4 ms·

If you want to quit to refuse to help, fine, but I take serious issue with what you're suggesting beyond that. These are the legal actions of the United States

If you want to quit to refuse to help, fine, but I take serious issue with what you're suggesting beyond that. These are the legal actions of the United States government, executing the authority given to them to the people's elected representatives, and overseen by a judiciary duly selected according the constitutional procedures. Their legal and democratic authority is unassailable. Further, you don't know what motivated these actions. Is it intelligence about a specific threat? Has the government identified how a specific adversary operates? You could be impeding the investigation into a deadly plot. You have no way of knowing this. This isn't a game. We have real enemies who would gladly kill all of us. We have processes as a society for deciding how we defend ourselves. If you don't like our current policies, then exercise your vote, exercise your right to speak and publish and assemble. But don't usurp the sovereignty of the people of this country.

walrus01 10y ago
> You could be impeding the investigation into a deadly plot. problem is, that's the excuse that's always going to be given by the intelligence community for even the most obviously unconstitutional intrusive privacy invading stuff, like the NSA's "opticnerve" program.
koenigdavidmj 10y ago
When your argument can also be used unchanged by the Nazis in the late 30s, it's probably not the best way to go.
- marcoperaza 10y ago
  >When your argument can also be used unchanged by the Nazis in the late 30s, it's probably not the best way to go. You either missed the entire 'democratic legitimacy' part of my point, or don't actually know anything about the Nazis in the late 30s.
  - kabdib 10y ago
    I don't see a whole lot of "democratic legitimacy" in FISA courts or black budgets in the tens to hundreds of billions of dollars.
  - mhluongo 10y ago
    Recall democratic legitimacy isn't necessarily moral authority. "The tyranny of the majority", etc.
kabdib 10y ago
"How do you know it's not really about a truly bad guy?" Ans: Tens of thousands of NSLs and other secret actions make it really improbable that a small set of refusals to cooperate will result in great harm. Or that the game the government is playing is really about "bad guys" most of the time. "No really, this is about an actual bad guy this time!" The government has lied repeatedly about this stuff. It has covered up the fact that it performs unlawful surveillance on its "sovereign people". If this is about a bad guy this time, rather than all the other times when it has been lies or cover-ups, then that's just too damned bad, isn't it? See also: The Boy Who Cried Wolf. I have a fundamental disgust with arguments that attempt to appeal to blind loyalty. That "sovereignty of the people" you wrote about has been invoked too many times by scoundrels to be respected. Sure, there are indeed bad guys who are trying to kill us. But that doesn't justify a wholesale surveillance state, or tens of thousands of NSLs, or secret courts. That's just stuff the powers-that-be want, and have used the bad guys as an excuse to get.
smokeyj 10y ago
> You could be impeding the investigation into a deadly plot. We have warrants for that. Subpoena Yahoo for specific records. I'm not willing to trade the freedom of an entire country for a single investigation. This isn't an episode of 24 and there is no Jack Bauer. The fourth amendment was sold as follows: > The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. I'm not a constitutional lawyer. I'm sure the actual amendment can be interpreted to mean whatever George W and Co want it to mean. But that's not how it was sold, and this government is not legitimate as far as I'm concerned. Not as long as it runs dragnet surveillance over the American people. Snowden is a patriot and the U.S gov't is betraying the public.
- ams6110 10y ago
  George W? He's been out of the picture for coming up on a decade. There's another guy in there now who could have fixed all this, if he wanted to.
brians 10y ago
I'm not so sure of that. For example, it's not clear that Congress has the authority to create NSLs, a sort of not-a-warrant. It's not clear that they can issue gag orders like this. Even if they could do these things with warrants, they're not---and that matters. The judiciary is not meaningfully overseeing the parts of the state where law enforcement and national security intelligence mix. The FISC is a great example: it pisses off the agents and attorneys who have to deal with it, because it imposes an unholy amount of drag: they're trying to do their jobs, catch bad guys, etc.---and a FISC submission takes weeks of full-time work. But the FISC only exercises drag, not control. It can't steer---we see this because it never refuses a request. I suspect that's all one-sided proceedings can do, given the way we train our lawyers and judges. So it fails the needs of the citizens, and it doesn't protect liberty. The FISC, and NSLs, will someday be looked at with the same light as Adams' Alien & Sedition Acts: as fundamental betrayals of the American promise by an executive too scared of what might go wrong to trust the country to go right. Look, there's a lay assault on their legal and democratic authority: NSLs are not obviously a legitimate exercise of Federal authority. And for all that, if I were at the FBI and chasing a terrorist cell on American soil, I'd use one in an instant.
- MichaelBurge 10y ago
  > It can't steer---we see this because it never refuses a request. There are issues with FISC(like lack of transparency), but this specific point is unclear to me. Here are some possible scenarios where a low refusal rate wouldn't be a problem: * The judge could informally tell the agent that the request needs to be amended before he'll grant it. * FISC could publish clear guidelines on what is and is not allowed, so agents are never surprised and only submit legal requests. * Agents only make requests in extraordinary circumstances, so every request comes with a lot of legwork and investigation done making it clear why it is necessary.
  - kabdib 10y ago
    The US court system is an adversarial one. You make arguments in court. There are two sides. FISC is a court in name only. There is no oversight (I don't count the political appointees in the Senate as oversight), there are no checks and balances, there are no appeals. Calling it a court beggars the term.
nitrogen 10y ago
But don't usurp the sovereignty of the people of this country. It's difficult to reconcile this idea of democratic sovereignty with the utter secrecy in which the operations under discussion are performed.
ghostDancer 10y ago
> You could be impeding the investigation into a deadly plot. That's the "think of the children" of security agencies. You think they are so clueless that they need to read all mail of Yahoo or only follow some accounts?.
nnq 10y ago
Not an american, but the idea is that passive aggressiveness / mild-sabotage from citizens is just another way of expression, just like voting. And it works for the purpose and/or towards democracy! This is imho the untold truth about why most communist / socialist regimes failed: people at all levels of society started doing their work gradually worse and worse, pissed off and stressed out by the lack of freedom and constant interference from state organs, until everything collapsed, and people now live in better economies and freer because they've destroyed their previous systems. Yeah, most of the people who performed such "low level sabotage" will not even recognize to themselves that they did it. And yeah, bad governments were also helped to fail by external interference and external sabotage, but imho a "socialist regime where the people would truly believe in socialism/communism" could have worked out and had good economic performance, problem is that when "good economic performance" can only be had at too high of a cost of "individual personal freedom", people will start, even subcounsciously motivated, without admitting even to themselves what they are doing, and with insect-like non-communicative coordination, to slowly and methodically weaken the system they live in from within, until it crumbles, even at the cost of their own lives sometimes. This was America's secret weapon that helped "win the cold war" - people's inner "instinct for freedom or death" - thank god we all have it and a race of subhumans lacking it has not yet been engineered! It might also be the reason why so many Americans "voted for Trump", though this was probably engineered by some really smart "puppet masters" - the guy is clearly a "man of the establishment" despite it's clown persona... Of course, there is no "monument to the lazy and drunk soviet worker that helped take down communism". And there will be no monument for the Google employee that writes a subtle bug in the "government reporting module XYZ" :) Of course, if the gov doesn't abuse its power and asks for too much, that poor programmer might not be so "overwhelmed" by it's duties so as to make stupid "mistakes" with dire consequences...
- CapacitorSet 10y ago
  That's an extremely rose-tinted narrative.
  - pjc50 10y ago
    Well, Stanislav Petrov won a Nobel Prize for refusing to follow orders ...
simonh 10y ago
Their legal and democratic authority is absolutely assailable, within the laws of the United States and within it's democratic processes. That's why the US system of governance contains within it checks and balances between the different institutions. There absolutely should be mechanisms to challenge or appeal against any action of government, and when there isn't as seemed to be the case with NSLs that's a very good indication that the system is being grossly abused by government agencies.

