I see people claiming that because we can discuss whether we are in a police state openly, we are not in one. This is a mistake because it assumes the goal of a police state is oppression. Oppression is not the goal of harsh policing or surveillance. Oppression is the means to achieve the goal of political stability.
Oppression can be used to liquidate protesters which threaten stability, as it has been done in the US as well as many other places. Oppression can be used to squash unorthodox thought, as it was done in the USSR and East Germany. Oppression doesn't have to do both of these things, though. Power is free to decide what items constitute the biggest threat, and how oppression should be applied to best mitigate that threat.
Openly using forceful oppression to prevent people from criticizing the government's policies is likely to stir up far more bad will and instability than merely using oppression to protect physical assets via invasive scanning etc. It is not intellectually realistic to envision a 1984-esque police state where speaking out against Big Brother gets you black bagged. That is far too obvious, and far too simple for reality.
Our current situation is as real of a police state as it gets. If you live in NYC, you're 24/7 surveilled via a multitude of vectors, even if you're not suspected of any crime. The police are not accountable for anything, and allowed to conceal their methods and programs, even to your detriment. A police state.
America has a lot of problems, but hyperbole isn't a solution to any of them.
EDIT:
It is clear no significant counter arguments can be made, so instead down votes and accusations. Enjoy your echo chamber HN
Americans do not live in a police state. Not by any sane interpretation of the definition. That's just absurd nonsense.
>The inhabitants of a police state may experience restrictions on their mobility, or on their freedom to express or communicate political or other views, which are subject to police monitoring or enforcement. Political control may be exerted by means of a secret police force which operates outside the boundaries normally imposed by a constitutional state.
~100% of American communications are monitored by the government. We have secret courts that authorize the killing of American citizens. We have National Security Letters, requiring people to do exactly as they're told and not allowing them to tell anyone (in some cases even their lawyer) they've been served with one. Government agencies operate outside the bounds of the constitution on a routine and mass basis (NSA's phone spying program was found to be illegal/unconstitutional) with zero repercussions to government employees and agents who violated the law.
It also defines this:
>An electronic police state is one in which the government aggressively uses electronic technologies to record, organize, search, and distribute forensic evidence against its citizens
America is the poster child of an electronic police state. We do it more than any other country on a scale larger than any country in history. Americans are more monitored than any large group of people in the history of the world.
Should really be:
He was served with an NSL requiring him to gather the private encrypted emails of one of his users.
Rather less inflammatory, and more accurate - the NSL really only affected the person (actually, it may have been slightly more - two people?) using the service that was being targeted. The reason the service was shut down was because of the precendent; the request was definitely not for blanket access to all users communications, which would be blatantly illegal.
Actually, this is exactly what was requested (and was eventually provided).
> "earlier orders intended to monitor a particular Lavabit user’s metadata."
> "the documents indicate the bureau was still trying only to capture metadata on one user."
> "while the metadata stream would be captured by a device, the device does not download, does not store, no one looks at it, [and] at the back end of the filter, we get what we’re required to get under the order."
> "So there’s no agents looking through the 400,000 other bits of information, customers, whatever, [...] No one looks at that, no one stores it, no one has access to it."
So, they were still only looking for (and recording) metadata on one user...
Airports. No fly lists. Mass surveillance. Free speech zones, civil forfeiture, national security letters. Millions of Americans have a security clearance, the government has created a two tier system of those inside and everyone else. Big media is tightly controlled in America, and after TPP and other international treaties the internet will also be even more tightly controlled. Civil liberties have been extensively erroded since 9-11, how can anyone besides a shill or the ignorant not know such basic facts?
TL;DR: A sense of proportion is missing from the factoids.
And of all the many, many issues brought up you cherry picked the only one which only effects a (likely) small number of Americans so honestly I'm inclined to give that to you since you've let the other 10 or so very serious charges stand. Hooray, you've established that given what's public knowledge it's reasonable to believe we probably don't secretly execute -that many- american citizens without a trial, if that's what 'defending the establishment' looks like then consider the establishment defended.
I think police state is a little much but honestly it's an amorphous term with no meaning other than as a rhetorical tool to evoke some horrible regimes from history. I don't think we are as bad as them, but in particular the post we are talking about is factual and hardly extremist. We don't have to be in Stalin's Russia for there to be some serious problems.
