US Government is hiding a secret court ruling about how it spies on Americans | Hacker News Reader

US Government is hiding a secret court ruling about how it spies on Americans

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1,079 pointshelterskelter2439 comments

"Wyden has also warned about a classified interpretation of Section 702 that he says multiple administrations have relied on and refused to declassify. “When it is eventually declassified,” he said in March, “the American people are going to be stunned that it took so long and that Congress had been debating this authority with insufficient information.”"

Spying on American citizens is a bipartisan point of agreement.

To be fair, the one raising this point, Wyden, is a Democrat.

The one raising the point. Apparently standing alone amongst otherwise bipartisan support of spying on Americans.

Wyden is the ranking D member of the intelligence committee (ie would be chair under a D senate). He's not some maverick bucking his party, this is the expression of the party position.

If that were the case, they'd have done something about it before. This doesn't appear to be new.

Hopefully the party learned something from Biden’s four years.

Fun fact, parties, and more importantly the people in them change and evolve over time. They aren't stagnant. For example, we see this with the Republican party which use to hold claim to things like law and order. But times change, and so do parties.

So just because something was a certain way 20 years ago doesn't mean it's still that way today. That would be CRAZY to suggest that.

They have "evolved" to the point there is no difference between them anymore

Yes, obviously they agree on everything.

Unfortunately they have, on the key things that everything else flows from. That doesn't mean that can't change at some point. That would take sizeable evidence that isn't there yet, though.

Republicans have de facto done away with the Constitution, and the rule of law, and are shockingly corrupt - are you saying that democrats are on board with that?

If not, then they're not the same.

We get this in the UK too, Tory party literally steal £Billions using emergency powers in COVID to send money to companies totally unrelated to the contracts made. Then a Labour MP has a complex mortgage arrangement and misses paying a few thousand pounds of tax. And people come in with 'they're all the same'.

It's stunningly moronic to entirely ignore the scale of issues in this way. Well, moronic or intentional deception.

Republicans and Democrats in terms of their cultural values are completely different.

Where they are not so different is in terms of the economic policies they create. One often notices that a few years later, Democrats extend and expand the Republican's policies.

Who started a class war and financial deregulation in the 1980s? Raegan.

Who enabled total deregulation? Clinton the in 90s with help and council from the Secretary of the Treasury Larry Page. By unshackling the banks from any rules, the Washington bureaucracy would enable the conditions for the 2008 financial crash.

And who does Obama appoint to oversee the 2008 financial crash? Larry Page.

Both parties have totally betrayed the American people in favor of the American oligarchs in terms of economic policy.

Who benefits from deregulation and offshoring? Not the now bankrupt rust belt states. Who benefits from bailouts for the banks but no bailouts for the average person? The Wall Street insiders.

There is billions in overt corruption, and you're right, that's wrong. But trillions that have been stolen from the average person via quantitative easing and given to big business to buy back their own shares.

They're on board with doing away the rule of law, yes.

When in power, did they do something against the NSA blatantly breaking the law, illegally surveilling hundreds of millions of citizens? No.

Did the 99.9% of them not named Lina Khan do something to uphold the existing antitrust laws? No.

Did they time and time again change the rule of law to suit corporate donors, lobbyists, megacorps? Yes.

Did they jail people who were actually trying to help uphold the rule of law by reporting on illegal torture facilities? Yes. [0]

> Then a Labour MP has a complex mortgage arrangement and misses paying a few thousand pounds of tax. And people come in with 'they're all the same'.

Arresting thousands of grandmothers for holding up some cardboard, and defending it, is enough to show that they're representing the same interests. How much privatization did they actually undo over the last 30 years? Right, none, they either directly aided it or looked the other way.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kiriakou#2012_indictment_...

> It's stunningly moronic

Lacing your message with insults neither emphasizes your point nor bolsters your credibility. democrats have assaulted the 2nd amendment, while enjoying all the benefits of having armed security for themselves. Hence, my original comment that they are just a uniparty, there is no right and left.

Taking AIPAC money for instance.

I wish this were true. My take after watching him for years is that he's uniquely equipped to evaluate these issues in a way his peers are not.

Given that a group of people is not typically of a single mind about the vast array of things for which a position might be expressed [0], the continued presence of Wyden reflects an ambivalence within the group and/or a controlled opposition to cite when the music stops.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice

President Obama was the President of the United States when he went on late night TV and assured everyone that the government didn't spy on Americans at all, after Wyden's warnings and the Snowden revelations.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/08/06/209692380...

Wyden is an aberration. He (unfortunately) does not represent the party on these issues.

That's Wyden as Wyden, not because he is a Democrat. Some of the strongest proponents of these intelligence authorities, and in many cases the literal authors of bills expanding these powers, have been leading Democrats e.g. Feinstein.

There is no credible version of history where Democrats as a party are not enthusiastic supporters of these surveillance powers. They've been actively complicit the entire time.

There’s still a sizable portion of the party as of right now that is against surveillance powers in a way that doesn’t really exist on the other side.

The Republican Party doesn’t really have an equivalent to a progressive caucus. AOC and Bernie Sanders are highly influential Democratic caucus members on record against state surveillance, with one of those two being a top candidate for the 2028 presidential elections. There is no such dynamic in the Republican Party.

They do. It's the entire Libertarian wing of the party.

I’ll concede that you are right, the libertarians are there. Rand Paul, Josh Hawley, they’re there.

Let’s look at the voting record.

The majority of house Democrats opposed being up debate on the FISA section 702 extension.

19 house Republicans joined the majority democrats in opposing the extension.

I’d say this still paints a picture of a Democratic Party being far less willing to extend FISA, and actually being majority opposed.

H. Res. 1175, 119th Congress

How much comes from this being the minority party in the 119th Congress? Note that when FISA section 702 was extended in April 2024, the House was 147 Democrats in favor, 126 Republicans in favor, 59 Democrats opposed, and 88 Republicans opposed.

When the other guys have control of the government, it is to your party's advantage to deny additional powers to the government. When your guys are in power, vote away to add more power to that. That's just human nature, and has been a staple of political history since the founding of American democracy.

Exactly right. The inutile minority sees it as their job to make a stink. It's all for show when the vote passes. They are not voting independently, they are rounded up before a vote to ensure success or failure. The vote itself is not what determines a bills passage or not, it's all the strings being pulled before hand; the lobbying, the alliances, the bargaining.

You're being very kind. Many people in Congress know that their base is overwhelmingly against this, so the corrupt ones (the vast majority, especially any with good committee assignments) vote against it only if they're sure there's absolutely no chance of it failing. Whether or not they're currently in power doesn't matter. There's horsetrading even between parties to make sure donor/intelligence-supported bills will pass, but also to give people whose elections might depend on it the opportunity to vote against them.

The last thing that Republicans want is another America First libertarian troublemaker in Congress, and the last thing that Democrats want is some lecturing lefty. It's about business, not beliefs. Also, it's probably increasingly about blackmail.

When this math somehow fails (which happens every once and a while if somebody surprises them), it throws everything into chaos.

> Many people in Congress know that their base is overwhelmingly against this

I have learned that "overwhelmingly against" is a useless concept in politics. The important question is "do they care about it enough to sway their vote?"

There is probably overwhelming support for Ukraine to defend itself in the US (and Europe), but very few people are willing to change their vote based on Ukrainian interests over their own {financial security, culture war, pet issue (abortion, guns, Epstein List, etc)}. If it's not a top-5 issue, it's not relevant to a political campaign.

2A voters and rabid anti-choice voters are polarized enough to actually show up at the capital or threaten their representatives. Extremely few people will dot at for issues lower down the priority list.

I'm surprised so many people miss this dynamic on so many topics. It's politics 101 to flip flop based on who gets credit, what the news cycle is pushing at that moment, which specific right/topic it applies to etc and then blame the opponent for the same action they themselves took or will take at another point in time. All the while the constituents argue about how their representative or party is somehow superior.

> I'm surprised so many people miss this dynamic on so many topics.

It's because the overwhelming majority of people, including the large majority of 'educated, "informed', Democrat voters', remain even as of 2026 far too tribal and addicted to cheering for the team they've been cheering for.

Another thing is that facing this reality is very scary. It's much easier to sleep at night if you believe that most of it isn't a show, including most of the tribe they've been voting for. The alternative is to admit that most of it is all one big theatre, and they've been scammed for their whole lives. That's another thing, admitting one has been scammed is painful and makes many feel like they're stupid, that they should've known better. Most much rather just not think about it too hard and believe "in the good of people".

In a sense I'm surprised that you're surprised as it's quite basic and well-studied human psychology.

Of course in reality the situation is even worse, as pessimizer aptly points out in a sibling comment.

> 'educated, "informed', Democrat voters'

The mismatched quotes are bothering me more than they ought to. :P

Not to distract from your main point, of course. You’re right. Democracy does allow the public to have some effect on policy but primarily it’s a mechanism for manufacturing the consent of the governed.

> It's because the overwhelming majority of people, including the large majority of 'educated, "informed', Democrat voters', remain even as of 2026 far too tribal and addicted to cheering for the team they've been cheering for.

It feels like you might be doing the same thing, just in the other direction. Any time a political party does something that is positive for Americans, it should be cheered and rewarded.

I still remember 62 Democrats voting against the Patriot Act while being labelled as traitors. We can cynically call them theatrics, or we could reward them for doing what is right in order to promote them doing more of the right things. The positive response to incentives is a basic and well-studied human psychology.

No, you still don't get it. There is ample evidence that the large majority of those 62 are only willing to do so if they're 100% sure it's going to pass anyway. This means their only goal is to gain brownie points, without actually supporting it.

That should not be rewarded, it should be punished. Ironically, it's even more harmful than voting in favor of it when it's going to pass. It's literally the worst thing one can do, because it muddies the waters.

The very few who clearly would vote against it even if it might not pass, yes, those should be rewarded.

I understand the point of politicians playing politics, but your accusation requires more than conjecture. I would love to see the ample evidence you reference. Otherwise, what I see are 3 public votes in 2001, 2005, and 2011.

Each time there was one party that voted against it in significantly larger numbers. Sometimes it even cost them their seats because it was such an unpopular stance (i.e. Feingold). In 2011 it was a vote directly against a popular President from their own party. Meanwhile, the party that supposedly has all the "Libertarians" were almost unanimous in support for each vote.

> When the other guys have control of the government

The most revealing part of the cycle comes around about once a decade, when for two years, the same party holds the White House and a majority in both houses of congress. They can pass whatever they really want and can't blame the other party when the things they've loudly claimed they stand for in every election, don't actually change. That's the only time those who are paying attention get to clearly see the difference between what the party claims to stand for when campaigning and what they really stand for. It's a sobering lesson and both parties do it equally.

That's when we see some extreme stage management to obfuscate the 'long con' both parties are running. Yes, a few things get passed but it's amazing how little of their long-time agenda really becomes law (or becomes law that's loop-holed and/or nerfed). It's so surprising how many politicians in the majority party suddenly discover rationalizations to not vote for a bill their party supports and which they should be for. Weirdly, these bills always fail to pass by just one or two votes. What are the odds of that happening - over and over again and only during those super-majority years?

Somehow, the politicians in the majority party from the 'safest' districts are the ones who suddenly find rationalizations to vote against what they loudly campaigned on (and will shamelessly campaign on again). Why is it only the politicians who stand little risk of losing their seat in the next election? Conversely, the politicians from the districts most at risk of losing to the other party somehow find the "courage of their principles" and don't sell out on traditional 'party-line' campaign issues. Ultimately, the big-money lobbyists feeding both political machines don't care how their goals are achieved or who votes for what. All that matters is any strongly worded law that goes against their interests either fails to pass by one vote or gets watered-down in committee and then passed.

It's a dog and pony show though, they take turns being the one to blame. How did the same record look when democrats were in power? I bet most democrats opposed the debate then and most republicans supported it.

As a libertarian, saying that there is a "Libertarian" wing of the Republican party is specious, especially in 2026. The Massie primary showed what happens if you actually go against the fash.

Rand Paul seems to be coasting on his father's reputation of having libertarian principles, while mainly sticking his head up for "culture war" bullshit. His main skill seems to be finely walking this line - show me a libertarian cause he openly supports that bucks a "culture war" narrative.

And I have no idea why you would have even mentioned Hawley. In general every politician talks a good game appealing to some libertarian causes (because most individuals want freedom, duh!), while readily supporting authoritarianism in some way or another.

(Props to Wyden on this issue, though)

"entire wing" makes it sound very meaningful for a group that has had no effective power for the last 10+ years.

“Moderate Democrats” say hello

Give data, please. Without it, this assertion is useless:

> There’s still a sizable portion of the [Democratic] party as of right now that is against surveillance powers in a way that doesn’t really exist on the [Republican] side.

H. Res. 1175, 119th Congress

Majority of Democrats voted not to extend FISA, only a small handful of Republicans joined them to block debate on the bill.

And what was the vote on the same issue when democrats were in power?

No, they voted to not bring the extension bill to the floor. This was a vote on a house rule, which is necessary to affirm before debating and voting on the bill itself.

