7 ms·

Why Isn't the Fourth Amendment Classified as Top Secret?

167 points by deepblueocean 13y ago

ChrisAntaki 13y ago
"Who will govern the governors? There is only one force in the nation that can be depended upon to keep the government pure and the governors honest, and that is the people themselves. They alone, if well informed, are capable of preventing the corruption of power, and of restoring the nation to its rightful course if it should go astray. They alone are the safest depository of the ultimate powers of government." Thomas Jefferson
- 6d0debc071 13y ago
  "It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance." - John Philpot Curran, 1790 (attributed by Lord Denning, 1988)
  - pedalpete 13y ago
    I'm not sure I understand your quote, and if is a rebuttal or agreement with the above quote.
    - saraid216 13y ago
      It's an additional point. People are allowed to do that.
    - d0ugie 13y ago
      Me neither, but I imagine he's a blast at parties..
      - schrodinger 13y ago
        Come on, that's unwarranted. Don't be a jerk.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - prawn 13y ago
      It's potentially a statement adding to or qualifying the first. Yes, the people must keep government in line, but the people are lazy and corporate interests or political parties have a stronger interest in remaining active and powerful. It's possible that the active party eating away at rights are terrorists, but I don't think that is ever a key interest of those actors.
efoto 13y ago
The scenario doesn't seem like a far fetched one indeed. Modern society witnessed several attempts to actually implement it, Stalin's USSR comes to mind.
Crito 13y ago
Between this article, yesterdays article about the black-market/drug-trade, and his recent articles on torture, Conor Friedersdorf has really been knocking the ball out of the park recently. I'm going to have to keep an eye open for more articles from him.
pm90 13y ago
The problem is a difficult one, and using the imagery of the righteous founders does not help the debate. Remember that they lived in a different time, where it would have been much more harder, and the scale would have been much lesser, of terrorist acts that can be carried out. I'm not saying either way is better, just that its not a simple choice, and there might be other choice as well. Or maybe, we can root out terrorism by bringing progress to the entire human race. OK, but then you still have to deal with domestic terrorism: sniper shootouts, school massacres etc. done by Citizens. How can that be prevented? One has to give credit to the US govt.'s efforts though: not a single case of terrorism on US soil after 9/11. That's pretty impressive.
- joe_inferno 13y ago
  Nice try, Obama
- vezzy-fnord 13y ago
  OK, but then you still have to deal with domestic terrorism: sniper shootouts, school massacres etc. done by Citizens. One has to give credit to the US govt.'s efforts though: not a single case of terrorism on US soil after 9/11. Fastest contradiction I've seen in a while.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway344 13y ago
  This list directly contradicts your last sentences. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States#2000s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States#...
- Domenic_S 13y ago
  > How can that be prevented? That's a totally tangential conversation. The first conversation is: is the NSA being lawful?
  - ThatGeoGuy 13y ago
orthecreedence 13y ago
Why classify it when nobody bothers to read it anymore anyway?
higherpurpose 13y ago
> There are ways in which the First, Second, and Fifth Amendments help to inform terrorists too. Don't worry, Emperor Alexander is already working hard to fix that glaring 1st Amendment problem! http://dailycaller.com/2014/03/05/nsa-chief-says-legislation-to-stop-media-leaks-is-only-weeks-away/ http://dailycaller.com/2014/03/05/nsa-chief-says-legislation...
c0ur7n3y 13y ago
The executive seems to have put a higher priority on protecting the people than upholding the constitution, which is not consistent with the oaths they take. The cynical take is that this another simply another consequence of the influence of money on politics. It's simply more profitable to "protect people". You see, when you uphold the constitution, nobody gets paid.
- Domenic_S 13y ago
  At that level, one doesn't care about money in the way you're thinking. One cares about power (money naturally follows).
- nickff 13y ago
  >"It's simply more profitable to "protect people"." I am very cynical, but I am not sure about this claim. I would agree to a narrowing of it, saying 'surveillance is more profitable to some concentrated and identifiable interests'. The government imposes a very large regulatory burden on many organizations as part of the PATRIOT act and many related executive orders and actions. The regulatory burden imposed by security interests often approaches the costs of labor and insurance regulations.
lotsofmangos 13y ago
“There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle. "That's some catch, that Catch-22," he observed. "It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed.”
slg 13y ago
I understand this type of argument, but it is somewhat faulty. I think we can all agree that the intelligence community can't operate with 100% transparency. They can't exactly do their job if they have to specifically tell their targets that they are being targeted. The opposite is also true. None of us want these organizations to operate in complete secrecy without having any idea what they are legally allowed to do. The problem is that Snowden's actions land somewhere in that huge gap between those two options. We can once again all probably agree that the ideal solution also lies between those two extremes. So trying to frame the debate as if either extreme is a possible outcome or one that is preferred by anyone seems disingenuous.
- higherpurpose 13y ago
