US Government is hiding a secret court ruling about how it spies on Americans
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Spying on American citizens is a bipartisan point of agreement.
I don't see how releasing an interpretation of a law could ever compromise law enforcement. Or actually I know how, it's because it would prove the way they do mass surveillance is illegal.
The problem is modern America doesn't see it that way. Any time the government does something evil they just say it's for "national security" and no one questions them. It's like a Winter Soldier password that makes courts go blank and say yes to anything.
To me the defining moment of the Press abdicating their job was when the NYTs reported the second gulf war. This was the end of me reading it. The Sunday times was staple reading growing up.
https://newrepublic.com/article/146481/new-york-times-bury-s...
https://fair.org/home/20-years-later-nyt-still-cant-face-its...
Sure, but the obvious pro-government response is “revealing that the government is doing bad things reflects badly on the government and damages its reputation at home and abroad.”
Which is true, of course!
This is -incidentally- how the ancient English "state secrets privilege" got introduced into US law.
In the 1940's, godawful maintenance resulted in the crash of a bomber over US soil and the death of all three of the civilians on board the plane. The widows of the dead civilians sued the government and demanded the accident report. The government refused to provide the report, claiming the privilege because "national security", and courts all the way up to the Supreme Court agreed.
In the early 2000s, the accident report was declassified. Inspection revealed that the only real reason to refuse to release it was to both prevent government embarrassment and to avoid having to pay out -IIRC- nearly a quarter million in 1940's USD to the widows.
Given its enormous potential for unchecked abuse, along with the fact that the first ever invocation of it was abusive, courts should refuse to permit its use.
WRT to this instance - I would likely argue that 50 years should have been more than enough time keeping the embargo
Or we have just independently rediscovered why most regimes seek the justification of some external threats to strengthen their power over their population, 1984 style.
Nah. A single fucked-up maintenance shop is a single fucked-up maintenance shop. You can gut-check this by noticing that bombers weren't routinely falling out of the sky.
FedGov simply didn't want to be deeply embarrassed and wanted to try to wiggle out of paying a quarter million 1940s USD to the widows. Because they were unwilling to admit to their negligence and face the consequences, they did deep and lasting damage to the US justice system by introducing a mechanism that lets FedGov conceal nearly any evidence for any reason by uttering the words "state secrets privilege".
So how did such a law ever survive scrutiny?
It seems like a blanket ban on exposure of nearly all possible wrongdoing.
And a proportional increase in power goes with that ban on exposing wrongdoing. Which is absolutely the goal of secrecy in government.
I think that’s A reason to keep information secret. The other is if it would reveal sensitive sources and methods (e.g., capabilities that it known, would impact the ability to use those methods).
Not saying the legal interpretation falls under that, but just mentioning it.
Imagine, for example, a case is about someone disclosing the location of nuclear arms to their spouse. Maybe even accidentally. If they are brought up on charges about this, national security doesn't want the fact that a case is about nuclear weapons to be public information. They further don't want it disclosed who was told about them (as the spouse wouldn't be subject to charges). That's basically where a secret interpretation and ruling would ultimately enter. The courts can't disclose what the ruling was nor what the case was even fully about.
They could even redact larger portions of the case and still release the interpretation in some form.
All it takes is 1 accidental redaction or someone who did something silly like using a black highlighter on a PDF and now where the nukes are stored is public information.
There's also simply information that can be gleaned just based on the location that the hearing is taking place. This came from x court in x district, well then it's likely a nuclear silo is roughly in that county or surrounding counties.
It's really hard if it is in your interest not to stop accidental information leaks, because it is easier to bulk classify everything and blame this difficulty. There is no incentive to stop accidental leaks if you can always hide everything.
The specific location of the court, and even identity if the judge, can be redacted. We don't have to use the case as precedent.
But the resulting material would be like, (XXXX meaning redactions)
XXXX was accused of XXXX
Tried before judge XXXX in XXXX District court
The evidence was XXXX XXXX XXXX
The witnesses were XXXX XXXX XXXX
They were found (not) guilty
If anything could be unredacted it could potentially (?) be the bare fact that it was about nuclear secrets but you can’t really reveal anything else without giving majorly risky facts to bad actors.
The redactions of every document could require many full-time very security-cleared clerks (or take years to do if understaffed) and is of the highest importance since a single failure to redact, or operational error, may reveal the whole secret thing. Mostly, all the things need redacting, so either whole documents, or everything but the prepositions and articles is redacted.
Since it sounds like the concern here is about the public’s interest in monitoring to make sure no abuses are taking place (which is a value I do share), what part of this aim would be served by a redacted report like this?
Its still pretty lame and shows vast incompetence on all levels. Maybe I am a bit naive but correct solution is to tackle underlying problems, not just give up because thats what you basically suggest.
Claude was able to work out who it was in less than 10min based on stringing together facts that remained and seemed irrelevant. Journalists uncovered the identity independently using different means. (The ability of Claude to do this was not revealed until the other journalists had gone public and confirmed the identity.)
The location of most US nuclear weapons are public. Moreover, if you suspect that the location of some you intend to be secret may have been compromised then the obvious sensible response is "move them" rather than "keep even the legal theory of the case a secret forever".
This is why the primary ones whose location is intended to be a secret are on submarines -- submarines are easy to move around.
2 parties bring up what they believe is the legal justification for their position in dispute and a judge rules on which is the correct position. If a party thinks the judge got the ruling wrong (interpreted the law wrong), they object and appeal.
Yet for some strange reason folks think secret agencies are bound by the same laws as regular police officers.
At least in nazi Germany, the state was explicitly designed like that. Most people should never come into contact with the prerogative state and spend their lives in the normative state, as capitalism doesn't work well in a prerogative state. You need to believe that punishment doesn't come arbitrarily in order to follow the rules.
But of course, things are very different in the prerogative state, where actions have unclear consequences.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dual_State
But I can't see a public benefit to keeping the principles such a court uses secret
It's not just "here's this law about spying in the abstract," which can be talked about in the open; it's "we're using the MIND READER 5000 under Title XVII powers delegated by the President to the Mind Reading Organization to conduct mind reading on persons X, Y, and Z." The legal briefings and rulings on the facts will by necessity reveal the nature of the technology or technique in question, and so, they are classified. If I recall correctly it was a big deal for the ACLU to get a lawyer a security clearance so they could interact with these courts, but I could be misremembering.
The first is that you assume whatever is being kept a secret is something that doesn't favor the government, and then the government loses the case by default. This is the more reasonable option, because it mitigates the perverse incentive for the government to declare something a secret whenever it makes them look bad. But it has the obvious problem that then the government would lose some cases it should have won if the information could be published.
The second is that you assume whatever is being kept a secret is something that favors the government, and then the government wins the case by default. But that doesn't solve the problem -- you then have members of the public losing cases they should have won if the information could be published. And doing this makes the perverse incentive worse.
So why do we accept the second one instead of the first one?
When Germany, which doesn't play by the same rules, got DiDW and then Boystown, that was quite revealing on how authorities can break Tor.
Imagine the public tried to do that. Sorry, IRS/DoJ, the defendant is refusing warrants and subpoenas because it's a secret and without that you can't prosecute them.