The ones that speak up get the "if you don't have anything to hide" treatment. I rarely, if ever, hear that line come from the left.

Show me your nudes then.

Publish your bank accounts.

Publish your private messages to friends, family, partner.

These idiots who say "nothing to hide" usually have the most to hide, and lose. And they can't see how something yesterday was legal and today isn't, can still be used against you.

I seem to remember there was some left wing male influencer who posted his dick pics somewhere and said "there, now they can't be leaked"

but my daily dick pics to local politicians is "a custodial matter" apparently

They only want the pics you want to hide, duh.

Nothing to hide? Then publish the Epstein files. All of them.

they have a libertarian caucus and a hard right MAGA caucus and those lines get blurred depending on who is winning and who is donating

May I suggest tweaking your mental model. Mike Johnson was THE MOST vocal opponent of mass surveillance, he was supposed to be the one to whip a republican congress to finally end Section 702.

Then he was made Speaker and literally overnight, flipped. In his words "I went to the SCIF and got the confidential briefing from sort of the other perspective on that, to understand the necessity of Section 702 of FISA and how important it is for national security. And it gave me a different perspective."

What his "briefing" was we can only guess. But there is a pattern on BOTH sides of the aisle they people are against mass surveillance, until they are put into positions of power and access to compartmentalized, classified info - and then they aren't. (for the record please dont interpret this as defense of anyone aforementioned, if you think that you're misreading me)

He finally got shown his personal blackmail folder, I assume.

If there is widespread illegal spying, any current or future public figure would have to be a priority.

> What his "briefing" was we can only guess. But there is a pattern on BOTH sides of the aisle they people are against mass surveillance, until they are put into positions of power and access to compartmentalized, classified info - and then they aren't.

It seems like there are two plausible explanations for this.

The first is that they have a list of atrocities allegedly prevented by the system and most politicians are too witless or spineless to ask the question of whether they could also have been prevented in a variety of other ways.

The second is that they're using the system to e.g. influence public opinion / elections and then once they feast their eyes on the one ring, most politicians aren't sufficiently inclined to throw it into the volcano.

Third - a rogue IC that doesn't fully answer to congress or/nor the president

The cynical (wizened) part of me has to wonder how much of Feinstein's support for surveillance maps back to how many of her constituents see the intelligence community as an addressable market.

To that point, she was on the Committee for Intelligence, so of course she was going to lean the direction of giving Intelligence Community what they wanted. I'd expect someone on Government Oversight to be the one to try to reign it back in, but doubtful any in modern times have the moral fortitude to push back especially under Comer's leadership.

> she was on the Committee for Intelligence

So is Wyden.

In American politics it seems like all the good ones side democrat, but it's few enough that most of the democrat party still isn't good ones.

Voting for the lesser of two evils is still voting for evil. The good people simply aren't attracted to power or acting as representatives. The good people don't step forward to try and move the levers of the system, because when they do they learn very very quickly that they're not up to "playing the game". Because they usually aren't sociopaths.

And mindful people know that by defeating the dragon you become the dragon, which they do not wish. So everyone else is stuck with the old dragon.

Voting is not a thing God created and said you must never vote for evil. Voting is just a thing you can do that has outcomes. Sometimes voting one way results in a better expected outcome than voting the other way or not voting. In these cases you should do it.

Spying on American citizens and going together on Lolita Express to Epstein island...

Nah, mostly republicans

I love the both siding argument springing up right before election day.

You know what I love? We have spent over 100 years going back and forth on party politics. It has done nothing to move the bar on justice. The democrats silently allow the same things under the radar while the republicans do things out in the open. Its the carrot and the stick approach. Populism isn't working. We need to focus on systemic change. Both parties are filled with institutionalists that will do nothing to stop the real abuses because they gain significantly by keeping things they way they are..

State an actual solution, you're just making a covert both sides argument under the guise of a longer rant.

It is both sides. Republicans accelerate it, but Democrats don't shut it down when they have the chance. Obama and Biden had 12 years to fix it.

Obama certainly was for this; he didn't shy away from extrajudicial assassination of an American citizen in a foreign land, executed by our military.

It is both sides. Wyden is a (welcome) aberration (on this topic).

Yep, Obama is a mass murderer just like the rest of them. People tend to not care until the oppression comes home and is in plain view.

Obama wasn't always pro-surveillance though. He campaigned on ending the NSAs domestic spying program. Only after he was elected did he suddenly praise the NSA publicly and greatly expand their spying powers.

Sounds more like he was pro-surveillance but knew how unpopular it was.

Obama taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. He spoke passionately about the dangers of domestic spying programs and against the Patriot Act. Maybe he was lying the entire time just to be elected, but he was extremely convincing.

Personally, I suspect that once in office he was either shown something that scared him so much that it genuinely made him believe that violating the rights of every American citizen was necessary, or he was strong armed into supporting what they were doing and expanding their abuses. I imagine the NSA had no shortage of dirt on him and his family just as they must have on every politician, CEO, parent, and child in the country.

I feel like this is a reasonable but nearly-impossible-to-prove take. Maybe this is why everything goes uniparty.

Yes, just another lying or compromised politician.

What? The guy who was killed was actively committing violence and had done so multiple times before. Continuing to evade capture isn’t a get out of jail free card to keep evading the US and keep making bombs.

The guy got more chances than the average US resident who would get shot by the cops for less

The guy who was killed was a propagandist. Also his children were killed.

> The guy got more chances than the average US resident who would get shot by the cops for less

Using violations of rights to justify more violations of rights. This makes a lot of sense!

I was reading his Wikipedia page and it makes me want to seek out some of his writings to get an idea of the thought process of his followers. I won't be doing that though because I'll probably be put on a watchlist. It's the same fascination I have about traditional cults and really anyone who has extreme/fringe beliefs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki

The constitution is clear: he had a right to a trial by jury.

You're right, but bringing up the assassination of a terrorist just isn't convincing to a lot of people, regardless of it should be.

Luckily there are other things that all reasonable people will find it hard to disagree with: The Obama government crackdown of Occupy Wall Street and his appointment of one of the fathers of the CIA torture program as NatSec Advisor, who promptly went on to jail whistleblowers of torture with Obama vouching for it.

Not sure why they have to provide a solution in order to talk about the issue.

The only solution is to elect better people. I know some people who hoped that Trump would be that in 2016 but he is just more of the same.

I do disagree with grandparent that nothing has changed; the Supreme Court has shored up the First Amendment rights over the last 50 years and with Chatrie v. United States it looks like they are expanding Fourth Amendment protection.

Now if the Executive and/or Legislative ignore those protections then not much can be done.

Similar to Denver, city votes out Flock, Mayor does a backdoor. Unless they elect someone new and/or bring the Mayor up on procedural charges or something then nothing will change.

> I know some people who hoped that Trump would be that in 2016 but he is just more of the same.

Trump's corruption is on such a different scale that calling him "more of the same" reads as a both sides argument.

Saying that calling out Trump's corruption while also calling out everyone else's corruption is a both sides argument reads as a my side doesn't have problems argument.

Trump sucks. So does Pelosi, so does Bush and Clinton. What, we need to rank how much they suck?

JFC man, if it's important to you to know how much each of them screwed you, then build a table or something. To me the degree doesn't matter because a little is bad enough.

I think you hit the nail on the head. It IS important to know how much each one screwed you. A quick search shows various outlets saying Trump has enriched himself to the tune of between $1.6B and $4B during his presidencies. Doing the same search on Biden gets estimates of $15M from books and speaking, and a Republican-led House influence peddling page alleges as much as $20M having been received by "the Bidens and their associates".

Using that scale as a proxy Trump is two orders of magnitude more corrupt than Biden.

I think we can all agree that Trump is the most corrupt we have seen for a long time. but It doesnt change that carrot and the stick problem. There are people operating to destroy freedom using these people as figureheads to push an authoritarian agenda, on both sides of the isle. Until people wake up to that, we have no chance to change this.

> The only solution is to elect better people. I know some people who hoped that Trump would be that in 2016 but he is just more of the same.

The system is rigged in such a way where that isn't a possibility. Look at the history of our country. ITS NOT WORKING.

The system has to change before we can elect better people. I cant believe I have to point this out with all thats going on... Every election the same arguments and the same responses.

So to fix the system, people should throw up their hands, not vote and just complain about it in the comments instead?

I'll vote in primaries for the candidate that most represents my views and continue to not let perfect be the enemy of good on election day. Lip service and small improvement officials are always much better than officials that negatively target me or my community.

No. We have to direct our energy to a different way of doing things. Voting inside of a corrupt system not working. Its like going into a mafia controlled city and voting for criminals expecting different results. How many decades need to elapse for this to be clear to you?

Hey I found the person who's the reason there's a fully equipped contingent of the National Guard in every major city.

>Trump would be that in 2016 but he is just more of the same.

Trump is not more of the same. He actually changed my stance on people being evil and beyond redemption.

Weird you don't feel the same obligation. Recommending more of the same is always safe somehow, even when it continually fails. The ability of certain people to implicitly trust the system that is now headed by a wrestling valet game show host is infinite.

Will you still believe in it when he gets a third term?

> covert both sides argument

As if somebody should be embarrassed about this. Extreme partisans think "both sides are doing it" is a logical fallacy, because of course their side isn't doing whatever you're talking about, if it's bad.

How can you change anything when the system is built with a fundamental flaw, the constitution never incorporated ethics, it was supposed to be up to the people to vote in ethical people, but that failed. The ones that benefit are corrupt and won’t change it, and good luck on getting enough people voted in power with a conscience to change it and not be swayed by power and money.

Part of the solution is to make bribery illegal so that people are less likely to be swayed by money. It'll be hard to get the people who have been stuffing their pockets with cash in exchange for selling out the American people to agree to limit their ability to do that now. Instead we're going in the opposite direction with the recent Supreme Court ruling making bribery legal as long as you call it a "tip" or "gift" after the public official gave you what you wanted.

> We have spent over 100 years going back and forth on party politics. It has done nothing to move the bar on justice.

You think there have been no advancements in "justice" since 1926? Either you are being hyperbolic, have no knowledge of history or you have a very idiosyncratic definition of justice.

What are the advancements?

There are people alive today who lived under Jim Crow laws. Is there any argument you would like to make that getting rid of them and enacting the other associated legislation in the 60s was not an advancement?

for starters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_rights_movement but if you have no knowledge of American history not sure a hn thread is right place to start

People who see the world in black and white are incapable of telling the difference between a shade of dark gray and light gray.

It's all one side as far as I'm concerned and always has been.

It literally is both sides though. Congress, courts, and executive all love spying, have for decades. Do you have evidence that the Democrats have tried to curtail anything?

> Spying on American citizens is a bipartisan point of agreement

Has been. Make it a priority in primaries. It hasn’t been to date—the overlap of privacy concerned Americans and the lazy and nihilistic who reject the political process is almost a union.

To add to this, it's completely dumb to think that any party is necessarily the same over decades. Look around. Most of what you see today is reactionary. Hold on to party views from 10 or 50 years ago, and you won't get elected today. Both parties are in turmoil in terms of public support.

Historical "bipartisan did X" means nothing today. The time is always right now to define what a future party should be. It's a great time to destroy the old and reimagine the new.

> President Obama defended the U.S. government's surveillance programs, telling NBC's Jay Leno on Tuesday that: "There is no spying on Americans."

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/08/06/209692380...

I seem to remember that Senator Wyden's public warnings (over a decade ago) that the government was spying on Americans was one reason for President Obama to go on national TV and lie to Americans.

Senator Wyden has a long history of warning the public on surveillance abuses.

> Make it a priority in primaries.

lol what primaries?

the primaries where the person who won dropped out and was replaced with someone that literally no one voted for

It will never get declassified. Never. The people get weaker and more passive with time, the govt gets stronger and reckless and less accountable.

Please stop with the security/privacy nihilism, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27897975.

Why is this downvoted? OP is simply suggesting to give up, ignoring many intermediate victories in the war for privacy. Consider supporting https://www.eff.org/issues/privacy instead.

Agreed.

    You can't say this. We have no idea. There is nothing about (s/the law of physics/US history) that pushes (s/cancer cure/the right to privacy) a long time away.

Don't mind me, just repurposing one of your old comments to save time.

Can please someone explain the concept of a 'classified interpretation' [of law] to me like I'm 5? I know the concept exists, but I don't really understand how it can be in any way justified in any country that's even pretending to be a democracy?

Once you have secret courts and secret warrants, secret interpretation of the law seems like a natural, if not necessary, progression.

This is basically it.

Imagine, for example, a case is about someone disclosing the location of nuclear arms to their spouse. Maybe even accidentally. If they are brought up on charges about this, national security doesn't want the fact that a case is about nuclear weapons to be public information. They further don't want it disclosed who was told about them (as the spouse wouldn't be subject to charges). That's basically where a secret interpretation and ruling would ultimately enter. The courts can't disclose what the ruling was nor what the case was even fully about.

