> The article was used for the imprisonment and execution of many prominent people, as well as multitudes of nonnotable innocents. (...) Article 58 of the Russian SFSR Penal Code was put in force on 25 February 1927 to arrest those suspected of counter-revolutionary activities.
So the point is that even in Soviet Russia people were sent into the Gulag based on written laws and going through the legal system, so I'd say that the US Government's reply that "it's all legal! it has gone through the courts" doesn't mean a thing as long as said laws are against the spirit of the US Constitution.
And I'd say that's the gist of it, the current laws are against the spirit of the original fundamental law of the United States. As long as its current citizens are ok with that (no mass protests etc) then I'd say there's nothing that the minority can do (if it matters I'm not from the US)
Yes, Hitler and Stalin spied a lot on their own populations for "national security" purposes, but we should be able to oppose surveillance on it's own merits with out resorting to the painting a (fallacious) slippery slope picture where the next frame is a KZ/Gulag camp.
One difference here is that when the USG says "well it's all done according to law", that law was written and passed by an institution who at least nominally represents and is elected by the people. I don't know if the same can be said of the USSR.
The USSR was also nominally run under laws, which were notionally written and formally adopted by an institution which at least nominally represented and was elected by the people, and no doubt for any particular policy the regime could point to some justification in some provision of the Constitution and laws for the authority to carry out the action.
For all practical purposes the "classical constitution United States" that we were taught in school and media doesn't exist anymore. But we pretend it does for pragmatic reasons.
We have all the pieces in place. Widespread surveillance, a "legal system" that allows anyone to be arrested and imprisoned, soldiers carrying out police work, secret courts/secret laws, mass imprisonment, etc. All it would take is for someone to arrange those pieces properly and tyranny would ensue.
Actually, it's a constitutional republic.
But my real concern here is with the "constitutional" part, because most reasonable readers seem to agree that the PRISM surveillance violates the Constitution. Yet the federal government only seems concerned about Constitutionality when it suits them, (literally) laughing it off otherwise:
CNS: Madam Speaker, where specifically does the Constitution grant Congress the authority to enact an individual health insurance mandate?
Pelosi: [Giggles] Are you serious? Are you serious?”
CNS: Yes, yes I am.
Pelosi: [Takes question from another reporter.]
So I'm concerned that the degree to which we're "consitutional" at all is becoming increasingly tenuous.
No, not at all. The situation is still all well within the US Constitution in the sense of want people "can do". In particular, as I will outline, there is a very fast, simple solution well within what "the minority can do".
Background: In the US Federal Government, there are three branches, executive (e.g., headed by the president), the legislative (i.e., Congress), and the judicial (with the Supreme Court).
In the case of the Snowden leaks, the actions Snowden was objecting to were by the executive branch which (more or less) was following laws passed by the legislative branch and signed into law by the executive branch. So far so good, that is, within the Constitution. Note that the judicial branch is not involved in passing or signing such laws and so far has not been involved in this whole matter.
But looking at the laws and what the executive branch did that Snowden revealed, a "minority" might conclude that the Constitution was violated. Really, still, so far so good because it's not up to the legislative or executive branch to determine if the Constitution was violated. It's been common throughout US history for the legislative branch to pass laws and the executive branch to sign and use those laws but later the US courts, usually including the US Supreme Court, to find that the laws were "unconstitutional" and strike them down.
So for what a "minority can do" in this case? Sure: Bring a law suit in the judicial branch where the suit claims that the Constitution, e.g., First or Fourth Amendment, was violated. Typically the case (I don't know the details of the process) makes it to the US Supreme Court. For the role of a "minority", in principle only one person need bring the case.
We should guess that people highly concerned with the situation leaked by Snowden will bring such cases. So, we will look for the ACLU and the EFF. But now we also see that Google is bringing a case. The legal costs for bringing a case might be significant, but there are plenty of organizations and individuals with much more than enough money to pay for those costs. Likely cases will be brought.
My guess is that much of the relevant laws will be struck down.
