To turn your comment around a little bit in a way that places responsibility on normal citizens or congresspeople instead of the NSA, it's inconvenient to disagree with authority, or deal with a lie, but once you start conceding rights or letting one branch of government lie to another, where do you stop? What's tolerated is encouraged, as most parents would suggest[0].

When this broke, a lot of people said "we already knew!" We did. But when you're explicitly confronted with something, you get to decide whether you're going to tolerate it or not. In fact, you have to - there's no way to not decide whether to tolerate something or not.

0. Incidentally, I wish we would start seeing ourselves as parents of a gov, if for no other reason than to not see ourselves as children.

This goes both ways (we have a Supreme Court endowed "right to privacy" that is nowhere in the constitution specifically, but results from cumulative analysis of several amendments).

The language in the constitution may seem extremely cut and dry, but there are at least ten thousand lines of binding precedent for each word in the bill of rights.

Truth be told, if the US constitution would be written or updated today, then the 4th amendment (or anything like it) wouldn't be there - you know it, they know it. The constitution is their only legal barrier in doing whatever they want to do.

Also, it isn't true that "unreasonable" is meaningless. A person subject to search without being a suspect in wrongdoing is unreasonable, unless you say that everybody is a suspect and that's also unreasonable.

You can't just pretend the 4th amendment says whatever you want it to say. It's written using much narrower language than the 1st, and it's use of "reasonable" invites judicial balancing and exception-making in its application.

The "Elastic Clause" is a classic example, which ostensibly constrains, but through the introduction of the phrase "Necessary and Proper", vastly expands the power of the federal government. There are numerous examples of similar qualifications throughout.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necessary_and_Proper_Clause

Common law is a more conservative approach in many ways, because laws are seen not as coming from some abstract, idealized system designed years and years ago, but strongly informed by the history of the law as lived through the people subject to it.

For example, take the 4th amendment. We're protected from "unreasonable searches and seizures." If you're pulled over for an arrest, does a police officer have the right to search your car? Your glovebox? Your trunk? How about your cellphone? Is the answer, "No, unless Congress passess a law?" Is it, "No, even if Congress passes a law?" If the latter, how do we know and when? What if judges disagree?

That's not even to point out that "unreasonable" not only varies between individuals but across time. John Adams didn't think the Alien and Sedition Acts were unconstitutional, for example, though Thomas Jefferson surely did. And what would be considered "unreasonable" to them might be wholly reasonable to us, or vice versa.

Congress or other legislative bodies are free to pass laws that specify intent, BTW. They're just awful at it. Really awful. So awful that the same Congress might pass two laws with obviously contradictory intent. Or pass laws which are deliberately open to multiple interpretations for the sake of getting a bill passed more quickly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_review_in_the_United_S...

I think the impedance mismatch is most clearly illustrated when you try to apply the text of the 4th amendment to something like the NSA getting call detail records from AT&T, or search histories from Google. The 4th amendment very clearly refers to "their... papers." To this English speaker, it strains the definition of "their" (i.e. "your's") to say that some electronic record that AT&T or Google generated that you never even had access to much less actually possessed is nonetheless "your" private paper or effect. It doesn't make any sense at all.

And people don't generally view their call records as something that's expected to be public. Many people would be rather embarrassed if their call records were made public. Same for their search histories, and they wouldn't feel comfortable with the idea that there's a person on the other side of the screen reading their queries if they didn't think it was all completely anonymous. The government is trying to break that wall of anonymity.

Also, the 4th amendment does not use the phrase "not public." It gives four examples that are intensely private: your person, your home, your effects, your papers. How private is data that you share with hundreds of people you don't even know?

You can't ignore the plain words on the page for your version of what you think the "spirit" of the language is. The framers could have drafted the 4th amendment much more broadly even only accounting for information sources that existed back then. They did not sue that, And you have to give effect to this conscious choice. P

I realize that the court ruling was about private computers, not data on servers, but as you said, it makes a difference if the informations systems you use can be expected to produce 'public' records.

What is different when the whole situation is made digital? I'm not saying all digital data held by third party companies is private, of course, but surely some of it should be.

And please don't bring up encryption for the moment, that only sidesteps the issue. There is no real-world unbreakable lock. This is a discussion about search and privacy rights.

But compare a safety deposit box to the kind of digital communications the NSA is collecting. The bank cannot open your safety deposit box. You have the key. Hundreds of strangers might work at the bank (just as hundreds of strangers might live in your apartment building), but none of them can access the contents of your box (obviously you have no privacy interest in the box itself, e.g. anything on the outside). It would be illegal for anyone at the bank to access that box. Generally the bank doesn't know whats in your box. You put it in there directly, you don't hand it to a bank employee to store. Certainly, they don't rummage through the box as a basic part of the service they provide to you. Compare that to an email in a gmail account or a Facebook profile or even a phone call made over a cell network. Your information is exposed, unprotected, to potentially hundreds of employees at those companies. And they rummage through that data as a matter of course, whether to target advertising or to do traffic shaping, etc. You have no property interest in that data. You can't sue the company for losing it, you can't sue the company for accessing it, etc.

I can certainly conceive of a digital equivalent of a safety deposit box. It would involve a provider hosting encrypted data that they themselves cannot decrypt or access in unencrypted form. But the services cooperating with PRISM are nothing like that.

