The NSA exists to spy on non-citizens, so it affects you more.
That's what's blocking instatement of a new director, so no, it won't have any effect on the data collected on foreigners.
The NSA spying on foreigners, who enjoy no protections from the Constitution, is part of its intended agenda.
The constitutional prohibitions should be applied to all government actions no matter where they are in the world, not just the land that is the US, as such the government prohibition on search should apply to all government agencies world wide. In short if it illegal for the NSA to spy on someone in Michigan, it should be illegal for them to Spy on them in Spain.
It is very strange that this prohibition applies to all persons while with in the borders of the US, and also applies to US Residents living aborad, but magically some how does not applies to non-citizens outside the US.
When in reality The Constitution does not apply to people at all, it does not grant me or any one else rights, it is a document where we the people surrender some of our power, some or our natural rights to the government for a limited purpose.
Somehow we have flipped this script, to where the constitution lays out what the government "cant" do, instead of that intention of providing a very limited list of things the government can do, of which is prohibited from all other activity
I mean, we'd appreciate your income tax, but you might not like all the gun ownership.
>> also implies that U.S. law in all other respects should apply globally.
No it does not imply that at all, again you are reversing the position I am talking about. In fact US Law probably applies too much to other nations via International Trade Agreements to other nations already.
If the US Constitution would bar the NSA from spying with out probable cause on everyone, not just US Citizens, then that has absolutely zero bearing on if the EU wants to have gun control. I am not even sure how there is a connection to the 2 at all
I don't disagree with you, but what is the philosophical reason why? I know the reason, but I'd really like people such as yourself and the GP to voice it. Because it doesn't form a consistent philosophy in the same way that the current realization of U.S. law is not consistent, simply precisely the opposite of what you (and GP) are saying it should be.
If you disagree, the at least answer this question, why is it the way it is today which is the de facto way it works?
In short, it is illegal for the NSA (or any part of the US government) to spy on Americans and legal to spy on foreigners, regardless of a given individual's location.
We generally draw the line using physical location because keeping track of whether you ended up with info on an American while spying somewhere outside America, say France or Japan, is utterly impractical. That doesn't mean the legal lines are drawn like that, though.
It's just that the operations in question will invoke "National Security" and "sovereign immunity" arguments sufficient to ensure the judiciary will either summary judgement the case. Or leave it conspicuously unreviewed.
Or, at the end of the day, a Presidential pardon will be conferred at the appropriate/most convenient opportunity.
Or actions will just be undertaken with the understanding that the participants will be operating deniably, in which case it is quite literally the Government unilaterally deciding that breaking the law is the only way.
So, I do get what you're saying. If it were federal employees directly participating they can be prosecuted in the US.But if this is done through a web of contractors it will be hard to prosecute.
You can, on common example is Sex crimes, a US Citizen can (and have been) charged with violations of various sex crime laws for actives that occurred outside the US in courts INSIDE the US, even if the activity was not a crime in the nation the activity took place in. aka "Sex Tourism" [1]
You can also be tried for Foreign crimes such as bribery in the US if you were bribing a Foreign official this applies to business as well as government.
[1] https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/ice-homeland-security-inve...
Yes.[1][2]
As far as the US is concerned, the Constitution is the supreme authority to which Americans can and will answer to and is protected by.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Criminal_Court#U...
[2]: "[Bolton] added that the U.S. would do everything 'to protect our citizens' should the ICC attempt to prosecute U.S. servicemen ..."
Also all constitutions are social contracts that are only as strong as the judicial branch is at restricting the government, so its really up to interpretation on that front.
EDIT: Former NSA directors have deliberately lied under oath to Congress about their activities and actions...with no penalty or rebuke. The NSA are above the law and constitution.
Not really. It's been inferred from the text by courts, but it's been a bit of a leap, and the Supreme Court can overturn the earlier interpretations at any time. "Many originalists, including most famously Judge Robert Bork in his ill-fated Supreme Court confirmation hearings, have argued that no such general right of privacy exists."
[1] http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/rightof...
When they overturned Roe v Wade last year they simultaneously overturned the previous rulings that established a (limited by international standards) right to privacy in the US.
The public has no way of knowing if the NSA follows the law and the theoretically available technology for the NSA to use, means it's extremely unlikely they have restrained themselves from gazing into your private life at home.
I'm actually pretty fond of the US, love to visit and the culture - but not realizing we're all just living under the US empire is a bit naive. The US does whatever it wants and everyone else just accepts. Basic things such as voting against the international criminal court and having law allowing it to invade The Netherlands if it ever prosecuted a US war criminal is a funny example, but there are many more.