So, why has the judicial branch or the Supreme Court not yet struck down the relevant laws? Because they don't do that; instead, there has to be a legal case brought.
In all of this, the Supreme Court will act very cautiously. And in principle there is nothing important to keep them from acting quickly.
Net, so far the US Constitution is working just as intended. No riots in the streets are needed yet. We just need for some cases to be brought. That the laws mandated a lot of secrecy may have helped slow the bringing of cases, but likely Google, Microsoft, and some individuals have plenty of 'legal standing' to bring suitable cases.
So far the legislative branch passed some laws. They can do that. The laws can later be found to violate the Constitution and even then we don't line up the people in Congress who passed the laws and shoot them. Similarly for the executive branch: Once Congress has passed a law, the executive branch can sign it and use it.
Net, there is only one branch that can say if a law is constitutional or not, the judicial branch, and so far apparently no suitable case has been brought and the judicial branch has yet to speak.
Indeed, I have a letter drafted to my members of Congress but have not sent it because the letter really just claims that the relevant laws were unconstitutional, and for the members of Congress such claims are nearly irrelevant.
Net, we just need a suitable case in the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court will have no difficulty at all understanding all the relevant issues, and that court has plenty of ability to slap down laws passed by Congress and signed and used by the executive branch. Slapping down unconstitutional laws is much of just why the Supreme Court is there, and they are 100% fully aware of that point.
Some of the recent appointees to the Supreme Court are quite 'liberal', but nearly always they are plenty bright and will see the constitutional issues in the activities Snowden described with crystal clarity and intense concern.
The fight over the constitutionality of the relevant laws is not nearly over and, indeed, has yet to begin but apparently is about to begin. Don't bet on those laws coming out whole.
In particular the Constitution says nothing about violating the Constitution with secret orders of the executive branch based on wacko laws and approved by a secret 'court' of persons appointed by a member of the judicial branch with secret oversight by committees of Congress. Maybe the people who dreamed up this wacko nonsense thought that they were clever, but they were not: What they constructed has nothing to do with the Constitution, and the Supreme Court will have no difficulty at all seeing this point.
If the Supreme Court strikes down the laws, they will be gone -- out'a here. And that's just the way the Constitution says the process is supposed to work.
We're a government of laws, not men: What matters are the laws, not what Presidents Bush and Obama say, what General Alexander says, what the FISA 'court' says, or what the Intelligence committees of Congress say. Instead what matters here is what laws the Supreme Court says are constitutional.
I wish I shared your optimism.
I sincerely hope that the laws will get struck down, but I also fear that the classified nature of many things that touch this will lead the courts to say that we can't show we have standing, and therefore decline to rule on the constitutionality.
More importantly, what matters is NOT just what the laws say, but whether the government follows them! The core issue here is that we believe the laws and constitution are NOT being followed, and that the government feels that What the King Does Is Legal. That was Nixon's claim, and in effect is what the Bush administration claimed re: treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. This time around, the fact that it's being done by the NSA with the President's permission allows them to claim that the classified nature of nearly everything at stake here means we should trust them.
Getting the laws overturned will be a HUGE first step, though, and you laid out in excellent detail things that we citizens can (and should) do and expect.
This is a myth. Any branch can declare a law unconstitutional. If Congress thinks a law is unconstitutional they can keep it off the books. If the President thinks a law is unconstitutional he can refuse to enforce or execute it.
The courts get a reputation as the ones who decide because A) if the other branches do their duty it never gets to the courts, which means the courts have the last word and are the final check on unconstitutional activity, and B) the other branches of government are happy to let you believe they have no responsibility to uphold the constitution (even though they very much do) because they're elected and elected officials violating the Supreme Law of the Land is fairly unpopular, so all the better if people mislead themselves into thinking that they have no responsibility.
Maybe we should ask the Japanese Americans who were put into camps if they feel safe with the Supreme Court protecting us from the legislative and executive branches.
