Leaked: Info on US Data Collection Programs

[Thanas]

Problem with that is that the NSA is building (or has built) huge Supercomputers which might very well aim to sift through the raw data.

[K. A. Pital]

Data mining is not okay regardless of whether the data is raw or not. That's pretty much a clear-cut thing. There's no reason to store tons of e-mails and messages on government servers unless they intend to read them.

Not only that, but regardless of "legality", which is an I will make it legal (c) thing, the morally correct action is to expose total surveillance at every stage, to smash and interrupt the works of such mechanisms as the CIA or NSA, since their more serious crimes and constant infringements upon individuals right to privacy are well-documented and have been the subject of several investigations into their activity over the course of decades.

There's simply nothing excusing NSA, CIA or Obama. There's everything excusing the right of every whistleblower to expose such actions that amount to the creation of a total surveillance state.

[Irbis]

It is kinda funny that nobody in this thread seems to bother about the actual implications of Obama doing this but instead spends time debating whether so-and-so should be shot or not.

What implications? To me, it's not even news - ECHELON system that can be used to do pretty much the same things as PRISM is active for what, 5 decades now? To me, protests by Merkel and the rest of European leaders are pretty much laughable as they accepted that USA turned their UK ECHELON station to EU-wide (industrial) espionage uses with end of Cold War, and now that weaker system is online they're suddenly uncomfortable? Ineffectual vote-whoring much?

Yes, people have right to privacy, and this level of surveillance is terrible, but no one in USA or EU save for small minority seems to care (recent survey that 55% of Americans support PRISM) so it's pretty much everyone's fault. Osama won that one.

Believe me, I am aware of them. As of right now, I'm trying to see if there's any way (from Australia, so likely exploiting legal loopholes) to at least evade U.S government survelliance. Once I've done that, I can move onto the much more tricky local stuff...

Too bad Australia has two ECHELON stations already, in Geraldton and Pine Gap, plus two more in New Zealand.

[StarSword]

Petition to the White House to pardon Edward Snowden that I'm sharing everywhere I can think of, because the man deserves a goddamn medal, not a treason charge like Speaker Bonehead, er, Boenher, wants to give him. You'd think the Republicans would be latching onto this as to discredit Obama but the exact opposite seems to be happening.

This makes four sections of the current US government I'm thoroughly disgusted with (the others being Congress for obstructionism and not giving a flying fuck about what the voters actually want them to work on, the Supreme Court for Citizens United, and the North Carolina General Assembly for cutting income taxes and raising sales taxes). I'd be disgusted with Verizon too, if I thought there was any way for them to fight this.

[Carinthium]

Sorry about the delay in responding- I've had a lot of work on (happens a lot, actually), plus I'm in several arguments at the same time making it harder. Will respond later today.

[Carinthium]

LaCroix- There is no literal use of the word "own" in the Constitution. There are the words "dispose of" and "make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting", but neither of these things imply a right of Congress to buy property.

To use something of a construct here, take the metaphor of the United States as a person. The United States "owns" various property. The United States cannot act for itself, so it delegates various powers to the Congress and to the Senate. However, it does not delegate to anybody the power to buy property on its behalf.

The problem with your theory is that it assumes the intentionalism that SOMEBODY has to act for the United States- that, say, Congress, controls the United States and can therefore deal with all matters related to it's property. it doesn't.

Knife- I've done my best to explain what I mean already. Now it's your turn to respond.

PKRude Boy-
First, you misunderstand me if you think I care what the Founding Fathers MEANT. I care what the words SAY, which is a different thing.

Second, there is nothing that makes it 'impossible' to govern the country by the Constitution except political unacceptability. A dictionary definition of the word "arms" created at the time (were there dictionaries) would give us a definition that would cover modern firearms as they are not so different as to cause a problem.

The Founding Fathers broke the Constitution. That does not logically imply that it is in any way legally invalid- it merely means the Founding Fathers were in the wrong.

Terralthra-
If you consider era of history and language being used to be "context", which I don't, then context is needed for interpretation. I would, however, contend that other than that context is completely unnecessary. The mechanical application of dictionary definitions is enough.

Magna Carta is a similiar case- a hypothetical medieval Dictionary would create a definitional meaning that covered at least most modern weapons because a key part of the medieval idea of Arms in that sense was use for harming other creatures.

Next, you should remember that I am advocating for the posistion of advocating consistent, unchanging Rules rather than change over time. Wouldn't it be a bit silly of me to advocate for an idea (changing the laws with linguistic change) that would logically lead to massive amounts of changes of the rules over time?

Finally, if the Constitution had given Congress "control over the United States as property within X restrictions" then I might have agreed with your interpretation. However, the United States as a legal entity and Congress as a legal entity are not identical. Congress does not necessarily, and indeed does not, have full rights over it.

