10 ms·

I want to provide some perspective here, at the risk of being downvoted. To compare what the US government is doing to a truly oppressive regime is insulting.

by hooande 13y ago

I want to provide some perspective here, at the risk of being downvoted. To compare what the US government is doing to a truly oppressive regime is insulting. People in the world today live in fear of physical harm from their own government. They aren't worried about phone call meta data or blanket call logging. They're worried about being taken by force with no trial, no ACLU or EFF to help them. Just gone. Ai Weiwei served months in jail for art projects that were critical of the government. Can anyone imagine that happening here, in the country where flag burning is constitutionally protected? There are dozens of countries in the world today that have a near 100% conviction rate for political dissidents. Here in America confessed terrorists have the right to an attorney and god help the prosecution if there was any missed technicality during the arrest. Don't dare be a girl trying to go to school in many middle eastern countries. Might get run over by a tank if you openly oppose the chinese government. Offend the king of saud with your actions and you'll be literally stoned to death in the street. And we're worried about phone call meta data? I think a lot of this is ignorance about how modern counter terrorism works. The most effective tool we have is social network analysis. Find a terrorist and see who calls them, then see who calls those people and out and out. Look at the vertices and edges and dependency networks and we can learn a lot about complex organizations without risking any lives. It's understood that this is offensive to many people's privacy beliefs, but it's the best tool we have. If you want to know why government agency's are engaging in this wildly unpopular behavior, here's the answer: On 9/11 a lot of people swore to god that it would never happen again. That might sound like a joke to people who never held up their hand and vowed protect and defend. People give their fucking lives to stop threats that you'll never know about. Question their methods all you want, they aren't going to listen. Also: Save the slippery slope nonsense. There is a 0% chance of the US government becoming an oppressive regime, surveillance or not. Those things just don't happen in times of peace and prosperity. No country has ever gone from being an advanced democracy to being a tyrannical regime. Obama can't even pass a law without 37 votes to repeal.