Why can't they? They can redact names of individuals in a case like that. "Oh some person who was married to some other person who works for some agency knows where nukes might be". That's not a risk.

They could even redact larger portions of the case and still release the interpretation in some form.

Because it's very hard to stop accidental or incidental information leaks. For an opinion to be rendered, generally they also attach the case facts which lead to that ruling. Heavy redaction means it becomes almost impossible to use that ruling as precedent but also runs a real risk of exposing state secrets. For example, which judge made the ruling? Well if you get that you can start pulling information about the days the judge was active and a short list of the people the judge was hearing cases for.

All it takes is 1 accidental redaction or someone who did something silly like using a black highlighter on a PDF and now where the nukes are stored is public information.

There's also simply information that can be gleaned just based on the location that the hearing is taking place. This came from x court in x district, well then it's likely a nuclear silo is roughly in that county or surrounding counties.

These courts don't have public lists of who was being tried.

The specific location of the court, and even identity if the judge, can be redacted. We don't have to use the case as precedent.

I’ll assume that there’s some fake district we can create in the system to attribute such things to, since normally the courts are in districts which may be too specific on their own.

But the resulting material would be like, (XXXX meaning redactions)

XXXX was accused of XXXX

Tried before judge XXXX in XXXX District court

The evidence was XXXX XXXX XXXX

The witnesses were XXXX XXXX XXXX

They were found (not) guilty

If anything could be unredacted it could potentially (?) be the bare fact that it was about nuclear secrets but you can’t really reveal anything else without giving majorly risky facts to bad actors.

The redactions of every document could require many full-time very security-cleared clerks (or take years to do if understaffed) and is of the highest importance since a single failure to redact, or operational error, may reveal the whole secret thing. Mostly, all the things need redacting, so either whole documents, or everything but the prepositions and articles is redacted.

Since it sounds like the concern here is about the public’s interest in monitoring to make sure no abuses are taking place (which is a value I do share), what part of this aim would be served by a redacted report like this?

Sounds like if one desperately wants some sort of excuse, this can be shoehorned to anything and everything. Exactly what 3 letter agencies would say to keep doing whatever nasty dirty unlawful and unconstitutional things they are doing on whims of current set of people in power.

Its still pretty lame and shows vast incompetence on all levels. Maybe I am a bit naive but correct solution is to tackle underlying problems, not just give up because thats what you basically suggest.

ok, so put a disclosure time on ruling. how how much time should pass so that information is non risk anymore? So you know that nukes locations got leaked, so what do you do? do you relocate the base? if not how sure can you be that this information is not accuired by enemies? So if you do not realocate the base you accept that this is acceptable risk. So might be that publishing the ruling is also acceptable?

> Because it's very hard to stop accidental or incidental information leaks.

It's really hard if it is in your interest not to stop accidental information leaks, because it is easier to bulk classify everything and blame this difficulty. There is no incentive to stop accidental leaks if you can always hide everything.

A federal court tried to conceal the identity of a judge who has been reprimanded.

Claude was able to work out who it was in less than 10min based on stringing together facts that remained and seemed irrelevant. Journalists uncovered the identity independently using different means. (The ability of Claude to do this was not revealed until the other journalists had gone public and confirmed the identity.)

This example requires a secret ruling but not a secret interpretation of the law.

Rulings are interpretations of the law.

2 parties bring up what they believe is the legal justification for their position in dispute and a judge rules on which is the correct position. If a party thinks the judge got the ruling wrong (interpreted the law wrong), they object and appeal.

> Imagine, for example, a case is about someone disclosing the location of nuclear arms to their spouse.

The location of most US nuclear weapons are public. Moreover, if you suspect that the location of some you intend to be secret may have been compromised then the obvious sensible response is "move them" rather than "keep even the legal theory of the case a secret forever".

This is why the primary ones whose location is intended to be a secret are on submarines -- submarines are easy to move around.

If you look at the history of secret interpretations / rulings, they are more like "retention of communications by the government is a pre-interception act". No specifics, very broad legal definitions of what it means for everyone's communications to be retained (and in this case, probably analyzed by AI systems for risk).

Yeah but they are only targeting bad people, so it's OK.

Everything you ever do will go in a data center. Forever.

Bluffdale.

privacy is a luxury only afforded to the most deserving who clearly are worthy of digital god hood , toil in the mines prole and watch your tongue

Yeah but I don’t use my real name online. /s

I can get the idea that for some cases it can be in the public's interest if specific court hearings are closed, or if it's secret that certain court hearings or entire cases even exist. There is a lot of potential of abuse (and a documented history of abuse), but at least the idea makes sense

But I can't see a public benefit to keeping the principles such a court uses secret

Why would you assume there needs to be a public benefit?

From warrantless wiretapping to extra judicial renditions, the US government has been a rogue state for sometime. Now they just have low-grade criminals and racists running the show, buddied up with media owners, O&G and the mic.

It’s a pretty obvious outcome. Attorney-client privilege applies to the executive branch of the government as much as it applies to anyone else, and not just in national security matters.

I am the first generation out of a dictatorship, the belief some folks have in their democratic processes always amazes, there is no law when secret courts and secret warrants are a thing.

Yet for some strange reason folks think secret agencies are bound by the same laws as regular police officers.

It is called "the dual state" [0]

At least in nazi Germany, the state was explicitly designed like that. Most people should never come into contact with the prerogative state and spend their lives in the normative state, as capitalism doesn't work well in a prerogative state. You need to believe that punishment doesn't come arbitrarily in order to follow the rules.

But of course, things are very different in the prerogative state, where actions have unclear consequences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dual_State

Not what you’re asking for, but see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_law#Secret_law_in_the_U....

It's not justified and it can never be. Keeping information secret is only justified if releasing it would put a person in serious danger or compromise a police/military operation. And even then it must be balanced against the public interest in transparency, strictly time limited and narrow scoped (no blacking out whole documents).

I don't see how releasing an interpretation of a law could ever compromise law enforcement. Or actually I know how, it's because it would prove the way they do mass surveillance is illegal.

The problem is modern America doesn't see it that way. Any time the government does something evil they just say it's for "national security" and no one questions them. It's like a Winter Soldier password that makes courts go blank and say yes to anything.

> Keeping information secret is only justified if releasing it would put a person in serious danger or compromise a police/military operation.

Sure, but the obvious pro-government response is “revealing that the government is doing bad things reflects badly on the government and damages its reputation at home and abroad.”

Which is true, of course!

This seems fairly obvious, clearly vast amounts of possible wrongdoing, once exposed, could genuinely damage reputation abroad to some degree.

So how did such a law ever survive scrutiny?

It seems like a blanket ban on exposure of nearly all possible wrongdoing.

> It seems like a blanket ban on exposure of nearly all possible wrongdoing.

And a proportional increase in power goes with that ban on exposing wrongdoing. Which is absolutely the goal of secrecy in government.

> “revealing that the government is doing bad things reflects badly on the government and damages its reputation at home and abroad.”

This is -incidentally- how the ancient English "state secrets privilege" got introduced into US law.

In the 1940's, godawful maintenance resulted in the crash of a bomber over US soil and the death of all three of the civilians on board the plane. The widows of the dead civilians sued the government and demanded the accident report. The government refused to provide the report, claiming the privilege because "national security", and courts all the way up to the Supreme Court agreed.

In the early 2000s, the accident report was declassified. Inspection revealed that the only real reason to refuse to release it was to both prevent government embarrassment and to avoid having to pay out -IIRC- nearly a quarter million in 1940's USD to the widows.

Given its enormous potential for unchecked abuse, along with the fact that the first ever invocation of it was abusive, courts should refuse to permit its use.

There is also a genuine case for National security in that - during the Second World War - releasing that information would (IMO) let the enemy know what maintenance was being held back, in bombers.

That war ended at some point.

Absolutely - but another war quickly replaced it (actually several did)

WRT to this instance - I would likely argue that 50 years should have been more than enough time keeping the embargo

The planes in question would have been obsolete by that point, also those planes from WW2 would have already been widely distributed among allied (including Soviet) countries

Wars quickly replace one another, how unfortunate!

Or we have just independently rediscovered why most regimes seek the justification of some external threats to strengthen their power over their population, 1984 style.

“The state makes war and war makes the state”

Yes, perpetual wars can be used as a tool of domestic control. The benign use is the rally around the flag effect. More harmful is using them as justifications to do anything without oversight. It’s one of the patterns shown by the vast majority of dictatorships and totalitarian governments. One of the aspects of fascism in Umberto Eco’s definition.

> ...releasing that information would (IMO) let the enemy know what maintenance was being held back, in bombers.

Nah. A single fucked-up maintenance shop is a single fucked-up maintenance shop. You can gut-check this by noticing that bombers weren't routinely falling out of the sky.

FedGov simply didn't want to be deeply embarrassed and wanted to try to wiggle out of paying a quarter million 1940s USD to the widows. Because they were unwilling to admit to their negligence and face the consequences, they did deep and lasting damage to the US justice system by introducing a mechanism that lets FedGov conceal nearly any evidence for any reason by uttering the words "state secrets privilege".

I feel the role of the Press is to root out these stories and publish them.

To me the defining moment of the Press abdicating their job was when the NYTs reported the second gulf war. This was the end of me reading it. The Sunday times was staple reading growing up.

https://newrepublic.com/article/146481/new-york-times-bury-s...

https://fair.org/home/20-years-later-nyt-still-cant-face-its...

Press increasingly started abdicating their job when journalism was no longer financially independent of the people and institutions it is supposed to scrutinize.

> Keeping information secret is only justified if releasing it would put a person in serious danger or compromise a police/military operation.

I think that’s A reason to keep information secret. The other is if it would reveal sensitive sources and methods (e.g., capabilities that it known, would impact the ability to use those methods).

Not saying the legal interpretation falls under that, but just mentioning it.

Really what it is is they had a lawyer say, "We can justify massive spying on citizens via [long long list of arguments and precedents]", the security apparatus would like to keep the veneer of legality that provides and knows if what they were doing was known there would be massive backlash and the law would be changed to make it more clearly illegal so they keep that interpretation secret. Basically going on the logic that they don't have to tell Congress or the Courts how they screwed up the 4th Amendment and it's not their job to fix it.

Likely these cases are part of the FISA court members appointed by Chief Justice currently John Roberts.

The chief justice also appoints the court FISA appeals go to.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_Justice_of_the_United_St...

different countries have different platforms or mechanisms where interpretations of law are discussed, in Belgium for example there are "rondzendbrieven" by which say judges discuss how to collectively misinterpret the law.

from a US perspective, isn't this diametrically opposed to the concept of "void for vagueness"? : the moment the interpretation of ostensibly non-vague law is under discussion by professionals is the moment said law is invalidated.

Any government side stepping law by interpreting law in any different manner than how it is written is breaking that law. In my opinion laws should not be interpreted at all and parliament should make any bug fixes rather than allowing courts or administration to interpret laws in any other way other than how its written down in the law.

> laws should not be interpreted at all

I get why that may reflexively seem right but such a blanket proscription would go off the rails and lead to unintended consequences you definitely don't want. It's simply not possible to write a law both specific enough yet broad enough to cover all cases. You or I can read a plainly worded law and think "There's no way this can be misconstrued, gamed or subverted" and, sadly, we'd be wrong.

> parliament should make any bug fixes rather than allowing courts or administration to interpret laws in any other way other than how its written down in the law.

It's certainly possible to theory-craft completely new and different governance, legal and justice systems from scratch which have different sets of constraints and trade-offs, but then it's a long conversation and unrelated to the existing U.S. system. If we limit ourselves to starting from what the existing U.S. system is and proposing modifications which are actually both constitutionally and logistically possible, then forcing all interpretation and clarification to be passed by congress would require monthly revisions, immediately breaking an already dysfunctional congressional system.

I think it's worth mentioning that in the U.S. system, judges interpreting application of laws passed by elected representatives is a feature not a bug. The U.S. system was designed to be adaptive and self-gating, so each of the three branches of the government have built-in checks and balances on the other two. Setting aside current politics, on a long time-horizon like the last ~50 years, I think the U.S. justice system, as imperfect as it is, is actually serving its designed purpose far better than the other two.

Usa is a common law based system where court judgements also serve as precedent rulings. It is more or less regarded as law even though its not passed by parliament/legislature.

There is another system, civil law based systems where law is passed by parliament and doesn't depend on any court precedents or court interpretation.

Might as well have just courts and call it as adaptive system instead of acknowledging that is isn't a good enough system. Europe has done better in this regard. Checks and balances hardly works in usa. Plenty of news on subverting various constitutional guarantees is example that it failed to work.

Proper democracy needs properly functioning non-lazy legislature. Making vague laws and calling it a day and leaving it for judges and lawyers to interpret based on whichever way the wind is blowing isn't democracy.

Legislature can also work 40 hours a week. Things can be more functional rather than dysfunctional. Active democracy and direct democracy where people can veto laws if necessary, in case representatives collude to pass draconian laws, would be the best kind of democracy. Only that can prevent erosion of rights.

