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‘America has no functioning democracy at this moment’ – Jimmy Carter on NSA
- swombat 13y agoQuick! Throw Jimmy Carter in jail! He's a terrorist sympathiser!
- Alex3917 13y agoI'm surprised Obama hasn't killed him with a drone yet.
- madaxe 13y agoI hear he's a godless traitor with a personality disorder! By which I mean he's a good, well intentioned, honest man.
- jivatmanx 13y agoI often see quotes by Peter T. King in these articles saying things like that, or like - "no American Muslim leaders are cooperating in the war on terror,", or "80-85 percent of mosques in this country are controlled by Islamic fundamentalists .... This is an enemy living amongst us." It's interesting to note that he was an actual terrorist financier: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_T._King#Support_for_the_IRA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_T._King#Support_for_the_I...
- walshemj 13y agoAn hard left ones as well :-)
- StefanKarpinski 13y agoJimmy Carter just gets more and more awesome.
- Roboprog 13y agoCarter told the truth (probably due to his background as an engineer and an actual family-business size businessman). Many people didn't like that. Carter wanted to do something about the energy crisis and peak oil. Reagan tore down the solar panels (it's symbolic, OK?). Now we have massive debt and an attempt at empire to capture remaining fossil fuel resources, as well as a blossoming police state to wrap a bow around the package.
- jliechti1 13y agoI wonder if Jimmy Carter realized it would come to this when he signed the FISA into law back in 1978.
- JonSkeptic 13y agoI suspect that if he knew, he would not have signed it.
- eliasmacpherson 13y agoProbably a good candidate for a debate on whether the slippery slope is real or imagined.
- dragonwriter 13y agoIf you think that FISA in 1978 started a slippery slope to the recent surveillance abuses, you don't understand what FISA did and what the state of affairs with regard to surveillance was before FISA.
- eliasmacpherson 13y agoLong story short: FISA made legal foreign intelligence surveillance on US soil and made domestic warrantless wiretaps illegal. Some people would argue the US Constitution's fourth amendment applies to all men and women, even those that are the subject of foreign intelligence surveillance. Once that was made legal, the definition of 'foreignness' has expanded to effectively include domestic warrantless wiretaps.
- dragonwriter 13y ago> FISA made legal foreign intelligence surveillance on US soil No, it didn't. Warrantless foreign intelligence surveillance was already legal on US soil; at least, that was the conclusion of the two federal appeals courts which ruled on the issue. And, were it an issue where the Fourth Amendment required a warrant, it would take a Constitutional amendment, not a statute, to change it. > Some people would argue the US Constitution's fourth amendment applies to all men and women, even those that are the subject of foreign intelligence surveillance. Some people did argue that in the US federal courts before FISA, and they lost, at least insofar as those courts found that however the Fourth Amendment might apply to them, it didn't require warrants for that kind of surveillance. (Note that the Fourth Amendment doesn't require warrants for all searches and seizures, it requires them to be reasonable, and sets a standard for warrants when they are issued; it has been held by the courts that warrants are generally required for reasonableness, but that there are a wide array of circumstances for which reasonableness does not include a warrant requirement.)
- sage_joch 13y agoFun fact: if you start typing "Edward Sn..." into Google News, it will not auto-complete it. I don't know if there is an innocuous explanation, but it is consistent with a media that is trying to downplay stories like this.
- roc 13y agoI get "Edward Snowden" as the first suggestion after typing as little as "edw". edit: I'm in the US; My browsers aren't configured to use google for address bar/search box searching. I may have explicitly searched for Snowden via Google at some point, but I don't really use Google for search anymore, so that feels unlikely. Searching directly from www.google.com, I get the suggestion at "edw". Though searching from news.google.com, I don't get an auto-suggestion, even if I type out "Edward Snowden" in its entirety. Amusingly, at "ns" I get "NSA warrantless surveillance controversy" as the first suggestion.
- dllthomas 13y agoGoogle News search box, or browser search bar? I am finding that the former is behaving like the parent comment said, the latter like you say.