Imagine if the bank had the lock to your lock box, and bank employees had access to the contents of your lock box, and bank employees regularly rifled through the contents of your lock box. Also, the bank had no obligations as to your lock box. You couldn't sue the bank if they lost the box, or if someone stole the contents, etc. To me, all that would make the box seem a lot less "private."

The 4th amendment doesn't extend to say the stuff you store in your friend's garage. Google, Facebook, etc, accounts resemble that a lot more than they resemble bank safe deposit boxes.

Also, it is not like a friend's garage; they aren't hosting people's email as a favor. It is more like a rent-a-storage-room place with a peculiar method of paying the rent; there is a business relationship/transaction going on. We trade algorithmic-advertising access to our emails in exchange for them providing hosting.

Let's look at Dropbox for a moment. If the system is working correctly the employees never have access to the contents of your files. The data flows past the employees in a TLS tunnel that only lets the destination server decrypt it. Employees are kept from accessing the contents via a mechanism similar in effectiveness to locks. Should this data be protected? I think it should.

Now let's move on to Email. Most of the time, with modern server configurations, it works in a very similar way. The messages are encrypted in transit, stored in plain text, and employees are kept out. Ignoring that obsolete rule about email 'abandonment' after a certain number of days, I see no reason email shouldn't need a warrant.

It comes down in part to how the data is stored in the first place. Why do you say that my email is 'unprotected'? Are there not locks on it, barriers keeping away employees in the typical case? What makes it less secure than a box with a lock that can be broken with a hammer?

At the end of the struggle, if the people win their rights back, we're just back to where we were supposed to be and there's nothing to stop the gov't from trying again.

It's a battle of bulges. They cross the line in one place, we push them back. They cross again in another place, we push them back again. Without penalties, there's no end to this.

Second, Article IV, Section 4, of the US Constitution states that it is the duty of the Federal Government to protect the states against invasion and domestic violence[2]. Clandestine surveillance programs have long been tools of governments to accomplish such goals; PRISM is just a 21st century version.

Furthermore, the US Government has LOTS of tools at it's disposal that _could_ be used to implement a tyrannical state. But, the beauty of the American system is that we have checks and balances in place to prevent these tools from being abused in a tyrannical manner.

In conclusion, it seems to me that PRISM is a necessary and justified government function. This makes me wonder who exactly is benefiting from the Obama administration receiving so much bad press because it seems that they really are being unjustly crucified (and this is coming from someone who voted against Obama both times).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program), paragraph 4.

[2] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_St...

In other words, I have right that my things are not subject of unreasonable search (and fishing expedition searching for patterns seems unreasonable - why do they think I might be a terrorist or connected with terrorists?). I don't care whether it will used against me or not but my right is that gov does not do that without warrant.

However, the Supreme Court has clarified these issues in a number of decisions, which is why our law is primarily based on judicial precedent, and not literal interpretation.

That may or not be a good thing, but it's the way our legal system is in fact designed to work.

So as first step I want to hear from Supreme Court whether this is constitutional. But NSA says that what they are doing is secret, so ...

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/director-national-inte...

  information is considered to be “collected” only after it has been 
  “received for use by an employee of a DoD intelligence component”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/02/james-clapper-se...

So I would say we need to have an open debate about exactly what they're doing, and have the Supreme Court, whose job it is, define what those terms mean and what they can do, instead of letting them make it up as they go along, and then lie about it.

That's not to say that it's not a fact that PRISM data is only used against a person when there is a warrant, but it is to say that we don't know that that is the case.

Second, no reasonable person with a decent understanding of this issue is claiming that the NSA isn't legally justifying their actions. Indeed, the NSA is using--as expected--national security in part as a motivating legal justification, and invoking Article IV Section 4. It is agreed: national security is their intelligence directive.

Nor are such people claiming that the government hasn't previously used secret surveillance programs, or that the government is necessarily intentionally tyrannical.

What we are saying is that legal justification aside, we want the details of this directive in the public conversation so that We the People can decide if we approve of the actions. We the People are the governors of this country, and We the People have the power to change the laws or the Constitution if we decide that the actions are not justifiable, are not reconcilable with liberty, or if the system of checks and balances have failed to check or balance.

This is a dangerous situation. If Snowden's claims are correct, not only are we being overbearingly surveilled, but that data is dangerously aggregated. Even if we are to assume complete benevolence and complete competence in our government (even government actors who may be under-paid and under-invested in their duties), then there is still a very real possibility that people who would seek destruction could acquire possession of that data, gaining a catastrophic trove of information about not just the American public--who would probably be protected by the overbearing force of the U.S. Military--but also the public of the rest of the world.

In conclusion, it seems to me that we can't know that PRISM or associated programs are necessary and justified government functions, because we know nothing about them. Of the 300,000,000+ people in the United States, 435 are in a position of both knowledge and decision on those policies, and given the importance of this issue that's just not good enough.

Especially when it is undisputed that those 435 people can't do their job even minimally effectively.

Regardless of whether Snowden is correct or not, I think that there are government functions that the general public should not be informed of. Having a policy of detailing the exact nature of PRISM could be just as damaging as, say, having a policy of publicly detailing all planned drone strikes. I bet the NSA's job is already harder because of Snowden's leaks.

