"Wyden has also warned about a classified interpretation of Section 702 that he says multiple administrations have relied on and refused to declassify. “When it is eventually declassified,” he said in March, “the American people are going to be stunned that it took so long and that Congress had been debating this authority with insufficient information.”"
Spying on American citizens is a bipartisan point of agreement.
Can please someone explain the concept of a 'classified interpretation' [of law] to me like I'm 5? I know the concept exists, but I don't really understand how it can be in any way justified in any country that's even pretending to be a democracy?
It's not justified and it can never be. Keeping information secret is only justified if releasing it would put a person in serious danger or compromise a police/military operation. And even then it must be balanced against the public interest in transparency, strictly time limited and narrow scoped (no blacking out whole documents).
I don't see how releasing an interpretation of a law could ever compromise law enforcement. Or actually I know how, it's because it would prove the way they do mass surveillance is illegal.
The problem is modern America doesn't see it that way. Any time the government does something evil they just say it's for "national security" and no one questions them. It's like a Winter Soldier password that makes courts go blank and say yes to anything.
I feel the role of the Press is to root out these stories and publish them.
To me the defining moment of the Press abdicating their job was when the NYTs reported the second gulf war. This was the end of me reading it. The Sunday times was staple reading growing up.
Press increasingly started abdicating their job when journalism was no longer financially independent of the people and institutions it is supposed to scrutinize.
> Keeping information secret is only justified if releasing it would put a person in serious danger or compromise a police/military operation.
Sure, but the obvious pro-government response is “revealing that the government is doing bad things reflects badly on the government and damages its reputation at home and abroad.”
> “revealing that the government is doing bad things reflects badly on the government and damages its reputation at home and abroad.”
This is -incidentally- how the ancient English "state secrets privilege" got introduced into US law.
In the 1940's, godawful maintenance resulted in the crash of a bomber over US soil and the death of all three of the civilians on board the plane. The widows of the dead civilians sued the government and demanded the accident report. The government refused to provide the report, claiming the privilege because "national security", and courts all the way up to the Supreme Court agreed.
In the early 2000s, the accident report was declassified. Inspection revealed that the only real reason to refuse to release it was to both prevent government embarrassment and to avoid having to pay out -IIRC- nearly a quarter million in 1940's USD to the widows.
Given its enormous potential for unchecked abuse, along with the fact that the first ever invocation of it was abusive, courts should refuse to permit its use.
There is also a genuine case for National security in that - during the Second World War - releasing that information would (IMO) let the enemy know what maintenance was being held back, in bombers.
The planes in question would have been obsolete by that point, also those planes from WW2 would have already been widely distributed among allied (including Soviet) countries
Imagine, for example, a case is about someone disclosing the location of nuclear arms to their spouse. Maybe even accidentally. If they are brought up on charges about this, national security doesn't want the fact that a case is about nuclear weapons to be public information. They further don't want it disclosed who was told about them (as the spouse wouldn't be subject to charges). That's basically where a secret interpretation and ruling would ultimately enter. The courts can't disclose what the ruling was nor what the case was even fully about.
> Imagine, for example, a case is about someone disclosing the location of nuclear arms to their spouse.
The location of most US nuclear weapons are public. Moreover, if you suspect that the location of some you intend to be secret may have been compromised then the obvious sensible response is "move them" rather than "keep even the legal theory of the case a secret forever".
This is why the primary ones whose location is intended to be a secret are on submarines -- submarines are easy to move around.
Why can't they? They can redact names of individuals in a case like that. "Oh some person who was married to some other person who works for some agency knows where nukes might be". That's not a risk.
They could even redact larger portions of the case and still release the interpretation in some form.
Because it's very hard to stop accidental or incidental information leaks. For an opinion to be rendered, generally they also attach the case facts which lead to that ruling. Heavy redaction means it becomes almost impossible to use that ruling as precedent but also runs a real risk of exposing state secrets. For example, which judge made the ruling? Well if you get that you can start pulling information about the days the judge was active and a short list of the people the judge was hearing cases for.
All it takes is 1 accidental redaction or someone who did something silly like using a black highlighter on a PDF and now where the nukes are stored is public information.
There's also simply information that can be gleaned just based on the location that the hearing is taking place. This came from x court in x district, well then it's likely a nuclear silo is roughly in that county or surrounding counties.
A federal court tried to conceal the identity of a judge who has been reprimanded.
Claude was able to work out who it was in less than 10min based on stringing together facts that remained and seemed irrelevant. Journalists uncovered the identity independently using different means. (The ability of Claude to do this was not revealed until the other journalists had gone public and confirmed the identity.)
From warrantless wiretapping to extra judicial renditions, the US government has been a rogue state for sometime. Now they just have low-grade criminals and racists running the show, buddied up with media owners, O&G and the mic.
I can get the idea that for some cases it can be in the public's interest if specific court hearings are closed, or if it's secret that certain court hearings or entire cases even exist. There is a lot of potential of abuse (and a documented history of abuse), but at least the idea makes sense
But I can't see a public benefit to keeping the principles such a court uses secret
It’s a pretty obvious outcome. Attorney-client privilege applies to the executive branch of the government as much as it applies to anyone else, and not just in national security matters.
There are whole laws that are classified and cannot be discussed in open court. Ignorance of the law is no defense when you are charged with violating a law and that’s still true in the USA even if the law is classified and you are not authorized to know what it says.
Is there more to this than the Wikipedia article says?
While it does say:
> Gilmore also complained about being subject to "secret law", when the airlines and government refused to show the directive under which they were requesting ID.
nowhere does the article say the courts commented on the complaint, let alone ruled on it.
Nor does the article say anything about "Ignorance of the law is no defense when you are charged with violating a law". The reason given was instead:
> there was no constitutional violation because air passengers could still travel without identification if they instead underwent the more stringent "secondary screening" search.
I'm not saying your wrong, just that the article you offered as evidence doesn't go as far as your claims.
The Wikipedia article is poor, but I cannot not edit it as I attended parts of the trial and in fact discussed the suit with john before he filed it so by Wikipedia’s rules I can’t edit it. Anyway a lawyer would be a better person.
John’s appeal is online. Section [10] of the decision discussion describes being subject to a law he cannot have access to. The judge saw it but could not discuss it in court, with the plaintiff (John Gilmore) or even his lawyer. Also the orders (law) are agreed by the court to be arbitrary, changing day by day and being arbitrarily different between airports. But since the Airport personnel knew them tht was good enough for the court.
And though the discussion mentioned that he could take a bus or walk, the conclusion, [21], said that his rights were not violated at all, both the bus precedent and the legality of being subject to unknown law. The brief Wikipedia page mentions only the former, though the latter was the primary factor of the complaint.
No one is giving the real answer to this question which is that these laws touch on the legality of capabilities the US does not want to acknowledge it has, and so it won't. Secret information in the US is like glitter - if you touch it, it spreads to you too.
It's not just "here's this law about spying in the abstract," which can be talked about in the open; it's "we're using the MIND READER 5000 under Title XVII powers delegated by the President to the Mind Reading Organization to conduct mind reading on persons X, Y, and Z." The legal briefings and rulings on the facts will by necessity reveal the nature of the technology or technique in question, and so, they are classified. If I recall correctly it was a big deal for the ACLU to get a lawyer a security clearance so they could interact with these courts, but I could be misremembering.
The real problem here is that if someone files a claim against the government and the government wants to keep the facts of the case a secret, you still need the case to have an outcome, and then you have two options.
The first is that you assume whatever is being kept a secret is something that doesn't favor the government, and then the government loses the case by default. This is the more reasonable option, because it mitigates the perverse incentive for the government to declare something a secret whenever it makes them look bad. But it has the obvious problem that then the government would lose some cases it should have won if the information could be published.
The second is that you assume whatever is being kept a secret is something that favors the government, and then the government wins the case by default. But that doesn't solve the problem -- you then have members of the public losing cases they should have won if the information could be published. And doing this makes the perverse incentive worse.
So why do we accept the second one instead of the first one?
Oftentimes the government drops the case. When people get convicted for things they did on Tor, and don't settle, the government often drops the case so they don't have to reveal how they got information about activities on Tor.
When Germany, which doesn't play by the same rules, got DiDW and then Boystown, that was quite revealing on how authorities can break Tor.
That's when the government is the one bringing the case to begin with. The issue is, if the government e.g. kills your spouse, why should the perpetrators get off scott free because the perpetrators want to keep something a secret?
Imagine the public tried to do that. Sorry, IRS/DoJ, the defendant is refusing discovery because it's a secret and without that you can't prosecute them.
Really what it is is they had a lawyer say, "We can justify massive spying on citizens via [long long list of arguments and precedents]", the security apparatus would like to keep the veneer of legality that provides and knows if what they were doing was known there would be massive backlash and the law would be changed to make it more clearly illegal so they keep that interpretation secret. Basically going on the logic that they don't have to tell Congress or the Courts how they screwed up the 4th Amendment and it's not their job to fix it.
You’re government agency, and you ask your lawyers about how the law operates given a particular set of circumstances.
In response, the lawyers provide you with advice about how they think the law applies to this situation, and what findings they think a court would make given the evidence etc available.
Information subject to attorney-client privilege (as this information would be) is exempt from release under FOIA anyway. Dropping a security classification on top adds protections against unauthorised release by insiders.
Sometimes there are good reasons for this, such as to protect particular technical capabilities that are easily circumvented if adversaries know that they exist, or to protect human sources who might end up dead if found out. Other times, there are no good reasons to do this but without knowing all the circumstances it’s impossible to tell either way.
Read it as classified misinterpretation of laws, so that they can do illegal things and claim this loophole when caught.
Usa has constitution and its government more or less side steps it in many things. Might as well have no constitution. Usa is a jungle for practical intends and purposes compared to europe or any functional democracy. This is the problem with allowing interpretation of law rather than taking law as it is written. Someone somewhere can interpret it in completely twisted way and throw away the spirit of the law.
A good faith answer to the question; classification hinges on damage done to the United States if it is released. So for example, a law might constraint or enforce the usage of a capability against an enemy, and this, of course would hang on some sort of spectrum also probably defined in law or in an agency interpretation. The agency interpretation is also probably classified and so as you start applying that spectrum, you enter gray areas and niches, and extremes, and so you have to ask a lawyer to disambiguate. And so this lawyer's interpretation is now the fulcrum on which employment of classified US capabilities is based. So therefore, teleologically this lawyer's interpretation has to be classified because it all goes back to whether public knowledge of this capability will damage the United States interest. if you know what the lawyer's interpretation is then you know the spectrum if you know the spectrum then you know the capability then you can damage the United States.
I guess when you have secret courts, it's something that starts to make sense.
I still can't understand how a government can work with some courts where everything is secret. That's something almost literally lifted out of The Process, but the Kafka book is an allegory for a kind of madness, not something that works.
different countries have different platforms or mechanisms where interpretations of law are discussed, in Belgium for example there are "rondzendbrieven" by which say judges discuss how to collectively misinterpret the law.
from a US perspective, isn't this diametrically opposed to the concept of "void for vagueness"? : the moment the interpretation of ostensibly non-vague law is under discussion by professionals is the moment said law is invalidated.
Any government side stepping law by interpreting law in any different manner than how it is written is breaking that law. In my opinion laws should not be interpreted at all and parliament should make any bug fixes rather than allowing courts or administration to interpret laws in any other way other than how its written down in the law.
I get why that may reflexively seem right but such a blanket proscription would go off the rails and lead to unintended consequences you definitely don't want. It's simply not possible to write a law both specific enough yet broad enough to cover all cases. You or I can read a plainly worded law and think "There's no way this can be misconstrued, gamed or subverted" and, sadly, we'd be wrong.
> parliament should make any bug fixes rather than allowing courts or administration to interpret laws in any other way other than how its written down in the law.
It's certainly possible to theory-craft completely new and different governance, legal and justice systems from scratch which have different sets of constraints and trade-offs, but then it's a long conversation and unrelated to the existing U.S. system. If we limit ourselves to starting from what the existing U.S. system is and proposing modifications which are actually both constitutionally and logistically possible, then forcing all interpretation and clarification to be passed by congress would require monthly revisions, immediately breaking an already dysfunctional congressional system.
I think it's worth mentioning that in the U.S. system, judges interpreting application of laws passed by elected representatives is a feature not a bug. The U.S. system was designed to be adaptive and self-gating, so each of the three branches of the government have built-in checks and balances on the other two. Setting aside current politics, on a long time-horizon like the last ~50 years, I think the U.S. justice system, as imperfect as it is, is actually serving its designed purpose far better than the other two.
Usa is a common law based system where court judgements also serve as precedent rulings. It is more or less regarded as law even though its not passed by parliament/legislature.
There is another system, civil law based systems where law is passed by parliament and doesn't depend on any court precedents or court interpretation.
Might as well have just courts and call it as adaptive system instead of acknowledging that is isn't a good enough system. Europe has done better in this regard. Checks and balances hardly works in usa. Plenty of news on subverting various constitutional guarantees is example that it failed to work.
Proper democracy needs properly functioning non-lazy legislature. Making vague laws and calling it a day and leaving it for judges and lawyers to interpret based on whichever way the wind is blowing isn't democracy.
Legislature can also work 40 hours a week. Things can be more functional rather than dysfunctional. Active democracy and direct democracy where people can veto laws if necessary, in case representatives collude to pass draconian laws, would be the best kind of democracy. Only that can prevent erosion of rights.
lol “we don’t feel like following the law so we just picked some fresh dog poop and yelled about bad things that were unrelated and then did whatever we want and invented these funny little games with paper thin jokes everyone is going to pretend is valid so we could do whatever we wanted to anyway lol”.
> I don't really understand how it can be in any way justified in any country that's even pretending to be a democracy?
You're not misunderstanding. It really is against everything most Americans think their government is allowed to do. To your question, the 'classified' part is what you think it is: secret. 'Interpretation' is the tricky part.
Unfortunately, laws and regulations aren't exactly clear and over time situations change so one important role of the court system is interpreting how, when and whether the words in a law apply in a specific context. Courts at different levels do this all the time as cases with unique situations arise. Sometimes it's as simple as deciding if a horse counts as a vehicle in a state law which says "no vehicles on this type of road." Assuming that ruling survives appeals without being overturned, the judge will have justified the basis and, hopefully, some clear reasoning for why a horse does or doesn't count as a vehicle. That judge's ruling then becomes part of the "precedent" (aka 'body of case law') attached to that law. In effect, such precedents become part of the law since they can clarify if and how the law applies in certain situations.
So whether some action is or isn't against a law can't solely be determined by just reading the law. You have to do some interpretation, which includes looking up any relevant precedents and weighing them. A single prior ruling from one local municipal court has low weight. The main job of the Supreme Court is resolving conflicting precedents set by lower courts, so a SCOTUS ruling has a lot of weight and multiple SCOTUS rulings over time, each successively refining and narrowing (or occasionally reversing) their prior interpretations, carries maximum weight. All of this happens in the open and, in the long run, I think SCOTUS manages to eventually get most things, if not perfect, pretty close to right.
Hence, the answer to "Is this legal" can be a bit tricky when the law is new or there aren't decades of court precedents. So lawyers have to do research and assess how a court would probably rule on a given situation. That's called "a formal legal opinion" and it's provided in writing, usually including research and justifications, like references to existing case law, as well as legal reasoning supporting the opinion. Anyone can hire a lawyer to research and assess if X action violates Y law (but if you get sued for relying on the lawyer's opinion, they won't be on the hook - you will). It's called an opinion because that's really all it is.
When a govt agency wants to know if they're allowed to do X under Y law, they ask the justice dept to assess and provide a formal opinion just like any company might ask their corporate counsel to. This is often routine but can be very consequential. Where this can go horribly wrong is when these govt lawyer opinions are classified top secret. For example, we all know torturing prisoners is against U.S. law, so in the 2000s the military and CIA asked the Bush Justice Dept to provide a secret legal opinion on whether certain 'enhanced interrogation' techniques met the legal definition of torture. And they got what they wanted, a written legal opinion that waterboarding isn't torture. The Obama Justice Dept issued a secret legal opinion that droning a teenaged American citizen in Somalia, who posed no exigent threat (but had the wrong Dad), did not meet the legal definition of murder. After it happened and was no longer secret, Senator Rand Paul was the only politician willing to stand on the floor of the senate and say killing a U.S. citizen without any legal due process was first degree murder authorized by a sitting U.S. President. While it's true his Dad was sort-of a terrorist (the real terrorists were happy to use him for propaganda but being an American, they never really trusted him). The dad was arguably an enemy combatant and maybe you could make a case he was an "exigent threat", but the kid wasn't and didn't. Reasonable people can differ on acceptable levels of 'collateral damage' (aka killing foreign innocents) but U.S. law is clear, non-combatant American citizens who aren't a clear and immediate threat are a hard, bright line. They get a judge and jury, not a drone.
Senator Ron Wyden is on the Senate intelligence committee, so he gets oversight on what intelligence agencies are doing and sees the secret legal opinions they're relying on. And he's saying the U.S. govt is relying on a secret legal opinion to do something in secret which is obviously, very, VERY wrong - but he's forbidden from telling us what it is because they made it top secret. For context, Ron Wyden has been a Senator and on the intelligence committee for a while and is pretty much a straight-shooter, not known for hyperbole or politically-motivated grandstanding. He'll call out his own party when he feels they're seriously wrong and he gets no benefit from making a big deal over this. His own party isn't supporting him and wishes he'd shut up about it. Yet for the last six months he's been signaling "DANGER, DANGER" in interviews, speeches and in writing over and over again - so I'm going to assume whatever it is is way beyond the Snowden revelations and probably in the neighborhood of the worst things we can possibly imagine.