All laws are interpreted.

You wrote "All laws are interpreted". If I put an asterisk on "interpreted" that can change the meaning you actually intended. Laws should not be interpreted. People need to learn how to properly use words with its actual meaning and write laws that are non-ambigous. Its not hard or impossible to write proper law in simple and easy to understand way. Feel free to interpret any law with its original meaning of the word and sentence structure. If it leaves room for interpretation, it is a vague law and not a good law.

> that can change the meaning you actually intended

Laws aren't made by one person. When everyone votes on them, they agree on the language because of how they interpret the words on the paper. The meaning is what the words on the paper say, which is interpreted by different people to mean different things before they even become law.

May be start attaching dictionary too as an appendix to law so that words are not interpreted the wrong way. Not having to explain meaning used to be common sense before double speak. But I guess now we need to idiot proof laws.

Read it as classified misinterpretation of laws, so that they can do illegal things and claim this loophole when caught.

Usa has constitution and its government more or less side steps it in many things. Might as well have no constitution. Usa is a jungle for practical intends and purposes compared to europe or any functional democracy. This is the problem with allowing interpretation of law rather than taking law as it is written. Someone somewhere can interpret it in completely twisted way and throw away the spirit of the law.

> I don't really understand how it can be in any way justified in any country that's even pretending to be a democracy?

You're not misunderstanding. It really is against everything most Americans think their government is allowed to do. To your question, the 'classified' part is what you think it is: secret. 'Interpretation' is the tricky part.

Unfortunately, laws and regulations aren't exactly clear and over time situations change so one important role of the court system is interpreting how, when and whether the words in a law apply in a specific context. Courts at different levels do this all the time as cases with unique situations arise. Sometimes it's as simple as deciding if a horse counts as a vehicle in a state law which says "no vehicles on this type of road." Assuming that ruling survives appeals without being overturned, the judge will have justified the basis and, hopefully, some clear reasoning for why a horse does or doesn't count as a vehicle. That judge's ruling then becomes part of the "precedent" (aka 'body of case law') attached to that law. In effect, such precedents become part of the law since they can clarify if and how the law applies in certain situations.

So whether some action is or isn't against a law can't solely be determined by just reading the law. You have to do some interpretation, which includes looking up any relevant precedents and weighing them. A single prior ruling from one local municipal court has low weight. The main job of the Supreme Court is resolving conflicting precedents set by lower courts, so a SCOTUS ruling has a lot of weight and multiple SCOTUS rulings over time, each successively refining and narrowing (or occasionally reversing) their prior interpretations, carries maximum weight. All of this happens in the open and, in the long run, I think SCOTUS manages to eventually get most things, if not perfect, pretty close to right.

Hence, the answer to "Is this legal" can be a bit tricky when the law is new or there aren't decades of court precedents. So lawyers have to do research and assess how a court would probably rule on a given situation. That's called "a formal legal opinion" and it's provided in writing, usually including research and justifications, like references to existing case law, as well as legal reasoning supporting the opinion. Anyone can hire a lawyer to research and assess if X action violates Y law (but if you get sued for relying on the lawyer's opinion, they won't be on the hook - you will). It's called an opinion because that's really all it is.

When a govt agency wants to know if they're allowed to do X under Y law, they ask the justice dept to assess and provide a formal opinion just like any company might ask their corporate counsel to. This is often routine but can be very consequential. Where this can go horribly wrong is when these govt lawyer opinions are classified top secret. For example, we all know torturing prisoners is against U.S. law, so in the 2000s the military and CIA asked the Bush Justice Dept to provide a secret legal opinion on whether certain 'enhanced interrogation' techniques met the legal definition of torture. And they got what they wanted, a written legal opinion that waterboarding isn't torture. The Obama Justice Dept issued a secret legal opinion that droning a teenaged American citizen in Somalia, who posed no exigent threat (but had the wrong Dad), did not meet the legal definition of murder. After it happened and was no longer secret, Senator Rand Paul was the only politician willing to stand on the floor of the senate and say killing a U.S. citizen without any legal due process was first degree murder authorized by a sitting U.S. President. While it's true his Dad was sort-of a terrorist (the real terrorists were happy to use him for propaganda but being an American, they never really trusted him). The dad was arguably an enemy combatant and maybe you could make a case he was an "exigent threat", but the kid wasn't and didn't. Reasonable people can differ on acceptable levels of 'collateral damage' (aka killing foreign innocents) but U.S. law is clear, non-combatant American citizens who aren't a clear and immediate threat are a hard, bright line. They get a judge and jury, not a drone.

Senator Ron Wyden is on the Senate intelligence committee, so he gets oversight on what intelligence agencies are doing and sees the secret legal opinions they're relying on. And he's saying the U.S. govt is relying on a secret legal opinion to do something in secret which is obviously, very, VERY wrong - but he's forbidden from telling us what it is because they made it top secret. For context, Ron Wyden has been a Senator and on the intelligence committee for a while and is pretty much a straight-shooter, not known for hyperbole or politically-motivated grandstanding. He'll call out his own party when he feels they're seriously wrong and he gets no benefit from making a big deal over this. His own party isn't supporting him and wishes he'd shut up about it. Yet for the last six months he's been signaling "DANGER, DANGER" in interviews, speeches and in writing over and over again - so I'm going to assume whatever it is is way beyond the Snowden revelations and probably in the neighborhood of the worst things we can possibly imagine.

The perverse thing is that the pretense for keeping it secret is to prevent 'foreign adversary governments' from knowing what it is, but it's clearly about domestic spying on U.S. citizens - and Russia and China probably already know exactly what it is (and are like, "Hmph amateurs, we've been doing that to our citizens years").

Absolutely fantastic comment (sorry, I know it's not the done thing here to say so).

To add a little bit to your comment, the US invented the term "enemy combatant" to evade the Geneva Convention rules about prisoners of war. And it also gave itself the right to designate whoever it wants as an enemy combatant.

You have the law, you have precedent, best not to get on the naughty list.

They invented the term because they were being attacked by non-state actors who didn't wear uniforms.

There's a lot of stuff they do wrong but that isn't one of them. In this case, the Geneva convention was just written in a different time.

Inventing the term "enemy combatants" as a label for people who don't wear uniforms isn't the problem. The problem is not even affording them the rights guaranteed to prisoners of war.

> The problem is not even affording them the rights guaranteed to prisoners of war.

I agree. There are really two separate issues.

Circa WWII, the term 'enemy combatants' was created to solve a definitional issue around military 'rules of engagement' (a concept which evolved with the rise of the professional military). There were "enemy soldiers" and "civilians" with separate rules of engagement for each (at least in theory, as the rules weren't always applied uniformly).

As you said, not affording "enemy combatants" any rights after capture is the problem and it's really arisen since the "War on Terror". The only slightly positive sign in all this is the U.S. military is clearly aware U.S. courts won't let them get away with defining a category of human that doesn't have any rights, forcing the military into temporary workarounds like Gitmo. When U.S. courts have been able to establish jurisdiction over enemy combatants, the rulings have not generally gone favorably for the military.

I'm still grateful whenever the U.S. Constitution manages to be inconvenient and annoying to the U.S. government :-). And I hold out some hope we're slowly beginning to claw back some of the unconstitutional excesses of the "War on Terror."

Usa is functioning in a way that is not how it is supposed to function in a democracy. There should not be anything hidden from any elected representatives as long as they are a citizen.

Civil law based systems are a more sane alternative to common law based system that relies on precedents. Law should be discussed in legislature and legislature must oversee and fix the law appropriately rather than make vague laws and leaving it to judges or others for interpretation. Due to not relying on precedents, the law is also easy to understand and apply and follow and enforce in civil law based systems. Cases also takes less time overall compared to common law based justice system.

Elected representatives are the authors or developers of law. Everyone else is users of law. Users cannot be allowed to change interpretation of law as anything other than how it is written.

Law made for horses and then vehicles got invented and law needs more clarity? Ask legislature to discuss and add new law for vehicles or modify existing law to also handle vehicles.

> The perverse thing is that the pretense for keeping it secret is to prevent 'foreign adversary governments' from knowing what it is, but it's clearly about domestic spying on U.S. citizens - and Russia and China probably already know exactly what it is

I think you're trying to hard to dismiss the justification here. There are certainly techniques for monitoring communications that use justifiably classified technologies that were probably developed to monitor communications of adversaries.

Imagine the use of which is helping keep American spies in Iran safe and the knowledge of the technique could help Iran identify those people. That's a perfectly reasonable classification of the technique.

What makes the interpretation of the law secret is that it mentions this hypothetical technology.

Imagine they have the technology to hear speech through walls passively using your WiFi signal. That technology is classified and they have the legal opinion that this doesn't violate the fourth amendment.

Wyden being concerned about whatever this is isn't surprising really but he's always on the extreme end of these interpretations, which I usually agree with, but judges typically don't agree with him.

I think it's probably generous to say the legal justification they are using has just as much chance of being legal as illegal. It would be nice to know what it was though because it can probably be defeated.

> There are certainly techniques for monitoring communications that use justifiably classified technologies

Wyden and others who are privy to what this is have made clear this is NOT about means or methods. This isn't about how the spying is done, it's about whether it's legal for the NSA to ever spy on U.S. citizens by ANY means. Existing law is very clear, it's absolutely not ever okay - no exceptions. It's completely irrelevant whether they're steaming open envelopes to read your junk mail or using a secret orbital mind-reading satellite to read your deepest private thoughts.

Experts like lawyers from the ACLU think it's something like a legal opinion which re-interprets the "absolute, no bulk spying on U.S. citizens ever" rule by claiming "it's not 'spying' if the govt pays a third-party commercial data collection service to give them the data voluntarily." That opens a backdoor for the govt to now back-link metadata and build one composite profile that includes all the private info the federal, state and local govt has ever had on you since birth (tax, employment, DMV, voting, school, govt assistance, Medicare, social security, etc) with everything any bank, credit card, or store knows about you, with every phone call, text, email and cell phone location ping you've had since 2014, with every bit of behavioral data Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc have about you.

To be clear, this is not "with probable cause they could get a warrant from a judge to send a supoena to each of those providers." This is something more like "they already have all that data in one searchable database but without this new secret legal opinion, as soon as it was clear the person was a U.S. citizen they could NOT look at it.

Now they can sit in a chair, and with just your phone number, email address, license plate or a facial ID match from a traffic camera to your driver's license, passport, Facebook profile or TSA airport photo, then instantly search for every single person you've communicated with in the past 3 years and every person they've communicated with and have an AI examine all that data from all those people and have a full 600 page report available in 15 seconds containing 7 million unique pieces of private data from 17,000 people that's instantly searchable - every email, every text, every purchase, every license plate scan, every location ping. No judge, no warrant, (and according to several recent reports), no record it ever happened, who did the search or under what pretext.

Everyone paying attention already knew it's been possible to do this for a decade. And everyone knows the government ALREADY does this for non-U.S. citizens. We just trusted that the government could not do it with U.S. citizens because the constitution and dozens of SCOTUS rulings make it so clearly ILLEGAL. But just like waterboarding and droning teenagers were once so clearly illegal, one secret legal opinion redefined "Spying" just like "Torture" was redefined in the 2000s and "Murder" was redefined in the 2010s - what the 4th Amendment has absolutely forbidden for 250 years instantly became legal to an invasive level Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton couldn't have dreamed in their worst nightmares.

> This isn't about how the spying is done, it's about whether it's legal for the NSA to ever spy on U.S. citizens by ANY means.

It's about whether it's spying.

"Droning an American citizen" is usually a problem with birthright citizenship, not with drones.

Basically any time a corrupt regime is hiding something it's either bad or embarrassing--usually both.

I guess when you have secret courts, it's something that starts to make sense.

I still can't understand how a government can work with some courts where everything is secret. That's something almost literally lifted out of The Process, but the Kafka book is an allegory for a kind of madness, not something that works.

If they could justify it, it wouldn’t be classified.

A good faith answer to the question; classification hinges on damage done to the United States if it is released. So for example, a law might constraint or enforce the usage of a capability against an enemy, and this, of course would hang on some sort of spectrum also probably defined in law or in an agency interpretation. The agency interpretation is also probably classified and so as you start applying that spectrum, you enter gray areas and niches, and extremes, and so you have to ask a lawyer to disambiguate. And so this lawyer's interpretation is now the fulcrum on which employment of classified US capabilities is based. So therefore, teleologically this lawyer's interpretation has to be classified because it all goes back to whether public knowledge of this capability will damage the United States interest. if you know what the lawyer's interpretation is then you know the spectrum if you know the spectrum then you know the capability then you can damage the United States.

The clear answer is that wrongdoing also needs to be ‘too big to fail’. Small, low impact shit will get you targeted.

Something so heinous it would make who-shot-Kennedy a forgotten footnote? Everyone is going to cover that up.

There are a couple of people with sober takes on this article and you’re one of them. The rest seem to have decided long ago that the entire military is full of mustachio-twirling evildoers, and building their whole mental model of what’s going on with that as the foundation of it.