  That's the problem, while you say we shouldn't use the argument that "spies need 100 percent transparency", they do pretty much use the opposite argument, that we can never know anything about what they're doing, often even their overseers, because it would "endanger national security". Plus, even though the 4th amendment clearly states that you can't even seize stuff from a person, without probable cause. Yet, they keep saying that they can, and it's ok to do it as long as they don't search it. They intentionally omit the seizure part of the 4th amendment. Look at it this way. Would it be ok for the police to come into your home, no proper warrant other than a "general warrant", like the writ of assistance for which Americans rebelled against UK, and take your stuff, as long as they promise to not look through it? I think that would be completely unacceptable and immediately be declared unconstitutional. Yet, NSA keeps pretending it's completely fine to take your "digital" stuff as long as they don't look at it.
  - slg 13y ago
    That isn't a far comparison to make because the British government taking my stuff deprives me of that very stuff. The US government making a copy of my digital stuff doesn't deprive me of my digital stuff. While I agree that you can't take either government at their word, the fact that one can happen without your knowledge makes it the preferable option from both an intelligence standpoint and maybe philosophically a rights infringing standpoint. I.E. it is the intelligence version of the tree falling in the woods. Are my rights infringed if the infringement has no impact on any of my other rights or my life in general (I didn't say it can't effect your life, but for the majority of people surveyed, I would guess it doesn't)?
DannyBee 13y ago
I've read a lot of what Stewart Baker has written over the years in his various capacities, and i've just never been impressed with either his logic, or his arguments. He really really doesn't get it, and seems to not be able to follow the logic of his arguments through to their end result (often claiming that those end results just won't happen, despite actual evidence to the contrary). For example, he doesn't see how (and has in the past denied) his idea of having secret overseers made of a special class of citizens may resultin a star chamber, despite this actually happening multiple times in the past. He also doesn't understand that his techniques are simply ineffective. Keeping surveillance and its limits secret has not stopped anything from happening. It's just caused it to be abused along the way. The "good terrorists" (in the sense of being good at terrorism, not morality) were already taking literally every precaution anyway, because they have to assume the worst. This is true whether they know they are being surveilled or not. For a small government conservative, he is one of the most paternalistic people i've seen in a long time when it comes to intelligence. For example, he was responsible for forcing everyone else to provide incoming passenger details to the US, then, on the side, repudiated most of the US obligations to protect the info. He also strongly believes 9/11 was an intelligence failure, but of "the FBI was required to follow too many laws, and wasn't allowed to use invasive modern technologies" type. See http://www.9-11commission.gov/hearings/hearing6/witness_baker.pdf http://www.9-11commission.gov/hearings/hearing6/witness_bake... ("In my view, there were two problems – a problem with the tools our agencies were able to use and a problem with the rules they were required to follow.")
- rockyleal 13y ago
  Ad Hominem
  - cheald 13y ago
    Criticism of a writer is only argumentum ad hominem if that criticism is an attempt to invalidate the the writer's statement by means of questioning his authority, which is certainly not what the OP was doing. Discussing the author's qualities outside of a debate of of the article's thesis is totally in-bounds.
oleganza 13y ago
"Transparency is, in that sense, terror-enabling." What a load of propagandistic nationalist crap. The government claims to have a monopoly of violence "for the common good" even if every individual is harmed (!). Then it wants every individual to not know anything about how it is going to do that harm. The only reason people can put up with this if they have religious belief that government is somehow formed of superior super-people, not the same mortals that require babysitting as all voters supposedly are. The logic of government power is broken on so many levels, just like your christian testaments. Yet millions are bullied into believing this crap. (Which leads to all sorts of catastrophes - economic, health, wars etc.)
- mullingitover 13y ago
  whoosh The author is satirizing the government's thinking, reductio ad absurdum style.
D9u 13y ago
Today every terrorist with access to a pocket Constitution The above sentiment leans towards labeling any who dare possess a pocket constitution as potential terrorists, which is absurd. Do people in the IC assume that terrorists want to harm us because our freedoms? Does the wholesale interception of electronic communications based upon the premise of someone might be a terrorist make us any safer? The Ft. Hood shootings, the Boston bombings, and other evil acts, were not prevented by any of the un-American spying by the alphabet gangs, furthermore, when viewed with an objective eye, acts of terror have actually decreased in the last few decades. Some may argue the point that this reduction is a direct result of the omnipresent intrusions by the Five Eyes crew, and if so I'd like to hear some reasonable explanations as to why some rather major attacks have occurred in spite of the spying. http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/terrorism/wrjp255a.html http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/terrorism/wrjp255a.html http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Terrorism/terror1952_1989.html http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Terrorism/terror... Seriously, is the article supposed to be a joke? How can any part of a covenant between a government and its people be considered to be Top Secret?
