The NSA Scandal.

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xenoargh

Grandmaster Knight
Pretty straightforward:  every tin-hat conspiracy-theorists' evil dream has been fulfilled.  The NSA really has been keeping track of everything it could within the borders of the U.S.; email, cellular calls, all kinds of online posting services (Facebook, Google et al), using GPS data to track users and assembling profiles based on their locations, etc., etc.

As this is not an issue that I feel is just Politics as Usual, and as the events have international ramifications, here is what is known at this time.  I'm afraid that the situation in Turkey will probably be a lot less visible in the U.S. from now on; this is, after the IRS scandals, a critical moment in U.S. politics.

Huffington Post

New York Times

WSJ

For the Neocons, it's probably a heavy blow, since they put this stuff together in the first place and strong-armed a number of nations into helping them out.  For everybody here who hated the Neocons, though, a word of caution: most of the really bad stuff happened after Obama arrived.  I'd advise some caution before this degenerates into Left vs. Right name-calling and so forth.

We're still not clear on just how many nations are involved in this, either, but this kind of widespread activity cannot be executed in a vacuum.  For example, how many routers and firewalls from countries around the world have been set up to allow this access?  Time will tell.

For the Obama Administration, this may be the moment when their legitimacy is completely lost- most of the Left agrees with the Right here, for once. 

This is not quite Watergate, but at least in my book, it's worse; widespread use of surveillance methods in dragnet patterns is a fundamental violation of our rights, specifically under the American Constitution, but more importantly, this is the same denial of basic human rights to freedom of expression, privacy and protection against unwarranted government searches that is seen in authoritarian regimes. 

We've apparently reached the edge here, and I expect that the politics on this issue will be quite sharp but pretty un-partisan in nature, as the "protect us at any cost" people try to argue their case in the face of what is obviously a fundamental problem.
 
True, it happened after the Obama administration took office,
but it seems like a natural follow up to the many laws passed after 9/11 tearing down fundamental rights.

I hope both the left and right wing - and all in between - can come together to criticize this;
and an army of journalists will work to uncover how widespread it is.
 
I'm afraid it's pretty much the historic moment that would mar the second Obama presidency for the books.
I also hope there will be a lively and comprehensive public debate and investigative journalism in the 'States that would uncover all that still remains secret about domestic surveillance, or the internet will be at the mercy of the tinfoil hat brigade for years to come.
Can't share the optimism with the left and right coming together, as they'll end up blaming each other, while a significant share of the general public will stray to the anti-political populist fringes, disgusted at the mainstream parties. It's harvesting time for the political loonies, I'm afraid.
 
You may be right; we'll see.  One of the good things here is that, due to our weird political system, we don't really have any Nazi / Stalinist political parties (at least none worth talking about) here. 

But it also means that both of our parties are heavily implicated in this scandal, since they've all signed off on the FISA warrants that were at the root of this.  Basically, neither party can safely point fingers at the other one, so it'll get interesting.  There's always a chance that, recognizing that their political survival is at stake, something substantial will be done.  There's been talk of repealing the Patriot Act completely again.

It's anybody's guess what's going to happen next, though; I don't think that we've seen so many serious scandals at once since Watergate, but none of them are things that Obama can be impeached for, so I have no idea who will get thrown under the bus to try and calm things down.  For foreigners, please understand, in the last 60 days, the Obama Administration's accepted the sudden resignations of quite a few people over other issues and our economy is still fairly awful; this news could not have possibly broken at a worse time.
 
xenoargh said:
But it also means that both of our parties are heavily implicated in this scandal, since they've all signed off on the FISA warrants that were at the root of this.  Basically, neither party can safely point fingers at the other one, so it'll get interesting.  There's always a chance that, recognizing that their political survival is at stake, something substantial will be done.  There's been talk of repealing the Patriot Act completely again.
How is their political survival at stake? Since both are involved and the two party system allows no other competition to speak of, they can just sit this out and continue as usual. Some heads may role, maybe they ll even rename an act or two, but the state of your political system inhibits change.
 
Every once in a long, long while, one of the two parties dies. 

More often, there is a sudden shift in the balance as constituents decide to switch parties permanently over an issue.

Since both parties fear losing their precious percentages, as they're nearly always close to 50/50 nationally if not at the local level... in issues like this one, both parties will not have the option to just sit it out.  The question therefore is whether one of the parties decides that now is the time to shift its position.  Perhaps, perhaps not; doing so means that various people will have to suddenly declare that they've "re-thought their positions" and so forth. 