The facts of the matter are probably much closer to what you’re saying, but some people have become so radicalized (including those who got that way due to Trump-era buffoonery) that they can’t accept even the possibility that most of the actors are operating to protect our collective legitimate best interests.

Most of the people in government and the military are not political appointees, are not political hacks, and are doing tough and sometimes high-risk jobs, from a motivation other than evil. On the other hand, many politicians are motivated mainly by political partisanship and will do anything to try to score political points, including trying to cause outrage about what’s being kept secret, even if it’s been explained to them why it must remain secret.

There are whole laws that are classified and cannot be discussed in open court. Ignorance of the law is no defense when you are charged with violating a law and that’s still true in the USA even if the law is classified and you are not authorized to know what it says.

Check out Gilmore v Gonzales for an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilmore_v._Gonzales

Is there more to this than the Wikipedia article says?

While it does say:

> Gilmore also complained about being subject to "secret law", when the airlines and government refused to show the directive under which they were requesting ID.

nowhere does the article say the courts commented on the complaint, let alone ruled on it.

Nor does the article say anything about "Ignorance of the law is no defense when you are charged with violating a law". The reason given was instead:

> there was no constitutional violation because air passengers could still travel without identification if they instead underwent the more stringent "secondary screening" search.

I'm not saying your wrong, just that the article you offered as evidence doesn't go as far as your claims.

The Wikipedia article is poor, but I cannot not edit it as I attended parts of the trial and in fact discussed the suit with john before he filed it so by Wikipedia’s rules I can’t edit it. Anyway a lawyer would be a better person.

John’s appeal is online. Section [10] of the decision discussion describes being subject to a law he cannot have access to. The judge saw it but could not discuss it in court, with the plaintiff (John Gilmore) or even his lawyer. Also the orders (law) are agreed by the court to be arbitrary, changing day by day and being arbitrarily different between airports. But since the Airport personnel knew them tht was good enough for the court.

And though the discussion mentioned that he could take a bus or walk, the conclusion, [21], said that his rights were not violated at all, both the bus precedent and the legality of being subject to unknown law. The brief Wikipedia page mentions only the former, though the latter was the primary factor of the complaint.

Airlines can refuse to carry people whose name starts with a vowel, if they want to. That's a principle of free business.

Depends on the business. You cannot have a bar or restaurant behaving like that with some racist/xenophobic/whatever shit like that, you would get your license revoked rather quickly.

Not sure if airliners are regulated like that, but 'free business' is not anarchy by any means, unlike you suggest.

Whether they can do that or not, in this case it was due to acknewledgedly arbitrary and capricious secret rules dictated by government personnel to the airlines, not decisions by the airlines themselves.

Unless your position is that one of the legally legitimate principles of free business is whether to follow the law or not.

lol “we don’t feel like following the law so we just picked some fresh dog poop and yelled about bad things that were unrelated and then did whatever we want and invented these funny little games with paper thin jokes everyone is going to pretend is valid so we could do whatever we wanted to anyway lol”.

No one is giving the real answer to this question which is that these laws touch on the legality of capabilities the US does not want to acknowledge it has, and so it won't. Secret information in the US is like glitter - if you touch it, it spreads to you too.

It's not just "here's this law about spying in the abstract," which can be talked about in the open; it's "we're using the MIND READER 5000 under Title XVII powers delegated by the President to the Mind Reading Organization to conduct mind reading on persons X, Y, and Z." The legal briefings and rulings on the facts will by necessity reveal the nature of the technology or technique in question, and so, they are classified. If I recall correctly it was a big deal for the ACLU to get a lawyer a security clearance so they could interact with these courts, but I could be misremembering.

The real problem here is that if someone files a claim against the government and the government wants to keep the facts of the case a secret, you still need the case to have an outcome, and then you have two options.

The first is that you assume whatever is being kept a secret is something that doesn't favor the government, and then the government loses the case by default. This is the more reasonable option, because it mitigates the perverse incentive for the government to declare something a secret whenever it makes them look bad. But it has the obvious problem that then the government would lose some cases it should have won if the information could be published.

The second is that you assume whatever is being kept a secret is something that favors the government, and then the government wins the case by default. But that doesn't solve the problem -- you then have members of the public losing cases they should have won if the information could be published. And doing this makes the perverse incentive worse.

So why do we accept the second one instead of the first one?

Oftentimes the government drops the case. When people get convicted for things they did on Tor, and don't settle, the government often drops the case so they don't have to reveal how they got information about activities on Tor.

When Germany, which doesn't play by the same rules, got DiDW and then Boystown, that was quite revealing on how authorities can break Tor.

That's when the government is the one bringing the case to begin with. The issue is, if the government e.g. kills your spouse, why should the perpetrators get off scott free because the perpetrators want to keep something a secret?

Imagine the public tried to do that. Sorry, IRS/DoJ, the defendant is refusing warrants and subpoenas because it's a secret and without that you can't prosecute them.

You’re government agency, and you ask your lawyers about how the law operates given a particular set of circumstances.

In response, the lawyers provide you with advice about how they think the law applies to this situation, and what findings they think a court would make given the evidence etc available.

Information subject to attorney-client privilege (as this information would be) is exempt from release under FOIA anyway. Dropping a security classification on top adds protections against unauthorised release by insiders.

Sometimes there are good reasons for this, such as to protect particular technical capabilities that are easily circumvented if adversaries know that they exist, or to protect human sources who might end up dead if found out. Other times, there are no good reasons to do this but without knowing all the circumstances it’s impossible to tell either way.

Kid, to keep you safe I need to keep a secret. Mommy loves you, go back to sleep!

To really blow your mind, there is an entire system of classified patents. Some technology is too important to publish but corporations still need to patent it. But when Lockheed wants to sue Boeing over infringement of a classified patent they need to go to a classified court were the patent can be litigated without anything being revealed publicly.

It isn't altogether different than the use of private judges for celebrity divorces. Divorce proceedings are a matter of public record, unless you agree to hire your own judge and then everything can remain out of the public eye. Technically, these are arbitrators but very often are recently retired judges who agree to abide the current law.

I thought patents had to be published for anyone to read? Isn't that the tradeoff of our freedoms, in exchange for a "limited" time monopoly on the idea, you have to publish the idea.

I think the most charitable argument for keeping it secret is: “it would expose capabilities and methods that if made public would allow our adversaries to avoid detection / change their methods”

I don’t agree with this rationale. On the other hand there is a tension between operating effective counter intelligence operations against nation state actors operating against your interests within your borders and free and open society. I’m not sure where the line is but my perception is we’re way beyond it.

It gets rather simple once you start thinking of the US as the richest third world country.

Inequality, price and state of healthcare system, huge polluters getting away, it all checks out.

Gonna take a wild guess that this has to do with the purchase of privately (and lawfully) collected bulk data for the purposes of mass surveillance. Who needs PRISM or xKeyscore when people willingly purchase TVs and install weather apps that spy on them 24/7? The open legal question has been whether the government is free to do whatever it wants with the data it purchases.

Exactly my instinct, as well.

> Spying on American citizens is a bipartisan point of agreement.

Not an American, but I can totally understand the need of governments to spy on its citizens that it has EVIDENCE of being involved in behaviour or activities that threaten the nation.

For example - if it had evidence that certain citizens were involved in espionage of their country, and they were thus passing on serious information to actors or other states that were intent on using that information to harm the nation, I would most definitely want those citizens to be spied upon.

Such evidence could be: Engaging in, or communicating with, known extremist organisations or forums known to be frequented by such individuals.

What you are describing would be straight up treason. The fact that treason charges are almost never laid upon anyone shows it is a farce.

The distinction I suspect is targeted spying vs mass spying. I don’t think anyone is going to get upset about a targeted counter espionage operation, but spying on the public at large with no evidence of suspicion of wrongdoing is another matter.

what happens if he just tells us what it is?

I mean he has Congressional privilege, he literally cannot be touched for reading anything he wants into the Congressional record. I wonder why more lawmakers talk about things instead of just revealing The Thing and leaning on their special rights as elected legislators.

Liberals build police state capacity that fascist then use against them

Agreed. Even if the political roles are flipped.

"iT's fOr yOuR oWn goOd"

Secret courts are anathema to democracy and need to be abolished.

I came to say the same thing. The secret courts and even the administrative agency courts should not exist. They are a violation of our rights. Any court where the prosecution, judge and jury are all government employees is a gross abuse of authority.

The 6th Amendment was written to prevent secret courts. The English Star Chamber was frequently secret and you could be put on trial without knowing what evidence/testimony was brought against you. The Star Chamber was also why the 5th Amendment exists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Chamber

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights

6th amendment is strictly about criminal prosecutions. The court in question is not a criminal court.

The "court" in question is being used to hide blatant violations of US Citizens constitutional rights against mass surveillance.

A secret court is arguably not even a court. It provides no legitimacy whatsoever. It's a bunch of people in a room making a decision. I don't understand why they even bother. Just conduct your dictatorship by issuing decrees over a Zoom meeting.

It's a word game. By calling it a court, legitimacy is implied. Most personalized TV channels are called "social media" even though they're really "personal TV" because the former sounds like it connects you with your friends. The NSA isn't a "surveillance state", it's "intelligence gathering". It's not a war, it's a special military operation. And so on.

> Most personalized TV channels are called "social media" even though they're really "personal TV" because the former sounds like it connects you with your friends.

This is clearly untrue; they're called "social media" because they developed inside other things that were already called "social media".

Then Netflix is a DVD rental?

If you think really, really hard, maybe you'll be able to get your arrows the right way around.

DVD rental developed from online streaming?

Reddit is undoubtedly “social media” and never had anything to do with connecting to your friends.

It’s basically synonymous with user-generated content site. It’s why TikTok is social media and Netflix isn’t, and PineDrama is somewhere in the middle because even though it’s studio content there’s still emphasis on the comments and whatnot.

This is a distraction from the problem, they are courts because they function as courts in providing binding precedent on how laws are interpreted. The people making the decision (FISA judges) are Article III federal judges (i.e. nominated by the President, confirmed by Senate), picked by SCOTUS Chief Justice, and continuously vetted for security clearance by exec branch. Public interest importance of their decisions are supposed to be released (for legislators to be able to preform their legislative function) within 180 days.

That is the problem -- if legislators aren't informed how the laws they wrote are interpreted / used by the executive, they cannot reason about how to legislate next.

Democracy has been deprecated in the United States, and will be removed in a future 'election'.

Great to see unfettered public discussion of such matters. Oh wait, "You've read your last free article."

If this is the case, then I shudder for democracies that look up to the US for inspiration on how to run their country.

I'm not sure there's anyone left who does that without the USA army kidnapping their president or similar things.

There ain't nobody 'looking up' to US these days, where does this fairy tale idea come from? People around the world are not dumb, whole world is completely fed up to the brim with direct and indirect attacks from US in past 2 years, sowing chaos, conflict and death. We just wan to be left alone, and thats it. Not something US can do but one can always dream right.

There are many places which are more democratic and free than US ever was, its not a secret information but you won't hear about it in latest hollywood flick or fox/cnn. One only needs to travel a bit outside US bubble with open mind.

US system of 2 parties is pretty dumb if you think about it, artificial in pretty bad ways and not really transferable elsewhere. Constitution and laws which are less than toilet paper when power is taken by sufficiently motivated bad actor, 0 working checks and balances. It could have been worse of course if thats how we want to rank it, but we are not even in the half of it and something tells me we haven't seen the worst of it yet.

The author of this statement is obviously American

The us constitution has been destroyed one step a time. It's dead letter now.

In Australia are have organisations with titles like "Independent Commission Against Corruption". Their remit is to investigate political corruption and corruption in the public service (like say the police). They come in two flavours. In some states their deliberations are done in public. In other states they are secret.

Over time it's become evident open model is far, far more effective at ensuring the public has confidence the people running the place are doing the right thing. It does risk the occasional unwarranted "witch hunt". But that threat ensures powerful people avoid doing things that while above board, could arouse public suspicion. Less suspicious acts mean higher trust in the government.

The root of the question though is "Is secrecy an anathema to democracy?"

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security.”

- Milton Mayer - They Thought They Were Free. The Germans, 1933-45

I will always be baffled by the dichotomy of "the US has the most freedom" and "no democratic country spies more on its citizens".

I bet you that China, Russia and the UK rank higher

Are China and Russia democracies?

In China the social contract is different.

You give up some rights for internal stability and in theory better social benefits.

In America, our social contract allows 10 guilty men to go free rather than imprisoning one innocent.

That's the myth anyway. Back in reality America is rapidly marching towards authoritarian capitalism.

Jump outs , black sites, indefinite detention.

>Naturally the common people don't want war . . . but after all it is the leaders of a country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or parliament or a communist dictatorship. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.

-Hermann Goering

Thus we're always at War. War on Drugs. War on Illegal Immigration. War on Crime. War on you.

So what we've already deported multiple born in the US citizens. This is war!

> So what we've already deported multiple born in the US citizens

What are their names?

Full deportation

https://www.texastribune.org/2026/04/23/texas-united-states-...

