I want to provide some perspective here, at the risk of being downvoted.
To compare what the US government is doing to a truly oppressive regime is insulting. People in the world today live in fear of physical harm from their own government. They aren't worried about phone call meta data or blanket call logging. They're worried about being taken by force with no trial, no ACLU or EFF to help them. Just gone.
Ai Weiwei served months in jail for art projects that were critical of the government. Can anyone imagine that happening here, in the country where flag burning is constitutionally protected? There are dozens of countries in the world today that have a near 100% conviction rate for political dissidents. Here in America confessed terrorists have the right to an attorney and god help the prosecution if there was any missed technicality during the arrest.
Don't dare be a girl trying to go to school in many middle eastern countries. Might get run over by a tank if you openly oppose the chinese government. Offend the king of saud with your actions and you'll be literally stoned to death in the street. And we're worried about phone call meta data?
I think a lot of this is ignorance about how modern counter terrorism works. The most effective tool we have is social network analysis. Find a terrorist and see who calls them, then see who calls those people and out and out. Look at the vertices and edges and dependency networks and we can learn a lot about complex organizations without risking any lives. It's understood that this is offensive to many people's privacy beliefs, but it's the best tool we have.
If you want to know why government agency's are engaging in this wildly unpopular behavior, here's the answer: On 9/11 a lot of people swore to god that it would never happen again. That might sound like a joke to people who never held up their hand and vowed protect and defend. People give their fucking lives to stop threats that you'll never know about. Question their methods all you want, they aren't going to listen.
Also: Save the slippery slope nonsense. There is a 0% chance of the US government becoming an oppressive regime, surveillance or not. Those things just don't happen in times of peace and prosperity. No country has ever gone from being an advanced democracy to being a tyrannical regime. Obama can't even pass a law without 37 votes to repeal.
> People in the world today live in fear of physical harm from their own government. They aren't worried about phone call meta data or blanket call logging. They're worried about being taken by force with no trial, no ACLU or EFF to help them. Just gone.
Can anyone imagine that happening here, in the country where flag burning is constitutionally protected?
Well, that feels sort of disingenuous. From the POV of a scheming politician in power, harmless gestures would certainly seem much less important than agents of your potential downfall communicating in ways that you can't penetrate. In most cases, those loudmouths are the devils you know.
I think a lot of this is ignorance about how modern counter terrorism works. The most effective tool we have is social network analysis. Find a terrorist and see who calls them, then see who calls those people and out and out. Look at the vertices and edges and dependencies networks and we can learn a lot about complex organizations without risking any lives.
I believe that's exactly happened half a year before 9/11. Then, someone thought, "what an interesting scenario, let's file it into our record system".
If you want to know why government agency's are engaging in this wildly unpopular behavior, here's the answer: On 9/11 a lot of people swore to god that it would never happen again.
OK, I'll bite: Didn't lousy healthcare kill more people in the US in the last decade (certainly, possibly even in a year) than 9/11 ever did? Do people swear to god that this must never happen again? I don't think so. It's the salami slicing effect, only with people. As long as it's not visible, nobody cares (or extremely few are actually bothered by it to any extent).
Didn't lousy healthcare kill more people in the US in the last decade (certainly, possibly even in a year) than 9/11 ever did? Do people swear to god that this must never happen again?
We're getting very far off-topic, but don't you remember the huge political battle over Obamacare?
Don't be obtuse. States wage regular campaigns to promote road safety and punish careless driving, within the limits of the resources available to them - besides which, traffic accidents are distributed among a large population of road users, rather than orchestrated through a chain of command.
> Do they spend billions of dollars, spy on American citizens, molest them before getting in their cars, and erode other rights?
Moreover, this is completely wrong reaction to the terrorism threat. The right reaction is to ignore it completely. Terrorism is not about blowing stuff up, it's about scaring people into changing their society and politics. By overreacting like this, America (and others) pretty much did exactly what the attacks were supposed to achieve.
By that logic, disbanding the police and court systems should bring crime to a swift and sudden end, because everyone knows that there was no crime before the creation of institutional policing.
> Terrorism is not about blowing stuff up, it's about scaring people into changing their society and politics.