jacquesm 13y ago
> People in the world today live in fear of physical harm from their own government. They aren't worried about phone call meta data or blanket call logging. They're worried about being taken by force with no trial, no ACLU or EFF to help them. Just gone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition
gngeal 13y ago
Can anyone imagine that happening here, in the country where flag burning is constitutionally protected? Well, that feels sort of disingenuous. From the POV of a scheming politician in power, harmless gestures would certainly seem much less important than agents of your potential downfall communicating in ways that you can't penetrate. In most cases, those loudmouths are the devils you know. I think a lot of this is ignorance about how modern counter terrorism works. The most effective tool we have is social network analysis. Find a terrorist and see who calls them, then see who calls those people and out and out. Look at the vertices and edges and dependencies networks and we can learn a lot about complex organizations without risking any lives. I believe that's exactly happened half a year before 9/11. Then, someone thought, "what an interesting scenario, let's file it into our record system". If you want to know why government agency's are engaging in this wildly unpopular behavior, here's the answer: On 9/11 a lot of people swore to god that it would never happen again. OK, I'll bite: Didn't lousy healthcare kill more people in the US in the last decade (certainly, possibly even in a year) than 9/11 ever did? Do people swear to god that this must never happen again? I don't think so. It's the salami slicing effect, only with people. As long as it's not visible, nobody cares (or extremely few are actually bothered by it to any extent). Ditto for people killed by burning all that coal.
- anigbrowl 13y ago
  Didn't lousy healthcare kill more people in the US in the last decade (certainly, possibly even in a year) than 9/11 ever did? Do people swear to god that this must never happen again? We're getting very far off-topic, but don't you remember the huge political battle over Obamacare?
  - TeMPOraL 13y ago
    How about cars? Cars kill many-a-WTC every year. Where is the War on Careless Driving?
    - refurb 13y ago
      Wait a second. You see no distinction between a death from a random vehicle accident and a death at the hands of an organization that is trying to kill as many citizens as possible? Those are equivalent in your mind?
lrhot9 13y ago
> There is a 0% chance of the US government becoming an oppressive regime, surveillance or not. Those things just don't happen in times of peace and prosperity. No country has ever gone from being an advanced democracy to being a tyrannical regime. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_Republic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_Republic
- anigbrowl 13y ago
  Weimar Germany was not prosperous or what I would call an advanced democracy. It had five good years, but the 5 years on either side were a mess. I wouldn't say that can't happen here, but it's not a good comparison at all. The US is remarkably stable in historical terms,even when you include the Civil War.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - ImprovedSilence 13y ago
    >> The US is remarkably stable in historical terms,even when you include the Civil War. Historical terms? 237 yrs is a relative piss in the bucket as far as historical terms are concerned. Talk to me once they get 800 yrs of stability under their belt.
    - anigbrowl 13y ago
      Most countries have had significant changes in their constitutional configuration over a much shorter timescale than the US, especially when you factor in scale. Your counter-argument is so weak as to constitute an endorsement; the existence of other, even more stable countries does not invalidate my point.
    - dredmorbius 13y ago
      As others have noted: there are very few countries in the world which have been established as long as the US, with the same governmental structures and (substantially) similar borders. There are cultures which are older, but many of these have existed under multiple different governments. Nations such as Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Czecheslovakia (since rendered into the states of Slovakia and the Czech Republic), much of the Balkans and Baltic countries, etc., simply didn't exist as national entities at the beginning of the 19th Century. Neither did the states of the Middle East (Ottoman Empire), Africa (colonies, prior to which: native tribal regions not structured as we'd consider modern nations), the Americas, etc. Yes, you'll find England, Spain, and France in much their modern form dating to ~ 1000 - 1400 AD, but only just. There are a few modern countries which have occupied much the same area (though with different governmental forms) more or less continuously: Persia/Iran, Vietnam, Japan, and China, with as I recall Vietnam being the oldest as I recall. But no, "nations" as such really aren't all that permanent.
sfjailbird 13y ago
Do you just ignore what the US government does to citizens in other countries? Or do they somehow not count? Because America kills people without trial, abducts suspects and tortures them, very often they turn out to be innocents. To say nothing of the support, if not wholesale installment, of the very kind of regimes that you guarantee me the US will never become. Comments like yours seem to say that all of this doesn't matter, because we are not doing it to Americans! (At least not white ones and only if they happen to be outside the country.)
- jlgreco 13y ago
  > Or do they somehow not count? That does seem to be the general sentiment of your typical statist american. Governments are allowed to abuse people that are "owned" by other governments, unless those people are americans. Or something.
guelo 13y ago
Isn't it amazing that we didn't used to have a thousand terrorist attacks every day before the internet existed and the government could read every conversation we have? Thank G_d for the surveillance apparatus that the government has available to it now. Civilization wouldn't be possible otherwise.
flyinRyan 13y ago
>in the country where flag burning is constitutionally protected? Which means precisely nothing. Laws are just an illusion of order that only exists if the enforcers make it so. Photographing cops is also protected, yet if you do it you might end up in the hospital with your camera broken, charged with assaulting a police officer. People in the US mostly aren't afraid of their government. Maybe they never will be. But the US government does unspeakable things inside and outside the borders of the US. The majority aren't afraid because they aren't yet effected. Maybe the majority will never be effected or never know it. One thing I would ask you; we know the government gets support from the press in the form of omissions. Is it completely impossible that someone inside the US has been "disappeared" without us knowing? How would we know if it wasn't reported? A lone family crying about a missing loved one can be ignored pretty easily if the media doesn't blow it up for all to see.
1123581321 13y ago
I appreciate your perspective, and I have not downvoted you. I disagree with some of the premises you've laid out and strongly agree with your main argument. Your main argument is that Americans should not be upset about this because it's not actually oppressive, and the United States will not become oppressive. I think this is wrong in two ways. 1. We should hold our government to a much higher standard than "oppressive." We should not even let them come close to it. I realize this is an axiom; why should we do that? Reasons like "because of the Constitution," "to protect people," "to keep the United States a place of refuge for oppressed people," are all good reasons, but I think the best is simply that it is evil to allow a good thing to be compromised or abrogated, so it is good to resist a compromising or abrogating force. I cannot justify this by logic (why anyone should be good or want good) but I cannot be persuaded otherwise, and thankfully, many other people are the same way. 2. Our government is already oppressive to certain people, and there is a chance that the list of people it oppresses will grow. Most of them are foreign but a few are already domestic. The systems being built today are designed to increase our capacity to treat people this way, so it is reasonable to expect more people will be treated poorly. Additionally, history provides ample examples of nearly utopic nations, including republics, that did go on to commit atrocities and reduce the quality of the lives of their own people. It is not a slippery slope to want to take precautions to avoid the same. But again, this is all secondary to point #1 above.
agwa 13y ago
Here a few examples of how citizens are treated in the United States: Cameron D'Ambrosio - held in jail for weeks without bail for posting rap lyrics the government found offensive. [http://cms.fightforthefuture.org/teenager/ http://cms.fightforthefuture.org/teenager/] Peaceful Occupy protesters - subjected to beatings and pepper-spraying at point blank range [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UC_Davis_pepper-spray_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UC_Davis_pepper-spray_incident]. (Note that no one was actually run over by a tank in China; OTOH, the US has the legacy of the Kent State Massacre [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings]. ETA: there have been worse massacres of protesters elsewhere, but the point is that the US is not exempt from this.) Bradley Manning - held for nine months in solitary confinement under conditions that at times could only be described as torture: naked and without his eye glasses, permitted to read or watch TV for only one hour a day, not permitted to exercise. [http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/manning-treatment-inhuman/ http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/manning-treatment-i...], [http://solitarywatch.com/2012/08/11/defense-motion-describes-bradley-mannings-unlawful-pretrial-punishment-in-solitary-confinement/ http://solitarywatch.com/2012/08/11/defense-motion-describes...] North-west anarchists - accused of no wrongdoing but refused to testify for a grand jury. Held in contempt of court and sent directly to jail. Spent 5 months in jail, much of it in solitary confinement during which they were permitted no visitors and had only one 15 minute phone call a month and limited access to reading and writing materials. According to the judge who both sent them there and then released them, "their physical health has deteriorated sharply and their mental health has also suffered from the effects of solitary confinement." [https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4hDq2p2PpMKRDRDQzViLWJTUmc/edit?pli=1 https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4hDq2p2PpMKRDRDQzViLWJTUmc/...] None of these people are even suspected terrorists. What they share in common is that they did things the government didn't like. As for suspected terrorists, they are not guaranteed due process. See Jose Padilla [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Padilla_%28prisoner%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Padilla_%28prisoner%...]: U.S. citizen, held from 2002 to 2006 as an "enemy combatant" and denied due process. Finally transferred to civilian court and convicted anyways, showing that criminal defendants do not get off on "technicalities" as you claim. Look up "harmless error analysis" if you want to learn the truth about "technicalities." The United States is not exceptional, and we need to stop pretending that it is.
malandrew 13y ago
"The most effective tool we have is social network analysis." It's also one of the most effective tools for coercion and blackmail. See this for an example: http://blog.etanzapinsky.com/2013/06/06/snapchat-youve-made-a-huge-mistake&#x2F http://blog.etanzapinsky.com/2013/06/06/snapchat-youve-made-...; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5832505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5832505 (especially the discussion following speeder's comment)

