Yes. Bradley Manning was tortured. He wasn’t waterboarded, but he was keptin long-term isolation, was subject to long term sleep deprivation, and other nasty tactics. It was posited that he was tortured in order to get him to “admit” that Assange had aided and abetted his leaks.
I do not begrudge Snowden anything he does to stay out of the clutches of our brutal and unaccountable police state.
The U.S. political system, as most political systems, is not designed for citizen involvement. We fear the mob, that would be us, and so we elect elites to decide for us. Voting is barely involvement. Voting in new people to make your decisions for you is not much involvement. We are responsible for what our government does in our name, but there is precious little we can actually do to change things, and that is exactly how our exalted democracy has been designed. Until we make fundamental changes to politics, we will not make fundamental changes to our world. We are dispossessed of real power, and are left with the mostly empty actions of voting, writing your elected official (ha), and demonstrations. None of these are effective at enacting change. And so it goes…
Yes. The wormy claims that he is showboating or something are cowardly and lame. There are a lot easier ways to get attention than to make yourself public enemy one of the scariest state on earth.
And its disgusting to me how many supposed “Americans” are so willing to throw away their privacy for the illusion of safety. And it IS illusion.
Perhaps if the government wasn’t spending so much of its time figuring out how to store every bit of data about every person in the world, and if they had taken a little time away from the massive surveillance of the peaceful and constitutional Occupy movement, they would’ve been able to concentrate a bit more on the Tsarnaev brothers. The Russians TOLD US to watch out for them, and we did a short cursory interview and left it at that. With all the funding available to the FBI, etc., you’d think they could’ve tailed these guys for a few months or years to see what they were up to. Perhaps they would’ve noticed the MURDER of 3 people by the elder Tsarnaev brother and perhaps that might’ve stopped the Marathon bombings. But that’s so boring! Its much more fun to hover up data and listen to servicemen’s sexy phone calls.
I’m not sure what your point is here. Snowden knows he doesn’t have any upper hand anywhere. What part of international wanted man don’t you get? He has had to throw himself into the tender arms of foreign governments to avoid the tentacles of the torturing, indefinitely detaining police state known as the USA.
Any notions you learned in school about the big bad Russians and scary clever Chinese, realize that they’ve got nothing on the US. We’ve broken every human and civil right that ever made our nation morally virtuous in fighting a non-war on a phantom called terrorism. We now torture (and is it any different if we outsource it instead of doing it in-house?). We now indefinitely detain people without trial. We now search EVERYONE all the time. What rights are left?
Snowden has given up his whole life to inform you of what your nation has become and all you can think to do is whine how he “thinks he has the upper hand”?
If you plan is to flee to Russia, then you need a better plan.
Then why do they keep reauthorizing it? And why do they keep funding it?
Let’s unpack this. “Why can’t we have a serious conversation, instead of being distracted by these media-whore whistleblowers? I base this perception, of course, on the media hype and distraction.”
Also, one type of meta-data gathering can result in eerily accurate personality profiles, and ultimately, invasive advertising. The other can result in the intentional - or accidental - destruction of your life.
But yeah, same diff.
Actually, I never thought Americans would be dumb enough to make America like Soviet Russia.
Money. Money. Money.
There’s quite a lot of ingrate whiners in this thread, I’ve noticed.
We’re all ears.
Sensenbrenner was told at the time that the law would allow for this sort of abuse, and he waved it off. He’s been engaged in a decade long bout of ass covering since then, trying to blame every actual use of the Patriot Act on everyone but himself.
He does this every time some new abuse of the patriot act is brought to light. He gave us this mess, and has stood in the way of every effort to repeal it and fix it. He doesn’t want it gone, doesn’t want it fixed, he just wants to make sure he’s not the one blamed for everything that’s obviously wrong with it.
It’s really clear that this stuff is going to continue as long as the Patriot Act and post-9/11 FISA expansions (which Sensenbrenner also voted for) are in place. Impeach Bush, impeach Obama, impeach whoever is up next, it won’t matter as long as this stuff is legal. And it is legal, no matter how much hand waving Sensenbrenner wants to engage in.
Insisting that this is all the work of some out of control executive branch, and not the US congress and the laws it put into place after 9/11 is ridiculous. This is Sensenbrenner and the rest of congress’s doing, whether he wants to admit it or not, and they need to fix it.