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/show/children-who-are-u-s-c...

Indefinite detention for being Hispanic despite being born in America.

https://www.cbsnews.com/baltimore/news/deportation-effort-ma...

https://www.reddit.com/r/immigration/comments/1w8vhot/born_h...

You guys are never able to manage one. That guy is a Mexican national, not an American

The children aren't deported, their parents are. They, of course, get the choice to take their children with them. You don't want to split apart families, right?

Of course #3 isn't a deportation so I didn't even look at it

> That guy is a Mexican national, not an American

If they actually have a valid US birth certificate then how can you say that?

He actually has a valid Mexican birth certificate, and the guys in charge of who is and isn't a citizen said he isn't.

They didn't randomly pick on this guy, and they've deported millions of people without deporting a citizen.

From what I've seen it looks like he has a birth certificate in both countries? If he does and his US birth certificate says he was born in the US then he is a US citizen.

Not to mention at least a few hundred America citizens have been indefinitely detained in all this.

A few other examples of full citizens being deported are out there , but your not going to convince certain people with logic.

>Karen, 65, had a British passport and a tourist visa.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/21/karen-newton...

Thank God we surrendered all of our basic rights. Anything to stop elderly British women!

> we surrendered all of our basic rights

Which rights did you surrender?

You first.

Tell me how detaining an elderly British woman made you feel safer.

If he's a US citizen, we'll find out and he'll be the first one ever deported.

Maybe in a few years there will be another one.

I think their track record has enough nines to make any techbro jealous. Even if he were a citizen, which he isn't, his singular deportation was easily worth the result.

Since he's a Mexican citizen, it can barely be called a hardship.

Mexico is a great place, by most accounts.

Your message suggests there is both a possibility that he is a US citizen and also claims that he is not a US citizen.

If it was 100% clear that he is not a US citizen then I don't think they would have let him back into the country. I'm curious to see how they are going to prove that he was not born in the US, assuming his US birth certificate is valid. Ideally the Mexican birth certificate shouldn't take precedence over the US one.

> the guys in charge of who is and isn't a citizen said he isn't.

At least you recognize that who is and isn't a citizen is no longer determined by law and facts, but by "guys".

There's been no change in how it's determined.

Next you'll learn about how laws come into existence, get interpreted, and get enforced.

>In America, our social contract allows 10 guilty men to go free rather than imprisoning one innocent.

For criminal matters, sure.

In civil and administrative matters it's the opposite with the decimal moved to the left a couple times.

Freedom isn't really about whether your country is a democracy or not. Dictatorships can be free (for a while) and democracies can be unfree (Hitler was elected).

>China, Russia

both notorious for bragging about being the most free country on earth

The difference is willingness to act on said spying. Luckily, despite the massive surveillance capabilities the U.S. "Intelligence" Community has, they don't seem to really mess with regular citizens all that much. This gives some credence to the "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about" point of view, but only if you can guarantee you have nothing to hide (which can change drastically depending on who is in power, hence why I don't believe in this - the classic example being that hiding one's religion in and around Germany in the 1930s and early 40s was not seen as important until it was really important).

China and Russia (and to some extent, the UK now) will absolutely act on the spying they do. Or just act and say they had a good reason. China and Russia are dictatorships. One of them has a very competent and hard-working population which succeeds in spite of the dictator, the other is a gas station with nukes that survives solely because of said nukes.

Well your assumption is that they are not using it; they weren't able to use it all before.. Times are changing; Now they can use and use it a lot.. military Ai infrastructure that is to connected political arm will read and process everything and they can target their apposition... its just matter of time. Absolute power = absolute corruption.

> they don't seem to really mess with regular citizens all that much.

Except they do. The NSA has been handing over intel over a decade ago:

> A former federal agent in the northeastern United States who received such tips from SOD described the process. “You’d be told only, ‘Be at a certain truck stop at a certain time and look for a certain vehicle.’ And so we’d alert the state police to find an excuse to stop that vehicle, and then have a drug dog search it,” the agent said. [1]

Sure these were criminals, but who knows how many “undesirables” were prosecuted or targeted for some crime anybody commits?

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/us-drug-agency-g...

Your position only makes sense if you think that the groups the US gov operates against aren't "regular citizens".

The US gov is acting on intel against its citiczens all the time, regular or not.

Personally, I don't like the right wing groups it's infiltrated, but I still think that is a reasonable example.

For me, more pressingly, there are current investigations going on in Minnesota from the US gov's "Puppetmaster" operation that actively infiltrated and monitored a highly diverse set of anti-ICE groups.

Historically this is nothing new; the US has been infiltrating "anti-government" groups for decades. AIM, the panthers, ELF, ALF, labor unions, MOVE, etc are all easy examples of domestic groups that the US gov has broken at some point or other.

Your position only work if you classify folks such as the Minnesota 15 as "terrorists" or some such. Which, hey, folks like the US Gov try to do. But at that point the point is kind of tautological: if you have "something to hide" then you are a legit target of government sanctioning.

That's not very satisfying to me, but plenty of folks in the US find it to be a just-fine principle.

FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Section 702

> Section 702 only permits the targeting of non-United States persons who are reasonably believed to be located outside the United States. United States persons and anyone in the United States may not be targeted under Section 702.

https://www.intel.gov/foreign-intelligence-surveillance-act/...

i would give the article a quick (re-?)skim for context of V__'s comment, as the article repeatedly talks about spying on american citizens

Under the Israel-US agreement for surveillance, that section was circumvented, as the NSA and other agencies are feeding raw unminimized tappings directly to the ELINT/SIGINT agencies and getting relayed back. [1]

This was also true for Five Eyes/EU sharing too, even though with this year's legislation some EU countries have offered Israel a direct access to INT feeds.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/sep/11/ns...

Wow. Does the US have this type of agreement with any other country?

Yes, the "fourteen eyes" group. It used to be five (basically all the English speaking countries) but they coerced more European countries to join and now it's fourteen.

The US _shares_ intel with the other Eyes, and within these there's layers of cooperation, with the US<->UK on top.

But this agreement concerns raw, non minimized, SIGINT (eg. direct tapping into feeds/traffic) mainly from US -> Israel.

That's pretty much what "intel sharing" is. They get other countries to spy on Americans and receive that data. In return they give their spy data on citizens of that country to that country.

I meant while the original five eyes are sharing raw sigint (we can also disagree on the level of sharing proportions), Israel gets also access to raw sigint intended as 3rd-country -> US.

The integration in the cyber domain is a different tier compared to the default the US has with other eyes.

> "the US has the most freedom"

This is an example of a thought-stopping cliche. It is a slogan to prevent the listener from thinking. Or at the least, to divert the listener's thoughts back to a more politically acceptable (to the speaker) rightthink.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rightthink

Not exactly a democratic country, but came across these instructions what to do in China when police has detected a VPN in your household, or you have posted something

https://x.com/hongguabg/status/2114213232454082869?s=20

We have some flexibility with freedom left, and let’s keep it that way.

If the US state regime would benefit from blocking VPNs, they'd do it in a heartbeat. They just don't need to yet.

That link you just posted is blocked for me because I don't have an X account. Here's an unblocker redirector - suspiciously like a HTTP VPN: https://xxcancel.com/hongguabg/status/2114213232454082869?s=...

The process that's described (appear cooperative but deny everything) is the same thing you should do in the US if the police come to your door and accuse you of drug possession. Every country does this violation of freedom, they just use different excuses.

> The process that's described (appear cooperative but deny everything)

...how did you come to this conclusion?

>> 但你确实做过的，而且白纸黑字的放在你面前，那就不要抵赖。

If it's something you did, and they put it in front of you in black and white, don't deny it.

> 去了之后，态度好一点，姿态低一点，开口说：“领导，不好意思，给你添麻烦了。”

Is 领导 not an incredibly subservient way to address someone? How do people normally address police officers in China?

The US doesn't have the most freedom. There's precisely zero evidence that people in the US are the most free, except for the fact that its government tells them they are. But North Korea tells its people that even harder.

I disagree. The US has the 1st and 2nd amendments, which gives us protection from tyranny in the government, and which lets us criticize the government without repercussion. No other country grants its citizens those rights, and you can see the effects of that worldwide, where despite it all, we still have our free speech!

Can you name a single western democracy where the citizens are prohibited from criticizing their government?

France just banned protesting

No they didn't.

> Under French law and Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), authorities may prohibit particular demonstrations when serious public-order risks make restrictions necessary and proportionate. They cannot impose an indiscriminate prohibition on peaceful assemblies simply because previous demonstrations have descended into violence.

You just described the mechanism by which they did. Sure, they didn't make it illegal nationwide permanently, because what serious country would do that and hope to maintain control? The real threat is in the vague exceptions for specific cases, which they have now used.

Didn't the USA also? I seen to remember that in Florida they passed a law that says you can run over protestors with your car.

It’s more akin to “stand your ground” laws (whether you’re for or against them). In situations where you reasonably fear for your life, like surrounded by an angry mob of people in the street busting up your car.

It’s not a blank check to run over people holding signs you don’t like as you drive home from work.

France just banned rioting

synonym for protesting when the government doesn't like it

there is protesting and then there is rioting and looting - its petty criminality and nothing grand like beheading elites

How does the 2nd amendment protect you? Are you allowed automatic weapons, grenades? You're not even allowed swords. And if you call for violence, which is what the 2nd amendment might enable, you won't find protection via the 1st amendment.

See citizens and ICE.

Where did you get your info from? Sword ownership is legal everywhere as far as I know and you can own automatic weapons and even grenades.

Stop making stuff up.

Many jurisdictions have laws against carrying blades longer than X (it varies) and any reasonable definition of a sword would fall under that category.

In the US at least automatic weapons are nominally legal at the federal level after hefty tax stamps and background checks but states / local jurisdictions can and do regulate more / outright ban them.

That's just moving the goalposts. Nothing in there says it's illegal to own any of those things. You just might not be able to carry a sword (there are carve outs for reenactments in most places btw) and you might have to move or pay more for automatic weapons.

They're still not illegal, as OP said.

Carrying arms is another word for bearing then. According to the constitution, this right shall not be infringed. If it's illegal to carry an arm then the constitution is being infringed.

The 2nd amendment was designed to protect the 1st amendment. As for how, it was supposed to give citizens teeth against their government if it ever turned tyrannical one day. Armed citizens were one of the factors that made the American Revolution successful, which probably why so many Americans hold onto the idea.

Good luck resisting a tyrannical government that has jets, tanks, bio weapons and nukes

That is a wonderfully naive understanding of the world.

You should ask Alex Pretti how he was able to criticize to criticize the government without repercussion.

IMO This is an even more naive (and dare I say intentionally malicious) bad-faith misinterpretation of the facts.

His death had nothing to do with the Constitution, it was because of a trigger-happy, confused cop who had his back to the guy, then noticed a gun next to him (that another officer previously put there). The US government had no part in that situation at all.

The US government is responsible for the training of its agents. It is culpable as well.

I think that's exactly the point. The constitution didn't prevent his death.

What are cops if they're not the government? Are they private corporations?

I don't understand the issue since no law can physically prevent people from breaking it.

Of course cops are the government, but they're also humans that make mistakes and commit crimes themselves. But this isn't actually related to some greater constitutional crisis or anything, unless you have some evidence that suggests they were instructed to act the way they did... but I've never seen anyone come forward with that yet.

The original argument was that the constitution protects you from government tyranny.

You have government officials tyranizing the population and now the argument is "of course it can't prevent that".

What good is it then?

> In the United States, the right to petition is enumerated in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which specifically prohibits Congress from abridging "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances".

I think the key point is that it allows this "petitioning" of the government in the first place, that's what it's good for. But you still have to go through the court system to right any wrongs, which includes misbehaving police who may be breaking the law themselves.

The Constitution is not a judge, jury or executioner, so in a way it was always "limited" in what it can do if it's not actually respected.

If you do your petitioning and then get shot by a government agent, then the piece of paper giving you the right is worthless and you don't really have the right. How is the justice system going to right the wrong? Are they going to resurrect the victim?

Anyone can write high minded promises. It's the real life application that makes them rights.

"The government" isn't some abstract cloud somewhere. It's a collection of people, and it's their actions that count, not their marketing.

If you can't exercise your rights without being murdered by a state sanctioned thug, then it's not really a right. Also, has he been indicted yet? charged?

That's kind of the point.

The constitution is just some rules people wrote up generations ago. It's not a magic spell that has power by itself, it is only effective as a social contract as long as power structures agree to follow it.

If armed government enforcers break it with impunity, what good is it?

Whatever one may think of gun control, it's clear the 2nd Amendment is on a much poorer footing.

In a number of states, you need to take a safety course before you're allowed to purchase a gun.

Compare that with the 1st amendment. If they passed laws saying "You can say whatever you want in public, but only after you've taken this course that informs you on what is acceptable and unacceptable to say in public", would you say there is free speech?

Or "You are free to practice any religion, but only after you've taken a course that ..."?

