Anonymity of the crowd was always an illusion. Its just become a thinner and thinner one. All the shit I would try to dig up on someone via a google is what a private detective would have done in years past. It's not like Sears-Roebuck didn't have records off all the purchases people were having shipped to them via trains.
Yes, but you're acting as though there isn't a meaningful difference between "we have records that this guy bought some items, and another company probably has records, as do various other public and private entities perhaps" versus "automated cross-referencing of all these systems as interfaced with by a smartphone with location tracking data is now trivial".
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TL DRNot at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered Userregular
This piece explains why all these breathless "revelation" stories are so dangerous.
The serial releases are kind of necessary to build and maintain public interest in our 24-hour news cycle. The fact that some people might make inaccurate judgments about a given release is something I'd blame more on the NSA deliberately trying to obfuscate the truth about their illegal activities but on this I assume we'll have to agree to disagree.
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
This piece explains why all these breathless "revelation" stories are so dangerous.
The serial releases are kind of necessary to build and maintain public interest in our 24-hour news cycle. The fact that some people might make inaccurate judgments about a given release is something I'd blame more on the NSA deliberately trying to obfuscate the truth about their illegal activities but on this I assume we'll have to agree to disagree.
The problem is that the guys making the inaccurate judgements are the guys actually talking to the source, so everybody else gets the story from them, and so there is almost no chance of accuracy.
Also seriously Ralg, you've never heard of Dogwagging? And considering that Brazil is just as guilty of it as everyone else, I think her objection to it is something besides an inherent moral one.
Anonymity of the crowd was always an illusion. Its just become a thinner and thinner one. All the shit I would try to dig up on someone via a google is what a private detective would have done in years past. It's not like Sears-Roebuck didn't have records off all the purchases people were having shipped to them via trains.
Yes, but you're acting as though there isn't a meaningful difference between "we have records that this guy bought some items, and another company probably has records, as do various other public and private entities perhaps" versus "automated cross-referencing of all these systems as interfaced with by a smartphone with location tracking data is now trivial".
This isn't happening though
When the misinformation leads some people to believe that "the NSA [is] deliberately trying to obfuscate the truth about their illegal activities" then we have a problem. Because those people are going to do one of two things
1) Dismantle necessary and proper surveillance
2) Act as useful idiots for people with interests in seeing the situation changed
Anonymity of the crowd was always an illusion. Its just become a thinner and thinner one. All the shit I would try to dig up on someone via a google is what a private detective would have done in years past. It's not like Sears-Roebuck didn't have records off all the purchases people were having shipped to them via trains.
Yes, but you're acting as though there isn't a meaningful difference between "we have records that this guy bought some items, and another company probably has records, as do various other public and private entities perhaps" versus "automated cross-referencing of all these systems as interfaced with by a smartphone with location tracking data is now trivial".
So...write my congressman to defund the SQL? Like I really don't understand what the fear is. Maybe my library should go back to call cards and paper check out slips too?
Anonymity of the crowd was always an illusion. Its just become a thinner and thinner one. All the shit I would try to dig up on someone via a google is what a private detective would have done in years past. It's not like Sears-Roebuck didn't have records off all the purchases people were having shipped to them via trains.
Yes, but you're acting as though there isn't a meaningful difference between "we have records that this guy bought some items, and another company probably has records, as do various other public and private entities perhaps" versus "automated cross-referencing of all these systems as interfaced with by a smartphone with location tracking data is now trivial".
So...write my congressman to defund the SQL? Like I really don't understand what the fear is. Maybe my library should go back to call cards and paper check out slips too?
I don't care that they have this information, or even that it is cross-referable. I want to know that there are adequate safeguards regarding what information goes in (eg, under what circumstances can the NSA collect and store information about citizens and non-citizens) and how that information comes out (eg, what is required for an NSA analyst to access confidential information, and when they make a request, how much ancillary information can they obtain?).
Bee tee dubs, painting TLDR as a Luddite who is scared of "SQL" is disingenuous.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Anonymity of the crowd was always an illusion. Its just become a thinner and thinner one. All the shit I would try to dig up on someone via a google is what a private detective would have done in years past. It's not like Sears-Roebuck didn't have records off all the purchases people were having shipped to them via trains.
Yes, but you're acting as though there isn't a meaningful difference between "we have records that this guy bought some items, and another company probably has records, as do various other public and private entities perhaps" versus "automated cross-referencing of all these systems as interfaced with by a smartphone with location tracking data is now trivial".
This isn't happening though
When the misinformation leads some people to believe that "the NSA [is] deliberately trying to obfuscate the truth about their illegal activities" then we have a problem.
Which in particular isn't happening? Automated data collection and cross-referencing? That's happening.
The NSA trying to obfuscate the truth about their activities? That's part of their charter - operating in secret requires a certain amount of necessary obfuscation.
That leaves one point of contention: whether the referenced activities are illegal. I grant you that the collection and storage of phone call metadata and other records relating to Internet communications could be legal, given arbitrarily broad interpretations of Smith, FISA, and the PATRIOT Act. To quote former NSA analyst John Schindler, "NSA has platoons of lawyers, and their entire job is figuring out how to stay within the law and maximize collection by exploiting every loophole." That doesn't necessarily mean that a less charitable judicial review wouldn't find them illegal; or that they shouldn't be illegal.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Which in particular isn't happening? Automated data collection and cross-referencing? That's happening.
The NSA trying to obfuscate the truth about their activities? That's part of their charter - operating in secret requires a certain amount of necessary obfuscation.
That leaves one point of contention: whether the referenced activities are illegal. I grant you that the collection and storage of phone call metadata and other records relating to Internet communications could be legal, given arbitrarily broad interpretations of Smith, FISA, and the PATRIOT Act. To quote former NSA analyst John Schindler, "NSA has platoons of lawyers, and their entire job is figuring out how to stay within the law and maximize collection by exploiting every loophole." That doesn't necessarily mean that a less charitable judicial review wouldn't find them illegal; or that they shouldn't be illegal.
So, where does our monitoring of international leaders fall within that argument?
The Fourth Amendment bits have been a dog and pony show to give a bare justification for the leaking of information on legitimate NSA actions because some people have a Stimsonial disgust with intelligence gathering. Most of the outcry, especially as of late, has been that the NSA is doing the job for which it is designed and tasked to do, and that it does so quite well - a good portion of Chancellor Merkel's ire is most likely due to the fact that the NSA completely clowned German intelligence.
Further, if you're really scared of automated data collection, you should be more concerned about private companies. If you think the NSA has platoons of lawyers, just wait until you see Google Legal.
Which in particular isn't happening? Automated data collection and cross-referencing? That's happening.
The NSA trying to obfuscate the truth about their activities? That's part of their charter - operating in secret requires a certain amount of necessary obfuscation.
That leaves one point of contention: whether the referenced activities are illegal. I grant you that the collection and storage of phone call metadata and other records relating to Internet communications could be legal, given arbitrarily broad interpretations of Smith, FISA, and the PATRIOT Act. To quote former NSA analyst John Schindler, "NSA has platoons of lawyers, and their entire job is figuring out how to stay within the law and maximize collection by exploiting every loophole." That doesn't necessarily mean that a less charitable judicial review wouldn't find them illegal; or that they shouldn't be illegal.
So, where does our monitoring of international leaders fall within that argument?
Guilt by association much?
The 1-2 punch you do here - associating a post with some objectionable opinion made by some third-party who happens to have superficially similar opinions, followed by an overt diversion to Valleywagging - is tiresome.
I recognize that much of the anti-surveillance crowd is populated by Paultards, including Edward Snowden himself. That's not a substantive counterargument, any more than it is a substantive argument for any other policy that libertarians happen to dislike whether it is drug criminalization, SOPA, or military support to Israel.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Which in particular isn't happening? Automated data collection and cross-referencing? That's happening.
The NSA trying to obfuscate the truth about their activities? That's part of their charter - operating in secret requires a certain amount of necessary obfuscation.
That leaves one point of contention: whether the referenced activities are illegal. I grant you that the collection and storage of phone call metadata and other records relating to Internet communications could be legal, given arbitrarily broad interpretations of Smith, FISA, and the PATRIOT Act. To quote former NSA analyst John Schindler, "NSA has platoons of lawyers, and their entire job is figuring out how to stay within the law and maximize collection by exploiting every loophole." That doesn't necessarily mean that a less charitable judicial review wouldn't find them illegal; or that they shouldn't be illegal.
So, where does our monitoring of international leaders fall within that argument?
Guilt by association much?
The 1-2 punch you do here - associating a post with some objectionable opinion made by some third-party who happens to have superficially similar opinions, followed by an overt diversion to Valleywagging - is tiresome.
I recognize that much of the anti-surveillance crowd is populated by Paultards, including Edward Snowden himself. That's not a substantive counterargument, any more than it is a substantive argument for any other policy that libertarians happen to dislike whether it is drug criminalization, SOPA, or military support to Israel.