I wasn't literally saying that the said secret courts were matching a quota of one per year. It was an intentionally extreme example to highlight the concept of proportionality.
And seriously, you chide me for playing funny buggers with numbers, then characterise a list of 11 things as 'many, many'? Not to mention that you're implying that the rest of the items are frequently encountered - how many people actually run into no-fly list problems, or have been corralled into a free speech zone?
Finally, I couldn't give a fuck about the Americanness of the victims. I'm not American myself. I think it's a stain on the general American character that so often in discussion about human rights, that whether or not a victim is a US citizen is a salient issue. Why is it less of a moral crime for an unaccountable court to decide to kill a foreigner they don't like? Why is it less of a crime for a tourist to be put on a no-fly list or have their speech curtailed?
You completely misread me if you think I'm of the opinion that the US doesn't have problems. It has serious problems, and a double-helping of them. It also has a lot of awesome aspects. Authoritarianism is on the rise, but the US as it currently stands is not a police state. There is so much hyperbole in US political discourse; everything is polarised and taken to extremes. Someone is a democrat|republican? Now we know everything there is to know about that individual, and they clearly support everything that one party (of only two) does!
The comment I'm arguing against is a typical sky-is-falling polarised position, and doesn't have the shades of gray that the real world does. In police states, people have their movement limited, are afraid to speak out against the government (hardly the case in the US) for fear of prison or similar, and are even afraid of talking to their neighbours due to widespread citizen informant networks. The US is a long way from that - but again, you don't have to be a police state in order to have problems.
And for certain middle-eastern racial groups the no-fly list is actually a pretty widespread concern that effects a lot of people.
10 is not a large number when you are discussing people. It is a huge number when you are discussing serious issues that are independent, each of which requires a response. It is so many most people cannot keep track of them all at once without pen and paper.
And if you are concerned with non-americans (as you should be) every statement in that list is much, much worse from your perspective.
I think the sky is falling, but it's falling slowly. A better analogy is a lobster in a pot of hot but not yet boiling water. If your lobster friend turns to you and says "this water we are in is boiling" do you respond "I took a temperature measurement and technically it's not boiling yet compared to these previous measurements, stop being hysterical" or do you say "you're right, we really need to get worried about this water temperature situation RIGHT NOW" and try to stop it?
It's a question of principle. Either the government and its agencies are held accountable, or they are not. Arbitrary and extra-judicial use of power is still arbitrary and extra-judicial use of power, even if the wielder of that power chooses to use it discreetly. The government is not restricted by the constitution if they can just choose what parts of it they pay lipservice to as they please, even if they do that only seldom and to people who don't matter or "don't deserve our sympathy".
edit. Edited for tone.
> Either the government and its agencies are held accountable, or they are not.
Such philosophical absolutes are useless in the actual human experience. You chide me for weak arguments, yet you hold the modern US state and Hitler/Stalin/Mao/Pot's states as morally equal, since they all have extrajudicially killed at least one person and proportionality does not matter. Clearly this is not the case - the world is shades of gray, not black and white absolutes. Some grays are darker than others.
You say this like it's an everyday occurrence, something that happens repeatedly, many many times. But it isn't - it happened once when Anwar al-Awlaki [1] was killed in a drone strike. [ EDIT - should be "happens rarely" not just once ]
As for the 'electronic police state' comment, again this is untrue. The purpose of the bulk surveillance is absolutely NOT to gather evidence against citizens. In fact, it is used agains foreigners only for national security and intelligence purposes. In absolutely exceptional circumstances it is permissible to search the collected data for records pertaining to citizens, but we see in the Snowden documents that there are legal safeguards and procedures to protect against accidental or inadvertant surveillance of citizens.
>The purpose of the bulk surveillance is absolutely NOT to gather evidence against citizens.
They admit themselves they gather bulk data on everything. The intent of an organization that has proven to lie through their teeth and break the law really means nothing. Intent is also pointless, the action is what matters.
>In fact, it is used agains foreigners only for national security and intelligence purposes.
This is simply not true.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/27/nsa-employee-sp...
www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/26/nsa-porn-muslims_n_4346128.htm
www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/08/23/bloomberg_report_nsa_employees_have_deliberately_abused_their_power.html
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-nsa-can-abuse-data-on-ame...
https://www.rt.com/usa/nsa-domestic-surveillance-abuse-684/
There are hundreds of resources and examples showing rampant abuse and non-security related surveillance of Americans.
edit: don't forget its use for corporate espionage: http://sputniknews.com/latam/20150707/1024322295.html
The "Main Core" intel database has dossiers on every person they could find data on. There are no distinctions between foreigners and Americans, as we saw from the Snowden docs.
