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I'm actually surprised, I would have figured that by this point, there would have been a revolution, or at least mutterings. The federal government is actually

• joshlegs 12y ago
  I don't think electing any one person is going to have an effect. The problem is that at this point, it's systemic corruption at nearly all levels of government.
• hvs 12y ago
  History shows through numerous examples that people are willing to put up with significantly more egregious activity from their governments before they do anything about it. And in many cases, they still never do.
  • r00fus 12y ago
    Do you not think this fear/caution is warranted based on history?
• pjc50 12y ago
  The American people is the enemy of the American people. By that I mean there are plenty of people who are happy to support this kind of thing so long as they believe it's only being used against people unlike them in skin color, socioeconomic background, religious or political beliefs. America is not strong on solidarity. On the other hand, the ship is turning, slowly. The war on drugs is being de-escalated, which may provide an opportunity to de-escalate the relationship between the public and the police.
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  • dmix 12y ago
    The war on drugs is de-escalating at the civil and state level but not the federal level. The federal gov is the worrying one. They're the only ones operating with as much secrecy as possible, over-extending executive power, and the biggest reason local police are becoming militarized (via the federal program delivering them military equipment).
    • themartorana 12y ago
      Right, and the militarization of local police forces by the federal government puts those forces under federal control - not explicitly or illegally, but as in this case, they are subservient to - and answer to - the federal government rather than the local population they are meant to protect.
    • jpgvm 12y ago
      The fact they are rolling out what are effectively heavily armoured APCs to local police really worries me. What possible use could local police have for such heavily armoured vehicles that wouldn't better be handled by SWAT or some other more specialised force? I don't relish the idea of relatively untrained police officers operating said vehicles in riots etc..
  • samspot 12y ago
    I'm going to apologize in advance for reading your post as "people who don't feel strongly against surveillance are racist bigots". I disagree. Most of us have not been affected by this personally. We are wrapped up in our own lives, and have disengaged from news sources we don't trust, or are completely beholden to our favorite news source. To change our thoughts, we need a high profile story of an outrageous use of this technology.
    • meddlepal 12y ago
      I think you hit on the real problem. Most American's do not really care about other American's problems unless they're very closely related or the other problems are impacting them in some negative way. I do not see a good way to fix that since that attitude seems to directly spawn from our highly-individualistic vision of society.
• x86_64Ubuntu 12y ago
  Revolution? You don't really understand revolution if you think the Stingray is going to be the cause of it. Look at what the East German Stasi was able to get away with, and there wasn't a world shattering revolution there. I wish people would leave the drama to the Young and the Restless and stop implying that the misdeeds of the NSA and other law enforcement in their current state will lead to revolution. You still have clothes, you still have food, the power structure at hand is stable, the key pieces of uncertainty that can foment a revolution are missing. More importantly, you can talk about revolution on a public forum without getting your door reduced to splinters.r
  • HelloMcFly 12y ago
    The casualness with which people seem to expect revolution shows a profound lack of historical appreciation for past revolutions. Life isn't a utopia, but that's not the revolution threshold.
    • mikeash 12y ago
      We value freedom, and therefore we think that people rebel when their freedom is sufficiently curtailed. Most people value wealth and security, and they only rebel when those are threatened. And not just a little bit: they have to be threatened to the extent that it looks like a worthwhile tradeoff to risk pain, privation, and death just to improve your lot. They really couldn't care less about freedom as long as their lack of freedom doesn't impact their wealth and security too much.
  • aet 12y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law
    • CaptainZapp 12y ago
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law What has that to do with his comment? For starters he was referring to the East German Stasi. Nothing to do with Nazis, Hitler, or the third Reich. In addition: Many people think that whenever Nazi (or equivalent) is mentioned you lose according to Godwin's Law. This is not so, however, when the reference is actually related to the discussion. For example: You may bring up Nazis in a discussion about totalitarian regime, or Fascism, without falling into Godwin's Law trap. And to conclude: In a discussion about a device, which enables snooping on a large scale a referenced to the GDR's stasi is certainly not out of line.
• mpyne 12y ago
  I'm more surprised at a couple of things: a) The stated justification for why it must be secret from defense attorneys. This isn't "sources and methods" of intelligence, this is tapping cell phones, hardly something no one thought the cops can do. And more to the point, what are crooks going to do, switch to landlines? b) The Federal LE agency involved in grabbing the records set aside for ACLU. The U.S. Marshals are, if I understand right, the law enforcement arm of the Federal courts themselves, so were they enforcing a Federal magistrate's order when they seized the records? c) The reasoning they use to say the search is reasonable; I know the law and technology have not mixed well with digital comms, but it would seem to me that if you have to MITM or otherwise actively communicate with and interfere in the operation of a person's cell phone, that you've performed a search, even if you only end up grabbing metadata. And the Smith v. Maryland exception used for NSA wouldn't seem to apply here either, as LE is going out to grab the same metadata themselves instead of obtaining a private entity's similar records.
