It is fascinating how casually people are reacting to this.
I am sure folks will swoop on in to pick apart the analogy, but "I don't have anything to hide" isn't the point. I doubt people who don't have a meth lab, WMD or a dungeon populated with victims in their pantries are trying to have cameras, microphones and random searches in their homes...you know, just so the authorities can make sure.
And given how definitions of wrong-doing and threatening are everything from ever-changing and whimsical to downright misinformed, this claim that the information won't be manipulated or misused isn't too convincing
To be clear, I am not surprised or anything. Even personally, my relationship with the US government changed about 12 years ago - and I wasn't even the one trying to change our status! Hurmph! If you're on one list, you're on others.
________________________
I am no fan of Obama, but still had a chuckle or two.
I am surprised foreign countries are not protesting more.
While the reveled snooping is [supposedly] limited in regards to US citizens, the whole point is foreign snooping.
There are zero limits what the US government can do with the info they gather on citizens of England, Germany or any other country.
DocMcCoy"Go and laugh in your own country!" 5,913 Posts
I am surprised foreign countries are not protesting more.
While the reveled snooping is [supposedly] limited in regards to US citizens, the whole point is foreign snooping.
There are zero limits what the US government can do with the info they gather on citizens of England, Germany or any other country.
Hands up who seriously, truly believes the governments of a foreign sovereign power are now going to start unquestioningly tossing random citizens in prison for no good reason on the say-so of the US government? Rendition or Gitmo are not acceptable answers, by the way. Feel free to rub my nose in it when Julian Assange in an orange jumpsuit is the lead story on every news outlet in the world. I'm not holding my breath on that one, however, and I suggest you do likewise.
Friendly reminder; in every other country in the world apart from the US, the Patriot Act isn't worth the paper it's printed on. They're your laws, not ours. We only have to concern ourselves with what's on our own statute books.
A massive portion of our online traffic is routed through the US. So it's just a given that our communication are monitored by a foreign government. No big deal right?
Except there can be consequences. For example, many foreigners can be put on no fly lists. Even if they haven't done anything illegal. I've read how people can't get on flights if the plane even flies over any US territory. Or even if US territory is a backup landing location in case of an emergency if they have been put on a no fly list. Even if it's a mistake.
Shit, I've even read of people who can't fly domestically in their own country because they were put on the list by accident or because they went for a job interview in a country deemed not suitable.
Or students being banned from going to speaking engagements because there was a photo on them on facebook with a leader from another party.
I highly doubt Rock has no problem with any of this. He wouldn't care that his regular mail was read? Or that a government could watch/listen to him and his family in his home?
Hypothetically speaking Rock. Would you have zero issue if the government put a lifetime ban on your children flying, because they had a moment lapse in judgement and wrote something stupid on their facebook wall or in an email?
Edit:
In the end, the real negative of what stuff like this can really do is stop many from anything close to critical thinking or freedom of speech.
Ai Weiwei said it best since this has all happened.
"When human beings are scared and feel everything is exposed to the government, we will censor ourselves from free thinking. That's dangerous for human development."
And I agree. Rock and anyone else may not agree. And that's cool. But they should respect the people that is does bother and scare.
I am surprised foreign countries are not protesting more.
While the reveled snooping is [supposedly] limited in regards to US citizens, the whole point is foreign snooping.
There are zero limits what the US government can do with the info they gather on citizens of England, Germany or any other country.
Hands up who seriously, truly believes the governments of a foreign sovereign power are now going to start unquestioningly tossing random citizens in prison for no good reason on the say-so of the US government? Rendition or Gitmo are not acceptable answers, by the way. Feel free to rub my nose in it when Julian Assange in an orange jumpsuit is the lead story on every news outlet in the world. I'm not holding my breath on that one, however, and I suggest you do likewise.
Friendly reminder; in every other country in the world apart from the US, the Patriot Act isn't worth the paper it's printed on. They're your laws, not ours. We only have to concern ourselves with what's on our own statute books.
Surely you realize that prison is far from the only real consequence that can result from this type of scrutiny.
And surely you also realize that intelligence agencies from different countries often work together on these issues. Tamerlan Tsarnaev was questioned several times by the FBI on a tip from Russian intelligence, for example. I'm sure people in other countries have been put under surveillance after tips from the FBI/CIA etc.