Laws, Supreme Court and so on mean nothing. They who hold the force make the rules. The constitution is nothing more than a security blanket that people can hold onto and pretend it's protecting them from something. In reality, the government will do what they want to do and (possibly, if they care to) justify it later with some "interpretation" of the law.
OK, I don't like what is happening, and almost day by day thing happen that I feel are pushing the west, led by the US, more and more towards something highly controlled and not in any way free. Liberty is slowly being eroded, and I genuinely feel that is a true statement objectively. Right now, words like stasi, fascist, etc are an exaggeration, but used by people who see it going that way. They use such words to warn, but we all know those words do not really stand up objectively.
So, what is the tipping point, what has to happen for such words to actually apply? Or is it merely a case of presentation? If society, superficially, doesn't look like old Nazi Germany, is that enough for a majority to be content, even if underling that is something deeply nasty?
The surveillance undertaken by the Stasi wasn't really as extensive as (for example) collecting all phone records for the entire country, so in some ways the US has surpassed the Stasi in surveillance, while in others obviously it's nowhere near the same situation (e.g. in-person surveillance and recruiting ordinary citizens as spies), and in other areas it's similar - secret courts and sweeping warrants etc.
I suppose the point of the comparison is to shock, and then perhaps point out that there are some areas in which the current situation is worse than it was in Eastern Germany.
(In East Germany, the Berlin Wall was called the "Anti-Fascist Barrier", and Nazis imprisoned and banned the communist party)
I grew up in Western Germany and visited the East several times. Living in the US now I have to say that it feels an order of magnitude "freer" than either of the Germanies of my youth. However, I'm very concerned about the NSA thing.
American citizens can be arrested on U.S. soil and sent to Guantanamo, they haven't "disappeared" but they are out of sight.
There has been at least two American citizens sent to Guantanamo:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasser_Hamdi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Padilla_(alleged_terr... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_detainees_at_Guantanam...
It feels like something out of the Niemoller poem:
"First they came for the muslims, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a muslim."
OT: I always feel awkward about writing "American" when referring to U.S. citizens, as we in South America also call ourselves Americans ("Americanos").
Unlike during the time of the Nazis, what most people in East Germany dreaded was not to disappear, but to have the few possibilities to achieve something taken from them.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/grand-jury-rejects...
Cases like that can be dangerous trial balloons.
You don't necessarily need to 'disappear' people when (with enough information) you can string together a bunch of charges such that a compliant judicial system will put them away for you. Even if there isn't a conviction, the process may be sufficient to destroy someone's life.
http://www.microsofttranslator.com/bv.aspx?from=de&to=en&a=n...
German original:
https://netzpolitik.org/2013/erschreckende-statistik-geheimd...
Also, his first name is Joachim.
That might be true but you would have to be naive to think that the information that could be gathered from these NSA activities would not be misused by people.
Imagine an up and coming politician. Squeaky clean but was friends with a few people who got prosecuted for drug dealing. Those useful NSA phone records could easily lead to the press asking the young idealist if he often hung around with drug users. Irrelevant and potentially career ending.
Civil rights campaigners who could be accused of having an affair because of call records.
A journalist investigating a corrupt politician... is he a terrorist sympathizer... comb through the records.
You may have nothing to hide but often the people trying to improve your country for the better and root out corruption and crime will be more vulnerable to this. Because the corrupt individuals in positions of power will not respect the laws and procedures and will use this information for evil.
Thoughts?
The third problem is that due to the complexity of the penal code, this is already the case. You have already done stuff in the last 10 years, that you didn't think was illegal, but somewhere in the tens of thousands of pages of the penal code someone can find a reason to throw you in jail if they have enough information about you. As Richelieu put it, "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." - the NSA has billions of lines about you. They can hang you a million times over.
Are there any examples of crimes that many people have probably committed? Maybe software piracy, but isn't that just a fine? And I hope that isn't the only example.
And I wonder if this also works for the Dutch police.