The perverse thing is that the pretense for keeping it secret is to prevent 'foreign adversary governments' from knowing what it is, but it's clearly about domestic spying on U.S. citizens - and Russia and China probably already know exactly what it is (and are like, "Hmph amateurs, we've been doing that to our citizens years").
Usa is functioning in a way that is not how it is supposed to function in a democracy. There should not be anything hidden from any elected representatives as long as they are a citizen.
Civil law based systems are a more sane alternative to common law based system that relies on precedents. Law should be discussed in legislature and legislature must oversee and fix the law appropriately rather than make vague laws and leaving it to judges or others for interpretation. Due to not relying on precedents, the law is also easy to understand and apply and follow and enforce in civil law based systems. Cases also takes less time overall compared to common law based justice system.
Elected representatives are the authors or developers of law. Everyone else is users of law. Users cannot be allowed to change interpretation of law as anything other than how it is written.
Law made for horses and then vehicles got invented and law needs more clarity? Ask legislature to discuss and add new law for vehicles or modify existing law to also handle vehicles.
> The perverse thing is that the pretense for keeping it secret is to prevent 'foreign adversary governments' from knowing what it is, but it's clearly about domestic spying on U.S. citizens - and Russia and China probably already know exactly what it is
I think you're trying to hard to dismiss the justification here. There are certainly techniques for monitoring communications that use justifiably classified technologies that were probably developed to monitor communications of adversaries.
Imagine the use of which is helping keep American spies in Iran safe and the knowledge of the technique could help Iran identify those people. That's a perfectly reasonable classification of the technique.
What makes the interpretation of the law secret is that it mentions this hypothetical technology.
Imagine they have the technology to hear speech through walls passively using your WiFi signal. That technology is classified and they have the legal opinion that this doesn't violate the fourth amendment.
Wyden being concerned about whatever this is isn't surprising really but he's always on the extreme end of these interpretations, which I usually agree with, but judges typically don't agree with him.
I think it's probably generous to say the legal justification they are using has just as much chance of being legal as illegal. It would be nice to know what it was though because it can probably be defeated.
> There are certainly techniques for monitoring communications that use justifiably classified technologies
Wyden and others who are privy to what this is have made clear this is NOT about means or methods. This isn't about how the spying is done, it's about whether it's legal for the NSA to ever spy on U.S. citizens by ANY means. Existing law is very clear, it's absolutely not ever okay - no exceptions. It's completely irrelevant whether they're steaming open envelopes to read your junk mail or using a secret orbital mind-reading satellite to read your deepest private thoughts.
Experts like lawyers from the ACLU think it's something like a legal opinion which re-interprets the "absolute, no bulk spying on U.S. citizens ever" rule by claiming "it's not 'spying' if the govt pays a third-party commercial data collection service to give them the data voluntarily." That opens a backdoor for the govt to now back-link metadata and build one composite profile that includes all the private info the federal, state and local govt has ever had on you since birth (tax, employment, DMV, voting, school, govt assistance, Medicare, social security, etc) with everything any bank, credit card, or store knows about you, with every phone call, text, email and cell phone location ping you've had since 2014, with every bit of behavioral data Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc have about you.
To be clear, this is not "with probable cause they could get a warrant from a judge to send a supoena to each of those providers." This is something more like "they already have all that data in one searchable database but without this new secret legal opinion, as soon as it was clear the person was a U.S. citizen they could NOT look at it.
Now they can sit in a chair, and with just your phone number, email address, license plate or a facial ID match from a traffic camera to your driver's license, passport, Facebook profile or TSA airport photo, then instantly search for every single person you've communicated with in the past 3 years and every person they've communicated with and have an AI examine all that data from all those people and have a full 600 page report available in 15 seconds containing 7 million unique pieces of private data from 17,000 people that's instantly searchable - every email, every text, every purchase, every license plate scan, every location ping. No judge, no warrant, (and according to several recent reports), no record it ever happened, who did the search or under what pretext.
Everyone paying attention already knew it's been possible to do this for a decade. And everyone knows the government ALREADY does this for non-U.S. citizens. We just trusted that the government could not do it with U.S. citizens because the constitution and dozens of SCOTUS rulings make it so clearly ILLEGAL. But just like waterboarding and droning teenagers were once so clearly illegal, one secret legal opinion redefined "Spying" just like "Torture" was redefined in the 2000s and "Murder" was redefined in the 2010s - what the 4th Amendment has absolutely forbidden for 250 years instantly became legal to an invasive level Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton couldn't have dreamed in their worst nightmares.
To add a little bit to your comment, the US invented the term "enemy combatant" to evade the Geneva Convention rules about prisoners of war. And it also gave itself the right to designate whoever it wants as an enemy combatant.
You have the law, you have precedent, best not to get on the naughty list.
Inventing the term "enemy combatants" as a label for people who don't wear uniforms isn't the problem. The problem is not even affording them the rights guaranteed to prisoners of war.
> Spying on American citizens is a bipartisan point of agreement
Has been. Make it a priority in primaries. It hasn’t been to date—the overlap of privacy concerned Americans and the lazy and nihilistic who reject the political process is almost a union.
To add to this, it's completely dumb to think that any party is necessarily the same over decades. Look around. Most of what you see today is reactionary. Hold on to party views from 10 or 50 years ago, and you won't get elected today. Both parties are in turmoil in terms of public support.
Historical "bipartisan did X" means nothing today. The time is always right now to define what a future party should be. It's a great time to destroy the old and reimagine the new.
I seem to remember that Senator Wyden's public warnings (over a decade ago) that the government was spying on Americans was one reason for President Obama to go on national TV and lie to Americans.
Senator Wyden has a long history of warning the public on surveillance abuses.
You can't say this. We have no idea. There is nothing about (s/the law of physics/US history) that pushes (s/cancer cure/the right to privacy) a long time away.
Don't mind me, just repurposing one of your old comments to save time.
That's Wyden as Wyden, not because he is a Democrat. Some of the strongest proponents of these intelligence authorities, and in many cases the literal authors of bills expanding these powers, have been leading Democrats e.g. Feinstein.
There is no credible version of history where Democrats as a party are not enthusiastic supporters of these surveillance powers. They've been actively complicit the entire time.
The cynical (wizened) part of me has to wonder how much of Feinstein's support for surveillance maps back to how many of her constituents see the intelligence community as an addressable market.
To that point, she was on the Committee for Intelligence, so of course she was going to lean the direction of giving Intelligence Community what they wanted. I'd expect someone on Government Oversight to be the one to try to reign it back in, but doubtful any in modern times have the moral fortitude to push back especially under Comer's leadership.
There’s still a sizable portion of the party as of right now that is against surveillance powers in a way that doesn’t really exist on the other side.
The Republican Party doesn’t really have an equivalent to a progressive caucus. AOC and Bernie Sanders are highly influential Democratic caucus members on record against state surveillance, with one of those two being a top candidate for the 2028 presidential elections. There is no such dynamic in the Republican Party.
May I suggest tweaking your mental model. Mike Johnson was THE MOST vocal opponent of mass surveillance, he was supposed to be the one to whip a republican congress to finally end Section 702.
Then he was made Speaker and literally overnight, flipped. In his words "I went to the SCIF and got the confidential briefing from sort of the other perspective on that, to understand the necessity of Section 702 of FISA and how important it is for national security. And it gave me a different perspective."
What his "briefing" was we can only guess. But there is a pattern on BOTH sides of the aisle they people are against mass surveillance, until they are put into positions of power and access to compartmentalized, classified info - and then they aren't. (for the record please dont interpret this as defense of anyone aforementioned, if you think that you're misreading me)
> What his "briefing" was we can only guess. But there is a pattern on BOTH sides of the aisle they people are against mass surveillance, until they are put into positions of power and access to compartmentalized, classified info - and then they aren't.
It seems like there are two plausible explanations for this.
The first is that they have a list of atrocities allegedly prevented by the system and most politicians are too witless or spineless to ask the question of whether they could also have been prevented in a variety of other ways.
The second is that they're using the system to e.g. influence public opinion / elections and then once they feast their eyes on the one ring, most politicians aren't inclined to throw it into the volcano.
Publish your private messages to friends, family, partner.
These idiots who say "nothing to hide" usually have the most to hide, and lose. And they can't see how something yesterday was legal and today isn't, can still be used against you.
How much comes from this being the minority party in the 119th Congress? Note that when FISA section 702 was extended in April 2024, the House was 147 Democrats in favor, 126 Republicans in favor, 59 Democrats opposed, and 88 Republicans opposed.
When the other guys have control of the government, it is to your party's advantage to deny additional powers to the government. When your guys are in power, vote away to add more power to that. That's just human nature, and has been a staple of political history since the founding of American democracy.
I'm surprised so many people miss this dynamic on so many topics. It's politics 101 to flip flop based on who gets credit, what the news cycle is pushing at that moment, which specific right/topic it applies to etc and then blame the opponent for the same action they themselves took or will take at another point in time. All the while the constituents argue about how their representative or party is somehow superior.
> I'm surprised so many people miss this dynamic on so many topics.
It's because the overwhelming majority of people, including the large majority of 'educated, "informed', Democrat voters', remain even as of 2026 far too tribal and addicted to cheering for the team they've been cheering for.
Another thing is that facing this reality is very scary. It's much easier to sleep at night if you believe that most of it isn't a show, including most of the tribe they've been voting for. The alternative is to admit that most of it is all one big theatre, and they've been scammed for their whole lives. That's another thing, admitting one has been scammed is painful and makes many feel like they're stupid, that they should've known better. Most much rather just not think about it too hard and believe "in the good of people".
In a sense I'm surprised that you're surprised as it's quite basic and well-studied human psychology.
Of course in reality the situation is even worse, as pessimizer aptly points out in a sibling comment.
> It's because the overwhelming majority of people, including the large majority of 'educated, "informed', Democrat voters', remain even as of 2026 far too tribal and addicted to cheering for the team they've been cheering for.
It feels like you might be doing the same thing, just in the other direction. Any time a political party does something that is positive for Americans, it should be cheered and rewarded.
I still remember 62 Democrats voting against the Patriot Act while being labelled as traitors. We can cynically call them theatrics, or we could reward them for doing what is right in order to promote them doing more of the right things. The positive response to incentives is a basic and well-studied human psychology.
No, you still don't get it. There is ample evidence that the large majority of those 62 are only willing to do so if they're 100% sure it's going to pass anyway. This means their only goal is to gain brownie points, without actually supporting it.
That should not be rewarded, it should be punished. Ironically, it's even more harmful than voting in favor of it when it's going to pass. It's literally the worst thing one can do, because it muddies the waters.
The very few who clearly would vote against it even if it might not pass, yes, those should be rewarded.
The mismatched quotes are bothering me more than they ought to. :P
Not to distract from your main point, of course. You’re right. Democracy does allow the public to have some effect on policy but primarily it’s a mechanism for manufacturing the consent of the governed.
> When the other guys have control of the government
The most revealing part of the cycle comes around about once a decade, when for two years, the same party holds the White House and a majority in both houses of congress. They can pass whatever they really want and can't blame the other party when the things they've loudly claimed they stand for in every election, don't actually change. That's the only time those who are paying attention get to clearly see the difference between what the party claims to stand for when campaigning and what they really stand for. It's a sobering lesson and both parties do it equally.
That's when we see some extreme stage management to obfuscate the 'long con' both parties are running. Yes, a few things get passed but it's amazing how little of their long-time agenda really becomes law (or becomes law that's loop-holed and/or nerfed). It's so surprising how many politicians in the majority party suddenly discover rationalizations to not vote for a bill their party supports and which they should be for. Weirdly, these bills always fail to pass by just one or two votes. What are the odds of that happening - over and over again and only during those super-majority years?
Somehow, the politicians in the majority party from the 'safest' districts are the ones who suddenly find rationalizations to vote against what they loudly campaigned on (and will shamelessly campaign on again). Why is it only the politicians who stand little risk of losing their seat in the next election? Conversely, the politicians from the districts most at risk of losing to the other party somehow find the "courage of their principles" and don't sell out on traditional 'party-line' campaign issues. Ultimately, the big-money lobbyists feeding both political machines don't care how their goals are achieved or who votes for what. All that matters is any strongly worded law that goes against their interests either fails to pass by one vote or gets watered-down in committee and then passed.
Exactly right. The inutile minority sees it as their job to make a stink. It's all for show when the vote passes. They are not voting independently, they are rounded up before a vote to ensure success or failure. The vote itself is not what determines a bills passage or not, it's all the strings being pulled before hand; the lobbying, the alliances, the bargaining.
You're being very kind. Many people in Congress know that their base is overwhelmingly against this, so the corrupt ones (the vast majority, especially any with good committee assignments) vote against it only if they're sure there's absolutely no chance of it failing. Whether or not they're currently in power doesn't matter. There's horsetrading even between parties to make sure donor/intelligence-supported bills will pass, but also to give people whose elections might depend on it the opportunity to vote against them.
The last thing that Republicans want is another America First libertarian troublemaker in Congress, and the last thing that Democrats want is some lecturing lefty. It's about business, not beliefs. Also, it's probably increasingly about blackmail.
When this math somehow fails (which happens every once and a while if somebody surprises them), it throws everything into chaos.
> Many people in Congress know that their base is overwhelmingly against this
I have learned that "overwhelmingly against" is a useless concept in politics. The important question is "do they care about it enough to sway their vote?"
There is probably overwhelming support for Ukraine to defend itself in the US (and Europe), but very few people are willing to change their vote based on Ukrainian interests over their own {financial security, culture war, pet issue (abortion, guns, Epstein List, etc)}. If it's not a top-5 issue, it's not relevant to a political campaign.
2A voters and rabid anti-choice voters are polarized enough to actually show up at the capital or threaten their representatives. Extremely few people will dot at for issues lower down the priority list.
It's a dog and pony show though, they take turns being the one to blame. How did the same record look when democrats were in power? I bet most democrats opposed the debate then and most republicans supported it.
As a libertarian, saying that there is a "Libertarian" wing of the Republican party is specious, especially in 2026. The Massie primary showed what happens if you actually go against the fash.
Rand Paul seems to be coasting on his father's reputation of having libertarian principles, while mainly sticking his head up for "culture war" bullshit. His main skill seems to be finely walking this line - show me a libertarian cause he openly supports that bucks a "culture war" narrative.
And I have no idea why you would have even mentioned Hawley. In general every politician talks a good game appealing to some libertarian causes (because most individuals want freedom, duh!), while readily supporting authoritarianism in some way or another.
Give data, please. Without it, this assertion is useless:
> There’s still a sizable portion of the [Democratic] party as of right now that is against surveillance powers in a way that doesn’t really exist on the [Republican] side.
No, they voted to not bring the extension bill to the floor. This was a vote on a house rule, which is necessary to affirm before debating and voting on the bill itself.
Wyden is the ranking D member of the intelligence committee (ie would be chair under a D senate). He's not some maverick bucking his party, this is the expression of the party position.
President Obama was the President of the United States when he went on late night TV and assured everyone that the government didn't spy on Americans at all, after Wyden's warnings and the Snowden revelations.
Fun fact, parties, and more importantly the people in them change and evolve over time. They aren't stagnant. For example, we see this with the Republican party which use to hold claim to things like law and order. But times change, and so do parties.
So just because something was a certain way 20 years ago doesn't mean it's still that way today. That would be CRAZY to suggest that.
Unfortunately they have, on the key things that everything else flows from. That doesn't mean that can't change at some point. That would take sizeable evidence that isn't there yet, though.
Republicans have de facto done away with the Constitution, and the rule of law, and are shockingly corrupt - are you saying that democrats are on board with that?
If not, then they're not the same.
We get this in the UK too, Tory party literally steal £Billions using emergency powers in COVID to send money to companies totally unrelated to the contracts made. Then a Labour MP has a complex mortgage arrangement and misses paying a few thousand pounds of tax. And people come in with 'they're all the same'.
It's stunningly moronic to entirely ignore the scale of issues in this way. Well, moronic or intentional deception.
Republicans and Democrats in terms of their cultural values are completely different.
Where they are not so different is in terms of the economic policies they create. One often notices that a few years later, Democrats extend and expand the Republican's policies.
Who started a class war and financial deregulation in the 1980s? Raegan.
Who enabled total deregulation? Clinton the in 90s with help and council from the Secretary of the Treasury Larry Page. By unshackling the banks from any rules, the Washington bureaucracy would enable the conditions for the 2008 financial crash.
And who does Obama appoint to oversee the 2008 financial crash? Larry Page.
Both parties have totally betrayed the American people in favor of the American oligarchs in terms of economic policy.
Who benefits from deregulation and offshoring? Not the now bankrupt rust belt states. Who benefits from bailouts for the banks but no bailouts for the average person? The Wall Street insiders.
There is billions in overt corruption, and you're right, that's wrong. But trillions that have been stolen from the average person via quantitative easing and given to big business to buy back their own shares.
They're on board with doing away the rule of law, yes.
When in power, did they do something against the NSA blatantly breaking the law, illegally surveilling hundreds of millions of citizens? No.
Did the 99.9% of them not named Lina Khan do something to uphold the existing antitrust laws? No.
Did they time and time again change the rule of law to suit corporate donors, lobbyists, megacorps? Yes.
Did they jail people who were actually trying to help uphold the rule of law by reporting on illegal torture facilities? Yes. [0]
> Then a Labour MP has a complex mortgage arrangement and misses paying a few thousand pounds of tax. And people come in with 'they're all the same'.
Arresting thousands of grandmothers for holding up some cardboard, and defending it, is enough to show that they're representing the same interests. How much privatization did they actually undo over the last 30 years? Right, none, they either directly aided it or looked the other way.