Sorry, but if the actual goal was to combat abuses of the Constitution, then why bring up unrelated actions, especially actions involving legitimate operations of the NSA? You don't get to ignore the goals of your fellow travelers when you find them distasteful and opposed to your own goals. The fact that the "anti-surveillance" crowd (and as I've pointed out in the past threads, it's telling that this group seems focused solely on this one bit of surveillance to the exclusion of other, more egregious abuses) is made up of a number of right wing groups with unhealthy views says something about what the movement really is about, and it's not something you can avoid. When someone points out that you're on the same side of the fence as the Oath Keepers, that should be a sign that you might want to think about exactly what it is that you're actually supporting.
Which in particular isn't happening? Automated data collection and cross-referencing? That's happening.
The NSA trying to obfuscate the truth about their activities? That's part of their charter - operating in secret requires a certain amount of necessary obfuscation.
That leaves one point of contention: whether the referenced activities are illegal. I grant you that the collection and storage of phone call metadata and other records relating to Internet communications could be legal, given arbitrarily broad interpretations of Smith, FISA, and the PATRIOT Act. To quote former NSA analyst John Schindler, "NSA has platoons of lawyers, and their entire job is figuring out how to stay within the law and maximize collection by exploiting every loophole." That doesn't necessarily mean that a less charitable judicial review wouldn't find them illegal; or that they shouldn't be illegal.
So, where does our monitoring of international leaders fall within that argument?
The Fourth Amendment bits have been a dog and pony show to give a bare justification for the leaking of information on legitimate NSA actions because some people have a Stimsonial disgust with intelligence gathering. Most of the outcry, especially as of late, has been that the NSA is doing the job for which it is designed and tasked to do, and that it does so quite well - a good portion of Chancellor Merkel's ire is most likely due to the fact that the NSA completely clowned German intelligence.
Further, if you're really scared of automated data collection, you should be more concerned about private companies. If you think the NSA has platoons of lawyers, just wait until you see Google Legal.
Regardless of how much data Google has on me, they are unlikely to arrest and imprison me, so I don't know if I agree that we should be more concerned about corporate data collection. Perhaps as concerned, for different reasons. I agree with the idea that the argument against surveillance should be broadened in scope to encompass both state and private actors.
Which in particular isn't happening? Automated data collection and cross-referencing? That's happening.
The NSA trying to obfuscate the truth about their activities? That's part of their charter - operating in secret requires a certain amount of necessary obfuscation.
That leaves one point of contention: whether the referenced activities are illegal. I grant you that the collection and storage of phone call metadata and other records relating to Internet communications could be legal, given arbitrarily broad interpretations of Smith, FISA, and the PATRIOT Act. To quote former NSA analyst John Schindler, "NSA has platoons of lawyers, and their entire job is figuring out how to stay within the law and maximize collection by exploiting every loophole." That doesn't necessarily mean that a less charitable judicial review wouldn't find them illegal; or that they shouldn't be illegal.
So, where does our monitoring of international leaders fall within that argument?
Guilt by association much?
The 1-2 punch you do here - associating a post with some objectionable opinion made by some third-party who happens to have superficially similar opinions, followed by an overt diversion to Valleywagging - is tiresome.
I recognize that much of the anti-surveillance crowd is populated by Paultards, including Edward Snowden himself. That's not a substantive counterargument, any more than it is a substantive argument for any other policy that libertarians happen to dislike whether it is drug criminalization, SOPA, or military support to Israel.
Sorry, but if the actual goal was to combat abuses of the Constitution, then why bring up unrelated actions, especially actions involving legitimate operations of the NSA? You don't get to ignore the goals of your fellow travelers when you find them distasteful and opposed to your own goals. The fact that the "anti-surveillance" crowd (and as I've pointed out in the past threads, it's telling that this group seems focused solely on this one bit of surveillance to the exclusion of other, more egregious abuses) is made up of a number of right wing groups with unhealthy views says something about what the movement really is about, and it's not something you can avoid. When someone points out that you're on the same side of the fence as the Oath Keepers, that should be a sign that you might want to think about exactly what it is that you're actually supporting.
Does D&D no longer have a stickied list of logical fallacies? This post could literally be a textbook example of an association fallacy.
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jmcdonaldI voted, did you?DC(ish)Registered Userregular
Which in particular isn't happening? Automated data collection and cross-referencing? That's happening.
The NSA trying to obfuscate the truth about their activities? That's part of their charter - operating in secret requires a certain amount of necessary obfuscation.
That leaves one point of contention: whether the referenced activities are illegal. I grant you that the collection and storage of phone call metadata and other records relating to Internet communications could be legal, given arbitrarily broad interpretations of Smith, FISA, and the PATRIOT Act. To quote former NSA analyst John Schindler, "NSA has platoons of lawyers, and their entire job is figuring out how to stay within the law and maximize collection by exploiting every loophole." That doesn't necessarily mean that a less charitable judicial review wouldn't find them illegal; or that they shouldn't be illegal.
So, where does our monitoring of international leaders fall within that argument?
The Fourth Amendment bits have been a dog and pony show to give a bare justification for the leaking of information on legitimate NSA actions because some people have a Stimsonial disgust with intelligence gathering. Most of the outcry, especially as of late, has been that the NSA is doing the job for which it is designed and tasked to do, and that it does so quite well - a good portion of Chancellor Merkel's ire is most likely due to the fact that the NSA completely clowned German intelligence.
Further, if you're really scared of automated data collection, you should be more concerned about private companies. If you think the NSA has platoons of lawyers, just wait until you see Google Legal.
Regardless of how much data Google has on me, they are unlikely to arrest and imprison me, so I don't know if I agree that we should be more concerned about corporate data collection. Perhaps as concerned, for different reasons. I agree with the idea that the argument against surveillance should be broadened in scope to encompass both state and private actors.
The challenge I have with this is twofold:
1. If Google collects your data and discovers you're doing some illegal shit, they will absolutely turn you in. So yes, indirectly they absolutely have the ability to lead to your arrest.
2. If you're not doing illegal shit, it seems awfully presumptuous to assume that some state actor will "arrest and imprison" you based on the aforementioned surveillance activities.
I am *really* tired of the fallback argument of "There are worse abuses, and clearly because I haven't heard *GROUP X* protesting those worse abuses that means this is totally an illegitimate complaint, damn those civil liberty activist fakers."
Its disingenous and insulting to anyone who does care about both
I am *really* tired of the fallback argument of "There are worse abuses, and clearly because I haven't heard *GROUP X* protesting those worse abuses that means this is totally an illegitimate complaint, damn those civil liberty activist fakers."
Its disingenous and insulting to anyone who does care about both
When you start protesting an abuse only because it's affecting your group, I think a questioning of the legitimacy of your position is in order. Once again, as I've stated in past threads, a lot of this outcry over surveillance boils down to "the surveillance state is supposed to target the dirty poors and minorities, not me."
Which in particular isn't happening? Automated data collection and cross-referencing? That's happening.
The NSA trying to obfuscate the truth about their activities? That's part of their charter - operating in secret requires a certain amount of necessary obfuscation.
That leaves one point of contention: whether the referenced activities are illegal. I grant you that the collection and storage of phone call metadata and other records relating to Internet communications could be legal, given arbitrarily broad interpretations of Smith, FISA, and the PATRIOT Act. To quote former NSA analyst John Schindler, "NSA has platoons of lawyers, and their entire job is figuring out how to stay within the law and maximize collection by exploiting every loophole." That doesn't necessarily mean that a less charitable judicial review wouldn't find them illegal; or that they shouldn't be illegal.
So, where does our monitoring of international leaders fall within that argument?
Guilt by association much?
The 1-2 punch you do here - associating a post with some objectionable opinion made by some third-party who happens to have superficially similar opinions, followed by an overt diversion to Valleywagging - is tiresome.
I recognize that much of the anti-surveillance crowd is populated by Paultards, including Edward Snowden himself. That's not a substantive counterargument, any more than it is a substantive argument for any other policy that libertarians happen to dislike whether it is drug criminalization, SOPA, or military support to Israel.
Sorry, but if the actual goal was to combat abuses of the Constitution, then why bring up unrelated actions, especially actions involving legitimate operations of the NSA? You don't get to ignore the goals of your fellow travelers when you find them distasteful and opposed to your own goals. The fact that the "anti-surveillance" crowd (and as I've pointed out in the past threads, it's telling that this group seems focused solely on this one bit of surveillance to the exclusion of other, more egregious abuses) is made up of a number of right wing groups with unhealthy views says something about what the movement really is about, and it's not something you can avoid. When someone points out that you're on the same side of the fence as the Oath Keepers, that should be a sign that you might want to think about exactly what it is that you're actually supporting.
