I think the bottom line is that the American people do not really mind the NSA doing this. I suspect this is because most people do not realize just how powerful and privacy-invading metadata surveillance is, or how the dataset does not need to be added to indefinitely to have tremendous value to law enforcement (for appropriate and inappropriate uses) once it exists at sufficient scale.
I think the people that do realize, short of armed rebellion, can do very little. If the people who control 60% of the nations wealth want to do this, all the complaining in the world isn't going to do anything.
The nation needs a “tax sit-in” - everyone ridicules this, but wtf do people think the boston tea party was about.
If you want governments to listen without armed rebellion, the only thing one can do is refuse taxes.
They know that this is the inly othe tool you have - and thats why taxes are woven into the fabric of the economy such that its automatically taken without you having any control over them.
Its also why you can never truly own land. Dont pay taxes on land, and they will take it.
You can only pay for the privilege to rent land. Forever.
"Government: If you refuse to pay unjust taxes, your property will be confiscated. If you attempt to defend your property, you will be arrested. If you resist arrest, you will be clubbed. If you defend yourself against clubbing, you will be shot dead. These procedures are known as the Rule of Law."
The problem is w2 employees (i.e. most of the workforce) get their taxes taken out of their paychecks automatically. It would be nearly impossible to withhold those taxes from the government.
Interestingly, the more independent contractors in a population, the easier it would be to stage a tax sit-in.
> The problem is w2 employees (i.e. most of the workforce) get their taxes taken out of their paychecks automatically
That's not a requirement, though. You can opt to have no taxes withheld and just pay what you owe in April. Of course, if you then don't pay your taxes, the IRS will find you.
> Its also why you can never truly own land. Dont pay taxes on land, and they will take it.
> You can only pay for the privilege to rent land. Forever.
Yet, you benefit from the state recognizing your rights to exclusively use that land, and from foreign military invasion. Why should I subsidize the government protecting your assets?
If anything, land should be the primary source of taxable revenue. Mis-distribution of land (And the low cost of asserting ownership of it) is the cause of no end of social ills.
There are municipalities in the USA that do not extort property taxes -- I've heard of one in Colorado, one in Arizona, a few in Texas, and some in Alaska.
Since a common justification is to finance public schools, I suppose that complete privatization of education would be a necessary step in order to vastly reduce or generally abolish property taxes.
Trump just announced today to the NRA that he just gave a shit-ton of military weaponry to the police “you cant buy this stuff” he said.
Corporations pay no taxes
Flint has no water
This country is a joke.
Wait until big agra (monsanto) and inefficient governments take over legal marijuana.
Legal marijuana is a scam from a tax perspective.
Look at the lotto - that was supposed to pay for schools.
Look at “paid cable television” - that was supposed to eliminate commercials for a paid service.
Have you timed how many minutes a commercial break is on CNN?
Its all a joke.
EDIT:
And the thing that pisses me off, is they want to push all the costs down to the consumers. Are ANY of the water bottle companies held accountable for the mass plastic pollution in every thread of our environment? Obviously plastic isnt going anywhere - but the oil companies and chemical companies that produce all these materials and products pay nothing.
Look at this douchebag in the EPA right now. Are you following any of his antics? He had his lackeys being pay $40,000 PER MONTH just by Morrocco alone for lobbying access.
He had his "security" guy spending $100,000 on first class flights. He stole $65,000 from his campaign fund saying that he was reimbursing himself.
And then you have morons apologizing for them and defending these clowns.
My sales taxes have doubled since my childhood. I am back in the same jurisdiction and they have gone from 4% with no local component to 7% state, 1% local. Nearly a tenth of everything I spend goes to taxes, and that's on top of federal income tax, social security tax, federal unemployment tax, state unemployment tax, state income tax, county income tax, property tax, fuel tax, excise tax, cable and internet tax, phone tax, restaurant tax, and probably a dozen others.
Other localities in other states are worse than that.
"In its annual report filed to the SEC in February 2018, Amazon estimated that not only would the company not be paying anything in 2017 federal income taxes, but it would be getting a $137 million tax refund."
What he is saying, I think, is that because of Citizens United, money controls our politics at this point and it really doesn't really matter what Joe Smith thinks.
We can prove that wrong in November, of course.
EDIT: Its true that the democrats are just as bought, but I have faith that they would also appoint a supreme court that would rule the other way as well.
No. FISA and the two federal courts (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review) created under it in the 1970s do not make this surveillance possible, as it was possible before FISA; instead, they are part of the regime established to restrict it after a number of notorious abuses (the FISA restrictions have been weakened in the post-9/11 era, but are still more than existed prior to FISA.)
Money has controlled politics in the US since the very beginning and without exception. In fact, money controlled politics in the distant US past to a far greater degree than it does today. In Rockefeller's time or before, you could do almost anything when it came to buying political favor, there were few limits on buying politicians.
The Chinese foreign funding scandals that followed the Clintons in both Bill and Hillary's campaigns - what was China buying? That was part of the deal that saw Bill spend vast amounts of time & effort lobbying to get China into the WTO during his Presidency, even going aggressively against his own party and voter interests.