And it also does good things for the world as well, it's not all good or all bad, but it is the largest empire in the world, with military bases all around, colonies all over the pacific, etc, we just don't talk about it like that usually.
Tell that to all of the high ranking military positions that Senator Tuberville is still holding up months later.
The Democrats may even try to use this to gain more support for the temporary rule change needed for mass approval of the military confirmations. They can say it isn't a partisan effort because they will use the rule change to override the hold of a Democrat.
Yeah, I know. It hasn't worked out that way. But do you think other governments, starting with fewer restraints, are doing less than the US? Or more?
I could see saying that the US is doing it in higher volume, because it's got more money to spend on government excess.
This is where the writers of the Constitution missed the boat a little. With all of their smarts they probably could have written something in there to hold accountable those who would have any part in enacting a rule or law the violates the Constitution. Not a simple task at all but a worthwhile addition IMHO.
lmao ycomb.
The buried lede here is: why is it legal to resell that data in the first place. (Hint: because it makes Intelligence Community's job 100x easier). This ultimatum for answers is simply theatre.
Exactly. Surveillance capitalism is orders of magnitude more invasive than the NSA and does not answer to anyone. Regulations don’t even really work because they can just offshore anything shady or do it through fly by night data brokers.
Most of them don't want to, and let the police and the bailiffs do that kind of thing for them in the relatively rare cases it matters, just like any other form of contracting or outsourcing.
"HDMI Ethernet and Audio Return Channel Introduced in HDMI 1.4, HDMI Ethernet and Audio Return Channel (HEAC) adds a high-speed bidirectional data communication link (HEC) and the ability to send audio data upstream to the source device (ARC). HEAC utilizes two lines from the connector: the previously unused Reserved pin (called HEAC+) and the Hot Plug Detect pin (called HEAC−).[51]: §HEAC-2.1 If only ARC transmission is required, a single mode signal using the HEAC+ line can be used, otherwise, HEC is transmitted as a differential signal over the pair of lines, and ARC as a common mode component of the pair."
HDMI Ethernet Channel (HEC)
HDMI Ethernet Channel technology consolidates video, audio, and data streams into a single HDMI cable, and the HEC feature enables IP-based applications over HDMI and provides a bidirectional Ethernet communication at 100 Mbit/s.[43] The physical layer of the Ethernet implementation uses a hybrid to simultaneously send and receive attenuated 100BASE-TX-type signals through a single twisted pair."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI
--------------------------------------------------
This gives me the impression that packet sniffs, and many other operations have been in play since HDMI 1.4,
possibly a subscription based desktop as a service, or game console as a service, could distribute this way, and leech off local LAN gateway, for heavy loads.
See also patent trolls, predatory DRM and copyright enforcement, and (often) the creation and maintenance of harmful monopolies.
Leveling such a broad criticism against “big tech companies” isn’t helpful, especially when you personally (along with every American) is categorically guilty of the same.
Unlike private households and businesses, public companies only exist due to licenses from the state. These include limitation on liability, protection for many types of property, and much, much more. The protections even extend to securities regulations; since public companies aren’t privately owned, there is a misalignment between incentives of owners and managers. The state sides with the owners by using force on managers to prevent them from acting in their own self interest, and instead to act on behalf of the shareholder public.
The NAP cannot extend to public companies as they are not privately owned and can only exist when granted rights by the state. A lot of work has been done by libertarians on the topic of how monopolies are formed; it’s not due to private markets.
> Unlike private households and businesses, public companies only exist due to licenses from the state.
There are a few problems with this. To start, private business and private households also exist due to licensure from the state. The distinction between public and private is a matter of technicality, not categorical difference. The monopoly that the state holds on the initiation of violence applies categorically to your ability to purchase a home and pay taxes, and it applies to large tech companies.
The second problem is that public businesses were as a matter of fact private before they were public. So instead of offering shares to the public on government regulated, public markets that anyone can participate in, they could just be private instead.
Regarding your second issue, we’re in agreement. Yes it’s true under capitalism that with the heavy regulation of private individuals and firms, everything becomes the public sphere. Your house becomes a public place where your actions are subject to judgement.
Being public just means that you are selling shares to anyone on a public market. Those markets don't need a license or regulation of any sort to exist. I'm confused as to why you're trying to draw such a sharp distinction between public and private companies in terms of government regulation. Regulation of a stock market and public companies who participate is no different than regulation of private businesses. You can't really divorce the two in a sensible way within this context.
> We humans were all stateless tribes once, and some of us still are.
A tribe is a form of government (I'm not sure that the usage of state makes a difference here versus government but maybe it does make a difference for you?) and your behavior is regulated within your tribe.