Does D&D no longer have a stickied list of logical fallacies? This post could literally be a textbook example of an association fallacy.
Guess what - in politics, association matters. If you lend support to a movement that is pushing for horrible thing A because they also support thing B which you want, you don't get to say that you really weren't for thing A, because in the end, your actions pushed for thing A.
I am *really* tired of the fallback argument of "There are worse abuses, and clearly because I haven't heard *GROUP X* protesting those worse abuses that means this is totally an illegitimate complaint, damn those civil liberty activist fakers."
Its disingenous and insulting to anyone who does care about both
Well maybe the people complaining about it can be more accurate, then. For example, the recent revelation as to the millions of calls monitored in France, Spain, and Germany? That wasn't done by the NSA, that was done by the French, Spanish, and Germans monitoring foreign nationals and sharing the intelligence, which is part of what NATO is. Basically, the revelation amounts to "Oh hey, NATO is still a thing". I mean, if corporate intelligence gathering is off limits, it seems to me like being against drone strikes, but saying that missile strikes are peachy keen AOK hunky dory.
Which in particular isn't happening? Automated data collection and cross-referencing? That's happening.
The NSA trying to obfuscate the truth about their activities? That's part of their charter - operating in secret requires a certain amount of necessary obfuscation.
That leaves one point of contention: whether the referenced activities are illegal. I grant you that the collection and storage of phone call metadata and other records relating to Internet communications could be legal, given arbitrarily broad interpretations of Smith, FISA, and the PATRIOT Act. To quote former NSA analyst John Schindler, "NSA has platoons of lawyers, and their entire job is figuring out how to stay within the law and maximize collection by exploiting every loophole." That doesn't necessarily mean that a less charitable judicial review wouldn't find them illegal; or that they shouldn't be illegal.
So, where does our monitoring of international leaders fall within that argument?
The Fourth Amendment bits have been a dog and pony show to give a bare justification for the leaking of information on legitimate NSA actions because some people have a Stimsonial disgust with intelligence gathering. Most of the outcry, especially as of late, has been that the NSA is doing the job for which it is designed and tasked to do, and that it does so quite well - a good portion of Chancellor Merkel's ire is most likely due to the fact that the NSA completely clowned German intelligence.
Further, if you're really scared of automated data collection, you should be more concerned about private companies. If you think the NSA has platoons of lawyers, just wait until you see Google Legal.
Regardless of how much data Google has on me, they are unlikely to arrest and imprison me, so I don't know if I agree that we should be more concerned about corporate data collection. Perhaps as concerned, for different reasons. I agree with the idea that the argument against surveillance should be broadened in scope to encompass both state and private actors.
The challenge I have with this is twofold:
1. If Google collects your data and discovers you're doing some illegal shit, they will absolutely turn you in. So yes, indirectly they absolutely have the ability to lead to your arrest.
2. If you're not doing illegal shit, it seems awfully presumptuous to assume that some state actor will "arrest and imprison" you based on the aforementioned surveillance activities.
The balance of your post I agree with.
I mostly agree with your first point.
The problem I have with your second point is that the definition of "illegal shit" varies widely depending on government policy, often encompassing expressions of dissent.
I think the current surveillance situation is disturbing largely because it is a fusion of corporate and state data collection.
Kaputa on
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jmcdonaldI voted, did you?DC(ish)Registered Userregular
Which in particular isn't happening? Automated data collection and cross-referencing? That's happening.
The NSA trying to obfuscate the truth about their activities? That's part of their charter - operating in secret requires a certain amount of necessary obfuscation.
That leaves one point of contention: whether the referenced activities are illegal. I grant you that the collection and storage of phone call metadata and other records relating to Internet communications could be legal, given arbitrarily broad interpretations of Smith, FISA, and the PATRIOT Act. To quote former NSA analyst John Schindler, "NSA has platoons of lawyers, and their entire job is figuring out how to stay within the law and maximize collection by exploiting every loophole." That doesn't necessarily mean that a less charitable judicial review wouldn't find them illegal; or that they shouldn't be illegal.
So, where does our monitoring of international leaders fall within that argument?
The Fourth Amendment bits have been a dog and pony show to give a bare justification for the leaking of information on legitimate NSA actions because some people have a Stimsonial disgust with intelligence gathering. Most of the outcry, especially as of late, has been that the NSA is doing the job for which it is designed and tasked to do, and that it does so quite well - a good portion of Chancellor Merkel's ire is most likely due to the fact that the NSA completely clowned German intelligence.
Further, if you're really scared of automated data collection, you should be more concerned about private companies. If you think the NSA has platoons of lawyers, just wait until you see Google Legal.
Regardless of how much data Google has on me, they are unlikely to arrest and imprison me, so I don't know if I agree that we should be more concerned about corporate data collection. Perhaps as concerned, for different reasons. I agree with the idea that the argument against surveillance should be broadened in scope to encompass both state and private actors.
The challenge I have with this is twofold:
1. If Google collects your data and discovers you're doing some illegal shit, they will absolutely turn you in. So yes, indirectly they absolutely have the ability to lead to your arrest.
2. If you're not doing illegal shit, it seems awfully presumptuous to assume that some state actor will "arrest and imprison" you based on the aforementioned surveillance activities.
The balance of your post I agree with.
I mostly agree with your first point.
The problem I have with your second point is that the definition of "illegal shit" varies widely depending on government policy, often encompassing expressions of dissent.
I think the current surveillance situation is disturbing largely because it is a fusion of corporate and state data collection.
Not to be a douche here, but (under the assumption you reside in the US) I'm going to call some shenanigans on your "dissent" position without some pretty significant citations backing that up. No slippery slope arguments, no "well it has happened in the past..." arguments. Actual bonified fact.
Which in particular isn't happening? Automated data collection and cross-referencing? That's happening.
The NSA trying to obfuscate the truth about their activities? That's part of their charter - operating in secret requires a certain amount of necessary obfuscation.
That leaves one point of contention: whether the referenced activities are illegal. I grant you that the collection and storage of phone call metadata and other records relating to Internet communications could be legal, given arbitrarily broad interpretations of Smith, FISA, and the PATRIOT Act. To quote former NSA analyst John Schindler, "NSA has platoons of lawyers, and their entire job is figuring out how to stay within the law and maximize collection by exploiting every loophole." That doesn't necessarily mean that a less charitable judicial review wouldn't find them illegal; or that they shouldn't be illegal.
So, where does our monitoring of international leaders fall within that argument?
Guilt by association much?
The 1-2 punch you do here - associating a post with some objectionable opinion made by some third-party who happens to have superficially similar opinions, followed by an overt diversion to Valleywagging - is tiresome.
I recognize that much of the anti-surveillance crowd is populated by Paultards, including Edward Snowden himself. That's not a substantive counterargument, any more than it is a substantive argument for any other policy that libertarians happen to dislike whether it is drug criminalization, SOPA, or military support to Israel.
Sorry, but if the actual goal was to combat abuses of the Constitution, then why bring up unrelated actions, especially actions involving legitimate operations of the NSA? You don't get to ignore the goals of your fellow travelers when you find them distasteful and opposed to your own goals. The fact that the "anti-surveillance" crowd (and as I've pointed out in the past threads, it's telling that this group seems focused solely on this one bit of surveillance to the exclusion of other, more egregious abuses) is made up of a number of right wing groups with unhealthy views says something about what the movement really is about, and it's not something you can avoid. When someone points out that you're on the same side of the fence as the Oath Keepers, that should be a sign that you might want to think about exactly what it is that you're actually supporting.
Does D&D no longer have a stickied list of logical fallacies? This post could literally be a textbook example of an association fallacy.
Guess what - in politics, association matters. If you lend support to a movement that is pushing for horrible thing A because they also support thing B which you want, you don't get to say that you really weren't for thing A, because in the end, your actions pushed for thing A.
The purpose of this forum is to debate and discuss our thoughts on things, not to win elections in US government. We shouldn't form our opinions on the basis of who else holds them, regardless of topic.
Which in particular isn't happening? Automated data collection and cross-referencing? That's happening.
The NSA trying to obfuscate the truth about their activities? That's part of their charter - operating in secret requires a certain amount of necessary obfuscation.
That leaves one point of contention: whether the referenced activities are illegal. I grant you that the collection and storage of phone call metadata and other records relating to Internet communications could be legal, given arbitrarily broad interpretations of Smith, FISA, and the PATRIOT Act. To quote former NSA analyst John Schindler, "NSA has platoons of lawyers, and their entire job is figuring out how to stay within the law and maximize collection by exploiting every loophole." That doesn't necessarily mean that a less charitable judicial review wouldn't find them illegal; or that they shouldn't be illegal.
So, where does our monitoring of international leaders fall within that argument?
Guilt by association much?