Check out Gilmore v Gonzales for an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilmore_v._Gonzales
While it does say:
> Gilmore also complained about being subject to "secret law", when the airlines and government refused to show the directive under which they were requesting ID.
nowhere does the article say the courts commented on the complaint, let alone ruled on it.
Nor does the article say anything about "Ignorance of the law is no defense when you are charged with violating a law". The reason given was instead:
> there was no constitutional violation because air passengers could still travel without identification if they instead underwent the more stringent "secondary screening" search.
I'm not saying your wrong, just that the article you offered as evidence doesn't go as far as your claims.
John’s appeal is online. Section [10] of the decision discussion describes being subject to a law he cannot have access to. The judge saw it but could not discuss it in court, with the plaintiff (John Gilmore) or even his lawyer. Also the orders (law) are agreed by the court to be arbitrary, changing day by day and being arbitrarily different between airports. But since the Airport personnel knew them tht was good enough for the court.
And though the discussion mentioned that he could take a bus or walk, the conclusion, [21], said that his rights were not violated at all, both the bus precedent and the legality of being subject to unknown law. The brief Wikipedia page mentions only the former, though the latter was the primary factor of the complaint.
Unless your position is that one of the legally legitimate principles of free business is whether to follow the law or not.
Not sure if airliners are regulated like that, but 'free business' is not anarchy by any means, unlike you suggest.
The chief justice also appoints the court FISA appeals go to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_Justice_of_the_United_St...
Usa has constitution and its government more or less side steps it in many things. Might as well have no constitution. Usa is a jungle for practical intends and purposes compared to europe or any functional democracy. This is the problem with allowing interpretation of law rather than taking law as it is written. Someone somewhere can interpret it in completely twisted way and throw away the spirit of the law.
In response, the lawyers provide you with advice about how they think the law applies to this situation, and what findings they think a court would make given the evidence etc available.
Information subject to attorney-client privilege (as this information would be) is exempt from release under FOIA anyway. Dropping a security classification on top adds protections against unauthorised release by insiders.
Sometimes there are good reasons for this, such as to protect particular technical capabilities that are easily circumvented if adversaries know that they exist, or to protect human sources who might end up dead if found out. Other times, there are no good reasons to do this but without knowing all the circumstances it’s impossible to tell either way.
The facts of the matter are probably much closer to what you’re saying, but some people have become so radicalized (including those who got that way due to Trump-era buffoonery) that they can’t accept even the possibility that most of the actors are operating to protect our collective legitimate best interests.
Most of the people in government and the military are not political appointees, are not political hacks, and are doing tough and sometimes high-risk jobs, from a motivation other than evil. On the other hand, many politicians are motivated mainly by political partisanship and will do anything to try to score political points, including trying to cause outrage about what’s being kept secret, even if it’s been explained to them why it must remain secret.
Something so heinous it would make who-shot-Kennedy a forgotten footnote? Everyone is going to cover that up.
Inequality, price and state of healthcare system, huge polluters getting away, it all checks out.
I don’t agree with this rationale. On the other hand there is a tension between operating effective counter intelligence operations against nation state actors operating against your interests within your borders and free and open society. I’m not sure where the line is but my perception is we’re way beyond it.
from a US perspective, isn't this diametrically opposed to the concept of "void for vagueness"? : the moment the interpretation of ostensibly non-vague law is under discussion by professionals is the moment said law is invalidated.
I get why that may reflexively seem right but such a blanket proscription would go off the rails and lead to unintended consequences you definitely don't want. It's simply not possible to write a law both specific enough yet broad enough to cover all cases. You or I can read a plainly worded law and think "There's no way this can be misconstrued, gamed or subverted" and, sadly, we'd be wrong.
> parliament should make any bug fixes rather than allowing courts or administration to interpret laws in any other way other than how its written down in the law.
It's certainly possible to theory-craft completely new and different governance, legal and justice systems from scratch which have different sets of constraints and trade-offs, but then it's a long conversation and unrelated to the existing U.S. system. If we limit ourselves to starting from what the existing U.S. system is and proposing modifications which are actually both constitutionally and logistically possible, then forcing all interpretation and clarification to be passed by congress would require monthly revisions, immediately breaking an already dysfunctional congressional system.
I think it's worth mentioning that in the U.S. system, judges interpreting application of laws passed by elected representatives is a feature not a bug. The U.S. system was designed to be adaptive and self-gating, so each of the three branches of the government have built-in checks and balances on the other two. Setting aside current politics, on a long time-horizon like the last ~50 years, I think the U.S. justice system, as imperfect as it is, is actually serving its designed purpose far better than the other two.
There is another system, civil law based systems where law is passed by parliament and doesn't depend on any court precedents or court interpretation.
Might as well have just courts and call it as adaptive system instead of acknowledging that is isn't a good enough system. Europe has done better in this regard. Checks and balances hardly works in usa. Plenty of news on subverting various constitutional guarantees is example that it failed to work.
Proper democracy needs properly functioning non-lazy legislature. Making vague laws and calling it a day and leaving it for judges and lawyers to interpret based on whichever way the wind is blowing isn't democracy.
Legislature can also work 40 hours a week. Things can be more functional rather than dysfunctional. Active democracy and direct democracy where people can veto laws if necessary, in case representatives collude to pass draconian laws, would be the best kind of democracy. Only that can prevent erosion of rights.
Laws aren't made by one person. When everyone votes on them, they agree on the language because of how they interpret the words on the paper. The meaning is what the words on the paper say, which is interpreted by different people to mean different things before they even become law.
I still can't understand how a government can work with some courts where everything is secret. That's something almost literally lifted out of The Process, but the Kafka book is an allegory for a kind of madness, not something that works.
You're not misunderstanding. It really is against everything most Americans think their government is allowed to do. To your question, the 'classified' part is what you think it is: secret. 'Interpretation' is the tricky part.
Unfortunately, laws and regulations aren't exactly clear and over time situations change so one important role of the court system is interpreting how, when and whether the words in a law apply in a specific context. Courts at different levels do this all the time as cases with unique situations arise. Sometimes it's as simple as deciding if a horse counts as a vehicle in a state law which says "no vehicles on this type of road." Assuming that ruling survives appeals without being overturned, the judge will have justified the basis and, hopefully, some clear reasoning for why a horse does or doesn't count as a vehicle. That judge's ruling then becomes part of the "precedent" (aka 'body of case law') attached to that law. In effect, such precedents become part of the law since they can clarify if and how the law applies in certain situations.
So whether some action is or isn't against a law can't solely be determined by just reading the law. You have to do some interpretation, which includes looking up any relevant precedents and weighing them. A single prior ruling from one local municipal court has low weight. The main job of the Supreme Court is resolving conflicting precedents set by lower courts, so a SCOTUS ruling has a lot of weight and multiple SCOTUS rulings over time, each successively refining and narrowing (or occasionally reversing) their prior interpretations, carries maximum weight. All of this happens in the open and, in the long run, I think SCOTUS manages to eventually get most things, if not perfect, pretty close to right.
Hence, the answer to "Is this legal" can be a bit tricky when the law is new or there aren't decades of court precedents. So lawyers have to do research and assess how a court would probably rule on a given situation. That's called "a formal legal opinion" and it's provided in writing, usually including research and justifications, like references to existing case law, as well as legal reasoning supporting the opinion. Anyone can hire a lawyer to research and assess if X action violates Y law (but if you get sued for relying on the lawyer's opinion, they won't be on the hook - you will). It's called an opinion because that's really all it is.