We also saw from Snowden docs that the DEA among other organizations definitely (100%, utterly indisputable, look at wikipedia if you are unclear on this matter) use "parallel construction" in which the NSA passes evidence for criminal cases to the DEA, which then obfuscates the source before going to trial.
Stop shilling, either intentionally or unintentionally.
"A shill [...] publicly helps a[n] organization without disclosing that they have a close relationship with the organization." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shill
There have been three US citizens[2] killed by two separate drone strikes. Anwar al-Awlaki is one; in that same strike also killed was Samir Khan — the very Wikipedia article you linked to mentions this. In a separate strike[1], Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki (the son of Anwar), a 16 year old with "no connection to terrorism", was killed.
> You say this like it's an everyday occurrence
Even that it isn't an everyday occurrence, how does that justify taking the life of an American citizen without providing due process to that citizen?
> procedures to protect against accidental or inadvertant surveillance of citizens
This is not even remotely true; the Wikipedia article on the NSA states that the NSA "[relies] on a secret interpretation of the Patriot Act whereby the entirety of US communications may be considered 'relevant' to a terrorism investigation if it is expected that even a tiny minority may relate to terrorism"; the 120 million Verizon subscribers whose data was collected were protected against "accidental or inadvertant surveillance"?
Programs such as MUSCULAR[3] gathered data secretly on American companies' data-center links.
But let's consider that perhaps you don't believe "merely" spying on someone to be a violation of the constitution; let's say that the collected information needs to be actually used against a citizen:
> In August 2013 it was revealed that a 2005 IRS training document showed that NSA intelligence intercepts and wiretaps, both foreign and domestic, were being supplied to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and were illegally used to launch criminal investigations of US citizens. Law enforcement agents were directed to conceal how the investigations began and recreate an apparently legal investigative trail by re-obtaining the same evidence by other means.
(emphasis mine)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdulrahman_al-Awlaki [2]: https://www.aclu.org/cases/al-aulaqi-v-panetta-constitutiona... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUSCULAR_(surveillance_program...
If you believe America is a police state, then you are on the extreme-fringes of opinion. So you'd need extraordinary evidence to back your claim up.
I don't know how anyone can argue that the US doesn't fit the definition of an electronic police state as it was defined above. Your head would have to be very deep in the sand.
> For a social commentator to speak out against the government on a major news outlet would be a ratings disaster.
What do you see them constantly doing when it comes to police brutality? And for the federal level, have you watched Fox News while we've had a Democrat president or MSNBC while we've had a Republican one? Gratuitously negative in both cases.
There is certainly tons of bias at all the popular news outlets, but it's very different from the bias of state owned news agencies.
Also, even amonst the academics, the only ones that make it on air the vast majority of the time (and are placed in a positive context within the programming) are the ones conforming to what the media wants. Ask anyone who's ever been on "the list" for expert interviews on television. They call you up and say "would you be willing to go on air and defend this position?". If no, they hang up and try the next person. The opinions broadcasted on American television are as scripted as any other TV show. Through this process they create what the socially accepted norm is, and even if the majority disagree, they become the "fringe" because their opinions are not as well represented.
Unfortunately the vast vast majority of people disagree with you, including basically every single social commentator. The only people agreeing with you are those on the fringe extremes.
I'm sorry, but I don't think reasoned debate is possible with you.
Read up on the electronic police state idea, then return... and try to be honest.
Does the Chicago blacksite count extraordinary evidence? There is so much evidence of police illegality, wanton murder, and lack of criminal action at every level, from the bottom to to the top where our country commits torture and does nothing that it is extraordinary for anyone to not belief America is a police state. You life in an oligarchy ruled by a corrupt elite, I can even site academic evidence of such but again, you argue by tautologies so why bother? Open your eyes.
This, and your freedom to comment about it on a public forum, is pretty much conclusive proof that America is NOT a police state.
When this evidence is suppressed or anyone attempting to cite this evidence is disappeared, THEN you should start worrying.
But the vast vast majority of people disagree and think that your opinions are extremist nonsense.
