Privacy, Government, Surveillance, and You.

If his positions on other things are semi-palatable, yes. District positions in particular tend to exhibit a lot more variance within parties than national positions.

No, I wouldn't vote for Feinstein and her ilk. I would (and do) ask Democrats to primary their asses the same way I try to primary out crazy Republicans in the hopes of having a playable alternative to the Feinsteins.

Failing both of those, I would vote for a third party with less of a taste for George Orwell, because I would genuinely not want either candidate within shelling distance of office. I don't really see much difference in long-term catastrophe between a shithole economy fundamentally designed to welcome flagrant corruption and a shithole surveillance state fundamentally designed to welcome flagrant corruption ripe to be enforced with military force.

Or I could vote for Wyden and DeFazio because, really, it's not that implausible to actually have a workable candidate on both fronts and I'm happy to call people out for thinking it is.

edited 3rd Mar '14 7:28:14 PM by Pykrete

You'd be wasting your vote.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Good. Get even a couple percent of people to visibly waste their vote instead of invisibly not voting at all, and you get a spoiler group that incentivizes main candidates to quit being cardboard cutouts or shameless power-grabbers. Maybe then I'll vote for them. Hell, there were enough no-votes last election cycle to outright landslide both candidates with a third, and competitively field a fourth.

It's only a wasted vote when other people have convinced everyone else that it's a waste.

Hell, if you want to talk about wasted votes, Romney and Obama didn't even have all that different policy. Oh, they parroted orthodox party lines for the debates, but looking at their policy record and what they've actually signed this was the most flagrant zero-choice election in decades. Obama's closer to Bush Jr. than the Democrat party as of ten years ago.

edited 3rd Mar '14 8:58:35 PM by Pykrete

"No cause is lost so long as there is still one fool left to fight for it."

It's an opportunity cost thing. Sure, you could make privacy the one and only issue you care about, and vote entirely based on that and nothing else. The problem is that if the issue in question is something neither of the major parties are willing to touch, then it's essentially Not Going To Happen, and your attempts to vote in a candidate that supports it is a waste of time and effort. You'd be much better off trying to sway politicians that are actually electable (ie, a Republican or a Democrat) to change their opinion on the matter to something you find acceptable.

Yeah, you can fight the good fight and support third-party candidates and blah blah, whatever. But if you actually want to be effective, then you're better off working with the system rather than against it.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Neither party? This has been the single most divisive issue within both parties we've seen in decades. If you can't find someone in your party that's actually on your side on this one, you're frankly not looking very hard.

edited 4th Mar '14 1:11:34 PM by Pykrete

The issue is certainly one of those rare ones that crosses party lines, but within our current political environment, it appears to be insoluble without sacrificing more pressing concerns. The only question we're likely to get to weigh in on to any significant degree is how much surveillance, not whether we will have it at all.

Unless you are prepared to have a full-scale revolution, the inevitable truth is that the people who are part of the problem will have to be part of the solution.

edited 4th Mar '14 1:17:41 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Oh bullshit. There's no way I'm going to believe, say, Feinstein is the only Democrat California would elect. This is exactly what primaries are for. Within a block of general concerns — and her views on "more pressing concerns" are about as rare as water in the ocean — weed out the ones with specific deviations you don't like or pull up the ones with deviations you do.

edited 4th Mar '14 1:25:51 PM by Pykrete

There's also the issue of information access, and how different the world looks to the man in the throne.

We witnessed this happen with Senator Obama, who railed against the PATRIOT Act as a senator, claiming that it was a violation of citizen rights and protesting its necessity. Obama was insistent that it was possible to protect citizens from terrorism without trampling on their individual liberties.

Flash forward to 2011, President Obama signed a renewal of the PATRIOT Act, claiming the surveillance was necessary in order to protect citizens from terrorism. Why the change? Was Obama lying about his opinions all along and secretly plotting to progress the surveillance measures as soon as he takes office, or did something he learned after becoming President change his mind?

