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Today Is One of the Biggest Surveillance Votes. Will the FBI Stop Spying?

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Re: Today Is One of the Biggest Surveillance Votes. Will the FBI Stop Spying?

#161

Post by mistrial9 »

x86x87 wrote: post #98
trinsic2 wrote: post #38

Pay careful attention to who is not on that list that opposes section 702. Microsoft, Google and Apple. If they really cared about privacy on their platforms, they would have made that known at some point before this vote.

Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc are also putting up a spectacular dog and pony show in order to convince you they carr about privacy. They don't.

this is tempting but, I think the answer is complicated. You happened to list them in the order of some spectrum ! "surveillance capitalism" seeps out like sewage, but two of those companies are older than the Internet.

Re: Today Is One of the Biggest Surveillance Votes. Will the FBI Stop Spying?

#162

Post by efsavage »

TriangleEdge wrote: post #125

As an engineer, what I want to see is metrics. Bar charts for events the surveillance program helped with: y = count of terrorist plots stopped, x = time bucket y = cost of surveillance programs, x = time bucket y = count of petty crimes caught, x = time bucket y = count of total analyst caught abusing power, x = time bucket y = count of total Americans profiles, x = time bucket y = count of total world wide profiles…

While I'm always in favor of accountability and transparency, measuring success by counting things that didn't happen is very difficult even under the most benign circumstances. Mix in politics and careers and it's almost certainly guaranteed to misrepresent the goals and work being done.

Re: Today Is One of the Biggest Surveillance Votes. Will the FBI Stop Spying?

#163

Post by raincom »

psunavy03 wrote: post #151
raincom wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because of metrics, easy tasks in scrum/agile are transformed into monstrous little tasks, spanning five months. Same thing with law enforcement: they find some mentally deranged person in KS, lays a trap to ensnare him in terrorism charges. Yes, 'our dragnet' captured this many number of terrorists (that is, y).

This is not how Scrum, Agile, or metrics work. Incompetent management doesn't need to be generalized into some sort of indictment of things beyond incompetent management.

That’s how every response to this sort of criticism: when people criticize capitalism, response is “that’s not a true capitalism”. When people criticize policies of communist regimes, defenders of communism say that these regimes are not instances of real communism. When majority instances are not supposedly true instances of whatever-is-in-dispute, then one should stop coming up with it-is-not-true-X.

Re: Today Is One of the Biggest Surveillance Votes. Will the FBI Stop Spying?

#164

Post by dahart »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #104
dahart wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what are some recent examples of governments giving up power? We have a whole category for it in the US and one of the two major parties devoted to it: Deregulation.

Boy, they got you good! There's no such thing as "deregulation." There's only rearranging regulation to protect the incumbents against competitors which would try to arise in an actual capitalistic system.

It sounds like you’re joking, but I can’t tell. Of course, there is such a thing as deregulation, it has a definition and history that doesn’t match your operative word choice of “rearranging”.

To your point, I have no doubt that some deregulation has been spin for regulatory capture and/or anti-competitive behavior. Unfortunately, perhaps especially for the environment, that’s not an accurate summary of all deregulation, nor of the US conservative party’s official stance on regulation.

Re: Today Is One of the Biggest Surveillance Votes. Will the FBI Stop Spying?

#165

Post by seanw444 »

raincom wrote: post #134
seanw444 wrote: post #111

The FBI director straight up admits that they violate the 4th amendment routinely, and then begs Congress to not ruin their precious workaround. And yet they will face no punishment whatsoever. Like another commenter said, many people were probably unconstitutionally charged via parallel construction thanks to this crap.

FBI director in his exchange with Senator Lee [1] claims this : the case law shows that 702 doesn't violate 4A. However, Sen Lee retorts back with 'FISA court doesn't even given standing to people who wants to litigate this'. So, Secret courts, lack of standing is what the relevant case law boils down to: if people are not permitted to litigate, no case law is established or challenged. [1] https://www.youtube.com/wa…

Probably some ridiculous claim that "at the time of the founding, they had no way of knowing how readily accessible data would be." Surely, finding 100x the information with 1/100th the effort compared to then must be 4A-compliant.

