8 ms·

There's no provision in the constitution for stealing property that you think is involved in a crime (only for taking evidence of a crime. They could collect ev

by nirvana 14y ago

There's no provision in the constitution for stealing property that you think is involved in a crime (only for taking evidence of a crime. They could collect evidence without taking the domain, that is completely unnecessary.) Actually, there's no provision in the constitution for a federal police force of any kind, and for this very reason[1]. (Check the enumerated powers clause specifically. If you disagree, please give me which enumerated power enumerates a federal police force.) I don't know what will bring the US federal government into compliance with the law, but it seems to me, over the 40 years I've been alive, they've just gotten further and further away from it, and more and more unaccountable as a result. So, since most of HN seems to be liberals, and I know there are many such crimes that many liberals disagree with: such as the patriot act, the kim dotcom fiasco, airport porno scanners, domestic spying of all kinds, the drug war, even in states that have legalized it, etc. how do you propose to fix this? Pick the crime the federal government is doing and continuing to do under Obama, and tell me, how do you propose to change things so that the federal government can no longer operate outside the law? The argument for electing Obama to end the wars and close guantanimo, etc, made some sense if you believed these were Republican initiatives. But we have not seen them undone. In my life this has been consistently the case- Bush didn't undo the "you must lend to people who can't repay" regulations of Clinton with the unsurprising result. Bush didn't undo the prohibitions on firearms clinton put in place, in fact, he banned even more guns than clinton did (something many republicans refuse to admit.) Clinton didn't undo the damage of the Bush years, Bush didn't undo the damage of the Reagan years, Reagan did undo a little of the damage of the Carter years but did more damage himself. Carter- I give him credit- did try to undo a lot of damage and made some progress, but he and reagan are the exceptions... before and after them it hasn't really which "party" (or wing of the one party from my perspective) was in charge. So, those of you who are younger. The Obama-Bush period is a perfect example. It is always like this. You can re-elect Obama because you think Mittens would be worse (he might be, I can't say, I think he would be just as bad.) But it isn't really going to change anything. The game is rigged until something asymmetrical comes to change it. That might be a period of severe economic pain (say when the dollar bubble collapses.) Whatever, if you want things like these domain thefts to end, and you're in your 20s, start working on how you're join to turn back federal authority. The hippies of the 60s may have been socialist, but they were right about opposing the concentration of power. The problem is, if google pisses enough people off, their fortunes will start to decline. Government is able to prosecute a drug war for 50+ years, one that pisses huge numbers of people off, but there's no seeming way to stop it. I'm using the drug war as an example here because it has more history than these domain thefts or the copyright craziness we've seen lately.... and I believe these thefts are a direct result of the drug war's Asset forfeiture "laws". [1] It would be very hard for the feds to ignore state law and raid drug dispensaries in california if there were no federal police agencies. Further, this is also why the federal government has no enumerated power to criminalize drugs, but states do based on their state constitutions. Desire to control the economy (via regulations) has caused many to defend the "regulate commerce between the states" as if it gave the power to regulate to the feds. (it doesn't, it gives the government the power to prevent states from charging tariffs on the goods of other states... "Regulate" at the time didn't mean what it is commonly used to mean now- at the time it meant "functional" or "keep functional" as in "well regulated militia". If you think about it "the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" means the militia is not to be regulated (in the modern meaning of the term) because it needs to be "regulated" (in the "keeping function" meaning of the term)

adventureful 14y ago
20 years ago the TSA would have been a strong enough shock to the American public that they would have revolted. Now they accept that level of abuse. So the bar has clearly been raised to a very high level, and it keeps going higher. They're passing so many dangerous laws it's all but impossible to keep up with (and the taxes and regulations to go with them). The monster in DC expends a lot of effort and money trying to keep the people asleep. It's the story about the frog and the boiling pot of water. To roll it back would take a two term President dedicated to absolutely nothing else but that effort, and a Congress willing to go along. Scenarios like that only become possible during particularly extreme situations, either war or depression.
- rhizome 14y ago
  Now they accept that level of abuse. That's unfair. The TSA was established by people hiding behind 9/11.
  - tptacek 14y ago
    Even this loses context. The suggestion here is that intrusive airport security was a knee-jerk reaction to 9/11. But that's not true at all; we've had intrusive airport security, supported Constitutionally by the framework of "administrative search", for dozens of years. What happened after 9/11 is that the government (rightly) acknowledged that airport security was run by a decentralized and largely ineffective hodgepodge of private and local security organizations. The TSA was a "reform" of airport security intended to centralize the practice and make it more consistent. The TSA is obviously terrible and much of airport security is a farce. But this isn't simply a result of people begging for farcical centralized security theater; it's a consequence of centralizing airport security in the federal government and thus making it far simpler for airport security to be "responsive" to "new threats". The TSA's incompetence and intrusiveness is largely an emergent phenomenon. It isn't a policy goal.
- aqme28 14y ago
  70 years ago Americans approved of imprisoning Japanese-American citizens simply for being of Japanese descent. It's hard to say how our views of civil liberties may have shifted, (except to say that if civil liberties have an enemy, it's War).

by nirvana 14y ago

adventureful 14y ago

20 years ago the TSA would have been a strong enough shock to the American public that they would have revolted. Now they accept that level of abuse. So the bar has clearly been raised to a very high level, and it keeps going higher. They're passing so many dangerous laws it's all but impossible to keep up with (and the taxes and regulations to go with them). The monster in DC expends a lot of effort and money trying to keep the people asleep. It's the story about the frog and the boiling pot of water. To roll it back would take a two term President dedicated to absolutely nothing else but that effort, and a Congress willing to go along. Scenarios like that only become possible during particularly extreme situations, either war or depression.

rhizome 14y ago
Now they accept that level of abuse. That's unfair. The TSA was established by people hiding behind 9/11.
- tptacek 14y ago
  Even this loses context. The suggestion here is that intrusive airport security was a knee-jerk reaction to 9/11. But that's not true at all; we've had intrusive airport security, supported Constitutionally by the framework of "administrative search", for dozens of years. What happened after 9/11 is that the government (rightly) acknowledged that airport security was run by a decentralized and largely ineffective hodgepodge of private and local security organizations. The TSA was a "reform" of airport security intended to centralize the practice and make it more consistent. The TSA is obviously terrible and much of airport security is a farce. But this isn't simply a result of people begging for farcical centralized security theater; it's a consequence of centralizing airport security in the federal government and thus making it far simpler for airport security to be "responsive" to "new threats". The TSA's incompetence and intrusiveness is largely an emergent phenomenon. It isn't a policy goal.
aqme28 14y ago
70 years ago Americans approved of imprisoning Japanese-American citizens simply for being of Japanese descent. It's hard to say how our views of civil liberties may have shifted, (except to say that if civil liberties have an enemy, it's War).