I'm not sure how I feel about this. As with many things, the devil is in the details. I'd like some more info on how this intelligence has been used.
Also, if you don't stand up for others rights there won't be anyone to stand up when they finally get around to violating your rights in a way that actually bothers you.
The Utah Data Center was built with the express purpose of collecting the majority of digital messages that travel through the US. The gov has said "oh we won't look at any of them, but if something happens we want to have them stored as evidence". That's one of the dumbest excuses I've heard for illegal activity.
If the government could keep this to a minimum and was actually stopping terrorist activities on a regular basis it might be OK. But the reality is they don't really know what they are doing and just strong arm the world with insane amounts of violence and get lucky stopping a minor event here and there. They had the Boston bomber in for questioning and then just lost track of him. When the Russian's call you and say "look out for this guy", you should probably be keeping an eye on him.
The police have been on a run of detaining and beating people and seizing phones and cameras for citizens filming the police. The government has also been passing laws saying it's illegal to film the police. Clearly the government doesn't want their day to day activities monitored and clearly they have something to hide.
DocMcCoy"Go and laugh in your own country!" 5,913 Posts
I am surprised foreign countries are not protesting more.
While the reveled snooping is [supposedly] limited in regards to US citizens, the whole point is foreign snooping.
There are zero limits what the US government can do with the info they gather on citizens of England, Germany or any other country.
Hands up who seriously, truly believes the governments of a foreign sovereign power are now going to start unquestioningly tossing random citizens in prison for no good reason on the say-so of the US government? Rendition or Gitmo are not acceptable answers, by the way. Feel free to rub my nose in it when Julian Assange in an orange jumpsuit is the lead story on every news outlet in the world. I'm not holding my breath on that one, however, and I suggest you do likewise.
Friendly reminder; in every other country in the world apart from the US, the Patriot Act isn't worth the paper it's printed on. They're your laws, not ours. We only have to concern ourselves with what's on our own statute books.
Surely you realize that prison is far from the only real consequence that can result from this type of scrutiny.
And surely you also realize that intelligence agencies from different countries often work together on these issues. Tamerlan Tsarnaev was questioned several times by the FBI on a tip from Russian intelligence, for example. I'm sure people in other countries have been put under surveillance after tips from the FBI/CIA etc.
I'm not sure how I feel about this. As with many things, the devil is in the details. I'd like some more info on how this intelligence has been used.
To be honest, I'm glad people like Tamerlan Tsarnaev are under surveillance. We'd all be in far worse trouble if they weren't. What I find most baffling about these revelations is the eagerness with which some people extrapolate from them that we must all be under surveillance. The technology and the capability to do this was in existence for a long, long time before anybody started seriously worrying about it, I think we can all agree on that much. The key component that's generally absent amongst governments of so-called developed nations is the political will to utilise that technology for the purpose of either actively spying on its own citizens or explicitly restricting their freedom.
There are thousands of CCTV cameras all over the streets of London and other British cities, way more than you'd see in most other countries. They're not hidden; everyone knows they're there, but they didn't stop people from taking to the streets two summers ago. The business of nicking people afterwards was made a lot easier, certainly, and there were several highly dubious cases as a consequence of judges being directly instructed by the government to apply existing laws much more severely when the time came to pass sentence. That was just a Conservative government reverting to authoritarian type, though; anyone who lived through the 1980s won't have been shocked by any of it. But my point is, the thought - the certainty, even - that we were all being watched wasn't enough to actually prevent large-scale rioting. I have absolutely no doubt that, if the government was to exceed its purview as a consequence of anything related to PRISM, there would be a riot of a very different kind. Bet on that.
And this is the thing; I don't like my government, and I certainly don't trust them. But I definitely don't fucking fear them. I flat-out refuse to live my life like that. I said this elsewhere on the same subject the other day, but a nice little industry has developed over the last fifty-odd years that depends for its continued survival upon people being scared - of foreigners, of people who don't look/think like them, of their government, of other governments, of their fellow citizens and neighbours, of even leaving the house. This is just one more aspect of it. Buy into it, or don't. In the words of Sartre; you are free - choose.
