As bad as governmental abuses can be in the U.S. I find it somewhat comforting that suing the CIA doesn't mean some people are going to start disappearing. I'm guessing not too many Russians sued the KGB.
That may be because no one needs to be disappeared, because the plaintiff just won't win. Remember the Church Committee only managed to scratch the surface. So what makes you think that suddenly, now, there will be transparency and justice. And even if the court ruled for the plaintiff, what happens if the CIA refuses to comply? Who is gonna hold them to account? You? Congress? The president? LOL.
It's a shame you would compare a Developed country, supposedly one of the best, with one that's knows to be not so good.
It's like comparing your sports team to one that consistently finishes low on the ladder - your team will always look good, even when they are far from the top.
If you want a comparison that will lead to improvement, compare your country to those known to have excellent human rights and freedom of information track records.
I'd argue that the US lost its reputation as "one of the best" quite some time ago. Communist Russia is probably still an overly contrasting comparison point - the US is not as bad as that - but compared to countries that are actually among "the best", the US has been quite low down the rankings for some time now.
So actually the OP's comparison seems fair. "The US may be bad these days, but at least it's not (yet) as bad as some of the worst in history!"
The problem here is that it's hard, if not impossible, to judge the two countries in such single-dimensional way.
For example if we would take into account the incarceration rate, USA has a higher one than Russia.
On a more subtle analysis, it's unfortunately possible that there is actually a (undergoing) way to silence dissidence, which is "just" different from directly killing people, for example legal rape, or manufacturing of doubt, just to mention a few.
Essentially, I think that there's no such direct comparison, and constructive analysis should take into account many many factors and contexts.
There would be France and the UK. Why do you consider the UNSC as an interesting subset when comparing governmental abuses? This is a genuine question.
The UK does everything the US does and more, just without the pretense of a concern for freedom. France is a cesspool of corruption and systemic bigotry, particularly towards Islamic people. The Security Council are the most powerful countries in the most widely recognized international decision making body. I think it's a fair way to identify US "peers".
The permanent members of the UNSC are the countries that were the most powerful at the end of World War II, not the countries that are most significant in the present day.
...and? What does that have to do with the current discussion?
You are partially correct but by and large the UNSC members are the key levers globally.
Regardless, the UNSC comment was to indicate that Russia is very much considered a peer of the USA. If they are not to be compared/contrasted then the debate is meaningless.
Let's just go with Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark for now, with New Zealand and Singapore thrown in to prove that you don't have to be Scandinavian to have an uncorrupted government.
Singapore doesn't have a corrupted government? Its not perceived by its people as having one. Its true too, as long as you vote for PAP members, reelect them and don't read foreign newspapers; everything then is fine and there is no corruption.
I do not claim that those governments are not in any way corrupt. They are simply the least corrupt of an inherently corruptible tradition.
The point is that we should be following our hopes rather than fleeing from our fears. Comparing yourself to the worst of your peers and patting yourself on the back because you are still somewhat better is blinding yourself to the absolutely unacceptable backsliding that has been occurring. Even comparing yourself to the best of your peers and dreaming about surpassing them is not enough. The ultimate, unattainable goal is zero corruption and perfect transparency. Effort required increases asymptotically as we approach that limit.
So it would seem that the only way to avoid having corruption in your government is to not have one at all.
We could have made the participatory government 20 years ago.
I always explain it like this (try to):
Our ancestors did not have Internet, direct participation was not possible. We therefore cant expect those ancestors of ours to have seriously considered it - at any stage. Arguably, before the Internet, everyone did his best to participate as much as they could. The new ingredient our generation introduced is for voters not to have influence on par with the technical possibilities.
If we would be overly modest we could allow that single vote to be changed when the voter wants to change it. If the voter cant change his vote the election program is not legally binding. One can say whatever he likes to get elected and enjoy 4 whole years without any consequences.
Technically we should be participating in the debate about specific issues at hand. Our officials would have little to do beyond the organization of that information (a feat easily automated) If we can do social networks and we can do flash trading then we need very little beyond a tech team and a few symbolic figure heads to make a kick ass democracy.
