Would anybody else vote on this one issue? Any candidate who said flat out "your government is spying on you through giant corporations and they're all lying about it, and I'm going to Washington to put a stop to it" would have my vote.
Ron Wyden, Al Franken, and Rand Paul are the only consistently good guys on this, imho. I believe Wyden and Paul have worked across the aisle many times. Paul was set to filibuster the PATRIOT act extension until both dems and republicans banded together to vote to block the filibuster, limiting discussion to 30 hours.
You do realize this is exactly what made Trump president right? Shout one thing the public wants, shout it hard and repeatedly to mask your incompetence in all the other things that are important to have a prospering nation.
The public will vote for one thing in plain sight and complain about their own choice the day after because all the other things in their life suddenly take a bad spin.
TL;DR; do not vote blindly on a single action point. Do not bewilder others to do so. Instead vote for the complete package and learn others to do so as well.
I've read a lot of criticism of Trump, but that he was a single-issue candidate is a new one. If anything, he was accused of saying everything and its opposite. What was that "one thing" you're saying he shouted?
He wasn't a single-issue candidate. He picked a bunch of issues that mattered to single-issue voters. The presentation is different, the overall effect is the same.
True. Though I would argue immigration was his spearhead, especially with his lack of political correctness on the matter. Banning various trade agreements to further arouse his voters was important but the repeated message on immigration probably dominated his position.
Disclaimer: seen from a foreign standpoint. This is what reached us oversees. For every other article on non-immigration there were 10 on his immigration rants.
If such a person had the credentials to back up their sincerity, then yes. A Chelsea Manning type who has suffered for their beliefs or otherwise demonstrated stalwart commitment to dismantling the security state would get my vote and money. A career politician riding whatever Zeitgeist there may be as a lesser evil would not. Surveillance and securitization may not be a big issue to many people, but it is a very big issue to some of us. At the very least, those representatives who continue to vote for the powers of these agencies (like in this previous 702 spying bill) will never see a primary or general election vote from me or my peers (who I can vouch for) regardless of how much "less worse" you are. I won't hold out hope that this is a popular issue but I would love to see someone take a stand.
I think this would backfire. If two large enough groups of legislators both said they would go to Washington and do opposing and mutually exclusive things it would create a deadlock where neither group has the ability to compromise.
Why would someone who says that lie have your vote? Unless you're under investigation or living somewhere like Iraq, the government is not spying on you through giant corporations, as both the law and Snowden's leaks show.
Through a sufficiently creative definition of spying, nobody has been spied on in human history. Otherwise, we're forced to contend with the fact that we are being caught in the same dragnets that were advertised to catch the next Osama. (Not advertised to us, of course
- we had no serious chance to vote on it.)
It makes sense to collect everything possible, then discard what you don't need later, because when conducting an investigation you don't know in advance which data are of interest.
If your communications are intercepted, stored, but then never looked at, and eventually deleted - this is functionally equivalent to having never been collected at all.
There's one big difference: if your data was never collected, then a breach (internal or external) doesn't endanger it. If it was "collected but never looked at," then it's subject to the integral of every mistake, malicious action or rule change from now until they loose it. One of the major things that Snowden revealed was that random nobodies had huge access to sigint material.
It's the responsibility of the communicating parties to protect themselves against interception if they consider this to be an unacceptable risk. Using end to end encryption for message content secrecy, and obfuscating message routes using e.g. Tor to help mask source and destination pairs.
We have already had proofs of the LEAs inability to keep TS information safe, expect a worse level of protection for routinely intercepted phone calls, emails, ...
It's very very difficult (some people say impossible) to assure 100 percent that people's data have been safely stored and transmitted for their whole retention lifetime.
If you ask me, keep one or the other.
The inability to maintain the operational reliability of a datastore (including backups), does not inspire confidence.
Which dragnets? Be specific. The phone metadata dragnet doesn't exist anymore, and the way it was used according to Snowden's documents when it did exist could hardly be called spying on OP.
I understand that some disagree with the other (and past) positions of the ACLU and may be disinclined to trust its website. Fortunately this issue isn't a particularly party-based one. Here's another good source, although it also says a lot about the history of the leaks:
If there is any accurate secondary source that is clearly conservative, It'd be welcome for me to see it in a reply. There's no particular reason why we'd have to porkbarel this issue - presumably there would be no party affinity at all.