When a govt agency wants to know if they're allowed to do X under Y law, they ask the justice dept to assess and provide a formal opinion just like any company might ask their corporate counsel to. This is often routine but can be very consequential. Where this can go horribly wrong is when these govt lawyer opinions are classified top secret. For example, we all know torturing prisoners is against U.S. law, so in the 2000s the military and CIA asked the Bush Justice Dept to provide a secret legal opinion on whether certain 'enhanced interrogation' techniques met the legal definition of torture. And they got what they wanted, a written legal opinion that waterboarding isn't torture. The Obama Justice Dept issued a secret legal opinion that droning a teenaged American citizen in Somalia, who posed no exigent threat (but had the wrong Dad), did not meet the legal definition of murder. After it happened and was no longer secret, Senator Rand Paul was the only politician willing to stand on the floor of the senate and say killing a U.S. citizen without any legal due process was first degree murder authorized by a sitting U.S. President. While it's true his Dad was sort-of a terrorist (the real terrorists were happy to use him for propaganda but being an American, they never really trusted him). The dad was arguably an enemy combatant and maybe you could make a case he was an "exigent threat", but the kid wasn't and didn't. Reasonable people can differ on acceptable levels of 'collateral damage' (aka killing foreign innocents) but U.S. law is clear, non-combatant American citizens who aren't a clear and immediate threat are a hard, bright line. They get a judge and jury, not a drone.
Senator Ron Wyden is on the Senate intelligence committee, so he gets oversight on what intelligence agencies are doing and sees the secret legal opinions they're relying on. And he's saying the U.S. govt is relying on a secret legal opinion to do something in secret which is obviously, very, VERY wrong - but he's forbidden from telling us what it is because they made it top secret. For context, Ron Wyden has been a Senator and on the intelligence committee for a while and is pretty much a straight-shooter, not known for hyperbole or politically-motivated grandstanding. He'll call out his own party when he feels they're seriously wrong and he gets no benefit from making a big deal over this. His own party isn't supporting him and wishes he'd shut up about it. Yet for the last six months he's been signaling "DANGER, DANGER" in interviews, speeches and in writing over and over again - so I'm going to assume whatever it is is way beyond the Snowden revelations and probably in the neighborhood of the worst things we can possibly imagine.
The perverse thing is that the pretense for keeping it secret is to prevent 'foreign adversary governments' from knowing what it is, but it's clearly about domestic spying on U.S. citizens - and Russia and China probably already know exactly what it is (and are like, "Hmph amateurs, we've been doing that to our citizens years").
Civil law based systems are a more sane alternative to common law based system that relies on precedents. Law should be discussed in legislature and legislature must oversee and fix the law appropriately rather than make vague laws and leaving it to judges or others for interpretation. Due to not relying on precedents, the law is also easy to understand and apply and follow and enforce in civil law based systems. Cases also takes less time overall compared to common law based justice system.
Elected representatives are the authors or developers of law. Everyone else is users of law. Users cannot be allowed to change interpretation of law as anything other than how it is written.
Law made for horses and then vehicles got invented and law needs more clarity? Ask legislature to discuss and add new law for vehicles or modify existing law to also handle vehicles.
I think you're trying to hard to dismiss the justification here. There are certainly techniques for monitoring communications that use justifiably classified technologies that were probably developed to monitor communications of adversaries.
Imagine the use of which is helping keep American spies in Iran safe and the knowledge of the technique could help Iran identify those people. That's a perfectly reasonable classification of the technique.
What makes the interpretation of the law secret is that it mentions this hypothetical technology.
Imagine they have the technology to hear speech through walls passively using your WiFi signal. That technology is classified and they have the legal opinion that this doesn't violate the fourth amendment.
Wyden being concerned about whatever this is isn't surprising really but he's always on the extreme end of these interpretations, which I usually agree with, but judges typically don't agree with him.
I think it's probably generous to say the legal justification they are using has just as much chance of being legal as illegal. It would be nice to know what it was though because it can probably be defeated.
Wyden and others who are privy to what this is have made clear this is NOT about means or methods. This isn't about how the spying is done, it's about whether it's legal for the NSA to ever spy on U.S. citizens by ANY means. Existing law is very clear, it's absolutely not ever okay - no exceptions. It's completely irrelevant whether they're steaming open envelopes to read your junk mail or using a secret orbital mind-reading satellite to read your deepest private thoughts.
Experts like lawyers from the ACLU think it's something like a legal opinion which re-interprets the "absolute, no bulk spying on U.S. citizens ever" rule by claiming "it's not 'spying' if the govt pays a third-party commercial data collection service to give them the data voluntarily." That opens a backdoor for the govt to now back-link metadata and build one composite profile that includes all the private info the federal, state and local govt has ever had on you since birth (tax, employment, DMV, voting, school, govt assistance, Medicare, social security, etc) with everything any bank, credit card, or store knows about you, with every phone call, text, email and cell phone location ping you've had since 2014, with every bit of behavioral data Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc have about you.
To be clear, this is not "with probable cause they could get a warrant from a judge to send a supoena to each of those providers." This is something more like "they already have all that data in one searchable database but without this new secret legal opinion, as soon as it was clear the person was a U.S. citizen they could NOT look at it.
Now they can sit in a chair, and with just your phone number, email address, license plate or a facial ID match from a traffic camera to your driver's license, passport, Facebook profile or TSA airport photo, then instantly search for every single person you've communicated with in the past 3 years and every person they've communicated with and have an AI examine all that data from all those people and have a full 600 page report available in 15 seconds containing 7 million unique pieces of private data from 17,000 people that's instantly searchable - every email, every text, every purchase, every license plate scan, every location ping. No judge, no warrant, (and according to several recent reports), no record it ever happened, who did the search or under what pretext.
Everyone paying attention already knew it's been possible to do this for a decade. And everyone knows the government ALREADY does this for non-U.S. citizens. We just trusted that the government could not do it with U.S. citizens because the constitution and dozens of SCOTUS rulings make it so clearly ILLEGAL. But just like waterboarding and droning teenagers were once so clearly illegal, one secret legal opinion redefined "Spying" just like "Torture" was redefined in the 2000s and "Murder" was redefined in the 2010s - what the 4th Amendment has absolutely forbidden for 250 years instantly became legal to an invasive level Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton couldn't have dreamed in their worst nightmares.
It's about whether it's spying.
You have the law, you have precedent, best not to get on the naughty list.
There's a lot of stuff they do wrong but that isn't one of them. In this case, the Geneva convention was just written in a different time.
I agree. There are really two separate issues.
Circa WWII, the term 'enemy combatants' was created to solve a definitional issue around military 'rules of engagement' (a concept which evolved with the rise of the professional military). There were "enemy soldiers" and "civilians" with separate rules of engagement for each (at least in theory, as the rules weren't always applied uniformly).
As you said, not affording "enemy combatants" any rights after capture is the problem and it's really arisen since the "War on Terror". The only slightly positive sign in all this is the U.S. military is clearly aware U.S. courts won't let them get away with defining a category of human that doesn't have any rights, forcing the military into temporary workarounds like Gitmo. When U.S. courts have been able to establish jurisdiction over enemy combatants, the rulings have not generally gone favorably for the military.