Organized terrorism has a particular goal in mind, and killing people is only a particular way to achieve it. If you won't let acts of terror influence your policy, they will have to chose another way to pursue their goals.
It's a grown-up, serious version of school bullies problem; the best way to get rid of them is to either ignore them 'till they get bored, or hit them by surprise in hope they'll be so shocked to never think of attacking you again. What you don't want to do is to walk around scared and yield all the time, as this only invites more attacks.
You're mistaken. The victims of terrorism are not going to be ignored by their own government, nor should they. Further, countries that have adopted the approach you mention, such as the UK, eventually ended up negotiating with their antagonists as part of a managed settlement. While I certainly do not think there is much value in running about with one's hair on fire (so to speak) the notion that any country could or would ignore an event like 9-11 as you suggest is just laughably unrealistic. It seems not to have occurred o you that the Us had repeatedly been the target of lower level terrorism from the same source over the previous decade and made minimal responses to it, yet Al Qaeda actually escalated the intensity of its attacks instead. According to you, they should have given up in frustration and chosen another way to pursue their goals, so I'd say your theory doesn't match up very well with events in the real world.
> You're mistaken. The victims of terrorism are not going to be ignored by their own government, nor should they.
No one said ignore the victims. The point is don't make everyone a victim by a cure worse than the attacks. 9-11 killed a few thousand. We've lost thousands by entering Iraq and Afghanistan.
We've spent a trillion dollars that if spent on heart disease treatment and research, or cancer research, or even just reducing the number of automobile related fatalities, would have saved more lives each year than we lost in 9-11.
> so I'd say your theory doesn't match up very well with events in the real world.
How can you say it doesn't match up? The terrorists changed US politics. They've made our country less free and they've drained us of a TRILLION dollars (1,000 Billion). Our country is turning into a hollywood caricature of the U.S.S.R circa 1985 -- secret police spying on citizens. These are self-inflicted wounds. We have shown there are huge rewards for terrorist action.
Lots of people would say yes to that question. Add up the cost of traffic enforcement and rule promulgation; consider the role of red light cameras, radar guns, in-car breathalysers, and various other tools, and the economic imposition of both fines and things like license suspensions and mandatory declarations. I think the majority of traffic laws are pretty reasonable, but they do impose a significant and measurable burden on auto users at both the individual and collective level. Why? Because the potential dangers of driving heavy vehicles at high speed are significant enough that a majority of people demand regulation.
It's an uncomfortable but unavoidable fact that most people expect the government to protect them from things like terrorist attacks too, which is why government oaths office include a clause about protecting the United States from enemies 'both foreign and domestic.'
Wait a second. You see no distinction between a death from a random vehicle accident and a death at the hands of an organization that is trying to kill as many citizens as possible?
Now who is missing the point. If we completely ignored 9-11 and spent all of that money on traffic fatality prevention, we'd have saved thousands and thousands of more lives without molesting everyone that gets onto a plane.
Deaths are deaths. And if the former kills thousand of times more people than the latter, I'd say the former is much worse. And the response to the terrorism threat so far was hugely irrational and mostly achieved exactly what they planned to.
Remember, for terrorists bombing and killing are only means to the end. The goal is political/social change; deaths are only collateral damage.
Basically, in this case one should shut up and multiply [0]. And [1], since we like Schneier around here.
but don't you remember the huge political battle over Obamacare?
Well, I do, but only very vaguely; after all, it took place thousands of kilometers from where I happen to live and it's not like we don't have enough of our local issues to take care of.
Do you just ignore what the US government does to citizens in other countries? Or do they somehow not count?
Because America kills people without trial, abducts suspects and tortures them, very often they turn out to be innocents. To say nothing of the support, if not wholesale installment, of the very kind of regimes that you guarantee me the US will never become.
Comments like yours seem to say that all of this doesn't matter, because we are not doing it to Americans! (At least not white ones and only if they happen to be outside the country.)
I appreciate your perspective, and I have not downvoted you. I disagree with some of the premises you've laid out and strongly agree with your main argument.
Your main argument is that Americans should not be upset about this because it's not actually oppressive, and the United States will not become oppressive.
I think this is wrong in two ways.