The 1-2 punch you do here - associating a post with some objectionable opinion made by some third-party who happens to have superficially similar opinions, followed by an overt diversion to Valleywagging - is tiresome.
I recognize that much of the anti-surveillance crowd is populated by Paultards, including Edward Snowden himself. That's not a substantive counterargument, any more than it is a substantive argument for any other policy that libertarians happen to dislike whether it is drug criminalization, SOPA, or military support to Israel.
Sorry, but if the actual goal was to combat abuses of the Constitution, then why bring up unrelated actions, especially actions involving legitimate operations of the NSA? You don't get to ignore the goals of your fellow travelers when you find them distasteful and opposed to your own goals. The fact that the "anti-surveillance" crowd (and as I've pointed out in the past threads, it's telling that this group seems focused solely on this one bit of surveillance to the exclusion of other, more egregious abuses) is made up of a number of right wing groups with unhealthy views says something about what the movement really is about, and it's not something you can avoid. When someone points out that you're on the same side of the fence as the Oath Keepers, that should be a sign that you might want to think about exactly what it is that you're actually supporting.
Does D&D no longer have a stickied list of logical fallacies? This post could literally be a textbook example of an association fallacy.
Guess what - in politics, association matters. If you lend support to a movement that is pushing for horrible thing A because they also support thing B which you want, you don't get to say that you really weren't for thing A, because in the end, your actions pushed for thing A.
The purpose of this forum is to debate and discuss our thoughts on things, not to win elections in US government. We shouldn't form our opinions on the basis of who else holds them, regardless of topic.
You've heard of the political term useful idiot, right? It's used to refer to an individual who is used as a pawn through their beliefs - it was first used to describe Western Soviet sympathizers who played down human rights abuses behind the Iron Curtain due to their support for Communism, and were played for patsies by the USSR.
You can hold whatever beliefs you want, but you don't get to be ignorant of how they interplay with other beliefs.
Which in particular isn't happening? Automated data collection and cross-referencing? That's happening.
The NSA trying to obfuscate the truth about their activities? That's part of their charter - operating in secret requires a certain amount of necessary obfuscation.
That leaves one point of contention: whether the referenced activities are illegal. I grant you that the collection and storage of phone call metadata and other records relating to Internet communications could be legal, given arbitrarily broad interpretations of Smith, FISA, and the PATRIOT Act. To quote former NSA analyst John Schindler, "NSA has platoons of lawyers, and their entire job is figuring out how to stay within the law and maximize collection by exploiting every loophole." That doesn't necessarily mean that a less charitable judicial review wouldn't find them illegal; or that they shouldn't be illegal.
So, where does our monitoring of international leaders fall within that argument?
The Fourth Amendment bits have been a dog and pony show to give a bare justification for the leaking of information on legitimate NSA actions because some people have a Stimsonial disgust with intelligence gathering. Most of the outcry, especially as of late, has been that the NSA is doing the job for which it is designed and tasked to do, and that it does so quite well - a good portion of Chancellor Merkel's ire is most likely due to the fact that the NSA completely clowned German intelligence.
Further, if you're really scared of automated data collection, you should be more concerned about private companies. If you think the NSA has platoons of lawyers, just wait until you see Google Legal.
Regardless of how much data Google has on me, they are unlikely to arrest and imprison me, so I don't know if I agree that we should be more concerned about corporate data collection. Perhaps as concerned, for different reasons. I agree with the idea that the argument against surveillance should be broadened in scope to encompass both state and private actors.
The challenge I have with this is twofold:
1. If Google collects your data and discovers you're doing some illegal shit, they will absolutely turn you in. So yes, indirectly they absolutely have the ability to lead to your arrest.
2. If you're not doing illegal shit, it seems awfully presumptuous to assume that some state actor will "arrest and imprison" you based on the aforementioned surveillance activities.
The balance of your post I agree with.
I mostly agree with your first point.
The problem I have with your second point is that the definition of "illegal shit" varies widely depending on government policy, often encompassing expressions of dissent.
I think the current surveillance situation is disturbing largely because it is a fusion of corporate and state data collection.
Not to be a douche here, but (under the assumption you reside in the US) I'm going to call some shenanigans on your "dissent" position without some pretty significant citations backing that up. No slippery slope arguments, no "well it has happened in the past..." arguments. Actual bonified fact.
I do reside in the US. I grant that the US government is not currently forcefully quelling domestic dissent, at least not on such a scale as it has historically. But I don't see why "it happened often in the past, and could happen in the future" is an invalid argument. If we acknowledge the tendency of state and corporate actors to engage in suppression of dissent, and we acknowledge that the hybrid state-corporate surveillance system could be used to aid (greatly aid, in my opinion) in such suppression, shouldn't we be wary of allowing such an expansion of the system?
Is there some reason to believe that the US government is now unable or unwilling to forcefully suppress dissent on a large scale? From my perspective, the relative lack of large scale dissent in the US in recent decades is the primary reason for the relative absence of blatant oppression.
Which in particular isn't happening? Automated data collection and cross-referencing? That's happening.
The NSA trying to obfuscate the truth about their activities? That's part of their charter - operating in secret requires a certain amount of necessary obfuscation.
That leaves one point of contention: whether the referenced activities are illegal. I grant you that the collection and storage of phone call metadata and other records relating to Internet communications could be legal, given arbitrarily broad interpretations of Smith, FISA, and the PATRIOT Act. To quote former NSA analyst John Schindler, "NSA has platoons of lawyers, and their entire job is figuring out how to stay within the law and maximize collection by exploiting every loophole." That doesn't necessarily mean that a less charitable judicial review wouldn't find them illegal; or that they shouldn't be illegal.
So, where does our monitoring of international leaders fall within that argument?
Guilt by association much?
The 1-2 punch you do here - associating a post with some objectionable opinion made by some third-party who happens to have superficially similar opinions, followed by an overt diversion to Valleywagging - is tiresome.
I recognize that much of the anti-surveillance crowd is populated by Paultards, including Edward Snowden himself. That's not a substantive counterargument, any more than it is a substantive argument for any other policy that libertarians happen to dislike whether it is drug criminalization, SOPA, or military support to Israel.
Sorry, but if the actual goal was to combat abuses of the Constitution, then why bring up unrelated actions, especially actions involving legitimate operations of the NSA? You don't get to ignore the goals of your fellow travelers when you find them distasteful and opposed to your own goals. The fact that the "anti-surveillance" crowd (and as I've pointed out in the past threads, it's telling that this group seems focused solely on this one bit of surveillance to the exclusion of other, more egregious abuses) is made up of a number of right wing groups with unhealthy views says something about what the movement really is about, and it's not something you can avoid. When someone points out that you're on the same side of the fence as the Oath Keepers, that should be a sign that you might want to think about exactly what it is that you're actually supporting.
Does D&D no longer have a stickied list of logical fallacies? This post could literally be a textbook example of an association fallacy.
Guess what - in politics, association matters. If you lend support to a movement that is pushing for horrible thing A because they also support thing B which you want, you don't get to say that you really weren't for thing A, because in the end, your actions pushed for thing A.
The purpose of this forum is to debate and discuss our thoughts on things, not to win elections in US government. We shouldn't form our opinions on the basis of who else holds them, regardless of topic.
You've heard of the political term useful idiot, right? It's used to refer to an individual who is used as a pawn through their beliefs - it was first used to describe Western Soviet sympathizers who played down human rights abuses behind the Iron Curtain due to their support for Communism, and were played for patsies by the USSR.
You can hold whatever beliefs you want, but you don't get to be ignorant of how they interplay with other beliefs.
I don't think this line of reasoning really goes the way you would want it to. On the flip side using your extra broad brush, I could claim that you are in bed with Republican House member Mike Rogers, who basically argued that your Constitutional rights to privacy couldn't be violated as long as you were never made aware of that fact that they were violated, because you are both supportive of the NSA's aggressive surveillance programs.
Supporting panoptic surveillance seems more likely it would make you a useful idiot for a creeping police state than opposing it would make you a useful idiot for libertarians. Just how unsuccessful RON PAUL 2012 type BS is should show you how far away they are from enacting their kookiness, at least the portion of their kookiness that doesn't already line up with the plutocrats and fascists and so on.
It might just be in your best interest to drop this line altogether, since I doubt too much of the anti-NSA crowd here is going to be convinced to vote libertarian or tea party or whatever, unless they were already planning to do so ahead of time.
It might just be in your best interest to drop this line altogether, since I doubt too much of the anti-NSA crowd here is going to be convinced to vote libertarian or tea party or whatever, unless they were already planning to do so ahead of time.
Not here, but the wider group of people picking up this issue aren't doing so because they're advocating for anything better. That's Hedgie's point - this isn't a razor focused issue, and the recent news coverage and its advocates prove it.