Edit: I know that there is lots of text behind those links, but the issue is an expansive one. I sincerely invite you to read them!
bill binney was a high ranking nsa cryptanalyst and engineer for decades who designed a program for collating data across networks. thinthread was designed specifically to protect the records of individual american citizens from being accessed without a warrant, ensured by encryption. after 9/11, his program (thinthread) was scrapped in favor of another, trailblazer, which explicitly did not have any of the built-in safeguards against a 'turnkey totalitarian state' as mr binney put it.
to sidestep legal restrictions requiring intercepted comms to have at least one party outside the the US, nsa developed tools (evilolive) to bounce traffic to a hop outside of the US and back through a tapped sea cable.
there's also parallel construction, the dea's term for constructing a legitimate-looking trail of investigation retroactively to 'launder' evidence intercepted by sigint programs.
i could go on, we have are dozens of fragments of evidence that point to mass surveillance, dressed up with nominal but unauditable claims of the protections of rights overseen by a court so secret that the names of its judges aren't public. what standard of evidence besides nsa admitting as much would you accept?
> This despite that they know that the device in that room is a filtering device and that Snowden's documents specifically show that the NSA filters the traffic for targets' communications.
it's a cable splitter that feeds metadata into their bulk collection database, which is then queried with selectors (keywords). thanks to creative legal interpretations of ussid 18, it doesn't count as wiretapping an individual to record all of their internet activity in a database, only to look at that database. and you'd have to have a lot more trust in a totally unaccountable spy agency than me to think they play it by the book 100% of the time.
sigint can be carried out illegally but you have no way of telling what evidence came from illegal surveillance because you don't know what evidence came from sigint to begin with, because it's laundered. you can't challenge illegal practices potentially used to lock you up because they're cloaked in national security.
>This despite that they know that the device in that room is a filtering device and that Snowden's documents specifically show that the NSA filters the traffic for targets' communications. (previous post)
>Secret government documents, published by the media in 2013, confirm the NSA obtains full copies of everything that is carried along major domestic fiber optic cable networks. (EFF, emphasis mine)
It goes pretty far beyond that one room. It is a bit like nailing down a noodle, though, I see where you're coming from.
Edit: How could a single excerpt from a single letter make any kind of claim about the activities of an entire agency?
It's coming. not in the 2018 elections, but the 2020 democrat party will be forced from below and unpredictable other sides to be far more leftist and treat privacy as a crucial issue
> At some point you've gotta admit they're just scrambling to be slightly less detestable than the GOP, to just enough voters to win elections.
absolutely. i'm arguing that that has finally (obviously) become untenable, the shift left will be bolstered by the vivid, insurmountable gulf in inequality
Personally, I find it more likely that the NSA or another organization ends up leaking some sort of damning info about Trump. This would give them a huge opinion boost, and the Democrats would end up owing the organization for their victory. We're already seeing this, the Democrats seem to love Comey despite his role in mass surveillance.
You think people would warm to the NSA if only they demonstrated an inability to keep secret the findings of their domestic spying, and revealed they'd been spying on the president?
You don't think that would make them look like they were illegally meddling in partisan politics?
>You think people would warm to the NSA if only they demonstrated an inability to keep secret the findings of their domestic spying, and revealed they'd been spying on the president?
They may not need to make it domestic or seem like they were spying on the president, finding some sort of scandal involving a different nation doesn't seem that hard. Or they could use some intercepted knowledge from a foreign spy agency.
As a whole though, I suspect they'd see an opinion boost even if it came from domestic surveillance. The hatred of Trump is ridiculous, Democrats have even praised Bush following his attacks on Trump. Plus, Mark Felt did basically did this and just got had a movie made about him.
This doesn't seem too unlikely to me. Fighting Trump has become something that seems to override concerns about democracy or any other principle for a wide swathe of people. Supporting intelligence agency meddling in partisan politics is one of the milder, more widely normalised and expected parts of being anti-Trump today; the more extreme fringe views involve support for tactics like a literal military coup.
"We Must Fight Even Harder Against Trump's Authoritarian Impulses Now That We've Voted To Enable Them" is another true to life, accurate Onion article. Obama administration certainly made no effort to correct any of the Bush DoJ authorized spying programs, until Wired and then Snowden forced some kind of response, resulting in FISA. Which seems to be a star court that refuses to answer any questions from congress or deny any request. https://politics.theonion.com/pelosi-we-must-fight-even-hard...
It's a shit show everywhere. Very very few congress-people seem to have any backbone what-so-ever. Ron Wyden of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is one of the only people that seems to even try to ask questions, and he is shut down and denied by the military at every turn. https://www.thecipherbrief.com/column_article/dont-pass-surv...
I may be wrong, but I am pretty sure that FISA has been around for 20 years or more. Wiki says it was established 1978 as part of an act passed that same year.
