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Obama continues to push hard to steal what little privacy rights US citizens have remaining. He is openly hostile about it, and lies about it constantly. Am I

by quail 13y ago

Obama continues to push hard to steal what little privacy rights US citizens have remaining. He is openly hostile about it, and lies about it constantly. Am I exaggerating here? The scary thing is I'm not. He's not done. It's going to get worse.

einhverfr 13y ago
What is even more scary is that we have been in freefall in this regard mostly since at least Nixon signed the Banking Secrecy Act. This was followed by Carter signing FISA.... Regan followed, signing among other things legislation to allow the military to enforce drug laws domestically as an exemption to Posse Comitatus. This meant that the military was involved in surveillance at both Ruby Ridge and Waco, and also directly provided military equipment and in some cases personnel to these operations (in addition to Navy SEALs raiding crack houses in some cities). Then came Clinton and things got worse again with the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and some other laws. Then came GWB, no further comment required. And now we have Obama. Whoever we elect screws us. That's the truth.
- VLM 13y ago
  The purpose of elections is to give the populace the false idea that they have a choice. If they could actually change anything, they'd be outlawed.
  - einhverfr 13y ago
    What you can use elections for is to extort policies from elected officials. The problem is that means being willing to vote for the greater evil if you don't get the things the country needs and our country is unwilling to enter into that mentality.
    - VLM 13y ago
      I think you're missing the point that the actual important policies are not up for debate and are agreed to by both sides before the two winners are picked for us to vote on. All the electorate gets to decide on is meaningless stuff. Both candidates will always want the elimination of privacy, destruction of the middle class, complete subservience to wall street, etc. The electorate gets to decide on unimportant stuff like the skin color of the winner... it doesn't really matter because either winner will implement the same policies, although perhaps with slightly different PR campaigns. A fundamental impedance mismatch is the public wants/needs policies. However they're only allowed to vote on two hand picked two sides of the same coin "leaders", not the actual policies. The "winner" is the candidate who tells the best lies about policies, which will of course be forgotten after inauguration, and both are going to do the same thing anyway so it doesn't matter very much which wins.
      - einhverfr 13y ago
        That's why voting is the final act of a series of political actions, and merely should be cast as an up/down "keep this guy" vote without looking too close at the alternatives. We have to take over the conversation and stop listening to the challenger. The challenger doesn't exist. It is up/down on the incumbent.
        VLM 13y ago
        I fail to see the point of that. By definition, both the incumbent and the challenger were hired by the same political action committee to achieve the same outcome by using different PR techniques. Your suggestion is that the general public should slightly modify how they select which lie is told to them. The result will be they'll be lied to slightly differently, and no change in actual outcome. With enough money, and it'll take a lot of money, the public could purchase their own candidates... That would be interesting, although unlikely. And there's an awful lot of intentional divide and conquer PR work already in place to prevent it. Once wealth inequality and income inequality exceed a certain level the system spirals out of control until it crashes and reboots. In that scenario the most sensible way to limit total overall human suffering is to floor the accelerator and encourage the process, rather than hold it back, so it crashes quicker and we get back to normalcy sooner. Given that background, a lot of current events suddenly make more sense. Look at federal reserve policy, or pretty much anything in contemporary politics.
  - rangibaby 13y ago
    Although people often bemoan political apathy as if it were a grave social ill, it seems to me that this is just as it should be. Why should essentially powerless people want to engage in a humiliating farce designed to demonstrate the legitimacy of those who wield the power? In Soviet-era Russia, intelligent people did their best to ignore the Communists: paying attention to them, whether through criticism or praise, would only serve to give them comfort and encouragement, making them feel as if they mattered. Why should Americans want to act any differently with regard to the Republicans and the Democrats? For love of donkeys and elephants? EXCERPT FROM Orlov, Dmitry. “Reinventing Collapse.” New Society Publishers, 2011-04-06. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.
