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Edward Snowden: Saving Us from the United Stasi of America

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Re: Edward Snowden: Saving Us from the United Stasi of America

#121

Post by AnthonyMouse »

mpyne wrote: post #88
gasull wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point I'm trying to make is that having surveillance in place gives them the power of effectively building such camps later.

Surveillance is orthogonal to camps. They could build the camps first and start dumping in undesirables and then start surveillance immediately after, for all we know.

It takes time to build surveillance capacity. If they build the camps first then people can pick up their pitch forks and organize a resistance before it goes anywhere. If they build the surveillance first then the day the camps become public they already have a list of all the prospective resistance leaders to round up and everyone else is too afraid to express opposition for fear of creating evidence of a lack of fealty.

The problem with widespread surveillance isn't that it's inherently malicious, it's that it's inherently dangerous. Because most people are good, the potential it creates in the hands of a good leader to catch evil terrorists will always be less than the potential it creates in the hands of an evil leader to catch good freedom fighters. It's a tool for the concentration of power. And it shrinks the time lag during which to mount a resistance between when someone malicious takes power and when the whole world is on fire.

Re: Edward Snowden: Saving Us from the United Stasi of America

#122

Post by AnthonyMouse »

notahacker wrote: post #105
gasull wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you believe that Obama (or secretive figures in the NSA) are actually planning gulags and concentration camps? What about a president 10 or 15 years from now?

I think the likelihood of of abuse of intercepted material by individual agents is probably worth emphasizing more than the remote possibility of America electing (and supporting) the Presidential candidate that wants to build death camps Frankly, if you think that in 10-15 years America is remotely likely to be introducing gulags and death camps, then NSA surveillance is the last thing you should be worrying about;…

>I think the likelihood of of abuse of intercepted material by individual agents is probably worth emphasizing more than the remote possibility of America electing (and supporting) the Presidential candidate that wants to build death camps

The possibility for individual abuse is certainly worth emphasizing, but the risk of systemic corruption is not to be dismissed.

People blame Hitler and Stalin individually, but they were far from the only ones in their respective countries with blood on their hands. A President who comes in and says "I want to build death camps" with no popular support is not going anywhere. But nobody advocating them will actually call them death camps. They get names like "military detention center" or just plain old prison. The people put there get sold to the population as terrorists or violent gang members. The soldiers or police don't contemplate what they're doing as wrong, even if humans die or are abused, because they're "the enemy" and they don't count.

And even if we never make it to death camps, every step on that road is human suffering. Even our existing prison and criminal justice system is an unfathomable catastrophe that people fail to revolt against almost entirely because those with the capacity to make change are not aware of the true nature of the existing system. The entire concept of secret surveillance with secret courts making secret laws can only exacerbate that effect significantly, creating the very real risk that one day we'll wake up to a world vastly different than the one we previously contemplated solely because no one was allowed to tell us about the changes until it had already happened.

Re: Edward Snowden: Saving Us from the United Stasi of America

#123

Post by Torgo »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #102
jbooth wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a really bad example, given the interstate commerce clause. Pelosi was laughing it off because damn near everybody, including the majority-conservative supreme court, agrees that regulating healthcare is regulation of interstate commerce, just like 1000s of other things that the federal government does which don't happen to be hot political footballs at the moment. Conversely, most people that I've talked to a…

But the eventual SCOTUS decision did determine that it's not covered by the Interstate Commerce Clause. So your explanation of Pelosi's laugh may illustrate what was going on in her mind (as well as most other legal scholars at that date ), but it also shows that they were wrong in the final analysis. The reason that ObamaCare survived wasn't because of the Interstate Commerce loophole. It was because SCOTUS determin…

In my cynical opinion Roberts wrote his finding as a tax to prevent being responsible for the ruling that found you could use interstate commerce to argue the government could compel you to actually _engage in commerce_ so that your activity could then be regulated, because inactivity affects the market. Ginsburg wrote a pissy rebuttal defending the Commerce Clause interpretation. It's almost comical she had to write a dissent for a decision in her favor simply because she loves the omnipotentCommerce Clause so fucking much.