It's almost like you can easily kill a vast number of people with guns but not words. Curious...

There are plenty of good reasons to ban guns altogether.

But let's not say the 1st and 2nd amendments in the same breath. One is real, and the other is much less so.

"A well regulated Militia"

The colonies were expected to defend themselves. In reality that meant every man possessed and drilled with arms whether the were part of a formal militia or not. If there was an attack people would be "called up" to the militia. There is no requirement of belonging to a formal militia in the 2nd amendment. While times have changed, it was expectated that you were proficient with arms in the case that a formal militia was required to be formed.

United States v. Cruikshank, 1875

> The First Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting Congress from abridging the right to assemble and petition, was not intended to limit the action of the State governments in respect to their own citizens, but to operate upon the National Government alone.

Before the 14th Amendment, your hypothetical was quite possible at a state level.

You can't possibly be this naive.

He's only 15.

>The US has the 1st and 2nd amendments, which gives us protection from tyranny in the government

Lmao. Jim Tyranny has had what? 3 cracks at him? Hardly protection.

In the choice between being allowed to carry a gun (and having people with guns all around me) versus being offered free healthcare (and having healthier people all around me) I know not just which one I'd choose, but also which one I'd call more free.

They don’t know that they’re not free. The good thing about a real dictatorship is that you know exactly what the rules are.

You don’t know what the rules are in a dictatorship either. Laws and regulations exist but they get selectively enforced based on a lot of factors. Take repressions in the early Soviet Union. There’s just a bureaucratic top down edict that this many “enemies of the people” must be found, so they are found.

So free in Europe you guys don't even have a legitimate tech industry. Anyone who wants to build comes to the US.

freedom is when tech industry, I guess. I didn't know that until bus. I looked up freedom in the dictionary and it said tech industry.

until now*

stupid swipe typing

So, free if you're a VC?

Funny how China leads in most tech areas now.

Turns out letting monopoly capital control your government policy leads to short term gains at the expense of long term viability. Maybe the VCs can make some money off government surveillance and defense contracts before being completely eclipsed?

https://www.aspi.org.au/news/aspis-critical-technology-track...

That’s supposed to be worse than the government controlling everything like in China?

it gets fun when you raise "government" is a variable that can be substituted with values that are not necessarily "Congress" or "the president"

China calls its government a State Council, Russia calls theirs a Duma, and the USA calls its one Microsoft. (Or Oracle, or Disney, or S&P 500...)

That's a bold claim. Do you really think that the Chinese government has such capacity?

Ignoring your weird correlation between freedom and tech. Not gonna google European tech before you comment?

Make a joke about immigrants on twitter in the UK and you get arrested. Meanwhile there are more heat deaths in Europe than gun deaths in America. Most of Europe can't be called a free country anymore.

What did they tweet, exactly?

https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1iim9je/list...

I’m on my phone, so it’s a little bit difficult for me to find clear examples, but I think this post talks about some of those freedom of speech violations.

I might be completely wrong, but it seems like news articles are not repeating the messages that caused the arrest. They just seem to be reporting that the arrest happened and high-level description of the content.

Are there theoretical tweets for which you believe arrests are warranted?

Inciting violence

I get that we have laws on the books making this illegal, but I still 100% disagree that the laws are constitutional.

People can say whatever they want without hurting anyone. In the case of incitement of violence, the issue is the person(s) who actually committed the violence, not a tweet online.

That is a very American perspective, which I like to think many people in the civilized world find irresponsible. (In the literal sense. You don't want to take responsibility for the consequences of your actions.)

The line must be drawn somewhere, we don't hold everyone responsible for every action they take.

I'd compare "inciting violence" to a woman dressing in provocative clothing in a bad area of town late at night. Very few people would blame the woman and say she's legally responsible if she's attacked, I hold the same line on speech.

Say what you want, dress how you want, it doesn't matter. If another person actually causes harm they can't shirk the blame off on you, they made the choice to commit violence.

Nobody is talking about shirking any blame off. Maybe this is our disconnect. You think there must be one singular person to blame entirely. That if someone is held accountable for a consequence of their action, then no one else can. That is not how the real world works.

No you are describing a scenario where one is shirking blame. One person commits a violent crime against another and you aren't holding them entirely accountable for their actions, your looking to who they may have listened to and what they may have heard such that some blame belongs there.

Notably you didn't engage with my analogy at all. Would you tell a victim of sexual assault that they were partly to blame based on their clothing choices or decision to be in a particular part of town a particular time of day? If not, how would you legally distinguish the two scenarios?

The laws are the constitution

Laws and the constitution are very different.

Procedurally they require different actions to create or change. More fundamentally though, the constitution protects rights while laws limit them.

Yes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...

Wow, checkmate.

>Meanwhile there are more heat deaths in Europe than gun deaths in America.

This is a weird metric of freedom. It seems more like a reflexive, zeitgeist based response than any actual freedom metric.

In my experience the country with the most freedom is Canada. I have never seen anything like it. It's just so easy to do business there. Even if it wasn't that the laws enable it (they do) but even the way people operate. Being able to have a discussion with a customer without 12 rounds of a solicitor trying to insert dumb loopholes into a contract, costing the potential customer more in billable hours to their solicitor than the cost of the contract.

The USA is just junk. States that want to be Feds, Feds that want to be States, and when you cut through all the red tape you still have to deal with Litigious, ignorant Americans. Oh and if you want to import or export something just forget it.

"Oh but we have guns" is basically the exception that proves the rule, in a country where people get detained for such crimes as "Being beloved childrens author Mem Fox" or "Said naughty things on reddit" or "Working while waiting for Immigration to sort their status out".

But guns right. Guns. Woohoo freedom yeehaw guns.

> Meanwhile there are more heat deaths in Europe than gun deaths in America.

You suggesting that in the name of freedom - everyone must have air conditioning and cool their homes to 60F?

72f is more reasonable, I don't think anyone does 60f.

all those people doing 72f should be in prison for violating the terms of their freedom

It is a common misconception, partly intentionally perpetuated by the UK right-wing press, that people are arrested and jailed for making jokes or otherwise casually chatting on social media. If you dig deeper you'll generally find that people jailed for Twitter or Facebook posts went vastly beyond “telling a joke” or “saying something inappropriate”. The UK quite meaningfully prosecutes hate speech, death threats and similar felonies, and I for one don't want to live in a place that condones or even actively protects it. Downplaying it as “a joke about immigrants” plays right into the hands of the xenophobic right.

Who defines what a "hate speech" is?

Here is one of the latest cases, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gz1qy30v5o Here is another one: "West Midlands Police arrested a 15-year-old boy named Fraser on August 3, 2026, after he published Facebook posts mocking Conservative Wolverhampton City Council member Simon Bennett." ...after posting an image of a politician with the bunny ears.

> Who defines what a "hate speech" is?

Who defines what is murder and what is self-defence? You already know the answer to this. The legislature.

Your first link is about police misconduct, not what the laws are or should be. Your second quote does not contain any of the relevant posts and just spews random unverifiable claims.

"The legislature"

In other words, whoever is at power at the moment. There is no constitutional protection.

"police misconduct"... The OP said "It is a common misconception... that people are arrested and jailed for making jokes or otherwise casually chatting on social media". I gave you an example to the contrary. I do follow the UK news, and it's not hard to come up with multiple similar examples, there is no need to gaslight me. UK democracy has been somewhat waning lately.

As for the bunny ears story, not spews but says -- and type the headline into google, you'll get multiple sources. It is verifiable, you are just afraid to check lest it is actually true. Try harder.

  (\_/)
  ( •.• )
  c(")_(")

Maga logic, as typical as it can get right.

One suggestion - don't travel much around the world and certainly avoid backpacking and interacting with locals and understanding things like history or culture, you may eventually lose those... beautiful opinions of yours

It's mostly corporations that are the most free to do as they please here.

The evidence is our humor. We can make fun of our leaders without being thrown into prison or worse unlike say China or North Korea. Try posting a Winnie the Pooh meme in China and see how fast it gets censored.

well i am chinese, we do cannot post Winnie the Pooh meme(with ugly xi image), the origin carton figure is fine.(we also have a show about it in shanghai disney i think)

what troubles me is why 'humor' is the most important thing? shouldn't be the action/output of the gov? i mean, you vote someone, he promise something, he cannot do it, he breaks the law, then nothing happens, you make fun of him. then after 4 yeras, you select another person. and go on. Biden didn't get punised for what he has not achieved. So will Trump.

how does that improve your life? how can people live like this? how is that 'democray'? its very hard for our people to understand.

our neighbor counties like Mongoel and Philippines, they have a system like USA, and the popeople can make fun of their leaders all the time, i can see that from reddit. but they basiclly live in a shit hole, with a small populartion and vast resources, and they are poor than average chinese. i never understand the deulusion of them.

Suppression of humour is a canary in the coal mine. If you can’t make fun of the politicians, it implies multiple things:

1. There’s no freedom of speech;

2. Which implies there’s no freedom of thought;

3. There’s no separation of powers. Meaning, there’s really no “politicians”, just the ruling “nomenklatura”;

Which is fine-ish as long as the nomenklatura is benign and competent enough. It becomes problematic when (not if) the nomenklatura stops being competent. This can happen naturally because people age, still cling to power, and/or they care about their children, so they try to push them into plush nomenklatura jobs regardless of how dense their offspring might be. This is btw happening in China right now as far as I know.

When that happens, because of 1. and 2., as well as the “repression muscle” that the government has, change becomes near impossible, as you have no leverage for change outside the nomenklatura, but the nomenklatura resists it because it’s suicidal for them. Then you start stagnating and/or getting pulled into pointless wars that the nomenklatura starts to “rally the flag”.

Everything you said is quite right. However, it is an overly generalized description that overlooks all kinds of details. I prefer details, because they reveal much more.

To take a simple example: China is currently carrying out its most severe anti-corruption campaign in decades. Five-Year Plans are still being executed, support for low-income groups is being passionately discussed across social media, and according to various reports, the government has already begun addressing disparities in the pension system.

I’m not denying anything you said. But you seem to overlook the fact that we live in a world where we are merely comparing degrees of dysfunction. The Chinese government is deeply flawed, and the US government is deeply flawed as well. So much so that those of us who use VPNs to scale the firewall are honestly tired of watching people on the outside indulge in the illusion of freedom without any desire for real change. People often fail to see that, fundamentally, both are societies controlled by privileged classes—the distinction between autocracy and democracy is far less meaningful than it appears. At least in China, most people aren't suffocated by rent, don't have to worry about mobs rioting, looting, or committing arson(ok i am talking what happening in France, i dont know whats wrong with these stupid people), and don't have to fear the ravages of drugs, walk safely in the night, enjoy comforatable public transport(the point is , if a country dont have this but have the freedom to make jokes of their leaders, i dont think most of us will move there). As for those dissatisfied with society, they can emigrate(i guess the number is clear, most people travel aboard and see the world will still lives in china), or they can use a VPN to explore the outside world and discover the truth for themselves. Likewise, outsiders can visit to see the real China.

As part of a generation raised to believe that America was a beacon of civilization—which is how the media educated us, even if the government didn't say so directly—watching the outside world turn into what it is today brings us just as much pain as it brings you. The Prism scandal happened, and yet no one learned a thing. ( i have to use gemini to translate as my writen english is not so good)

Yes, to quote myself:

> It’s fine-ish as long as the nomenklatura is benign and competent enough.

i would say CCP is not the worst of them. but i do hope something better. and it would never be the shit thing like in USA or EU.

> you select another person. and go on. Biden didn't get punised for what he has not achieved. So will Trump.

Democracy (in the US) is the whole system, not just the president. Biden didn't achieve everything he promised because he was in contention with the senators and representatives that were also elected by the people; same for Trump. It's checks and balances, the president can't do everything he wants because he gets checked by Congress and the courts; Congress can't do everything they want because they get checked by the president and the courts. Trump is straining that right now but that's the soul of American democracy – one guy doesn't decide it all, they must cooperate with Congress.

We'll see the system turn against Trump after the November election, when democrats are expected to take the house and probably the senate back from Trump's party. That's democracy in action: people are extremely unhappy with how Trump is handling things, so they're punishing him by voting in representatives who promise to rein him in.

Does that means the us gov, not only the president,but also thr congress, speak for the people in USA, supoorts go with war with Iran, supoort the genocide in GAZA, support tariff on every country ,threatens Canada, Greenland... and ICE shooting people in the street?

Then i have no respect for the people in USA

Like I said, he's straining the system. But if the people punish Trump in November by removing the senators and representatives who've supported him, then I think it means the people explicitly don't support what he's done.

can the people undone the bad things he did?

> what troubles me is why 'humor' is the most important thing?

Being able to criticize your government is a fundamental freedom that can help curb things like corruption or change policy direction. Humor is a very direct and blunt form or criticism

As for your examples of democratic countries that are still not so great places, I’m pretty sure they would be even worse without their democratic freedom to criticize their respective governments

> I’m pretty sure they would be even worse without their democratic freedom to criticize their respective governments

in an ideal world, yes. but with geopolicts, no. Like i see tons of USA news claims china is interven USA election. or Russia. I would say the truth for these contries are much horriable than it looks.