I also think that there is a very real possibility that people who would seek destruction could acquire possession of an aircraft carrier's control systems or the control systems of the missile defense shield. Should the US not pursue those tools because of that possibility, too?

The citizenry will have a hard time exercising it's natural rights to participate in debates about national policies in the American Republic if each citizen has to also worry about protecting himself from thieves/bandits/pirates/foreign armies.

There is no functioning missile defense shield, that program was a huge costly boondoggle.

There is next to no chance that terrorists would be able to take over an aircraft carrier or any other significant military target for any significant length of time. They're full of armed soldiers. Can you imagine what would happen if real, actually well funded militaries and spy agencies could do that? You should try not to live in fear of extremely unlikely dangers.

You're pretty conveniently leaving out several important words, and also ignoring the ", and" between the first and second clauses of the amendment.

1) You left out the word "unreasonable" from "search." The 4th amendment doesn't protect against "search of those effects" it protects against "unreasonable" searches thereof.

2) You left out the word "their". The 4th amendment doesn't protect against searches of effects. It protects against searches of your effects. You might reasonably say that a Word document on your hard drive is your effect. It's a little harder to say that a Word document on Google's hard drives is nonetheless your effect. I think it strains the definition of the word "your" to say that Google's records about what you search for, or AT&T's records about who you call are your effects, rather than AT&T's effects, when you didn't generate those records and indeed when those records were never even in your possession.

3) Searches don't necessarily require probable cause. The ", and" separates the two parts of the sentence. Searches must be reasonable, and also for any search that requires a warrant, the warrant must be supported by probable cause.

Lawyers can try to wiggle through the subjective parts in the constitution's language, but the intent seems very clear, given the context. The founders did not want the government violating its citizens privacy except when there was a clear reason to, and then only in limited cases, or in trivial cases of privacy invasion that aren't worth considering. Any violation of that is a violation of the spirit of the amendment, if not strictly the letter of it. The language is very forceful on this, and it's clearly meant to be very inclusive on what is considered protected.

The founders didn't have anything in their world that paralleled telephone conversations or server records, except perhaps letters, which they would consider to be effects. They also didn't have anything to parallel our ability to pull out insights from masses of low-signal data.

When people talk on the phone, they have a reasonable expectation that that call is between them and the other person on the call, with AT&T acting as a dumb pipe between them, doing only as much as necessary to make that service work and count the time and rate for billing purposes. There is also the reasonable expectation that AT&T will do with that data what is necessary to bill you for it, but there is no reasonable expectation that they or the govt. will do deep analysis on it to figure out your social connections, who you like best, your travel patterns, who you might be planning something with, etc.

In talking about intent you're projecting onto the framers a broad conception of "privacy" that they did not have. You can't just ignore the text. If you're arguing something is encompassed by the spirit of the law, there must be some evidence of it in the text. It's not there. The text and the discussion at the time is consistent with a more narrow principle: the sanctity of one's home and person, not some broad overarching principle of privacy that attaches to information even when it's shared with potentially hundreds of third parties (how many engineers at Google have access to your email accounts?)

The framers didn't have phones, but they did have all sorts of stored records. Banking records, ledgers, commercial transaction records, shipping records, etc. You can't just ignore the fact that all these things existed, yet the founders made no mention of protecting information that was routinely and by its nature disclosed to other people.

Those data are seized. Either they are 'mine' or they are 'Google's' but they certainly are not 'public'. In any of both cases, it is unreasonable to seizure them (even if what you get is just a copy) arbitrarily.

"It is also true that on at least one occasion the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court held that some collection carried out pursuant to section 702 minimization procedures used by the government was unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment."[2]

Again, no one is saying that the government isn't claiming legal authority. But what you--we--need to understand and accept is that no matter what actions the government takes, they will always claim legal authority. If they were to take unconstitutional or otherwise illegal actions against U.S. citizens--even with benevolent intent (e.g. protection and safety)--they must claim the legal authority to do so. The problem at hand is that neither the actions taken nor the legal justification of those actions are known to the general public and thus we have absolutely no avenue to check the government and ensure that their claims of legal authority are accurate.

It's important to now note that by definition there is no enemy of any nation which presents a greater threat to the sovereignty of that nation than a corruption of that sovereignty itself--be it political corruption, abuse, or tyranny. Therefore, it is an a priori requirement to national security for the public to know that the actions and justifications of the government are legal--and that the public views their legality as justified.

And this can and should be done without releasing specific details which would result in an unreasonable threat to national security. We're not talking about releasing the source code here; we're talking about proving to the public that they approve of the both the actions and the justification of those actions. It may be inconvenient to be restrained by the constitution, but violation of it--even if only in spirit--is tyranny as the founders defined it.

Finally, as an aside to your point about aircraft carriers and missile defense shields, those examples are neither questionably unconstitutional nor are they equivalent. If a aircraft carrier or a missile defense shield become compromised, there will be destruction; but manageable, well-defined, destruction. We can measure and contain that sort of destruction. It's impossible to imagine or measure the amount of destruction caused by the release of in-depth intelligence data of many, most, or all citizens of the world.