    - einhverfr 13y ago
      I used to disagree with you and Mr Orlov, but there is a point where apathy is the correct response because it frees up energy to build a better future through other means.
    - raintrees 13y ago
      George Carlin had it right yet again... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxsQ7jJJcEA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxsQ7jJJcEA
- rst 13y ago
  The funny thing is that FISA was originally intended to curb the intelligence abuses that had come to light earlier in the '70s, in which phones were tapped, and international telegrams seized en masse, with no legal authority whatever. It doesn't seem to have been effective in that regard even before it was effectively gutted by the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, but it's still not quite of a piece with the stuff that came later.
demallien 13y ago
I don't think that it's useful to be talking about Obama specifically. Before Obama there was Bush Jr, who was the sitting president when most of these programs were put in place. It should be clear now that it's not one specific President, or one specific party, but the whole political class that has been corrupted. Thinking things will get better at the next election will absolutely not help things, unless the issue du jour of the next election is privacy, and the new president chosen based on their commitment to privacy. Even then it's not sure whether such a President could successfully make meaningful change.
- mcv 13y ago
  I lot of people were hoping Obama was the start of a new direction. I'm now hoping he'll be the last of the old direction. The big problem to solve is: how do you elect someone different? As long as the two parties get to decide who American can elect, democracy is a hollow gesture. And the media are all in the pocket of the main parties. Honestly, it seems like only Al-Jazeera US might be the only independent news station.
  - chalst 13y ago
    One of the Wikileaks releases contained allegations that Qatar was leaning on Al-Jazeera: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/05/wikileaks-cables-al-jazeera-qatari-foreign-policy http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/05/wikileaks-cable...
    - hobs 13y ago
      Yep, most people would say Al-Jazeera is not biased on the topics we are speaking about, but everyone has a corporate master somewhere.
      - chris_mahan 13y ago
        see http://gulfnews.com/news/gulf/qatar/al-jazeera-turning-into-private-media-organisation-1.837871 http://gulfnews.com/news/gulf/qatar/al-jazeera-turning-into-...
tilsammans 13y ago
We -- all citizens of Western countries -- should seriously stop voting altogether. And I mean full stop. When the next election comes, nobody votes. That'll destabilize things right quick.
- mr_spothawk 13y ago
  I think it'd be too difficult to execute this plan.
- Karunamon 13y ago
  Not ever going to happen. All you've accomplished then is abdicated your vote to people who did. Would be more realistic to elect a third party, meaning someone who is not part of the corrupt R/D duopoly.
  - einhverfr 13y ago
    More pragmatic would be to vote anti-incombant regardless of party until things change. Let the elected officials know that if they want a second term, they had better cooperate.
- dwiel 13y ago
  most people in the US already don't vote, and look what that has accomplished ...
- ywyrd 13y ago
  There is no "we", but I also disagree that it would "destabilize things". I think that after a brief initial upheaval, it would stabilize things to a great degree, and in a positive manner.
- lukifer 13y ago
  It is a curious quirk of psychology that a single vote for a two major parties is considered to matter, despite being guaranteed not to sway the outcome, while a vote for a third party is considered "wasted". And even curiouser, choosing not to vote at all is considered the more rational option. Here's hoping that the people eventually figure out that instant runoff can be implemented state-by-state.
badman_ting 13y ago
Sadly, I think this is part of our problem. "Obama". Attaching his name to this just makes it so that we all vote for a Republican next year, congratulate ourselves for getting rid of the guy who loved spying on us all, and everything stays exactly the same. I'm not trying to defend him or say he is blameless here. I'm saying that it's bigger than who is in the President's chair at the moment, and I wish we could think about these things in a more systemic way.
- SkyMarshal 13y ago
  Exactly. The problem is so far beyond partisan now that people still framing it in terms of "Bush" or "Obama" have the blinders on. The problem is systemic and cultural, the federal bureaucracy is more influential on elected officials than elected officials are on the federal bureaucracy, at least in matters of intelligence and national security. Every politician elected into this system faces extraordinary forces of compliance, and only a few on both the left and right (Wyden, Paul, etc) seem able to resist.