I'm still grateful whenever the U.S. Constitution manages to be inconvenient and annoying to the U.S. government :-). And I hold out some hope we're slowly beginning to claw back some of the unconstitutional excesses of the "War on Terror."
It isn't altogether different than the use of private judges for celebrity divorces. Divorce proceedings are a matter of public record, unless you agree to hire your own judge and then everything can remain out of the public eye. Technically, these are arbitrators but very often are recently retired judges who agree to abide the current law.
Sensibly, I would think not patenting it would be the better path, but if you/your company wants to profit from sale to the government, any patent must remain secret.
Has been. Make it a priority in primaries. It hasn’t been to date—the overlap of privacy concerned Americans and the lazy and nihilistic who reject the political process is almost a union.
Historical "bipartisan did X" means nothing today. The time is always right now to define what a future party should be. It's a great time to destroy the old and reimagine the new.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/08/06/209692380...
I seem to remember that Senator Wyden's public warnings (over a decade ago) that the government was spying on Americans was one reason for President Obama to go on national TV and lie to Americans.
Senator Wyden has a long history of warning the public on surveillance abuses.
lol what primaries?
There is no credible version of history where Democrats as a party are not enthusiastic supporters of these surveillance powers. They've been actively complicit the entire time.
So is Wyden.
The Republican Party doesn’t really have an equivalent to a progressive caucus. AOC and Bernie Sanders are highly influential Democratic caucus members on record against state surveillance, with one of those two being a top candidate for the 2028 presidential elections. There is no such dynamic in the Republican Party.
Then he was made Speaker and literally overnight, flipped. In his words "I went to the SCIF and got the confidential briefing from sort of the other perspective on that, to understand the necessity of Section 702 of FISA and how important it is for national security. And it gave me a different perspective."
What his "briefing" was we can only guess. But there is a pattern on BOTH sides of the aisle they people are against mass surveillance, until they are put into positions of power and access to compartmentalized, classified info - and then they aren't. (for the record please dont interpret this as defense of anyone aforementioned, if you think that you're misreading me)
It seems like there are two plausible explanations for this.
The first is that they have a list of atrocities allegedly prevented by the system and most politicians are too witless or spineless to ask the question of whether they could also have been prevented in a variety of other ways.
The second is that they're using the system to e.g. influence public opinion / elections and then once they feast their eyes on the one ring, most politicians aren't sufficiently inclined to throw it into the volcano.
If there is widespread illegal spying, any current or future public figure would have to be a priority.
Publish your bank accounts.
Publish your private messages to friends, family, partner.
These idiots who say "nothing to hide" usually have the most to hide, and lose. And they can't see how something yesterday was legal and today isn't, can still be used against you.
Let’s look at the voting record.
The majority of house Democrats opposed being up debate on the FISA section 702 extension.
19 house Republicans joined the majority democrats in opposing the extension.
I’d say this still paints a picture of a Democratic Party being far less willing to extend FISA, and actually being majority opposed.
H. Res. 1175, 119th Congress
When the other guys have control of the government, it is to your party's advantage to deny additional powers to the government. When your guys are in power, vote away to add more power to that. That's just human nature, and has been a staple of political history since the founding of American democracy.
It's because the overwhelming majority of people, including the large majority of 'educated, "informed', Democrat voters', remain even as of 2026 far too tribal and addicted to cheering for the team they've been cheering for.
Another thing is that facing this reality is very scary. It's much easier to sleep at night if you believe that most of it isn't a show, including most of the tribe they've been voting for. The alternative is to admit that most of it is all one big theatre, and they've been scammed for their whole lives. That's another thing, admitting one has been scammed is painful and makes many feel like they're stupid, that they should've known better. Most much rather just not think about it too hard and believe "in the good of people".
In a sense I'm surprised that you're surprised as it's quite basic and well-studied human psychology.
Of course in reality the situation is even worse, as pessimizer aptly points out in a sibling comment.
It feels like you might be doing the same thing, just in the other direction. Any time a political party does something that is positive for Americans, it should be cheered and rewarded.
I still remember 62 Democrats voting against the Patriot Act while being labelled as traitors. We can cynically call them theatrics, or we could reward them for doing what is right in order to promote them doing more of the right things. The positive response to incentives is a basic and well-studied human psychology.
That should not be rewarded, it should be punished. Ironically, it's even more harmful than voting in favor of it when it's going to pass. It's literally the worst thing one can do, because it muddies the waters.
The very few who clearly would vote against it even if it might not pass, yes, those should be rewarded.
Each time there was one party that voted against it in significantly larger numbers. Sometimes it even cost them their seats because it was such an unpopular stance (i.e. Feingold). In 2011 it was a vote directly against a popular President from their own party. Meanwhile, the party that supposedly has all the "Libertarians" were almost unanimous in support for each vote.
The mismatched quotes are bothering me more than they ought to. :P
Not to distract from your main point, of course. You’re right. Democracy does allow the public to have some effect on policy but primarily it’s a mechanism for manufacturing the consent of the governed.
The most revealing part of the cycle comes around about once a decade, when for two years, the same party holds the White House and a majority in both houses of congress. They can pass whatever they really want and can't blame the other party when the things they've loudly claimed they stand for in every election, don't actually change. That's the only time those who are paying attention get to clearly see the difference between what the party claims to stand for when campaigning and what they really stand for. It's a sobering lesson and both parties do it equally.
That's when we see some extreme stage management to obfuscate the 'long con' both parties are running. Yes, a few things get passed but it's amazing how little of their long-time agenda really becomes law (or becomes law that's loop-holed and/or nerfed). It's so surprising how many politicians in the majority party suddenly discover rationalizations to not vote for a bill their party supports and which they should be for. Weirdly, these bills always fail to pass by just one or two votes. What are the odds of that happening - over and over again and only during those super-majority years?
Somehow, the politicians in the majority party from the 'safest' districts are the ones who suddenly find rationalizations to vote against what they loudly campaigned on (and will shamelessly campaign on again). Why is it only the politicians who stand little risk of losing their seat in the next election? Conversely, the politicians from the districts most at risk of losing to the other party somehow find the "courage of their principles" and don't sell out on traditional 'party-line' campaign issues. Ultimately, the big-money lobbyists feeding both political machines don't care how their goals are achieved or who votes for what. All that matters is any strongly worded law that goes against their interests either fails to pass by one vote or gets watered-down in committee and then passed.
The last thing that Republicans want is another America First libertarian troublemaker in Congress, and the last thing that Democrats want is some lecturing lefty. It's about business, not beliefs. Also, it's probably increasingly about blackmail.
When this math somehow fails (which happens every once and a while if somebody surprises them), it throws everything into chaos.
I have learned that "overwhelmingly against" is a useless concept in politics. The important question is "do they care about it enough to sway their vote?"
There is probably overwhelming support for Ukraine to defend itself in the US (and Europe), but very few people are willing to change their vote based on Ukrainian interests over their own {financial security, culture war, pet issue (abortion, guns, Epstein List, etc)}. If it's not a top-5 issue, it's not relevant to a political campaign.
2A voters and rabid anti-choice voters are polarized enough to actually show up at the capital or threaten their representatives. Extremely few people will dot at for issues lower down the priority list.