Are you sure about this assumption? That no brute force, human rights violation, wrong doings have been committed both inside and outside of US?

Would you please explain your reasoning more? I hope we understand that the American system has worked even without PRISM for as long as I have known and read about American history. And quite efficiently at that. So why is Dragnet needed so much now?

> Furthermore, the US Government has LOTS of tools at it's disposal that _could_ be used to implement a tyrannical state.

Let's say such a tyrannical state is inevitably implemented one day.

1. I am curious to understand how you would logically conclude and arrive (I mean agree to agree) at evaluating a _tyrannical_presence_ = true;

2. What checks and balances you indicate are going to be mechanisms at disposal with people to get rid of such a tyranny?

From what it seems none of your arguments are true at the moment.

Most of the case law that has shaped this area of jurisprudence involves obvious criminals, mainly those who would be prosecuted for illegal drug possession. One could read all those cases, say, while in law school, and think "Why do we need to be so careful to observe the protections of 4th Amendment? Aren't we just protecting drug dealers and other criminals? Aren't we just making the job of the police more difficult?" But one could also conclude that it is the Constitutional principles we are exercising such caution to protect, not the obvious criminals who sometimes might escape prosecution as a result of forcing police to "follow the rules".

In the context of modern telephone and internet surveillence (which in the coming decade or two will become one in the same, when AT&T is fully transitioned to TCP/IP), one might reason that there's little need to observe the 4th Amendment as it only protects criminals, would-be criminals or citizens with "something to hide". The net is widening.

Instead of the undesirable side effect of having guilty parties (e.g. drug dealers) get away because of the hassle to police of following the rules so as not to collect inadmissible evidence, it seems like we are headed for a different sort of undesired side effect. When all evidence is by default "lawfully" collected (because it's so easy to collect it and people have over time assented to this by failing to object to it): innocent parties are likely to get swept up in what will become a massive dragnet.

Well. You don't. And that's the horrifying reality we are waking up to. The data gathering and political targeting by groups such as NSA and IRS are more than likely the tip of a really ugly iceberg.

I think the fundamental lesson here is to remain engaged and, as citizens, make sure that government always sees us as their masters and not their property.

Restore balance to the force we must.

On the corner of hitler road and stalin street.

By the way, there are other means we can use to work together to promote freedom. If you really want to be an idealistic but hard-headed freedom-fighter, mobilizing an effective popular movement for more freedom wherever you live, I suggest you read deeply in the free, downloadable publications of the Albert Einstein Institution,

http://www.aeinstein.org/organizationsde07.html

remembering that the transition from dictatorship to democracy described in those publications is an actual historical process with recent examples around the world that we can all learn from. You can find publications in Arabic, Azeri, Belarusian, Burmese, Burma (Chin), Burma (Jing-paw), Burma (Karen), Burma (Mon), Chinese (Mandarin), Dutch, English, Estonian, Farsi, French, German, Hebrew, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Kyrgyz, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Thai, Tibetan, and Ukrainian there to share with your friends around the world.

I really encourage you to go, even for an hour.

If you can't make it but agree in principle, then discuss it with your friends and family at their BBQ, before fireworks, or whatever you're doing to celebrate today. You don't need heated discussion. Just share what you think and why you think it.

I think you'll be surprised how many minds can change by simply talking. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow. But eventually.

For some reason, I just don't feel passionately about this issue. I could be in the minority, but to me, our society has become very desensitized by sharing with Facebook leading the charge. This is a new reality and I don't think it's such a bad thing that warrants a protest, though I respect those who feel differently. Our government having the ability to track me has only led to benefits in my life including:

* Being able to retrieve a stolen car

* Not being blown up by terrorists

* Practice any religion I choose

* Fly safely between 5 states and 5 different countries

* Drive hundreds even thousands of miles safely

* Buy and sell what I please, without fear of jail

So yes, if it means I am kept safe and if it means society as a whole can operate more openly, then the government can do what they want with my call data, car location and speed records, buying history, surfing history, etc

Someone who secretly has access to Warren Buffett's movements and communications could get a jump on the market, stealing a little bit from all the honest players.

If you're protesting the government's eminent domain seizure of your home, but you only have enough money to pay the lawyers for another couple of months, the government can just wait you out. They'll be able to figure it out just by looking at the outside of the bill collection notices sent to your home, and the fact that you sent email to several lawyers who are known to work pro bono.

The problem is that the mere existence of this kind of information will draw the corrupt among us like flies to a corpse. I'm not all that concerned about the personal motivations of the people who currently have access to that information, although power does corrupt. I'm more concerned about people who will start working for those agencies because they're intrigued by the possibilities.

If the information must be gathered, then it is essential that it be a really big deal for any analyst to get access to someone's communication metadata and movements. High visibility, court oversight, logging and review, the works.

Side note: I went to the Austin Restore the Fourth rally today; couple hundred people I'd guess, mostly middle-class-looking. Pleasant energy. It's hard to tell whether that's enough of an indicator to make politicians start wondering about their campaign pocketbooks; I'm not optimistic.

What you are living in is not safety. It is the illusion of safety. And thanks to years of government propaganda, you have come to associate the pleasant feelings that come with this illusion with government spying programs.