Sometimes I think people confuse individual choice or individualism with how humans exist, but humans are pack animals. Always have been. So we're always within a regulated tribe, democracy, religious cult, or other form of government. Even your example of a human being born without a license seems like an unimportant technical detail that doesn't have a basis in reality, because your license would just be you conforming to the rules of your social group. Being formally issued by some people wearing funny hats in an "office" doesn't make a difference except for the purposes of management and efficiency.
Public markets cannot exist without regulation, for complex reasons you can read about elsewhere. Private markets can exist without the state and do; whether it’s drug markets or decentralized crypto trading apps. The distinction is important to understand for people working in blockchain especially; people have tried to import ideas from corporate governance with general failure. The most successful daos measured by impact are molochdaos, which are designed to be controlled by a small number of private actors. Publicly owned daos such as dash and makerdao have consistently run into issues related to governance, such as decision capture by private organizations, low voter turnout, poor returns to capital, and more. Even now in the case of MakerDao the main driving force is a single developer, Rune, while the dao mostly acts as a discussion platform for his ideas. His endgame plan even will result in the dao governance from having minimal control over the core protocol. Understanding the difference between public and private would have prevented a lot of mistakes.
How are you defining a public market? Because it seems quite clear to me that a public market can exist without state regulation. The original discussion point was:
> public companies only exist due to licenses from the state.
Which seems pretty clearly false to me unless you are defining a public company as a company in which it "has a license" from the state, but then that falls flat on its face because the vast majority of businesses have to have some licensure of some sort to operate. That could be a restaurant being required to pass food safety inspections, it could be a hotel and requirements to be ADA accessible, or various other "licensures", let alone the actual business licenses needed to be filed either at the state of federal level in order to operate.
To bring this back into focus, being irate at "big public tech companies" because they "have a special license from the state" as was implied is quite silly.
> States are parasocial, not social. It might feel like state officials are your friends, the president is like a father, and your representative is like a respected community leader you’ve known your whole life. But those relationships aren’t based in natural social human behavior; they require a media ecosystem. Arguments that humans are social and therefore statist doesn’t hold water.
I think there is merit in arguing that states work because of a shared fiction, in which a media ecosystem is, while not necessary, certainly of great benefit, but I think the key point here is one of scale, not form.
I don't draw a sharp distinction between a 25 person democracy and a 25 person tribe or community. Whether that should change as you scale to 25,000,000 people is a more interesting discussion I think.
It is reasonable to be upset at the use of force by the state to protect big tech companies that are using this protection to violate human rights. We might like the idea that the system functions differently, and perhaps some powerful individuals could institute temporary reforms, but as long as a monopoly of force exists it will be abused due to incentives.
There’s a huge difference between a 25 person “democracy” and a 25m person democracy. Firstly in common modern parlance democracy means a set of institutions with a distributed power base. That’s why Germany is democratic and China is not, even though both appeal to the “will of the people” and both have elections. Obviously a 25 person group will not have these institutions and cannot be democratic. Second the small group is based on fundamental human social relationships, while the second one is necessarily parasocial. You can personally know everyone in a 25 person group; you cannot for a 25m one.
Yes!
> They cannot exist without regulation
No! In fact, early crypto exchanges are examples of unregulated public markets. But we also know that this is incorrect because you can just imagine a world where the government doesn’t regulate these markets. The owner/agent problem you are describing can be solved without the use of government - you just find a different third party.
> It is reasonable to be upset at the use of force by the state to protect big tech companies
Sure but the criticism wasn’t “the State should stop big tech companies from doing bad things” it was:
* The big tech companies are not private; they are public companies that rely on state force to maintain their monopolies. Just as an example, intellectual property laws rely on the state for enforcement.*
Which is nonsense because being “public” and “licensed” isn’t relevant to the protection of the State here.
> China is not, even though both appeal to the “will of the people” and both have elections.
I lost track of what we were really discussing here but China does not hold elections in a way that resembles what we mean by an election. Chinese citizens don’t go to the voting booth, the appointment of the CCP ruler isn’t up to the public.
Public markets need state intervention because the application of force is required.
The point regarding democracy is that you cannot call a 25 person tribe a democracy just because they vote. “What we mean by an election” is about diverse institutions of power such as multiple parties, independent media, freedom of political speech, etc.
Debatable[1] but you can buy commodities and currencies (and even Bitcoin) on public markets in addition to your S&P 500 or shares of Nvidia.
> Public markets need state intervention because the application of force is required.
So does your home and all private business.
