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You, as a non-US citizen, are not protected by our constitution. Nor am I, a US citizen, protected from your government. I have no grounds to "raise outrage" a

by jmadsen 13y ago

You, as a non-US citizen, are not protected by our constitution. Nor am I, a US citizen, protected from your government. I have no grounds to "raise outrage" at my government for spying on foreigners, much as I might disapprove. They don't break any laws when they do that. Moral rules, yes; disrespect to our friends and allies, yes; laws, no. When they spy on US citizens, they tear up our Constitution in doing so. The outrage is less about the spying - although that is obviously very important - and more about the laws they are breaking.

Ziomislaw 13y ago
well, what hitler and stalin did also was didnt break any laws, because they had changed them, just like US
barrkel 13y ago
Outrage generally isn't triggered by breaking laws; rather, "moral rules" and "disrespect". A certain strand in the US considers the constitution an almost sacred document. Their outrage is less about laws being broken, and more about a perceived violation of sanctity. I'm fairly confident they don't feel the same way about e.g. driving 5mph over the limit.
- Ygg2 13y ago
  Constitution is the highest form of law. IANAL but from what I understand all laws are made in such way that they shouldn't contradict constitution. If laws openly go against the constitution it weakness its position as the supreme law of a state/nation (for better or for worse).
vidarh 13y ago
Of course you have grounds to "raise outrage", if you disapprove at what they are doing. If you don't, that's a choice. Whether or not they break the law is irrelevant - they are meant to represent you - if their actions are immoral, it reflects badly on you, in particular if you do not speak up against them or otherwise do anything to reign them in. Personally, I feel outraged when "my" government acts immorally towards foreigners just as much as when they do to citizens and residents. The distinction means nothing to me. EDIT: I'm Norwegian, but I live in the UK and I've got plenty to be outraged about with respect to UK law and GCHQ etc. I haven't been politically active in about 20 years other than posting stuff online, but this is the first time I've started considering getting politically active again.
Udo 13y ago
Yet, I - a non-US citizen - am subject to all your whims and power grabs. You can't simply hide behind the assertion that the US is just another one of many countries vying for supremacy. For better or worse, the US sets the tone and the precedences for all of the Western countries' policies, and to top it off it is by far the most powerful when it comes to the military and secret services. You - a US citizen - might interpret this to mean that things are going well and that "might makes right" and all that, but the moral bankruptcy of such a view should be obvious to pretty much everybody. I'm a EU citizen and as such subject to yet more surveillance from my home countries and that's bad enough in of itself. However, the EU does not project its power outward at such a massive scale as the US does. In effect, the sum of US policy, international role, and military action means that I am subject to the US at all times, yet I do not have "real person" status. Germany is by far not perfect, and has its own share of secret service scandals to look back on, but at least the German constitution grants fundamental rights to every human being, not just citizens. In an era where state and corporate powers are used so abundantly, so disproportionally, and with so much moral corruption, this kind of constitutional scope is clearly the way to go forward. Yes, citizens need special protection, but that doesn't mean everybody else is just a bag of meat. In fact, as a member of the civilized world, I kind of expect the many host countries I travel to to protect me as well. The US lulls other Westerners into the illusion that you're our friends, yet this is evidently an absolutely one-sided pact. You take for yourselves sweeping rights and powers without oversight (both external and, let's not kid ourselves, internally as well), and you expect other people to bow and be exploited. Your response to this as a US citizen cannot with any ethical justification be along the lines of "well, if you can't make us stop doing this, you are too weak and deserve everything we deem appropriate". Even if you're not interested in ethics, and you really should be because it has everything to do with protecting groups of people you are not a part of, you could at least view it from a practical perspective: this attitude is incredibly damaging to the Western civilization as a whole. Whether you like it or not, we're going to need each other moving forward.
- jmadsen 13y ago