My point is that you are conflating the Patriot Act with the way the Executive Branch is implementing it. James Clapper testified only a couple months ago and blatantly lied to Congress when asked if the NSA is spying on millions of Americans. Its fairly clear that most of Congress didn’t know the extent of the illegal spying that was being done when even the Intelligence Committee members didn’t know much of it.
Should they overturn the Patriot Act? Should Congress force the Executive to stop dragnet surveillance of American citizens based on secret interpretations of law?
Those are very different questions. Reasonable people could disagree on the first (apparently). If the first is constitutionally questionable, the second is clearly and totally unconstitutional, as well as deeply unethical.
How is providing us with information on how our government is behaving in our names problematic for you? The principle is that the American people should know what is done in our names. Secrecy and clandestine action have gotten completely out of control in the US. There is now a massive and all-powerful group of agencies that is utterly unaccountable to the people. That can grab anyone off the street and essentially disappear them. That can spy on everything we do and say, and keep those records as long as they want.
If what our “national security” apparatus has been doing is ethical, constitutional and legal, then why can’t the stormtroopers be allowed to go house to house searching for illegal activity? They would surely find “criminals” that way. And “terrorists” too. We’d all be much safer from the scary terrorist criminals.
I’m not privy to Jim Sensenbrenner’s inner most conscience, and I’m not really interested either. The point is if you read section 215, it in no way allows for the dragnet surveillance that is being done. That’s why the Executive has created a “secret” interpretation of the law to justify its actions. Similar to the way John Yoo and company wrote opinions that somehow managed to make torture legal, any law can be twisted to mean pretty much anything if the interpretation isn’t subject to review.
Yes Congress is culpable in much of what has gone wrong, and the Patriot Act is terrible and unconstitutional. But secret interpretations of law by the Executive, and the blocking of all attempts at review by the Executive using technicalities (claiming those suing don’t have standing because they can’t prove they are being surveilled) is a gross abuse of process and a massive power grab. We can claim that we knew this would happen, but my point is that this could happen even without the Patriot Act. If the Executive can essentially create its own law and rebuff any efforts to have that law reviewed, it has just cut out the legislature AND the judiciary from the balance of powers. The Executive has made itself all powerful. Do you really think the surveillance would be stopped if the Patriot Act was revoked? The Executive would just find some other law to twist into a new shape to suit their needs.
I’m using the following argument sparingly because it’s commonly known to derail a thread in an instant but I think this time it’s appropriate:
I’d like to ask you a simple question: Who is made responsible for Hitler? Ask anyone - especially a Brit or USian and he will tell you “the Germans”. He was voted to office. There was a size-able opposition, namely from the Social Democrats (SPD) but ultimately everyone was responsible for the things that they didn’t prevent.
You and your fellow countrymen/women ARE responsible. You personally didn’t vote for X but it’s your democratically elected government and you did nothing to prevent the things done in your name. Inaction made you complicit. Whats making the situation worse is that the US citizen re-elected Bush and Obama knowing full well what kind of agenda and policy he had. Voting for a shitty politician could happen and is far more excusable than seeing he is full of shit and THEN re-electing him - that makes you (as a US citizen) even more responsible.
So don’t tell me, a german citizen, that you are not responsible for your government. You are. I’m being made responsible for a government my own grandfather didn’t vote for!
They are actually storing our emails and phone calls. They are using word games and lying when they claim its “only” metadata they are storing.
I’m very torn on this idea. I see why you are correct. But I also know that in Germany during Hitler’s reign anyone who spoke out or acted to stop the Nazi government was murdered. They murdered A LOT of dissidents. That being said, if a huge portion of the populace had taken to the streets to oust the Nazis they could’ve routed the bastards. So I guess I agree with you. In such an instance, if the US keeps going on its current path, I know my choices would involve either doing something to protest (and likely being imprisoned or worse) or going into exile. I could not sit and watch and thus, essentially, benefit from such horrifying acts.
lawlz at all the “you voted for this” comments.
Blame your Founding Fathers for enshrining government in your constitution; for instituting this unequal power relationship. Blame the people who are begging to cash in their liberty so readily for a piece of illusory security. Blame the media who are clamoring for prosecution of journalists, who are asking those in power to determine who can message to you.
Blame yourself if you’re willing to defend the system, even if only a little bit, because they cannot be redeemed. Blame yourself if you’re not clamoring to tear the entire system down, because time and time again, you have been betrayed.
(And with that, I send my customary greetings to the NSA, as this missive is transiting an international link to a server hosted within the US, and connections to bbs.boingboing.net aren’t even encrypted. Wonderful stuff.)