Statistically, people are safer today than in the past, if you are looking at violent death rates. It's really not an illusion. Life expectancies are higher not just because of scientific advances, but because we are simply less likely to die at the hands of others.

Putting aside the domestic manslaughter rate, over the past few decades people have been far less likely to die through war than at any other point over the past 3-4 centuries (if not longer, records pre the 1700s are unreliable).

What I think could be argued as an illusion is that this period of safety has been due to increased surveillance and espionage, especially domestic surveillance.

Exactly. As we all should know by now, 'Correlation != Causation'. This increase in safety could just as easily be attributed to the Flynn Effect[1] as it can to spying.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

If my car is stolen, I don't particularly want it back.

Not being blown up by terrorists

Your odds of dying in that car are far worse than your odds of being blown up by terrorists.

Also, if I choose to believe that NSA monitoring has actually prevented a single genuine terrorist attack, I'm in the awkward position of believing some people who literally lie for a living.

Practice any religion I choose

Help me out here. Why do you need to be tracked by the government in order to be able to practice a religion? Is that some kind of Eastern thing?

Fly safely between 5 states and 5 different countries

Credible claims have been made that the TSA's X-ray scanners expose you to more risk than terrorism, over a lifetime of flying.

Drive hundreds even thousands of miles safely

Again, why do you need a (metaphorical) cop following you in order to drive safely? Have you found a way to make it less likely that you'll die in a car crash than from terrorist activity? If so, please share with the class.

Buy and sell what I please, without fear of jail

At this point I have to assume I've been trolled. I will now STFU, GBTW, and HAND.

> Not being blown up by terrorists

Please explain this. A few thousand dead Americans would disagree. The USA's epic spying over the last many decades did not stop thousands of people from dying in terrorist attacks. NSA spying does not keep you safe from terrorists; in fact, I think it does the opposite. It creates terrorists.

> Drive hundreds even thousands of miles safely

Driving is one of the least safe activities available to you, largely due to the government's incompetence in keeping safety regulations at a reasonable level. Tens of thousands of people die every year in the USA due to the lack of safety driving on roads. You are not safe when you are driving a car.

* Being able to retrieve a stolen car * Not being blown up by terrorists * Practice any religion I choose * Fly safely between 5 states and 5 different countries * Drive hundreds even thousands of miles safely * Buy and sell what I please, without fear of jail

They've either been able to do these things, or simply failed to do it even with the data.

Until we have evidence that all this data mining is actually useful and essential to government function - and that the /improvements/ to the job they do at those things actually merits the risk we're taking by arming them with the tools to easily take political prisoners or implement a highly repressive regime, your argument is critically flawed.

Just because I can buy a candy bar with $500 doesn't mean I need $500 to buy it - I might be able to with $1 - and you should probably check that the money is actually going where it should.

Similarly, privacy.

tl;dr: Your argument misses the point, because it's not the spying they're doing that enables most of those things, and they were doing a pretty good job of all of those before the mass surveillance.

The last one you mentioned is actually the opposite. You can accidentally trip over a law you weren't aware of. Ignorance of the law is no excuse.

Wait, what? In what "new reality" does that make any sense?

if it means I am kept safe

Safe from what? Safe from people being murdered in your name without charge or trial? Safe from inheriting debt to your children? Safe from heart attacks? "Safe" without qualifier is a mighty huge and mighty useless word.

if it means society as a whole can operate more openly

Now that's just doublethink. How do secret laws for spooks make society more "open"?

The issue is what Snowden called "turnkey tyranny". These tools can easily be seriously abused. When they are, a Democratic regime can collapse. The US democracy is eroding. Civil rights will be lost.

Eventually, they won't even need to carry on with the democracy theater. The indirect consequences for everyone, may be dire.

I don't know if what you believe is necessarily true (that we are safer as a result of spying) - but here's what I don't understand: even if you believe surveillance leads to safety, would you not want a clear, transparent, and accountable process for governing this surveillance?

The surveillance is not going away - people broadly don't care about their privacy anymore. What seems unacceptable to me is the lack of legal framework to control it.

How's your marijuana business going?

If you would prefer, I can reply at length. I thought doing so was unnecessary.

Matthew R. Davies ran a dispensary out of Stockton, CA. By all appearances his business complied with local and state laws. He relied on a pledges by the President and AG not to prosecute conduct that was in line with local and state laws. He's facing 40 years for cultivation of marijuana.

This is very bad for reasons that should be obvious.

As far as the guidelines bit, sorry but... nothing you mentioned is in there. I felt the need to correct your comment and was annoyed. I didn't consider it off-topic, just useless and confusing to the uninformed. Have a nice day!

Sure, the thieves weren't very sophisticated, but few thieves are.

Now, an argument in terms of civil liberties or the danger of concentrating too much power in too few hands or possible abuses of the technology or invasion of privacy would have been completely reasonable, and such arguments have been well made in other posts. But yours by itself is completely empty.

The constitution is great, but it's hardly the perfect authority on everything and shouldn't be revered as such.

We thought the reasons weren't holding up anymore, we could have changed it, but that takes so long so we just did it in secret, thats ok yea? Its "just the constitution".

Is this your standpoint?

> The constitution is great, but it's hardly the perfect authority on everything and shouldn't be revered as such.

