111–120 of 196 posts
Obligatory: And this is a branch of the same government that HN users want to “regulate tech”. Why would anyone want to give government more power?
Because normally a government does smart thing for its people. It hasn't done that in some time in the US.
Just a reminder all kinds of "government" for any reason is reading all of your email any time they want without a warrant and it's perfectly legal. Just has to be 180 days old but I suspect that doesn't make a difference.
The law allowing it is 30 years old and why the Clintons had their own private email server in their basement in the first place. Congress was going to close the loophole but Jeff Sessions and Trump stopped it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If the US government made one request to stop a terrorist plot that they had some specific knowledge of, that would be okay in my eyes. How can we tell that they just didn't straight up lie about whether the one request was to stop a terrorist plot, and not to gather intel on political foes or ex girlfriends? With no oversight and no one allowed to advocate for the rights of the individuals under surveillance, I am…
A NSL doesn’t allow the government to ask for the contents of a DM. They would need a warrant for that, providing some checks and balances.
Can we just ponder for a moment that we are being asked to believe that anything Twitter does or does not do could pose an existential threat to the United States? “National security” is a sham now and has been a sham every other time it has ever been used as a blanket override for human rights. Human rights to free expression are more important than any nation. This is just government spies trying to cover their ass…
What's more disturbing and I simply can't get my head around is that Americans feel that they can trust big corporations more than their own government. I don't trust US corporations at all and I thought that there was some kind of corporate conspiracy to discredit the US government to allow corporations to gain more power... Now I'm thinking that the situation in the US is even worse than that; not only are corporat…
Of course it is.
Powerful and motivated interests have long been working to overturn basically every social program and every protection for labor, discrimination, environment, voting, etc. The goal is to "starve the beast," privatize everything to work toward a government that only runs the military and police, and to make sure it stays that way once it gets there.
Insidiously, they can win support by pushing the government to be more wasteful, more corrupt, less effective, more intrusive, more bumbling, and more frustrating to work with. The moment of victory is when they convince you that government fundamentally is a bad idea that cannot work well, all those taxes you are paying are just going to be squandered, and we'd be better off getting rid of the whole thing.
They have been at work for decades through groups like the Heritage Foundation, CATO institute, etc., to push this into the mainstream. They reached new heights of legitimacy with FOX news & co., and have made great progress with the Trump presidency so far.
Can we just ponder for a moment that we are being asked to believe that anything Twitter does or does not do could pose an existential threat to the United States? “National security” is a sham now and has been a sham every other time it has ever been used as a blanket override for human rights. Human rights to free expression are more important than any nation. This is just government spies trying to cover their ass…
What's more disturbing and I simply can't get my head around is that Americans feel that they can trust big corporations more than their own government. I don't trust US corporations at all and I thought that there was some kind of corporate conspiracy to discredit the US government to allow corporations to gain more power... Now I'm thinking that the situation in the US is even worse than that; not only are corporat…
Does anyone know why judges are so deferential to the US security apparatus? It seems in general like they have a clear bias toward "taking the security system at its word", even when common sense would dictate otherwise in any particular case. It's sincerely puzzling to me why national security entities seem to get treated so differently and I wonder if there's some legal precedent or consideration I'm not aware of.…
No judge wants to be responsible for a future terrorist attack or degrading intelligence capabilities against other foreign adversaries, regardless of whether the threats are real, perceived, and/or imagined. In this case, releasing the numbers might shine light into their capacity for investigations. In other words, sometimes security/capability gains more from perception than reality.
You make a good point re: investigatory capacity, but it seems even that is fuzzy and could maybe be handled through other means (aggregating time periods or using some kind of required delay).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There aren't many/any instances of single corporations causing >10M deaths, or oppressing millions of people. There are lots of recorded occasions of single governments doing this. Governments are seen as having authorities that corporations do not, and thus are to be viewed much more skeptically as a general policy. Companies can't raid your house with machine guns, or toss you in jail for publishing an integer on y…
“Smoking was the second leading risk factor for early death and disability worldwide in 2015. It has claimed more than 5 million lives every year since 1990.” [1] “6 Mega Corporations Control Almost the Entire Global Cigarette Industry” [2] 25 years × 5M people / 6 corporations = 20.83M deaths per corporation (leaving out pre-1990 / post-2015 deaths). [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5439023/ [2] http…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's more disturbing and I simply can't get my head around is that Americans feel that they can trust big corporations more than their own government. I don't trust US corporations at all and I thought that there was some kind of corporate conspiracy to discredit the US government to allow corporations to gain more power... Now I'm thinking that the situation in the US is even worse than that; not only are corporat…
Corporate power comes, largely, through government power. Corporations coopt the government and use its power to protect or enrich themselves. Why would corporations want to weaken that?
Can we just ponder for a moment that we are being asked to believe that anything Twitter does or does not do could pose an existential threat to the United States? “National security” is a sham now and has been a sham every other time it has ever been used as a blanket override for human rights. Human rights to free expression are more important than any nation. This is just government spies trying to cover their ass…
Can we just ponder for a moment that we are being asked to believe that anything Twitter does or does not do could pose an existential threat to the United States? “National security” is a sham now and has been a sham every other time it has ever been used as a blanket override for human rights. Human rights to free expression are more important than any nation. This is just government spies trying to cover their ass…
They have a point about a security risk but what they also sneak under that guise is their desire to hide intelligence capabilities and potential threats. It is not a risk if you don't have a specific threat or plan of attack,certainly not a risk to the nation. Vulnerabilty is not risk.
Revealing a request may thwart their investigation but the burden of proof that a specific threat that cannot be stopped if the information is public is required of them. Short of that, you can chit chat on the subway with a third cousin of a terrorist or something and they can say "if we can't monitor his DMs then we can't know if they are using code words to plan a terrorist attack"
On a different note, I think it is a failure if the US constitution to not clarify details like this. A constitutional convention to review and update the bill of rights and a few other things is long over due.