- talon88 13y ago
  It's written at least slightly tongue-in-cheek...
- saraid216 13y ago
  > Do people in the IC assume that terrorists want to harm us because our freedoms? The irony of this is that the most strident critics of such authoritarianism are precisely the kind of people who mindlessly characterize these things as "our freedoms". And no. The IC is not under such a misconception. The IC regards terrorists as enemies precisely because they know the terrorists are less interested in our magical "freedoms" and more in the reality of how the military and industry will happily, say, invade Iraq to get what they want. The privacy debate is just a way to keep us from discussing the larger problems.
- hencq 13y ago
  The above sentiment leans towards labeling any who dare possess a pocket constitution as potential terrorists, which is absurd. Yes, that's exactly the author's point. Seriously, is the article supposed to be a joke? No, it's a criticism of Baker's point of view that the limits of intelligence can't be discussed because it would help those it's trying to surveil.
Yaa101 13y ago
The current executive class is extemely weak because it resorts to con tricks for fighting corruption, they are not able to fight it by playing along the rules. The problem with this is that sooner rather than later they will use these same con tricks in all the situations where they want to just get their way. This means that the people they are supposed to serve will be victims of these con tricks and in the end will cause a revolution in slowmotion, no matter how violent the executive will react to this. At some point the con tricks will undermine every moral validity of any person that is supposed to maintain authority.
mindstab 13y ago
I thought he was joking at first, as in satire that shows how silly the rest of the "secret laws" are (like NYC's classified FOI system).
maldeh 13y ago
From a policy standpoint, I like to think of the Senate Intelligence Committee as a good-faith attempt at providing "sufficient statistics" of otherwise sensitive data -- having trusted elected officials peruse classified information, collate it into the essential set of decisions the public might formulate should they have full access, then let the public debate proceed along the transformed decision space. For the outcomes to be truly unbiased, a number of assumptions should be enforced, that are being insufficiently upheld: - the sample of the senators in the committee should to be representative of the people's interests. The 8/7 member split between parties sounds nice and non-partisan but might be biased in favour of the minority. Also, nomination to the post depends on party favour. - a mechanism guaranteeing that the intelligence committee obtains ALL pertinent documents sans curation by the agencies. It's certainly ridiculous that there's even the possibility the CIA could claim that the Intelligence Committee obtained some documents illegally. - finally, a notion of weighting actions appropriately. The intelligence committee is not in the business of taking action in itself, but making recommendations for the rest of congress to act on (subject to weights based on their political stances and the requirements of the situation). These weights are unfortunately being re-normalized to near even odds along purely political lines in the senate and in the media. While the representational biases can be repaired somewhat with appropriate procedure, the final problem of retaining the right weights for actions doesn't seem solvable so long as the first amendment is around. One can't silence Fox/MSNBC pundits constantly trying to put their spins on every debate, and it's difficult to correctly evaluate these solutions unless the public can actually gauge the adequacy of each approach against all the data. tl;dr: IMO the ability to take optimal rational decisions via proxy opinions from the intelligence committee is severely mitigated by biases inherent in the institution. So long as the committee model persists it may be possible to mitigate these biases but impossible to completely eliminate them.
joesmo 13y ago
'"Retroactive classification can even reach documents that are available in public libraries, on the Internet, or elsewhere in the public domain."' No, it can't. It can try, but that doesn't mean it would succeed or even have a chance to. This is simply ridiculous. I don't know who Jonathan Abel is, but someone should teach him some basics on how the Internet and digital communications work. That goes for the author too. This is a hypothetical that is just not backed by reality. How exactly does one "give back" a digitally distributed document?
- wiml 13y ago
  It's not a hypothetical; it's a thing that actually happens[1]. You seem to be confusing the notion of classification with the question of whether something is easily available. The Snowden and Manning leaks, for example, did not become unclassified simply because they became public. [1] http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/07/05/translator_in_eye_of_storm_on_retroactive_classification/?page=full http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/07/05/transl...
snowwrestler 13y ago
When laws are passed, there are often little errors in wording or phrasing that might cause undesirable side effects. So the Congress often passes "technical fix" bills that do nothing to change the substance of the law, but simply adjust wording to better achieve the intended effect. I propose that it's time for a technical fix to the 4th Amendment: the addition of one word, one comma, and one space. > The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, ++data, ++ 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.