by hooande 13y ago

jacquesm 13y ago

> People in the world today live in fear of physical harm from their own government. They aren't worried about phone call meta data or blanket call logging. They're worried about being taken by force with no trial, no ACLU or EFF to help them. Just gone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition

gngeal 13y ago

Can anyone imagine that happening here, in the country where flag burning is constitutionally protected? Well, that feels sort of disingenuous. From the POV of a scheming politician in power, harmless gestures would certainly seem much less important than agents of your potential downfall communicating in ways that you can't penetrate. In most cases, those loudmouths are the devils you know. I think a lot of this is ignorance about how modern counter terrorism works. The most effective tool we have is social network analysis. Find a terrorist and see who calls them, then see who calls those people and out and out. Look at the vertices and edges and dependencies networks and we can learn a lot about complex organizations without risking any lives. I believe that's exactly happened half a year before 9/11. Then, someone thought, "what an interesting scenario, let's file it into our record system". If you want to know why government agency's are engaging in this wildly unpopular behavior, here's the answer: On 9/11 a lot of people swore to god that it would never happen again. OK, I'll bite: Didn't lousy healthcare kill more people in the US in the last decade (certainly, possibly even in a year) than 9/11 ever did? Do people swear to god that this must never happen again? I don't think so. It's the salami slicing effect, only with people. As long as it's not visible, nobody cares (or extremely few are actually bothered by it to any extent). Ditto for people killed by burning all that coal.