1. We should hold our government to a much higher standard than "oppressive." We should not even let them come close to it. I realize this is an axiom; why should we do that? Reasons like "because of the Constitution," "to protect people," "to keep the United States a place of refuge for oppressed people," are all good reasons, but I think the best is simply that it is evil to allow a good thing to be compromised or abrogated, so it is good to resist a compromising or abrogating force. I cannot justify this by logic (why anyone should be good or want good) but I cannot be persuaded otherwise, and thankfully, many other people are the same way.
2. Our government is already oppressive to certain people, and there is a chance that the list of people it oppresses will grow. Most of them are foreign but a few are already domestic. The systems being built today are designed to increase our capacity to treat people this way, so it is reasonable to expect more people will be treated poorly. Additionally, history provides ample examples of nearly utopic nations, including republics, that did go on to commit atrocities and reduce the quality of the lives of their own people. It is not a slippery slope to want to take precautions to avoid the same. But again, this is all secondary to point #1 above.
Isn't it amazing that we didn't used to have a thousand terrorist attacks every day before the internet existed and the government could read every conversation we have? Thank G_d for the surveillance apparatus that the government has available to it now. Civilization wouldn't be possible otherwise.
>in the country where flag burning is constitutionally protected?
Which means precisely nothing. Laws are just an illusion of order that only exists if the enforcers make it so. Photographing cops is also protected, yet if you do it you might end up in the hospital with your camera broken, charged with assaulting a police officer.
People in the US mostly aren't afraid of their government. Maybe they never will be. But the US government does unspeakable things inside and outside the borders of the US. The majority aren't afraid because they aren't yet effected. Maybe the majority will never be effected or never know it.
One thing I would ask you; we know the government gets support from the press in the form of omissions. Is it completely impossible that someone inside the US has been "disappeared" without us knowing? How would we know if it wasn't reported? A lone family crying about a missing loved one can be ignored pretty easily if the media doesn't blow it up for all to see.
> There is a 0% chance of the US government becoming an oppressive regime, surveillance or not. Those things just don't happen in times of peace and prosperity. No country has ever gone from being an advanced democracy to being a tyrannical regime.
Weimar Germany was not prosperous or what I would call an advanced democracy. It had five good years, but the 5 years on either side were a mess. I wouldn't say that can't happen here, but it's not a good comparison at all. The US is remarkably stable in historical terms,even when you include the Civil War.
>> The US is remarkably stable in historical terms,even when you include the Civil War.
Historical terms? 237 yrs is a relative piss in the bucket as far as historical terms are concerned. Talk to me once they get 800 yrs of stability under their belt.
As others have noted: there are very few countries in the world which have been established as long as the US, with the same governmental structures and (substantially) similar borders.
There are cultures which are older, but many of these have existed under multiple different governments. Nations such as Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Czecheslovakia (since rendered into the states of Slovakia and the Czech Republic), much of the Balkans and Baltic countries, etc., simply didn't exist as national entities at the beginning of the 19th Century. Neither did the states of the Middle East (Ottoman Empire), Africa (colonies, prior to which: native tribal regions not structured as we'd consider modern nations), the Americas, etc.
Yes, you'll find England, Spain, and France in much their modern form dating to ~ 1000 - 1400 AD, but only just.
There are a few modern countries which have occupied much the same area (though with different governmental forms) more or less continuously: Persia/Iran, Vietnam, Japan, and China, with as I recall Vietnam being the oldest as I recall.
But no, "nations" as such really aren't all that permanent.
Most countries have had significant changes in their constitutional configuration over a much shorter timescale than the US, especially when you factor in scale. Your counter-argument is so weak as to constitute an endorsement; the existence of other, even more stable countries does not invalidate my point.
Peaceful Occupy protesters - subjected to beatings and pepper-spraying at point blank range [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UC_Davis_pepper-spray_incident]. (Note that no one was actually run over by a tank in China; OTOH, the US has the legacy of the Kent State Massacre [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings]. ETA: there have been worse massacres of protesters elsewhere, but the point is that the US is not exempt from this.)