Given that a group of people is not typically of a single mind about the vast array of things for which a position might be expressed [0], the continued presence of Wyden reflects an ambivalence within the group and/or a controlled opposition to cite when the music stops.
Voting for the lesser of two evils is still voting for evil. The good people simply aren't attracted to power or acting as representatives. The good people don't step forward to try and move the levers of the system, because when they do they learn very very quickly that they're not up to "playing the game". Because they usually aren't sociopaths.
I mean he has Congressional privilege, he literally cannot be touched for reading anything he wants into the Congressional record. I wonder why more lawmakers talk about things instead of just revealing The Thing and leaning on their special rights as elected legislators.
> Spying on American citizens is a bipartisan point of agreement.
Not an American, but I can totally understand the need of governments to spy on its citizens that it has EVIDENCE of being involved in behaviour or activities that threaten the nation.
For example - if it had evidence that certain citizens were involved in espionage of their country, and they were thus passing on serious information to actors or other states that were intent on using that information to harm the nation, I would most definitely want those citizens to be spied upon.
Such evidence could be:
Engaging in, or communicating with, known extremist organisations or forums known to be frequented by such individuals.
Gonna take a wild guess that this has to do with the purchase of privately (and lawfully) collected bulk data for the purposes of mass surveillance. Who needs PRISM or xKeyscore when people willingly purchase TVs and install weather apps that spy on them 24/7? The open legal question has been whether the government is free to do whatever it wants with the data it purchases.
You know what I love? We have spent over 100 years going back and forth on party politics. It has done nothing to move the bar on justice. The democrats silently allow the same things under the radar while the republicans do things out in the open. Its the carrot and the stick approach. Populism isn't working. We need to focus on systemic change. Both parties are filled with institutionalists that will do nothing to stop the real abuses because they gain significantly by keeping things they way they are..
> We have spent over 100 years going back and forth on party politics. It has done nothing to move the bar on justice.
You think there have been no advancements in "justice" since 1926? Either you are being hyperbolic, have no knowledge of history or you have a very idiosyncratic definition of justice.
There are people alive today who lived under Jim Crow laws. Is there any argument you would like to make that getting rid of them and enacting the other associated legislation in the 60s was not an advancement?
Obama wasn't always pro-surveillance though. He campaigned on ending the NSAs domestic spying program. Only after he was elected did he suddenly praise the NSA publicly and greatly expand their spying powers.
Obama taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. He spoke passionately about the dangers of domestic spying programs and against the Patriot Act. Maybe he was lying the entire time just to be elected, but he was extremely convincing.
Personally, I suspect that once in office he was either shown something that scared him so much that it genuinely made him believe that violating the rights of every American citizen was necessary, or he was strong armed into supporting what they were doing and expanding their abuses. I imagine the NSA had no shortage of dirt on him and his family just as they must have on every politician, CEO, parent, and child in the country.
You're right, but bringing up the assassination of a terrorist just isn't convincing to a lot of people, regardless of it should be.
Luckily there are other things that all reasonable people will find it hard to disagree with: The Obama government crackdown of Occupy Wall Street and his appointment of one of the fathers of the CIA torture program as NatSec Advisor, who promptly went on to jail whistleblowers of torture with Obama vouching for it.
What? The guy who was killed was actively committing violence and had done so multiple times before. Continuing to evade capture isn’t a get out of jail free card to keep evading the US and keep making bombs.
The guy got more chances than the average US resident who would get shot by the cops for less
I was reading his Wikipedia page and it makes me want to seek out some of his writings to get an idea of the thought process of his followers. I won't be doing that though because I'll probably be put on a watchlist. It's the same fascination I have about traditional cults and really anyone who has extreme/fringe beliefs.
Not sure why they have to provide a solution in order to talk about the issue.
The only solution is to elect better people. I know some people who hoped that Trump would be that in 2016 but he is just more of the same.
I do disagree with grandparent that nothing has changed; the Supreme Court has shored up the First Amendment rights over the last 50 years and with Chatrie v. United States it looks like they are expanding Fourth Amendment protection.
Now if the Executive and/or Legislative ignore those protections then not much can be done.
Similar to Denver, city votes out Flock, Mayor does a backdoor. Unless they elect someone new and/or bring the Mayor up on procedural charges or something then nothing will change.
> The only solution is to elect better people. I know some people who hoped that Trump would be that in 2016 but he is just more of the same.
The system is rigged in such a way where that isn't a possibility. Look at the history of our country. ITS NOT WORKING.
The system has to change before we can elect better people. I cant believe I have to point this out with all thats going on... Every election the same arguments and the same responses.
So to fix the system, people should throw up their hands, not vote and just complain about it in the comments instead?
I'll vote in primaries for the candidate that most represents my views and continue to not let perfect be the enemy of good on election day. Lip service and small improvement officials are always much better than officials that negatively target me or my community.
No. We have to direct our energy to a different way of doing things. Voting inside of a corrupt system not working. Its like going into a mafia controlled city and voting for criminals expecting different results. How many decades need to elapse for this to be clear to you?
Saying that calling out Trump's corruption while also calling out everyone else's corruption is a both sides argument reads as a my side doesn't have problems argument.
Trump sucks. So does Pelosi, so does Bush and Clinton. What, we need to rank how much they suck?
JFC man, if it's important to you to know how much each of them screwed you, then build a table or something. To me the degree doesn't matter because a little is bad enough.
I think you hit the nail on the head. It IS important to know how much each one screwed you. A quick search shows various outlets saying Trump has enriched himself to the tune of between $1.6B and $4B during his presidencies. Doing the same search on Biden gets estimates of $15M from books and speaking, and a Republican-led House influence peddling page alleges as much as $20M having been received by "the Bidens and their associates".
Using that scale as a proxy Trump is two orders of magnitude more corrupt than Biden.
Weird you don't feel the same obligation. Recommending more of the same is always safe somehow, even when it continually fails. The ability of certain people to implicitly trust the system that is now headed by a wrestling valet game show host is infinite.
Will you still believe in it when he gets a third term?
> covert both sides argument
As if somebody should be embarrassed about this. Extreme partisans think "both sides are doing it" is a logical fallacy, because of course their side isn't doing whatever you're talking about, if it's bad.
How can you change anything when the system is built with a fundamental flaw, the constitution never incorporated ethics, it was supposed to be up to the people to vote in ethical people, but that failed. The ones that benefit are corrupt and won’t change it, and good luck on getting enough people voted in power with a conscience to change it and not be swayed by power and money.
Part of the solution is to make bribery illegal so that people are less likely to be swayed by money. It'll be hard to get the people who have been stuffing their pockets with cash in exchange for selling out the American people to agree to limit their ability to do that now. Instead we're going in the opposite direction with the recent Supreme Court ruling making bribery legal as long as you call it a "tip" or "gift" after the public official gave you what you wanted.
It literally is both sides though. Congress, courts, and executive all love spying, have for decades. Do you have evidence that the Democrats have tried to curtail anything?
The 6th Amendment was written to prevent secret courts. The English Star Chamber was frequently secret and you could be put on trial without knowing what evidence/testimony was brought against you. The Star Chamber was also why the 5th Amendment exists.
A secret court is arguably not even a court. It provides no legitimacy whatsoever. It's a bunch of people in a room making a decision. I don't understand why they even bother. Just conduct your dictatorship by issuing decrees over a Zoom meeting.
It's a word game. By calling it a court, legitimacy is implied. Most personalized TV channels are called "social media" even though they're really "personal TV" because the former sounds like it connects you with your friends. The NSA isn't a "surveillance state", it's "intelligence gathering". It's not a war, it's a special military operation. And so on.
> Most personalized TV channels are called "social media" even though they're really "personal TV" because the former sounds like it connects you with your friends.
This is clearly untrue; they're called "social media" because they developed inside other things that were already called "social media".
I came to say the same thing. The secret courts and even the administrative agency courts should not exist. They are a violation of our rights. Any court where the prosecution, judge and jury are all government employees is a gross abuse of authority.
In Australia are have organisations with titles like "Independent Commission Against Corruption". Their remit is to investigate political corruption and corruption in the public service (like say the police). They come in two flavours. In some states their deliberations are done in public. In other states they are secret.
Over time it's become evident open model is far, far more effective at ensuring the public has confidence the people running the place are doing the right thing. It does risk the occasional unwarranted "witch hunt". But that threat ensures powerful people avoid doing things that while above board, could arouse public suspicion. Less suspicious acts mean higher trust in the government.
The US doesn't have the most freedom. There's precisely zero evidence that people in the US are the most free, except for the fact that its government tells them they are. But North Korea tells its people that even harder.
Make a joke about immigrants on twitter in the UK and you get arrested. Meanwhile there are more heat deaths in Europe than gun deaths in America. Most of Europe can't be called a free country anymore.
>Meanwhile there are more heat deaths in Europe than gun deaths in America.
This is a weird metric of freedom. It seems more like a reflexive, zeitgeist based response than any actual freedom metric.
In my experience the country with the most freedom is Canada. I have never seen anything like it. It's just so easy to do business there. Even if it wasn't that the laws enable it (they do) but even the way people operate. Being able to have a discussion with a customer without 12 rounds of a solicitor trying to insert dumb loopholes into a contract, costing the potential customer more in billable hours to their solicitor than the cost of the contract.
The USA is just junk. States that want to be Feds, Feds that want to be States, and when you cut through all the red tape you still have to deal with Litigious, ignorant Americans. Oh and if you want to import or export something just forget it.
"Oh but we have guns" is basically the exception that proves the rule, in a country where people get detained for such crimes as "Being beloved childrens author Mem Fox" or "Said naughty things on reddit" or "Working while waiting for Immigration to sort their status out".
I’m on my phone, so it’s a little bit difficult for me to find clear examples, but I think this post talks about some of those freedom of speech violations.
I might be completely wrong, but it seems like news articles are not repeating the messages that caused the arrest. They just seem to be reporting that the arrest happened and high-level description of the content.
The evidence is our humor. We can make fun of our leaders without being thrown into prison or worse unlike say China or North Korea. Try posting a Winnie the Pooh meme in China and see how fast it gets censored.
well i am chinese, we do cannot post Winnie the Pooh meme(with ugly xi image), the origin carton figure is fine.(we also have a show about it in shanghai disney i think)
what troubles me is why 'humor' is the most important thing? shouldn't be the action/output of the gov? i mean, you vote someone, he promise something, he cannot do it, he breaks the law, then nothing happens, you make fun of him. then after 4 yeras, you select another person. and go on. Biden didn't get punised for what he has not achieved. So will Trump.
how does that improve your life? how can people live like this? how is that 'democray'? its very hard for our people to understand.
our neighbor counties like Mongoel and Philippines, they have a system like USA, and the popeople can make fun of their leaders all the time, i can see that from reddit. but they basiclly live in a shit hole, with a small populartion and vast resources, and they are poor than average chinese. i never understand the deulusion of them.
I disagree. The US has the 1st and 2nd amendments, which gives us protection from tyranny in the government, and which lets us criticize the government without repercussion. No other country grants its citizens those rights, and you can see the effects of that worldwide, where despite it all, we still have our free speech!
How does the 2nd amendment protect you? Are you allowed automatic weapons, grenades? You're not even allowed swords. And if you call for violence, which is what the 2nd amendment might enable, you won't find protection via the 1st amendment.
Many jurisdictions have laws against carrying blades longer than X (it varies) and any reasonable definition of a sword would fall under that category.
In the US at least automatic weapons are nominally legal at the federal level after hefty tax stamps and background checks but states / local jurisdictions can and do regulate more / outright ban them.
That's just moving the goalposts. Nothing in there says it's illegal to own any of those things. You just might not be able to carry a sword (there are carve outs for reenactments in most places btw) and you might have to move or pay more for automatic weapons.
The 2nd amendment was designed to protect the 1st amendment. As for how, it was supposed to give citizens teeth against their government if it ever turned tyrannical one day. Armed citizens were one of the factors that made the American Revolution successful, which probably why so many Americans hold onto the idea.
Whatever one may think of gun control, it's clear the 2nd Amendment is on a much poorer footing.
In a number of states, you need to take a safety course before you're allowed to purchase a gun.
Compare that with the 1st amendment. If they passed laws saying "You can say whatever you want in public, but only after you've taken this course that informs you on what is acceptable and unacceptable to say in public", would you say there is free speech?
Or "You are free to practice any religion, but only after you've taken a course that ..."?
> The First Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting Congress from abridging the right to assemble and petition, was not intended to limit the action of the State governments in respect to their own citizens, but to operate upon the National Government alone.
Before the 14th Amendment, your hypothetical was quite possible at a state level.
The colonies were expected to defend themselves. In reality that meant every man possessed and drilled with arms whether the were part of a formal militia or not. If there was an attack people would be "called up" to the militia. There is no requirement of belonging to a formal militia in the 2nd amendment. While times have changed, it was expectated that you were proficient with arms in the case that a formal militia was required to be formed.
IMO This is an even more naive (and dare I say intentionally malicious) bad-faith misinterpretation of the facts.
His death had nothing to do with the Constitution, it was because of a trigger-happy, confused cop who had his back to the guy, then noticed a gun next to him (that another officer previously put there). The US government had no part in that situation at all.
I don't understand the issue since no law can physically prevent people from breaking it.
Of course cops are the government, but they're also humans that make mistakes and commit crimes themselves. But this isn't actually related to some greater constitutional crisis or anything, unless you have some evidence that suggests they were instructed to act the way they did... but I've never seen anyone come forward with that yet.
The constitution is just some rules people wrote up generations ago. It's not a magic spell that has power by itself, it is only effective as a social contract as long as power structures agree to follow it.
If armed government enforcers break it with impunity, what good is it?
If you can't exercise your rights without being murdered by a state sanctioned thug, then it's not really a right. Also, has he been indicted yet? charged?
It’s more akin to “stand your ground” laws (whether you’re for or against them). In situations where you reasonably fear for your life, like surrounded by an angry mob of people in the street busting up your car.
It’s not a blank check to run over people holding signs you don’t like as you drive home from work.
> Under French law and Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), authorities may prohibit particular demonstrations when serious public-order risks make restrictions necessary and proportionate. They cannot impose an indiscriminate prohibition on peaceful assemblies simply because previous demonstrations have descended into violence.
You just described the mechanism by which they did. Sure, they didn't make it illegal nationwide permanently, because what serious country would do that and hope to maintain control? The real threat is in the vague exceptions for specific cases, which they have now used.
Turns out letting monopoly capital control your government policy leads to short term gains at the expense of long term viability. Maybe the VCs can make some money off government surveillance and defense contracts before being completely eclipsed?
Not exactly a democratic country, but came across these instructions what to do in China when police has detected a VPN in your household, or you have posted something
The process that's described (appear cooperative but deny everything) is the same thing you should do in the US if the police come to your door and accuse you of drug possession. Every country does this violation of freedom, they just use different excuses.
This is an example of a thought-stopping cliche. It is a slogan to prevent the listener from thinking. Or at the least, to divert the listener's thoughts back to a more politically acceptable (to the speaker) rightthink.
> Section 702 only permits the targeting of non-United States persons who are reasonably believed to be located outside the United States. United States persons and anyone in the United States may not be targeted under Section 702.
Under the Israel-US agreement for surveillance, that section was circumvented, as the NSA and other agencies are feeding raw unminimized tappings directly to the ELINT/SIGINT agencies and getting relayed back. [1]
This was also true for Five Eyes/EU sharing too, even though with this year's legislation some EU countries have offered Israel a direct access to INT feeds.
Yes, the "fourteen eyes" group. It used to be five (basically all the English speaking countries) but they coerced more European countries to join and now it's fourteen.
That's pretty much what "intel sharing" is. They get other countries to spy on Americans and receive that data. In return they give their spy data on citizens of that country to that country.
I meant while the original five eyes are sharing raw sigint (we can also disagree on the level of sharing proportions), Israel gets also access to raw sigint intended as 3rd-country -> US.
The integration in the cyber domain is a different tier compared to the default the US has with other eyes.
When you stop judging systems by their design intent and instead by their outcomes, it makes perfect sense. Democracies inexorably diffuse responsibility until its component entities are distant enough from punishment that hiding power levers becomes an easy advantage to grab for, whether the justification is internal or external conflict. All that's needed is for the necessary overseers to be rubber stamps.
Democracies that are real democracy also exists and they don't have systemic corruption such as hiding behind complexity or interpretations or misinterpretations, or repeatedly pushing to pass draconian laws. Number of real democratic sovereign countries can be easily counted in one hand and may be it can extend upto two hands. Countries with monarch who has any power are not exactly democratic, uk for example even though it has democracy like parliament. Transparency and real oversight by citizens is required in a democracy. What if representatives make draconian laws? People need to be able to veto it. What if representatives refuse to make a law people want? They need to be able to make it directly. Systems can be designed to make these happen regardless of the size of the country or its population count.
Most of those countries have not been democracies for very long. The United States used to have many of those checks and balances, all of which were systematically ripped out by the relentless political machine. Give it another century, and even with proportional voting or citizen's veto's, things will still probably end up in a similar state.
You give up some rights for internal stability and in theory better social benefits.
In America, our social contract allows 10 guilty men to go free rather than imprisoning one innocent.
That's the myth anyway. Back in reality America is rapidly marching towards authoritarian capitalism.
Jump outs , black sites, indefinite detention.
>Naturally the common people don't want war . . . but after all it is the leaders of a country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or parliament or a communist dictatorship. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.
-Hermann Goering
Thus we're always at War.
War on Drugs.
War on Illegal Immigration.
War on Crime.
War on you.
So what we've already deported multiple born in the US citizens. This is war!