It was supposed to be. And when things were found to no longer work it was supposed to be amended with all branches of government having their say.

If one thing can be disregarded "because its not perfect" then all things can be disregarded. Or at least, if you think they can't just all be disregarded, because some things would be crossing the line, who is the one that gets to draw the line? Previously we had this piece of paper which drew the line, but then this guy said online it wasn't perfect.

Arguing against a proposed amendment on the grounds that the proposed change allows something currently prohibited would be silly, obviously, but that's not what anyone is doing I think.

Disregarding the fact that most of those items have nothing to do with government surveillance, this particular item has more to do with the fact that attempted (and competent) acts of terrorism are an extremely rare event.

The CIA and FBI failed to stop 9/11 when they failed to exchange relevant information [1]. Lack of actionable data was not the problem then, and I have a hard time believing it's a problem now.

[1] http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/wall.pdf

I like to scream at wrong moments and so far I've not heard of anyone being raped by wolftrolls riding UFOs. So I saved you and whole world from being raped by wolftrolls. You owe me exactly $1000.

There's a difference between people voluntarily sharing information with a third-party, and having that information forcibly gathered without your knowledge. There has to be a line.

I think everyone who participates in this unconstitutional surveillance, and whoever approved it, willfully ignored it or bent the law to support it, should be taken out back and prosecuted.

Addendum: I looked a little more I cannot find the reference. I think it was probably in The Spitting Image. I also would like to thank you for not commenting on the sentiment. In my opinion the phrase has a large personal component and it is impossible for a complete stranger to form a well reasoned opinion on the authenticity of the sentiment.

Since the "national organizers" raised ~$100k, has anyone asked them about being transparent?

Hint: this is not how it gets done (although, that would be repeating myself). Since I was so lambasted in the last thread when I attempted to point out the reality based community P.O.V. I won't repeat it.

Please, you can "down vote" this, however this was an extreme non-event. Hint: if you'd like an example of how a real, multi-week protest with >30k+ protestors each day is being ignored by the media, look to Bulgaria. And their total population is only ~7 million, which places the statistical % at a magnitude far higher than this.

Happy 4th of July, America!

p.s. We have noted the "Reddit Moderators" and their ambitions. Quite the 'motley crew' of under 20 activists! Wise the fuck up.

One thing that was going through my head during the march: much ado has been made about Obama's statement that "you can't have 100% security and also have 100% privacy." I think it deserves rebuttal, but a more careful one than a simple statement that it is false. It is not false; if Obama had stopped before the "and" it would have still been true: you can't have 100% security. What bothers me about it is that it ignores the fact that liberty itself - while valuable in its own right - is also an essential part of security against some threats. It is also unreasonable that "there are tradeoffs" be used as an excuse to avoid discussion of whether the decisions being made are appropriate.

It helps that the context was threefold: NSA spying, NYPD Stop & Frisk, and NYPD unlawful surveillance of Muslims throughout the tri-state area. All clear 4th Amendment issues. We had a diverse crowd, with a mix of geeks, Occupy-types, Tea Partiers, and members of the Muslim community.

We marched, we chanted, we even took some streets in lower Manhattan. Hard to say how big, but probably about a thousand there. The farthest anyone got off-topic was "Free Bradley Manning." Very rare to see that kind of discipline in a diverse crowd. I was very impressed.

I imagine a few more people would have shown up but on the 4th, plenty of folks already have their day planned out or want to spend the day with family/friends instead.

http://donohoe.tumblr.com/post/54550880706/facebook-is-warni...

Solution is the other way around, change communication protocols and practices the way making any wiretapping useless, using open source solutions everyone with enough hacking skills can independently verify. Don't play with the government on their own field, you always lose.

Except PRISM, other point were the banks - this isn't visible from the U.S. much, but when Greek bonds were defaulted it was done in a way which avoided the technical default - so, credit-default swaps were not triggered, and people and banks who bought them lost everything. After that, Cyprus banks bankrupted but also in a way avoiding the legal bankruptcy - instead, government instituded a 'tax' on their deposits. All lies! Which means banks also cannot be trusted any longer.

With the banks and governments out, what remains?

http://www.salon.com/2013/06/06/security_expert_all_occupier...

More detail here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griswold_v._Connecticut

I was just trying to explain where the right to privacy comes from. It surprises most Americans that it isn't explicitly enumerated and is built up from several different amendments. That also means that it is far from universally agreed upon by legal scholars. It is also the reason that people push for a privacy amendment.

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized"

Thus, the government needs a warrant to open your mail, but not to inspect the envelopes you send your mail in - and this was spelled out in 1878 (Ex Parte Jackson). The scope of what courts have considered to be unreasonable searches is actually fairly narrow. I'm all for rethinking the fourth (or better, adding a 28th). But restore it to...what? How you imagined it when you were in grade school?

THE problem with pedantry is not that it is incorrect.

And if we can't get our own government to obey the basic founding rules of the country, we're got going to get any real protections for non citizens.

Edit: And the county sheriffs officers out in full combat gear, with M-4s and body armor, were alarming. But not surprising.

This isn't necessarily a bad goal, but even if NSA entirely stopped all domestic spying, it would still continue to tap cables headed for foreign lands, and would still be able to compel silent cooperation of any US company to allow them to spy on foreigners.