Rand Paul seems to be coasting on his father's reputation of having libertarian principles, while mainly sticking his head up for "culture war" bullshit. His main skill seems to be finely walking this line - show me a libertarian cause he openly supports that bucks a "culture war" narrative.
And I have no idea why you would have even mentioned Hawley. In general every politician talks a good game appealing to some libertarian causes (because most individuals want freedom, duh!), while readily supporting authoritarianism in some way or another.
(Props to Wyden on this issue, though)
> There’s still a sizable portion of the [Democratic] party as of right now that is against surveillance powers in a way that doesn’t really exist on the [Republican] side.
Majority of Democrats voted not to extend FISA, only a small handful of Republicans joined them to block debate on the bill.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/08/06/209692380...
So just because something was a certain way 20 years ago doesn't mean it's still that way today. That would be CRAZY to suggest that.
If not, then they're not the same.
We get this in the UK too, Tory party literally steal £Billions using emergency powers in COVID to send money to companies totally unrelated to the contracts made. Then a Labour MP has a complex mortgage arrangement and misses paying a few thousand pounds of tax. And people come in with 'they're all the same'.
It's stunningly moronic to entirely ignore the scale of issues in this way. Well, moronic or intentional deception.
Lacing your message with insults neither emphasizes your point nor bolsters your credibility. democrats have assaulted the 2nd amendment, while enjoying all the benefits of having armed security for themselves. Hence, my original comment that they are just a uniparty, there is no right and left.
Where they are not so different is in terms of the economic policies they create. One often notices that a few years later, Democrats extend and expand the Republican's policies.
Who started a class war and financial deregulation in the 1980s? Raegan.
Who enabled total deregulation? Clinton the in 90s with help and council from the Secretary of the Treasury Larry Page. By unshackling the banks from any rules, the Washington bureaucracy would enable the conditions for the 2008 financial crash.
And who does Obama appoint to oversee the 2008 financial crash? Larry Page.
Both parties have totally betrayed the American people in favor of the American oligarchs in terms of economic policy.
Who benefits from deregulation and offshoring? Not the now bankrupt rust belt states. Who benefits from bailouts for the banks but no bailouts for the average person? The Wall Street insiders.
There is billions in overt corruption, and you're right, that's wrong. But trillions that have been stolen from the average person via quantitative easing and given to big business to buy back their own shares.
When in power, did they do something against the NSA blatantly breaking the law, illegally surveilling hundreds of millions of citizens? No.
Did the 99.9% of them not named Lina Khan do something to uphold the existing antitrust laws? No.
Did they time and time again change the rule of law to suit corporate donors, lobbyists, megacorps? Yes.
Did they jail people who were actually trying to help uphold the rule of law by reporting on illegal torture facilities? Yes. [0]
> Then a Labour MP has a complex mortgage arrangement and misses paying a few thousand pounds of tax. And people come in with 'they're all the same'.
Arresting thousands of grandmothers for holding up some cardboard, and defending it, is enough to show that they're representing the same interests. How much privatization did they actually undo over the last 30 years? Right, none, they either directly aided it or looked the other way.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kiriakou#2012_indictment_...
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice
Not an American, but I can totally understand the need of governments to spy on its citizens that it has EVIDENCE of being involved in behaviour or activities that threaten the nation.
For example - if it had evidence that certain citizens were involved in espionage of their country, and they were thus passing on serious information to actors or other states that were intent on using that information to harm the nation, I would most definitely want those citizens to be spied upon.
Such evidence could be: Engaging in, or communicating with, known extremist organisations or forums known to be frequented by such individuals.
You think there have been no advancements in "justice" since 1926? Either you are being hyperbolic, have no knowledge of history or you have a very idiosyncratic definition of justice.
The only solution is to elect better people. I know some people who hoped that Trump would be that in 2016 but he is just more of the same.
I do disagree with grandparent that nothing has changed; the Supreme Court has shored up the First Amendment rights over the last 50 years and with Chatrie v. United States it looks like they are expanding Fourth Amendment protection.
Now if the Executive and/or Legislative ignore those protections then not much can be done.
Similar to Denver, city votes out Flock, Mayor does a backdoor. Unless they elect someone new and/or bring the Mayor up on procedural charges or something then nothing will change.
The system is rigged in such a way where that isn't a possibility. Look at the history of our country. ITS NOT WORKING.
The system has to change before we can elect better people. I cant believe I have to point this out with all thats going on... Every election the same arguments and the same responses.
I'll vote in primaries for the candidate that most represents my views and continue to not let perfect be the enemy of good on election day. Lip service and small improvement officials are always much better than officials that negatively target me or my community.
Trump is not more of the same. He actually changed my stance on people being evil and beyond redemption.
Trump's corruption is on such a different scale that calling him "more of the same" reads as a both sides argument.
Trump sucks. So does Pelosi, so does Bush and Clinton. What, we need to rank how much they suck?
JFC man, if it's important to you to know how much each of them screwed you, then build a table or something. To me the degree doesn't matter because a little is bad enough.
Using that scale as a proxy Trump is two orders of magnitude more corrupt than Biden.
Will you still believe in it when he gets a third term?
> covert both sides argument
As if somebody should be embarrassed about this. Extreme partisans think "both sides are doing it" is a logical fallacy, because of course their side isn't doing whatever you're talking about, if it's bad.
It is both sides. Wyden is a (welcome) aberration (on this topic).
Personally, I suspect that once in office he was either shown something that scared him so much that it genuinely made him believe that violating the rights of every American citizen was necessary, or he was strong armed into supporting what they were doing and expanding their abuses. I imagine the NSA had no shortage of dirt on him and his family just as they must have on every politician, CEO, parent, and child in the country.
Luckily there are other things that all reasonable people will find it hard to disagree with: The Obama government crackdown of Occupy Wall Street and his appointment of one of the fathers of the CIA torture program as NatSec Advisor, who promptly went on to jail whistleblowers of torture with Obama vouching for it.
The guy got more chances than the average US resident who would get shot by the cops for less
> The guy got more chances than the average US resident who would get shot by the cops for less
Using violations of rights to justify more violations of rights. This makes a lot of sense!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Chamber
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights
It’s basically synonymous with user-generated content site. It’s why TikTok is social media and Netflix isn’t, and PineDrama is somewhere in the middle because even though it’s studio content there’s still emphasis on the comments and whatnot.
This is clearly untrue; they're called "social media" because they developed inside other things that were already called "social media".
That is the problem -- if legislators aren't informed how the laws they wrote are interpreted / used by the executive, they cannot reason about how to legislate next.
- Milton Mayer - They Thought They Were Free. The Germans, 1933-45
There are many places which are more democratic and free than US ever was, its not a secret information but you won't hear about it in latest hollywood flick or fox/cnn. One only needs to travel a bit outside US bubble with open mind.
US system of 2 parties is pretty dumb if you think about it, artificial in pretty bad ways and not really transferable elsewhere. Constitution and laws which are less than toilet paper when power is taken by sufficiently motivated bad actor, 0 working checks and balances. It could have been worse of course if thats how we want to rank it, but we are not even in the half of it and something tells me we haven't seen the worst of it yet.