Don't be surprised if the next candidate you vote for on the platform of, "Surveillance is bad!" hits the Presidential office, turns around, and goes, "...hey guys, maybe surveillance is okay." It's already happened once.

edited 4th Mar '14 1:26:22 PM by TobiasDrake

My Tumblr. Currently liveblogging Haruhi Suzumiya and revisiting Danganronpa V3.

For all we know, declassified materials 50 years from now will reveal dozens of attacks that were foiled thanks to our surveillance efforts.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

That may be the case — certainly from those cases that come to Court.

Keep Rolling On

Again, no one wants no surveillance at all- we just dont want warrentless surveillance.

I'm fine with total privacy in fact i'd prefer it over having people look into my business.

Presenting!

Terrorists would be more than fine with total privacy too, you know.

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Well terrorists are not afforded the privacy law abiding citizens have earned.

Presenting!

Good thing terrorists are a smaller threat than smoking, toilets, bathtubs, cars, malnutrition, and poor health care.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

Seriously. Terrorism is scary when it happens, but statistically in America you have a considerably higher chance of being killed in traffic, drowning in your bathtub, being struck by lightning, or being fatally stung by a swarm of bees than dying in a terrorist attack. And most of the people who actually do flip out and kill a lot of people are domestic.

So why all the surveillance and rights violations in the name of protecting from outside forces when the probability is low?

Presenting!

Power. Conventional means are sufficient to catch the overwhelming majority of attackers. If it was actually about protecting anyone, they'd dump all the funding they get into any number of social programs that would do a lick of good instead.

Like, terrorist plots do happen. This one comes to mind. But they really don't take unreasonably invasive measures to find. They found that guy years ahead of time because he was closely associating with a known terrorist recruiter, which is incredibly easy to get a legit warrant to investigate.

Now if you want to get into shady, that case reeks of entrapment. But that's another issue entirely.

Profit too. There's no other reason to have spent millions on invasive airport scanners that were shown to be utterly ineffectual within a week.

edited 6th Mar '14 5:52:21 PM by Pykrete

Vested interests from the military-industrial complex and the Powers That Be is a possible reason.

I think it's the remaining minority of attackers that they're mostly worried about. I mean, look at 9/11. The perps seem to have bypassed all those conventional means of airport security, and look how many they managed to take down with them. I think governments and ordinary citizens don't want to see another disaster like that happen again any time soon.

The question, of course, is how far people are willing to sacrifice their rights in exchange for more security.

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

The 9/11 hijackers could have - should have - been very easily intercepted by the American authorities. The reason they were not is largely down to some impressive bureaucratic stupidity on the part of the US security services. The whole story can be found in Lawrence Wright's excellent The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda's Road to 9/11.

Schild und Schwert der Partei

Isn't that always the case, though? Hindsight is 20/20; if security services did their jobs perfectly 100% of the time, no attack would ever get through. The fact is that it happened. Scapegoating doesn't help; what helps is a rational analysis of the failures that allowed it to happen and an attempt to correct them as well as possible.

edited 7th Mar '14 6:43:49 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

No such analysis was ever carried out. The rationale for most of the post-9/11 security hysteria was "we need it to stop 9/11 happening again"; in fact, all the US intelligence services would have needed to prevent 9/11 would have been to actually talk to each other rather than run operations that were almost totally compartmentalized. If you actually read Wright's book, that's extremely clear: the critical failure that led to 9/11 wasn't a failure of technique or intelligence, it was a failure of bureaucracy.

EDIT: And a Hand Wave like "oh well nobody could ever be always right all the time" shouldn't serve as a distraction from actual instances of gross incompetence.

edited 7th Mar '14 6:51:33 AM by Achaemenid

Schild und Schwert der Partei

In flooding the internet with malware, and by increasing wariness of data sharing, the NSA’s actions have had a negative impact on the fight against cybercrime.