Nothing in the recent publications is anything illegal for the NSA to do, it's part of its stated mission. Now we have the whole "embassies used for signals intercept" thing which is trying to be desperately spun into an issue, and I see a lot of talk by people who are wholly ignorant of the local geopolitical situation in Asia (cliffnotes: Indonesia is a hard to predict, violent government which very recently was funding militia groups who may have killed up to a 33% of the East Timorese population over the last decade or so).
Of course, nothing Indonesia says on this matters, because they know it, we know it, it's not news except when useful idiots make it so. But it does highlight that the people who want to argue about "what is a hostile nation" have no clue.
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
Yeah, when we say "So basically what we are learning is that the NSA is doing its job?", we are not, in fact, joking. Now, maybe we should have a conversation about the scope of the NSA's mission. But right now, at this second, we haven't really gotten any proof that they've exceeded it. The reason why warantless wiretaps were disturbing was because 1) it was against US citizens, and 2) No warrants. It wasn't because wiretapping is bad in all cases.
It might just be in your best interest to drop this line altogether, since I doubt too much of the anti-NSA crowd here is going to be convinced to vote libertarian or tea party or whatever, unless they were already planning to do so ahead of time.
Not here, but the wider group of people picking up this issue aren't doing so because they're advocating for anything better. That's Hedgie's point - this isn't a razor focused issue, and the recent news coverage and its advocates prove it.
Nothing in the recent publications is anything illegal for the NSA to do, it's part of its stated mission. Now we have the whole "embassies used for signals intercept" thing which is trying to be desperately spun into an issue, and I see a lot of talk by people who are wholly ignorant of the local geopolitical situation in Asia (cliffnotes: Indonesia is a hard to predict, violent government which very recently was funding militia groups who may have killed up to a 33% of the East Timorese population over the last decade or so).
Of course, nothing Indonesia says on this matters, because they know it, we know it, it's not news except when useful idiots make it so. But it does highlight that the people who want to argue about "what is a hostile nation" have no clue.
Well, a lot of the stuff in the more recent publication is illegal in the countries the NSA has been spying on, just not illegal by US law. Which is pretty typical for espionage. With the spying on foreign leaders and the like, the issue is less about the NSA stepping outside of its mission statement, and more about how much the surveillance is worth it compared to the political blowback if/when they get caught.
However, when you are talking about stuff like them breaking into Google's networks wholesale by exploiting a flaw in their datacenters' mirroring processes, that's an entirely different story.
Which in particular isn't happening? Automated data collection and cross-referencing? That's happening.
The NSA trying to obfuscate the truth about their activities? That's part of their charter - operating in secret requires a certain amount of necessary obfuscation.
That leaves one point of contention: whether the referenced activities are illegal. I grant you that the collection and storage of phone call metadata and other records relating to Internet communications could be legal, given arbitrarily broad interpretations of Smith, FISA, and the PATRIOT Act. To quote former NSA analyst John Schindler, "NSA has platoons of lawyers, and their entire job is figuring out how to stay within the law and maximize collection by exploiting every loophole." That doesn't necessarily mean that a less charitable judicial review wouldn't find them illegal; or that they shouldn't be illegal.
So, where does our monitoring of international leaders fall within that argument?
The Fourth Amendment bits have been a dog and pony show to give a bare justification for the leaking of information on legitimate NSA actions because some people have a Stimsonial disgust with intelligence gathering. Most of the outcry, especially as of late, has been that the NSA is doing the job for which it is designed and tasked to do, and that it does so quite well - a good portion of Chancellor Merkel's ire is most likely due to the fact that the NSA completely clowned German intelligence.
Further, if you're really scared of automated data collection, you should be more concerned about private companies. If you think the NSA has platoons of lawyers, just wait until you see Google Legal.
Regardless of how much data Google has on me, they are unlikely to arrest and imprison me, so I don't know if I agree that we should be more concerned about corporate data collection. Perhaps as concerned, for different reasons. I agree with the idea that the argument against surveillance should be broadened in scope to encompass both state and private actors.
The challenge I have with this is twofold:
1. If Google collects your data and discovers you're doing some illegal shit, they will absolutely turn you in. So yes, indirectly they absolutely have the ability to lead to your arrest.
2. If you're not doing illegal shit, it seems awfully presumptuous to assume that some state actor will "arrest and imprison" you based on the aforementioned surveillance activities.
The balance of your post I agree with.
I mostly agree with your first point.
The problem I have with your second point is that the definition of "illegal shit" varies widely depending on government policy, often encompassing expressions of dissent.
I think the current surveillance situation is disturbing largely because it is a fusion of corporate and state data collection.
1) If expressing dissent is illegal then Google still has an obligation to turn you in so no that does not fix the conundrum.
2) If the government wants to throw dissidents in jail: again, it does not need the NSA for this.
3) If the government was using the NSA to throw dissidents in jail, the problem with this would not be that the NSA can spy with warrants, but that the government was throwing dissidents in jail
Well, a lot of the stuff in the more recent publication is illegal in the countries the NSA has been spying on, just not illegal by US law. Which is pretty typical for espionage. With the spying on foreign leaders and the like, the issue is less about the NSA stepping outside of its mission statement, and more about how much the surveillance is worth it compared to the political blowback if/when they get caught.
However, when you are talking about stuff like them breaking into Google's networks wholesale by exploiting a flaw in their datacenters' mirroring processes, that's an entirely different story.
So now your argument is "we shouldn't spy because we might get caught" and as proof of this we have someone "revealing these things we didn't get caught doing for the good of the Nation... because we might get caught".
Which in particular isn't happening? Automated data collection and cross-referencing? That's happening.
The NSA trying to obfuscate the truth about their activities? That's part of their charter - operating in secret requires a certain amount of necessary obfuscation.
That leaves one point of contention: whether the referenced activities are illegal. I grant you that the collection and storage of phone call metadata and other records relating to Internet communications could be legal, given arbitrarily broad interpretations of Smith, FISA, and the PATRIOT Act. To quote former NSA analyst John Schindler, "NSA has platoons of lawyers, and their entire job is figuring out how to stay within the law and maximize collection by exploiting every loophole." That doesn't necessarily mean that a less charitable judicial review wouldn't find them illegal; or that they shouldn't be illegal.
So, where does our monitoring of international leaders fall within that argument?
Guilt by association much?
The 1-2 punch you do here - associating a post with some objectionable opinion made by some third-party who happens to have superficially similar opinions, followed by an overt diversion to Valleywagging - is tiresome.
I recognize that much of the anti-surveillance crowd is populated by Paultards, including Edward Snowden himself. That's not a substantive counterargument, any more than it is a substantive argument for any other policy that libertarians happen to dislike whether it is drug criminalization, SOPA, or military support to Israel.
Sorry, but if the actual goal was to combat abuses of the Constitution, then why bring up unrelated actions, especially actions involving legitimate operations of the NSA? You don't get to ignore the goals of your fellow travelers when you find them distasteful and opposed to your own goals. The fact that the "anti-surveillance" crowd (and as I've pointed out in the past threads, it's telling that this group seems focused solely on this one bit of surveillance to the exclusion of other, more egregious abuses) is made up of a number of right wing groups with unhealthy views says something about what the movement really is about, and it's not something you can avoid. When someone points out that you're on the same side of the fence as the Oath Keepers, that should be a sign that you might want to think about exactly what it is that you're actually supporting.
Does D&D no longer have a stickied list of logical fallacies? This post could literally be a textbook example of an association fallacy.
Guess what - in politics, association matters. If you lend support to a movement that is pushing for horrible thing A because they also support thing B which you want, you don't get to say that you really weren't for thing A, because in the end, your actions pushed for thing A.
The purpose of this forum is to debate and discuss our thoughts on things, not to win elections in US government. We shouldn't form our opinions on the basis of who else holds them, regardless of topic.
You've heard of the political term useful idiot, right? It's used to refer to an individual who is used as a pawn through their beliefs - it was first used to describe Western Soviet sympathizers who played down human rights abuses behind the Iron Curtain due to their support for Communism, and were played for patsies by the USSR.
You can hold whatever beliefs you want, but you don't get to be ignorant of how they interplay with other beliefs.
I don't think this line of reasoning really goes the way you would want it to. On the flip side using your extra broad brush, I could claim that you are in bed with Republican House member Mike Rogers, who basically argued that your Constitutional rights to privacy couldn't be violated as long as you were never made aware of that fact that they were violated, because you are both supportive of the NSA's aggressive surveillance programs.
Supporting panoptic surveillance seems more likely it would make you a useful idiot for a creeping police state than opposing it would make you a useful idiot for libertarians. Just how unsuccessful RON PAUL 2012 type BS is should show you how far away they are from enacting their kookiness, at least the portion of their kookiness that doesn't already line up with the plutocrats and fascists and so on.