Over time it's become evident open model is far, far more effective at ensuring the public has confidence the people running the place are doing the right thing. It does risk the occasional unwarranted "witch hunt". But that threat ensures powerful people avoid doing things that while above board, could arouse public suspicion. Less suspicious acts mean higher trust in the government.
Do they, though? Americans are more constantly propagandized than anyone else.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/freedom-i...
what troubles me is why 'humor' is the most important thing? shouldn't be the action/output of the gov? i mean, you vote someone, he promise something, he cannot do it, he breaks the law, then nothing happens, you make fun of him. then after 4 yeras, you select another person. and go on. Biden didn't get punised for what he has not achieved. So will Trump.
how does that improve your life? how can people live like this? how is that 'democray'? its very hard for our people to understand.
our neighbor counties like Mongoel and Philippines, they have a system like USA, and the popeople can make fun of their leaders all the time, i can see that from reddit. but they basiclly live in a shit hole, with a small populartion and vast resources, and they are poor than average chinese. i never understand the deulusion of them.
1. There’s no freedom of speech;
2. Which implies there’s no freedom of thought;
3. There’s no separation of powers. Meaning, there’s really no “politicians”, just the ruling “nomenklatura”;
Which is fine-ish as long as the nomenklatura is benign and competent enough. It becomes problematic when (not if) the nomenklatura stops being competent. This can happen naturally because people age, still cling to power, and/or they care about their children, so they try to push them into plush nomenklatura jobs regardless of how dense their offspring might be. This is btw happening in China right now as far as I know.
When that happens, because of 1. and 2., as well as the “repression muscle” that the government has, change becomes near impossible, as you have no leverage for change outside the nomenklatura, but the nomenklatura resists it because it’s suicidal for them. Then you start stagnating and/or getting pulled into pointless wars that the nomenklatura starts to “rally the flag”.
To take a simple example: China is currently carrying out its most severe anti-corruption campaign in decades. Five-Year Plans are still being executed, support for low-income groups is being passionately discussed across social media, and according to various reports, the government has already begun addressing disparities in the pension system.
I’m not denying anything you said. But you seem to overlook the fact that we live in a world where we are merely comparing degrees of dysfunction. The Chinese government is deeply flawed, and the US government is deeply flawed as well. So much so that those of us who use VPNs to scale the firewall are honestly tired of watching people on the outside indulge in the illusion of freedom without any desire for real change. People often fail to see that, fundamentally, both are societies controlled by privileged classes—the distinction between autocracy and democracy is far less meaningful than it appears. At least in China, most people aren't suffocated by rent, don't have to worry about mobs rioting, looting, or committing arson(ok i am talking what happening in France, i dont know whats wrong with these stupid people), and don't have to fear the ravages of drugs, walk safely in the night, enjoy comforatable public transport(the point is , if a country dont have this but have the freedom to make jokes of their leaders, i dont think most of us will move there). As for those dissatisfied with society, they can emigrate(i guess the number is clear, most people travel aboard and see the world will still lives in china), or they can use a VPN to explore the outside world and discover the truth for themselves. Likewise, outsiders can visit to see the real China.
As part of a generation raised to believe that America was a beacon of civilization—which is how the media educated us, even if the government didn't say so directly—watching the outside world turn into what it is today brings us just as much pain as it brings you. The Prism scandal happened, and yet no one learned a thing. ( i have to use gemini to translate as my writen english is not so good)
> It’s fine-ish as long as the nomenklatura is benign and competent enough.
Being able to criticize your government is a fundamental freedom that can help curb things like corruption or change policy direction. Humor is a very direct and blunt form or criticism
As for your examples of democratic countries that are still not so great places, I’m pretty sure they would be even worse without their democratic freedom to criticize their respective governments
in an ideal world, yes. but with geopolicts, no. Like i see tons of USA news claims china is interven USA election. or Russia. I would say the truth for these contries are much horriable than it looks.
Democracy (in the US) is the whole system, not just the president. Biden didn't achieve everything he promised because he was in contention with the senators and representatives that were also elected by the people; same for Trump. It's checks and balances, the president can't do everything he wants because he gets checked by Congress and the courts; Congress can't do everything they want because they get checked by the president and the courts. Trump is straining that right now but that's the soul of American democracy – one guy doesn't decide it all, they must cooperate with Congress.
We'll see the system turn against Trump after the November election, when democrats are expected to take the house and probably the senate back from Trump's party. That's democracy in action: people are extremely unhappy with how Trump is handling things, so they're punishing him by voting in representatives who promise to rein him in.
Then i have no respect for the people in USA
See citizens and ICE.
Stop making stuff up.
In the US at least automatic weapons are nominally legal at the federal level after hefty tax stamps and background checks but states / local jurisdictions can and do regulate more / outright ban them.
They're still not illegal, as OP said.
In a number of states, you need to take a safety course before you're allowed to purchase a gun.
Compare that with the 1st amendment. If they passed laws saying "You can say whatever you want in public, but only after you've taken this course that informs you on what is acceptable and unacceptable to say in public", would you say there is free speech?
Or "You are free to practice any religion, but only after you've taken a course that ..."?
> The First Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting Congress from abridging the right to assemble and petition, was not intended to limit the action of the State governments in respect to their own citizens, but to operate upon the National Government alone.
Before the 14th Amendment, your hypothetical was quite possible at a state level.
But let's not say the 1st and 2nd amendments in the same breath. One is real, and the other is much less so.
It’s not a blank check to run over people holding signs you don’t like as you drive home from work.
> Under French law and Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), authorities may prohibit particular demonstrations when serious public-order risks make restrictions necessary and proportionate. They cannot impose an indiscriminate prohibition on peaceful assemblies simply because previous demonstrations have descended into violence.
You should ask Alex Pretti how he was able to criticize to criticize the government without repercussion.
His death had nothing to do with the Constitution, it was because of a trigger-happy, confused cop who had his back to the guy, then noticed a gun next to him (that another officer previously put there). The US government had no part in that situation at all.
What are cops if they're not the government? Are they private corporations?
Of course cops are the government, but they're also humans that make mistakes and commit crimes themselves. But this isn't actually related to some greater constitutional crisis or anything, unless you have some evidence that suggests they were instructed to act the way they did... but I've never seen anyone come forward with that yet.
You have government officials tyranizing the population and now the argument is "of course it can't prevent that".
What good is it then?
I think the key point is that it allows this "petitioning" of the government in the first place, that's what it's good for. But you still have to go through the court system to right any wrongs, which includes misbehaving police who may be breaking the law themselves.
The Constitution is not a judge, jury or executioner, so in a way it was always "limited" in what it can do if it's not actually respected.
Anyone can write high minded promises. It's the real life application that makes them rights.
"The government" isn't some abstract cloud somewhere. It's a collection of people, and it's their actions that count, not their marketing.
Hard disagree, there is no evidence that the agent acted in that exact way at the instruction of the government, I do not believe that it makes people's rights worth any less.
To me this is like saying rights are somehow fundamentally useless just because murderers exist in the world. Or accidents. Makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever.
The constitution is just some rules people wrote up generations ago. It's not a magic spell that has power by itself, it is only effective as a social contract as long as power structures agree to follow it.
If armed government enforcers break it with impunity, what good is it?
Lmao. Jim Tyranny has had what? 3 cracks at him? Hardly protection.
