…it’s that we can’t trust these people.
For instance, how hard would it be to search the metadata to find out who attended Tea Party rallies?
[Update late morning]
Hey, gun grabbers? This is why we don’t want you to know what guns we have. If you don’t have a list, we don’t have to worry about you abusing it.
In April, 2009, Homeland Security released a document describing the threat veterans posed to the nation. Connect the dots with the abuses at the IRS and EPA. The government is looking for threats, all right, but they aren’t looking for people like the Boston bombers. They’re looking for the next McVeigh. Government can’t be trusted to not abuse this kind of data.
Slight correction.
It isn’t that we can’t trust “these” people. Other people, exposed to the same temptations, would in time develop the same attitudes. We can’t assume angels will govern us — we mostly have to govern ourselves, delegating as little power to government as we deem necessary, in the full knowledge that whatever power we grant them WILL be abused, and so nothing should ever be left to government which can plausibly be accomplished without it.
I’ll point out for the record that it isn’t *other* people: the last administration didn’t in fact use FISA and the NSA for a massive data-mining effort against American citizens on American soil for purposes of political enforcement. That’s just the Democrats.
The last Administration called FISA the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Obama’s calls it Federal. One looked outside for attacks on our country. The other seems more interested in looking at its own citizens as the enemy.
Seriously, given what is known about Obama isn’t it natural he would consider about 50% of this country to be his enemy and the other 50% only to be trusted when under surveillance?
While no men are angels, these people have shown themselves to be particularly untrustworthy. Unless you want to trust that they will abuse their power
If it hadn’t been the minions of the Unicorn Prince it would have been someone else. The trajectory of Beltway Republicans isn’t cause for optimism.
I would have to agree with most of this:
“Some people can be trusted with these kinds of powers, some can’t.”
I have to disagree with you here. NOBODY can be trusted with this kind of power. Period. The only thing you can do is vote them out frequently enough so that that power is not allowed to corrupt absolutely.
Sadly, we’ve failed in our duty to vote them out often enough. So as a result, we’ve gotten ever-bigger government, gorging itself and bloated on its own ever-growing power, and it may be too late, short of armed revolution, to throw the bastards out and slow the growth.”
http://datechguyblog.com/2013/06/07/how-stupid-do-you-think-we-are-paulie-was-right-edition/
I have to disagree with you here. NOBODY can be trusted with this kind of power.
I agree. But even if I didn’t, how would we keep the people that we trust in those positions of power? The problem here is that eventually your guy gets replaced with some other guy.
Even if I trusted Bill Clinton, he got replaced with G. W. Bush. Even if I trust Bush, he got replaced with Obama. Even if I trust Obama, he’s going to get replaced in turn. It’s worse for people in lower offices both because of their lower visibility (you aren’t going to have any knowledge of most of the people whom you will allegedly trust) and because they can be replaced on a whim by someone higher up – whom you don’t trust.
The answer is to try to get back to the Constitutional limits on what the government was supposed to be allowed to do in the first place. Which is to say the Libertarian’s desire to shrink the power and scope of government, something neither of the two dominate parties want to do. A third party trying to get in maybe just maybe might deliver, or at least scare the two other parties until finally doing allot along these lines. The Libertarian candidate for President Gary Johnson’s positions, would be a good start, I hope he runs again with better luck.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Gary_Johnson
I mean listening to Obama rant about how the republicans are “playing politics” because they won’t let his nominees to the federal appeals court come to a vote, arguing that because they are in his view qualified, means they deserve a straight up 51-49 vote. We have one chance to vet these federal judges appointed for life, if they sail through on a straight party line vote we are stuck with them for life, long after Obama leaves office. I think it should require a super-majority (at least) to put someone in a powerful position for decades, with little chance of removing them if they turn out to be a loon, hopeless ideologue, or merely incompetent.
I think what worries people with the data gathering is that the public’s trust was already breached by a government that showed it was willing to abuse law, policy, and procedure to target ordinary Americans for partisan political gain, and do it across multiple agencies. If they were willing to do that, why would they stop with just the IRS and DoJ? If they were willing to lie to Congress and the American people repeatedly and continuously (IRS, DoJ, BATF, State), then they can’t be trusted when they claim our privacy was not violated.
In fact, isn’t it a bit suspicious that such an administration happens to have twice as many prosecutions under the 1917 treason and sedition acts than all previous administrations combined? Such a charge must be pretty hard to suspect, and harder still to prove, unless they happen to be running PRISM searches on people who are definitely not foreign terrorists.