  So what is your point? That I'm not spending time writing blogs about how broke up I am that foreigners are also being targeted? Ok, I'll go write a blog. Personally I feel America is in a crisis right now, and I'd prefer to focus my energy on fighting something I actually have a legal basis for fighting and might win. We aren't talking morals, we are talking LAW. Do you think that if we lose this in America, that will still be able to carry on and fight on your behalf?
arrrg 13y ago
You are factually wrong. You, as a US citizen, are most certainly protected from my government by the German constitution. Not when it comes to all basic rights in the constitution (only Germans have freedom of movement, freedom of labor and freedom of association), but most are universal and apply to every person. The US constitution is out of date and simply wrong on this point. Human rights are universal and every human has them. Citizenship shouldn’t come into play. (I really hope that when it comes to freedom of movement, labor and association the limitation on Germans can also be lifted one day. For now the pest of nationalism lives on and makes lifting those limitations a practical impossibility. To me it seems clear that morally it is very wrong to have such limitations.) Oh, and by the way, breaking moral rules is a hell of a good reason to raise outrage. I don’t understand why you seem to think that something being legal is reason to not be outraged.
- vixen99 13y ago
  Make clear what you mean by 'nationalism' before you use perjorative words like pest - as if your assertion is axiomatic.
  - PavlovsCat 13y ago
    If you have a definition by which it's not a pest, I'd love to hear it, honestly. Wikipedia: Nationalism is a belief, creed or political ideology that involves a voluntary accepted or coercively imposed mode of identification with individual persons and a nation. George Orwell: http://www.george-orwell.org/Notes_on_Nationalism/0.html http://www.george-orwell.org/Notes_on_Nationalism/0.html I'd say identifying with anything other than oneself is even bigger a delusion than identifying with oneself, and since it's so widespread, calling it a pest is actually polite.
  - arrrg 13y ago
    You don’t have to agree with me. That was just an aside and certainly my personal opinion. It doesn’t really have anything to do with the main point I was making. I do think, though, that nation states are a fundamentally bad model for governance and both too large and too small. I’m not sure what could replace them (and not a fan of pre-nation governance models), though something like the EU can provide some (tiny and obviously deeply flawed) hints at how to approach the “too small” problem, I’m not so sure what to do about the “too large” problem.
mtgx 13y ago
No, I think you do have the right to raise that issue. That's why we have "international" human rights. But even those didn't all exist from the very beginning. People have to fight to introduce some of them to that list. Didn't the EU recently say that Internet access is a human right? I think being able to use anonymous speech should be a human right, too, if it's not already, and a right to reasonable privacy. If there are no proper legal structures internationally for that, then maybe there should be. Net neutrality is also not a law in most countries, but seeing how carriers are increasingly salivating at abusing their power so they can charge different content providers for their content, maybe we should be looking at net neutrality becoming some sort of international law, too.
rmc 13y ago
That's not true. The outrage is often mentioned as violation of privacy, as a police state, as spying on innocent people. If it was some rule breaking legal reason, then the FISA courts should make US citizens happy, but it demonstratidly doesn't. However it appears the people outraged font consider me a full person.
acro 13y ago
But you certainly are protected by the Finnish constitution. At the start it says like this: "All humans are equal in the eyes of the law".
hsuresh 13y ago
There is another important reason why you, as a US citizen should be worried about spying on non-US citizens. Now that everyone knows about this, other countries are probably going down the same route - in fact, it looks like some already are, and this is going to be net loss for everyone - both US citizens and everyone else.
bambax 13y ago
> You, as a non-US citizen, are not protected by our constitution. This is a myth, recently revived by Republicans to justify "enhanced interrogation techniques" (ie, abominable torture methods that used to qualify as 'war crimes'). The most important articles of the Bill of Rights don't refer to "citizen" but to "people" in general. Here's the full text of the 4th Amendment, most relevant in this case 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.
- randallsquared 13y ago
  It is not at all clear that "the people" means "people in general". If they had meant people in general, they could have simply omitted the article, and thereby not referred to any specific group of people.
- Kylekramer 13y ago
  Sure, but the whole Constitution begins with "We the People of the United States". You can argue that it should include non-citizens, but the constitution itself and subsequent applications are very clear that it does not. It is a somewhat odd proposition to claim the constitution of one country apply to all. Should the rest of the world have stopped drinking in 1919? (Not a Republican mythmaker who loves torture, just stating the facts)