• CalRobert 12y ago
  In fairness, if you're the type who doesn't like this sort of thing but doesn't really feel like going to jail, emigration is the more appealing option while it remains available.
• logfromblammo 12y ago
  There are mutterings. And they are coming from multiple vectors. Perhaps you should have your political hearing tested? If you have ever tried to buy ammunition for popular cartridge sizes, you could just do the math. Americans have been predicting and preparing for civil disturbances for decades. For a long time, you had to turn over rocks and poke at the mud underneath to find the people doing it, but now you're likely to have met at least one personally. They will not tell you they are doing it. Firstly, they don't want to be perceived as a kooky crackpot. Secondly, they don't want you showing up to mooch when things go bad. Thirdly, they don't want you to be the one to rat them out to whomever they believe to be their adversary. It's a lot like figuring out which of your acquaintances is (or are) the closeted homosexual(s). Ironically, a lot of the increasingly paranoid and increasingly isolationist doomsayers are voting to elect the very people that will bring on the crisis that they fear. And on the other side of the spectrum, you have people leveraging the new ubiquity of videocameras to reflect even more sunlight into the dark corners of government. They post videos of government employees behaving badly or unlawfully, and file public records requests and lawsuits at every opportunity. The left-libertarians and the right-libertarians are natural allies against a centrist-authoritarian government, but I wish you good luck getting them to even give each other a polite hello. And as an American familiar with Churchill quotes, I remain hopeful that we are finally running out of wrong things to try.
  • hga 12y ago
    "Perhaps you should have your political hearing tested?" Or look outside of whatever cultural bubble he's in? I knew I'd only have to wait a few hours to come across something like "mutterings". While this is about the aftermath of the ever more likely coming collapse, it's akin: http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/06/22/learning-to-love-cloward-piven/?singlepage=true http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/06/22/learning-to-love-clowar... "Yet increasingly, I have to wonder how much of a win Cloward-Piven would be for them. As things stand, those that have helped guide the decline such as Obama, Eric Holder, Harry Reid, and their accomplices such as the disgusting Lois Lerner, will never see the inside of a courtroom. Once a true collapse hits, the color of legal legitimacy that both gives them authority and makes them for the moment untouchable is washed away. With the old order’s restraints gone, whose to say those that midwifed the collapse shouldn’t swing listlessly against the backdrop of a crow-filled sky?" There's a lot more where that comes from, from people who e.g. know Obama launched his political career in the home of a domestic terrorist who estimated that, after his '60s era revolution succeeded, a full 1/10 of the population would be so resistant to reeducation that they'd have to be killed outright. 25 million then, obviously quite a few more now. And I'd guess most of the US residents reading this should really pay attention to the following, especially per the misattributed to Trotsky quote, "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested to you" One of the things that's on the table if the US devolves into a second civil war is the relatively simple expedient of killing Blue cities: http://www.bob-owens.com/2013/01/shock-the-system/ http://www.bob-owens.com/2013/01/shock-the-system/ Or as Dean Ing put it in his 1981 novel Systemic Shock (http://www.amazon.com/Systemic-Shock-Dean-Ing/dp/0812500385 http://www.amazon.com/Systemic-Shock-Dean-Ing/dp/0812500385), about an attack on the US by forces significantly less capable than the Soviet Union: "The American public had by turns ignored and ridiculed its cassandras: city planners, ecologists, demographers, socialists, immigrants, who had all warned against our increasing tendency to crowd into our cities. Social stress, failure of essential services, and warfare were only a few of the spectres we had granted only a passing glance. We had always found some solution to our problems, though: often at the last moment. Firmly anchored in most Americans was the tacit certainty that, even to the problem of nuclear war against population centers, there must be a uniquely American solution; we would find it. The solution was sudden death. A hundred million Americans found it." Take out enough of the really big transformers, for which there aren't many spares on hand, deprive big Blue cities of power for a few weeks, and the situation will be ... significantly changed. I'm not looking forward to any of the above, if for no other reason than that I depend on civilization providing a reliable supply of pharmaceuticals to stay alive in the face of a chronic medical condition (and any time now that'll be true of my parents, right now it's looking like that's now going to be true for my father), but I do believe in keeping my eyes open.
• Shivetya 12y ago
  The sad part is that they not just doing it in this case but also in the IRS case. Why they are not being called on it for both by the same groups is not reassuring when it comes to fixing this behemoth
• PhasmaFelis 12y ago
  Revolution sounds like a magical cure-all for bad government when you're chatting around your buddy's dining table, but in practice it tends to be excruciatingly horrible. Lots and lots of innocent people get killed or brutalized (by both sides--revolutionaries aren't known to make fine distinctions between murderous jackbooted thugs vs. guys who think maybe the old regime was okay sometimes); lots more suffer from the loss of utilities, emergency services, and general civil order; and even if the rebels win, it's basically a coinflip whether the new government is actually any better than the old one. The Revolution hasn't happened yet because the closer one gets to putting it into practice, the more apparent all of this becomes. You don't get a revolution when things are bad. You get a revolution when things are so inhumanly awful that mass death and chaos starts to sound like a step up.