walrus01 10y ago

> You could be impeding the investigation into a deadly plot. problem is, that's the excuse that's always going to be given by the intelligence community for even the most obviously unconstitutional intrusive privacy invading stuff, like the NSA's "opticnerve" program.

koenigdavidmj 10y ago

When your argument can also be used unchanged by the Nazis in the late 30s, it's probably not the best way to go.

marcoperaza 10y ago
>When your argument can also be used unchanged by the Nazis in the late 30s, it's probably not the best way to go. You either missed the entire 'democratic legitimacy' part of my point, or don't actually know anything about the Nazis in the late 30s.
- kabdib 10y ago
  I don't see a whole lot of "democratic legitimacy" in FISA courts or black budgets in the tens to hundreds of billions of dollars.
- mhluongo 10y ago
  Recall democratic legitimacy isn't necessarily moral authority. "The tyranny of the majority", etc.

kabdib 10y ago

"How do you know it's not really about a truly bad guy?" Ans: Tens of thousands of NSLs and other secret actions make it really improbable that a small set of refusals to cooperate will result in great harm. Or that the game the government is playing is really about "bad guys" most of the time. "No really, this is about an actual bad guy this time!" The government has lied repeatedly about this stuff. It has covered up the fact that it performs unlawful surveillance on its "sovereign people". If this is about a bad guy this time, rather than all the other times when it has been lies or cover-ups, then that's just too damned bad, isn't it? See also: The Boy Who Cried Wolf. I have a fundamental disgust with arguments that attempt to appeal to blind loyalty. That "sovereignty of the people" you wrote about has been invoked too many times by scoundrels to be respected. Sure, there are indeed bad guys who are trying to kill us. But that doesn't justify a wholesale surveillance state, or tens of thousands of NSLs, or secret courts. That's just stuff the powers-that-be want, and have used the bad guys as an excuse to get.