When that happens, the whole tectonic mass of our two-party system shifts, often quite rapidly, as the other party tries to figure out the best way to either join in or stake out an equally-well-polling position, and eventually we get back to the two-party stability.  The interim periods are usually quite messy, though :smile:

I know that to most foreigners, our two-party system must seem bizarre, but that's how it works and why it's generally stayed very stable while reacting to what people want.  It doesn't always work, but it usually does. 

9/11 created some fairly strange bedfellows, however; lots of moderate Democrats were OK with the Patriot Act so long as it seemed limited and aimed at Al Qaeda and joined the Neocons and Far Right, while the Libertarian Right and the Far Left both opposed it, albeit for different reasons.  I think it's likely that that coalition might now split, but it's unclear which way it will go.
 
Well, it's specifically forbidden here, for one thing. 

Our Constitution bans this sort of large-scale surveillance and we have a lot of legal precedents saying that it's not OK to engage in these sorts of practices without specific suspicions about specific individuals.  It's illegal, for example, for the government to tape random peoples' phone calls; they have to get a specific warrant and justify it to a judge.  This stuff basically turns all of our law regarding presumptions of innocence on its head.

Moreover, we don't think our government is entitled to know where we are, who we talk to, or what we believe.  In a multicultural society where one person's taboos may be another's daily activities, it's a pretty important concept.  If the government can spy on us, inevitably that information will get leaked, exposing people to blackmail, for example. 

Not to mention all of the other abuses seen where governments routinely spy on their citizens' telecommunications:

1.  Stock market manipulation.  Pretty easy to know which stocks to buy, if you know what the companies are saying to each other or even merely have the phone records showing that X talked to Y a lot this month, indicating a merger may be in the works.  Plenty of campaign funds, slush funds to pay off rivals, buy up the services of organized criminals to break up demonstrations, that sort of stuff.

2.  Press surveillance.  It's a lot easier to control the press if you know what they're investigating before it's published.  It's a lot easier to suppress the press if you can silence their sources or know when you'll have to prepare a discrediting file or just blackmail the press member you're dealing with.  For example, in culturally-conservative countries, knowing who's gay is probably pretty valuable.

3.  Political parties are inherently corrupted by this.  It's so much easier to discredit the opposition if you can record what they're saying and to whom.  All political parties inherently end up making strange arrangements with odd bedfellows, but only the parties with the power to access the surveillance know who's doing deals with whom.  Kind of makes it easy to get and keep power and make sure that the opposition is always caught doing something stupid or talking to people that they shouldn't be.  Pretty soon your party always wins "fair elections" and is very popular, while the opposition is marginalized and always seems to be plagued by scandals. Sounding familiar?

Just a few examples. 

Basically, the last thing anybody should want is a government that really knows what you're doing.  But with modern cellular phones, we've given governments pretty good tracking devices and listening posts, even if they aren't actually listening in to our conversations.  Add in Internet surveillance and drone coverage for more specific snooping, and even a "democracy" can quickly become nothing but another form of totalitarianism.
 
Captain Lust said:
Why is everyone so surprised? Since when do you have to be a tin-hat conspiracy theorist to realise that they will monitor you in every way they possibly can?
I see you have asssimilated well to Turkey.  :smile: But you're right, no need for ridicule about such conspiracy theories.
Pretty much all western democracies have laws preventing authorities from indiscriminately surveying its citizens, like tapping phone calls and such.
 
Captain Lust said:
Why is everyone so surprised? Since when do you have to be a tin-hat conspiracy theorist to realise that they will monitor you in every way they possibly can?

This. I'm not surprised the least. "It's against the law"? As if that's a problem with surveillance that ought to stayed a secret.
 
I'm already letting google try to predict what fetishes I might be interested in from all the naughty stuff I search for, I don't see how it can be worse unless I'm looking up bomb recipes or something.
 
Interestingly enough Microsoft got into it first and Apple last, just as we would expect. Only Twitter seems to have successfully resisted so far. A smart move for them now is to open an email service and market it as NSA-free.

Captain Lust said:
xenoargh said:
Our Constitution... [snip]
Bahahaha
Well, you don't even have one in the UK. :smile:
 
I think I heard about this about 6 years ago, so I googled "How to make bomb and blow up America". Why did the FBI never come :sad: Could they not find me because of my tinfoil hat?
 
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