You suggesting that in the name of freedom - everyone must have air conditioning and cool their homes to 60F?
This is a weird metric of freedom. It seems more like a reflexive, zeitgeist based response than any actual freedom metric.
In my experience the country with the most freedom is Canada. I have never seen anything like it. It's just so easy to do business there. Even if it wasn't that the laws enable it (they do) but even the way people operate. Being able to have a discussion with a customer without 12 rounds of a solicitor trying to insert dumb loopholes into a contract, costing the potential customer more in billable hours to their solicitor than the cost of the contract.
The USA is just junk. States that want to be Feds, Feds that want to be States, and when you cut through all the red tape you still have to deal with Litigious, ignorant Americans. Oh and if you want to import or export something just forget it.
"Oh but we have guns" is basically the exception that proves the rule, in a country where people get detained for such crimes as "Being beloved childrens author Mem Fox" or "Said naughty things on reddit" or "Working while waiting for Immigration to sort their status out".
But guns right. Guns. Woohoo freedom yeehaw guns.
I’m on my phone, so it’s a little bit difficult for me to find clear examples, but I think this post talks about some of those freedom of speech violations.
I might be completely wrong, but it seems like news articles are not repeating the messages that caused the arrest. They just seem to be reporting that the arrest happened and high-level description of the content.
People can say whatever they want without hurting anyone. In the case of incitement of violence, the issue is the person(s) who actually committed the violence, not a tweet online.
I'd compare "inciting violence" to a woman dressing in provocative clothing in a bad area of town late at night. Very few people would blame the woman and say she's legally responsible if she's attacked, I hold the same line on speech.
Say what you want, dress how you want, it doesn't matter. If another person actually causes harm they can't shirk the blame off on you, they made the choice to commit violence.
Notably you didn't engage with my analogy at all. Would you tell a victim of sexual assault that they were partly to blame based on their clothing choices or decision to be in a particular part of town a particular time of day? If not, how would you legally distinguish the two scenarios?
Procedurally they require different actions to create or change. More fundamentally though, the constitution protects rights while laws limit them.
Here is one of the latest cases, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gz1qy30v5o Here is another one: "West Midlands Police arrested a 15-year-old boy named Fraser on August 3, 2026, after he published Facebook posts mocking Conservative Wolverhampton City Council member Simon Bennett." ...after posting an image of a politician with the bunny ears.
Who defines what is murder and what is self-defence? You already know the answer to this. The legislature.
Your first link is about police misconduct, not what the laws are or should be. Your second quote does not contain any of the relevant posts and just spews random unverifiable claims.
In other words, whoever is at power at the moment. There is no constitutional protection.
"police misconduct"... The OP said "It is a common misconception... that people are arrested and jailed for making jokes or otherwise casually chatting on social media". I gave you an example to the contrary. I do follow the UK news, and it's not hard to come up with multiple similar examples, there is no need to gaslight me. UK democracy has been somewhat waning lately.
As for the bunny ears story, not spews but says -- and type the headline into google, you'll get multiple sources. It is verifiable, you are just afraid to check lest it is actually true. Try harder.
One suggestion - don't travel much around the world and certainly avoid backpacking and interacting with locals and understanding things like history or culture, you may eventually lose those... beautiful opinions of yours
stupid swipe typing
Funny how China leads in most tech areas now.
Turns out letting monopoly capital control your government policy leads to short term gains at the expense of long term viability. Maybe the VCs can make some money off government surveillance and defense contracts before being completely eclipsed?
https://www.aspi.org.au/news/aspis-critical-technology-track...
China calls its government a State Council, Russia calls theirs a Duma, and the USA calls its one Microsoft. (Or Oracle, or Disney, or S&P 500...)
https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/43535/do-other-...
closing as duplicate. (/joke)
https://x.com/hongguabg/status/2114213232454082869?s=20
We have some flexibility with freedom left, and let’s keep it that way.
That link you just posted is blocked for me because I don't have an X account. Here's an unblocker redirector - suspiciously like a HTTP VPN: https://xxcancel.com/hongguabg/status/2114213232454082869?s=...
The process that's described (appear cooperative but deny everything) is the same thing you should do in the US if the police come to your door and accuse you of drug possession. Every country does this violation of freedom, they just use different excuses.
...how did you come to this conclusion?
>> 但你确实做过的，而且白纸黑字的放在你面前，那就不要抵赖。
If it's something you did, and they put it in front of you in black and white, don't deny it.
Is 领导 not an incredibly subservient way to address someone? How do people normally address police officers in China?
This is an example of a thought-stopping cliche. It is a slogan to prevent the listener from thinking. Or at the least, to divert the listener's thoughts back to a more politically acceptable (to the speaker) rightthink.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rightthink
> Section 702 only permits the targeting of non-United States persons who are reasonably believed to be located outside the United States. United States persons and anyone in the United States may not be targeted under Section 702.
https://www.intel.gov/foreign-intelligence-surveillance-act/...
This was also true for Five Eyes/EU sharing too, even though with this year's legislation some EU countries have offered Israel a direct access to INT feeds.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/sep/11/ns...
But this agreement concerns raw, non minimized, SIGINT (eg. direct tapping into feeds/traffic) mainly from US -> Israel.
The integration in the cyber domain is a different tier compared to the default the US has with other eyes.
Democracy itself is young concept. So there is no point looking beyond a certain time period as they were all monarchies before that. However even during earlier times there are examples of democracy like monarchies where citizens were not ignored by monarch, and they ruled for the people.
https://www.passportindex.org/de/byRank.php
You give up some rights for internal stability and in theory better social benefits.
In America, our social contract allows 10 guilty men to go free rather than imprisoning one innocent.
That's the myth anyway. Back in reality America is rapidly marching towards authoritarian capitalism.
Jump outs , black sites, indefinite detention.
>Naturally the common people don't want war . . . but after all it is the leaders of a country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or parliament or a communist dictatorship. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.
-Hermann Goering
Thus we're always at War. War on Drugs. War on Illegal Immigration. War on Crime. War on you.
So what we've already deported multiple born in the US citizens. This is war!
For criminal matters, sure.
In civil and administrative matters it's the opposite with the decimal moved to the left a couple times.
What are their names?
https://www.texastribune.org/2026/04/23/texas-united-states-...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/show/children-who-are-u-s-c...
Indefinite detention for being Hispanic despite being born in America.
https://www.cbsnews.com/baltimore/news/deportation-effort-ma...
You guys are never able to manage one. That guy is a Mexican national, not an American
The children aren't deported, their parents are. They, of course, get the choice to take their children with them. You don't want to split apart families, right?
Of course #3 isn't a deportation so I didn't even look at it
If they actually have a valid US birth certificate then how can you say that?
They didn't randomly pick on this guy, and they've deported millions of people without deporting a citizen.
At least you recognize that who is and isn't a citizen is no longer determined by law and facts, but by "guys".
Next you'll learn about how laws come into existence, get interpreted, and get enforced.
A few other examples of full citizens being deported are out there , but your not going to convince certain people with logic.
>Karen, 65, had a British passport and a tourist visa.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/21/karen-newton...
Thank God we surrendered all of our basic rights. Anything to stop elderly British women!
Which rights did you surrender?
Tell me how detaining an elderly British woman made you feel safer.