This is unacceptable if the United States wishes to continue competing on the Internet. If every US-based company can be silently forced to turn over their data to the US government, why use US services? There are a whole lot more customers on the web outside of the US than there are who are US citizens.

Why host on AWS, then, if you know it'll scare your customers away? Why use Google Apps for your email? Why buy Android devices or iPhones for your employees if that data's going straight to NSA via Google?

There are something like 7 billion people on this planet. There are only about 315 million US citizens, or about 4.5%. The vast majority of the profits to be made from the Internet are _not in the USA_.

It's short-sighted. The US military really needs to serve the interests of the country and its businesses, not some stupid fear-based warmongering agenda of its own.

"To address this shortfall and protect the nation from future terrorist attacks like 9/11, we made several changes to our intelligence efforts and added a number of capabilities. Two of these capabilities are the programs in the news. They were approved by the Administration, Congress, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court"

http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/speeches_testimonies/25jun13_...

https://yougen.tv/video/78dd523f-1db2-4a20-833f-b07d0749b6fb...

https://www.adoberevel.com/shares/d8403bbd4b374bd18fdb475aa6...

Your only recourse is voting (as it should be in a democratic society), however that's a pointless exercise when a change in leaders/political-parties-in-power doesn't result in a change in policy.

Just like how the natural progression beyond free-trade agreements is even tighter economic and social integration between nations (eg: European Union, Trans-Pacific Partnership), the natural progression beyond voting is civil disobedience (ie: protesting). I'm sure you can imagine what lies beyond civil disobedience.

And how do we know who to keep in office and who to vote out when there is very little transparency?

You have a point that it may be difficult to vote for the right people, but it's very easy to make a good start. If a politician campaigns on and promises to increase the amount of creepy spying in your country like Obama did between 2006 and 2008, don't vote for him/her.

It's very important to vote in the primary elections in order to not end up with two evils by the main presidential election. The same logic goes for all other elections, too: your state government, and all levels really. Voting for just one president from two choices is hardly voting at all.

I mean, we can have all these complicated websites/applications that are expected/relied upon to have utmost security (that are constantly being made better), but we still can't have the option to vote online? I know in some eastern European countries people can vote online like Estonia [0].

[0] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/11/06/e...

But even the process that people would have to go through to even get something like that up and running would be too heavily influenced by the ever printed federal reserve notes flowing into the beltway.

The way people state we can participate in the system just seems so moot when I think about it. Which is probably why I don't vote and because subversion seems to be the only thing working these days that is in the interests of the people and not just what we are told where our interests should lie…

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5991588

Outside elections seriously massive scale public protest or large scale civil disobedience and general strikes really can change things. For smaller things mass lobbying of politicians can swing a balance.

Edit: Actually online is still worse than a good recountable, auditable paper based system although maybe equal to a Diebold polling station based one.

Oh really?[0]: "The Florida election recount of 2000 was a period of vote re-counting that occurred following the unclear results of the 2000 United States presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore, specifically the Florida results. The election was ultimately settled in favor of George W. Bush when the U.S. Supreme Court, with its final ruling on Bush v. Gore, stopped a recount that had been proposed by the all Democrat Florida Supreme Court, which had the effect of awarding Bush a majority of votes in the Electoral College."

With one flick of the wrist by a couple appointed judges, recounts become moot.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_election_recount

And as we have seen throughout history, they can grant themselves more power through amendments and executive orders that can go (and have gone in some cases) unchecked once enacted.

>2) recounts did not become moot

In that instance they did. But of course, something like this can never happen again even though it happened once already.

>Surely you've noticed that other elections since then have also involved recounts and nobody has tried to prevent them going ahead on the basis of Bush v Gore.

I haven't, care to point to some information?

By 'they' I presume you mean Presidents and Senators. And guess what the Cosntitution contains provisions for them to do exactly that, and for you to challenge it if you see fit. And that sort of thing happens quite frequently.

>2) recounts did not become moot

In that instance they did.

That doesn't even make sense.

I haven't, care to point to some information?

Really, you can't use Google to search for stories about election recounts over the last 12 years? You're just being lazy now. How can you expect me to take you seriously on elections when you obviously don't pay much attention to them?

Here's a story about a recount. Last year. In Florida. The Republican lost. Happy now? http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1112/84068.html

I guess "stopped a recount that had been proposed by the all Democrat Florida Supreme Court, which had the effect of awarding Bush a majority of votes in the Electoral College." is over your head.

>Really, you can't use Google to search for stories about election recounts over the last 12 years? You're just being lazy now. How can you expect me to take you seriously on elections when you obviously don't pay much attention to them?

>Here's a story about a recount. Last year. In Florida. The Republican lost. Happy now? http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1112/84068.html

Probably because I don't pay attention congressional elections because I don't live in Florida? I'm sure many other citizens wouldn't pay attention to that.

Really, you can't scroll through this thread? Now you're just being lazy now. How can you expect me to take you seriously when you obviously don't read through this thread to look if I stated my participation level in the puppet show on federal reserve note strings we call an election process in its current form? If I can have some of your Kool Aid, I'll be happy.