As for consequences, I wonder how many of the people expressing outrage over this were enthusiastically cheerleading for Assange and Wikileaks while one of his boys was selling some of the classified data they liberated to Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, prior to the 2010 election. Lukashenko promptly used that information to arrest around 600 journalists and opposition supporters. The whereabouts and exact fate of many of them remains unknown. Let's have a big hand for the good guys.
i've not heard a mention of this in any of the recent nsa talk,
i wonder why ?
DocMcCoy"Go and laugh in your own country!" 5,913 Posts
volumen said:
They had the Boston bomber in for questioning and then just lost track of him. When the Russian's call you and say "look out for this guy", you should probably be keeping an eye on him.
You might want to consider the possibility that they didn't lose track of him at all, but instead had insufficient hard evidence of any wrongdoing to enable them to arrest, detain and charge him with anything.
Now, if one of the main objectives of all this surveillance is, as many are suggesting, to circumvent due process/the rule of law in some nefarious way or other, then why didn't they just arrest and detain him, and then fit him up on some trumped-up charge at a later date? Could it perhaps be that to do so would be, y'know, illegal?
They had the Boston bomber in for questioning and then just lost track of him. When the Russian's call you and say "look out for this guy", you should probably be keeping an eye on him.
You might want to consider the possibility that they didn't lose track of him at all, but instead had insufficient hard evidence of any wrongdoing to enable them to arrest, detain and charge him with anything.
Now, if one of the main objectives of all this surveillance is, as many are suggesting, to circumvent due process/the rule of law in some nefarious way or other, then why didn't they just arrest and detain him, and then fit him up on some trumped-up charge at a later date? Could it perhaps be that to do so would be, y'know, illegal?
if this massive surveillance can't prevent the acts of people like the Tsarnaevs, who seem to have raised a number of red flags, then what is the point of it?
They had the Boston bomber in for questioning and then just lost track of him. When the Russian's call you and say "look out for this guy", you should probably be keeping an eye on him.
You might want to consider the possibility that they didn't lose track of him at all, but instead had insufficient hard evidence of any wrongdoing to enable them to arrest, detain and charge him with anything.
Now, if one of the main objectives of all this surveillance is, as many are suggesting, to circumvent due process/the rule of law in some nefarious way or other, then why didn't they just arrest and detain him, and then fit him up on some trumped-up charge at a later date? Could it perhaps be that to do so would be, y'know, illegal?
if this massive surveillance can't prevent the acts of people like the Tsarnaevs, who seem to have raised a number of red flags, then what is the point of it?
They had the Boston bomber in for questioning and then just lost track of him. When the Russian's call you and say "look out for this guy", you should probably be keeping an eye on him.
You might want to consider the possibility that they didn't lose track of him at all, but instead had insufficient hard evidence of any wrongdoing to enable them to arrest, detain and charge him with anything.
Now, if one of the main objectives of all this surveillance is, as many are suggesting, to circumvent due process/the rule of law in some nefarious way or other, then why didn't they just arrest and detain him, and then fit him up on some trumped-up charge at a later date? Could it perhaps be that to do so would be, y'know, illegal?
if this massive surveillance can't prevent the acts of people like the Tsarnaevs, who seem to have raised a number of red flags, then what is the point of it?
What makes you so sure it hasn't?
well, the government should say something about that. Maybe drag a prisoner from its rendition program out in public and assure everyone that person is a terrorist and was caught using this massive surveillance program.
either way, giving up my (or other people's, if you've done nothing wrong) rights to privacy and due process isn't the kind of price I'd like to pay to have some vague sense of safety.
They had the Boston bomber in for questioning and then just lost track of him. When the Russian's call you and say "look out for this guy", you should probably be keeping an eye on him.
You might want to consider the possibility that they didn't lose track of him at all, but instead had insufficient hard evidence of any wrongdoing to enable them to arrest, detain and charge him with anything.
Now, if one of the main objectives of all this surveillance is, as many are suggesting, to circumvent due process/the rule of law in some nefarious way or other, then why didn't they just arrest and detain him, and then fit him up on some trumped-up charge at a later date? Could it perhaps be that to do so would be, y'know, illegal?
if this massive surveillance can't prevent the acts of people like the Tsarnaevs, who seem to have raised a number of red flags, then what is the point of it?