[Terralthra]

Ironically, you don't consider context to be exactly what the dictionary definition of context is. "The circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed."

[LaCroix]

So, in other words, you only use the dictionary to look up what a word means when it suits what you intend the words to mean. (e.g. arms - modern firearms are close enough IN MY OPINION)
You ignore the meaning of words (e.g. property == to own something, and the inseparable ability to manage your property by buying and selling) when they don't agree with what you intend to make the word mean.

This is simply dishonest...

[loomer]

Please don't use Magna Carta as an example again. It reads a lot differently than you might expect if you use the period definitions and the context in which they were used. Also, have you read Holmes yet?

[Carinthium]

When did I say I was going to read Holmes?

LaCroix- There isn't any dictionary I know of defining words from the time the Constitution was written. Therefore, I have to guess. However, some guesses are pretty much common sense.

Terralthra- You're misunderstanding the extent to which I call upon the dictionary- I'm saying it should be used for assesing words in a Constitution. I never said it should be used for other things.

[loomer]

When did I say I was going to read Holmes?

LaCroix- There isn't any dictionary I know of defining words from the time the Constitution was written. Therefore, I have to guess. However, some guesses are pretty much common sense.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dictiona ... h_Language.

You didn't say you'd read Holmes, but if you're going to debate about constitutionalism and living constitution theory, you should really educate yourself on one of its most influential jurisprudential precursors.

[Carinthium]

loomer- I didn't actually know about that. I'll go take a look then.

[Broomstick]

When did I say I was going to read Holmes?

LaCroix- There isn't any dictionary I know of defining words from the time the Constitution was written. Therefore, I have to guess. However, some guesses are pretty much common sense.

You could use Noah Webster's first dictionary, published in 1806. It was after the Constitution itself was written, but closer in time than we are, and focused on the language as used in the US. The actual title was A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, and it's in the public domain so you can probably find a copy on line somewhere.

[Irbis]

To get back on topic - funny thing, a week after I said this?

What implications? To me, it's not even news - ECHELON system that can be used to do pretty much the same things as PRISM is active for what, 5 decades now? To me, protests by Merkel and the rest of European leaders are pretty much laughable as they accepted that USA turned their UK ECHELON station to EU-wide (industrial) espionage uses with end of Cold War, and now that weaker system is online they're suddenly uncomfortable? Ineffectual vote-whoring much?

Turns out UK was using their ECHELON and PRISM equipment to spy on G20 leaders and like obedient 51st state shared their findings with USA where they were leaked with rest of Snowden's papers:

LONDON -- A newspaper report that British eavesdropping agency GCHQ repeatedly hacked into foreign diplomats' phones and emails has prompted an angry response from traditional rival Russia and provoked demands for an investigation from Turkey and South Africa.

Although spying on diplomats is as old as diplomacy itself, the Guardian's report laid out in explicit detail steps taken by GCHQ to monitor foreign officials' conversations in real time, saying that British spies had hacked emails, stolen passwords and gone so far as to set up a bugged Internet cafe in an effort to get an edge in high-stakes negotiations.

The Guardian cited more than half a dozen internal government documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden as the basis for its reporting on GCHQ's intelligence operations, which it says involved, among other things, hacking into the South African foreign ministry's computer network, targeting the Turkish delegation at the 2009 Group of 20 summit in London and using the vast spying base at northern England's Menwith Hill to monitor the satellite communications of Russian leader Dmitry Medvedev.

Russians responded angrily.

"It's a scandal! The U.S. and British special services tapped (then President Dmitry) Medvedev's phone at the 2009 G-20 summit. The U.S. denies it, but we can't trust them," Alexei Pushkov, the Kremlin-connected chief of foreign affairs committee in the lower house of Russian parliament, wrote on his Twitter feed Monday.

Turkey's Ministry of Foreign Affairs called the report alarming, saying in a statement that if the story was true "this will evidently constitute a scandal."

"Such (an) act by an allied country would clearly be deemed unacceptable," the statement went on. "British authorities are expected to present an official and satisfactory explanation on this issue."

South African diplomats said in a statement that they were concerned by the report, demanding that London "investigate this matter fully."

Experts say that while the expressions of shock may be spurious – it's widely known that all nearly all countries spy on one another – Britain's standing could nevertheless suffer real damage.

The report was awkwardly timed, coming as Britain opened the G-8 summit, a meeting of the world's leading economies that include Russia, in Northern Ireland on Monday. The allegation that the United Kingdom previously used its position as host to spy on its allies and other attendees could make for awkward conversation as the delegates tackle the issues of Syria, taxes and free trade.

"The diplomatic fallout from this could be considerable," according to British academic Richard J. Aldrich, whose book "GCHQ" charts the agency's history.

Speaking at the G-8 summit, Prime Minister David Cameron declined to address the issue.