smokeyj 10y ago

> You could be impeding the investigation into a deadly plot. We have warrants for that. Subpoena Yahoo for specific records. I'm not willing to trade the freedom of an entire country for a single investigation. This isn't an episode of 24 and there is no Jack Bauer. The fourth amendment was sold as follows: > The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. I'm not a constitutional lawyer. I'm sure the actual amendment can be interpreted to mean whatever George W and Co want it to mean. But that's not how it was sold, and this government is not legitimate as far as I'm concerned. Not as long as it runs dragnet surveillance over the American people. Snowden is a patriot and the U.S gov't is betraying the public.

ams6110 10y ago
George W? He's been out of the picture for coming up on a decade. There's another guy in there now who could have fixed all this, if he wanted to.

brians 10y ago

I'm not so sure of that. For example, it's not clear that Congress has the authority to create NSLs, a sort of not-a-warrant. It's not clear that they can issue gag orders like this. Even if they could do these things with warrants, they're not---and that matters. The judiciary is not meaningfully overseeing the parts of the state where law enforcement and national security intelligence mix. The FISC is a great example: it pisses off the agents and attorneys who have to deal with it, because it imposes an unholy amount of drag: they're trying to do their jobs, catch bad guys, etc.---and a FISC submission takes weeks of full-time work. But the FISC only exercises drag, not control. It can't steer---we see this because it never refuses a request. I suspect that's all one-sided proceedings can do, given the way we train our lawyers and judges. So it fails the needs of the citizens, and it doesn't protect liberty. The FISC, and NSLs, will someday be looked at with the same light as Adams' Alien & Sedition Acts: as fundamental betrayals of the American promise by an executive too scared of what might go wrong to trust the country to go right. Look, there's a lay assault on their legal and democratic authority: NSLs are not obviously a legitimate exercise of Federal authority. And for all that, if I were at the FBI and chasing a terrorist cell on American soil, I'd use one in an instant.

MichaelBurge 10y ago
> It can't steer---we see this because it never refuses a request. There are issues with FISC(like lack of transparency), but this specific point is unclear to me. Here are some possible scenarios where a low refusal rate wouldn't be a problem: * The judge could informally tell the agent that the request needs to be amended before he'll grant it. * FISC could publish clear guidelines on what is and is not allowed, so agents are never surprised and only submit legal requests. * Agents only make requests in extraordinary circumstances, so every request comes with a lot of legwork and investigation done making it clear why it is necessary.
- kabdib 10y ago
  The US court system is an adversarial one. You make arguments in court. There are two sides. FISC is a court in name only. There is no oversight (I don't count the political appointees in the Senate as oversight), there are no checks and balances, there are no appeals. Calling it a court beggars the term.

nitrogen 10y ago

But don't usurp the sovereignty of the people of this country. It's difficult to reconcile this idea of democratic sovereignty with the utter secrecy in which the operations under discussion are performed.

ghostDancer 10y ago

> You could be impeding the investigation into a deadly plot. That's the "think of the children" of security agencies. You think they are so clueless that they need to read all mail of Yahoo or only follow some accounts?.

nnq 10y ago

Not an american, but the idea is that passive aggressiveness / mild-sabotage from citizens is just another way of expression, just like voting. And it works for the purpose and/or towards democracy! This is imho the untold truth about why most communist / socialist regimes failed: people at all levels of society started doing their work gradually worse and worse, pissed off and stressed out by the lack of freedom and constant interference from state organs, until everything collapsed, and people now live in better economies and freer because they've destroyed their previous systems. Yeah, most of the people who performed such "low level sabotage" will not even recognize to themselves that they did it. And yeah, bad governments were also helped to fail by external interference and external sabotage, but imho a "socialist regime where the people would truly believe in socialism/communism" could have worked out and had good economic performance, problem is that when "good economic performance" can only be had at too high of a cost of "individual personal freedom", people will start, even subcounsciously motivated, without admitting even to themselves what they are doing, and with insect-like non-communicative coordination, to slowly and methodically weaken the system they live in from within, until it crumbles, even at the cost of their own lives sometimes. This was America's secret weapon that helped "win the cold war" - people's inner "instinct for freedom or death" - thank god we all have it and a race of subhumans lacking it has not yet been engineered! It might also be the reason why so many Americans "voted for Trump", though this was probably engineered by some really smart "puppet masters" - the guy is clearly a "man of the establishment" despite it's clown persona... Of course, there is no "monument to the lazy and drunk soviet worker that helped take down communism". And there will be no monument for the Google employee that writes a subtle bug in the "government reporting module XYZ" :) Of course, if the gov doesn't abuse its power and asks for too much, that poor programmer might not be so "overwhelmed" by it's duties so as to make stupid "mistakes" with dire consequences...

CapacitorSet 10y ago
That's an extremely rose-tinted narrative.
- pjc50 10y ago
  Well, Stanislav Petrov won a Nobel Prize for refusing to follow orders ...

simonh 10y ago

Their legal and democratic authority is absolutely assailable, within the laws of the United States and within it's democratic processes. That's why the US system of governance contains within it checks and balances between the different institutions. There absolutely should be mechanisms to challenge or appeal against any action of government, and when there isn't as seemed to be the case with NSLs that's a very good indication that the system is being grossly abused by government agencies.