What makes you so sure it hasn't?
well, the government should say something about that. Maybe drag a prisoner from its rendition program out in public and assure everyone that person is a terrorist and was caught using this massive surveillance program.
either way, giving up my (or other people's, if you've done nothing wrong) rights to privacy and due process isn't the kind of price I'd like to pay to have some vague sense of safety.
Here's about 30, and I think it's safe to assume that some have not been revealed for security reasons:
Some of these are admittedly small potatoes, but some could have killed more people than 9/11.
DocMcCoy"Go and laugh in your own country!" 5,913 Posts
ppadilha said:
DocMcCoy said:
volumen said:
They had the Boston bomber in for questioning and then just lost track of him. When the Russian's call you and say "look out for this guy", you should probably be keeping an eye on him.
You might want to consider the possibility that they didn't lose track of him at all, but instead had insufficient hard evidence of any wrongdoing to enable them to arrest, detain and charge him with anything.
Now, if one of the main objectives of all this surveillance is, as many are suggesting, to circumvent due process/the rule of law in some nefarious way or other, then why didn't they just arrest and detain him, and then fit him up on some trumped-up charge at a later date? Could it perhaps be that to do so would be, y'know, illegal?
if this massive surveillance can't prevent the acts of people like the Tsarnaevs, who seem to have raised a number of red flags, then what is the point of it?
That's a good question, but it's one that might lead me to think that perhaps this surveillance isn't quite as massive as some people would have us believe. Perhaps it's restricted largely to individuals and groups who've already been identified as representing a potential threat to national security, human life, whatever (and yes, I fully understand and accept that those definitions can be as fluid as the authorities want them to be). The rest of us may well be able to continue going about our daily business unmolested for the rest of our lives. I don't know. However, I do know that in a democracy you can vote out a bad government or campaign for bad laws to be changed/repealed and bad organisations to be reformed. If you want to.
They had the Boston bomber in for questioning and then just lost track of him. When the Russian's call you and say "look out for this guy", you should probably be keeping an eye on him.
When to comes to Putin, Chechnyan political dissenters and armed separatists are exactly the same thing. I'm guessing the warning was either taken with a pinch of salt by the US or there just wasn't enough there to move on it.
They had the Boston bomber in for questioning and then just lost track of him. When the Russian's call you and say "look out for this guy", you should probably be keeping an eye on him.
You might want to consider the possibility that they didn't lose track of him at all, but instead had insufficient hard evidence of any wrongdoing to enable them to arrest, detain and charge him with anything.
Now, if one of the main objectives of all this surveillance is, as many are suggesting, to circumvent due process/the rule of law in some nefarious way or other, then why didn't they just arrest and detain him, and then fit him up on some trumped-up charge at a later date? Could it perhaps be that to do so would be, y'know, illegal?
if this massive surveillance can't prevent the acts of people like the Tsarnaevs, who seem to have raised a number of red flags, then what is the point of it?
According to some members of Congress, the NSA program HAS prevented terror attacks.
Some of these are admittedly small potatoes, but some could have killed more people than 9/11.
it's not a question of how many people have to die before this becomes ok. The same argument is trotted out in defense of torture, and was trotted out when Bush argued for the invasion of Iraq. I don't think a hypothetical prevention of deaths trumps a very real abuse of power. Conversely, one could ask, how many people have to be wrongfully accused before a program like this is considered unacceptable? What's an acceptable rate, say, for the number of innocent people taken by the government's extraordinary rendition program? What's an acceptable number for innocent people killed by drone attacks? Because ultimately that's what this intelligence is used for, to help determine foreign targets for intel operations.
to me the real question is, does the government really need this in order to investigate terrorism? In the list of plots foiled, there are cases like the shoe bomber and the Times Square bomber that were caught in the act, not because of intelligence. There are cases like the Lackawanna group, where questions have been raised as to what extent the FBI entrapped their suspects. Does this program really make the government's work more effective, and is it prone to the same abuses of other policing strategies? And why does it have to operate under a shroud of secrecy?
you notice none of those questions relate to whether or not the government has a huge, secret domestic spying program? You can shoot the messenger all you want, but as far as I can tell that's the real scandal.
However, I do know that in a democracy you can vote out a bad government or campaign for bad laws to be changed/repealed and bad organisations to be reformed. If you want to.
I don't think US democracy is functional enough to that at this point, to be honest. Obama is living proof of this.