  - bambax 13y ago
    The purpose of the US Constitution is not to tell people what to do or not do, it is to define very precisely what the US Government can and can't do (and how it should function), and therefore it seems more than logical that it would talk about what the US Government can or can't do to people in general (or animals, or nature).
    - Kylekramer 13y ago
dbuxton 13y ago
Actually, the 4th Amendment doesn't just apply to US persons - it's a blanket requirement. The restriction of the various agencies' activities to non-US persons is not because (directly, anyway) of any constitutional issue but rather to do with the division of labour between the various agencies - the NSA (et al) is meant to be doing foreign-focused stuff and the FBI to focus on domestic spying.
Gonzih 13y ago
So human rights are unique feature only for US citizens in US constitution?
jmadsen 13y ago
I think a few of you don't understand my point, so perhaps I didn't explain it very well. The US government is on the verge of becoming a totalitarian regime. The US government is on the verge of throwing out the Constitution & just doing whatever the hell it wants from now on. The US government is on the verge of declaring that there is no such thing as a law, only some rules it has decided to enforce to its own benefit You want Americans to focus on fighting this, using our laws and Constitution as a legal basis, or do you want us to waste our time gnashing our teeth in front of the Fox News crowd that foreigners - which to the Fox News crowd means, "al Queda, Mexican drug cartels, smugglers, etc" - are having their email read? In WWII there were a lot of sacrifices made so that Hitler & the Nazis didn't win. The war was more important than the battles or the individuals. Spying on foreigners is an important issue. It just isn't the most important issue right now, so you'll have to take a backseat for a while. If we don't block this for Americans, you have absolutely no chance of having it blocked for you.
- philwelch 13y ago
  > The US government is on the verge of becoming a totalitarian regime. > The US government is on the verge of throwing out the Constitution & just doing whatever the hell it wants from now on. > The US government is on the verge of declaring that there is no such thing as a law, only some rules it has decided to enforce to its own benefit The US government is rampantly, and problematically, violating its constitution and its founding principles in a dozen different ways. But this much has always been true. Are we closer to a totalitarian regime than when we imprisoned all Americans of Japanese descent, or when we threw people in prison for speaking out against World War I, or when COINTELPRO and MKULTRA were going on? The bulk of the system remains safely in place. A government on the verge of throwing out the constitution does not have a Supreme Court throwing out federal laws.
ajuc 13y ago
Yes you are protected in civilized countries nobody can read your letters without your consent, no matter your citizenship. It's criminal offence if they do.
- scarmig 13y ago
  True. But do any civilized countries exist?
  - ajuc 13y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrecy_of_correspondence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrecy_of_correspondence Polish constitution (in Polish, but I'll translate): http://www.msw.gov.pl/portal/pl/193/24/Konstytucyjne_wolnosci_prawa_i_obowiazki_obywateli.html http://www.msw.gov.pl/portal/pl/193/24/Konstytucyjne_wolnosc... Article 49: "Zapewnia się wolność i ochronę tajemnicy komunikowania się. Ich ograniczenie może nastąpić jedynie w przypadkach określonych w ustawie i w sposób w niej określony." = "[The state] ensure everybody has freedom of ommunication and secrecy of communication, this can only be limited in cases specified in the law, and in a way specified in law". Article 37: "Kto znajduje się pod władzą Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej, korzysta z wolności i praw zapewnionych w Konstytucji. Wyjątki od tej zasady, odnoszące się do cudzoziemców, określa ustawa. " = "Who is on the Polish territory - has the same rights and freedoms as Polish citizen. Only exceptions are specified in the law". The exceptions are mostly about the right to be elected to government etc. Poland isn't particulary civilized country, this is really common sense.
dram 13y ago
But a US citizen's rights are not derived from the Constitution. It's clearly hypocritical to say a German has no natural right to privacy. We could declare war on Germany, then we could morally justify violating their rights. But we can't pretend they have no such rights. And I'd contend that this does violate the US organic law, although this is a minority opinion. It depends on how you define "all men" and rationalize the fact that every human right existed before any government ever did.

