You really think any of this is about Israel anymore? I think they could disappear into the sand and nothing would change regarding the terrorist threats from the middle east. Sure US support of Israel is an issue to them but I think things have progressed beyond that now.
Houngan is right.
And whether the desire to strip liberties comes from the top or the bottom, it is equally illegitimate. The fact of the matter is that we are a target for Al Qaeda because we betrayed Osama bin Laden and his freedom fighters during and after their armed conflict with the Soviets and because we prop up an Apartheid government in the Middle East, and we prop up autocratic, monarchical, fake theocracies in several countries. And because we propped up right leaning dictators throughout the region, and because we deposed Mossadegh at the behest of a corporation, and because one of the ways we chose to deflect popular opinion away from the men in those countries was a series of social welfare programs predicated on religious study.
You don’t take away the privacy of every single American because the government fucked its own secret plans in other countries decades ago. You fucking apologize to those countries for your ill-intentioned, ill-executed intrigues, do what you can to make it up to them, and focus on domestic problems that kill more people every day than any of these attacks.
Smoking kills more people, but the government didn’t break into a tobacco company’s offices and steal their documents. Coal production and use kills more people every year than terrorism, but you don’t see the government designing and enforcing a hundred billion dollar monitoring and technology initiative aimed at reducing emissions. The badges of slavery that persist and brand swaths of the population as a permanent criminal underclass whose only job prospects are the drug trade or welfare could benefit from some statistical analysis and compilation of records exposing connections between certain policemen, judges, prosecutors, and outrageous or cruel charging and sentencing practices, but God forbid the people in power ever be forced to confront the fact that societal problems don’t spring forth fully grown from seafoam and marijuana.
Our government acts like it has some special authority beyond what the people have granted to it. It acts like it exists as a legitimate entity and not a necessary evil facillitated through legal fiction. Those governmental agents who were discussing having Glenn Greenwald murdered acted in a way to give any police officer worth her salt probable cause to believe that they were actively engaged in an attempt to solicit individuals to join them in a criminal conspiracy. Their computers should have been seized, they should have been arrested, and a warrant should have been executed to search their persons and papers in order to determine whether or not proof exists to the level that they should be formally charged. Because hey, individuals who overheard the violent statements made in a public place under circumstances which tended to cause a disturbance were disturbed in fact, so that was not even a victimless crime.
And really, Obama having, and publically discussing a list of people that he allows or pretty much asks the government to kill without a hearing that admittedly includes children? And he gets to decide when it is worth it to murder someone’s entire family just to get to them? What the fuck is he trying to do?
Oh, I know, he wants a mention in the “Influenced,” section of the wikipedia article on the Tonton Macoute.
You might be tired of hearing about it, but most places aren’t. Our continued support for an Apartheid State radicalizes individuals against us every single day. Most nations know that without our support, those behaviors would not continue, and continue they do, with beatings, job losses, land theft, politically motivated starvation disguised as embargoes, disenfranchisement, the list goes on.
Right now, there’s a kid in Palestine who did not get dinner because of the United States allowing Israel to cage the people of Palestine. The kid has an uncle, the kid has an older brother. Imagine you were trapped in a bantustan for several decades, and you had to see your niece or younger brother go without food because your ethnic heritage meant you were undesirable to the people outside the fence? How about when they get sick, and go without medicine? Medicine that you used to be able to get, but you can’t, because two countries have banded together to deny that you are a human being that deserves the right to be free and to vote and to work and to travel?
Don’t mistake the fact that something bores you with a problem being solved.
Flowers broke it down far better than I could, I’ll just add this: I suspect you buy into the whole “they hate us for our freedoms” line of thinking. They don’t, they hate us for very specific and compelling reasons, and they are not a people that tend to sit on their asses and bitch on the internet. Thus, terrorism. If you want to actually prevent terrorism you do it by leaving these people alone with their culture and making the rest of the world intolerably awesome. People don’t go to war over sour grapes, they go to war because somebody actively screwed them over.
They don’t hate us for our freedoms, they hate us for our actions. We have actively exploited the middle east (and the world) for our own good in ways which are bound to have created life time enemies.
Even with Israel out of the picture at this time those enemies would remain.
Had the terrorist “mindset” existed 100 years ago I am sure England would have been the focus of this type of terrorism. It is the modern weapon and our emergence that makes us the target, at this time.
Fine, give me less security. I’d rather have the privacy and lack of inconvenience.
Privacy will be a curious relic of the pre-digital age, the interstitial dark spaces where forbidden thoughts are nurtured and grow. The real questions going forward is who will determines what is forbidden.
Unless you voted for Gary Johnson, you voted for this shit. Anyone who thought Obama would do anything but piss on civil liberties after his first term is brain damaged.
I voted for Gary Johnson.
And the thing that most angers me about Obama is that he’s made the list of “specific and compelling reasons” even more compelling despite running on a platform of doing the exact opposite. He hasn’t added much new to the list, but he’s made parts of it way worse.
The big databases don’t even make us more secure. The ability to wiretap, record, surviel, this is hardly new. Before there were less rules. Then there was the Church Committee and there was a little more oversight, because some the the results of the lack of internal rules resulted in internal problems. The issue isn’t the fact that we have three letter agencies trying to get intelligence. The issue is the scope of the activity, the scope of access to the activity and the ability for internal abuse with the lack of oversight. The fact you have Senators on the standing committee now overseeing this that said they tried to stop it and failed should raise some eyebrows. This is a significant structural issue.