167 points by deepblueocean 13y ago

"Who will govern the governors? There is only one force in the nation that can be depended upon to keep the government pure and the governors honest, and that is the people themselves. They alone, if well informed, are capable of preventing the corruption of power, and of restoring the nation to its rightful course if it should go astray. They alone are the safest depository of the ultimate powers of government." Thomas Jefferson

6d0debc071 13y ago
"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance." - John Philpot Curran, 1790 (attributed by Lord Denning, 1988)
- pedalpete 13y ago
  I'm not sure I understand your quote, and if is a rebuttal or agreement with the above quote.
  - saraid216 13y ago
    It's an additional point. People are allowed to do that.
  - d0ugie 13y ago
    Me neither, but I imagine he's a blast at parties..
    - schrodinger 13y ago
      Come on, that's unwarranted. Don't be a jerk.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - prawn 13y ago
    It's potentially a statement adding to or qualifying the first. Yes, the people must keep government in line, but the people are lazy and corporate interests or political parties have a stronger interest in remaining active and powerful. It's possible that the active party eating away at rights are terrorists, but I don't think that is ever a key interest of those actors.

efoto 13y ago

The scenario doesn't seem like a far fetched one indeed. Modern society witnessed several attempts to actually implement it, Stalin's USSR comes to mind.

Crito 13y ago

Between this article, yesterdays article about the black-market/drug-trade, and his recent articles on torture, Conor Friedersdorf has really been knocking the ball out of the park recently. I'm going to have to keep an eye open for more articles from him.

pm90 13y ago

The problem is a difficult one, and using the imagery of the righteous founders does not help the debate. Remember that they lived in a different time, where it would have been much more harder, and the scale would have been much lesser, of terrorist acts that can be carried out. I'm not saying either way is better, just that its not a simple choice, and there might be other choice as well. Or maybe, we can root out terrorism by bringing progress to the entire human race. OK, but then you still have to deal with domestic terrorism: sniper shootouts, school massacres etc. done by Citizens. How can that be prevented? One has to give credit to the US govt.'s efforts though: not a single case of terrorism on US soil after 9/11. That's pretty impressive.