It might just be in your best interest to drop this line altogether, since I doubt too much of the anti-NSA crowd here is going to be convinced to vote libertarian or tea party or whatever, unless they were already planning to do so ahead of time.
I've actually seen quite a few commentators espouse the position that an anti-NSA plank would make Rand Paul an attractive choice in 2016. So that's an end result I'm not going to dismiss out of hand.
Furthermore, if we're going to discuss the "creeping police state", there are much better targets to aim for, such as the incredibly punitive audits that Medicaid recipients go through to verify that the family is sufficiently poor, the growing push to subject supplemental benefits recipients to drug tests, or policies like "stop and frisk" that are intended to terrorize a portion of the population. And yet, when the concept of the "surveillance state" is brought up, we never talk about these abusive and intrusive policies - instead, we're discussing policies that may potentially affect middle-class white men primarily. I don't think that's a coincidence.
It might just be in your best interest to drop this line altogether, since I doubt too much of the anti-NSA crowd here is going to be convinced to vote libertarian or tea party or whatever, unless they were already planning to do so ahead of time.
Not here, but the wider group of people picking up this issue aren't doing so because they're advocating for anything better. That's Hedgie's point - this isn't a razor focused issue, and the recent news coverage and its advocates prove it.
Nothing in the recent publications is anything illegal for the NSA to do, it's part of its stated mission. Now we have the whole "embassies used for signals intercept" thing which is trying to be desperately spun into an issue, and I see a lot of talk by people who are wholly ignorant of the local geopolitical situation in Asia (cliffnotes: Indonesia is a hard to predict, violent government which very recently was funding militia groups who may have killed up to a 33% of the East Timorese population over the last decade or so).
Of course, nothing Indonesia says on this matters, because they know it, we know it, it's not news except when useful idiots make it so. But it does highlight that the people who want to argue about "what is a hostile nation" have no clue.
Well, a lot of the stuff in the more recent publication is illegal in the countries the NSA has been spying on, just not illegal by US law. Which is pretty typical for espionage. With the spying on foreign leaders and the like, the issue is less about the NSA stepping outside of its mission statement, and more about how much the surveillance is worth it compared to the political blowback if/when they get caught.
However, when you are talking about stuff like them breaking into Google's networks wholesale by exploiting a flaw in their datacenters' mirroring processes, that's an entirely different story.
The NSA breaks into Google's networks for the same reason that John Dillinger robbed banks - that's where their target (information/money) is. People forget how much traffic is within the internal Google network - enough to make leaving it alone into a sizable blind spot for them.
Which in particular isn't happening? Automated data collection and cross-referencing? That's happening.
The NSA trying to obfuscate the truth about their activities? That's part of their charter - operating in secret requires a certain amount of necessary obfuscation.
That leaves one point of contention: whether the referenced activities are illegal. I grant you that the collection and storage of phone call metadata and other records relating to Internet communications could be legal, given arbitrarily broad interpretations of Smith, FISA, and the PATRIOT Act. To quote former NSA analyst John Schindler, "NSA has platoons of lawyers, and their entire job is figuring out how to stay within the law and maximize collection by exploiting every loophole." That doesn't necessarily mean that a less charitable judicial review wouldn't find them illegal; or that they shouldn't be illegal.
So, where does our monitoring of international leaders fall within that argument?
Guilt by association much?
The 1-2 punch you do here - associating a post with some objectionable opinion made by some third-party who happens to have superficially similar opinions, followed by an overt diversion to Valleywagging - is tiresome.
I recognize that much of the anti-surveillance crowd is populated by Paultards, including Edward Snowden himself. That's not a substantive counterargument, any more than it is a substantive argument for any other policy that libertarians happen to dislike whether it is drug criminalization, SOPA, or military support to Israel.
Sorry, but if the actual goal was to combat abuses of the Constitution, then why bring up unrelated actions, especially actions involving legitimate operations of the NSA? You don't get to ignore the goals of your fellow travelers when you find them distasteful and opposed to your own goals. The fact that the "anti-surveillance" crowd (and as I've pointed out in the past threads, it's telling that this group seems focused solely on this one bit of surveillance to the exclusion of other, more egregious abuses) is made up of a number of right wing groups with unhealthy views says something about what the movement really is about, and it's not something you can avoid. When someone points out that you're on the same side of the fence as the Oath Keepers, that should be a sign that you might want to think about exactly what it is that you're actually supporting.
Does D&D no longer have a stickied list of logical fallacies? This post could literally be a textbook example of an association fallacy.
Guess what - in politics, association matters. If you lend support to a movement that is pushing for horrible thing A because they also support thing B which you want, you don't get to say that you really weren't for thing A, because in the end, your actions pushed for thing A.
The purpose of this forum is to debate and discuss our thoughts on things, not to win elections in US government. We shouldn't form our opinions on the basis of who else holds them, regardless of topic.
You've heard of the political term useful idiot, right? It's used to refer to an individual who is used as a pawn through their beliefs - it was first used to describe Western Soviet sympathizers who played down human rights abuses behind the Iron Curtain due to their support for Communism, and were played for patsies by the USSR.
You can hold whatever beliefs you want, but you don't get to be ignorant of how they interplay with other beliefs.
I don't think this line of reasoning really goes the way you would want it to. On the flip side using your extra broad brush, I could claim that you are in bed with Republican House member Mike Rogers, who basically argued that your Constitutional rights to privacy couldn't be violated as long as you were never made aware of that fact that they were violated, because you are both supportive of the NSA's aggressive surveillance programs.
Supporting panoptic surveillance seems more likely it would make you a useful idiot for a creeping police state than opposing it would make you a useful idiot for libertarians. Just how unsuccessful RON PAUL 2012 type BS is should show you how far away they are from enacting their kookiness, at least the portion of their kookiness that doesn't already line up with the plutocrats and fascists and so on.
It might just be in your best interest to drop this line altogether, since I doubt too much of the anti-NSA crowd here is going to be convinced to vote libertarian or tea party or whatever, unless they were already planning to do so ahead of time.
I've actually seen quite a few commentators espouse the position that an anti-NSA plank would make Rand Paul an attractive choice in 2016. So that's an end result I'm not going to dismiss out of hand.
Furthermore, if we're going to discuss the "creeping police state", there are much better targets to aim for, such as the incredibly punitive audits that Medicaid recipients go through to verify that the family is sufficiently poor, the growing push to subject supplemental benefits recipients to drug tests, or policies like "stop and frisk" that are intended to terrorize a portion of the population. And yet, when the concept of the "surveillance state" is brought up, we never talk about these abusive and intrusive policies - instead, we're discussing policies that may potentially affect middle-class white men primarily. I don't think that's a coincidence.
Guess what the main difference between stop and frisk, drug tests for welfare recipients, auditing poor people and this is?
Nobody here is likely to support any of the former policies. The stop and frisk thread would just be a bunch of people going "hey this is terrible and racist too"
So maybe that's why we are talking about this, and not that
Which in particular isn't happening? Automated data collection and cross-referencing? That's happening.
The NSA trying to obfuscate the truth about their activities? That's part of their charter - operating in secret requires a certain amount of necessary obfuscation.
That leaves one point of contention: whether the referenced activities are illegal. I grant you that the collection and storage of phone call metadata and other records relating to Internet communications could be legal, given arbitrarily broad interpretations of Smith, FISA, and the PATRIOT Act. To quote former NSA analyst John Schindler, "NSA has platoons of lawyers, and their entire job is figuring out how to stay within the law and maximize collection by exploiting every loophole." That doesn't necessarily mean that a less charitable judicial review wouldn't find them illegal; or that they shouldn't be illegal.
So, where does our monitoring of international leaders fall within that argument?
The Fourth Amendment bits have been a dog and pony show to give a bare justification for the leaking of information on legitimate NSA actions because some people have a Stimsonial disgust with intelligence gathering. Most of the outcry, especially as of late, has been that the NSA is doing the job for which it is designed and tasked to do, and that it does so quite well - a good portion of Chancellor Merkel's ire is most likely due to the fact that the NSA completely clowned German intelligence.
Further, if you're really scared of automated data collection, you should be more concerned about private companies. If you think the NSA has platoons of lawyers, just wait until you see Google Legal.
Regardless of how much data Google has on me, they are unlikely to arrest and imprison me, so I don't know if I agree that we should be more concerned about corporate data collection. Perhaps as concerned, for different reasons. I agree with the idea that the argument against surveillance should be broadened in scope to encompass both state and private actors.
The challenge I have with this is twofold:
1. If Google collects your data and discovers you're doing some illegal shit, they will absolutely turn you in. So yes, indirectly they absolutely have the ability to lead to your arrest.
2. If you're not doing illegal shit, it seems awfully presumptuous to assume that some state actor will "arrest and imprison" you based on the aforementioned surveillance activities.
The balance of your post I agree with.
I mostly agree with your first point.
