On 1/11/2015 12:27 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Sun, Jan 11, 2015 at 7:14 AM, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 1/10/2015 12:54 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Sat, Jan 10, 2015 at 7:19 PM, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 1/10/2015 2:00 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Sat, Jan 10, 2015 at 12:24 AM, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 1/9/2015 3:11 PM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List wrote:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From:* meekerdb <[email protected]>
<mailto:[email protected]>
*To:* [email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>
*Sent:* Friday, January 9, 2015 2:45 PM
*Subject:* Re: Democracy
On 1/9/2015 1:08 PM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List wrote:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From:* meekerdb <[email protected]>
<mailto:[email protected]>
*To:* [email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>
*Sent:* Friday, January 9, 2015 12:25 PM
*Subject:* Re: Democracy
On 1/9/2015 4:55 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
Money becomes coercive under statism, because it becomes illegal to
use
alternative currencies, operate outside of the banking and taxation
system and so on.
>>Banks used to issue their own script and in principle anyone could do it.
The trouble with anarcho-capitalism is that there's nothing to prevent a
group from organizing, forming a "government", raising an army a
conquering people around them. In fact that's exactly the arc of
history. If you want anarchy you can go to Syria or Somalia right
now.
What you describe is not the political philosophy of anarchy; what
you
describe is life under warlords, and the susceptibility of anarchy
to
such organized groups of thugs.
Functioning anarchy would require a level of individual ethics that
does
not yet exist (or at least is not widespread). Anarchy is
vulnerable to
being destroyed by thuggery and mayhem; no doubt about that;
however it
should not be confused with that heartless outcome.
>>Every form of government will work well with perfect people.
That is side-stepping the point that some forms of social
organization
require a much higher degree of civic involvement than others do.
Exactly, and anarchy that functions as well as constitutionally
limited
democracy would require angels.
This overestimates the importance of things written in a piece of paper
and
underestimates the importance of social norms, culture and education.
The reason why I don't go and loot my neighbours is not because a piece
of
paper says I can't, or even because I am afraid of the police. Remove
this too
things and I still wouldn't do it. I suspect everyone participating in
this
discussion is the same. Why?
On the other hand, the Weimar constitution was powerless to stop the
nazis,
and the American constitution appears powerless to stop the NSA.
And I think you underestimate it. It is something any citizen can
point to as
a norm. Notice that everyone who complains about the NSA's invasion of
privacy
cites the Constitution as evidence their complaint is justified.
That is true, but it's far from the only argument. Now my question is: do
you
figure that people think that invasion of privacy without a warrant is
wrong think
that because of what the constitution says, or do you figure invasion of
privacy
offends their sense of morality and then they look for arguments to justify
their
position and find the constitution?
That's a good question, and the answer supports my point. When you poll
people and
ask if they think it's right to wiretap people suspected of plotting crimes
the
majority say yes. So in a way the Constitution informs and bolsters
people's
understanding of the importance of freedom from government surveillance.
If they
were just morally offended by surveillance then they would be equally
exercised
about AT&T, Google, Time-Warner, Verizon, and a dozen other corporate
organizations
that spy on them. But because they know the Constitution forbids the
government
from doing it they are much MORE offended when the government does it.
Without it they would have to give a long argument based the prior
abuses that
the founding fathers used to to support the right to privacy.
This would be a good argument had the Constitution actually succeeded in
preventing
total surveillance from the government on its own people. But it didn't.
But it did. The NSA is only allowed to track who-calls-who, not what is
said.
Unfortunately, after Snowden we know better.
No, we don't. First, while I approve of Snowden I don't think he *knows* everything
attributed to him.
One of the important tricks here is how they interpret the word "track". A secret
court(!!!) decided that storing data is not tracking if no human is looking at it. So
they can record your phone calls and the content of your internet communications and
then, if they get a court order, they can go look at it.
And that is wrong how?
But they don't really need to bother about these warrants. The neat "five eyes" system
allows the participants to spy on behalf of each other, circumventing these privacy
protections.
The NSA sent divers to place physical optical splitters on submarine cables. It stores
all the data in gigantic datacenters and has algorithms comb through it.
A slightly paranoid idea. It's much easier for them to get data other ways.
It infiltrated American companies, like Google, to install spying software on its
servers. It also infiltrated technical committees responsible for cryptography standards
to introduce backdoors in the implementation of cryptographic algorithms. These actions
make us all less safe. Even open source cryptography projects like TrueCrypt decided to
give up, because they were infiltrated by the NSA and realised they could do nothing
against it.
What makes you think it makes us less safe. I'd say part of the problem is it makes us
more safe and people think being safe is more important than privacy - and they are right
at least in the short run. The problem is the long run.
These are not the actions of an organisation that respects privacy.
Any intelligence agency worth it's salt is going to push to the limit of the law. Would
you expect, or want anything less? Would you be happy to hear, "Yeah, we could have found
he was conspiring to blow up that building, but we thought we should respect his privacy
when talking to Al Queda in Syria" Here's a good analysis of the technical aspects of the
situation:
http://bit-player.org/2006/room-641a
Brent
The courts recently ruled that putting a GPS tracking device on a car
without a
warrant was unconstitutional.
This tells us very little in a world where every single word in that sentence can be
subject to "interpretation" by a secret court.
Would you rather live in a nation with no Constitutional prohibition of
unreasonable
search and seizure or with one?
I would rather live in a nation with a Constitution that worked. If it doesn't work, it
might make things worse, by masking the problem.
Telmo.
Brent
I have to admit something though. I used to work in a lab not far from
Charlie
Hebdo. Seeing the terrorist act in a very familiar setting is incredibly
disturbing. It made me understand the excesses after 9/11 a bit better. A
part of
me feels that primordial "how dare they bring their medieval rules and
behaviours
to my backyard". It's human, no doubt.
Telmo.
Brent
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