American Politics Thread 2013: I'm a cool Rodham grandma in the USA

because they got caught!

but yeah I ain't surprised and who cares

Merkel and the christian democrats just pulled off a huge win and need little help forming a government.. she can probably do whatever the fuck she wants right now

it's an issue because merkel can't be like "lol w/e" because german people have taken offense at the disrespect

what, exactly, did they get caught doing? i ask mostly rhetorically.

i have to admit to being fatigued by a lot of these espionage stories; they have a certain rhythm of greenwald/snowden making really sweeping claims followed by agency pushback followed by (maybe not) outside tech bod types saying, well, this claim is bogus but this defense is also etc etc etc

No one's ever gonna quit spying anyway. It's fun to pretend that we're mad about it, though.

don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom pizza

yeah, this. the issue is they're "allies" i guess, but on that score i have to say i'm a little suspicious of merkel's motives here. or at least, i wonder what they are, not knowing much about german domestic politics.

― goole, Tuesday, October 29, 2013 7:27 PM (25 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

are we already forgetting the collection of metadata from non-prime minister-humans phones in spain and france or is that just clean off the speeding conveyer belt of horror at this point

i thought the latest word on that was that it was all provided by .fr and .es gov'ts? eh that's what i get for staying at the headline level i guess.

The Spanish government on Monday summoned the American ambassador to address allegations that the National Security Agency had recently collected data on 60 million telephone calls in Spain.

Adding to a spying scandal that includes Brazil, France, Germany and Mexico, the government’s move came after two Spanish newspapers reported Monday that the agency had gathered data on phone numbers and locations but had not monitored the contents of the calls.

Iñigo Méndez de Vigo, a Spanish secretary of state, referred in a separate statement to the need to maintain “a necessary balance” between security and privacy concerns. Spain, he added, is calling on Washington to clarify “the reach of measures that, if proven to be true, are improper and unacceptable between partners and friendly countries.”

The two Spanish newspapers, El Mundo and El País, based their reporting on documents viewed by Glenn Greenwald, an American journalist, that were provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor who has been at the center of the spying scandal.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/29/world/europe/spain-calls-in-us-ambassador-in-spying-scandal.html?_r=0

oh you're more up to date than i am, my bad

No one's ever gonna quit spying anyway. It's fun to pretend that we're mad about it, though

sign up for my Endless Supply of Rage At Authoritarian Shit seminar next spring

are we already forgetting the collection of metadata from non-prime minister-humans phones in spain and france or is that just clean off the speeding conveyer belt of horror at this point

― HOOS it because...of steen???? (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Tuesday, October 29, 2013 3:56 PM (29 minutes ago)

if we're not using the info to convict people of crimes and put them in prison what does it matter?

cause if they've done nothing wrong, they have nothing to hide

europeans all have something to hide

no i was actually being serious -- the reason we oppose some spy powers domestically is because we believe in procedural protections in criminal trials. "privacy" is such a red herring in these debates -- what do we care if the government can see you in your undies if the information isn't being used against you? what does collecting metadata on randos from spain have to do with violations of procedural protections? (serious question, maybe i don't understand the way they overseas metadata are being used, i haven't read too much about it)

what do we care if the government can see you in your undies if the information isn't being used against you?

idk, something about "freedom from unreasonable search and seizure"? are you actually being serious? that argument is a slippery slope to surveillance hell.

didn't usa pluck up to 100 people off the streets in europe and throw them into vans and white planes?

that was Expedia

or at least expedient

they seem happy to me

http://www.fab4collectibles.com/images3/VisitFeb21TheDeparture3.jpg

I need to tell my pals in the French, Spanish and German governments that if they want to spy on Kevin K., he's ok with it-- its just collecting metadata on rando Yanks

privacy has always been a fiction

the reason we oppose some spy powers domestically is because we believe in procedural protections in criminal trials

...

what does collecting metadata on randos from spain have to do with violations of procedural protections?

i think that's one of the reasons to oppose a country spying on its own citizens, not the sole reason. and (slippery slope weeeeeeee!) what if, hypothetically, we accepted the idea that it's ok to spy on citizens from other countries, but not your own, and then all countries followed that maxim? then every government would know the underwear choices of everybody in the world except their own citizens.

and that's just WRONG.

The 4th amendment was once more than a fiction

Rando European snooping has probably been as unsuccessful as the stuff NSA's Alexander has already admitted to:

During Wednesday’s hearing, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy pushed Alexander to admit that plot numbers had been fudged in a revealing interchange:

“There is no evidence that [bulk] phone records collection helped to thwart dozens or even several terrorist plots,” said Leahy. The Vermont Democrat then asked the NSA chief to admit that only 13 out of a previously cited 54 cases of foiled plots were genuinely the fruits of the government’s vast dragnet surveillance systems:

“These weren’t all plots, and they weren’t all foiled,” Leahy said, asking Alexander, “Would you agree with that, yes or no?”