No they are not unified. Going by the congressional vote about 25% of Republicans and 70% of Democrats voted against the spying. If this issue is important to you you're generally better off voting Democrat unless you have a Ron Paul type of Republican.
That doesn't say much, probably less of an issue to be seen as "soft on terror" these days than supporting anything the president even offhandedly says he might be in favor of.
You appear to be grossly misusing the term "left". I'm guessing you're talking about Democrats here, which are center-right liberals. Leftist politics for the most part don't even vaguely resemble the Democratic party platform.
Um...no. Leftist politics are inherently anti-nationalist, anti-capitalist, and anti-racist. The venn diagram between liberals and leftists only really overlaps on issues of racism, and even that only weakly.
Your definition confuses the goals with the implementation. You don't need the workers to seize the means of production to achieve minimum living standards, and research shows that there are better ways.
A few things: 1. This isn't "my" definition, this is how the term is used everywhere it hasn't been coopted. 2. "goals and implementation" is a non-sequitur in what was a conversation about the meaning of words. 3. Kindly source your claims about "research". I'm currently unaware of any method of establishing controls for whole-society scale experiments in economics so am left puzzled regarding what this "research" might entail.
You can make causal statements about data from natural experiments with instrumental variables. This technique has been used by economists since 1928.
From the Wikipedia definition (the definition in common use) of left politics: "Left-wing politics supports social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy and social inequality." If you want to redefine Left-wing politics to be Marxism, do that first before claiming that they are already equivalent.
Obama quietly expanded privacy as an issue? That doesn't parse.
Edit: parent fixed his parenthetical to be merely factually incorrect instead of grammatically incorrect.
As I recall, he publicly discussed privacy as an issue and both privately (until the Snowden leaks showed his cancellation of email metadata collection) and publicly (phone metadata) shut down data collection programs.
His regime was brutal against whistle-blowers. Look at Chelsea Manning.
In his last few years as president, he did not exert much effort at all to shut down the NSA program, as he surely already mostly knew the extent of it and was fine with it.
Obama does not care about doing the right thing here.
> His regime was brutal against whistle-blowers. Look at Chelsea Manning.
Walking free. After she blew the whistle on what, exactly? The heavily edited Collateral Murder video that conveniently left out the RPG[1]? What do the cable leaks have to do with that?
> In his last few years as president, he did not exert much effort at all to shut down the NSA program.
He shut down the email metadata collection program two years after taking office.
> I didn't say anything about cable leaks or what Manning leaked, that is a different conversation.... Nice strawmanning, though.
You literally pointed to Manning as an example of how Obama was brutal to whistleblowers. I quoted you. I pointed out that the actions she took do not count as whistleblowing, and you appear to have conceded that point.
> I'm implicitly referring to the NSA spying programs leaked by Snowden.
How does that example show Obama's brutality to whistleblowers? Snowden is not a whistleblower, and Obama didn't treat him brutally. Out of the millions of documents that Snowden leaked, only phone metadata collection was found to be illegal. If you leak millions of documents from any government agency or any private company for that matter, you're bound to find at least one instance of illegal activity.
I didn't say anything about cable leaks or what Manning leaked, that is a different conversation.
I am simply referring to the Obama administration's treatment of Manning, and Obama's cowardly attempts at saving grace by granting clemency right as he's leaving office, and shortly after Assange claimed he would turn himself in if Manning was granted clemency (Obviously Assange wasn't being for real and didn't)
I'm implicitly referring to the NSA spying programs leaked by Snowden. That has nothing to do with the program you're talking about.
So in litigation, when one side destroys evidence, you can ask the court to draw an adverse inference about what the evidence would have contained. That seems like it would be appropriate here.
NSA "oversight" is a complete joke, especially with Senate Intelligence Committee members like Feinstein cheerleading for more surveillance.
How is anyone ever going to rein in on NSA or find out what they're really up to if they come up with excuses like this one and then they're just let off the hook?
Stuff like this is also why I can't take seriously any pro-surveillance argument, because clearly the NSA is very non-serious about it, too.
Wow, this is probably true yet people are down voting--just look at the retroactive immunity for the telecomms providing data feeds to the government as an example.
If they can't comply with this direct court order how are they going to ensure compliance with the Constitution? The mass surveillance program is too expansive to be responsibly controlled and should be shut down.
Even if it was actually deleted, it's still in the backups somewhere. Even if it's not in the backups, the NSA SSD firmware copied it off to unused hidden blocks. Even if it didn't, the NSA has tools to recover data, even after multiple passes of file wiping.
Nobody ever deletes data anymore. They didn't physically destroy all devices with a copy? They still have it.