- mladenkovacevic 13y agoI get the correct behaviour in both the search bar and the omnibar (edward snowden girlfriend being the second result).. I should not that I am in Canada but I've tried both google.com and google.ca (although I am logged in at the moment so they know where I'm from regardless)
- bowmessage 13y agoYou must have previously searched it, or maybe aren't in the US? I get the same result as the parent comment though. Very odd.
- drcube 13y agoI get instant suggestions for "Edward Snowden" on the main search site, but nothing from Google News. Suggests "Edward Sharpe" until I type the "n", then nothing.
- nostromo 13y agoI always liked this quote from Carter on his legacy: "We kept our country at peace. We never went to war. We never dropped a bomb. We never fired a bullet. But still we achieved our international goals. We brought peace to other people, including Egypt and Israel. We normalised relations with China, which had been non-existent for 30-something years. We brought peace between US and most of the countries in Latin America because of the Panama Canal Treaty. We formed a working relationship with the Soviet Union."
- vph 13y agoWith all due respect to Jimmy Carter, and he is a good man at heart, but he appears naive as to what is the true core of the USA. The USA has always been a country of military power. Without military power, the USA would not be what it is today. Even during peace time with the Soviet and others, the underlying military power of the US serves as an important factor to maintain that peace.
- adventured 13y agoAmerica in fact had a very modest military before the WW2 build-up, as others have noted. Before it could afford that military might, it required a substantial economy to pay for it all. Land, natural resources, enterprising & hard working immigrants, low regulation, the protections enshrined in the Constitution, ease of starting a business, labor mobility, strong judicial system, checks & balances restraining and slowing down government abuses - just a few of the actual reasons America became what it did.
- drcube 13y ago"Since WWII" is not the same thing as "always".
- dragonwriter 13y ago> Even during peace time with the Soviet and others, the underlying military power of the US serves as an important factor to maintain that peace. What makes you think that Carter, who was President during that time and initiated the large military buildup that Reagan is often credited with to maintain that peace, is too naive to recognize that?
- dllthomas 13y agoHe should run for President or something.
- adventured 13y agoHe has another term left.
- melchebo 13y agoHe'll be 91 years old in 2016..
- dllthomas 13y agoYeah, I might've been serious if I thought he could survive the campaign...
- adventured 13y agoI'd like to see him jump into it just to get the TV time. Zero real campaigning, no intention of trying to win (have to raise a billion dollars to do that). He should just declare, do the minimum necessary to stay in it as long as possible, run on a civil liberties platform, and leverage the publicity of it all to push a message against what's going on.
- dllthomas 13y agoThat would be pretty amazing.
- shank8 13y agoI love Jimmy Carter
- sehugg 13y agoThe former POTUS's quote "America does not have a functioning democracy at this point in time" was covered in few U.S. outlets, and initially reported in the German paper Der Spiegel in the German language. Perhaps the most visible outlet to include the quote was The Huffington Post, but they can't be bothered to do their own translation. So they cover it via a link to The Inquisitr, which can't bring itself to validate the source, questioning the accuracy of the German newspaper Der Spiegel (which it calls "Die Spiegel"). Note: Carter made this statement in Atlanta, Georgia, not Germany. Maybe Carter should have also said "America does not have a functioning news media at this point in time."
- eeky 13y agoTHIS. I mostly go to RT for actual news these days. The American media is propaganda and it's killing our country with DELIBERATE misinformation.
- griffordson 13y agoDeliberate misinformation has a pretty long history. Here's a good report about the CIA manipulating the US media from Carl Bernstein (yes, that Bernstein) circa 1977: http://carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php http://carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php I agree this is causing a great deal of damage to democracy around the world, I'm just pointing out that it has been going on for a very long time. Thanks to the Google News archive, you can see lots of examples of those CIA "journalists" advancing the interests of the CIA throughout the '50s and '60s. It is fascinating to compare that known manipulated media content to what is now contained in the historical record about those same events. You'll also see many striking similarities to the way every modern story is reported and commented on in the modern media.
- foobarqux 13y ago"Few" is and understatement. Searching on Google News for "no functioning democracy" yields only two recognizable US outlets: Huffington Post and The Atlantic Wire.