by quail 13y ago

einhverfr 13y ago

What is even more scary is that we have been in freefall in this regard mostly since at least Nixon signed the Banking Secrecy Act. This was followed by Carter signing FISA.... Regan followed, signing among other things legislation to allow the military to enforce drug laws domestically as an exemption to Posse Comitatus. This meant that the military was involved in surveillance at both Ruby Ridge and Waco, and also directly provided military equipment and in some cases personnel to these operations (in addition to Navy SEALs raiding crack houses in some cities). Then came Clinton and things got worse again with the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and some other laws. Then came GWB, no further comment required. And now we have Obama. Whoever we elect screws us. That's the truth.

VLM 13y ago
The purpose of elections is to give the populace the false idea that they have a choice. If they could actually change anything, they'd be outlawed.
- einhverfr 13y ago
  What you can use elections for is to extort policies from elected officials. The problem is that means being willing to vote for the greater evil if you don't get the things the country needs and our country is unwilling to enter into that mentality.
  - VLM 13y ago
    I think you're missing the point that the actual important policies are not up for debate and are agreed to by both sides before the two winners are picked for us to vote on. All the electorate gets to decide on is meaningless stuff. Both candidates will always want the elimination of privacy, destruction of the middle class, complete subservience to wall street, etc. The electorate gets to decide on unimportant stuff like the skin color of the winner... it doesn't really matter because either winner will implement the same policies, although perhaps with slightly different PR campaigns. A fundamental impedance mismatch is the public wants/needs policies. However they're only allowed to vote on two hand picked two sides of the same coin "leaders", not the actual policies. The "winner" is the candidate who tells the best lies about policies, which will of course be forgotten after inauguration, and both are going to do the same thing anyway so it doesn't matter very much which wins.
    - einhverfr 13y ago
      That's why voting is the final act of a series of political actions, and merely should be cast as an up/down "keep this guy" vote without looking too close at the alternatives. We have to take over the conversation and stop listening to the challenger. The challenger doesn't exist. It is up/down on the incumbent.
      - VLM 13y ago
        I fail to see the point of that. By definition, both the incumbent and the challenger were hired by the same political action committee to achieve the same outcome by using different PR techniques. Your suggestion is that the general public should slightly modify how they select which lie is told to them. The result will be they'll be lied to slightly differently, and no change in actual outcome. With enough money, and it'll take a lot of money, the public could purchase their own candidates... That would be interesting, although unlikely. And there's an awful lot of intentional divide and conquer PR work already in place to prevent it. Once wealth inequality and income inequality exceed a certain level the system spirals out of control until it crashes and reboots. In that scenario the most sensible way to limit total overall human suffering is to floor the accelerator and encourage the process, rather than hold it back, so it crashes quicker and we get back to normalcy sooner. Given that background, a lot of current events suddenly make more sense. Look at federal reserve policy, or pretty much anything in contemporary politics.
- rangibaby 13y ago
  Although people often bemoan political apathy as if it were a grave social ill, it seems to me that this is just as it should be. Why should essentially powerless people want to engage in a humiliating farce designed to demonstrate the legitimacy of those who wield the power? In Soviet-era Russia, intelligent people did their best to ignore the Communists: paying attention to them, whether through criticism or praise, would only serve to give them comfort and encouragement, making them feel as if they mattered. Why should Americans want to act any differently with regard to the Republicans and the Democrats? For love of donkeys and elephants? EXCERPT FROM Orlov, Dmitry. “Reinventing Collapse.” New Society Publishers, 2011-04-06. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.
  - einhverfr 13y ago
    I used to disagree with you and Mr Orlov, but there is a point where apathy is the correct response because it frees up energy to build a better future through other means.
  - raintrees 13y ago
    George Carlin had it right yet again... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxsQ7jJJcEA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxsQ7jJJcEA
rst 13y ago
The funny thing is that FISA was originally intended to curb the intelligence abuses that had come to light earlier in the '70s, in which phones were tapped, and international telegrams seized en masse, with no legal authority whatever. It doesn't seem to have been effective in that regard even before it was effectively gutted by the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, but it's still not quite of a piece with the stuff that came later.

