On Jun 12, 2013, at 3:49 AM, unix_fan <[email protected]> wrote: > 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.
Heller's a situation where the courts are doing their job of protecting our rights. Clapper v Amnesty Int'l, for example, is an example of SCOTUS doing the opposite. > 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. > The current *scale* of data collection may make people uncomfortable, but it > has been ruled to be legal. Period. It's not a maybe. Separate but equal was ruled to be "legal" at one point too. > 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. Calling back to an earlier hypothetical I used. If the Courts had ruled that "slaughtering civilians in the desert" was legal, the "honorable response" to discovering your employer is doing so is just to quit? NOT to try and affect any sort of actual positive change in the world? > > 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. Name a couple of "other mechanisms" Snowden had available to him, remembering that the US Congress, in classified intelligence briefings demanded from DNI Clapper an answer to a simple question "Are you gathering telephone records on millions of Americans" and the bastard had the balls to stand there and lie and say "No, we are not." Which avenue for dealing with classified/TS abuse was Snowden going to avail himself of when the DNI was willing to lie to Congress to cover up the activities of the intelligence community? > It was legal and he had a moral, contractual, and legal obligation to > safeguard that classified data. Well, there's some debate about where his "moral obligation" was with regards to that data, or we wouldn't be having this conversation right now. :-) > 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. "Keeping one's word" and "just following orders" have about the same amount of weight to me, when used as defenses against covering up (or worse, participating in) State sponsored immoral behavior. >> > 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 And it seems that what the State learned from Carnivore was that it was imperative to make sure those who you were ordering to do the monitoring and surveillance were legally obligated to not only keep quiet about it, but to actively deny it was happening. Because that's how Carnivore got "discussed" was when ISPs rose up en masse and said "hell no". So the State was forced to eventually retire the program. But they made sure not to repeat the mistakes of previous iterations of snooping on its citizenry, and said "OK, well, the next time we start snooping on everyone, make sure nobody's allowed to even talk about the existence of the program, so that it becomes harder for the public to rise up in opposition to it." And it wasn't until someone started actively defying that mandate that the public got wind of what was being done in their name, and started to raise holy hell over it. D
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