You guys are never able to manage one. That guy is a Mexican national, not an American
The children aren't deported, their parents are. They, of course, get the choice to take their children with them. You don't want to split apart families, right?
Of course #3 isn't a deportation so I didn't even look at it
From what I've seen it looks like he has a birth certificate in both countries? If he does and his US birth certificate says he was born in the US then he is a US citizen.
Freedom isn't really about whether your country is a democracy or not. Dictatorships can be free (for a while) and democracies can be unfree (Hitler was elected).
The difference is willingness to act on said spying. Luckily, despite the massive surveillance capabilities the U.S. "Intelligence" Community has, they don't seem to really mess with regular citizens all that much. This gives some credence to the "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about" point of view, but only if you can guarantee you have nothing to hide (which can change drastically depending on who is in power, hence why I don't believe in this - the classic example being that hiding one's religion in and around Germany in the 1930s and early 40s was not seen as important until it was really important).
China and Russia (and to some extent, the UK now) will absolutely act on the spying they do. Or just act and say they had a good reason. China and Russia are dictatorships. One of them has a very competent and hard-working population which succeeds in spite of the dictator, the other is a gas station with nukes that survives solely because of said nukes.
> they don't seem to really mess with regular citizens all that much.
Except they do. The NSA has been handing over intel over a decade ago:
> A former federal agent in the northeastern United States who received such tips from SOD described the process. “You’d be told only, ‘Be at a certain truck stop at a certain time and look for a certain vehicle.’ And so we’d alert the state police to find an excuse to stop that vehicle, and then have a drug dog search it,” the agent said. [1]
Sure these were criminals, but who knows how many “undesirables” were prosecuted or targeted for some crime anybody commits?
Your position only makes sense if you think that the groups the US gov operates against aren't "regular citizens".
The US gov is acting on intel against its citiczens all the time, regular or not.
Personally, I don't like the right wing groups it's infiltrated, but I still think that is a reasonable example.
For me, more pressingly, there are current investigations going on in Minnesota from the US gov's "Puppetmaster" operation that actively infiltrated and monitored a highly diverse set of anti-ICE groups.
Historically this is nothing new; the US has been infiltrating "anti-government" groups for decades. AIM, the panthers, ELF, ALF, labor unions, MOVE, etc are all easy examples of domestic groups that the US gov has broken at some point or other.
Your position only work if you classify folks such as the Minnesota 15 as "terrorists" or some such. Which, hey, folks like the US Gov try to do. But at that point the point is kind of tautological: if you have "something to hide" then you are a legit target of government sanctioning.
That's not very satisfying to me, but plenty of folks in the US find it to be a just-fine principle.
Well your assumption is that they are not using it; they weren't able to use it all before.. Times are changing; Now they can use and use it a lot.. military Ai infrastructure that is to connected political arm will read and process everything and they can target their apposition... its just matter of time. Absolute power = absolute corruption.
How it is done, everybody knows how.. backdoors in servers, back door in communication equipment, decryption method for of all that goes through fiber in entire world.. Massive data storage to store everything. How is not an issue; every node and communication, hardware and software has a backdoor.
Do they have the right to tap into world communication as well as their own is the issue? They are not challenged by apposing parties and their own population or people have given up.
Perhaps there will be a disaster is waiting with all these backdoors and Ai supremacy.
> Perhaps there will be a disaster is waiting with all these backdoors and Ai supremacy.
Absolutely. AI only needs to bring the keys, and everything else will be waiting for it on a silver platter. And AI is really good at making spare keys.
Isn't that what all the hype about National Security Letters (and related events from those years) were all about? I never thought any of that went away, the media just stopped reporting on it. We had Lavabit and Snowden showing us how unhinged these things can get.
Even more unhinged once you realize that trust fund kids are regularly placed in three-letter agencies because those role provide literal immunity. Much better than just a simple diplomatic passport from some micro nation.
It's not only about assassinations or intelligence, things like organizing beauty pageants or producing snuff porn are valid duties for secret police. And this does not even touch the whole KKK thing. Those are the people writing the NSLs.
The debate about reapproval of section 702 is all theater. Does anyone genuinely believe the government would stop surveilling us if the authorization expired?
I guess that depends, do you think that an administration would be willing to prosecute its predecessors for doing it if it were against the law? Maybe you don't because of mutually assured destruction, but lately there's been a lot more appetite for prosecuting people in the other party (with some charges being extremely trumped up, if you'll pardon the pun), so I don't know that this is a given anymore.
I'm increasingly of the opinion that state secret classification of our law enforcement systems should only exist for a year max. We've abused the system to shield evil people from accountability and to hide evil actions by our government, and that has to change.
This capability virtually guarantees that the next generation of Nelson Mandellas, Julian Assanges, <insert national activist of your choice>, etc. gets nipped in the bud long before they become an actual headache to the ruling class. This is why the owners of every country come together to support these technologies, without exception and regardless of political coalition membership.
Going all the way back to lenin these guys were often controlled by third party states anyhow with the goal of destabilizing power structures. Almost like a virus you unleash. That is why lenin was shipped via railcar by germany to the russian empire in 1917 at the height of war. The plan worked and the third rome fell apart shortly thereafter.
He was akin to a molotov cocktail they could toss at any oppressed populace in europe and have non small odds of civil war. It might be more fair to say they controlled him the same way an incendiary bomber controls fire.
You're right, a genuine activist used by the state for cynical motives is called a Useful Idiot. Ironically, this turn of phrase was traditionally said to be coined by Lenin, although modern scholarship no longer espouses this view.
> This capability virtually guarantees that the next generation of Nelson Mandellas [..] gets nipped in the bud long before they become an actual headache to the ruling class.
They are way ahead of you. The intent is not just to monitor, it's also to predict/preempt and to shape.
The whole sales pitch of Palantir is effectively marketing talk for pre-crime. And if we see what the russians and the chinese are doing online to shape our opinions I can only imagine what the US capabilities are in this realm.
This is not just about stopping the next Mandela. This is about knowing who the next Mandela is before future Mandela even knows it. And this about shaping the opinion of all potential future Mandela's into a neutered state.
That only protects him from non-Senate consequences. He could certainly be ejected from the Senate. Can the Senate try and convict him of breaking national security secrecy laws?
He would most likely not be chosen for the intelligence committee anymore if he did that, it would only be worth before retiring or for something really huge
they are doing much more than reading private messages in real time; they are also manipulating, distorting, delaying, etc based on the content; even going so far as to muck with your local programs (such as VPN) to throttle internet connectivity so that the most sensitive information cannot propagate virally as it should.
The AI matrix prison is real and discussions about it are censored.
This is why I laugh at the face of anyone demonising china and on the moral high horse. At least the Chinese government doesn’t lie about their surveillance. It’s far more insidious what the American government does, it just outright lies and indoctrinates its citizens.
Then, not completely relevant. The US government was not *hiding secret court rulings about how it spies on Americans" since the day the FBI was founded.
Spying on Americans? You could say that, perhaps, but you would have to say it about every law enforcement organization (including the local police) since 1776.
What the actual article is talking about is a massive extension, not covered by the regular "get a warrant in court" mechanism. Saying "just like the FBI" ignores how different this is, and how alien to the Constitution.
All the big federal law enforcement agencies engage in various degrees of unconstitutional surveillance. The fact that the FBI also gets a lot of warrants as part of its job doesn't change that. The FBI also did it first and has been doing it since it's inception. Heck they named their HQ after the guy who really took it to the next level.
What else could have been expected when this fake imitation America started creating the FISA courts and created the treasonous 5-eyes network of circumventing the Constitution like traitors do.
The article could have been interesting but by fundamentally misrepresenting the structure of the American federal government they made it impossible to take seriously.
I had a dream last night that the government had a database that corps sent in "opt-out" info from people. Anytime someone opted out of a surveillance system (e.g. ad tracking, etc...) that info got sent to the government as a signal that the person is sus. They took the "if you have nothing to hide" logic to its full conclusion.
The only good thing is that at least under capitalism (not a system I'm a fan of) this is difficult to do (well as long as the owners of said companies weren't sheep), and like most conspiracies is very hard to enforce, there would be a leakage in a program so broad as this.
But it was a disturbing concept. Merely by signalling you didn't want to be watched made you more watched.
what was always remarkable about surveillance is that given these immense intrusive powers and a total panopticon, this is still the best they can do.
fentanyl epidemic, mass illegal migration and trafficking, networks of terrible abuse, flagrant public corruption, infiltration of schools and academia, conspiracies to demolish the entire western world, and yet even with total information awareness or some variant, these crimes occur in the open.
the scandal isnt that they are spying, its what they have explicitly chooseb to allow and enable.
You are assuming they are trying to do the best for citizens or best to abide by the constitution. They are not. In fact they actively try to side step the laws and constitution, and have these kind of secret interpretations ready. Would also like to remind you that no democratic country would allow smuggling of drugs by its own government apparatus but the usa has done that, so the drug epidemic isn't that shocking outcome.
What enrages me is the longstanding precedent that the government cannot read your letters without a warrant, but apparently electronic messages that are directly analogous are fair game.
> The Trump administration has until November 6 to answer the senators.
How convenient that this is right after the midterm elections. If they maintain control, the republicans can simply decide to ignore this requirement without penalty.
Yep this authoritarian movement is much bigger than the parties. We will see, again and again, how much it matters and the go back to the same old game every election and everyone will forget about how they have been played the first time. Im so sick of this corrupt system.
If that were true, he wouldn't have had a second term. Americans are finally experiencing his fuckery first hand with fuel prices, which is why he is going to lose. The lies weren't much of a concern. Fox News is still I believe the biggest cable channel in the country.
> Fox News is still I believe the biggest cable channel in the country.
Not only is this true, but most of the legacy media landscape also shifted hard to the right (in large part due to massive corporate consolidation) over the past decade, so Fox isn't even especially unique anymore in terms of being extremely right-partisan.
"Wyden has also warned about a classified interpretation of Section 702 that he says multiple administrations have relied on and refused to declassify. “When it is eventually declassified,” he said in March, “the American people are going to be stunned that it took so long and that Congress had been debating this authority with insufficient information.”"
Spying on American citizens is a bipartisan point of agreement.
Can please someone explain the concept of a 'classified interpretation' [of law] to me like I'm 5? I know the concept exists, but I don't really understand how it can be in any way justified in any country that's even pretending to be a democracy?
It's not justified and it can never be. Keeping information secret is only justified if releasing it would put a person in serious danger or compromise a police/military operation. And even then it must be balanced against the public interest in transparency, strictly time limited and narrow scoped (no blacking out whole documents).
I don't see how releasing an interpretation of a law could ever compromise law enforcement. Or actually I know how, it's because it would prove the way they do mass surveillance is illegal.
The problem is modern America doesn't see it that way. Any time the government does something evil they just say it's for "national security" and no one questions them. It's like a Winter Soldier password that makes courts go blank and say yes to anything.
I feel the role of the Press is to root out these stories and publish them.
To me the defining moment of the Press abdicating their job was when the NYTs reported the second gulf war. This was the end of me reading it. The Sunday times was staple reading growing up.
https://newrepublic.com/article/146481/new-york-times-bury-s...
https://fair.org/home/20-years-later-nyt-still-cant-face-its...
Press increasingly started abdicating their job when journalism was no longer financially independent of the people and institutions it is supposed to scrutinize.
> Keeping information secret is only justified if releasing it would put a person in serious danger or compromise a police/military operation.
Sure, but the obvious pro-government response is “revealing that the government is doing bad things reflects badly on the government and damages its reputation at home and abroad.”
Which is true, of course!
> “revealing that the government is doing bad things reflects badly on the government and damages its reputation at home and abroad.”
This is -incidentally- how the ancient English "state secrets privilege" got introduced into US law.
In the 1940's, godawful maintenance resulted in the crash of a bomber over US soil and the death of all three of the civilians on board the plane. The widows of the dead civilians sued the government and demanded the accident report. The government refused to provide the report, claiming the privilege because "national security", and courts all the way up to the Supreme Court agreed.
In the early 2000s, the accident report was declassified. Inspection revealed that the only real reason to refuse to release it was to both prevent government embarrassment and to avoid having to pay out -IIRC- nearly a quarter million in 1940's USD to the widows.
Given its enormous potential for unchecked abuse, along with the fact that the first ever invocation of it was abusive, courts should refuse to permit its use.
There is also a genuine case for National security in that - during the Second World War - releasing that information would (IMO) let the enemy know what maintenance was being held back, in bombers.
That war ended at some point.
Absolutely - but another war quickly replaced it (actually several did)
WRT to this instance - I would likely argue that 50 years should have been more than enough time keeping the embargo
[delayed]
The planes in question would have been obsolete by that point, also those planes from WW2 would have already been widely distributed among allied (including Soviet) countries
This seems fairly obvious, clearly vast amounts of possible wrongdoing, once exposed, could genuinely damage reputation abroad to some degree.
So how did such a law ever survive scrutiny?
It seems like a blanket ban on exposure of nearly all possible wrongdoing.
> It seems like a blanket ban on exposure of nearly all possible wrongdoing.
And a proportional increase in power goes with that ban on exposing wrongdoing. Which is absolutely the goal of secrecy in government.
Once you have secret courts and secret warrants, secret interpretation of the law seems like a natural, if not necessary, progression.
This is basically it.
Imagine, for example, a case is about someone disclosing the location of nuclear arms to their spouse. Maybe even accidentally. If they are brought up on charges about this, national security doesn't want the fact that a case is about nuclear weapons to be public information. They further don't want it disclosed who was told about them (as the spouse wouldn't be subject to charges). That's basically where a secret interpretation and ruling would ultimately enter. The courts can't disclose what the ruling was nor what the case was even fully about.
> Imagine, for example, a case is about someone disclosing the location of nuclear arms to their spouse.
The location of most US nuclear weapons are public. Moreover, if you suspect that the location of some you intend to be secret may have been compromised then the obvious sensible response is "move them" rather than "keep even the legal theory of the case a secret forever".
This is why the primary ones whose location is intended to be a secret are on submarines -- submarines are easy to move around.
Why can't they? They can redact names of individuals in a case like that. "Oh some person who was married to some other person who works for some agency knows where nukes might be". That's not a risk.
They could even redact larger portions of the case and still release the interpretation in some form.
Because it's very hard to stop accidental or incidental information leaks. For an opinion to be rendered, generally they also attach the case facts which lead to that ruling. Heavy redaction means it becomes almost impossible to use that ruling as precedent but also runs a real risk of exposing state secrets. For example, which judge made the ruling? Well if you get that you can start pulling information about the days the judge was active and a short list of the people the judge was hearing cases for.
All it takes is 1 accidental redaction or someone who did something silly like using a black highlighter on a PDF and now where the nukes are stored is public information.
There's also simply information that can be gleaned just based on the location that the hearing is taking place. This came from x court in x district, well then it's likely a nuclear silo is roughly in that county or surrounding counties.
These courts don't have public lists of who was being tried.
The specific location of the court, and even identity if the judge, can be redacted. We don't have to use the case as precedent.
A federal court tried to conceal the identity of a judge who has been reprimanded.
Claude was able to work out who it was in less than 10min based on stringing together facts that remained and seemed irrelevant. Journalists uncovered the identity independently using different means. (The ability of Claude to do this was not revealed until the other journalists had gone public and confirmed the identity.)
This example requires a secret ruling but not a secret interpretation of the law.
From warrantless wiretapping to extra judicial renditions, the US government has been a rogue state for sometime. Now they just have low-grade criminals and racists running the show, buddied up with media owners, O&G and the mic.
Yeah but they are only targeting bad people, so it's OK.
Everything you ever do will go in a data center. Forever.
Bluffdale.
privacy is a luxury only afforded to the most deserving who clearly are worthy of digital god hood , toil in the mines prole and watch your tongue
Yeah but I don’t use my real name online. /s
I can get the idea that for some cases it can be in the public's interest if specific court hearings are closed, or if it's secret that certain court hearings or entire cases even exist. There is a lot of potential of abuse (and a documented history of abuse), but at least the idea makes sense
But I can't see a public benefit to keeping the principles such a court uses secret
Why would you assume there needs to be a public benefit?
It’s a pretty obvious outcome. Attorney-client privilege applies to the executive branch of the government as much as it applies to anyone else, and not just in national security matters.
There are whole laws that are classified and cannot be discussed in open court. Ignorance of the law is no defense when you are charged with violating a law and that’s still true in the USA even if the law is classified and you are not authorized to know what it says.
Check out Gilmore v Gonzales for an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilmore_v._Gonzales
Airlines can refuse to carry people whose name starts with a vowel, if they want to. That's a principle of free business.
Is there more to this than the Wikipedia article says?
While it does say:
> Gilmore also complained about being subject to "secret law", when the airlines and government refused to show the directive under which they were requesting ID.
nowhere does the article say the courts commented on the complaint, let alone ruled on it.
Nor does the article say anything about "Ignorance of the law is no defense when you are charged with violating a law". The reason given was instead:
> there was no constitutional violation because air passengers could still travel without identification if they instead underwent the more stringent "secondary screening" search.
I'm not saying your wrong, just that the article you offered as evidence doesn't go as far as your claims.
The Wikipedia article is poor, but I cannot not edit it as I attended parts of the trial and in fact discussed the suit with john before he filed it so by Wikipedia’s rules I can’t edit it. Anyway a lawyer would be a better person.
John’s appeal is online. Section [10] of the decision discussion describes being subject to a law he cannot have access to. The judge saw it but could not discuss it in court, with the plaintiff (John Gilmore) or even his lawyer. Also the orders (law) are agreed by the court to be arbitrary, changing day by day and being arbitrarily different between airports. But since the Airport personnel knew them tht was good enough for the court.