The problem I have with your second point is that the definition of "illegal shit" varies widely depending on government policy, often encompassing expressions of dissent.
I think the current surveillance situation is disturbing largely because it is a fusion of corporate and state data collection.
Not to be a douche here, but (under the assumption you reside in the US) I'm going to call some shenanigans on your "dissent" position without some pretty significant citations backing that up. No slippery slope arguments, no "well it has happened in the past..." arguments. Actual bonified fact.
I do reside in the US. I grant that the US government is not currently forcefully quelling domestic dissent, at least not on such a scale as it has historically. But I don't see why "it happened often in the past, and could happen in the future" is an invalid argument. If we acknowledge the tendency of state and corporate actors to engage in suppression of dissent, and we acknowledge that the hybrid state-corporate surveillance system could be used to aid (greatly aid, in my opinion) in such suppression, shouldn't we be wary of allowing such an expansion of the system?
Is there some reason to believe that the US government is now unable or unwilling to forcefully suppress dissent on a large scale? From my perspective, the relative lack of large scale dissent in the US in recent decades is the primary reason for the relative absence of blatant oppression.
This argument comes up fairly frequently, so as long as we're speaking historically:
There is a correlation between rights erosion and oppressive governments, but historically speaking the correlation is that it happens rapidly rather than gradually - in the twentieth century, the vast majority of oppressive governments (key examples include China, USSR, and North Korea) were installed by popular revolution who rapidly enacted policies of suppression when the came to power. Even those that fell into genocide following democratic elections, such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, followed the same rapid pattern (in that instance it was a mere 16 months between the elections and the first major paramilitary attack). In modern history, there appears to be no evidence that improvements in intelligence and information gathering leads to suppression of dissent (although it has certainly happened in reverse).
Oppressive governments have used a number of innocuous (or even beneficial) tools to great effect over the years - from railroads to radiotransmitters to census reports. Hell, people even complained that the Domesday Book was used to extract money from tenants. Any tool, in the hands of a willing actor, can be used to fairly devastating effect. While it is certainly true that an oppressive government could use Google's or Facebook's data to kick down doors and drag off dissidents, if the government has reached that point then what is stopping them from kicking down down Google's doors and taking their servers before kicking down other doors and dragging off dissidents? Do we expect that introducing a constitutional amendment to prevent government agencies from matching two different databases will prevent an oppressive government from coming to power (it wont), or prevent said oppressive government from ignoring the constitution while it slaughters its own populace (ditto).
The problem with the hypothetical "an oppressive government could use this tool in the future" is not the tool, but the oppressive government. Which is why I would encourage everyone to vote and write to their representatives whenever possible.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
This 'useful idiot' stuff is asinine. Just because someone else believes some particular thing for bad reasons--or even most of the people who believe that particular thing do so for bad reasons!--does not mean that I cannot myself believe it for good reasons. It's probably safe to say that most of the people in the world who have ever been deliberate vegetarians have done so for religious reasons. This does not mean that when I decide to be vegetarian, or explain my (very different) reasons for being a vegetarian, I thereby become a stooge for the Hindu menace.
It is frankly bizarre to me how many times people can make this very basic point, and yet it keeps coming up. It's like guilt by association, when the people aren't even associated.
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jmcdonaldI voted, did you?DC(ish)Registered Userregular
edited November 2013
Thanks @archangle. I was sleeping when that post came in, and you said exactly what I would have.
EDIT
Also. I still note the lack of citations here...but I am seeing quite a bit of "feeling" based statements again.
This 'useful idiot' stuff is asinine. Just because someone else believes some particular thing for bad reasons--or even most of the people who believe that particular thing do so for bad reasons!--does not mean that I cannot myself believe it for good reasons. It's probably safe to say that most of the people in the world who have ever been deliberate vegetarians have done so for religious reasons. This does not mean that when I decide to be vegetarian, or explain my (very different) reasons for being a vegetarian, I thereby become a stooge for the Hindu menace.
It is frankly bizarre to me how many times people can make this very basic point, and yet it keeps coming up. It's like guilt by association, when the people aren't even associated.
Unless you'd care to dissociate yourself from the idiots who are presently talking about nothing but how terrible it is we have covert intelligence agencies at all, then this post seems pretty asinine. And if you think throwing your lot in with them privately or publically is worth it because it might get you what you want, well, guess what, you're a useful idiot to them too.
So now you can't have opinions if you share them with American right wingers because then you are helping them! Good lord, and I thought Spanish politics were idiotic.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
This 'useful idiot' stuff is asinine. Just because someone else believes some particular thing for bad reasons--or even most of the people who believe that particular thing do so for bad reasons!--does not mean that I cannot myself believe it for good reasons. It's probably safe to say that most of the people in the world who have ever been deliberate vegetarians have done so for religious reasons. This does not mean that when I decide to be vegetarian, or explain my (very different) reasons for being a vegetarian, I thereby become a stooge for the Hindu menace.
It is frankly bizarre to me how many times people can make this very basic point, and yet it keeps coming up. It's like guilt by association, when the people aren't even associated.
Unless you'd care to dissociate yourself from the idiots who are presently talking about nothing but how terrible it is we have covert intelligence agencies at all, then this post seems pretty asinine. And if you think throwing your lot in with them privately or publically is worth it because it might get you what you want, well, guess what, you're a useful idiot to them too.
When I say "A because B" I don't throw my lot in with anyone. Thinking is not a herd activity.
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You are going to argue that trying to distract from a domestic issue by pushing a foreign non-issue isn't a thing?
Good luck with that.
Yes, but you're acting as though there isn't a meaningful difference between "we have records that this guy bought some items, and another company probably has records, as do various other public and private entities perhaps" versus "automated cross-referencing of all these systems as interfaced with by a smartphone with location tracking data is now trivial".
The serial releases are kind of necessary to build and maintain public interest in our 24-hour news cycle. The fact that some people might make inaccurate judgments about a given release is something I'd blame more on the NSA deliberately trying to obfuscate the truth about their illegal activities but on this I assume we'll have to agree to disagree.
The problem is that the guys making the inaccurate judgements are the guys actually talking to the source, so everybody else gets the story from them, and so there is almost no chance of accuracy.
Also seriously Ralg, you've never heard of Dogwagging? And considering that Brazil is just as guilty of it as everyone else, I think her objection to it is something besides an inherent moral one.
This isn't happening though
When the misinformation leads some people to believe that "the NSA [is] deliberately trying to obfuscate the truth about their illegal activities" then we have a problem. Because those people are going to do one of two things
1) Dismantle necessary and proper surveillance
2) Act as useful idiots for people with interests in seeing the situation changed
So...write my congressman to defund the SQL? Like I really don't understand what the fear is. Maybe my library should go back to call cards and paper check out slips too?
I don't care that they have this information, or even that it is cross-referable. I want to know that there are adequate safeguards regarding what information goes in (eg, under what circumstances can the NSA collect and store information about citizens and non-citizens) and how that information comes out (eg, what is required for an NSA analyst to access confidential information, and when they make a request, how much ancillary information can they obtain?).
Bee tee dubs, painting TLDR as a Luddite who is scared of "SQL" is disingenuous.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Which in particular isn't happening? Automated data collection and cross-referencing? That's happening.
The NSA trying to obfuscate the truth about their activities? That's part of their charter - operating in secret requires a certain amount of necessary obfuscation.
That leaves one point of contention: whether the referenced activities are illegal. I grant you that the collection and storage of phone call metadata and other records relating to Internet communications could be legal, given arbitrarily broad interpretations of Smith, FISA, and the PATRIOT Act. To quote former NSA analyst John Schindler, "NSA has platoons of lawyers, and their entire job is figuring out how to stay within the law and maximize collection by exploiting every loophole." That doesn't necessarily mean that a less charitable judicial review wouldn't find them illegal; or that they shouldn't be illegal.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
So, where does our monitoring of international leaders fall within that argument?
The Fourth Amendment bits have been a dog and pony show to give a bare justification for the leaking of information on legitimate NSA actions because some people have a Stimsonial disgust with intelligence gathering. Most of the outcry, especially as of late, has been that the NSA is doing the job for which it is designed and tasked to do, and that it does so quite well - a good portion of Chancellor Merkel's ire is most likely due to the fact that the NSA completely clowned German intelligence.
Further, if you're really scared of automated data collection, you should be more concerned about private companies. If you think the NSA has platoons of lawyers, just wait until you see Google Legal.
Guilt by association much?
The 1-2 punch you do here - associating a post with some objectionable opinion made by some third-party who happens to have superficially similar opinions, followed by an overt diversion to Valleywagging - is tiresome.