The truth might be found in the meta data about people the administration went after that it shouldn’t have otherwise suspected and who have no foreign ties, whether leakers or OWS idiots, or perhaps some politicians whose careers were ended when a journalist got a helpful tip from an insider, time and time again.
Don’t forget about the EPA. Global warming zealots abusing the powers of the state to target undesireables for persecution, aide administration friends, and implement Obama dictates that couldn’t pass congress.
It is absolutely exhausting to see all the abuse which are so comment we don’t even count most of it. It exists from top to bottom in a mindset that organizations control individuals and that’s the only way it can be. Point out the alternative of individual liberty and you can see their eyes glaze. The only spark is the recognition that you’re some kind of kook.
You see it even in the most libertarian of places where liberty is fine except…
Now we have abuses that stink to the heavens and all they can do is mumble about it.
I shall remain a kook, now and forever, until they put a bullet in my brain. Then I’ll rest.
I wonder if they have a list of people who downloaded the blueprints of that Liberator gun.
There is another point getting lost in all this, even at Volokh. All this data collection had little social effect when it was secret and hidden under layers of top secret classification. Well, we are through the looking glass now, and we all know that everything is in there. So why, in any future legal criminal proceeding, shouldn’t the prosecutor and defense lawyer subpoena NSA data that will either convict a client or exonerate him? The judge knows the data exists. The jury knows it exists. Even the bailiff knows it exists. Last week such data “didn’t exist” and therefore was off the table. Now we know. The PRISM system is still classified, and a judge might try to rule it out, but how on Earth could the phone records and chat logs recorded by that system, concerning only Dr. Richard Kimble and a one-armed man, be national security concerns? All it takes is one ruling to start the avalanche, and since all these records were legally obtained they should all be admissible in court, and hiding behind national security doesn’t really work once the secret is out.
So when we have the next heinous killer sucking up the 24/7 cable news cycle, the public outcry to access the NSA data on him will become a clamor, led by the victim’s family. The camel will wander into the tent, and the next thing you know PRISM data will be the biggest boon to divorce lawyers since the sixties, the pill, and disco. Instead of feeling safe that your online personal activities could only be accessed if you tried to blow up Manhattan, and even then only by top counter-terrorism officials at the FBI, CIA, and Pentagon, soon your wife’s divorce lawyer could browse them by jumping through a few trivial hoops, as could your local sheriff, or perhaps even concerned citizens on the school PTA looking to build a case that you’re an unfit parent.
Beyond “is it lega?”, the question is what this all means now that the extent of the databases are no longer a closely held secret confined to an elite group of government code breakers. Why can’t they be accessed by a local court just like any other government records?
Rand,
FYI California has been seizing guns for years. They have a system already in place, the state would just need to expand it. And teach other states how to do it.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-12/california-seizes-guns-as-owners-lose-right-to-bear-arms.html
California Seizes Guns as Owners Lose Right to Keep Arms
By Michael B. Marois & James Nash – Mar 12, 2013 12:06 PM PT
Another good reason to call Nevada home 🙂
A very good reason to never register all of your guns, the law be damned.
I find it especially troubling in regard to the seizures related to restraining orders (taking away a right of a person who has been convicted of nothing). Same goes for the mental health issue; who gets to make that call?
Doesn’t matter if you’ve registered them, if you ever paid anything but cash for them, or for parts or accessories or ammo. NSA has been collecting credit card transactions too.
For that matter, I’d be amazed if a background check doesn’t go over the net at some point. Whoops! A permanent record of something they’re legally not supposed to keep permanent records of. I’m shocked – shocked, I say.
Gingery Lathe from scrap
Just sayin.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pOiOhxujsE
As I live in Australia, lemme explain how this works: Johnny Howard took our guns and cooked the way we do gun crime statistics. For example, the Snowtown murders are not considered gun crime because other weapons were found to be used as well.
Yes, illicit guns (and ammo!) are as readily available as illicit drugs. The vast majority of rural gun owners “gave up” only their junky old weapons (it was a buyback scheme, so why not) and simply buried their good weapons until the national fever for gun control died down. Police turn a blind eye to rifles and illegal ammo sales in rural areas.
In terms of left-right politics of the US, Howard was what you’d call a conservative.
For example, the Snowtown murders are not considered gun crime because other weapons were found to be used as well.