And though the discussion mentioned that he could take a bus or walk, the conclusion, [21], said that his rights were not violated at all, both the bus precedent and the legality of being subject to unknown law. The brief Wikipedia page mentions only the former, though the latter was the primary factor of the complaint.
No one is giving the real answer to this question which is that these laws touch on the legality of capabilities the US does not want to acknowledge it has, and so it won't. Secret information in the US is like glitter - if you touch it, it spreads to you too.
It's not just "here's this law about spying in the abstract," which can be talked about in the open; it's "we're using the MIND READER 5000 under Title XVII powers delegated by the President to the Mind Reading Organization to conduct mind reading on persons X, Y, and Z." The legal briefings and rulings on the facts will by necessity reveal the nature of the technology or technique in question, and so, they are classified. If I recall correctly it was a big deal for the ACLU to get a lawyer a security clearance so they could interact with these courts, but I could be misremembering.
The real problem here is that if someone files a claim against the government and the government wants to keep the facts of the case a secret, you still need the case to have an outcome, and then you have two options.
The first is that you assume whatever is being kept a secret is something that doesn't favor the government, and then the government loses the case by default. This is the more reasonable option, because it mitigates the perverse incentive for the government to declare something a secret whenever it makes them look bad. But it has the obvious problem that then the government would lose some cases it should have won if the information could be published.
The second is that you assume whatever is being kept a secret is something that favors the government, and then the government wins the case by default. But that doesn't solve the problem -- you then have members of the public losing cases they should have won if the information could be published. And doing this makes the perverse incentive worse.
So why do we accept the second one instead of the first one?
Oftentimes the government drops the case. When people get convicted for things they did on Tor, and don't settle, the government often drops the case so they don't have to reveal how they got information about activities on Tor.
When Germany, which doesn't play by the same rules, got DiDW and then Boystown, that was quite revealing on how authorities can break Tor.
That's when the government is the one bringing the case to begin with. The issue is, if the government e.g. kills your spouse, why should the perpetrators get off scott free because the perpetrators want to keep something a secret?
Imagine the public tried to do that. Sorry, IRS/DoJ, the defendant is refusing discovery because it's a secret and without that you can't prosecute them.
Really what it is is they had a lawyer say, "We can justify massive spying on citizens via [long long list of arguments and precedents]", the security apparatus would like to keep the veneer of legality that provides and knows if what they were doing was known there would be massive backlash and the law would be changed to make it more clearly illegal so they keep that interpretation secret. Basically going on the logic that they don't have to tell Congress or the Courts how they screwed up the 4th Amendment and it's not their job to fix it.
Likely these cases are part of the FISA court members appointed by Chief Justice currently John Roberts.
The chief justice also appoints the court FISA appeals go to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_Justice_of_the_United_St...
You’re government agency, and you ask your lawyers about how the law operates given a particular set of circumstances.
In response, the lawyers provide you with advice about how they think the law applies to this situation, and what findings they think a court would make given the evidence etc available.
Information subject to attorney-client privilege (as this information would be) is exempt from release under FOIA anyway. Dropping a security classification on top adds protections against unauthorised release by insiders.
Sometimes there are good reasons for this, such as to protect particular technical capabilities that are easily circumvented if adversaries know that they exist, or to protect human sources who might end up dead if found out. Other times, there are no good reasons to do this but without knowing all the circumstances it’s impossible to tell either way.
Read it as classified misinterpretation of laws, so that they can do illegal things and claim this loophole when caught.
Usa has constitution and its government more or less side steps it in many things. Might as well have no constitution. Usa is a jungle for practical intends and purposes compared to europe or any functional democracy. This is the problem with allowing interpretation of law rather than taking law as it is written. Someone somewhere can interpret it in completely twisted way and throw away the spirit of the law.
A good faith answer to the question; classification hinges on damage done to the United States if it is released. So for example, a law might constraint or enforce the usage of a capability against an enemy, and this, of course would hang on some sort of spectrum also probably defined in law or in an agency interpretation. The agency interpretation is also probably classified and so as you start applying that spectrum, you enter gray areas and niches, and extremes, and so you have to ask a lawyer to disambiguate. And so this lawyer's interpretation is now the fulcrum on which employment of classified US capabilities is based. So therefore, teleologically this lawyer's interpretation has to be classified because it all goes back to whether public knowledge of this capability will damage the United States interest. if you know what the lawyer's interpretation is then you know the spectrum if you know the spectrum then you know the capability then you can damage the United States.
The clear answer is that wrongdoing also needs to be ‘too big to fail’. Small, low impact shit will get you targeted.
Something so heinous it would make who-shot-Kennedy a forgotten footnote? Everyone is going to cover that up.
Kid, to keep you safe I need to keep a secret. Mommy loves you, go back to sleep!
Not what you’re asking for, but see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_law#Secret_law_in_the_U....
I guess when you have secret courts, it's something that starts to make sense.
I still can't understand how a government can work with some courts where everything is secret. That's something almost literally lifted out of The Process, but the Kafka book is an allegory for a kind of madness, not something that works.
different countries have different platforms or mechanisms where interpretations of law are discussed, in Belgium for example there are "rondzendbrieven" by which say judges discuss how to collectively misinterpret the law.
from a US perspective, isn't this diametrically opposed to the concept of "void for vagueness"? : the moment the interpretation of ostensibly non-vague law is under discussion by professionals is the moment said law is invalidated.
Any government side stepping law by interpreting law in any different manner than how it is written is breaking that law. In my opinion laws should not be interpreted at all and parliament should make any bug fixes rather than allowing courts or administration to interpret laws in any other way other than how its written down in the law.
> laws should not be interpreted at all
I get why that may reflexively seem right but such a blanket proscription would go off the rails and lead to unintended consequences you definitely don't want. It's simply not possible to write a law both specific enough yet broad enough to cover all cases. You or I can read a plainly worded law and think "There's no way this can be misconstrued, gamed or subverted" and, sadly, we'd be wrong.
> parliament should make any bug fixes rather than allowing courts or administration to interpret laws in any other way other than how its written down in the law.
It's certainly possible to theory-craft completely new and different governance, legal and justice systems from scratch which have different sets of constraints and trade-offs, but then it's a long conversation and unrelated to the existing U.S. system. If we limit ourselves to starting from what the existing U.S. system is and proposing modifications which are actually both constitutionally and logistically possible, then forcing all interpretation and clarification to be passed by congress would require monthly revisions, immediately breaking an already dysfunctional congressional system.
I think it's worth mentioning that in the U.S. system, judges interpreting application of laws passed by elected representatives is a feature not a bug. The U.S. system was designed to be adaptive and self-gating, so each of the three branches of the government have built-in checks and balances on the other two. Setting aside current politics, on a long time-horizon like the last ~50 years, I think the U.S. justice system, as imperfect as it is, is actually serving its designed purpose far better than the other two.
Usa is a common law based system where court judgements also serve as precedent rulings. It is more or less regarded as law even though its not passed by parliament/legislature.
There is another system, civil law based systems where law is passed by parliament and doesn't depend on any court precedents or court interpretation.
Might as well have just courts and call it as adaptive system instead of acknowledging that is isn't a good enough system. Europe has done better in this regard. Checks and balances hardly works in usa. Plenty of news on subverting various constitutional guarantees is example that it failed to work.
Proper democracy needs properly functioning non-lazy legislature. Making vague laws and calling it a day and leaving it for judges and lawyers to interpret based on whichever way the wind is blowing isn't democracy.
Legislature can also work 40 hours a week. Things can be more functional rather than dysfunctional. Active democracy and direct democracy where people can veto laws if necessary, in case representatives collude to pass draconian laws, would be the best kind of democracy. Only that can prevent erosion of rights.
All laws are interpreted.
Basically any time a corrupt regime is hiding something it's either bad or embarrassing--usually both.
lol “we don’t feel like following the law so we just picked some fresh dog poop and yelled about bad things that were unrelated and then did whatever we want and invented these funny little games with paper thin jokes everyone is going to pretend is valid so we could do whatever we wanted to anyway lol”.
> I don't really understand how it can be in any way justified in any country that's even pretending to be a democracy?
You're not misunderstanding. It really is against everything most Americans think their government is allowed to do. To your question, the 'classified' part is what you think it is: secret. 'Interpretation' is the tricky part.
Unfortunately, laws and regulations aren't exactly clear and over time situations change so one important role of the court system is interpreting how, when and whether the words in a law apply in a specific context. Courts at different levels do this all the time as cases with unique situations arise. Sometimes it's as simple as deciding if a horse counts as a vehicle in a state law which says "no vehicles on this type of road." Assuming that ruling survives appeals without being overturned, the judge will have justified the basis and, hopefully, some clear reasoning for why a horse does or doesn't count as a vehicle. That judge's ruling then becomes part of the "precedent" (aka 'body of case law') attached to that law. In effect, such precedents become part of the law since they can clarify if and how the law applies in certain situations.
So whether some action is or isn't against a law can't solely be determined by just reading the law. You have to do some interpretation, which includes looking up any relevant precedents and weighing them. A single prior ruling from one local municipal court has low weight. The main job of the Supreme Court is resolving conflicting precedents set by lower courts, so a SCOTUS ruling has a lot of weight and multiple SCOTUS rulings over time, each successively refining and narrowing (or occasionally reversing) their prior interpretations, carries maximum weight. All of this happens in the open and, in the long run, I think SCOTUS manages to eventually get most things, if not perfect, pretty close to right.
Hence, the answer to "Is this legal" can be a bit tricky when the law is new or there aren't decades of court precedents. So lawyers have to do research and assess how a court would probably rule on a given situation. That's called "a formal legal opinion" and it's provided in writing, usually including research and justifications, like references to existing case law, as well as legal reasoning supporting the opinion. Anyone can hire a lawyer to research and assess if X action violates Y law (but if you get sued for relying on the lawyer's opinion, they won't be on the hook - you will). It's called an opinion because that's really all it is.
When a govt agency wants to know if they're allowed to do X under Y law, they ask the justice dept to assess and provide a formal opinion just like any company might ask their corporate counsel to. This is often routine but can be very consequential. Where this can go horribly wrong is when these govt lawyer opinions are classified top secret. For example, we all know torturing prisoners is against U.S. law, so in the 2000s the military and CIA asked the Bush Justice Dept to provide a secret legal opinion on whether certain 'enhanced interrogation' techniques met the legal definition of torture. And they got what they wanted, a written legal opinion that waterboarding isn't torture. The Obama Justice Dept issued a secret legal opinion that droning a teenaged American citizen in Somalia, who posed no exigent threat (but had the wrong Dad), did not meet the legal definition of murder. After it happened and was no longer secret, Senator Rand Paul was the only politician willing to stand on the floor of the senate and say killing a U.S. citizen without any legal due process was first degree murder authorized by a sitting U.S. President. While it's true his Dad was sort-of a terrorist (the real terrorists were happy to use him for propaganda but being an American, they never really trusted him). The dad was arguably an enemy combatant and maybe you could make a case he was an "exigent threat", but the kid wasn't and didn't. Reasonable people can differ on acceptable levels of 'collateral damage' (aka killing foreign innocents) but U.S. law is clear, non-combatant American citizens who aren't a clear and immediate threat are a hard, bright line. They get a judge and jury, not a drone.
Senator Ron Wyden is on the Senate intelligence committee, so he gets oversight on what intelligence agencies are doing and sees the secret legal opinions they're relying on. And he's saying the U.S. govt is relying on a secret legal opinion to do something in secret which is obviously, very, VERY wrong - but he's forbidden from telling us what it is because they made it top secret. For context, Ron Wyden has been a Senator and on the intelligence committee for a while and is pretty much a straight-shooter, not known for hyperbole or politically-motivated grandstanding. He'll call out his own party when he feels they're seriously wrong and he gets no benefit from making a big deal over this. His own party isn't supporting him and wishes he'd shut up about it. Yet for the last six months he's been signaling "DANGER, DANGER" in interviews, speeches and in writing over and over again - so I'm going to assume whatever it is is way beyond the Snowden revelations and probably in the neighborhood of the worst things we can possibly imagine.
The perverse thing is that the pretense for keeping it secret is to prevent 'foreign adversary governments' from knowing what it is, but it's clearly about domestic spying on U.S. citizens - and Russia and China probably already know exactly what it is (and are like, "Hmph amateurs, we've been doing that to our citizens years").
Usa is functioning in a way that is not how it is supposed to function in a democracy. There should not be anything hidden from any elected representatives as long as they are a citizen.
Civil law based systems are a more sane alternative to common law based system that relies on precedents. Law should be discussed in legislature and legislature must oversee and fix the law appropriately rather than make vague laws and leaving it to judges or others for interpretation. Due to not relying on precedents, the law is also easy to understand and apply and follow and enforce in civil law based systems. Cases also takes less time overall compared to common law based justice system.
Elected representatives are the authors or developers of law. Everyone else is users of law. Users cannot be allowed to change interpretation of law as anything other than how it is written.
Law made for horses and then vehicles got invented and law needs more clarity? Ask legislature to discuss and add new law for vehicles or modify existing law to also handle vehicles.
Absolutely fantastic comment (sorry, I know it's not the done thing here to say so).
> The perverse thing is that the pretense for keeping it secret is to prevent 'foreign adversary governments' from knowing what it is, but it's clearly about domestic spying on U.S. citizens - and Russia and China probably already know exactly what it is
I think you're trying to hard to dismiss the justification here. There are certainly techniques for monitoring communications that use justifiably classified technologies that were probably developed to monitor communications of adversaries.
Imagine the use of which is helping keep American spies in Iran safe and the knowledge of the technique could help Iran identify those people. That's a perfectly reasonable classification of the technique.
What makes the interpretation of the law secret is that it mentions this hypothetical technology.
Imagine they have the technology to hear speech through walls passively using your WiFi signal. That technology is classified and they have the legal opinion that this doesn't violate the fourth amendment.
Wyden being concerned about whatever this is isn't surprising really but he's always on the extreme end of these interpretations, which I usually agree with, but judges typically don't agree with him.
I think it's probably generous to say the legal justification they are using has just as much chance of being legal as illegal. It would be nice to know what it was though because it can probably be defeated.
> There are certainly techniques for monitoring communications that use justifiably classified technologies
Wyden and others who are privy to what this is have made clear this is NOT about means or methods. This isn't about how the spying is done, it's about whether it's legal for the NSA to ever spy on U.S. citizens by ANY means. Existing law is very clear, it's absolutely not ever okay - no exceptions. It's completely irrelevant whether they're steaming open envelopes to read your junk mail or using a secret orbital mind-reading satellite to read your deepest private thoughts.
Experts like lawyers from the ACLU think it's something like a legal opinion which re-interprets the "absolute, no bulk spying on U.S. citizens ever" rule by claiming "it's not 'spying' if the govt pays a third-party commercial data collection service to give them the data voluntarily." That opens a backdoor for the govt to now back-link metadata and build one composite profile that includes all the private info the federal, state and local govt has ever had on you since birth (tax, employment, DMV, voting, school, govt assistance, Medicare, social security, etc) with everything any bank, credit card, or store knows about you, with every phone call, text, email and cell phone location ping you've had since 2014, with every bit of behavioral data Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc have about you.
To be clear, this is not "with probable cause they could get a warrant from a judge to send a supoena to each of those providers." This is something more like "they already have all that data in one searchable database but without this new secret legal opinion, as soon as it was clear the person was a U.S. citizen they could NOT look at it.
Now they can sit in a chair, and with just your phone number, email address, license plate or a facial ID match from a traffic camera to your driver's license, passport, Facebook profile or TSA airport photo, then instantly search for every single person you've communicated with in the past 3 years and every person they've communicated with and have an AI examine all that data from all those people and have a full 600 page report available in 15 seconds containing 7 million unique pieces of private data from 17,000 people that's instantly searchable - every email, every text, every purchase, every license plate scan, every location ping. No judge, no warrant, (and according to several recent reports), no record it ever happened, who did the search or under what pretext.
Everyone paying attention already knew it's been possible to do this for a decade. And everyone knows the government ALREADY does this for non-U.S. citizens. We just trusted that the government could not do it with U.S. citizens because the constitution and dozens of SCOTUS rulings make it so clearly ILLEGAL. But just like waterboarding and droning teenagers were once so clearly illegal, one secret legal opinion redefined "Spying" just like "Torture" was redefined in the 2000s and "Murder" was redefined in the 2010s - what the 4th Amendment has absolutely forbidden for 250 years instantly became legal to an invasive level Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton couldn't have dreamed in their worst nightmares.
> This isn't about how the spying is done, it's about whether it's legal for the NSA to ever spy on U.S. citizens by ANY means.
It's about whether it's spying.
To add a little bit to your comment, the US invented the term "enemy combatant" to evade the Geneva Convention rules about prisoners of war. And it also gave itself the right to designate whoever it wants as an enemy combatant.
You have the law, you have precedent, best not to get on the naughty list.
They invented the term because they were being attacked by non-state actors who didn't wear uniforms.
There's a lot of stuff they do wrong but that isn't one of them. In this case, the Geneva convention was just written in a different time.
Inventing the term "enemy combatants" as a label for people who don't wear uniforms isn't the problem. The problem is not even affording them the rights guaranteed to prisoners of war.
If they could justify it, it wouldn’t be classified.
> Spying on American citizens is a bipartisan point of agreement
Has been. Make it a priority in primaries. It hasn’t been to date—the overlap of privacy concerned Americans and the lazy and nihilistic who reject the political process is almost a union.
To add to this, it's completely dumb to think that any party is necessarily the same over decades. Look around. Most of what you see today is reactionary. Hold on to party views from 10 or 50 years ago, and you won't get elected today. Both parties are in turmoil in terms of public support.