by jmadsen 13y ago

Ziomislaw 13y ago

well, what hitler and stalin did also was didnt break any laws, because they had changed them, just like US

barrkel 13y ago

Outrage generally isn't triggered by breaking laws; rather, "moral rules" and "disrespect". A certain strand in the US considers the constitution an almost sacred document. Their outrage is less about laws being broken, and more about a perceived violation of sanctity. I'm fairly confident they don't feel the same way about e.g. driving 5mph over the limit.

Ygg2 13y ago
Constitution is the highest form of law. IANAL but from what I understand all laws are made in such way that they shouldn't contradict constitution. If laws openly go against the constitution it weakness its position as the supreme law of a state/nation (for better or for worse).

vidarh 13y ago

Of course you have grounds to "raise outrage", if you disapprove at what they are doing. If you don't, that's a choice. Whether or not they break the law is irrelevant - they are meant to represent you - if their actions are immoral, it reflects badly on you, in particular if you do not speak up against them or otherwise do anything to reign them in. Personally, I feel outraged when "my" government acts immorally towards foreigners just as much as when they do to citizens and residents. The distinction means nothing to me. EDIT: I'm Norwegian, but I live in the UK and I've got plenty to be outraged about with respect to UK law and GCHQ etc. I haven't been politically active in about 20 years other than posting stuff online, but this is the first time I've started considering getting politically active again.

Udo 13y ago

Yet, I - a non-US citizen - am subject to all your whims and power grabs. You can't simply hide behind the assertion that the US is just another one of many countries vying for supremacy. For better or worse, the US sets the tone and the precedences for all of the Western countries' policies, and to top it off it is by far the most powerful when it comes to the military and secret services. You - a US citizen - might interpret this to mean that things are going well and that "might makes right" and all that, but the moral bankruptcy of such a view should be obvious to pretty much everybody. I'm a EU citizen and as such subject to yet more surveillance from my home countries and that's bad enough in of itself. However, the EU does not project its power outward at such a massive scale as the US does. In effect, the sum of US policy, international role, and military action means that I am subject to the US at all times, yet I do not have "real person" status. Germany is by far not perfect, and has its own share of secret service scandals to look back on, but at least the German constitution grants fundamental rights to every human being, not just citizens. In an era where state and corporate powers are used so abundantly, so disproportionally, and with so much moral corruption, this kind of constitutional scope is clearly the way to go forward. Yes, citizens need special protection, but that doesn't mean everybody else is just a bag of meat. In fact, as a member of the civilized world, I kind of expect the many host countries I travel to to protect me as well. The US lulls other Westerners into the illusion that you're our friends, yet this is evidently an absolutely one-sided pact. You take for yourselves sweeping rights and powers without oversight (both external and, let's not kid ourselves, internally as well), and you expect other people to bow and be exploited. Your response to this as a US citizen cannot with any ethical justification be along the lines of "well, if you can't make us stop doing this, you are too weak and deserve everything we deem appropriate". Even if you're not interested in ethics, and you really should be because it has everything to do with protecting groups of people you are not a part of, you could at least view it from a practical perspective: this attitude is incredibly damaging to the Western civilization as a whole. Whether you like it or not, we're going to need each other moving forward.

jmadsen 13y ago
So what is your point? That I'm not spending time writing blogs about how broke up I am that foreigners are also being targeted? Ok, I'll go write a blog. Personally I feel America is in a crisis right now, and I'd prefer to focus my energy on fighting something I actually have a legal basis for fighting and might win. We aren't talking morals, we are talking LAW. Do you think that if we lose this in America, that will still be able to carry on and fight on your behalf?