demallien 13y ago

I don't think that it's useful to be talking about Obama specifically. Before Obama there was Bush Jr, who was the sitting president when most of these programs were put in place. It should be clear now that it's not one specific President, or one specific party, but the whole political class that has been corrupted. Thinking things will get better at the next election will absolutely not help things, unless the issue du jour of the next election is privacy, and the new president chosen based on their commitment to privacy. Even then it's not sure whether such a President could successfully make meaningful change.

mcv 13y ago
I lot of people were hoping Obama was the start of a new direction. I'm now hoping he'll be the last of the old direction. The big problem to solve is: how do you elect someone different? As long as the two parties get to decide who American can elect, democracy is a hollow gesture. And the media are all in the pocket of the main parties. Honestly, it seems like only Al-Jazeera US might be the only independent news station.
- chalst 13y ago
  One of the Wikileaks releases contained allegations that Qatar was leaning on Al-Jazeera: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/05/wikileaks-cables-al-jazeera-qatari-foreign-policy http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/05/wikileaks-cable...
  - hobs 13y ago
    Yep, most people would say Al-Jazeera is not biased on the topics we are speaking about, but everyone has a corporate master somewhere.
    - chris_mahan 13y ago
      see http://gulfnews.com/news/gulf/qatar/al-jazeera-turning-into-private-media-organisation-1.837871 http://gulfnews.com/news/gulf/qatar/al-jazeera-turning-into-...

tilsammans 13y ago

We -- all citizens of Western countries -- should seriously stop voting altogether. And I mean full stop. When the next election comes, nobody votes. That'll destabilize things right quick.

mr_spothawk 13y ago
I think it'd be too difficult to execute this plan.
Karunamon 13y ago
Not ever going to happen. All you've accomplished then is abdicated your vote to people who did. Would be more realistic to elect a third party, meaning someone who is not part of the corrupt R/D duopoly.
- einhverfr 13y ago
  More pragmatic would be to vote anti-incombant regardless of party until things change. Let the elected officials know that if they want a second term, they had better cooperate.
dwiel 13y ago
most people in the US already don't vote, and look what that has accomplished ...
ywyrd 13y ago
There is no "we", but I also disagree that it would "destabilize things". I think that after a brief initial upheaval, it would stabilize things to a great degree, and in a positive manner.
lukifer 13y ago
It is a curious quirk of psychology that a single vote for a two major parties is considered to matter, despite being guaranteed not to sway the outcome, while a vote for a third party is considered "wasted". And even curiouser, choosing not to vote at all is considered the more rational option. Here's hoping that the people eventually figure out that instant runoff can be implemented state-by-state.

badman_ting 13y ago

Sadly, I think this is part of our problem. "Obama". Attaching his name to this just makes it so that we all vote for a Republican next year, congratulate ourselves for getting rid of the guy who loved spying on us all, and everything stays exactly the same. I'm not trying to defend him or say he is blameless here. I'm saying that it's bigger than who is in the President's chair at the moment, and I wish we could think about these things in a more systemic way.

SkyMarshal 13y ago
Exactly. The problem is so far beyond partisan now that people still framing it in terms of "Bush" or "Obama" have the blinders on. The problem is systemic and cultural, the federal bureaucracy is more influential on elected officials than elected officials are on the federal bureaucracy, at least in matters of intelligence and national security. Every politician elected into this system faces extraordinary forces of compliance, and only a few on both the left and right (Wyden, Paul, etc) seem able to resist.