Historical "bipartisan did X" means nothing today. The time is always right now to define what a future party should be. It's a great time to destroy the old and reimagine the new.
> President Obama defended the U.S. government's surveillance programs, telling NBC's Jay Leno on Tuesday that: "There is no spying on Americans."
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/08/06/209692380...
I seem to remember that Senator Wyden's public warnings (over a decade ago) that the government was spying on Americans was one reason for President Obama to go on national TV and lie to Americans.
Senator Wyden has a long history of warning the public on surveillance abuses.
> Make it a priority in primaries.
lol what primaries?
the primaries where the person who won dropped out and was replaced with someone that literally no one voted for
It will never get declassified. Never. The people get weaker and more passive with time, the govt gets stronger and reckless and less accountable.
Please stop with the security/privacy nihilism, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27897975.
To be fair, the one raising this point, Wyden, is a Democrat.
That's Wyden as Wyden, not because he is a Democrat. Some of the strongest proponents of these intelligence authorities, and in many cases the literal authors of bills expanding these powers, have been leading Democrats e.g. Feinstein.
There is no credible version of history where Democrats as a party are not enthusiastic supporters of these surveillance powers. They've been actively complicit the entire time.
The cynical (wizened) part of me has to wonder how much of Feinstein's support for surveillance maps back to how many of her constituents see the intelligence community as an addressable market.
To that point, she was on the Committee for Intelligence, so of course she was going to lean the direction of giving Intelligence Community what they wanted. I'd expect someone on Government Oversight to be the one to try to reign it back in, but doubtful any in modern times have the moral fortitude to push back especially under Comer's leadership.
> she was on the Committee for Intelligence
So is Wyden.
There’s still a sizable portion of the party as of right now that is against surveillance powers in a way that doesn’t really exist on the other side.
The Republican Party doesn’t really have an equivalent to a progressive caucus. AOC and Bernie Sanders are highly influential Democratic caucus members on record against state surveillance, with one of those two being a top candidate for the 2028 presidential elections. There is no such dynamic in the Republican Party.
May I suggest tweaking your mental model. Mike Johnson was THE MOST vocal opponent of mass surveillance, he was supposed to be the one to whip a republican congress to finally end Section 702.
Then he was made Speaker and literally overnight, flipped. In his words "I went to the SCIF and got the confidential briefing from sort of the other perspective on that, to understand the necessity of Section 702 of FISA and how important it is for national security. And it gave me a different perspective."
What his "briefing" was we can only guess. But there is a pattern on BOTH sides of the aisle they people are against mass surveillance, until they are put into positions of power and access to compartmentalized, classified info - and then they aren't. (for the record please dont interpret this as defense of anyone aforementioned, if you think that you're misreading me)
> What his "briefing" was we can only guess. But there is a pattern on BOTH sides of the aisle they people are against mass surveillance, until they are put into positions of power and access to compartmentalized, classified info - and then they aren't.
It seems like there are two plausible explanations for this.
The first is that they have a list of atrocities allegedly prevented by the system and most politicians are too witless or spineless to ask the question of whether they could also have been prevented in a variety of other ways.
The second is that they're using the system to e.g. influence public opinion / elections and then once they feast their eyes on the one ring, most politicians aren't inclined to throw it into the volcano.
Third - a rogue IC that doesn't fully answer to congress or/nor the president
He finally got shown his personal blackmail folder, I assume.
If there is widespread illegal spying, any current or future public figure would have to be a priority.
The ones that speak up get the "if you don't have anything to hide" treatment. I rarely, if ever, hear that line come from the left.
Show me your nudes then.
Publish your bank accounts.
Publish your private messages to friends, family, partner.
These idiots who say "nothing to hide" usually have the most to hide, and lose. And they can't see how something yesterday was legal and today isn't, can still be used against you.
I seem to remember there was some left wing male influencer who posted his dick pics somewhere and said "there, now they can't be leaked"
but my daily dick pics to local politicians is "a custodial matter" apparently
They only want the pics you want to hide, duh.
Nothing to hide? Then publish the Epstein files. All of them.
They do. It's the entire Libertarian wing of the party.
I’ll concede that you are right, the libertarians are there. Rand Paul, Josh Hawley, they’re there.
Let’s look at the voting record.
The majority of house Democrats opposed being up debate on the FISA section 702 extension.
19 house Republicans joined the majority democrats in opposing the extension.
I’d say this still paints a picture of a Democratic Party being far less willing to extend FISA, and actually being majority opposed.
H. Res. 1175, 119th Congress
How much comes from this being the minority party in the 119th Congress? Note that when FISA section 702 was extended in April 2024, the House was 147 Democrats in favor, 126 Republicans in favor, 59 Democrats opposed, and 88 Republicans opposed.
When the other guys have control of the government, it is to your party's advantage to deny additional powers to the government. When your guys are in power, vote away to add more power to that. That's just human nature, and has been a staple of political history since the founding of American democracy.
I'm surprised so many people miss this dynamic on so many topics. It's politics 101 to flip flop based on who gets credit, what the news cycle is pushing at that moment, which specific right/topic it applies to etc and then blame the opponent for the same action they themselves took or will take at another point in time. All the while the constituents argue about how their representative or party is somehow superior.
> I'm surprised so many people miss this dynamic on so many topics.
It's because the overwhelming majority of people, including the large majority of 'educated, "informed', Democrat voters', remain even as of 2026 far too tribal and addicted to cheering for the team they've been cheering for.
Another thing is that facing this reality is very scary. It's much easier to sleep at night if you believe that most of it isn't a show, including most of the tribe they've been voting for. The alternative is to admit that most of it is all one big theatre, and they've been scammed for their whole lives. That's another thing, admitting one has been scammed is painful and makes many feel like they're stupid, that they should've known better. Most much rather just not think about it too hard and believe "in the good of people".
In a sense I'm surprised that you're surprised as it's quite basic and well-studied human psychology.
Of course in reality the situation is even worse, as pessimizer aptly points out in a sibling comment.
> It's because the overwhelming majority of people, including the large majority of 'educated, "informed', Democrat voters', remain even as of 2026 far too tribal and addicted to cheering for the team they've been cheering for.
It feels like you might be doing the same thing, just in the other direction. Any time a political party does something that is positive for Americans, it should be cheered and rewarded.
I still remember 62 Democrats voting against the Patriot Act while being labelled as traitors. We can cynically call them theatrics, or we could reward them for doing what is right in order to promote them doing more of the right things. The positive response to incentives is a basic and well-studied human psychology.
No, you still don't get it. There is ample evidence that the large majority of those 62 are only willing to do so if they're 100% sure it's going to pass anyway. This means their only goal is to gain brownie points, without actually supporting it.
That should not be rewarded, it should be punished. Ironically, it's even more harmful than voting in favor of it when it's going to pass. It's literally the worst thing one can do, because it muddies the waters.
The very few who clearly would vote against it even if it might not pass, yes, those should be rewarded.
> 'educated, "informed', Democrat voters'
The mismatched quotes are bothering me more than they ought to. :P
Not to distract from your main point, of course. You’re right. Democracy does allow the public to have some effect on policy but primarily it’s a mechanism for manufacturing the consent of the governed.
> When the other guys have control of the government
The most revealing part of the cycle comes around about once a decade, when for two years, the same party holds the White House and a majority in both houses of congress. They can pass whatever they really want and can't blame the other party when the things they've loudly claimed they stand for in every election, don't actually change. That's the only time those who are paying attention get to clearly see the difference between what the party claims to stand for when campaigning and what they really stand for. It's a sobering lesson and both parties do it equally.
That's when we see some extreme stage management to obfuscate the 'long con' both parties are running. Yes, a few things get passed but it's amazing how little of their long-time agenda really becomes law (or becomes law that's loop-holed and/or nerfed). It's so surprising how many politicians in the majority party suddenly discover rationalizations to not vote for a bill their party supports and which they should be for. Weirdly, these bills always fail to pass by just one or two votes. What are the odds of that happening - over and over again and only during those super-majority years?
Somehow, the politicians in the majority party from the 'safest' districts are the ones who suddenly find rationalizations to vote against what they loudly campaigned on (and will shamelessly campaign on again). Why is it only the politicians who stand little risk of losing their seat in the next election? Conversely, the politicians from the districts most at risk of losing to the other party somehow find the "courage of their principles" and don't sell out on traditional 'party-line' campaign issues. Ultimately, the big-money lobbyists feeding both political machines don't care how their goals are achieved or who votes for what. All that matters is any strongly worded law that goes against their interests either fails to pass by one vote or gets watered-down in committee and then passed.
Exactly right. The inutile minority sees it as their job to make a stink. It's all for show when the vote passes. They are not voting independently, they are rounded up before a vote to ensure success or failure. The vote itself is not what determines a bills passage or not, it's all the strings being pulled before hand; the lobbying, the alliances, the bargaining.
You're being very kind. Many people in Congress know that their base is overwhelmingly against this, so the corrupt ones (the vast majority, especially any with good committee assignments) vote against it only if they're sure there's absolutely no chance of it failing. Whether or not they're currently in power doesn't matter. There's horsetrading even between parties to make sure donor/intelligence-supported bills will pass, but also to give people whose elections might depend on it the opportunity to vote against them.
The last thing that Republicans want is another America First libertarian troublemaker in Congress, and the last thing that Democrats want is some lecturing lefty. It's about business, not beliefs. Also, it's probably increasingly about blackmail.
When this math somehow fails (which happens every once and a while if somebody surprises them), it throws everything into chaos.
> Many people in Congress know that their base is overwhelmingly against this
I have learned that "overwhelmingly against" is a useless concept in politics. The important question is "do they care about it enough to sway their vote?"
There is probably overwhelming support for Ukraine to defend itself in the US (and Europe), but very few people are willing to change their vote based on Ukrainian interests over their own {financial security, culture war, pet issue (abortion, guns, Epstein List, etc)}. If it's not a top-5 issue, it's not relevant to a political campaign.
2A voters and rabid anti-choice voters are polarized enough to actually show up at the capital or threaten their representatives. Extremely few people will dot at for issues lower down the priority list.
It's a dog and pony show though, they take turns being the one to blame. How did the same record look when democrats were in power? I bet most democrats opposed the debate then and most republicans supported it.
As a libertarian, saying that there is a "Libertarian" wing of the Republican party is specious, especially in 2026. The Massie primary showed what happens if you actually go against the fash.
Rand Paul seems to be coasting on his father's reputation of having libertarian principles, while mainly sticking his head up for "culture war" bullshit. His main skill seems to be finely walking this line - show me a libertarian cause he openly supports that bucks a "culture war" narrative.
And I have no idea why you would have even mentioned Hawley. In general every politician talks a good game appealing to some libertarian causes (because most individuals want freedom, duh!), while readily supporting authoritarianism in some way or another.
(Props to Wyden on this issue, though)
"entire wing" makes it sound very meaningful for a group that has had no effective power for the last 10+ years.
“Moderate Democrats” say hello
they have a libertarian caucus and a hard right MAGA caucus and those lines get blurred depending on who is winning and who is donating
Give data, please. Without it, this assertion is useless:
> There’s still a sizable portion of the [Democratic] party as of right now that is against surveillance powers in a way that doesn’t really exist on the [Republican] side.
H. Res. 1175, 119th Congress
Majority of Democrats voted not to extend FISA, only a small handful of Republicans joined them to block debate on the bill.
And what was the vote on the same issue when democrats were in power?
No, they voted to not bring the extension bill to the floor. This was a vote on a house rule, which is necessary to affirm before debating and voting on the bill itself.
Wyden is an aberration. He (unfortunately) does not represent the party on these issues.
The one raising the point. Apparently standing alone amongst otherwise bipartisan support of spying on Americans.
Wyden is the ranking D member of the intelligence committee (ie would be chair under a D senate). He's not some maverick bucking his party, this is the expression of the party position.
I wish this were true. My take after watching him for years is that he's uniquely equipped to evaluate these issues in a way his peers are not.
President Obama was the President of the United States when he went on late night TV and assured everyone that the government didn't spy on Americans at all, after Wyden's warnings and the Snowden revelations.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/08/06/209692380...
If that were the case, they'd have done something about it before. This doesn't appear to be new.
Hopefully the party learned something from Biden’s four years.
Fun fact, parties, and more importantly the people in them change and evolve over time. They aren't stagnant. For example, we see this with the Republican party which use to hold claim to things like law and order. But times change, and so do parties.
So just because something was a certain way 20 years ago doesn't mean it's still that way today. That would be CRAZY to suggest that.
They have "evolved" to the point there is no difference between them anymore
Yes, obviously they agree on everything.
Unfortunately they have, on the key things that everything else flows from. That doesn't mean that can't change at some point. That would take sizeable evidence that isn't there yet, though.
Republicans have de facto done away with the Constitution, and the rule of law, and are shockingly corrupt - are you saying that democrats are on board with that?
If not, then they're not the same.
We get this in the UK too, Tory party literally steal £Billions using emergency powers in COVID to send money to companies totally unrelated to the contracts made. Then a Labour MP has a complex mortgage arrangement and misses paying a few thousand pounds of tax. And people come in with 'they're all the same'.
It's stunningly moronic to entirely ignore the scale of issues in this way. Well, moronic or intentional deception.
Republicans and Democrats in terms of their cultural values are completely different.
Where they are not so different is in terms of the economic policies they create. One often notices that a few years later, Democrats extend and expand the Republican's policies.
Who started a class war and financial deregulation in the 1980s? Raegan.
Who enabled total deregulation? Clinton the in 90s with help and council from the Secretary of the Treasury Larry Page. By unshackling the banks from any rules, the Washington bureaucracy would enable the conditions for the 2008 financial crash.
And who does Obama appoint to oversee the 2008 financial crash? Larry Page.
Both parties have totally betrayed the American people in favor of the American oligarchs in terms of economic policy.
Who benefits from deregulation and offshoring? Not the now bankrupt rust belt states. Who benefits from bailouts for the banks but no bailouts for the average person? The Wall Street insiders.
There is billions in overt corruption, and you're right, that's wrong. But trillions that have been stolen from the average person via quantitative easing and given to big business to buy back their own shares.
They're on board with doing away the rule of law, yes.
When in power, did they do something against the NSA blatantly breaking the law, illegally surveilling hundreds of millions of citizens? No.
Did the 99.9% of them not named Lina Khan do something to uphold the existing antitrust laws? No.
Did they time and time again change the rule of law to suit corporate donors, lobbyists, megacorps? Yes.
Did they jail people who were actually trying to help uphold the rule of law by reporting on illegal torture facilities? Yes. [0]
> Then a Labour MP has a complex mortgage arrangement and misses paying a few thousand pounds of tax. And people come in with 'they're all the same'.
Arresting thousands of grandmothers for holding up some cardboard, and defending it, is enough to show that they're representing the same interests. How much privatization did they actually undo over the last 30 years? Right, none, they either directly aided it or looked the other way.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kiriakou#2012_indictment_...
Taking AIPAC money for instance.
Given that a group of people is not typically of a single mind about the vast array of things for which a position might be expressed [0], the continued presence of Wyden reflects an ambivalence within the group and/or a controlled opposition to cite when the music stops.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice
In American politics it seems like all the good ones side democrat, but it's few enough that most of the democrat party still isn't good ones.
Voting for the lesser of two evils is still voting for evil. The good people simply aren't attracted to power or acting as representatives. The good people don't step forward to try and move the levers of the system, because when they do they learn very very quickly that they're not up to "playing the game". Because they usually aren't sociopaths.
And mindful people know that by defeating the dragon you become the dragon, which they do not wish. So everyone else is stuck with the old dragon.
I mean he has Congressional privilege, he literally cannot be touched for reading anything he wants into the Congressional record. I wonder why more lawmakers talk about things instead of just revealing The Thing and leaning on their special rights as elected legislators.
what happens if he just tells us what it is?
> Spying on American citizens is a bipartisan point of agreement.
Not an American, but I can totally understand the need of governments to spy on its citizens that it has EVIDENCE of being involved in behaviour or activities that threaten the nation.
For example - if it had evidence that certain citizens were involved in espionage of their country, and they were thus passing on serious information to actors or other states that were intent on using that information to harm the nation, I would most definitely want those citizens to be spied upon.
Such evidence could be: Engaging in, or communicating with, known extremist organisations or forums known to be frequented by such individuals.
What you are describing would be straight up treason. The fact that treason charges are almost never laid upon anyone shows it is a farce.
Gonna take a wild guess that this has to do with the purchase of privately (and lawfully) collected bulk data for the purposes of mass surveillance. Who needs PRISM or xKeyscore when people willingly purchase TVs and install weather apps that spy on them 24/7? The open legal question has been whether the government is free to do whatever it wants with the data it purchases.
Spying on American citizens and going together on Lolita Express to Epstein island...
Nah, mostly republicans
I love the both siding argument springing up right before election day.
You know what I love? We have spent over 100 years going back and forth on party politics. It has done nothing to move the bar on justice. The democrats silently allow the same things under the radar while the republicans do things out in the open. Its the carrot and the stick approach. Populism isn't working. We need to focus on systemic change. Both parties are filled with institutionalists that will do nothing to stop the real abuses because they gain significantly by keeping things they way they are..
> We have spent over 100 years going back and forth on party politics. It has done nothing to move the bar on justice.
You think there have been no advancements in "justice" since 1926? Either you are being hyperbolic, have no knowledge of history or you have a very idiosyncratic definition of justice.
People who see the world in black and white are incapable of telling the difference between a shade of dark gray and light gray.