Where are all the conspiracy theorists coming from on HackerNews recently?
It's like you went to a website of logical fallacies and said to yourself, "how many of these can I commit on a single HN thread?"
Fly away, troll.
Like say being able to casually do an X-Ray scan of any car or vehicle they see.
If you've ever been in an actual police state, you'd understand that New York isn't one.
Like say....stop and frisking "shady" people who've committed no crime?
You overlook what technology has opened up in terms of non-invasive surveillance.
They don't care if officers killed in the line of duty, as apparently we have an unlimited numbers of people who would love to risk their lives as a LEO so that other's can remain safe.
Is the system foolproof? No. Do accidents and unjustified firings happen? Yes. Are the measures some people want to take practical or logical? No. People want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. These sorts of events used to happen just as frequently - but didn't have Twitter and social media backlash behind every occurrence. With social media coverage these events seem far more common than they used to be, which leads to more outrage against them. I can understand and to some extent sympathize with where people are coming from - but we need a more practical solution than "try to hit an extremity and pray you don't hit an artery". Arm/thigh shots can be fatal from bleed-out. Life isn't the Hollywood movie that some people think it is.
They are asking officers to have 100% accuracy (take an arm/leg shot on a moving target from a distance? Good fucking luck!) and don't recognize that "target with a knife" is a deadly threat from a surprisingly close distance, whether you have a gun or not [0].
[0] Tueller Drill, as seen on Mythbusters: https://youtu.be/ckz7EmDxhtU?t=263
You get a constant drum beat of news articles showing the cops killing people who were unarmed, and public resistance grows, which for most people means nothing, as they aren't about to become criminals. Years of police abuses leads to a lot of people not caring if officers live or die, though-- where we are right now. This is a good thing, because everyone is on the same page: violent police are unliked.
The colder the community gets to police, the faster they will change their tune. Ferguson was a turning point, with many police departments realizing that violence begets violence, and military occupation of neighborhoods as a policy begets violent opposition. Since Ferguson we've seen a lot of police departments start to walk back violence as a policy, and maybe in 10 years we'll be back to community policing.
People see the European policing model (police not murdering tons of people or constantly beating/tasing them, having polite and helpful cops who are members of the community) and are getting jealous and angry. This too is a good thing.
Anything that gets views will be a constant drum beat in the media. Media coverage is a bad indicator of reality. I would prefer these numbers stay lower [0]. But these numbers never get brought up by the media. They happen frequently enough that articles could be drummed out once a week, I wonder why they aren't?
>I don't think that people complaining about excessive use of force hurt the point of view that the US is a police state.
I'm arguing that the people who bring up foolish points as solutions are more harmful than helpful. I for one don't like reading articles like this one [1]. This isn't about being a police state - this is about people not knowing how to deescalate things. "Taking arm/leg shots" is not deescalation. Not shooting a violent and armed suspect is not deescalation. More or less asking officers to risk death is not deescalation. Yes - the US is increasingly becoming a police state. No, asking officers to risk death instead of shooting is not going to solve it.
I agree about being members of the community. Public outreach and police interacting with the community in friendly ways goes a long way. We need more of this [2] [3] [4] [5]. It builds trust, it builds a sense of community, and that's something sorely lacking in many places of the US.
[0] http://imgur.com/vu7kh0L.jpg
[1] http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/13/us/alabama-birmingham-police-d...
[2] http://imgur.com/gallery/fgGLfPv
[3] http://imgur.com/gallery/6tpEqly
1: http://www.odmp.org/search/year 2: http://killedbypolice.net/
Though I will ask that you do not make the dangerous assumption that "unarmed = not dangerous" or that being found to be unarmed post-facto made them not dangerous to begin with.
If someone threatens to have a gun and threatens to shoot but is actually unarmed at a distance of 30' and they reach behind them - what do you do? Waiting for visual confirmation of a weapon could leave you dead. The potential of them not bluffing is there.
That scenario is a little contrived but there are many variations and they don't involve the suspect having a weapon or bluffing to have a weapon. What if they don't say anything at all but reach behind them? Does that change the situation?
>And it also seems odd to me that anyone would be surprised that officers might be injured
I'm not surprised at all, it is expected to have risk after all. I am surprised that people are asking officers to take additional and unnecessary risks.
Americans live in a police state and they are too cowed to even admit such a basic truth.