"May 24, 2000, Bill Clinton clinched what many believed would be the last great legislative victory of his presidency. That afternoon, the House of Representatives voted to award China permanent normal trade relations, effectively backing Beijing’s long-in-the-making bid to join the World Trade Organization. The historic deal had been Clinton’s top priority in the waning days of his last term—a move he hoped would improve relations with the world’s most populous nation, while cementing his own legacy of using free trade to advance America’s foreign policy interests. It had been opposed by labor unions wary of competition from poorly paid foreign workers and championed by corporations salivating over 1.3 billion potential Chinese customers (the business lobby had spent millions on TV ads supporting the pact). In the end, after much wrangling, 73 Democrats joined 164 Republicans to pass the agreement, which was expected to glide through the Senate."
You've missed the point entirely, on purpose I imagine. The impact of Citizens United is primarily with regard to corporate lobbying, not campaign contributions. Super PACs, the biggest travesty to come out of Citizens United, explicitly CANNOT contribute to election campaigns or specific parties.
This is another comment that crossed into incivility. If you want to keep posting to HN, we need you to follow the rules at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all.
Citizens United is especially relevant to presidential elections -- it arose directly out of the 2004 and 2008 campaigns.
"The conservative non-profit organization Citizens United wanted to air a film critical of Hillary Clinton and to advertise the film during television broadcasts, which was a violation of the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, commonly known as the McCain–Feingold Act..." [1]
In other words, you are wrong about Citizens United, and unpleasant about it.
Mostly because the NSA will enforce the status quo which has made them powerful and the oligarchs rich (and powerful). It's a self-feeding mechanism. Read more about this phenomenon–the beige dictatorship– here: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/02/politica...
It's more complicated than that. You can bet many wealthy people DO care about these things (in fact, I know some who do); however, if they stand up against them then they riak preferential targetting far more than the average citizen precisely because they have influence and need to be shut down.
Part of the problem is that privacy invasion is only visible when it results in arrests, leaking, or some other use of the power to effect change. Most people will never experience someone obviously exploiting their trust here.
Of course, the complacency of us individuals reduces the security and privacy of us all. Realistically the NSA hasn’t been successful in reducing terrorist threats; in fact, the correlation is negative.
Terrorism is the justification for recent astronomical military/defense budgets. It is a convenient basis for infinite war and surveillance; it is conveniently poorly defined. At face value, the people generating the most domestic terror appear to be the politicians and internet trolls....
Even if you accept and desire the NSA for the purposes of sigint, it makes no sense to pretend they can combat terrorism any better than any human can. They should stick to nation states. That we can’t easily discern whether or not they are spying on US citizens should be a red flag, even to lovers of spy games.
Thanks for that reputable source -- but I'm still missing your implication. Do you mean to say that the NSA is primarily concerned with foreign intelligence rather than combating domestic terrorism? Then why so much domestic spying, the entire point of this conversation thread?
Furthermore, are you trying to tell me you think they've done a good job in their counterintelligence work? Honestly, given what we have observed in the Middle East for decades and what happened in 2016?
>Then why so much domestic spying, the entire point of this conversation thread?
Oh yeah, that makes sense. Let's only worry about what other nations are doing, until their agents and activities enter our country. Then we might as well stop bothering. Makes sense.
<Furthermore, are you trying to tell me you think they've done a good job in their counterintelligence work? Honestly, given what we have observed in the Middle East for decades and what happened in 2016?
What are you referring to? Do you have a security clearance? Do you think that other nations aren't constantly attacking our electronic infrastructure and security? What in the world makes you think that you would be aware of any success whatsoever of intelligence gathering in the Middle East? What makes you think that the situation couldn't have gotten much worse that it did?
> What in the world makes you think that you would be aware of any success whatsoever of intelligence gathering in the Middle East? What makes you think that the situation couldn't have gotten much worse that it did?
To the extent that the expanded sigint is used for actual defense, it's trivial to expect more data to have helped (at least marginally) with the national defense aims of the agency. This is not controversial and somewhat trivial to point out.
The issue is that the NSA's behavior violated the 4th amendment rights of millions of people. You suggest that the ends justify the means. I respect that opinion and may even agree with it, but that doesn't matter.
What matters is that the law was broken in the creation of the domestic surveillance program and nobody is currently serving time in prison for breaking it.
The bill of rights exists because of very hard earned lessons about the appropriate relationship between the people and the government. We let a handful of officials ignore the 4th amendment and steal billions of dollars in taxpayer dollars to build the infrastructure to do so.
This is not just a major violation of rights but a major financial crime. The program should be cancelled, the officials responsible jailed, and the equipment auctioned off so that the proceeds can be returned to taxpayers.
Many of our rights as citizens give criminals and innocent people various protections against law enforcement. This is not a design flaw.
> Then why so much domestic spying, the entire point of this conversation thread?
The estimates in this thread are that they received .3% or less of all call metadata in the US, which is probably a generous overestimate since the article says the full call records are "billions ... per day." Of that, they query less. I don't know how this can be considered "so much" domestic surveillance.
Major difference though is that we as individuals gave Facebook permission, and most of us would still knowingly make a "limited tracking in exchange for tangible personal utility" trade.
We as individuals never gave the NSA permission to track us, and most of us would never knowingly make the "unlimited tracking in exchange for nebulous collective utility" trade.