Maybe in a few years there will be another one.
I think their track record has enough nines to make any techbro jealous. Even if he were a citizen, which he isn't, his singular deportation was easily worth the result.
Since he's a Mexican citizen, it can barely be called a hardship.
Mexico is a great place, by most accounts.
If it was 100% clear that he is not a US citizen then I don't think they would have let him back into the country. I'm curious to see how they are going to prove that he was not born in the US, assuming his US birth certificate is valid. Ideally the Mexican birth certificate shouldn't take precedence over the US one.
both notorious for bragging about being the most free country on earth
CSIS and ASIS in Canada and Australia have far more powers than anything the CIA could ever do.
I owned more guns, got paid more, and had more vacation while working for a US company than I ever did in the Oz or Glorious Canukistan
China and Russia (and to some extent, the UK now) will absolutely act on the spying they do. Or just act and say they had a good reason. China and Russia are dictatorships. One of them has a very competent and hard-working population which succeeds in spite of the dictator, the other is a gas station with nukes that survives solely because of said nukes.
Except they do. The NSA has been handing over intel over a decade ago:
> A former federal agent in the northeastern United States who received such tips from SOD described the process. “You’d be told only, ‘Be at a certain truck stop at a certain time and look for a certain vehicle.’ And so we’d alert the state police to find an excuse to stop that vehicle, and then have a drug dog search it,” the agent said. [1]
Sure these were criminals, but who knows how many “undesirables” were prosecuted or targeted for some crime anybody commits?
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/us-drug-agency-g...
The US gov is acting on intel against its citiczens all the time, regular or not.
Personally, I don't like the right wing groups it's infiltrated, but I still think that is a reasonable example.
For me, more pressingly, there are current investigations going on in Minnesota from the US gov's "Puppetmaster" operation that actively infiltrated and monitored a highly diverse set of anti-ICE groups.
Historically this is nothing new; the US has been infiltrating "anti-government" groups for decades. AIM, the panthers, ELF, ALF, labor unions, MOVE, etc are all easy examples of domestic groups that the US gov has broken at some point or other.
Your position only work if you classify folks such as the Minnesota 15 as "terrorists" or some such. Which, hey, folks like the US Gov try to do. But at that point the point is kind of tautological: if you have "something to hide" then you are a legit target of government sanctioning.
That's not very satisfying to me, but plenty of folks in the US find it to be a just-fine principle.
Do they have the right to tap into world communication as well as their own is the issue? They are not challenged by apposing parties and their own population or people have given up.
Perhaps there will be a disaster is waiting with all these backdoors and Ai supremacy.
Absolutely. AI only needs to bring the keys, and everything else will be waiting for it on a silver platter. And AI is really good at making spare keys.
The judicial branch does not decide who to prosecute. They're supposed to ensure that the law is applied consistently, but prosecutorial discretion is entirely up to the DoJ and at least nominally is part of the executive branch (for federal crimes). They also don't directly decide whether someone is convicted in most cases; a judge can throw out a meritless case or in rare cases vacate a jury verdict, but the jury verdict itself is outside of any of the three branches by design.
In any case though, this is isn't super relevant to my comment you replied to. The parent comment claimed that the debate about the law was purely theater, and I argued that it might not be because someone could get prosecuted for it if the law isn't on the books. Whether the DoJ should try to prosecute someone for something is not the same as whether they will try to. The DoJ has tended to operate in a somewhat removed way from the whims of the president in the aftermath of Watergate, but that's a precedent that's been pretty clearly been eroded in recent years. That doesn't mean political prosecutions will be successful, but using legalism as a way of trying to enforce one's political agenda is not a new phenomenon; the Bush administration had lawyers write up opinions justifying their use of "enhanced interrogation" because being able to couch one's actions in legal terms is one of many ways to try to build support (or mitigate opposition) to them. Having laws that say something is not allowed has at least some effect even when people try to get away with violating them, even if it's only in the form of soft pressure.
Its important to note that the DoJ is part of the executive branch, not the judicial branch.
It's not only about assassinations or intelligence, things like organizing beauty pageants or producing snuff porn are valid duties for secret police. And this does not even touch the whole KKK thing. Those are the people writing the NSLs.
Exceptions should be rare. Honestly, I cannot imagine any exceptions outside of protecting military secrets from foreign powers.
They are way ahead of you. The intent is not just to monitor, it's also to predict/preempt and to shape.
The whole sales pitch of Palantir is effectively marketing talk for pre-crime. And if we see what the russians and the chinese are doing online to shape our opinions I can only imagine what the US capabilities are in this realm.
This is not just about stopping the next Mandela. This is about knowing who the next Mandela is before future Mandela even knows it. And this about shaping the opinion of all potential future Mandela's into a neutered state.
Perhaps all the spying data should just be publicly accessible and easily accessible for all to use and abuse.
Would democratizing it all so there is never an expectation of privacy from the public vs a select few in power be better in the long run?
The AI matrix prison is real and discussions about it are censored.
The FBI was founded.
Spying on Americans? You could say that, perhaps, but you would have to say it about every law enforcement organization (including the local police) since 1776.
What the actual article is talking about is a massive extension, not covered by the regular "get a warrant in court" mechanism. Saying "just like the FBI" ignores how different this is, and how alien to the Constitution.
Secret courts on the other hand undermine the entire concept of rule of law and we should have absolutely zero tolerance for them.
The only good thing is that at least under capitalism (not a system I'm a fan of) this is difficult to do (well as long as the owners of said companies weren't sheep), and like most conspiracies is very hard to enforce, there would be a leakage in a program so broad as this.
But it was a disturbing concept. Merely by signalling you didn't want to be watched made you more watched.
It took an insider with one of the highest clearances you can get to break the news about these kinds of wiretapping deals.
Apple, Google, and other insiders were very quiet about those back room deals. You can bet they never stopped and only expanded too.
What I see from outside is complete full reversal of US and China and their roles in the world regarding politics and security. US has nothing to offer to anybody - backstabbing, frequent changes of policies on morning whims of an old sick man, or very direct economical attacks to closest former allies and threats of military attacks. Plus completely destabilizing global oil transport, massively increasing prices and helping trigger a global recession.
Only an absolute fool would think US has anything positive to offer. In such world, China is by far the least of the evil, role traditionally held by US but not anymore.
But at least they were subject to Congressional oversight.
> the Trump administration is illegally withholding a secret court’s findings from Congress
Oops.
Wow! It's amazing how the time travelers went back in time after 9/11 just for FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act). It was enacted, and FISA courts created in 1978[0].
All sorts of stupid stuff was done after (and in the name of "anti-terrorism") 9/11. FISA was not one of them.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveilla...
How convenient that this is right after the midterm elections. If they maintain control, the republicans can simply decide to ignore this requirement without penalty.
fentanyl epidemic, mass illegal migration and trafficking, networks of terrible abuse, flagrant public corruption, infiltration of schools and academia, conspiracies to demolish the entire western world, and yet even with total information awareness or some variant, these crimes occur in the open.
the scandal isnt that they are spying, its what they have explicitly chooseb to allow and enable.
Not only is this true, but most of the legacy media landscape also shifted hard to the right (in large part due to massive corporate consolidation) over the past decade, so Fox isn't even especially unique anymore in terms of being extremely right-partisan.