Some of these are admittedly small potatoes, but some could have killed more people than 9/11.
it's not a question of how many people have to die before this becomes ok. The same argument is trotted out in defense of torture, and was trotted out when Bush argued for the invasion of Iraq. I don't think a hypothetical prevention of deaths trumps a very real abuse of power.
Except there's nothing hypothetical about it.
I'm not defending all of the anti terror measures by any means, but dismissing the issue as abstract is a bit of a stretch, imo.
. I don't think a hypothetical prevention of deaths trumps a very real abuse of power. Conversely, one could ask, how many people have to be wrongfully accused before a program like this is considered unacceptable?
1) It's not a hypothetical prevention of death according to members of Congress and the President. The prevention of death has been very real, at least according to them. Why people have to die to make sure your never private to begin with information can not potentially be viewed by the government is strange.
2) You can ask your converse question, but the answer is that noone has been wrongfully accused.
However, I do know that in a democracy you can vote out a bad government or campaign for bad laws to be changed/repealed and bad organisations to be reformed. If you want to.
I don't think US democracy is functional enough to that at this point, to be honest. Obama is living proof of this.
You don't think Obama was the better choice over Romney?
You don't think Obama was the better choice over Romney?
I think the Democratic and Republican parties represent a lot of the same interests. With the exception of a handful of wedge issues, they are ideologically identical. Obama may be well intentioned as a person, but in many ways his presidency has just been a continuation of the Bush years, especially when it comes to issues like this.
You don't think Obama was the better choice over Romney?
I think the Democratic and Republican parties represent a lot of the same interests. With the exception of a handful of wedge issues, they are ideologically identical. Obama may be well intentioned as a person, but in many ways his presidency has just been a continuation of the Bush years, especially when it comes to issues like this.
Comments
I am sure folks will swoop on in to pick apart the analogy, but "I don't have anything to hide" isn't the point. I doubt people who don't have a meth lab, WMD or a dungeon populated with victims in their pantries are trying to have cameras, microphones and random searches in their homes...you know, just so the authorities can make sure.
And given how definitions of wrong-doing and threatening are everything from ever-changing and whimsical to downright misinformed, this claim that the information won't be manipulated or misused isn't too convincing
To be clear, I am not surprised or anything. Even personally, my relationship with the US government changed about 12 years ago - and I wasn't even the one trying to change our status! Hurmph! If you're on one list, you're on others.
________________________
I am no fan of Obama, but still had a chuckle or two.
Obama is Checking Your Email
While the reveled snooping is [supposedly] limited in regards to US citizens, the whole point is foreign snooping.
There are zero limits what the US government can do with the info they gather on citizens of England, Germany or any other country.
Hands up who seriously, truly believes the governments of a foreign sovereign power are now going to start unquestioningly tossing random citizens in prison for no good reason on the say-so of the US government? Rendition or Gitmo are not acceptable answers, by the way. Feel free to rub my nose in it when Julian Assange in an orange jumpsuit is the lead story on every news outlet in the world. I'm not holding my breath on that one, however, and I suggest you do likewise.
Friendly reminder; in every other country in the world apart from the US, the Patriot Act isn't worth the paper it's printed on. They're your laws, not ours. We only have to concern ourselves with what's on our own statute books.
A massive portion of our online traffic is routed through the US. So it's just a given that our communication are monitored by a foreign government. No big deal right?
Except there can be consequences. For example, many foreigners can be put on no fly lists. Even if they haven't done anything illegal. I've read how people can't get on flights if the plane even flies over any US territory. Or even if US territory is a backup landing location in case of an emergency if they have been put on a no fly list. Even if it's a mistake.
Shit, I've even read of people who can't fly domestically in their own country because they were put on the list by accident or because they went for a job interview in a country deemed not suitable.
Or students being banned from going to speaking engagements because there was a photo on them on facebook with a leader from another party.
I highly doubt Rock has no problem with any of this. He wouldn't care that his regular mail was read? Or that a government could watch/listen to him and his family in his home?
Hypothetically speaking Rock. Would you have zero issue if the government put a lifetime ban on your children flying, because they had a moment lapse in judgement and wrote something stupid on their facebook wall or in an email?
Edit:
In the end, the real negative of what stuff like this can really do is stop many from anything close to critical thinking or freedom of speech.