The risk for internal abuse is huge. If all the activity is secret, any one in the program or in charge of the program can surveil anyone they want for personal reasons and then blackmail. Someone with enough clout with anyone running or in the program can request actions for political, not terrorism prevention, reasons and then use that information for blackmail or political gain. That blackmail can be severe enough to force bureaucrats the instigator dislikes to permanently leave public life or even commit suicide. I grew up with someone who testified before the Church committee, if you think this hasn’t all happened before and won’t again then you are quite naive.
This also won’t make us any more secure internally or abroad. There are two factors on this. First, everyone that watches and foreign activists were already fairly sure this was going on. This makes the US government even less sympathetic than is already seems abroad. The other foreign image issues have been mentioned. This adds to it, which means that both domestic and foreign people with information will be far, far less likely to volunteer it to US intelligence. Second, is the same psychological effect as no one reporting a crime that happens in broad daylight in a populated area. Everyone assumes someone else has. The government will assume it has the information. This is security theater for the government. But when someone has a real tip, they’ll assume someone must have already recorded something. But maybe they haven’t, and the real bad actors were already assuming this program existed and behaving accordingly. Bad mix for any real security improvements.
Nobody got hurt over this. The problem is that the government kept this a secret from the people. Go ahead and tap everyone if you feel that’s what will protect your country but don’t keep it a secret from the people you’re trying to “protect”. So what if the terrorists know (which they probably did already)? What are they going to do? Send a letter instead? LOL
I disagree. If continuation of major policy isn’t POTUS responsibility, then why do we keep them? Yes, Obama did not initiate this, but he allowed it to continue for a very long time.
I guess I’m a closet fascist, but I’m not feeling much outrage. PRISM is simply a software suite for implementing electronic wiretaps, as authorized by a FISA Court. The phone logs are useful for only one purpose, building network maps. The House and Senate approved this legislation, the DOJ signed off on it, and it’s been upheld by the courts.
From the The Guardian
In 2003, he enlisted in the US army and began a training program to join the Special Forces. Invoking the same principles that he now cites to justify his leaks, he said: “I wanted to fight in the Iraq war because I felt like I had an obligation as a human being to help free people from oppression”.
He recounted how his beliefs about the war’s purpose were quickly dispelled. “Most of the people training us seemed pumped up about killing Arabs, not helping anyone,” he said. After he broke both his legs in a training accident, he was discharged."
What on earth was he expecting? The Army exists for one purpose, to inflict violence on others. And he selected combat arms, of all things?
He described as formative an incident in which he claimed CIA operatives were attempting to recruit a Swiss banker to obtain secret banking information. Snowden said they achieved this by purposely getting the banker drunk and encouraging him to drive home in his car. When the banker was arrested for drunk driving, the undercover agent seeking to befriend him offered to help, and a bond was formed that led to successful recruitment.
“Much of what I saw in Geneva really disillusioned me about how my government functions and what its impact is in the world,” he says. “I realised that I was part of something that was doing far more harm than good.”
The CIA exists to perform morally gray work in the pursuit of a greater good. Why on earth would you sign up if your uncomfortable with that?
I’m just going to go ahead and let your statements stand as the most damning indictment of your argument.
Don’t ever be “fair” to a politician. Don’t ever give them the benefit of the doubt. They engage in a profession whose pursuit is power. Power over law, power over people, power over you. With an issue of this magnitude we must overcome partisanship to ensure such insidious practices are crushed forever. Did Bush start it? Blame him. Is Obama continuing it? Blame him. But focus on the one in power.
The best thing about blame is you can spread it as wide and lay it on as thick as you want and you never run out.
But yeah, what Clanan said.
If you’re doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide from the giant surveillance apparatus the government’s been hiding.
FISA itself was implemented as a result of the Church committee work to prevent future abuses like those that had already happened. Some very old, jaded, cynical and not at all altruistic people were behind this. The abuses actually make you less safe in the long run.
The issue is that it isn’t just “some phone logs”. Since 2006, esp but it started in 2001, FISA has been significantly amended. So like good limits that were relaxed, you run into problems. This situation is like intelligence’s version of Glass-Steagal. FISA was a good idea, now we’ve watered it down, we’re going to get reminded of why that was and soon. The warrantless part can be made nearly universally applicable now for both internet and telephony. The rule now states that if part of the communication is outside the US, it can be collected. Make one route hop for internet or telephony technically outside the US and great, you can now get anything you want. The bar for the renewable warranted part is now set so low I think I could get a warrant, renewable yearly, for my dog. Once you have the warrant for the dog, warrants for all associates of the dog should be easy. So rapidly expanding, totally legal, secret recording of at least meta data on all electronic activity should be quite easy.
Like Glass Steagal, what the banks did recently was bad but legal. It used to be illegal after we realized we needed those rules for good reasons. Then we forgot and watered them down. FISA is the same. What can be done now under the new watered down amendments used to be illegal. There was a reason for that. “Legal” now does not mean desirable.
Also, due to the drone program. The protections of citizenship have also been watered down significantly now too.
This I would agree with. However, the rules used to be to ensure the work would most often be for the greater good. Without the the rules, abuses of the capability of the agencies can be done more easily. Though that specific example he used sets off no flags for me. The capability should to exist (imho), but there should be clear rules of engagement with more oversight than exists currently.
I’ve never been kidding about this stuff.