"We never comment on security or intelligence issues and I am not about to start now," he said. "I don't make comments on security or intelligence issues. That would be breaking something that no government has previously done."

GCHQ also declined to comment on the report.

It wasn't completely clear how Snowden would have had access to the British intelligence documents, although in one article the Guardian mentions that source material was drawn from a top-secret internal network shared by GCHQ and the NSA. Aldrich said he wouldn't be surprised if the GCHQ material came from a shared network accessed by Snowden, explaining that the NSA and GCHQ collaborated so closely that in some areas the two agencies effectively operated as one.

One document cited by the Guardian – but not posted to its website – appeared to boast of GCHQ's tapping into smartphones. The Guardian quoted the document as saying that "capabilities against BlackBerry provided advance copies of G-20 briefings to ministers." It went on to say that "Diplomatic targets from all nations have an MO (a habit) of using smartphones," adding that spies "exploited this use at the G-20 meetings last year."

Another document cited – but also not posted – concerned GCHQ's use of a customized Internet cafe which was "able to extract key logging info, providing creds (credentials) for delegates, meaning we have sustained intelligence options against them even after conference has finished." No further details were given, but the reference to key logging suggested that computers at the cafe would have been pre-installed with malicious software designed to spy on key strokes, steal passwords and eavesdrop on emails.

Aldrich said that revelation stuck out as particularly ingenious.

"It's a bit `Mission Impossible,'" he said.

Gee, maybe they should apply for US state membership, then, Cameron would fit right in with the likes of Romney and Boehner

[Thanas]

Too left for them.

[Simon_Jester]

LaCroix- There is no literal use of the word "own" in the Constitution. There are the words "dispose of" and "make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting", but neither of these things imply a right of Congress to buy property.

To use something of a construct here, take the metaphor of the United States as a person. The United States "owns" various property. The United States cannot act for itself, so it delegates various powers to the Congress and to the Senate. However, it does not delegate to anybody the power to buy property on its behalf.

What kind of schizophrenic-idiot approach is that?

If you're going to adopt that argument, then "the United States" should damn well have the power to buy property. The organization can't justly be deprived of the power to do that on the grounds that it forgot to designate an official to do that.

If there are, say, four powers associated with landowning (say, power to repel trespassers, improve property, buy and sell), and I own land, and I only delegate away three of them, I keep the fourth. It does not disappear or vanish from the Earth. Even if for whatever reason "I" am unable to carry out that fourth power, it remains. And the people responsible for protecting my interests and executing my will still have reasonable grounds to use that fourth power, even if it was not explicitly delegated to them.

Second, there is nothing that makes it 'impossible' to govern the country by the Constitution except political unacceptability. A dictionary definition of the word "arms" created at the time (were there dictionaries) would give us a definition that would cover modern firearms as they are not so different as to cause a problem.

There IS something that makes it 'impossible.' It is impossible to govern a country in a way that forces such disastrous idiocy on you that people stop listening to the government and do their own thing. That is the one guaranteed way to destroy a country- to effectively disband it by being so absurd and stupid about policy that your "rules" are simply ignored.

Because if you start trying to govern the country that way, you won't be governing it that way for long. If you think the Constitution was intended as a self-destruct mechanism for the United States, you're a fool and have no place in discussions of public policy.

The Founding Fathers broke the Constitution. That does not logically imply that it is in any way legally invalid- it merely means the Founding Fathers were in the wrong.

One thing it implies is that the people who knew what it said, who had in their minds every relevant detail of what the words they'd written meant, were doing things that we today would consider breaking it.

Either our definition of "break" has evolved, or we have to start accepting that the Founders were in fact normal political human beings, not gods. In the latter case, we have to consider that the wording of their documents may not be holy writ.

---

PKRudeBoy, I'm making a more basic point here. Literally speaking "keep and bear arms" means you can keep and bear the arms that are attached to your body. Firearms are a metaphorical reading of "arms." Only in the modern era has "arms" come to be defined as "firearms," in addition to talking about the arm of a human, or of a shirt, or of an armchair.

That's not a literal reading, that's a willfully ignorant reading, because it ignores linguistic drift.

By the same argument "gay rights" means "right to be happy" or some such thing- because that's what 'gay' meant as recently as the 1950s before it was repurposed to mean 'homosexual.'

At a bare minimum even a literalist would (or should) allow for linguistic drift that had changed the denotation of a word at the time it was written down.

I'd challenge him to justify his assertion that the context of the early 1800s English-descended elite, white, rich, land-owning, political language community is the only context in which it is valid to interpret the Constitution. We don't live in that society any more. We live in an evolution of it, and the language we use has evolved in keeping with that. Interpreting the Constitution according to our current language is no less valid - and arguably more valid - than trying to resurrect the sensibilities of two-centuries-dead patricians filtered through our own biases.