arrrg 13y ago

You are factually wrong. You, as a US citizen, are most certainly protected from my government by the German constitution. Not when it comes to all basic rights in the constitution (only Germans have freedom of movement, freedom of labor and freedom of association), but most are universal and apply to every person. The US constitution is out of date and simply wrong on this point. Human rights are universal and every human has them. Citizenship shouldn’t come into play. (I really hope that when it comes to freedom of movement, labor and association the limitation on Germans can also be lifted one day. For now the pest of nationalism lives on and makes lifting those limitations a practical impossibility. To me it seems clear that morally it is very wrong to have such limitations.) Oh, and by the way, breaking moral rules is a hell of a good reason to raise outrage. I don’t understand why you seem to think that something being legal is reason to not be outraged.

vixen99 13y ago
Make clear what you mean by 'nationalism' before you use perjorative words like pest - as if your assertion is axiomatic.
- PavlovsCat 13y ago
  If you have a definition by which it's not a pest, I'd love to hear it, honestly. Wikipedia: Nationalism is a belief, creed or political ideology that involves a voluntary accepted or coercively imposed mode of identification with individual persons and a nation. George Orwell: http://www.george-orwell.org/Notes_on_Nationalism/0.html http://www.george-orwell.org/Notes_on_Nationalism/0.html I'd say identifying with anything other than oneself is even bigger a delusion than identifying with oneself, and since it's so widespread, calling it a pest is actually polite.
- arrrg 13y ago
  You don’t have to agree with me. That was just an aside and certainly my personal opinion. It doesn’t really have anything to do with the main point I was making. I do think, though, that nation states are a fundamentally bad model for governance and both too large and too small. I’m not sure what could replace them (and not a fan of pre-nation governance models), though something like the EU can provide some (tiny and obviously deeply flawed) hints at how to approach the “too small” problem, I’m not so sure what to do about the “too large” problem.

mtgx 13y ago

No, I think you do have the right to raise that issue. That's why we have "international" human rights. But even those didn't all exist from the very beginning. People have to fight to introduce some of them to that list. Didn't the EU recently say that Internet access is a human right? I think being able to use anonymous speech should be a human right, too, if it's not already, and a right to reasonable privacy. If there are no proper legal structures internationally for that, then maybe there should be. Net neutrality is also not a law in most countries, but seeing how carriers are increasingly salivating at abusing their power so they can charge different content providers for their content, maybe we should be looking at net neutrality becoming some sort of international law, too.

rmc 13y ago

That's not true. The outrage is often mentioned as violation of privacy, as a police state, as spying on innocent people. If it was some rule breaking legal reason, then the FISA courts should make US citizens happy, but it demonstratidly doesn't. However it appears the people outraged font consider me a full person.

acro 13y ago

But you certainly are protected by the Finnish constitution. At the start it says like this: "All humans are equal in the eyes of the law".

hsuresh 13y ago

There is another important reason why you, as a US citizen should be worried about spying on non-US citizens. Now that everyone knows about this, other countries are probably going down the same route - in fact, it looks like some already are, and this is going to be net loss for everyone - both US citizens and everyone else.

bambax 13y ago

> You, as a non-US citizen, are not protected by our constitution. This is a myth, recently revived by Republicans to justify "enhanced interrogation techniques" (ie, abominable torture methods that used to qualify as 'war crimes'). The most important articles of the Bill of Rights don't refer to "citizen" but to "people" in general. Here's the full text of the 4th Amendment, most relevant in this case 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.