We can do considerably more than vote 1 time, ideas from citizens are a type of resource, value waiting to be extracted. Extraction will help it grow faster. Clearly we are missing out on incalculable riches, just sitting there, expiring while waiting for exploitation.
It would be more accurate to say that direct participation was not scalable past a certain population size.
But now, well... Nintendo even made a free Wii amusement called "Everybody Votes Channel". If people are willing to waste time voting on silly things just to see what other people in their tribe and around the world selected, they can certainly vote on things that actually matter to them, like taxes and laws.
The difficult problem nowadays is not the technical ability to get everyone participating, but how to avoid the pitfalls of democracy, such as an arbitrary majority tyrannizing an arbitrary minority, or a focused minority advancing a specific agenda over a relatively apathetic majority.
There would almost have to be a submission petition with a certain number of supporters, an initial 50% majority of those who care to vote to trigger spending development resources on the issue, then a funding round, where supporters have to supply the required budget directly, and finally a ratification round, where a supermajority, perhaps 67% of all possible voters, where non-voters automatically vote to reject, determines whether to proceed to implementation or not.
But that's all irrelevant detail when it is likely that those who currently hold power would use it to prevent a new system from taking it away from them. The status quo likes where it stands now. The system is ripe for disruption, but it is also quite good at retaliating against existential threats.
Peeling off the grandstanding, hyperbolic huffing and puffing, what's left is that the law enforcement response to the nationally coordinated Occupy movement was nationally coordinated.
Not at all. Occupy was political. Individual police departments cracking down on political dissent is problematic. But when the federal government does it, federal powers make it much more significant. And when you see those folks all working with private security to suppress political dissent, it's deeply problematic.
That's especially true given that the feds have a history of illegal surveillance of (and even interference with) political activity that powerful people happened to find uncomfortable: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
"Cracking down" is a gross exaggeration of what the documents actually describe. Naomi Wolf's column is essentially blogspam of a press release by the "Partnership for Civil Justice Fund", which cherry-picks and sexes-up excerpts from the pretty dull documents they got through a FOIA request. It's nowhere near COINTELPRO. It's documentation of exactly the kind of mundane police work you would expect to be associated with a nation-wide protest movement.
Freedom of speech and freedom of assembly are vital to successful democracy. I don't expect any police work to be associated with a nation-wide political protest movement.
I agree that it's not as bad as COINTELPRO. That doesn't make it right, though.
Freedom of speech and freedom of assembly != freedom to be completely ignored until you do something wrong.
I'll inline my other comment: Mass gatherings of any kind are a public safety issue, and an organized nation-wide protest with anarchist overtones is hardly the least likely to result in violence and property damage. For police to not gather and share information on what to expect would be stupid.
You may get tons of warm fuzzies thinking about OWS, but it still involved thousands of angry people gathering in one place, which is not something any reasonable person expects the police to be wholly ignorant of.
Now we can see the police and FBI behavior toward the civil rights movement for what it was: the police helping people in power stay in power.
One of the defaults on Hacker News is a general skepticism toward increasing police power. It's amazing to me how quickly that can switch to justification when it's the "wrong" people getting policed. The reason Aaron Swartz got pursued so vigorously is exactly the reason that Occupy did: they were both (correctly) perceived as a political threat to people with power and wealth.
What are you even talking about? "Wrong" people? Aaron Swartz?
I'm just saying the documents mentioned above[1] don't back up your claims, and that what they do describe is mundane, expected behavior. (I know this because I read them myself, rather than relying on the summary of someone with a clear agenda.) If you weren't speaking in the context of the thread, why post in it?
One of the defaults on Hacker News is a general skepticism toward increasing police power.
First of all, that's not a default of Hacker News, that's a default of individual users of Hacker News. If you want a community of uniform opinion, I suggest digging out your dog-eared copy of 1984 and re-reading the scene of the two-minutes' hate to see where that leads.
Secondly, I'd like to point out that I share that default, but with the additional (and seemingly rare) default of skepticism toward reporting about increasing police power.