joe_inferno 13y ago
Nice try, Obama
vezzy-fnord 13y ago
OK, but then you still have to deal with domestic terrorism: sniper shootouts, school massacres etc. done by Citizens. One has to give credit to the US govt.'s efforts though: not a single case of terrorism on US soil after 9/11. Fastest contradiction I've seen in a while.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
throwaway344 13y ago
This list directly contradicts your last sentences. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States#2000s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States#...
Domenic_S 13y ago
> How can that be prevented? That's a totally tangential conversation. The first conversation is: is the NSA being lawful?
- ThatGeoGuy 13y ago

orthecreedence 13y ago

Why classify it when nobody bothers to read it anymore anyway?

higherpurpose 13y ago

> There are ways in which the First, Second, and Fifth Amendments help to inform terrorists too. Don't worry, Emperor Alexander is already working hard to fix that glaring 1st Amendment problem! http://dailycaller.com/2014/03/05/nsa-chief-says-legislation-to-stop-media-leaks-is-only-weeks-away/ http://dailycaller.com/2014/03/05/nsa-chief-says-legislation...

c0ur7n3y 13y ago

The executive seems to have put a higher priority on protecting the people than upholding the constitution, which is not consistent with the oaths they take. The cynical take is that this another simply another consequence of the influence of money on politics. It's simply more profitable to "protect people". You see, when you uphold the constitution, nobody gets paid.

Domenic_S 13y ago
At that level, one doesn't care about money in the way you're thinking. One cares about power (money naturally follows).
nickff 13y ago
>"It's simply more profitable to "protect people"." I am very cynical, but I am not sure about this claim. I would agree to a narrowing of it, saying 'surveillance is more profitable to some concentrated and identifiable interests'. The government imposes a very large regulatory burden on many organizations as part of the PATRIOT act and many related executive orders and actions. The regulatory burden imposed by security interests often approaches the costs of labor and insurance regulations.

lotsofmangos 13y ago

“There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle. "That's some catch, that Catch-22," he observed. "It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed.”

slg 13y ago

I understand this type of argument, but it is somewhat faulty. I think we can all agree that the intelligence community can't operate with 100% transparency. They can't exactly do their job if they have to specifically tell their targets that they are being targeted. The opposite is also true. None of us want these organizations to operate in complete secrecy without having any idea what they are legally allowed to do. The problem is that Snowden's actions land somewhere in that huge gap between those two options. We can once again all probably agree that the ideal solution also lies between those two extremes. So trying to frame the debate as if either extreme is a possible outcome or one that is preferred by anyone seems disingenuous.

higherpurpose 13y ago
That's the problem, while you say we shouldn't use the argument that "spies need 100 percent transparency", they do pretty much use the opposite argument, that we can never know anything about what they're doing, often even their overseers, because it would "endanger national security". Plus, even though the 4th amendment clearly states that you can't even seize stuff from a person, without probable cause. Yet, they keep saying that they can, and it's ok to do it as long as they don't search it. They intentionally omit the seizure part of the 4th amendment. Look at it this way. Would it be ok for the police to come into your home, no proper warrant other than a "general warrant", like the writ of assistance for which Americans rebelled against UK, and take your stuff, as long as they promise to not look through it? I think that would be completely unacceptable and immediately be declared unconstitutional. Yet, NSA keeps pretending it's completely fine to take your "digital" stuff as long as they don't look at it.
- slg 13y ago
  That isn't a far comparison to make because the British government taking my stuff deprives me of that very stuff. The US government making a copy of my digital stuff doesn't deprive me of my digital stuff. While I agree that you can't take either government at their word, the fact that one can happen without your knowledge makes it the preferable option from both an intelligence standpoint and maybe philosophically a rights infringing standpoint. I.E. it is the intelligence version of the tree falling in the woods. Are my rights infringed if the infringement has no impact on any of my other rights or my life in general (I didn't say it can't effect your life, but for the majority of people surveyed, I would guess it doesn't)?

