Hemisphere Project Summary: Office of National Drug Control Policy [pdf]

The problem is that his analysis is weak: the reason that there are two choices are because of people like him disengaging and not supporting a third choice.

Further, it's not the case that actions like those done by the NSA happened in a vacuum. The reality is that most of the country demanded, following one stinging terrorist attack that this must never happened again. The men and women of our military fulfilled that wish: at the cost of $20 billion a year, they delivered to us most of the globe on a silver platter, completely electronically dominated and ready to be watched to stop even a whiff of such a threat.

That our social demands (in aggregate) are childish, insane, bipolar, etc isn't their fault. They simply did what society demanded it needed to feel safe, what they saw as their duty.

The simple truth is that the current state of affairs is exactly what we've asked for, in large part, and that the most realistic way to reform it is to engage with other citizens and help them understand why their contrary and silly demands are contrary and silly.

All that pulling away from the political exchange will do is lead us down the path of a civil war (or other turmoil) as people who refuse to be part of the rule making also refuse to follow the rules.

Sidebar: for all the ranting that deserves to be done here, it's also interesting to note that this was an internal IT program, like many other programs I suspect HN readers may have participated in. There was a help desk, a POC, a procedure to follow, and so on.

They didn't want the average Law Enforcement schmuck calling operations! Instead you had to contact your POC. They were probably afraid of being overwhelemed by call volume. Turnaround looks like a couple of hours on a good day. In addition, they were doing one of those "train the trainer" things where they were looking at using the POCS to create "super users" to work the system and work with the local folks. Must have been a real concern about volume and support. Gad, how many people were (are) using this thing, anyway?

Email was the preferred medium of response, so no online app, at least as far as end-users go. In addition, there was a section about "deconfliction" which was a bit confusing to me, but I never took the training. Was there training? I wonder if, along with this deck, there wasn't a 1-day or 2-day class? If so, who was sent to take it?

It always surprises me that when you see something really bad, how normal it all looks and acts. I can just see a conference room at some Holiday Inn full of regular-looking middle-aged folks, slurping up bad coffee and stale donuts, wondering if they were going to be let out early while some other guy putzes around with a MacBook and a projector and an assistant hands out TS/SCI forms.

End the War on Drugs

OK. Yes the framers of the constitution did create protections from the government for themselves, and shared that with the rest of the population. As you imply it is hard to know if the general case was a side-effect or original intent.

At the same time they purposefully sought to disenfranchise the majority so that they might change the rules at any time.

So the constitution within the constitution is that the government will protect the wealthy, and that makes sense given who was writing it.

It appears that the ruling elites now value control of the population over privacy. I see two possible explanations but perhaps there are others.

* They see the incredible growth of poverty in the US and there is no vast neighboring region in which to exterminate existing inhabitants and settle. Hence wealth protection from the masses is a higher priority than the privacy protections.

* Mass media has distorted the scale of the disenfranchising effects of our system (rich have more control and poor even less) and the wealthy realise they can use their control of the government to make huge fortunes. For example the profits of the banks are derived by transfer of wealth from taxpayers through implicit insurance since insurance allows highly profitable high risk strategies. They then choose short term profits over privacy / human rights.

In any case they choose to exercise their rights under the constitution within the constitution to change the laws to bring about repression and control.

I'm not really rebutting your point here. Instead I want to highlight that what is happening now IS consistent with the ideals of governance around during the formation of the US and what has changed is likely a lower level 'priority'

Some people are always surprised by well established facts half the world knows about.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_and_Contras_cocaine_traffic...