Re: Today Is One of the Biggest Surveillance Votes. Will the FBI Stop Spying?

#167

Post by yunwal »

tastyfreeze wrote: post #76
Der_Einzige wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn’t you see the Portland Oregon thread earlier? Oregon has done a ton to legalize drugs, muzzle the police (can’t pull people over for ghetto cars anymore as one small example), and generally reduce the amount of power that the government has over your day to day life. Ron wyden tries every day to reduce mass surveillance and similar risks for Oregonians You do get governments willing to give up power if you elect…

Interesting that you have a carve out for progressive democrats but all Republicans are bad. There are "unitary executive theory" camps in both parties. Seems to be a more dominant idea in the Democrat party than Republican from my view. Democrats vote as a block on almost every bill in congress. Democrats have also been behind most expansions to executive power in the last 100 years.

They also carved out an exception for libertarians, which in the US are basically all republican.

Re: Today Is One of the Biggest Surveillance Votes. Will the FBI Stop Spying?

#168

Post by _heimdall »

pdonis wrote: post #158
_heimdall wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The legal authority to surveil itself should be considered enough harm in my opinion. It fundamentally damages right to privacy, harm caused by the actual surveillance itself shouldn't be needed if the legal system is really designed to protect our rights.

> The legal authority to surveil itself should be considered enough harm in my opinion. While I'm sympathetic to this viewpoint, one should be clear about the tradeoff. One of the government's primary duties is to keep citizens secure, from crime, terrorism, etc. That is the argument that is used to justify the legal authority to surveil. It's not enough to just say "protect our rights"--the whole point is that there…

I'm not proposing that we should go full absolutist and also revoke the power for law enforcement to request court-approved warrants that clearly outline what they need to investigate and why.

The laws up for discussion in this thread are largely there to give the FBI a backdoor to surveil the general public without requesting a warrant with clear details on what they're looking for and where they can look.

Personally I have a much higher bar than most and think view the tradeoffs of privacy invasion rarely worth it, though I also don't expect our government to protect me in any meaningful way and would rather depend on my fellow citizens for that instead. There's a whole discussion there related to the surveillance and military state we live in today, but that probably veers way to far off topic.

Re: Today Is One of the Biggest Surveillance Votes. Will the FBI Stop Spying?

#169

Post by pdonis »

_heimdall wrote: post #168
pdonis wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The legal authority to surveil itself should be considered enough harm in my opinion. While I'm sympathetic to this viewpoint, one should be clear about the tradeoff. One of the government's primary duties is to keep citizens secure, from crime, terrorism, etc. That is the argument that is used to justify the legal authority to surveil. It's not enough to just say "protect our rights"--the whole point is that there…

I'm not proposing that we should go full absolutist and also revoke the power for law enforcement to request court-approved warrants that clearly outline what they need to investigate and why. The laws up for discussion in this thread are largely there to give the FBI a backdoor to surveil the general public without requesting a warrant with clear details on what they're looking for and where they can look. Personall…

> The laws up for discussion in this thread are largely there to give the FBI a backdoor to surveil the general public without requesting a warrant with clear details on what they're looking for and where they can look.

Yes, if we restrict discussion to warrantless surveillance then I think the restrictions ought to be much tighter.

> I also don't expect our government to protect me in any meaningful way and would rather depend on my fellow citizens for that instead.

In some respects this is already part of our legal framework: for example, there have been multiple court rulings at multiple levels that the police do not have a duty to protect individual citizens from crime.

However, the public policies adopted by the government regarding crime can have a huge effect on overall crime rates, which in turn affects how much you need* a means of protection other than the government's overall police powers. This is more a matter of state and local governments than federal, but even here federal policies have an effect.

Also, I didn't limit government protection to police vs. ordinary crime. Government also has responsibility for national defense, border control, gathering intelligence abroad, preventing terrorism, etc.

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