What are the advancements?
for starters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_rights_movement but if you have no knowledge of American history not sure a hn thread is right place to start
There are people alive today who lived under Jim Crow laws. Is there any argument you would like to make that getting rid of them and enacting the other associated legislation in the 60s was not an advancement?
State an actual solution, you're just making a covert both sides argument under the guise of a longer rant.
It is both sides. Republicans accelerate it, but Democrats don't shut it down when they have the chance. Obama and Biden had 12 years to fix it.
Obama certainly was for this; he didn't shy away from extrajudicial assassination of an American citizen in a foreign land, executed by our military.
It is both sides. Wyden is a (welcome) aberration (on this topic).
Obama wasn't always pro-surveillance though. He campaigned on ending the NSAs domestic spying program. Only after he was elected did he suddenly praise the NSA publicly and greatly expand their spying powers.
Sounds more like he was pro-surveillance but knew how unpopular it was.
Obama taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. He spoke passionately about the dangers of domestic spying programs and against the Patriot Act. Maybe he was lying the entire time just to be elected, but he was extremely convincing.
Personally, I suspect that once in office he was either shown something that scared him so much that it genuinely made him believe that violating the rights of every American citizen was necessary, or he was strong armed into supporting what they were doing and expanding their abuses. I imagine the NSA had no shortage of dirt on him and his family just as they must have on every politician, CEO, parent, and child in the country.
I feel like this is a reasonable but nearly-impossible-to-prove take. Maybe this is why everything goes uniparty.
Yes, just another lying or compromised politician.
Yep, Obama is a mass murderer just like the rest of them. People tend to not care until the oppression comes home and is in plain view.
You're right, but bringing up the assassination of a terrorist just isn't convincing to a lot of people, regardless of it should be.
Luckily there are other things that all reasonable people will find it hard to disagree with: The Obama government crackdown of Occupy Wall Street and his appointment of one of the fathers of the CIA torture program as NatSec Advisor, who promptly went on to jail whistleblowers of torture with Obama vouching for it.
What? The guy who was killed was actively committing violence and had done so multiple times before. Continuing to evade capture isn’t a get out of jail free card to keep evading the US and keep making bombs.
The guy got more chances than the average US resident who would get shot by the cops for less
The constitution is clear: he had a right to a trial by jury.
The guy who was killed was a propagandist. Also his children were killed.
> The guy got more chances than the average US resident who would get shot by the cops for less
Using violations of rights to justify more violations of rights. This makes a lot of sense!
I was reading his Wikipedia page and it makes me want to seek out some of his writings to get an idea of the thought process of his followers. I won't be doing that though because I'll probably be put on a watchlist. It's the same fascination I have about traditional cults and really anyone who has extreme/fringe beliefs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki
Not sure why they have to provide a solution in order to talk about the issue.
The only solution is to elect better people. I know some people who hoped that Trump would be that in 2016 but he is just more of the same.
I do disagree with grandparent that nothing has changed; the Supreme Court has shored up the First Amendment rights over the last 50 years and with Chatrie v. United States it looks like they are expanding Fourth Amendment protection.
Now if the Executive and/or Legislative ignore those protections then not much can be done.
Similar to Denver, city votes out Flock, Mayor does a backdoor. Unless they elect someone new and/or bring the Mayor up on procedural charges or something then nothing will change.
> The only solution is to elect better people. I know some people who hoped that Trump would be that in 2016 but he is just more of the same.
The system is rigged in such a way where that isn't a possibility. Look at the history of our country. ITS NOT WORKING.
The system has to change before we can elect better people. I cant believe I have to point this out with all thats going on... Every election the same arguments and the same responses.
So to fix the system, people should throw up their hands, not vote and just complain about it in the comments instead?
I'll vote in primaries for the candidate that most represents my views and continue to not let perfect be the enemy of good on election day. Lip service and small improvement officials are always much better than officials that negatively target me or my community.
No. We have to direct our energy to a different way of doing things. Voting inside of a corrupt system not working. Its like going into a mafia controlled city and voting for criminals expecting different results. How many decades need to elapse for this to be clear to you?
Hey I found the person who's the reason there's a fully equipped contingent of the National Guard in every major city.
> I know some people who hoped that Trump would be that in 2016 but he is just more of the same.
Trump's corruption is on such a different scale that calling him "more of the same" reads as a both sides argument.
Saying that calling out Trump's corruption while also calling out everyone else's corruption is a both sides argument reads as a my side doesn't have problems argument.
Trump sucks. So does Pelosi, so does Bush and Clinton. What, we need to rank how much they suck?
JFC man, if it's important to you to know how much each of them screwed you, then build a table or something. To me the degree doesn't matter because a little is bad enough.
I think you hit the nail on the head. It IS important to know how much each one screwed you. A quick search shows various outlets saying Trump has enriched himself to the tune of between $1.6B and $4B during his presidencies. Doing the same search on Biden gets estimates of $15M from books and speaking, and a Republican-led House influence peddling page alleges as much as $20M having been received by "the Bidens and their associates".
Using that scale as a proxy Trump is two orders of magnitude more corrupt than Biden.
>Trump would be that in 2016 but he is just more of the same.
Trump is not more of the same. He actually changed my stance on people being evil and beyond redemption.
Weird you don't feel the same obligation. Recommending more of the same is always safe somehow, even when it continually fails. The ability of certain people to implicitly trust the system that is now headed by a wrestling valet game show host is infinite.
Will you still believe in it when he gets a third term?
> covert both sides argument
As if somebody should be embarrassed about this. Extreme partisans think "both sides are doing it" is a logical fallacy, because of course their side isn't doing whatever you're talking about, if it's bad.
How can you change anything when the system is built with a fundamental flaw, the constitution never incorporated ethics, it was supposed to be up to the people to vote in ethical people, but that failed. The ones that benefit are corrupt and won’t change it, and good luck on getting enough people voted in power with a conscience to change it and not be swayed by power and money.
Part of the solution is to make bribery illegal so that people are less likely to be swayed by money. It'll be hard to get the people who have been stuffing their pockets with cash in exchange for selling out the American people to agree to limit their ability to do that now. Instead we're going in the opposite direction with the recent Supreme Court ruling making bribery legal as long as you call it a "tip" or "gift" after the public official gave you what you wanted.
It literally is both sides though. Congress, courts, and executive all love spying, have for decades. Do you have evidence that the Democrats have tried to curtail anything?
It's all one side as far as I'm concerned and always has been.
Secret courts are anathema to democracy and need to be abolished.
The 6th Amendment was written to prevent secret courts. The English Star Chamber was frequently secret and you could be put on trial without knowing what evidence/testimony was brought against you. The Star Chamber was also why the 5th Amendment exists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Chamber
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights
6th amendment is strictly about criminal prosecutions. The court in question is not a criminal court.
A secret court is arguably not even a court. It provides no legitimacy whatsoever. It's a bunch of people in a room making a decision. I don't understand why they even bother. Just conduct your dictatorship by issuing decrees over a Zoom meeting.
It's a word game. By calling it a court, legitimacy is implied. Most personalized TV channels are called "social media" even though they're really "personal TV" because the former sounds like it connects you with your friends. The NSA isn't a "surveillance state", it's "intelligence gathering". It's not a war, it's a special military operation. And so on.
> Most personalized TV channels are called "social media" even though they're really "personal TV" because the former sounds like it connects you with your friends.
This is clearly untrue; they're called "social media" because they developed inside other things that were already called "social media".
Then Netflix is a DVD rental?
If you think really, really hard, maybe you'll be able to get your arrows the right way around.
DVD rental developed from online streaming?
I came to say the same thing. The secret courts and even the administrative agency courts should not exist. They are a violation of our rights. Any court where the prosecution, judge and jury are all government employees is a gross abuse of authority.
Democracy has been deprecated in the United States, and will be removed in a future 'election'.
If this is the case, then I shudder for democracies that look up to the US for inspiration on how to run their country.
I'm not sure there's anyone left who does that without the USA army kidnapping their president or similar things.
Great to see unfettered public discussion of such matters. Oh wait, "You've read your last free article."
In Australia are have organisations with titles like "Independent Commission Against Corruption". Their remit is to investigate political corruption and corruption in the public service (like say the police). They come in two flavours. In some states their deliberations are done in public. In other states they are secret.
Over time it's become evident open model is far, far more effective at ensuring the public has confidence the people running the place are doing the right thing. It does risk the occasional unwarranted "witch hunt". But that threat ensures powerful people avoid doing things that while above board, could arouse public suspicion. Less suspicious acts mean higher trust in the government.
The us constitution has been destroyed one step a time. It's dead letter now.
The root of the question though is "Is secrecy an anathema to democracy?"
I will always be baffled by the dichotomy of "the US has the most freedom" and "no democratic country spies more on its citizens".
The US doesn't have the most freedom. There's precisely zero evidence that people in the US are the most free, except for the fact that its government tells them they are. But North Korea tells its people that even harder.
Make a joke about immigrants on twitter in the UK and you get arrested. Meanwhile there are more heat deaths in Europe than gun deaths in America. Most of Europe can't be called a free country anymore.
>Meanwhile there are more heat deaths in Europe than gun deaths in America.
This is a weird metric of freedom. It seems more like a reflexive, zeitgeist based response than any actual freedom metric.
In my experience the country with the most freedom is Canada. I have never seen anything like it. It's just so easy to do business there. Even if it wasn't that the laws enable it (they do) but even the way people operate. Being able to have a discussion with a customer without 12 rounds of a solicitor trying to insert dumb loopholes into a contract, costing the potential customer more in billable hours to their solicitor than the cost of the contract.
The USA is just junk. States that want to be Feds, Feds that want to be States, and when you cut through all the red tape you still have to deal with Litigious, ignorant Americans. Oh and if you want to import or export something just forget it.
"Oh but we have guns" is basically the exception that proves the rule, in a country where people get detained for such crimes as "Being beloved childrens author Mem Fox" or "Said naughty things on reddit" or "Working while waiting for Immigration to sort their status out".
But guns right. Guns. Woohoo freedom yeehaw guns.
What did they tweet, exactly?
https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1iim9je/list...
I’m on my phone, so it’s a little bit difficult for me to find clear examples, but I think this post talks about some of those freedom of speech violations.
I might be completely wrong, but it seems like news articles are not repeating the messages that caused the arrest. They just seem to be reporting that the arrest happened and high-level description of the content.
Are there theoretical tweets for which you believe arrests are warranted?
They don’t know that they’re not free. The good thing about a real dictatorship is that you know exactly what the rules are.
The evidence is our humor. We can make fun of our leaders without being thrown into prison or worse unlike say China or North Korea. Try posting a Winnie the Pooh meme in China and see how fast it gets censored.
well i am chinese, we do cannot post Winnie the Pooh meme(with ugly xi image), the origin carton figure is fine.(we also have a show about it in shanghai disney i think)
what troubles me is why 'humor' is the most important thing? shouldn't be the action/output of the gov? i mean, you vote someone, he promise something, he cannot do it, he breaks the law, then nothing happens, you make fun of him. then after 4 yeras, you select another person. and go on. Biden didn't get punised for what he has not achieved. So will Trump.
how does that improve your life? how can people live like this? how is that 'democray'? its very hard for our people to understand.
our neighbor counties like Mongoel and Philippines, they have a system like USA, and the popeople can make fun of their leaders all the time, i can see that from reddit. but they basiclly live in a shit hole, with a small populartion and vast resources, and they are poor than average chinese. i never understand the deulusion of them.
It's mostly corporations that are the most free to do as they please here.
I disagree. The US has the 1st and 2nd amendments, which gives us protection from tyranny in the government, and which lets us criticize the government without repercussion. No other country grants its citizens those rights, and you can see the effects of that worldwide, where despite it all, we still have our free speech!
How does the 2nd amendment protect you? Are you allowed automatic weapons, grenades? You're not even allowed swords. And if you call for violence, which is what the 2nd amendment might enable, you won't find protection via the 1st amendment.
See citizens and ICE.
Where did you get your info from? Sword ownership is legal everywhere as far as I know and you can own automatic weapons and even grenades.
Stop making stuff up.
Many jurisdictions have laws against carrying blades longer than X (it varies) and any reasonable definition of a sword would fall under that category.
In the US at least automatic weapons are nominally legal at the federal level after hefty tax stamps and background checks but states / local jurisdictions can and do regulate more / outright ban them.
That's just moving the goalposts. Nothing in there says it's illegal to own any of those things. You just might not be able to carry a sword (there are carve outs for reenactments in most places btw) and you might have to move or pay more for automatic weapons.
They're still not illegal, as OP said.
The 2nd amendment was designed to protect the 1st amendment. As for how, it was supposed to give citizens teeth against their government if it ever turned tyrannical one day. Armed citizens were one of the factors that made the American Revolution successful, which probably why so many Americans hold onto the idea.
Whatever one may think of gun control, it's clear the 2nd Amendment is on a much poorer footing.
In a number of states, you need to take a safety course before you're allowed to purchase a gun.
Compare that with the 1st amendment. If they passed laws saying "You can say whatever you want in public, but only after you've taken this course that informs you on what is acceptable and unacceptable to say in public", would you say there is free speech?
Or "You are free to practice any religion, but only after you've taken a course that ..."?
United States v. Cruikshank, 1875
> The First Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting Congress from abridging the right to assemble and petition, was not intended to limit the action of the State governments in respect to their own citizens, but to operate upon the National Government alone.
Before the 14th Amendment, your hypothetical was quite possible at a state level.
"A well regulated Militia"
The colonies were expected to defend themselves. In reality that meant every man possessed and drilled with arms whether the were part of a formal militia or not. If there was an attack people would be "called up" to the militia. There is no requirement of belonging to a formal militia in the 2nd amendment. While times have changed, it was expectated that you were proficient with arms in the case that a formal militia was required to be formed.
It's almost like you can easily kill a vast number of people with guns but not words. Curious...
There are plenty of good reasons to ban guns altogether.
But let's not say the 1st and 2nd amendments in the same breath. One is real, and the other is much less so.
That is a wonderfully naive understanding of the world.
You should ask Alex Pretti how he was able to criticize to criticize the government without repercussion.
IMO This is an even more naive (and dare I say intentionally malicious) bad-faith misinterpretation of the facts.
His death had nothing to do with the Constitution, it was because of a trigger-happy, confused cop who had his back to the guy, then noticed a gun next to him (that another officer previously put there). The US government had no part in that situation at all.
I think that's exactly the point. The constitution didn't prevent his death.
What are cops if they're not the government? Are they private corporations?
I don't understand the issue since no law can physically prevent people from breaking it.
Of course cops are the government, but they're also humans that make mistakes and commit crimes themselves. But this isn't actually related to some greater constitutional crisis or anything, unless you have some evidence that suggests they were instructed to act the way they did... but I've never seen anyone come forward with that yet.
The original argument was that the constitution protects you from government tyranny.
You have government officials tyranizing the population and now the argument is "of course it can't prevent that".
What good is it then?
The US government is responsible for the training of its agents. It is culpable as well.
That's kind of the point.
The constitution is just some rules people wrote up generations ago. It's not a magic spell that has power by itself, it is only effective as a social contract as long as power structures agree to follow it.
If armed government enforcers break it with impunity, what good is it?
If you can't exercise your rights without being murdered by a state sanctioned thug, then it's not really a right. Also, has he been indicted yet? charged?
Can you name a single western democracy where the citizens are prohibited from criticizing their government?
France just banned protesting
Didn't the USA also? I seen to remember that in Florida they passed a law that says you can run over protestors with your car.
It’s more akin to “stand your ground” laws (whether you’re for or against them). In situations where you reasonably fear for your life, like surrounded by an angry mob of people in the street busting up your car.
It’s not a blank check to run over people holding signs you don’t like as you drive home from work.
No they didn't.
> Under French law and Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), authorities may prohibit particular demonstrations when serious public-order risks make restrictions necessary and proportionate. They cannot impose an indiscriminate prohibition on peaceful assemblies simply because previous demonstrations have descended into violence.
You just described the mechanism by which they did. Sure, they didn't make it illegal nationwide permanently, because what serious country would do that and hope to maintain control? The real threat is in the vague exceptions for specific cases, which they have now used.
You can't possibly be this naive.
>The US has the 1st and 2nd amendments, which gives us protection from tyranny in the government
Lmao. Jim Tyranny has had what? 3 cracks at him? Hardly protection.
So free in Europe you guys don't even have a legitimate tech industry. Anyone who wants to build comes to the US.
So, free if you're a VC?
Funny how China leads in most tech areas now.
Turns out letting monopoly capital control your government policy leads to short term gains at the expense of long term viability. Maybe the VCs can make some money off government surveillance and defense contracts before being completely eclipsed?
https://www.aspi.org.au/news/aspis-critical-technology-track...
That’s supposed to be worse than the government controlling everything like in China?
freedom is when tech industry, I guess. I didn't know that until bus. I looked up freedom in the dictionary and it said tech industry.
Not exactly a democratic country, but came across these instructions what to do in China when police has detected a VPN in your household, or you have posted something
https://x.com/hongguabg/status/2114213232454082869?s=20
We have some flexibility with freedom left, and let’s keep it that way.
If the US state regime would benefit from blocking VPNs, they'd do it in a heartbeat. They just don't need to yet.
That link you just posted is blocked for me because I don't have an X account. Here's an unblocker redirector - suspiciously like a HTTP VPN: https://xxcancel.com/hongguabg/status/2114213232454082869?s=...
The process that's described (appear cooperative but deny everything) is the same thing you should do in the US if the police come to your door and accuse you of drug possession. Every country does this violation of freedom, they just use different excuses.
> The process that's described (appear cooperative but deny everything)
...how did you come to this conclusion?