Now, if that is your argument I have no problem with the argument as such- I just think you've taken the premise a little too far. Metaphors that become welded into the dictionary are so much a part of language that I don't think you can exclude them by saying "if you were REALLY literal, you wouldn't use these."

A nitpick, I admit. I still agree that you have to read a document in terms of its context, unless it is written with scientific precision, which the Constitution is not. And that the context of 1787 is not necessarily the best, or the only, one in which to read the Constitution.

Further, I'd challenge that even if one is to accept the rather questionable premise that early 18th century political elite English is the only acceptable language context in which to examine the Constitution, their visions of property were provably based on Hobbes/Locke/Hume's ideas about property, in which the ability to transfer - buy or sell - property is inherent to the idea of property itself. Should we accept the warrant that the Constitution grants the Federal government the rights to own and regulate land as property, it would be inherent in that grant to include buying and selling it.

Oooh. Good one.

---

Petition to the White House to pardon Edward Snowden that I'm sharing everywhere I can think of, because the man deserves a goddamn medal, not a treason charge like Speaker Bonehead, er, Boenher, wants to give him. You'd think the Republicans would be latching onto this as to discredit Obama but the exact opposite seems to be happening.

It is the Republicans' greatest desire that Obama be dropped from office as soon as possible and that the Democrats be ruined. But it is their second-greatest desire to have a powerful security state at their disposal when they eventually regain power; they're not stupid enough to compromise that objective, it seems.

[TheHammer]

LaCroix- There is no literal use of the word "own" in the Constitution. There are the words "dispose of" and "make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting", but neither of these things imply a right of Congress to buy property.

To use something of a construct here, take the metaphor of the United States as a person. The United States "owns" various property. The United States cannot act for itself, so it delegates various powers to the Congress and to the Senate. However, it does not delegate to anybody the power to buy property on its behalf.

The answer to this is the concept of eminent domain, and is made quite clear in the final line of the Fifth amendment:

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation

The last line is clear. Property can be taken for public use if be done so with just compensation. That's a purchase any way you slice it.

[Carinthium]

On the matter of the legal dictionary- I'm getting around to it. In the meantime:

The Hammer- That may establish a right to buy private property (the reason I say may is that you could argue that "just compensation" does not necessarily involve money). Louisana was not private property.

[Broomstick]

On the matter of the legal dictionary- I'm getting around to it. In the meantime:

The Hammer- That may establish a right to buy private property (the reason I say may is that you could argue that "just compensation" does not necessarily involve money). Louisana was not private property.

On what basis do you claim that eminent domain applies only the private property? Point to where that limitation is written into the constitution.

[loomer]

Don't bother. Carinthium doesn't have a legal education or the inclination to actually explore the law. If he did, he'd have already bowed out for a while to go and study some jurisprudence on the matter. Instead, he's arguing only from his own perspective with nothing at all to back it - no philosophical understanding of the deeper epistemological content of law, the inherently contextual nature of law as a purely linguistic construct, or even an idea of who Oliver Wendell Holmes was.

And, frankly, if you don't know who Holmes is when you're trying to argue constitutional interpretation, you're building a house not even on sand - you're building it on the cracked ice of a lake, with spring coming the next day.

[Carinthium]

Where is eminent domain in the Constitution?

Loomer- I've already explained where I'm coming from philosophically, and why I ignore most legal theory.

[loomer]

Where you are coming from an uneducated position with little understanding of the reality of the legal system, it's underlying elements, or recent developments in jurisprudence based on recent developments in sociologyand linguistics.

Here's a hint. Words do not have inherent meanings. Do you disagree? If so, please provide a proper critique not of me, but of Saussure and his semiotics and Derrida's deconstructionism and post-structuralist doctrines in general. The meaning of a word is ALWAYS contextual, because a word is only a signifier of a number of linked concepts.

You cannot just put your fingers in your ears and go 'blablablah not listening' when it comes to jurists if you want to be taken at all seriously. Go fucking educate yourself.

[Terralthra]

Here's a hint. Words do not have inherent meanings. Do you disagree? If so, please provide a proper critique not of me, but of Saussure and his semiotics and Derrida's deconstructionism and post-structuralist doctrines in general. The meaning of a word is ALWAYS contextual, because a word is only a signifier of a number of linked concepts.

I tried to point this out to him, multiple times, with varieties of approaches. It bounced off.

[Straha]

I explained that to him once in a thread at length. He accused me of 'subjectivism' and buggered off. It was mildly amusing.

[Carinthium]

I'll get back to Terralthra- but suffice to say to Loomer that I don't come from the question of "What is the Law?" but from the posistion of a human right (rooted in ethics) to have only laws imposed that one can actually understand. I then proceed from there to point out that it is impossible to have understandable law from any other legal interpretation because there will always be ambiguity.