DannyBee 13y ago

I've read a lot of what Stewart Baker has written over the years in his various capacities, and i've just never been impressed with either his logic, or his arguments. He really really doesn't get it, and seems to not be able to follow the logic of his arguments through to their end result (often claiming that those end results just won't happen, despite actual evidence to the contrary). For example, he doesn't see how (and has in the past denied) his idea of having secret overseers made of a special class of citizens may resultin a star chamber, despite this actually happening multiple times in the past. He also doesn't understand that his techniques are simply ineffective. Keeping surveillance and its limits secret has not stopped anything from happening. It's just caused it to be abused along the way. The "good terrorists" (in the sense of being good at terrorism, not morality) were already taking literally every precaution anyway, because they have to assume the worst. This is true whether they know they are being surveilled or not. For a small government conservative, he is one of the most paternalistic people i've seen in a long time when it comes to intelligence. For example, he was responsible for forcing everyone else to provide incoming passenger details to the US, then, on the side, repudiated most of the US obligations to protect the info. He also strongly believes 9/11 was an intelligence failure, but of "the FBI was required to follow too many laws, and wasn't allowed to use invasive modern technologies" type. See http://www.9-11commission.gov/hearings/hearing6/witness_baker.pdf http://www.9-11commission.gov/hearings/hearing6/witness_bake... ("In my view, there were two problems – a problem with the tools our agencies were able to use and a problem with the rules they were required to follow.")

rockyleal 13y ago
Ad Hominem
- cheald 13y ago
  Criticism of a writer is only argumentum ad hominem if that criticism is an attempt to invalidate the the writer's statement by means of questioning his authority, which is certainly not what the OP was doing. Discussing the author's qualities outside of a debate of of the article's thesis is totally in-bounds.

oleganza 13y ago

"Transparency is, in that sense, terror-enabling." What a load of propagandistic nationalist crap. The government claims to have a monopoly of violence "for the common good" even if every individual is harmed (!). Then it wants every individual to not know anything about how it is going to do that harm. The only reason people can put up with this if they have religious belief that government is somehow formed of superior super-people, not the same mortals that require babysitting as all voters supposedly are. The logic of government power is broken on so many levels, just like your christian testaments. Yet millions are bullied into believing this crap. (Which leads to all sorts of catastrophes - economic, health, wars etc.)

mullingitover 13y ago
whoosh The author is satirizing the government's thinking, reductio ad absurdum style.

D9u 13y ago

Today every terrorist with access to a pocket Constitution The above sentiment leans towards labeling any who dare possess a pocket constitution as potential terrorists, which is absurd. Do people in the IC assume that terrorists want to harm us because our freedoms? Does the wholesale interception of electronic communications based upon the premise of someone might be a terrorist make us any safer? The Ft. Hood shootings, the Boston bombings, and other evil acts, were not prevented by any of the un-American spying by the alphabet gangs, furthermore, when viewed with an objective eye, acts of terror have actually decreased in the last few decades. Some may argue the point that this reduction is a direct result of the omnipresent intrusions by the Five Eyes crew, and if so I'd like to hear some reasonable explanations as to why some rather major attacks have occurred in spite of the spying. http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/terrorism/wrjp255a.html http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/terrorism/wrjp255a.html http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Terrorism/terror1952_1989.html http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Terrorism/terror... Seriously, is the article supposed to be a joke? How can any part of a covenant between a government and its people be considered to be Top Secret?

talon88 13y ago
It's written at least slightly tongue-in-cheek...
saraid216 13y ago
> Do people in the IC assume that terrorists want to harm us because our freedoms? The irony of this is that the most strident critics of such authoritarianism are precisely the kind of people who mindlessly characterize these things as "our freedoms". And no. The IC is not under such a misconception. The IC regards terrorists as enemies precisely because they know the terrorists are less interested in our magical "freedoms" and more in the reality of how the military and industry will happily, say, invade Iraq to get what they want. The privacy debate is just a way to keep us from discussing the larger problems.
hencq 13y ago
The above sentiment leans towards labeling any who dare possess a pocket constitution as potential terrorists, which is absurd. Yes, that's exactly the author's point. Seriously, is the article supposed to be a joke? No, it's a criticism of Baker's point of view that the limits of intelligence can't be discussed because it would help those it's trying to surveil.