Meh… Nidan Hasan’s murder of 13 soldiers, while yelling “Alluh Akabar” for the defense of the Taliban, was just work place violence for which he is still paid, because he’s innocent until proven guilty. No word if he was forced to take a furlough because of the sequester. Anyway, 3 1/2 years later, the Obama Administration hasn’t managed to figure out if Hasan actually hurt anybody. They have decided Hasan can keep his beard, and they might just give him another 3 months that he claims is necessary for him to prepare for the trial. Can’t rush these things, because he might not get a fair trial. We certainly don’t want to convict of innocent man of murders he confessed to carrying out and witnessed by several dozen people.
Maybe the 13 people just slipped, tripped, and fell to their death. It’s a tragic but all too common workplace hazard. OSHA would look into it, but they are busy checking into “True the Vote”.
You misread. He was forced into the workplace violence by the sequester. Yes, causality would have to flow oddly. But it will be insinuated soon enough.
Thank you. I’ve been re-educated.
A serious question:
Why didn’t anyone in Australia use their guns to shoot the people who came to deprive them of their liberties?
Just make sure you have friends that are machinists.
THIS is why you don’t want to vote for congenital liars and scammers like Elizabeth Warren or Hillary Clinton into office.
If they are willing to lie to you about their heritage (Fauxcahontas), or lie about being under sniper fire (the Lioness of Tusla), then they will have no problem ordering up a sweep-up of people’s data and using it against them (IRS, AP and Fox reporters).
Worse, they will have no problem covering up their horrid decisions regarding events like Benghazi. Indeed that sort of character failure is what GETS you Behghazi.
And yes before the reflexive leftie crybabies for Obama or Hillary pipe up with the fact that republicans lie – everyone does. It’s a matter of if it’s habitual and damning.
It’s not that we can’t trust these people–we can’t trust people, period.
There are two major problems with bestowing power upon individuals in government:
1) No matter how decent, well-meaning, competent, and conscientious the individual government employee is (and almost all of them start out that way), the day will come when he’s tired, burned-out, callous, spiteful, venal, or just plain old doesn’t give a crap. That’s a bad day (or set of days) for you as a citizen to be interacting with him.
2) Government entropy tends to a maximum. Once an employee is tired, burned-out, callous, etc., he tends to stay that way. Even worse, the attitudes and procedures he adopts in that state tend to remain the official attitudes and procedures forever, inherited by his successors, with little chance for the system to self-correct.
The only way to limit the damage is to limit the power of the individual in government. But constraining the amount of judgment that a government employee can exercise constrains the flexibility and effectiveness of government (to say nothing of guaranteeing that you get the least talented bureaucrats). The only answer to this dilemma is to sharply curtail the number of “services” that government “provides” and to carefully constrain the power associated with those “services”.
Rad writes:
“1) No matter how decent, well-meaning, competent, and conscientious the individual government employee is (and almost all of them start out that way), the day will come when he’s tired, burned-out, callous, spiteful, venal, or just plain old doesn’t give a crap. That’s a bad day (or set of days) for you as a citizen to be interacting with him.”
I can conceive of an even less mischievous justification in the mind of a Federal Employee:
They want to do good.
They see that “Bad” can be stopped if he/she would only exceed the Constitution, this time, by a little bit.
The avoidance of bad seems to be more valuable than the law, *in their mind*.
So they stretch the Constitution.
Classic Bastiat Broken Window scenario….they do not see the Bad that results from their action.
I’m sure the predicament happens every single working day, at various levels of severity.
Ok let’s see…..with regard to the NSA scandal:
On the one hand, we have Obama telling us nothing to see here…move along:
“When it comes to telephone calls, every member of Congress has been briefed on this program,” President Obama said at a press conference yesterday.
And on the other hand we have:
“That’s not true,” U.S. Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Boston) said. “Certainly we understood that in specific instances the FBI would be able to go with evidence and probable cause and get a court order. They did not brief us on how it was being implemented.”
Lynch called for investigations into why the NSA has been collecting phone data from millions of customers for seven years — something he said was never intended by lawmakers.
“It’s absolutely government overreach. It was supposed to be targeted toward specific threats,” he said.
..and we also have:
U.S. Rep. Michael Capuano (D-Somerville), who has railed against the domestic spying as “un-American,” said he only found out about the NSA programs through media reports, while U.S. Rep. James McGovern’s office said he also had been unaware of the programs.
Hmmm.
But the Dear Leader says:
“He also called reports on sweeping efforts by the National Security Agency to seize phone records, as well access Internet search histories, emails and online chat messages, for average citizens “hype.” ”
Why should we trust him?