Ai Weiwei said it best since this has all happened.
"When human beings are scared and feel everything is exposed to the government, we will censor ourselves from free thinking. That's dangerous for human development."
And I agree. Rock and anyone else may not agree. And that's cool. But they should respect the people that is does bother and scare.
Surely you realize that prison is far from the only real consequence that can result from this type of scrutiny.
And surely you also realize that intelligence agencies from different countries often work together on these issues. Tamerlan Tsarnaev was questioned several times by the FBI on a tip from Russian intelligence, for example. I'm sure people in other countries have been put under surveillance after tips from the FBI/CIA etc.
I'm not sure how I feel about this. As with many things, the devil is in the details. I'd like some more info on how this intelligence has been used.
http://falkvinge.net/2012/07/19/debunking-the-dangerous-nothing-to-hide-nothing-to-fear/
Also, if you don't stand up for others rights there won't be anyone to stand up when they finally get around to violating your rights in a way that actually bothers you.
The Utah Data Center was built with the express purpose of collecting the majority of digital messages that travel through the US. The gov has said "oh we won't look at any of them, but if something happens we want to have them stored as evidence". That's one of the dumbest excuses I've heard for illegal activity.
If the government could keep this to a minimum and was actually stopping terrorist activities on a regular basis it might be OK. But the reality is they don't really know what they are doing and just strong arm the world with insane amounts of violence and get lucky stopping a minor event here and there. They had the Boston bomber in for questioning and then just lost track of him. When the Russian's call you and say "look out for this guy", you should probably be keeping an eye on him.
The police have been on a run of detaining and beating people and seizing phones and cameras for citizens filming the police. The government has also been passing laws saying it's illegal to film the police. Clearly the government doesn't want their day to day activities monitored and clearly they have something to hide.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/11/us/nsa-snowden-girlfriend/index.html?hpt=hp_c3
To be honest, I'm glad people like Tamerlan Tsarnaev are under surveillance. We'd all be in far worse trouble if they weren't. What I find most baffling about these revelations is the eagerness with which some people extrapolate from them that we must all be under surveillance. The technology and the capability to do this was in existence for a long, long time before anybody started seriously worrying about it, I think we can all agree on that much. The key component that's generally absent amongst governments of so-called developed nations is the political will to utilise that technology for the purpose of either actively spying on its own citizens or explicitly restricting their freedom.
There are thousands of CCTV cameras all over the streets of London and other British cities, way more than you'd see in most other countries. They're not hidden; everyone knows they're there, but they didn't stop people from taking to the streets two summers ago. The business of nicking people afterwards was made a lot easier, certainly, and there were several highly dubious cases as a consequence of judges being directly instructed by the government to apply existing laws much more severely when the time came to pass sentence. That was just a Conservative government reverting to authoritarian type, though; anyone who lived through the 1980s won't have been shocked by any of it. But my point is, the thought - the certainty, even - that we were all being watched wasn't enough to actually prevent large-scale rioting. I have absolutely no doubt that, if the government was to exceed its purview as a consequence of anything related to PRISM, there would be a riot of a very different kind. Bet on that.
And this is the thing; I don't like my government, and I certainly don't trust them. But I definitely don't fucking fear them. I flat-out refuse to live my life like that. I said this elsewhere on the same subject the other day, but a nice little industry has developed over the last fifty-odd years that depends for its continued survival upon people being scared - of foreigners, of people who don't look/think like them, of their government, of other governments, of their fellow citizens and neighbours, of even leaving the house. This is just one more aspect of it. Buy into it, or don't. In the words of Sartre; you are free - choose.
As for consequences, I wonder how many of the people expressing outrage over this were enthusiastically cheerleading for Assange and Wikileaks while one of his boys was selling some of the classified data they liberated to Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, prior to the 2010 election. Lukashenko promptly used that information to arrest around 600 journalists and opposition supporters. The whereabouts and exact fate of many of them remains unknown. Let's have a big hand for the good guys.
i've not heard a mention of this in any of the recent nsa talk,
i wonder why ?
You might want to consider the possibility that they didn't lose track of him at all, but instead had insufficient hard evidence of any wrongdoing to enable them to arrest, detain and charge him with anything.
