Derek Balling <[email protected]> writes: Mario, > > >This was sanctioned by FISA. You can bitch about FISA all you want, but it and >several other checks serve as the due process. Work to change FISA if you >believe it flawed. Corporations are people by law, though I think that's one >of the more stupid judgements of this century, and I work toward righting that >wrong. It's still the damn law. >> > > >What do you do when the Courts charged with protecting our rights refuse to do >so? Throughout the history of the Republic, courts have made good and bad calls. You seem to have no problems repeatedly citing Heller from the same Supremes as a defense of your rights.
> >At what point do we acknowledge that the game is rigged, and there is nobody >watching the watchers, and that if you expect the Courts to ACTUALLY care >about your rights, you're just fooling yourself? That's a bit dramatic, and I don't subscribe to such a bleak outlook. Much of the discomfort I have in defending Snowden's actions is that inevitably demands subscribing to a "end justifies the means" doctrine. Soldiers have a duty not to follow *illegal* orders, Snowden is not a soldier. He has no duty to follow any orders.No, it's an extreme example I chose, that even those expected to follow orders are still expected to think critically about those orders in terms of their legality. I've said and written several times at my work that I can follow stupid directives, but not illegal ones. And in my 33 year career, I've encountered situations where I had to research if what I've been directed to do was legal. This isn't an academic exercise for me. I'll refer you to my USENIX 2010 Invited Talk on Employee Monitoring, slide 49, titled "Is it Legal?". Once the determination is in, I don't expect the right to throw a public tantrum or engage in sabotage because I don't agree with it. The current *scale* of data collection may make people uncomfortable, but it has been ruled to be legal. Period. It's not a maybe. I expect that people I hire follow legal directions. If employees have problems carrying out legal directives, there is an honorable response: quit, or get reassigned to other duties. Again, not an academic exercise: In the early 90s, I was asked to work on offensive weapons. I respectfully declined, knowing damn well that aerospace jobs were declining in number. It wasn't illegal, it was just on the wrong side of the line for me. The devil is in the detail: "How" should that soldier proceed when faced with a possibly illegal order? A court *had* weighed in and this was legal. If he was so bothered by what he saw, and didn't believe the FISA protocol was adequate, he could have exhausted a number of other avenues to appeal and air his concerns. >> >>I think you should _first_ follow proper avenues for appeal. If one still feels a strength of conviction after that first rebuff, then sure - engage in civil disobedience, protest, etc. >> > > >I think history shows us that the people who stand out in a crowd, demanding >the attention of their superiors are the ones who get drummed out >(troublemakers) and start to have the fictional loner backstory filled out for >them in advance by the powers that be "just in case its needed". The only way >to get ahead of that routine, which happens time and time again, is to get out >there AHEAD of the government's propaganda machine, so you can make your own >first impression, and not have the government spoonfeed to the media the >soundbites to be used in all media coverage describing you. There are numerous examples in history of people pushing relentlessly until the system changed. We have a sharply differing view of history, and mine is not colored by your bleak assessment of government. The latter is a a human institution like many others, subject to the same bell curve. We will simply leave it as disagreement that the "only" way to deal with state secrets you don't like is to make *individual* judgement calls about whether those secrets are worth publishing or not. We have confidential ethics hot lines and other mechanisms available to report wrong doing, including things like the False Claims Act, or the UK Bribery Act, which have serious teeth to them. Snowden had choices and went for the shhot first, ask questions later approach. Unilaterally doing a classified data dump and then fleeing to China of all places, doesn't exactly give me warm fuzzies about this guy's critical thinking capabilities. Sorry if I disappoint very good friends on this list, but I'm not a Snowden fan, though this is far from a black and white case. I can see thinking people having compelling arguments for either side. > > >What are the "compelling arguments" for maintaining secrecy? > It was legal and he had a moral, contractual, and legal obligation to safeguard that classified data. If keeping one's word has such little value to you, does keeping one's written commitments have greater value? Does your employer expect you to abide by confidentiality agreements or not? I've signed tons of NDAs in my career, not a single one of them had a "But you can go ahead and blab about it if *you* individually decide it's not right" clause. Maybe LinkedIn can add a checkbox for those who reserve the right to make judgement calls about the confidentiality of our employer's data. If that's what one believes, why hide it. It's not like our enemies don't know that the US gov't could get this data. Heck, one could argue that it's almost certain that "our enemies" understood far better than American citizens do, just how corrupt, how rotten to the core, the government has become. One might EVEN argue that some of that is why we call them "our enemies" in the first place. > > >And maybe it scares us a little bit to think maybe they are, in just a little >bit, "right" about our gov't.We'll respectfully disagree. It may be >fashionable to loathe the government but I don't subscribe to this view. My >own experience is that I observe government workers every single day, doing >the right thing, overwhelmingly. That darned bell curve that rules large >numbers again. The 24 hour news cycle only spends time on one end of that >curve, because the other is simply expected behavior, and boring. I think Toobin captures the essence of my concerns here: >> >>http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/06/edward-snowden-nsa-leaker-is-no-hero.html > > >To quote the Toobin article: > > >The American government, and its democracy, are flawed institutions. But our >system offers legal options to disgruntled government employees and >contractors. They can take advantage of federal whistle-blower laws; they can >bring their complaints to Congress; they can try to protest within the >institutions where they work. But Snowden did none of this. Instead, in an act >that speaks more to his ego than his conscience, he threw the secrets he knew >up in the air—and trusted, somehow, that good would come of it. We all now >have to hope that he’s right. > > >I would argue that more "good" has come out of his "throwing the secrets up in >the air" than would EVER have come out of pissing upwind at the NSA or writing >to some bought-and-paid-for congresscritter. > > >He's convinced society to have a discussion about what our "leaders" are doing >in our name. A discussion that would never in a bajillion years have come >about through anything resembling the "proper channels". A discussion that >NEEDED to happen. > > History and facts simply do not support your assertion and capital letter exclamations. Discussion about government surveillance limits has been going on for years, it is hardly new (see e.g., Carnivore). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore_%28software%29
_______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