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- hga 13y agoCarter was the first Democratic President after the Church Commission, and his CIA director (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Director_of_Central_Intelligence#Stansfield_Turner_1977.E2.80.931981 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Director_of_Central_Intelligenc...) was infamous for his scorn of HUMIT and e.g. firing of 800 in operational positions in a "Halloween Massacre". I've read that today the CIA has 90% of its personal stationed in the US, and their loss of fieldcraft skills is infamous (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Chapman_attack http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Chapman_attack). So you might say that his actions in the long term pushed us towards a dependence on what the NSA does, especially in a "War on Terror" where image reconnaissance is of limited utility.
- ihsw 13y agoFinancial necessity pushed us towards what the NSA does -- it's an operational imperative to cut costs, and processing the world's communications definitely cuts costs quite a bit. Maintaining listening posts and other intelligence infrastructure is a massive economic and political undertaking, and the vacuuming of everything reduces dependence of third-parties.
- diminoten 13y agoThis is the stance you must take if you believe Snowden was in the right. You must believe there is no recourse from within the system for which to correct it if you believe that acting outside of the system is a valid strategy. I applaud Jimmy Carter for being consistent, at least.
- dllthomas 13y agoI think, as a general principle, this is dead wrong. One could think an injustice so egregious that righting it needs to be pursued both within and outside the system, for instance.
- diminoten 13y agoYou can't believe in a system of government and also act outside of it. The system is utterly worthless if you don't believe it can correct egregious errors. It's the mundane errors (parking tickets, etc.) which aren't so important, not the other way around.
- dllthomas 13y ago> The system is utterly worthless if you don't believe it can correct egregious errors. So, a system that corrects 99.9% of egregious errors, while alternatives correct 20%, is utterly worthless?
- rangibaby 13y ago"Carter ran on a platform of "honesty" and was apparently the only president in American history to actually mean it. See where it got him..." http://www.rotten.com/library/history/political-scandal/watergate/ http://www.rotten.com/library/history/political-scandal/wate...
- tptacek 13y agoBut it totally had a functioning democracy when the President had a team of henchmen breaking into the offices of his political opponents, during an era where the Joint Chiefs had a plan to depose the President if he was unwilling to abide by impeachment. Certainly, democracy must have flourished during the time where the administration waged an undeclared war in Central America that sponsored death squads and brokered arms deals with the Iranians, in part as an effort to undermine the campaign of the preceding incumbent President. And democracy was no doubt stronger during the era of the Vietnam Draft. And it absolutely had a functioning democracy during a time when the House had a committee on "Un-American Activities" that subpoena'd citizens and had them testify under penalty of perjury --- a penalty that actually imprisoned Americans --- for merely sympathizing with the aims of Communism. And surely we had a functioning democracy during the times where voting was controlled by literacy tests --- "Question 13: Spell Backwards, Forwards" and dogs and firehoses greeted people who dared challenge enforced, legal segregation. The idea that it's never been worse in American, because some government agency might be reading your Facebook posts, is lunacy; an insult to people who actually stood up to real malignant government power. It's an easy mistake to make: it's the availability heuristic. You understand the implications of worldwide Internet surveillance, but barely remember (if you even knew about in the first place) HUAC. I don't know what Carter's excuse is, though; he surely knows about Watergate, Iran-Contra, HUAC, Tuskegee, COINTELPRO, and the Hoover FBI. Carter is just being a coot.