Well of course, we shouldn’t.
And thinking people don’t.
If you’re going to get hung up on the idea that _any_ government or tradeoffs eventually result in ultimate corruption, and it doesn’t matter who power is entrusted to, you’re going to wake up and find out that whenever the next attack forces everyone else into the side of the tradeoff they don’t agree with they’re going to wind up doing so with the least honorable people in charge.
I don’t think that’s right. If it’s inevitable that portions of a bureaucracy degrade over time, you need to design the bureaucracy to be fault-tolerant, maintainable, and replaceable.
That’s a challenging systems design issue, but not an impossible one. It starts with a lot of humility: you want to keep things really simple because you know that complexity breeds unanticipated failure modes, corruption, and abuse. Hint: when you’re passing thousand-page hunks of legislation that let unaccountable bureaucracy write tens of thousands of pages of regulations, you’re probably doing it wrong.
And yes, I know I’m being utopian. But maybe we’re coming up on one of those rare historical moments where government is actually susceptible to reform. I hope so, because the rot is way too deep to fix just by replacing their guys with our guys. (Choose whatever values for “theirs” and “ours” that you like–it won’t make any difference.)
The point I keep harping on is the distinction between NIST and the EPA.
NIST’s work is arguably far more pervasive … but their mandate is well-defined and their “governmental powers” are -very- limited.
The EPA has powers that just aren’t necessary to meet the overt goals. And with the authority comes the abuse. And the spread. And more power …. If the EPA’s pollution mandate read more like NIST’s: “Define acceptable release levels, and defend every single one with three independent studies.” with the regular courts being used instead of self-selected environmentalists doing the evaluations we’d be better off.
” Hint: when you’re passing thousand-page hunks of legislation that let unaccountable bureaucracy write tens of thousands of pages of regulations, you’re probably doing it wrong.
And yes, I know I’m being utopian. ”
Your hint is not utopian at all. I think that’s the very first place to start.
Congress used to have to debate and persuade the other congress-critters to vote for a particular piece of legislation.
Well what a bother THAT is. No, so much easier to add ornaments to the tree to buy a vote.
So now no one has to be convinced of the merits of your proposal. They need only state the price.
Also, think what the thousands of amendments to a Bill does to actual debate time:
instead of debating the merits of the main proposal, they spend their time debating the merits of a completely unrelated amendment.
Ah it’s so much more convenient this way. None of that nasty persuasion or having to defend your position.
Our government — indeed, any government — reflects the character of the governed. The citizens of the United States could overthrow the government at any point if we wanted to. The fact that we don’t overthrow it indicates that we don’t want to.
We get the government we deserve. The form of government is unimportant. It doesn’t matter if a country is governed as by a democracy, a republic, an oligarchy, an aristocracy, a monarchy, an authoritarian autocrat, or a military dictatorship. Bad people -> bad government. Good people -> good government.
There is no political solution to the problem of bad government. Our government is cynical, unjust, and corrupt because we have become a cynical, unjust, and corrupt country. The only way we’ll ever have a good government is if we become a good people — good inside, at a basic level.
Good people create a good culture, and a good culture doesn’t need much in the way of laws of government. Good folks largely govern themselves.
The solution is spiritual, not political. The best way to start creating a better country is to start become better people, and the only way to do that is for us each and all to humbly seek to conform our hearts and minds to that of the Maker of all things.
When I look at our world today, I see a tidal wave of evil engulfing everything. I see no cause for hope. But perhaps God has allowed us to come to this pass so that we may finally realize that our attempt to create Heaven on Earth by an act of will is a futile lie. Perhaps we have to be rendered hopeless in order to discover that our only hope is Him.
Well said. We have become as a group a corrupt people. Corruption used to be hidden and shamed when exposed. That doesn’t happen much anymore. The loudest voices are now often the most corrupt. Soon the truth will be undeniable.
There is no political solution to the problem of bad government.
Can we get everyone, starting in Washington, to write this on the chalk board 100 times?
Today we have a name and a motive. So at the certain risk of outrage from our blog idiot; is what Snowden did wrong? We don’t know yet what harm he has done to the hunt for terrorism, and much more likely US relations with pretty much the entire world. For the record, I disagree with his methods. He’s no whistleblower to me, as he did not take his concerns and evidence to Congress but to the press, a foreign press.
I recommend the Guardian keeps it employee that reached out to Snowden away from Holder. I suspect they might be labeled criminal co-conspirators. I wonder if it was Glenn Greenwald?