That's bullshit, though. Mass gatherings of any kind are a public safety issue, and an organized nation-wide protest with anarchist overtones is hardly the least likely to result in violence and property damage. For police to not gather and share information on what to expect would be stupid.
You may get tons of warm fuzzies thinking about OWS, but it still involved thousands of angry people gathering in one place, which is not something any reasonable person expects the police to be wholly ignorant of.
Similarily, Westboro Baptist Church protests are public safety issues, because they provoke large angry gatherings. How does the FBI handle that? Do they collaborate with corporations and local police departments to systematically discredit, propagandize against, and wage psychological warfare against the WBC?
Or do they do striaghtforward police work, provide a detail of officers at protests and counterprotests just in case anything gets out of hand, and generally behave reasonably?
There is a very far divide between "wholly ignorant" and "actively subverting." There is also a far divide between that and "sharing information on what to expect."
See also: undercover police excesses in the UK and US, including having children with activists to maintain cover.
Or do they do striaghtforward police work, provide a detail of officers at protests and counterprotests just in case anything gets out of hand, and generally behave reasonably?
According to the documents Naomi Wolf (your link!) cites, this is pretty much what happened. Try reading them for yourself instead of ignorantly complaining about "propaganda".
> Not at all. Occupy was political. Individual police departments cracking down on political dissent is problematic.
The fact that your motivation is political does not provide a license to break the law, and you must expect a response from law enforcement if you do so.
I agree that political protest doesn't provide a license to do absolutely anything. But when laws are selectively enforced against people with particular political views because of their views, that's a big deal to me regardless of the views.
Because of that, I believe that political activity should be given relatively wide latitude for anything that is basically related to freedom of speech or freedom of assembly. For example, here in San Francisco, a person blocking traffic for the hell of it might get ticketed for jaywalking. But if a group of protestors takes to the streets, the police will just direct traffic around it and keep an eye on it as long as it stays peaceful. And I think that's about right.
To me the part that makes it truly insidious is the coordination between banks, the FBI, local police departments, and universities, in order to stifle a political movement. This coordination occurred before the start of the Occupy movement, and so before any laws had been broken and needed to be enforced. As such, your use of the word "response" is inappropriate. A "response" implies a previous action to be responded to. This coordination between banks and the FBI happened prior to any protest.
I would expect the law enforcement response to, say, an actual terrorist group to be nationally coordinated.
I would not expect the law enforcement response to semi-legal public camping to be nationally coordinated.
The fact that it was implies that there was a political motivation to the specific law enforcement actions that took place, which is something typically considered inappropriate for the American government. We like to think that in America, we have the freedom to assemble and organize with fellow citizens to coordinate social change.
These documents tell us that we do not. Should we attempt to do so, should we go outside the gameboard for any action, we will be ruthlessly, violently swatted down. The tanks[0] will roll in, the LRADs[1] will blare, and armored stormtroopers will march alongside firing tear gas and pepper spray[2].
And not only will that dismantle that movement, but it will make every subsequent movement have to overcome not just a typical barrier to adoption, but also the fear of being there when the gloves come off and the gas canisters fire. It's what's called a chilling effect[3].
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/09/us/war-gear-flows-to-polic... (among many articles documenting this trend; if you want to see it in person go to any large protest in a major city, I have seen them in DC, New York, Pittsburgh, and Oakland among other places)
None of this is about democracy, but the freedoms of the constitution and a less corrupt system than some other countries. Corruption still exists heavily in America, but it's primarily focused on money and lobbies and whatnot.
It may not be directly associated to the democratic process for electing a government, but I think you'll find that it's still closely related to democracy in general.
Democracy is fundamentally anchored on the idea that the legitimate right to govern derives from the people, not from the sword or from the blessing of a priest. This means that governments exist to serve the people, not the other way around. The freedoms of the constitution derive from this principle.
Fun historical fact: In medieval Karantania[1] the "king" was appointed and crowned by the people. He still inherited his title and whatnot, but had to be approved by his people and a free peasant performed the coronation.