Re: Edward Snowden: Saving Us from the United Stasi of America

#124

Post by Spooky23 »

pmichaud wrote: post #34
Spooky23 wrote: post #14

The fact that these conversations are happening is indicative that we do not have a Stasi. We have serious problems, as evidence by the unwillingness of any member of Congress to really speak out on the issue, and the sheer scope and reach power of this poorly regulated surveillance regime. There's no gulag archipelago, but the tools used by repressive totalitarian regimes are being built for other purposes, and many…

I'm not so sure. Europeans stopped conquering and colonizing in favor of economic colonialism, which is just as bad perhaps, but now with a veneer of credibility. They are just doing business. Nevermind that the despot du jour was installed by the CIA. Similarly we can talk about NSA overreaches all we want, as opposed to the old way of actually silencing the dissent. Great, except everyone is just talking, they are…

In East Germany, this thread would likely have led to our arrest.

Re: Edward Snowden: Saving Us from the United Stasi of America

#125

Post by dragonwriter »

jacoblyles wrote: post #89
jbooth wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a really bad example, given the interstate commerce clause. Pelosi was laughing it off because damn near everybody, including the majority-conservative supreme court, agrees that regulating healthcare is regulation of interstate commerce, just like 1000s of other things that the federal government does which don't happen to be hot political footballs at the moment. Conversely, most people that I've talked to a…

It was actually a very close ruling (5-4) that hinged on whether "regulating interstate commerce" gave the power to the government to compel people to participate in commerce. Personally, I disagree with the Wickard v. Filburn ruling that gave the power to the government to control what a farmer grows on his own land to feed to his own cattle under the "interstate commerce" power. The Constitution was distorted beyon…

> It was actually a very close ruling (5-4) that hinged on whether "regulating interstate commerce" gave the power to the government to compel people to participate in commerce.

No, it didn't hinge on that point. The court split a number of different ways on different points in the case, but the rationale to which a majority signed on to for finding the individual mandate constitutional was the Taxing Clause, not the Commerce Clause.

There was an apparent 5-4 majority against finding for it under the Commerce Clause (the four conservative dissenters who would have struck it down plus Roberts), though there was no single opinion to that effect joined by any majority.

Re: Edward Snowden: Saving Us from the United Stasi of America

#126

Post by Torgo »

tootie wrote: post #42
paganel wrote: post #3

For once I'll avoid Godwin's law and link instead to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_58 > The article was used for the imprisonment and execution of many prominent people, as well as multitudes of nonnotable innocents. (...) Article 58 of the Russian SFSR Penal Code was put in force on 25 February 1927 to arrest those suspected of counter-revolutionary activities. So the point is that even in Soviet Russia…

I think the key is that we don't have Article 58. Per the quote in the op-ed, the NSA has had the ability to make America a tyrrany since 1975 and it hasn't done so. None of history's police states required digital surveillance. What they required was, you know, tyranny. We don't have any right now. I look at this purely as a question of privacy and due process.

When I was a kid, the Soviet Union was declared bad _because_ it did these things. So it's hard for some of us to shift from a mindset that it was bad on its face as proven by the Soviet Union, to that it's only bad if it's done by a bad state. I mean, right or wrong, this is the conditioning society gave us at the time. I happen to think it was right. I don't really care about their reasons, no legitimate process operating under the principle of limited government and consent of the govern gives it the power to collect extensive data about the private lives of citizens without some kind of cause to believe the citizen is engaged in wrongdoing.

Re: Edward Snowden: Saving Us from the United Stasi of America

#127

Post by mpyne »

Andrew_Quentin wrote: post #118
mpyne wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you ask for requires sweeping structural changes, which itself requires cooperation between a bunch of mutually-antagonistic parties, and all of that happening under the watchful eyes of the entire world who are more than happy to lace into America for the slightest fault they see. It certainly helps that Americans are so seemingly genetically suspicious of government that even government workers despise the gov…

You boil a frog slowly. If such thing as torture, surveillance, indefinite imprisonment without trial, secretive kill list, secretive removal of right (no fly list) etc, become normalized and accepted, then a huge part of what forms a free society is already gone.

Every single one of your examples as occurred within the U.S. in the past though, and often all at the same time. This frog has often jumped out of the pot.

This is not to say that is any excuse for surveillance for the sake of surveillance. But things like Prism do have a use.

More importantly Big Data is already here and I fear it will be impossible to fully prevent the government from getting their hands into, whether it's stuff like capturing Internet traffic directly or simply ad hoc arrangements with telecom and cloud companies.