That invalidates their entire premise instantly, by pointing out that it is not their judgment that matters as to whether they have anything to hide.
People say that they have nothing to hide - in response to things like the NSA spying scandals - because they're terrified of confrontation. To say almost anything else is to challenge the government's authority, to say to them: you have no right to violate my constitutional rights and I refuse to accept it.
When you see someone cowering in fear behind that statement, remember what their mental state of mind likely is and re-approach how you discuss the spying with them, otherwise you'll find they will just turtle. It's far easier for most people to back down from confrontation than to challenge such extreme authority (the US Govt.).
Consider that lobbyists & bureaucrats now have the capability (prevented only by policy) to snoop the past and present communications of elected officials.
Imagine your squeaky clean politician, whose friends are equally squeaky clean. How effective will this politician be when at negotiations, hearings, etc, his opponents have already studied his history and relationships? They know where he likes to eat, where he's been on vacation, where his dog goes to the vet. They know how the talks are going, they know which strategies are working, and which lines of thought aren't.
In short, they know which ideas to push, and which ideas to back away from.
This politician will be both ineffective at representing his constituents, as well as unable to point to why this is the case. And he's never going to cry out "blackmail!"
Who hasn't broken some minor law at some time? Selective enforcement and total information awareness on the part of the enforcers are a dangerous combination.
http://www.france24.com/en/20130619-us-seizure-journalist-re...
The 4th amendment is all but obliterated, and now this is how the 1st amendment and the freedom of the press will be destroyed, too, by killing any sort of investigative journalism left, and by prosecuting all leakers.
I used to think that Wikileaks and other such secure leaking is the future of investigative journalism. If you believe the print media will die, and blogging will take its place, then investigative journalism will die, too, because I doubt many bloggers will go out and do that. So in a way Wikileaks would serve as a "disruptive innovation" for investigative journalism. Actually, most investigative journalism is only about finding "sources" that are willing to leak stuff to them, anyway. Wikileaks is kind of a "user-generated" investigative journalism/leaking, or investigative journalism 2.0.
But if the government is trying to kill both at once, then I'm not sure what's left to uncover illegalities inside the government.
We have serious problems, as evidence by the unwillingness of any member of Congress to really speak out on the issue, and the sheer scope and reach power of this poorly regulated surveillance regime.
There's no gulag archipelago, but the tools used by repressive totalitarian regimes are being built for other purposes, and many of us believe that these tools are not compatible with a free and democratic society.
Let's focus on the real and stop running down the slippery slope.
Similarly we can talk about NSA overreaches all we want, as opposed to the old way of actually silencing the dissent. Great, except everyone is just talking, they are probably continuing with impunity under a different program name.
"There's a war out there, old friend. A world war. And it's not about who's got the most bullets. It's about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think... it's all about the information!"
"The world isn't run by weapons anymore, or energy, or money. It's run by little ones and zeroes, little bits of data. It's all just electrons."
Because even if we win this round, the state will find ways to bring these programs back in some other guise. For example, the FISA courts were part of the reforms that emerged from the abuses of the CIA and FBI during the Red Scare and Civil Rights eras.
In other words, we need a technical Rosa Parks. Well, more like a million of them.
The only reasonable conclusion is that to stop the bloodshed and invasion, one must stop supporting the oppressors.
You are quite literally paying many thousands of thugs to fly to the middle east and support a paedophilic, incompetent, oppressive regime which directly hurts people's lives. At home you're paying many more thousands to pick on people carrying small amounts of plant trimmings, specifically targeted by the colour of their skin. Those people are then sent to buildings and force fed in contract-incestuous CEO-laden prisons with an economic incentive to cost more money to their handlers.
Aggression is the problem, and paying people to use it against you, or anyone else for that matter, is probably not going to help.
Stop all domestic surveillance? What about US Citizens in other countries? What about foreign nationals inside the US?
Increase oversight? What about for rare unambiguous national security threats? How can that be enforced?
And it sounds a lot like learned helplessness, but what is an individual supposed to do?