Yaa101 13y ago

The current executive class is extemely weak because it resorts to con tricks for fighting corruption, they are not able to fight it by playing along the rules. The problem with this is that sooner rather than later they will use these same con tricks in all the situations where they want to just get their way. This means that the people they are supposed to serve will be victims of these con tricks and in the end will cause a revolution in slowmotion, no matter how violent the executive will react to this. At some point the con tricks will undermine every moral validity of any person that is supposed to maintain authority.

mindstab 13y ago

I thought he was joking at first, as in satire that shows how silly the rest of the "secret laws" are (like NYC's classified FOI system).

maldeh 13y ago

From a policy standpoint, I like to think of the Senate Intelligence Committee as a good-faith attempt at providing "sufficient statistics" of otherwise sensitive data -- having trusted elected officials peruse classified information, collate it into the essential set of decisions the public might formulate should they have full access, then let the public debate proceed along the transformed decision space. For the outcomes to be truly unbiased, a number of assumptions should be enforced, that are being insufficiently upheld: - the sample of the senators in the committee should to be representative of the people's interests. The 8/7 member split between parties sounds nice and non-partisan but might be biased in favour of the minority. Also, nomination to the post depends on party favour. - a mechanism guaranteeing that the intelligence committee obtains ALL pertinent documents sans curation by the agencies. It's certainly ridiculous that there's even the possibility the CIA could claim that the Intelligence Committee obtained some documents illegally. - finally, a notion of weighting actions appropriately. The intelligence committee is not in the business of taking action in itself, but making recommendations for the rest of congress to act on (subject to weights based on their political stances and the requirements of the situation). These weights are unfortunately being re-normalized to near even odds along purely political lines in the senate and in the media. While the representational biases can be repaired somewhat with appropriate procedure, the final problem of retaining the right weights for actions doesn't seem solvable so long as the first amendment is around. One can't silence Fox/MSNBC pundits constantly trying to put their spins on every debate, and it's difficult to correctly evaluate these solutions unless the public can actually gauge the adequacy of each approach against all the data. tl;dr: IMO the ability to take optimal rational decisions via proxy opinions from the intelligence committee is severely mitigated by biases inherent in the institution. So long as the committee model persists it may be possible to mitigate these biases but impossible to completely eliminate them.

joesmo 13y ago

'"Retroactive classification can even reach documents that are available in public libraries, on the Internet, or elsewhere in the public domain."' No, it can't. It can try, but that doesn't mean it would succeed or even have a chance to. This is simply ridiculous. I don't know who Jonathan Abel is, but someone should teach him some basics on how the Internet and digital communications work. That goes for the author too. This is a hypothetical that is just not backed by reality. How exactly does one "give back" a digitally distributed document?

wiml 13y ago
It's not a hypothetical; it's a thing that actually happens[1]. You seem to be confusing the notion of classification with the question of whether something is easily available. The Snowden and Manning leaks, for example, did not become unclassified simply because they became public. [1] http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/07/05/translator_in_eye_of_storm_on_retroactive_classification/?page=full http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/07/05/transl...

snowwrestler 13y ago

When laws are passed, there are often little errors in wording or phrasing that might cause undesirable side effects. So the Congress often passes "technical fix" bills that do nothing to change the substance of the law, but simply adjust wording to better achieve the intended effect. I propose that it's time for a technical fix to the 4th Amendment: the addition of one word, one comma, and one space. > The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, ++data, ++ 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.