I recognize that much of the anti-surveillance crowd is populated by Paultards, including Edward Snowden himself. That's not a substantive counterargument, any more than it is a substantive argument for any other policy that libertarians happen to dislike whether it is drug criminalization, SOPA, or military support to Israel.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Sorry, but if the actual goal was to combat abuses of the Constitution, then why bring up unrelated actions, especially actions involving legitimate operations of the NSA? You don't get to ignore the goals of your fellow travelers when you find them distasteful and opposed to your own goals. The fact that the "anti-surveillance" crowd (and as I've pointed out in the past threads, it's telling that this group seems focused solely on this one bit of surveillance to the exclusion of other, more egregious abuses) is made up of a number of right wing groups with unhealthy views says something about what the movement really is about, and it's not something you can avoid. When someone points out that you're on the same side of the fence as the Oath Keepers, that should be a sign that you might want to think about exactly what it is that you're actually supporting.
The challenge I have with this is twofold:
1. If Google collects your data and discovers you're doing some illegal shit, they will absolutely turn you in. So yes, indirectly they absolutely have the ability to lead to your arrest.
2. If you're not doing illegal shit, it seems awfully presumptuous to assume that some state actor will "arrest and imprison" you based on the aforementioned surveillance activities.
The balance of your post I agree with.
Its disingenous and insulting to anyone who does care about both
When you start protesting an abuse only because it's affecting your group, I think a questioning of the legitimacy of your position is in order. Once again, as I've stated in past threads, a lot of this outcry over surveillance boils down to "the surveillance state is supposed to target the dirty poors and minorities, not me."
Guess what - in politics, association matters. If you lend support to a movement that is pushing for horrible thing A because they also support thing B which you want, you don't get to say that you really weren't for thing A, because in the end, your actions pushed for thing A.
Well maybe the people complaining about it can be more accurate, then. For example, the recent revelation as to the millions of calls monitored in France, Spain, and Germany? That wasn't done by the NSA, that was done by the French, Spanish, and Germans monitoring foreign nationals and sharing the intelligence, which is part of what NATO is. Basically, the revelation amounts to "Oh hey, NATO is still a thing". I mean, if corporate intelligence gathering is off limits, it seems to me like being against drone strikes, but saying that missile strikes are peachy keen AOK hunky dory.
I mostly agree with your first point.
The problem I have with your second point is that the definition of "illegal shit" varies widely depending on government policy, often encompassing expressions of dissent.
I think the current surveillance situation is disturbing largely because it is a fusion of corporate and state data collection.
Not to be a douche here, but (under the assumption you reside in the US) I'm going to call some shenanigans on your "dissent" position without some pretty significant citations backing that up. No slippery slope arguments, no "well it has happened in the past..." arguments. Actual bonified fact.
You've heard of the political term useful idiot, right? It's used to refer to an individual who is used as a pawn through their beliefs - it was first used to describe Western Soviet sympathizers who played down human rights abuses behind the Iron Curtain due to their support for Communism, and were played for patsies by the USSR.
You can hold whatever beliefs you want, but you don't get to be ignorant of how they interplay with other beliefs.
Is there some reason to believe that the US government is now unable or unwilling to forcefully suppress dissent on a large scale? From my perspective, the relative lack of large scale dissent in the US in recent decades is the primary reason for the relative absence of blatant oppression.
I don't think this line of reasoning really goes the way you would want it to. On the flip side using your extra broad brush, I could claim that you are in bed with Republican House member Mike Rogers, who basically argued that your Constitutional rights to privacy couldn't be violated as long as you were never made aware of that fact that they were violated, because you are both supportive of the NSA's aggressive surveillance programs.
Supporting panoptic surveillance seems more likely it would make you a useful idiot for a creeping police state than opposing it would make you a useful idiot for libertarians. Just how unsuccessful RON PAUL 2012 type BS is should show you how far away they are from enacting their kookiness, at least the portion of their kookiness that doesn't already line up with the plutocrats and fascists and so on.
It might just be in your best interest to drop this line altogether, since I doubt too much of the anti-NSA crowd here is going to be convinced to vote libertarian or tea party or whatever, unless they were already planning to do so ahead of time.
Not here, but the wider group of people picking up this issue aren't doing so because they're advocating for anything better. That's Hedgie's point - this isn't a razor focused issue, and the recent news coverage and its advocates prove it.
Nothing in the recent publications is anything illegal for the NSA to do, it's part of its stated mission. Now we have the whole "embassies used for signals intercept" thing which is trying to be desperately spun into an issue, and I see a lot of talk by people who are wholly ignorant of the local geopolitical situation in Asia (cliffnotes: Indonesia is a hard to predict, violent government which very recently was funding militia groups who may have killed up to a 33% of the East Timorese population over the last decade or so).
Of course, nothing Indonesia says on this matters, because they know it, we know it, it's not news except when useful idiots make it so. But it does highlight that the people who want to argue about "what is a hostile nation" have no clue.
Well, a lot of the stuff in the more recent publication is illegal in the countries the NSA has been spying on, just not illegal by US law. Which is pretty typical for espionage. With the spying on foreign leaders and the like, the issue is less about the NSA stepping outside of its mission statement, and more about how much the surveillance is worth it compared to the political blowback if/when they get caught.
However, when you are talking about stuff like them breaking into Google's networks wholesale by exploiting a flaw in their datacenters' mirroring processes, that's an entirely different story.
1) If expressing dissent is illegal then Google still has an obligation to turn you in so no that does not fix the conundrum.
2) If the government wants to throw dissidents in jail: again, it does not need the NSA for this.
3) If the government was using the NSA to throw dissidents in jail, the problem with this would not be that the NSA can spy with warrants, but that the government was throwing dissidents in jail
So now your argument is "we shouldn't spy because we might get caught" and as proof of this we have someone "revealing these things we didn't get caught doing for the good of the Nation... because we might get caught".
Somehow i think its a slight bit different
I've actually seen quite a few commentators espouse the position that an anti-NSA plank would make Rand Paul an attractive choice in 2016. So that's an end result I'm not going to dismiss out of hand.
Furthermore, if we're going to discuss the "creeping police state", there are much better targets to aim for, such as the incredibly punitive audits that Medicaid recipients go through to verify that the family is sufficiently poor, the growing push to subject supplemental benefits recipients to drug tests, or policies like "stop and frisk" that are intended to terrorize a portion of the population. And yet, when the concept of the "surveillance state" is brought up, we never talk about these abusive and intrusive policies - instead, we're discussing policies that may potentially affect middle-class white men primarily. I don't think that's a coincidence.
The NSA breaks into Google's networks for the same reason that John Dillinger robbed banks - that's where their target (information/money) is. People forget how much traffic is within the internal Google network - enough to make leaving it alone into a sizable blind spot for them.
Guess what the main difference between stop and frisk, drug tests for welfare recipients, auditing poor people and this is?
Nobody here is likely to support any of the former policies. The stop and frisk thread would just be a bunch of people going "hey this is terrible and racist too"
So maybe that's why we are talking about this, and not that
There is a correlation between rights erosion and oppressive governments, but historically speaking the correlation is that it happens rapidly rather than gradually - in the twentieth century, the vast majority of oppressive governments (key examples include China, USSR, and North Korea) were installed by popular revolution who rapidly enacted policies of suppression when the came to power. Even those that fell into genocide following democratic elections, such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, followed the same rapid pattern (in that instance it was a mere 16 months between the elections and the first major paramilitary attack). In modern history, there appears to be no evidence that improvements in intelligence and information gathering leads to suppression of dissent (although it has certainly happened in reverse).
Oppressive governments have used a number of innocuous (or even beneficial) tools to great effect over the years - from railroads to radiotransmitters to census reports. Hell, people even complained that the Domesday Book was used to extract money from tenants. Any tool, in the hands of a willing actor, can be used to fairly devastating effect. While it is certainly true that an oppressive government could use Google's or Facebook's data to kick down doors and drag off dissidents, if the government has reached that point then what is stopping them from kicking down down Google's doors and taking their servers before kicking down other doors and dragging off dissidents? Do we expect that introducing a constitutional amendment to prevent government agencies from matching two different databases will prevent an oppressive government from coming to power (it wont), or prevent said oppressive government from ignoring the constitution while it slaughters its own populace (ditto).
The problem with the hypothetical "an oppressive government could use this tool in the future" is not the tool, but the oppressive government. Which is why I would encourage everyone to vote and write to their representatives whenever possible.
It is frankly bizarre to me how many times people can make this very basic point, and yet it keeps coming up. It's like guilt by association, when the people aren't even associated.
EDIT
Also. I still note the lack of citations here...but I am seeing quite a bit of "feeling" based statements again.
Unless you'd care to dissociate yourself from the idiots who are presently talking about nothing but how terrible it is we have covert intelligence agencies at all, then this post seems pretty asinine. And if you think throwing your lot in with them privately or publically is worth it because it might get you what you want, well, guess what, you're a useful idiot to them too.
When I say "A because B" I don't throw my lot in with anyone. Thinking is not a herd activity.