> The point regarding democracy is that you cannot call a 25 person tribe a democracy just because they vote.
Why?
[1] It seems as a society we're still trying to categorize and regulation crypto currencies/assets/etc. so I don't think this is settled.
It doesn’t matter whether the state says Bitcoin is an equity or not; it isn’t one. States frequently make all sorts of false claims.
Regarding democracy, in modern parlance it’s a set of institutions; a 25 person tribe is too small to support those institutions; accordingly a 25 person tribe cannot be democracy in the modern sense.
As a tangential example: my roommate and I have paid $115,000 in rent for our current unit. Condos in this area went for $250k-$300k in 2018, when we moved in, but we didn't have a down payment. So, fast forward 5 years, and the management company (after jacking up payments 30+%) isn't renewing our lease. Do the math: assuming a hypothetical where the mean payment over this period was stable for a 30-year mortgage, we could have afforded to pay principal+interest+fees+maintenance of almost $700k, almost *two* comparable condos. In a sane system, it would be recognized that "rights" defaulting to an entity that is not paying 2x the holding and upkeep costs of a property is ridiculous at best, and economically unsustainable if a widespread phenomenon (which it is). Instead, my roommate and I get nothing, because we're getting kicked out in a few days. Because we couldn't afford an arbitrary down payment.
The mindless appeal to "property rights" seems to absolve you of the responsibility to consider these complexities, I guess.
Note that half of this country was settled this way.
The alternative that is the current status quo is real estate corporations in New York and Delaware disrupting community fabric 200, 500, 1000 miles away in the name of quarterly profits. Legality is not the measure of morality.
I’ve spent a lot of money at fast food over the years, but no one has given me a franchise.
>Thats what you paid for I presume?
I presume I paid for shelter, but also someone's luxury car or home renovation.
"Property rights" are laughable, especially in America. Stolen or conned resources abound, and all that matters is that someone from the state recognizes your ownership over someone else's (however crooked that circumstance may have come about or been perpetuated).
All humans in the world live, have lived, or will live under the exact same circumstances. It’s a good sounding clip but it’s meaningless, rooted in cynicism, and less than useless since it detracts from the ability to make progress.
Therein lies the rub: you can't. Or, at least, didn't. Each of your statements is falsifiable, particularly the last, which is a confession masquerading as an accusation. There are few worse ways to "make progress" than to dismiss criticism of the status quo out-of-hand.
If you want to hold and exercise property rights, you need to own property. Renting a property does not mean you own it. It's as simple as that.
My argument relies on acknowledging what you've said as the current, horribly dysfunctional reality. You don't need to state it plainly.
What happens to a society when a large subset of the population is forced to subsidize a 100% profit margin on the most expensive basic good most will ever put money towards, and it doesn't even buy them stability or predictability in access to that good? I guess we're going to find out.
At the same, government by congressional hobbling and sabotage also makes a mockery of democracy through agencies not ceasing bad behavior but rather a continuous war between congress and agencies being normalized in a way that makes agencies actually more autonomous from congress. The "Washington Monument Syndrome" is just one piece of the problematic situation [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument_syndrome
Try sneaking a little graft in there and get laughed at in public. It'd be great.
We should reveal every detail about our military's weapons systems so our adversaries can more easily build countermeasures against them?
It seems exceedingly unrealistic that any government, even a democracy, could keep no secrets at all and survive.
When the Allies in WW2 broke Germany's Enigma cipher, are you suggesting that by not telling Germany that the Allies could now read a large fraction of Germany's military communication they were endangering their own national security?!
If the NSA has broken whatever cipher suite the GRU uses, or the Iranian RG, or whomever, please explain how keeping that fact a secret endangers the USA?
Keep in mind they share info with the other Five Eyes and select other allied nations.
According to what exactly?
1. Security through obscurity is different from secrecy. Not at all what we were arguing. You just pulled pop sci quotes from the crypo world.
2. > Imagine if every interaction with the government; every contract, negotiation, communication was a matter of easily searchable public record.
Democracies do have FOIA but it doesn't and shouldn't extend for foreign entities.
Security for me, clarity into you, is a big problem. We should build unsurveillable homes.
It's over, privacy is dead and so is a private bedroom. We need physical answers to surveillance, electronics are totally ruined.
Sooner or later we need off this planet, surveillance has trapped everybody.
So, the most probable outcome is that this will delay the process for a few weeks at most until congress just pushes it through. At least it shines a bit light on the whole charade. Not that it makes much of a difference for me, since I'm not an US citizen, but imho the easiest and best solution would be to stop private companies from gobbling up and selling private data. But that would mean going against companies and we can't have that now, can we?