North-west anarchists - accused of no wrongdoing but refused to testify for a grand jury. Held in contempt of court and sent directly to jail. Spent 5 months in jail, much of it in solitary confinement during which they were permitted no visitors and had only one 15 minute phone call a month and limited access to reading and writing materials. According to the judge who both sent them there and then released them, "their physical health has deteriorated sharply and their mental health has also suffered from the effects of solitary confinement." [https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4hDq2p2PpMKRDRDQzViLWJTUmc/...]
None of these people are even suspected terrorists. What they share in common is that they did things the government didn't like.
As for suspected terrorists, they are not guaranteed due process. See Jose Padilla [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Padilla_%28prisoner%...]: U.S. citizen, held from 2002 to 2006 as an "enemy combatant" and denied due process. Finally transferred to civilian court and convicted anyways, showing that criminal defendants do not get off on "technicalities" as you claim. Look up "harmless error analysis" if you want to learn the truth about "technicalities."
The United States is not exceptional, and we need to stop pretending that it is.
> Note that no one was actually run over by a tank in China; OTOH, the US has the legacy of the Kent State Massacre
No protestor was run over by a tank at Kent State, either; OTOH, China has the legacy of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, in which at least (even by the official government counts) 50 times as many civilians were killed as at Kent State.
I do agree with most of your points, but I wouldn't say that Bradley Manning was tortured. Suicide watch in prison is meant to keep the person alive, not to be nice. He was in solitary confinement for his own protection, (general population would have killed him, which would have been a far, far worse public relations fiasco) and then threatened to kill himself.
I would say that the restrictions placed on him were overly harsh, but people have tried to hang themselves with their clothes and blankets before.
Just to give another perspective - say you're in charge of the prison that Bradley Manning is held at. He's in a very fragile state of mind and is facing life without parole. If he gets treated too poorly, then it's your ass. But if you give him too much freedom, then he could use that opportunity to kill himself.
That being said, the US is not exceptional about this. But I'd much rather be in the US than many other countries if I were charged with terrorism.
I understand the need to protect prisoners, but I find the oft-repeated suggestion that people need to be placed in solitary confinement for their "own protection" rather perverse. Often times, solitary confinement, and suicide watch in particular, is so harsh and causes so much physical and emotional damage that it's only "protection" in the very narrow sense that the prisoner doesn't die. (Though, in California, suicide watch has been found to actually drive people to commit suicide as soon as they get out[1].)
Also, I believe we should make these assessments based on what's the right thing to do, rather than on what minimizes public relations fiascoes or best covers the asses of prison officials.
The guy standing before of a column of tanks in the famous photo, he got run over by a different tank not long after. Or so I read the other day on the anniversary of the massacre.
To compare what the US government is doing to a truly oppressive regime is insulting. People in the world today live in fear of physical harm from their own government. They aren't worried about phone call meta data or blanket call logging. They're worried about being taken by force with no trial, no ACLU or EFF to help them. Just gone.
Ai Weiwei served months in jail for art projects that were critical of the government. Can anyone imagine that happening here, in the country where flag burning is constitutionally protected? There are dozens of countries in the world today that have a near 100% conviction rate for political dissidents. Here in America confessed terrorists have the right to an attorney and god help the prosecution if there was any missed technicality during the arrest.
Don't dare be a girl trying to go to school in many middle eastern countries. Might get run over by a tank if you openly oppose the chinese government. Offend the king of saud with your actions and you'll be literally stoned to death in the street. And we're worried about phone call meta data?
I think a lot of this is ignorance about how modern counter terrorism works. The most effective tool we have is social network analysis. Find a terrorist and see who calls them, then see who calls those people and out and out. Look at the vertices and edges and dependency networks and we can learn a lot about complex organizations without risking any lives. It's understood that this is offensive to many people's privacy beliefs, but it's the best tool we have.
If you want to know why government agency's are engaging in this wildly unpopular behavior, here's the answer: On 9/11 a lot of people swore to god that it would never happen again. That might sound like a joke to people who never held up their hand and vowed protect and defend. People give their fucking lives to stop threats that you'll never know about. Question their methods all you want, they aren't going to listen.
Also: Save the slippery slope nonsense. There is a 0% chance of the US government becoming an oppressive regime, surveillance or not. Those things just don't happen in times of peace and prosperity. No country has ever gone from being an advanced democracy to being a tyrannical regime. Obama can't even pass a law without 37 votes to repeal.