So, not a democracy, but right to govern still derives from the people. It has been done.
From wikipedia:
> The ritual was performed in the Slovene language by a free peasant who, selected by his peers, in the name of the people of the land questioned the new Prince about his integrity and reminded him of his duties. Later, when the Duchy of Carinthia had fallen to the Habsburgs, the idea that it was actually the people from whom the Duke of Carinthia received his legitimation was the basis of the Habsburgs' claim to the unique title of Archduke.
Beats the crap out of 'ordained by the heavens'. What never ceases to amaze me is that good solutions to lots of things have been found over time and were lost again.
Well, I think this is not the case in practice, only in ideal. Russia is democratic by definition (far more so than China is communist), so is almost all of South America, at least a third of Africa, most of Europe, and several Asian countries including India (Which just had the biggest democratic election in the world), and most of coastal Asia. There are a few in the middle east, but those have yet to really take fruit. Democracy in practice only means the people get to choose from one or more preselected individuals.
Well, the bulk of the governments today can be classified as Democracy, Monarchy, and Constitutional Monarchy. On the whole, if we average the types of government, you'll find that Constitutional Monarchy actually has a higher middle class wealth, more freedom, and less 'mysterious disappearances' than the republics. I've seen some pretty bad republics in my travels.
I'm afraid that in a government of rampant spying, secret laws, secret courts, and secret gag letters, believing that people aren't being silenced because you don't hear about it requires your own personal leap of faith.
One of the strengths of the US Government is that they're smarter than to whisk people away in the middle of the night. That's why they're around and the KGB isn't. It remains to be seen whether that's a good thing or not.
Also, CIA != NSA. CIA are the people doing field work and writing intelligence assessments, NSA is doing mass surveillance/SIGINT. Believe it or not - they compete for funding and attention from their paymasters like any bureaucracy.
Recursive FOIA requests. Very neat :) Breadth first or depth first is going to be their main problem. The plus for the government is that if they lose a document they now have an off-site backup. Presumably the CIA is not playing ball because they have their own backups.
In Canada, similar requests had partially liberated the information contained in the Coordination of Access to Information Requests System that the Federal Government used to centrally manage ATI requests (our FOIA), so that people could do this kind of recursive research. The Conservatives disbanded the database in 2008 in order to remove this resource from being the target of ATI requests, and make it harder to get information to the public.
I use MuckRock to FOIA the CIA quite often, and they are probably the third-worst agency to deal with (behind the NSA and the US State Department). They don't even accept FOIA requests via email!
I really appreciate these guys following through with this. I've benefited from the information they have set free. That we have to pull it kicking and screaming out of the bureaucracies is sad.
Nice try, but likely nothing will happen. Even if a judge in a moment of insanity ruled in your favor, the CIA will simply say it's a national secret or whatever and nothing will change.
The parent didn't say "don't bother trying". They said it's not going to work. Definitely do it. But don't be shocked and surprised when it gets swept under the rug.
Edit: In fact it's important to do it, just so everyone can watch the system wrap it all up and dispose of it in full view. And then there will be less of the false choice inherent in "See how great our system is, you're allowed to criticise! Not like those Russians!"
Knowing in advance that your reasonable request will be denied allows you to use that knowledge to your advantage.
Instead of waiting for the results, you simply plan another step ahead, and you show the farce, as it unfolds, to the legislative branch overseers and directly to the public.
Rather than "Why are you breaking transparency laws?", the question then becomes, "If it is so obvious the executive is breaking the laws you wrote, and the judiciary is letting them get away with it, why do you keep signing their paychecks?"
After it is clear that there is a problem, and absolutely no one entrusted with the power to fix it is willing to do so, then the peaceful demonstrations and violent riots can start, as appropriate. But it is always wise to explore all diplomatic options before putting lives, liberty, and property at risk.
"Don't waste your time on this approach" isn't defeatist, it's saying you'll get a better outcome with another approach. There are lots of worthless activities that will change nothing, and a very few that are effective. It's important to think about how to invest.
That said.. It's more helpful to hear alternate ideas than just "this won't work".