Probably because I don't pay attention congressional elections because I don't live in Florida?

That didn't stop you knowing about the Florida recount in Bush v Gore, did it? I've never even been to Florida, I just read newspapers and use the internet and pay attention to the makeup of Congress.

If I can have some of your Kool Aid

And I thought you wanted to have a serious conversation. Oh well, more fool me.

I didn't say Bush v Gore had made recounts. You said that.

The recounts were underway before the supreme court stopped them in Bush v Gore.[0]

Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000), is the United States Supreme Court decision that effectively resolved the dispute surrounding the 2000 presidential election. Only eight days earlier, the United States Supreme Court had unanimously decided the closely related case of Bush v. Palm Beach County Canvassing Board, 531 U.S. 70 (2000), and only three days earlier, had preliminarily halted a recount that was occurring.

See the last part: had preliminarily halted a recount that was occurring

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore

>And I thought you wanted to have a serious conversation. Oh well, more fool me.

Only as serious as one can converse with a state apologist. ;)

a recount != recounts.

Troll away, but I'm out of this conversation.

And to suggest that just because it only happened once, to mean that it can't happen again is naive (but I guess that is in the nature for apologists of the state).

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5992013

Because databases and computer systems aren't audit able? How do dba's and computer forensics ever solve any problems?

>The fact that there were votes to argue in court about is still a step above "computer says Bush".

A step above because you say so? I guess all those punch card machines that accepted and counted votes during the election probably were dismissed then since a computer gave an answer.

As for auditing computer databases and software that is hard enough with computers you control but for elections the people operating the machine are one of the threats and the process needs to be verifiable by independent volunteers and the parties contesting the election.

When a voting system is insecure and abuses your trust, someone makes tremendous gains, and nobody may even know. The incentives to rig an election are huge, and the verifiability of an online election is very low.

How do you think paper ballots, for example, hinder progress?

Because the electronic machines in use now aren't vulnerable?

>How do you think paper ballots, for example, hinder progress?

Not easily accessible to all people (like those with disabilities, and those without sufficient access to public transportation, those having to work without having the flexibility to show up to vote) and it's disconnected from the way more and more people are engaging about ideas and exchanging information that could influence how they vote. Same is true of electronic voting machines in use during elections…

And it's not like people haven't documented themselves on youtube committing voting fraud in person or the news stories that pop up about it…

I think these drawbacks of paper ballots are minor compared to "black box voting" where there's absolutely no way to prevent or even know about massive scale frauds.

Way to minimize the disenfranchisement millions of people from the voting process. Besides, do you really think people are going to recount millions of ballots, when the last attempt to do so was waived away by appointed judges in 2000?

Even if massive scale fraud were going on, most people would stick their heads in the sand (at least in the United States), like we have seen with other issues…

These problems are surmountable.

The problems of "black box voting" are not.

Massive scale fraud with paper ballots is harder given relatively simple means of oversight.

Really? Man made problems surrounding "black box voting" and voting online aren't surmountable, but only proposed solutions to the archaic nature of the status quo that aren't being implemented (or not effectively in the case part of what you listed is being used), suffice as such? That's laughable.

The problems of "black box voting" are insurmountable. They cannot be solved.

Just like the internet voting in Estonia…

>The problems of "black box voting" are insurmountable. They cannot be solved.

Because you say they are? Plenty examples of groups of people overcoming the perceived impossibility of "complex" systems throughout history contrary to popular beliefs during those occasions…

1) Be able to identify the correct people and allow them to vote.

2) Give them certainty that their vote is recorded correctly.

3) Give them privacy while voting so that they cannot be coerced or bribed (postal voting fails this one too).

4) Allow volunteers to audit the process. e.g. Observe polling stations, sealed ballot boxes, numbered, signed, counts open to observers, tallies checkable, votes recountable etc.

5) Allow wide access to the vote, short queues, local polling stations, physical access etc. Postal voting helps this but at a cost to points 3 and 4. This is manageable when postal voting is a small proportion of the total but gets riskier if it rises.

Online voting fails to allow for most of these requirements in ways that are not just hard they are impossible to fix. You can trade some for others like the ability to confirm your vote was correctly recorded but that gives a receipt and the possibility for coercion or bribery.

Now the US voting system also fails many of these at least in some locations but giving the power to run the elections to controllers of the computers is too dangerous. There are just too many opportunities to tamper with votes that way with almost no risk of detection.

I had not looked into the Estonian experience until now but this is one perspective on it: https://www.verifiedvoting.org/report-on-the-estonian-intern...

The verifiedvoting.org website also has lots of other information about internet voting and voting machines generally. I did not look at it before compiling my list above.

Tampering with some computer systems? Not so hard.

* By proxy I mean a sychophantic gov official in their pocket.

If I believe that every man is free to do what they please as long as it doesn't have a direct negative effect on someone else's right to be free, how can I vote for someone and give them the implicit power to restrict the freedom of myself and others?

And when society is built around the presence of their services, not using them may not be a realistic option. If you don't like the way banks behave, for example, not using them isn't a realistic option.

Therefore mass protest and political action are perfectly reasonable approaches to changing corporate behavior.

Option 1 is available. Earning less money means you pay less tax, and spending less money means you pay less tax. You have control over both of these things.