>> 但你确实做过的，而且白纸黑字的放在你面前，那就不要抵赖。
If it's something you did, and they put it in front of you in black and white, don't deny it.
> 去了之后，态度好一点，姿态低一点，开口说：“领导，不好意思，给你添麻烦了。”
Is 领导 not an incredibly subservient way to address someone? How do people normally address police officers in China?
Already answered here:
https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/43535/do-other-...
closing as duplicate. (/joke)
> "the US has the most freedom"
This is an example of a thought-stopping cliche. It is a slogan to prevent the listener from thinking. Or at the least, to divert the listener's thoughts back to a more politically acceptable (to the speaker) rightthink.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rightthink
"A" marketing for a "B" product usually wins over "B" marketing of an "A" product.
FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Section 702
> Section 702 only permits the targeting of non-United States persons who are reasonably believed to be located outside the United States. United States persons and anyone in the United States may not be targeted under Section 702.
https://www.intel.gov/foreign-intelligence-surveillance-act/...
Under the Israel-US agreement for surveillance, that section was circumvented, as the NSA and other agencies are feeding raw unminimized tappings directly to the ELINT/SIGINT agencies and getting relayed back. [1]
This was also true for Five Eyes/EU sharing too, even though with this year's legislation some EU countries have offered Israel a direct access to INT feeds.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/sep/11/ns...
Wow. Does the US have this type of agreement with any other country?
Yes, the "fourteen eyes" group. It used to be five (basically all the English speaking countries) but they coerced more European countries to join and now it's fourteen.
The US _shares_ intel with the other Eyes, and within these there's layers of cooperation, with the US<->UK on top.
But this agreement concerns raw, non minimized, SIGINT (eg. direct tapping into feeds/traffic) mainly from US -> Israel.
That's pretty much what "intel sharing" is. They get other countries to spy on Americans and receive that data. In return they give their spy data on citizens of that country to that country.
I meant while the original five eyes are sharing raw sigint (we can also disagree on the level of sharing proportions), Israel gets also access to raw sigint intended as 3rd-country -> US.
The integration in the cyber domain is a different tier compared to the default the US has with other eyes.
i would give the article a quick (re-?)skim for context of V__'s comment, as the article repeatedly talks about spying on american citizens
When you stop judging systems by their design intent and instead by their outcomes, it makes perfect sense. Democracies inexorably diffuse responsibility until its component entities are distant enough from punishment that hiding power levers becomes an easy advantage to grab for, whether the justification is internal or external conflict. All that's needed is for the necessary overseers to be rubber stamps.
Democracies that are real democracy also exists and they don't have systemic corruption such as hiding behind complexity or interpretations or misinterpretations, or repeatedly pushing to pass draconian laws. Number of real democratic sovereign countries can be easily counted in one hand and may be it can extend upto two hands. Countries with monarch who has any power are not exactly democratic, uk for example even though it has democracy like parliament. Transparency and real oversight by citizens is required in a democracy. What if representatives make draconian laws? People need to be able to veto it. What if representatives refuse to make a law people want? They need to be able to make it directly. Systems can be designed to make these happen regardless of the size of the country or its population count.
Most of those countries have not been democracies for very long. The United States used to have many of those checks and balances, all of which were systematically ripped out by the relentless political machine. Give it another century, and even with proportional voting or citizen's veto's, things will still probably end up in a similar state.
Why are you baffled?
passport wise, probably true or close to true.
9th place
https://www.passportindex.org/de/byRank.php
I bet you that China, Russia and the UK rank higher
>China, Russia
both notorious for bragging about being the most free country on earth
Are China and Russia democracies?
In China the social contract is different.
You give up some rights for internal stability and in theory better social benefits.
In America, our social contract allows 10 guilty men to go free rather than imprisoning one innocent.
That's the myth anyway. Back in reality America is rapidly marching towards authoritarian capitalism.
Jump outs , black sites, indefinite detention.
>Naturally the common people don't want war . . . but after all it is the leaders of a country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or parliament or a communist dictatorship. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.
-Hermann Goering
Thus we're always at War. War on Drugs. War on Illegal Immigration. War on Crime. War on you.
So what we've already deported multiple born in the US citizens. This is war!
>In America, our social contract allows 10 guilty men to go free rather than imprisoning one innocent.
For criminal matters, sure.
In civil and administrative matters it's the opposite with the decimal moved to the left a couple times.
> So what we've already deported multiple born in the US citizens
What are their names?
Full deportation
https://www.texastribune.org/2026/04/23/texas-united-states-...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/show/children-who-are-u-s-c...
Indefinite detention for being Hispanic despite being born in America.
https://www.cbsnews.com/baltimore/news/deportation-effort-ma...
https://www.reddit.com/r/immigration/comments/1w8vhot/born_h...
You guys are never able to manage one. That guy is a Mexican national, not an American
The children aren't deported, their parents are. They, of course, get the choice to take their children with them. You don't want to split apart families, right?
Of course #3 isn't a deportation so I didn't even look at it
> That guy is a Mexican national, not an American
If they actually have a valid US birth certificate then how can you say that?
He actually has a valid Mexican birth certificate, and the guys in charge of who is and isn't a citizen said he isn't.
They didn't randomly pick on this guy, and they've deported millions of people without deporting a citizen.
From what I've seen it looks like he has a birth certificate in both countries? If he does and his US birth certificate says he was born in the US then he is a US citizen.
Not to mention at least a few hundred America citizens have been indefinitely detained in all this.
A few other examples of full citizens being deported are out there , but your not going to convince certain people with logic.
>Karen, 65, had a British passport and a tourist visa.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/21/karen-newton...
Thank God we surrendered all of our basic rights. Anything to stop elderly British women!
Freedom isn't really about whether your country is a democracy or not. Dictatorships can be free (for a while) and democracies can be unfree (Hitler was elected).
nah the UK spies pretty hard on its citizens.
CSIS and ASIS in Canada and Australia have far more powers than anything the CIA could ever do.
I owned more guns, got paid more, and had more vacation while working for a US company than I ever did in the Oz or Glorious Canukistan
The difference is willingness to act on said spying. Luckily, despite the massive surveillance capabilities the U.S. "Intelligence" Community has, they don't seem to really mess with regular citizens all that much. This gives some credence to the "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about" point of view, but only if you can guarantee you have nothing to hide (which can change drastically depending on who is in power, hence why I don't believe in this - the classic example being that hiding one's religion in and around Germany in the 1930s and early 40s was not seen as important until it was really important).
China and Russia (and to some extent, the UK now) will absolutely act on the spying they do. Or just act and say they had a good reason. China and Russia are dictatorships. One of them has a very competent and hard-working population which succeeds in spite of the dictator, the other is a gas station with nukes that survives solely because of said nukes.
> they don't seem to really mess with regular citizens all that much.
Except they do. The NSA has been handing over intel over a decade ago:
> A former federal agent in the northeastern United States who received such tips from SOD described the process. “You’d be told only, ‘Be at a certain truck stop at a certain time and look for a certain vehicle.’ And so we’d alert the state police to find an excuse to stop that vehicle, and then have a drug dog search it,” the agent said. [1]
Sure these were criminals, but who knows how many “undesirables” were prosecuted or targeted for some crime anybody commits?
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/us-drug-agency-g...
Your position only makes sense if you think that the groups the US gov operates against aren't "regular citizens".
The US gov is acting on intel against its citiczens all the time, regular or not.
Personally, I don't like the right wing groups it's infiltrated, but I still think that is a reasonable example.
For me, more pressingly, there are current investigations going on in Minnesota from the US gov's "Puppetmaster" operation that actively infiltrated and monitored a highly diverse set of anti-ICE groups.
Historically this is nothing new; the US has been infiltrating "anti-government" groups for decades. AIM, the panthers, ELF, ALF, labor unions, MOVE, etc are all easy examples of domestic groups that the US gov has broken at some point or other.
Your position only work if you classify folks such as the Minnesota 15 as "terrorists" or some such. Which, hey, folks like the US Gov try to do. But at that point the point is kind of tautological: if you have "something to hide" then you are a legit target of government sanctioning.
That's not very satisfying to me, but plenty of folks in the US find it to be a just-fine principle.
Well your assumption is that they are not using it; they weren't able to use it all before.. Times are changing; Now they can use and use it a lot.. military Ai infrastructure that is to connected political arm will read and process everything and they can target their apposition... its just matter of time. Absolute power = absolute corruption.
How it is done, everybody knows how.. backdoors in servers, back door in communication equipment, decryption method for of all that goes through fiber in entire world.. Massive data storage to store everything. How is not an issue; every node and communication, hardware and software has a backdoor.
Do they have the right to tap into world communication as well as their own is the issue? They are not challenged by apposing parties and their own population or people have given up.
Perhaps there will be a disaster is waiting with all these backdoors and Ai supremacy.
> Perhaps there will be a disaster is waiting with all these backdoors and Ai supremacy.
Absolutely. AI only needs to bring the keys, and everything else will be waiting for it on a silver platter. And AI is really good at making spare keys.
Isn't that what all the hype about National Security Letters (and related events from those years) were all about? I never thought any of that went away, the media just stopped reporting on it. We had Lavabit and Snowden showing us how unhinged these things can get.
Even more unhinged once you realize that trust fund kids are regularly placed in three-letter agencies because those role provide literal immunity. Much better than just a simple diplomatic passport from some micro nation.
It's not only about assassinations or intelligence, things like organizing beauty pageants or producing snuff porn are valid duties for secret police. And this does not even touch the whole KKK thing. Those are the people writing the NSLs.
The debate about reapproval of section 702 is all theater. Does anyone genuinely believe the government would stop surveilling us if the authorization expired?
I guess that depends, do you think that an administration would be willing to prosecute its predecessors for doing it if it were against the law? Maybe you don't because of mutually assured destruction, but lately there's been a lot more appetite for prosecuting people in the other party (with some charges being extremely trumped up, if you'll pardon the pun), so I don't know that this is a given anymore.
Even if it were perfectly illegal plain as day, they’d launder the intelligence gathering through a partner intelligence org like mossad.
They already do, look up a thing called 5 eyes.
They don't want the public to see the big green "APPROVED" rubber stamp that the FISC uses.
I'm increasingly of the opinion that state secret classification of our law enforcement systems should only exist for a year max. We've abused the system to shield evil people from accountability and to hide evil actions by our government, and that has to change.
This capability virtually guarantees that the next generation of Nelson Mandellas, Julian Assanges, <insert national activist of your choice>, etc. gets nipped in the bud long before they become an actual headache to the ruling class. This is why the owners of every country come together to support these technologies, without exception and regardless of political coalition membership.
Going all the way back to lenin these guys were often controlled by third party states anyhow with the goal of destabilizing power structures. Almost like a virus you unleash. That is why lenin was shipped via railcar by germany to the russian empire in 1917 at the height of war. The plan worked and the third rome fell apart shortly thereafter.
Lenin was supported by Germany, but I don't think anyone credible would say he wa controlled by Germany.
He was akin to a molotov cocktail they could toss at any oppressed populace in europe and have non small odds of civil war. It might be more fair to say they controlled him the same way an incendiary bomber controls fire.
They waited until there was a civil war in Russia to send him back.
he accomplished their aims, however, and that is enough.
You're right, a genuine activist used by the state for cynical motives is called a Useful Idiot. Ironically, this turn of phrase was traditionally said to be coined by Lenin, although modern scholarship no longer espouses this view.
> This capability virtually guarantees that the next generation of Nelson Mandellas [..] gets nipped in the bud long before they become an actual headache to the ruling class.
They are way ahead of you. The intent is not just to monitor, it's also to predict/preempt and to shape.
The whole sales pitch of Palantir is effectively marketing talk for pre-crime. And if we see what the russians and the chinese are doing online to shape our opinions I can only imagine what the US capabilities are in this realm.
This is not just about stopping the next Mandela. This is about knowing who the next Mandela is before future Mandela even knows it. And this about shaping the opinion of all potential future Mandela's into a neutered state.
They are only doing it for the children.
FISA court is an insane post-9/11 secret tribunal, a bad idea for these past 25 years.
But at least they were subject to Congressional oversight.
> the Trump administration is illegally withholding a secret court’s findings from Congress
Oops.
He should go further and describe or read these secret rulings on the Senate floor, where the speech and debate clause protects him.
That only protects him from non-Senate consequences. He could certainly be ejected from the Senate. Can the Senate try and convict him of breaking national security secrecy laws?
He would most likely not be chosen for the intelligence committee anymore if he did that, it would only be worth before retiring or for something really huge
they are doing much more than reading private messages in real time; they are also manipulating, distorting, delaying, etc based on the content; even going so far as to muck with your local programs (such as VPN) to throttle internet connectivity so that the most sensitive information cannot propagate virally as it should.
The AI matrix prison is real and discussions about it are censored.
This is why I laugh at the face of anyone demonising china and on the moral high horse. At least the Chinese government doesn’t lie about their surveillance. It’s far more insidious what the American government does, it just outright lies and indoctrinates its citizens.
This kind of thing will never stop. And those who control it have all the leverage and power.
Perhaps all the spying data should just be publicly accessible and easily accessible for all to use and abuse.
Would democratizing it all so there is never an expectation of privacy from the public vs a select few in power be better in the long run?
Yes, if it truly all data, available to all.
No.
So grateful to have Wyden in my corner. Especially for the last decade or so it sparks joy to fill his bubble in on the ballot.
He's my favorite democrat
archived, no trackers: https://nonograph.com/the-us-government-is-hiding-a-secret-c...
Secret methods are an unavoidable necessity of governance. Secret laws an legal decisions are the hallmark of a failed polity.
This headline has been relevant since 2001.
I would argue it's been relevant since July 26, 1908
Could you be a bit more specific about the relevance of that date?
Searching the date yields this link: https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/july-26/fbi-foun...
The FBI was founded.
Then, not completely relevant. The US government was not *hiding secret court rulings about how it spies on Americans" since the day the FBI was founded.
Spying on Americans? You could say that, perhaps, but you would have to say it about every law enforcement organization (including the local police) since 1776.
What the actual article is talking about is a massive extension, not covered by the regular "get a warrant in court" mechanism. Saying "just like the FBI" ignores how different this is, and how alien to the Constitution.
All the big federal law enforcement agencies engage in various degrees of unconstitutional surveillance. The fact that the FBI also gets a lot of warrants as part of its job doesn't change that. The FBI also did it first and has been doing it since it's inception. Heck they named their HQ after the guy who really took it to the next level.
Every non-trivial organization everywhere has some level of law breaking. We should try to avoid it, but we will never get to zero.
Secret courts on the other hand undermine the entire concept of rule of law and we should have absolutely zero tolerance for them.
To clarify, I'm not promoting the previous comment, I'm just clarifying what the date was
What else could have been expected when this fake imitation America started creating the FISA courts and created the treasonous 5-eyes network of circumventing the Constitution like traitors do.
"Secret court ruling" — Land of the free, home of the brave
A ruling belongs to the judicial branch.
The article could have been interesting but by fundamentally misrepresenting the structure of the American federal government they made it impossible to take seriously.
I had a dream last night that the government had a database that corps sent in "opt-out" info from people. Anytime someone opted out of a surveillance system (e.g. ad tracking, etc...) that info got sent to the government as a signal that the person is sus. They took the "if you have nothing to hide" logic to its full conclusion.
The only good thing is that at least under capitalism (not a system I'm a fan of) this is difficult to do (well as long as the owners of said companies weren't sheep), and like most conspiracies is very hard to enforce, there would be a leakage in a program so broad as this.
But it was a disturbing concept. Merely by signalling you didn't want to be watched made you more watched.
> there would be a leakage in a program so broad as this
It took an insider with one of the highest clearances you can get to break the news about these kinds of wiretapping deals.
Apple, Google, and other insiders were very quiet about those back room deals. You can bet they never stopped and only expanded too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore?useskin=vector
what was always remarkable about surveillance is that given these immense intrusive powers and a total panopticon, this is still the best they can do.
fentanyl epidemic, mass illegal migration and trafficking, networks of terrible abuse, flagrant public corruption, infiltration of schools and academia, conspiracies to demolish the entire western world, and yet even with total information awareness or some variant, these crimes occur in the open.
the scandal isnt that they are spying, its what they have explicitly chooseb to allow and enable.
You are assuming they are trying to do the best for citizens or best to abide by the constitution. They are not. In fact they actively try to side step the laws and constitution, and have these kind of secret interpretations ready. Would also like to remind you that no democratic country would allow smuggling of drugs by its own government apparatus but the usa has done that, so the drug epidemic isn't that shocking outcome.
What enrages me is the longstanding precedent that the government cannot read your letters without a warrant, but apparently electronic messages that are directly analogous are fair game.
> The Trump administration has until November 6 to answer the senators.
How convenient that this is right after the midterm elections. If they maintain control, the republicans can simply decide to ignore this requirement without penalty.
Remind me in February to look back at how much the Democrats have done about it.
If it's simply not blocking this answer, then it's a win. Doing nothing is better than actively breaking the law.
Yep this authoritarian movement is much bigger than the parties. We will see, again and again, how much it matters and the go back to the same old game every election and everyone will forget about how they have been played the first time. Im so sick of this corrupt system.
Trump is going to lose. People are tired of his lies.
If that were true, he wouldn't have had a second term. Americans are finally experiencing his fuckery first hand with fuel prices, which is why he is going to lose. The lies weren't much of a concern. Fox News is still I believe the biggest cable channel in the country.
> Fox News is still I believe the biggest cable channel in the country.
Not only is this true, but most of the legacy media landscape also shifted hard to the right (in large part due to massive corporate consolidation) over the past decade, so Fox isn't even especially unique anymore in terms of being extremely right-partisan.