

sinak wrote: post #31

Just a quick note to add that this was built over the course of 5 hours by four developers as part of http://taskforce.is , which was pretty much assembled here on Hacker News. Please take a few minutes to call. It's amazing how low conversion rates are on calling campaigns like this one - a factor of 100 lower than email asks - but this is really critical. We only have one day to make this happen. If you're interest…

I would strongly recommend including an auto email form. Maybe not as powerful as a phone calll, but conversions will be much higher

Re: Block NSA funding for collecting the call records of all Americans

#88

Post by mcherm »

Important point:

(This point was made clear in the actual page, but some of the comments suggest that not everyone understood it.)

The title to this posting (and the name of the website) are misleading. This is not a proposal to block funding for the NSA. And that's good, because such a proposal would have NO chance of passing, and would probably be a bad idea anyhow. Instead, this is a proposal to block funding for NSA collecting records on American citizens that are not being investigated. Which is a much more reasonable position.

Re: Block NSA funding for collecting the call records of all Americans

#89

Post by unimpressive »

falk wrote: post #70
unimpressive wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>David D. Friedman and Stefan Molyneux Any particular volumes?

This guy is nothing more than an extremist. Ask him about his prison system and I'm sure he'll parrot how privatized prisons are the solution to our woes. Alas, they aren't. Be weary of someone trying to tell you that if we just did X everything would be so much better.

There's a reason I described myself as a "true seeker".

"No theory, no ready-made system, no book that has ever been written will save the world. I cleave to no system. I am a true seeker." - Mikhail Bakunin

You're overestimating my risk for memetic infection and underestimating how much prior exposure I may have had to this subject. I often ask people for examples or book recommendations to learn more about them as much as I do to learn about a subject.[0]

Besides, it couldn't possibly be worse than Mussolini's autobiography.

[0]: An example. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6056707

The authors response was worth more to me than the response of other commentators because I find that socialists often like to say that X or Y society wasn't socialist. So as an exercise I asked what they consider a socialist society.

(And I was genuinely interested in what they had to say, so I wasn't lying.)

Re: Block NSA funding for collecting the call records of all Americans

#90

Post by andyakb »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #56

No, no, a thousand times no. Hey, I'm the biggest fan of anonymity and privacy you can find. This is not an answer. It's an emotional over-reaction. Countries need intelligence agencies -- they are the best way NOT to fight future wars. SIGINT is a useful function when used against foreign leaders. It's just a terrible idea when used against the population as a whole. Separate the parts that work and are useful from…

Read the website. Despite the name, it is not about defunding the entire nsa, but instead about removing the authorization and funding for blanket data collection
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