“Yes,” replied Alexander.

http://www.salon.com/2013/10/02/nsa_director_admits_to_misleading_public_on_terror_plots/

in an abstract ideal way the deal is supposed to be that a gov't spies on other countries (ideally just the gov't and not randos) but tries to protect its own citizens from same.

maybe the angry reaction from spanish, german gov't et al is an admission that not only do they do zero job protecting their ppl from this intrusion but are probably not doing much peeking into american life either, in return? i mean, who knows.

i harbor this odd confident hope that foreign agencies are able to look into american power more dispassionately and, for ex, game out something like the shutdown more cleanly. ah yes, ted krooss, veddy interestink, tree veeks, tops. but that doesn't seem to be true?

privacy has always been a fiction

ok, why

poor Louis Brandeis!

Well, rumours in Europe are, that the data collected by the US has been given to american businesses, which has given them an unfair advantage. Also, US and EU was negotiating a trade agreement at the moment, and we'd rather that we could do our internal negotiation in peace. Which is an utopic idea, anyway... Also, foreign leaders hate when these rumours happen because they will always be asked "do you think the US is spying on you" and they have the choice of answering 1) No (because I'm stupid and naive) 2) Yes (because I don't trust our allies). It's a stupid situation to bring your allies in, and really, if you think of yourself as the leader of the free world, then respect the rest. Don't spy, or do it right!

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/10/polll-finds-vast-gaps-in-basic-views-on-gender-race-religion-and-politics/

among many other things,

• Just 23 percent overall say it would be a good thing if more nonwhites were elected to Congress; 73 percent instead say it makes no difference to them. Seeing this as a good thing peaks at 50 percent among liberal Democrats (far more, in this case, than the number of nonwhites themselves who say so, 29 percent). Among conservative Republicans, it’s 5 percent.

O_o

The 4th amendment was once more than a fiction

Not for people of color

/privacy has always been a fiction/

ok, why

slavery

what do we care if the government can see you in your undies if the information isn't being used against you?

I grew up in this weird era post-fall of the Soviet Union, where most of my early school was rah-rah Capitalism and Free Markets and by the time I read about the coup and the fall of the soviet empire I had no idea what communism was, it may as well have been historical fiction. The only reasons I could gather why Communism was such a big threat (one warranting destroying the entire planet for, and reminding the populace of this daily) were:

1) bread lines
2) KGB listening to your phone calls

Not having a surveillance state was sort of the ultimate demonstration of why America = Freedom, and how Freedom is a real word that means something.

hat do we care if the government can see you in your undies if the information isn't being used against you?

I've seen what you look like in undies.

fuck privacy, yay Obama is on ILX currency

the more people who can see you in your undies, the less control you have over whether that information is used against you at any point for the rest of your life.

the real threat of collectivization of private property wasn't bread lines or the KGB spying on you - both things that can happen in mismanaged democracies too. the real threat was holodomor and the 3 years of difficult period.

sure glad famine never happened in mismanaged democracies

for my own edification which democracies experienced such cataclysmic famines? i'm not saying you're wrong, but i can't think of anything on that scale.

and both were in such large numbers specifically bc of how the collectivization + political process occurred. neither were natural famines.

do u know where i am from or

well the sample size for cataclysmic famines of that scale is pretty small - there's the Ukraine, China, and probably several African countries but that's about it, right?

xp

zvookster, my xls sheet on you is completely empty except that your handle starts w/ a z and is as many characters as zachlyon.

my point was just that being directly + indirectly responsible for the murder of millions of your citizens through forced starvation + also direct killing is probably a bigger distinction between the US and the USSR than whether the CIA or the KGB spies more.

ireland?

for scale:

Great Chinese Famine: 20-45 million
Holodomor: 2-6 million
Irish Famine: 1 million

ilx

so i thought i'd been posting here long enough that my civil libertarian bona fides were well enough established, but maybe i just wasn't being clear -- i'm obviously against the indiscriminate collection of information on citizens by their governments, but there's a reason for that, and it's not that i want my "privacy". it's that i think that the government/cops should not be allowed to collect information that can be used to build a case against you without showing probable cause and getting approval from a judge. to me that's what the 4th amendment means and i feel strongly about that. and i don't think the government should be collecting this sort of information indiscriminately (ie as the NSA has done) because as j points out, that information is just begging to be used in one way or another. in the particular case of the US govt collecting info on foreign nationals, i just don't understand whose rights are being compromised. if it turns out that we're alerting the spanish government to information we pick up, then that's pretty lame and we probably should not be doing that, but that also sounds like something the spanish people could take care of legislatively if they felt strongly about it

OK fine -- you can still be my secretary of state.

you'll have to keep those undie pics i sent you under wraps or i'll have a tough time getting confirmed