- forgotAgain 13y agoBut it totally had a functioning democracy when the President had a team of henchmen breaking into the offices of his political opponents, during an era where the Joint Chiefs had a plan to depose the President if he was unwilling to abide by impeachment. That president was forced to resign after public, televised House hearings showed the country what was going on. Certainly, democracy must have flourished during the time where the administration waged an undeclared war in Central America that sponsored death squads and brokered arms deals with the Iranians, in part as an effort to undermine the campaign of the preceding incumbent President. The public Iran contra hearings exposed what happened and sent Oliver North to jail. And democracy was no doubt stronger during the era of the Vietnam Draft. Nightly news programs showing the war and giving the count of US deaths led to protests that ended the war and the draft. And it absolutely had a functioning democracy during a time when the House had a committee on "Un-American Activities" that subpoena'd citizens and had them testify under penalty of perjury --- a penalty that actually imprisoned Americans --- for merely sympathizing with the aims of Communism. And those public hearings ultimately led to the downfall and disgrace of McCarthy. And surely we had a functioning democracy during the times where voting was controlled by literacy tests --- "Question 13: Spell Backwards, Forwards" and dogs and firehoses greeted people who dared challenge enforced, legal segregation. Would those tests have ever ended if they were not publicly known? The idea that it's never been worse in American, because some government agency might be reading your Facebook posts, is lunacy; an insult to people who actually stood up to real malignant government power. It's an easy mistake to make: it's the availability heuristic. You understand the implications of worldwide Internet surveillance, but barely remember (if you even knew about in the first place) HUAC. You're purposefully trivializing what has been going on. All of the situations you described were ended by public knowledge of what was going on. In the current case not only is there no public knowledge, there is the threat of imprisonment for those who discuss what they know publicly. I don't know what Carter's excuse is, though; he surely knows about Watergate, Iran-Contra, HUAC, Tuskegee, COINTELPRO, and the Hoover FBI. Carter is just being a coot. Carter has always listened to a different drummer. He's also been willing to speak for others. In this case he happens to be speaking out for us.
- rayiner 13y agoCarter is a nice guy. My dad really likes him. His political views are actually quite consistent with the prevailing attitudes among my liberal friends and a lot of what I read on HN. So it's extremely telling that America dislikes him. The right has an intense hatred for him, and the left is at best ashamed of him. It's also extremely telling that America, on both sides of the aisle, loves Reagan, quite the opposite of Carter, someone who espoused a militarily powerful America that wasn't afraid to get its hands dirty abroad. Obama seems, to me, to be a democrat for "Reagan's America." Socially liberal, but as willing to blow up random people in the Middle East as anyone who has come before him. When Obama killed Bin Laden and ran with that during the 2008 campaign, I could distinctly perceive democrats thinking: "we found our Reagan." It's no surprise then, that Obama's approval ratings on his handling of the war on terror are still in the black, and are surprisingly good overall for someone whose entire presidency has been mired in a terrible economy. That doesn't seem to me to be a democracy that isn't functioning. It seems to me to be giving people what they want.
- ace_of_spades 13y agoI think you are missing the fact that's media and money telling most of the people what they should want. It's sad to say but too many don't people think for themselves... that's why public debates are necessary to help people build an opinion. I'm just glad that Snowden stepped forward and exposed this system of ruthless disinformation. I'm optimistic that now is the time where we have a chance to really make a noise about these problems that we see right now and get people to listen to more sides of the story and drive change.
- rayiner 13y agoI think that's a phat cop-out. The media can steer the public narrative, but it cannot create predispositions out of whole cloth. I think Americans, especially those raised in the shadow of the cold war, have a predisposition towards wanting a militarily aggressive government. And Carter argued against that, and was reviled for it and seen as weak. I think the media steered that narrative and maybe made Carter less popular than he would otherwise be, but I don't think they created that visceral reaction in people: that his actions showed weakness on the part of America and the gut aversion to showing weakness. I think that was always there and the media just took advantage of it.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y agoMakes the "USS Jimmy Carter" a rather ironic name for the submarine, given its mission. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Jimmy_Carter_%28SSN-23%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Jimmy_Carter_%28SSN-23%29
- jingo 13y agoWho cares? Life in America is great at the moment. It was great yesterday and it'll be great tomorrow. Carter is living a nice comfortable life. So can you. How is life outside America? It's either the same or not as good. Count your blessings. Americans have it good. Land of milk and honey. Take a deep breath and breathe that glorious American air. Freedom! Love it, live it!
- rogerthis 13y agoI don't trust this Castro brother's friend.
- rogerthis 13y agohttp://electoralmap.net/PastElections/past_elections.php?year=1980 http://electoralmap.net/PastElections/past_elections.php?yea...