anigbrowl 13y ago
Didn't lousy healthcare kill more people in the US in the last decade (certainly, possibly even in a year) than 9/11 ever did? Do people swear to god that this must never happen again? We're getting very far off-topic, but don't you remember the huge political battle over Obamacare?
- TeMPOraL 13y ago
  How about cars? Cars kill many-a-WTC every year. Where is the War on Careless Driving?
  - refurb 13y ago
    Wait a second. You see no distinction between a death from a random vehicle accident and a death at the hands of an organization that is trying to kill as many citizens as possible? Those are equivalent in your mind?

lrhot9 13y ago

> There is a 0% chance of the US government becoming an oppressive regime, surveillance or not. Those things just don't happen in times of peace and prosperity. No country has ever gone from being an advanced democracy to being a tyrannical regime. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_Republic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_Republic

anigbrowl 13y ago
Weimar Germany was not prosperous or what I would call an advanced democracy. It had five good years, but the 5 years on either side were a mess. I wouldn't say that can't happen here, but it's not a good comparison at all. The US is remarkably stable in historical terms,even when you include the Civil War.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- ImprovedSilence 13y ago
  >> The US is remarkably stable in historical terms,even when you include the Civil War. Historical terms? 237 yrs is a relative piss in the bucket as far as historical terms are concerned. Talk to me once they get 800 yrs of stability under their belt.
  - anigbrowl 13y ago
    Most countries have had significant changes in their constitutional configuration over a much shorter timescale than the US, especially when you factor in scale. Your counter-argument is so weak as to constitute an endorsement; the existence of other, even more stable countries does not invalidate my point.
  - dredmorbius 13y ago
    As others have noted: there are very few countries in the world which have been established as long as the US, with the same governmental structures and (substantially) similar borders. There are cultures which are older, but many of these have existed under multiple different governments. Nations such as Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Czecheslovakia (since rendered into the states of Slovakia and the Czech Republic), much of the Balkans and Baltic countries, etc., simply didn't exist as national entities at the beginning of the 19th Century. Neither did the states of the Middle East (Ottoman Empire), Africa (colonies, prior to which: native tribal regions not structured as we'd consider modern nations), the Americas, etc. Yes, you'll find England, Spain, and France in much their modern form dating to ~ 1000 - 1400 AD, but only just. There are a few modern countries which have occupied much the same area (though with different governmental forms) more or less continuously: Persia/Iran, Vietnam, Japan, and China, with as I recall Vietnam being the oldest as I recall. But no, "nations" as such really aren't all that permanent.

sfjailbird 13y ago

Do you just ignore what the US government does to citizens in other countries? Or do they somehow not count? Because America kills people without trial, abducts suspects and tortures them, very often they turn out to be innocents. To say nothing of the support, if not wholesale installment, of the very kind of regimes that you guarantee me the US will never become. Comments like yours seem to say that all of this doesn't matter, because we are not doing it to Americans! (At least not white ones and only if they happen to be outside the country.)

jlgreco 13y ago
> Or do they somehow not count? That does seem to be the general sentiment of your typical statist american. Governments are allowed to abuse people that are "owned" by other governments, unless those people are americans. Or something.

guelo 13y ago

Isn't it amazing that we didn't used to have a thousand terrorist attacks every day before the internet existed and the government could read every conversation we have? Thank G_d for the surveillance apparatus that the government has available to it now. Civilization wouldn't be possible otherwise.

flyinRyan 13y ago

>in the country where flag burning is constitutionally protected? Which means precisely nothing. Laws are just an illusion of order that only exists if the enforcers make it so. Photographing cops is also protected, yet if you do it you might end up in the hospital with your camera broken, charged with assaulting a police officer. People in the US mostly aren't afraid of their government. Maybe they never will be. But the US government does unspeakable things inside and outside the borders of the US. The majority aren't afraid because they aren't yet effected. Maybe the majority will never be effected or never know it. One thing I would ask you; we know the government gets support from the press in the form of omissions. Is it completely impossible that someone inside the US has been "disappeared" without us knowing? How would we know if it wasn't reported? A lone family crying about a missing loved one can be ignored pretty easily if the media doesn't blow it up for all to see.