In short, we risk allowing incredible capabilities to fall into the hands of a cyber-paramilitary of dubious loyalty to the people.

What we have done with nearly every other dangerous tool is to own it, allow it to exist but specify precisely the conditions under which we will allow it to exist. We formed professional communities around these tools, wrapped them in layers and layers and layers of accountability, law, policy, and yes, transparency.

Of course none of us want the government to spy on us. But I also don't want to pay taxes, or have the government search my home, but both are possible (some with more requirements than others).

Instead most of the discussion dismisses the question out-of-hand: "I don't ever want the government to know anything about me so there's no possible way to demonstrate a situation that would be worth it".

I'm not saying surveillance is worth it here. I'm just trying to figure out why no one seems to even consider the questions.

1. What valid law enforcement or national security purpose can be served by program $X? 2. Can it be uniquely served only by program $X? 3. If it can be served by other programs, can it be done so in a cost-effective way, relative to the risk/reward for program $X? 4. Assuming there are benefit, what risks does the program pose? 5. Can those risks be ameliorated by law, policy, and/or technical means? (E.g. with the crypto wizards at NSA it should be easily possible to implement a collection system which is kept encrypted and requires 2 or 3 parties to agree to decrypt for a given analysis).

You're saying the program is too risky, which kind of pre-supposes that there's a valid use to the program at all. Has anyone here seriously considered, however, whether it's actually socially, organizationally, and technically feasible to implement a program such as this assuming it has a valid use?

Re: Edward Snowden: Saving Us from the United Stasi of America

#128

Post by graycat »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #120
graycat wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd say there's nothing that the minority can do (if it matters I'm not from the US) No, not at all. The situation is still all well within the US Constitution in the sense of want people "can do". In particular, as I will outline, there is a very fast, simple solution well within what "the minority can do". Background: In the US Federal Government, there are three branches, executive (e.g., headed by the president…

>Net, there is only one branch that can say if a law is constitutional or not, the judicial branch This is a myth. Any branch can declare a law unconstitutional. If Congress thinks a law is unconstitutional they can keep it off the books. If the President thinks a law is unconstitutional he can refuse to enforce or execute it. The courts get a reputation as the ones who decide because A) if the other branches do thei…

When the Supreme Court declares a law unconstitutional, that ends the issue until the Supreme Court decides to address the issue again.

When anyone else or any other organization declares a law unconstitutional, then that's nice, nice to have their opinion, but mostly that's just their opinion. As I recall, the president is sworn to uphold the laws. If there is some law the president refuses to enforce, then there might be a law suit that goes to the Supreme Court. Or there might be an impeachment proceeding in the Congress.

Really, in practice there is a lot of discretion on what laws get enforced, and part of the role of the Attorney General (AG) is to decide, as a political matter as the AG serves at the pleasure of the president, what laws will be enforced. Still, likely (I'm not a lawyer) if I am suffering because some law was not enforced, then I can bring suit against the people supposed to enforce that law.

Re: Edward Snowden: Saving Us from the United Stasi of America

#129

Post by trg2 »

graycat wrote: post #65
paganel wrote: post #3

For once I'll avoid Godwin's law and link instead to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_58 > The article was used for the imprisonment and execution of many prominent people, as well as multitudes of nonnotable innocents. (...) Article 58 of the Russian SFSR Penal Code was put in force on 25 February 1927 to arrest those suspected of counter-revolutionary activities. So the point is that even in Soviet Russia…

> I'd say there's nothing that the minority can do (if it matters I'm not from the US) No, not at all. The situation is still all well within the US Constitution in the sense of want people "can do". In particular, as I will outline, there is a very fast, simple solution well within what "the minority can do". Background: In the US Federal Government, there are three branches, executive (e.g., headed by the president…

Absolutely incredible. Thank you for breaking this down.

Re: Edward Snowden: Saving Us from the United Stasi of America

#130

Post by nknighthb »

graycat wrote: post #115
makomk wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So, the Supreme Court will let claims of 'secrecy' trash the Constitution? They already have for decades, starting with United States v. Reynolds . That ship has well and truly sailed.

Then the court should revisit the case. They can do that, too.

They've had ample opportunity to do so. They turned down one just a few months ago, in fact. There is no reason to believe they will ever revisit it.
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