randallsquared 13y ago
It is not at all clear that "the people" means "people in general". If they had meant people in general, they could have simply omitted the article, and thereby not referred to any specific group of people.
Kylekramer 13y ago
Sure, but the whole Constitution begins with "We the People of the United States". You can argue that it should include non-citizens, but the constitution itself and subsequent applications are very clear that it does not. It is a somewhat odd proposition to claim the constitution of one country apply to all. Should the rest of the world have stopped drinking in 1919? (Not a Republican mythmaker who loves torture, just stating the facts)
- bambax 13y ago
  The purpose of the US Constitution is not to tell people what to do or not do, it is to define very precisely what the US Government can and can't do (and how it should function), and therefore it seems more than logical that it would talk about what the US Government can or can't do to people in general (or animals, or nature).
  - Kylekramer 13y ago

dbuxton 13y ago

Actually, the 4th Amendment doesn't just apply to US persons - it's a blanket requirement. The restriction of the various agencies' activities to non-US persons is not because (directly, anyway) of any constitutional issue but rather to do with the division of labour between the various agencies - the NSA (et al) is meant to be doing foreign-focused stuff and the FBI to focus on domestic spying.

Gonzih 13y ago

So human rights are unique feature only for US citizens in US constitution?

jmadsen 13y ago

I think a few of you don't understand my point, so perhaps I didn't explain it very well. The US government is on the verge of becoming a totalitarian regime. The US government is on the verge of throwing out the Constitution & just doing whatever the hell it wants from now on. The US government is on the verge of declaring that there is no such thing as a law, only some rules it has decided to enforce to its own benefit You want Americans to focus on fighting this, using our laws and Constitution as a legal basis, or do you want us to waste our time gnashing our teeth in front of the Fox News crowd that foreigners - which to the Fox News crowd means, "al Queda, Mexican drug cartels, smugglers, etc" - are having their email read? In WWII there were a lot of sacrifices made so that Hitler & the Nazis didn't win. The war was more important than the battles or the individuals. Spying on foreigners is an important issue. It just isn't the most important issue right now, so you'll have to take a backseat for a while. If we don't block this for Americans, you have absolutely no chance of having it blocked for you.

philwelch 13y ago
> The US government is on the verge of becoming a totalitarian regime. > The US government is on the verge of throwing out the Constitution & just doing whatever the hell it wants from now on. > The US government is on the verge of declaring that there is no such thing as a law, only some rules it has decided to enforce to its own benefit The US government is rampantly, and problematically, violating its constitution and its founding principles in a dozen different ways. But this much has always been true. Are we closer to a totalitarian regime than when we imprisoned all Americans of Japanese descent, or when we threw people in prison for speaking out against World War I, or when COINTELPRO and MKULTRA were going on? The bulk of the system remains safely in place. A government on the verge of throwing out the constitution does not have a Supreme Court throwing out federal laws.

ajuc 13y ago

Yes you are protected in civilized countries nobody can read your letters without your consent, no matter your citizenship. It's criminal offence if they do.

scarmig 13y ago
True. But do any civilized countries exist?
- ajuc 13y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrecy_of_correspondence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrecy_of_correspondence Polish constitution (in Polish, but I'll translate): http://www.msw.gov.pl/portal/pl/193/24/Konstytucyjne_wolnosci_prawa_i_obowiazki_obywateli.html http://www.msw.gov.pl/portal/pl/193/24/Konstytucyjne_wolnosc... Article 49: "Zapewnia się wolność i ochronę tajemnicy komunikowania się. Ich ograniczenie może nastąpić jedynie w przypadkach określonych w ustawie i w sposób w niej określony." = "[The state] ensure everybody has freedom of ommunication and secrecy of communication, this can only be limited in cases specified in the law, and in a way specified in law". Article 37: "Kto znajduje się pod władzą Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej, korzysta z wolności i praw zapewnionych w Konstytucji. Wyjątki od tej zasady, odnoszące się do cudzoziemców, określa ustawa. " = "Who is on the Polish territory - has the same rights and freedoms as Polish citizen. Only exceptions are specified in the law". The exceptions are mostly about the right to be elected to government etc. Poland isn't particulary civilized country, this is really common sense.

dram 13y ago

But a US citizen's rights are not derived from the Constitution. It's clearly hypocritical to say a German has no natural right to privacy. We could declare war on Germany, then we could morally justify violating their rights. But we can't pretend they have no such rights. And I'd contend that this does violate the US organic law, although this is a minority opinion. It depends on how you define "all men" and rationalize the fact that every human right existed before any government ever did.