1123581321 13y ago

I appreciate your perspective, and I have not downvoted you. I disagree with some of the premises you've laid out and strongly agree with your main argument. Your main argument is that Americans should not be upset about this because it's not actually oppressive, and the United States will not become oppressive. I think this is wrong in two ways. 1. We should hold our government to a much higher standard than "oppressive." We should not even let them come close to it. I realize this is an axiom; why should we do that? Reasons like "because of the Constitution," "to protect people," "to keep the United States a place of refuge for oppressed people," are all good reasons, but I think the best is simply that it is evil to allow a good thing to be compromised or abrogated, so it is good to resist a compromising or abrogating force. I cannot justify this by logic (why anyone should be good or want good) but I cannot be persuaded otherwise, and thankfully, many other people are the same way. 2. Our government is already oppressive to certain people, and there is a chance that the list of people it oppresses will grow. Most of them are foreign but a few are already domestic. The systems being built today are designed to increase our capacity to treat people this way, so it is reasonable to expect more people will be treated poorly. Additionally, history provides ample examples of nearly utopic nations, including republics, that did go on to commit atrocities and reduce the quality of the lives of their own people. It is not a slippery slope to want to take precautions to avoid the same. But again, this is all secondary to point #1 above.

agwa 13y ago

Here a few examples of how citizens are treated in the United States: Cameron D'Ambrosio - held in jail for weeks without bail for posting rap lyrics the government found offensive. [http://cms.fightforthefuture.org/teenager/ http://cms.fightforthefuture.org/teenager/] Peaceful Occupy protesters - subjected to beatings and pepper-spraying at point blank range [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UC_Davis_pepper-spray_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UC_Davis_pepper-spray_incident]. (Note that no one was actually run over by a tank in China; OTOH, the US has the legacy of the Kent State Massacre [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings]. ETA: there have been worse massacres of protesters elsewhere, but the point is that the US is not exempt from this.) Bradley Manning - held for nine months in solitary confinement under conditions that at times could only be described as torture: naked and without his eye glasses, permitted to read or watch TV for only one hour a day, not permitted to exercise. [http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/manning-treatment-inhuman/ http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/manning-treatment-i...], [http://solitarywatch.com/2012/08/11/defense-motion-describes-bradley-mannings-unlawful-pretrial-punishment-in-solitary-confinement/ http://solitarywatch.com/2012/08/11/defense-motion-describes...] North-west anarchists - accused of no wrongdoing but refused to testify for a grand jury. Held in contempt of court and sent directly to jail. Spent 5 months in jail, much of it in solitary confinement during which they were permitted no visitors and had only one 15 minute phone call a month and limited access to reading and writing materials. According to the judge who both sent them there and then released them, "their physical health has deteriorated sharply and their mental health has also suffered from the effects of solitary confinement." [https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4hDq2p2PpMKRDRDQzViLWJTUmc/edit?pli=1 https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4hDq2p2PpMKRDRDQzViLWJTUmc/...] None of these people are even suspected terrorists. What they share in common is that they did things the government didn't like. As for suspected terrorists, they are not guaranteed due process. See Jose Padilla [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Padilla_%28prisoner%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Padilla_%28prisoner%...]: U.S. citizen, held from 2002 to 2006 as an "enemy combatant" and denied due process. Finally transferred to civilian court and convicted anyways, showing that criminal defendants do not get off on "technicalities" as you claim. Look up "harmless error analysis" if you want to learn the truth about "technicalities." The United States is not exceptional, and we need to stop pretending that it is.

malandrew 13y ago

"The most effective tool we have is social network analysis." It's also one of the most effective tools for coercion and blackmail. See this for an example: http://blog.etanzapinsky.com/2013/06/06/snapchat-youve-made-a-huge-mistake&#x2F http://blog.etanzapinsky.com/2013/06/06/snapchat-youve-made-...; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5832505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5832505 (especially the discussion following speeder's comment)