Now, if one of the main objectives of all this surveillance is, as many are suggesting, to circumvent due process/the rule of law in some nefarious way or other, then why didn't they just arrest and detain him, and then fit him up on some trumped-up charge at a later date? Could it perhaps be that to do so would be, y'know, illegal?
http://www.chinacartimes.com/2013/04/fixed-gear-bikes-banned-in-beijing/
if this massive surveillance can't prevent the acts of people like the Tsarnaevs, who seem to have raised a number of red flags, then what is the point of it?
What makes you so sure it hasn't?
well, the government should say something about that. Maybe drag a prisoner from its rendition program out in public and assure everyone that person is a terrorist and was caught using this massive surveillance program.
either way, giving up my (or other people's, if you've done nothing wrong) rights to privacy and due process isn't the kind of price I'd like to pay to have some vague sense of safety.
Here's about 30, and I think it's safe to assume that some have not been revealed for security reasons:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_foiled_Islamic_terrorist_plots_in_the_post-9/11_United_States
Is that enough? If not, how many would be? What's the acceptable mortality rate?
EDIT: Here's a list of 45:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/09/08/9-11-anniversary-45-terror-plots-foiled-in-last-10-years.html
Some of these are admittedly small potatoes, but some could have killed more people than 9/11.
That's a good question, but it's one that might lead me to think that perhaps this surveillance isn't quite as massive as some people would have us believe. Perhaps it's restricted largely to individuals and groups who've already been identified as representing a potential threat to national security, human life, whatever (and yes, I fully understand and accept that those definitions can be as fluid as the authorities want them to be). The rest of us may well be able to continue going about our daily business unmolested for the rest of our lives. I don't know. However, I do know that in a democracy you can vote out a bad government or campaign for bad laws to be changed/repealed and bad organisations to be reformed. If you want to.
Techdirt has done some good stuff on this over the last few days.
When to comes to Putin, Chechnyan political dissenters and armed separatists are exactly the same thing. I'm guessing the warning was either taken with a pinch of salt by the US or there just wasn't enough there to move on it.
What do the fans of 30 Seconds to Mars have to do with this?
According to some members of Congress, the NSA program HAS prevented terror attacks.
it's not a question of how many people have to die before this becomes ok. The same argument is trotted out in defense of torture, and was trotted out when Bush argued for the invasion of Iraq. I don't think a hypothetical prevention of deaths trumps a very real abuse of power. Conversely, one could ask, how many people have to be wrongfully accused before a program like this is considered unacceptable? What's an acceptable rate, say, for the number of innocent people taken by the government's extraordinary rendition program? What's an acceptable number for innocent people killed by drone attacks? Because ultimately that's what this intelligence is used for, to help determine foreign targets for intel operations.
to me the real question is, does the government really need this in order to investigate terrorism? In the list of plots foiled, there are cases like the shoe bomber and the Times Square bomber that were caught in the act, not because of intelligence. There are cases like the Lackawanna group, where questions have been raised as to what extent the FBI entrapped their suspects. Does this program really make the government's work more effective, and is it prone to the same abuses of other policing strategies? And why does it have to operate under a shroud of secrecy?
you notice none of those questions relate to whether or not the government has a huge, secret domestic spying program? You can shoot the messenger all you want, but as far as I can tell that's the real scandal.
I don't think US democracy is functional enough to that at this point, to be honest. Obama is living proof of this.
Except there's nothing hypothetical about it.
I'm not defending all of the anti terror measures by any means, but dismissing the issue as abstract is a bit of a stretch, imo.
1) It's not a hypothetical prevention of death according to members of Congress and the President. The prevention of death has been very real, at least according to them. Why people have to die to make sure your never private to begin with information can not potentially be viewed by the government is strange.
2) You can ask your converse question, but the answer is that noone has been wrongfully accused.
You don't think Obama was the better choice over Romney?
of course it wasn't a secret, that's why no one cares about Edward Snowden's claims and his whereabouts, right?
I think the Democratic and Republican parties represent a lot of the same interests. With the exception of a handful of wedge issues, they are ideologically identical. Obama may be well intentioned as a person, but in many ways his presidency has just been a continuation of the Bush years, especially when it comes to issues like this.
Hate to burst your bubble, but this program has not been a secret.
The Patriot Act became law in 2001, and was reenacted in 2006 and 2010.
You didn't answer the question.