Genuine question: So anecdotally which country is the most free? Hard evidence can be difficult to obtain, but often speaking to locals and/or living in different countries does give a comparative sense of freedoms.

Search for freedom indexes there are a bunch with different criteria.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/freedom-i...

US still in top N with not significant diff in index value from leader.

> North Korea tells its people that even harder.

Do they, though? Americans are more constantly propagandized than anyone else.

Than North Koreans? Show your bias more

They know that Kim doesn't shit ice cream like they're told, it's a loyalty test. Americans tend to never even consider that they are being lied to because their idea of propaganda is about as nuanced as a cartoon. You should do some reading on the topic.

passport wise, probably true or close to true.

9th place

https://www.passportindex.org/de/byRank.php

nah the UK spies pretty hard on its citizens.

CSIS and ASIS in Canada and Australia have far more powers than anything the CIA could ever do.

I owned more guns, got paid more, and had more vacation while working for a US company than I ever did in the Oz or Glorious Canukistan

Why are you baffled?

Already answered here:

https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/43535/do-other-...

closing as duplicate. (/joke)

"A" marketing for a "B" product usually wins over "B" marketing of an "A" product.

When you stop judging systems by their design intent and instead by their outcomes, it makes perfect sense. Democracies inexorably diffuse responsibility until its component entities are distant enough from punishment that hiding power levers becomes an easy advantage to grab for, whether the justification is internal or external conflict. All that's needed is for the necessary overseers to be rubber stamps.

Democracies that are real democracy also exists and they don't have systemic corruption such as hiding behind complexity or interpretations or misinterpretations, or repeatedly pushing to pass draconian laws. Number of real democratic sovereign countries can be easily counted in one hand and may be it can extend upto two hands. Countries with monarch who has any power are not exactly democratic, uk for example even though it has democracy like parliament. Transparency and real oversight by citizens is required in a democracy. What if representatives make draconian laws? People need to be able to veto it. What if representatives refuse to make a law people want? They need to be able to make it directly. Systems can be designed to make these happen regardless of the size of the country or its population count.

Most of those countries have not been democracies for very long. The United States used to have many of those checks and balances, all of which were systematically ripped out by the relentless political machine. Give it another century, and even with proportional voting or citizen's veto's, things will still probably end up in a similar state.

There are also countries that are real democratic countries that are older than usa. They have not been corrupted like usa, because they have proper discourse and discussions by its citizens, which doesn't happen in usa. Even usa can be reformed to be a proper democratic country within 1 or 2 years or even as short as 6 months, if proper consensus can be formed by people. Institutions doesn't matter as much as people and real democracy isn't hard to implement if there is political will for it. Current usa is an anti-example of what a democracy should not be.

Democracy itself is young concept. So there is no point looking beyond a certain time period as they were all monarchies before that. However even during earlier times there are examples of democracy like monarchies where citizens were not ignored by monarch, and they ruled for the people.

"Proper", "consensus", "discourse", "corrupted", "real democracy". You're an idealistic true-believer well beyond fault.

I will take that as a complement. I don't believe in building stale systems that can drift into corrupt forms of democracy. Where is the proper discourse and philosophy that is necessary in usa's democracy? Continuous feedback loop and active political discourse that are not controlled or hijacked via media narratives are some of the fundamental aspects of healthy democracy. When you analyse usa from first principles, its bad. At the same time I am extremely happy that some real democratic countries exist in the world even if I am not a direct beneficiary.

"The US has the most freedom. Don't look into that fact. Just trust us"

How it is done, everybody knows how.. backdoors in servers, back door in communication equipment, decryption method for of all that goes through fiber in entire world.. Massive data storage to store everything. How is not an issue; every node and communication, hardware and software has a backdoor.

Do they have the right to tap into world communication as well as their own is the issue? They are not challenged by apposing parties and their own population or people have given up.

Perhaps there will be a disaster is waiting with all these backdoors and Ai supremacy.

> Perhaps there will be a disaster is waiting with all these backdoors and Ai supremacy.

Absolutely. AI only needs to bring the keys, and everything else will be waiting for it on a silver platter. And AI is really good at making spare keys.

The next wave after AI hype will be all of the security issues and real world fall out. Refrigerators spoiling food is only the beginning.

The debate about reapproval of section 702 is all theater. Does anyone genuinely believe the government would stop surveilling us if the authorization expired?

Even if it were perfectly illegal plain as day, they’d launder the intelligence gathering through a partner intelligence org like mossad.

They already do, look up a thing called 5 eyes.

I guess that depends, do you think that an administration would be willing to prosecute its predecessors for doing it if it were against the law? Maybe you don't because of mutually assured destruction, but lately there's been a lot more appetite for prosecuting people in the other party (with some charges being extremely trumped up, if you'll pardon the pun), so I don't know that this is a given anymore.

Elected administrations should notbbe deciding who is or is not prosecuted, period. We have three branches of government for a reason, its up to the judicial to decide what cases will or won't be tried, and they should be basing that on evidence alone.

> We have three branches of government for a reason, its up to the judicial to decide what cases will or won't be tried, and they should be basing that on evidence alone.

The judicial branch does not decide who to prosecute. They're supposed to ensure that the law is applied consistently, but prosecutorial discretion is entirely up to the DoJ and at least nominally is part of the executive branch (for federal crimes). They also don't directly decide whether someone is convicted in most cases; a judge can throw out a meritless case or in rare cases vacate a jury verdict, but the jury verdict itself is outside of any of the three branches by design.

In any case though, this is isn't super relevant to my comment you replied to. The parent comment claimed that the debate about the law was purely theater, and I argued that it might not be because someone could get prosecuted for it if the law isn't on the books. Whether the DoJ should try to prosecute someone for something is not the same as whether they will try to. The DoJ has tended to operate in a somewhat removed way from the whims of the president in the aftermath of Watergate, but that's a precedent that's been pretty clearly been eroded in recent years. That doesn't mean political prosecutions will be successful, but using legalism as a way of trying to enforce one's political agenda is not a new phenomenon; the Bush administration had lawyers write up opinions justifying their use of "enhanced interrogation" because being able to couch one's actions in legal terms is one of many ways to try to build support (or mitigate opposition) to them. Having laws that say something is not allowed has at least some effect even when people try to get away with violating them, even if it's only in the form of soft pressure.

The judiciary absolutely decides what cases to take to trial. From grand juries to motions for dismissal, the judicial branch is responsible for deciding when a case is heard vs when a case is thrown out.

Its important to note that the DoJ is part of the executive branch, not the judicial branch.

If we had more representation with guts like El Sayd and AOC, yes.

Isn't that what all the hype about National Security Letters (and related events from those years) were all about? I never thought any of that went away, the media just stopped reporting on it. We had Lavabit and Snowden showing us how unhinged these things can get.

Even more unhinged once you realize that trust fund kids are regularly placed in three-letter agencies because those role provide literal immunity. Much better than just a simple diplomatic passport from some micro nation.

It's not only about assassinations or intelligence, things like organizing beauty pageants or producing snuff porn are valid duties for secret police. And this does not even touch the whole KKK thing. Those are the people writing the NSLs.

I'm increasingly of the opinion that state secret classification of our law enforcement systems should only exist for a year max. We've abused the system to shield evil people from accountability and to hide evil actions by our government, and that has to change.

I would go much further. Almost nothing that a government does, should be classified. The government is there to serve the people. If it cannot do so in daylight, then it is doing something wrong.

Exceptions should be rare. Honestly, I cannot imagine any exceptions outside of protecting military secrets from foreign powers.

Yeah, I’d say the only thing that deserves classification would be weapon technical designs (but not existence/purpose), and maybe short term operational details for law enforcement or military planned actions.

Think about this some more. It would be horrendous for individual privacy if your neighbors could see what you paid in taxes, all your medicare claims, which of your family members are imprisoned, your kids public school grades. Many things the government does should not be public record.

They don't want the public to see the big green "APPROVED" rubber stamp that the FISC uses.

He should go further and describe or read these secret rulings on the Senate floor, where the speech and debate clause protects him.

He would most likely not be chosen for the intelligence committee anymore if he did that, it would only be worth before retiring or for something really huge

Worth waiting for. Except for the part about having to wait.

That only protects him from non-Senate consequences. He could certainly be ejected from the Senate. Can the Senate try and convict him of breaking national security secrecy laws?

This capability virtually guarantees that the next generation of Nelson Mandellas, Julian Assanges, <insert national activist of your choice>, etc. gets nipped in the bud long before they become an actual headache to the ruling class. This is why the owners of every country come together to support these technologies, without exception and regardless of political coalition membership.

They are only doing it for the children.

Going all the way back to lenin these guys were often controlled by third party states anyhow with the goal of destabilizing power structures. Almost like a virus you unleash. That is why lenin was shipped via railcar by germany to the russian empire in 1917 at the height of war. The plan worked and the third rome fell apart shortly thereafter.

Lenin was supported by Germany, but I don't think anyone credible would say he wa controlled by Germany.

he accomplished their aims, however, and that is enough.

He was akin to a molotov cocktail they could toss at any oppressed populace in europe and have non small odds of civil war. It might be more fair to say they controlled him the same way an incendiary bomber controls fire.

They waited until there was a civil war in Russia to send him back.

You're right, a genuine activist used by the state for cynical motives is called a Useful Idiot. Ironically, this turn of phrase was traditionally said to be coined by Lenin, although modern scholarship no longer espouses this view.

> This capability virtually guarantees that the next generation of Nelson Mandellas [..] gets nipped in the bud long before they become an actual headache to the ruling class.

They are way ahead of you. The intent is not just to monitor, it's also to predict/preempt and to shape.

The whole sales pitch of Palantir is effectively marketing talk for pre-crime. And if we see what the russians and the chinese are doing online to shape our opinions I can only imagine what the US capabilities are in this realm.

This is not just about stopping the next Mandela. This is about knowing who the next Mandela is before future Mandela even knows it. And this about shaping the opinion of all potential future Mandela's into a neutered state.

Secret methods are an unavoidable necessity of governance. Secret laws an legal decisions are the hallmark of a failed polity.

archived, no trackers: https://nonograph.com/the-us-government-is-hiding-a-secret-c...

This kind of thing will never stop. And those who control it have all the leverage and power.

Perhaps all the spying data should just be publicly accessible and easily accessible for all to use and abuse.

Would democratizing it all so there is never an expectation of privacy from the public vs a select few in power be better in the long run?

No.

Yes, if it truly all data, available to all.

they are doing much more than reading private messages in real time; they are also manipulating, distorting, delaying, etc based on the content; even going so far as to muck with your local programs (such as VPN) to throttle internet connectivity so that the most sensitive information cannot propagate virally as it should.

The AI matrix prison is real and discussions about it are censored.

So grateful to have Wyden in my corner. Especially for the last decade or so it sparks joy to fill his bubble in on the ballot.

He's my favorite democrat

This headline has been relevant since 2001.

I would argue it's been relevant since July 26, 1908

Could you be a bit more specific about the relevance of that date?

Searching the date yields this link: https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/july-26/fbi-foun...

The FBI was founded.

Then, not completely relevant. The US government was not *hiding secret court rulings about how it spies on Americans" since the day the FBI was founded.

Spying on Americans? You could say that, perhaps, but you would have to say it about every law enforcement organization (including the local police) since 1776.

What the actual article is talking about is a massive extension, not covered by the regular "get a warrant in court" mechanism. Saying "just like the FBI" ignores how different this is, and how alien to the Constitution.

To clarify, I'm not promoting the previous comment, I'm just clarifying what the date was

All the big federal law enforcement agencies engage in various degrees of unconstitutional surveillance. The fact that the FBI also gets a lot of warrants as part of its job doesn't change that. The FBI also did it first and has been doing it since it's inception. Heck they named their HQ after the guy who really took it to the next level.

Every non-trivial organization everywhere has some level of law breaking. We should try to avoid it, but we will never get to zero.

Secret courts on the other hand undermine the entire concept of rule of law and we should have absolutely zero tolerance for them.

I'll give incidental law breaking a pass but dubiously legal if not illegal surveillance has been a core activity of the FBI from day 1-ish.

I had a dream last night that the government had a database that corps sent in "opt-out" info from people. Anytime someone opted out of a surveillance system (e.g. ad tracking, etc...) that info got sent to the government as a signal that the person is sus. They took the "if you have nothing to hide" logic to its full conclusion.

The only good thing is that at least under capitalism (not a system I'm a fan of) this is difficult to do (well as long as the owners of said companies weren't sheep), and like most conspiracies is very hard to enforce, there would be a leakage in a program so broad as this.

But it was a disturbing concept. Merely by signalling you didn't want to be watched made you more watched.

> there would be a leakage in a program so broad as this

It took an insider with one of the highest clearances you can get to break the news about these kinds of wiretapping deals.

Apple, Google, and other insiders were very quiet about those back room deals. You can bet they never stopped and only expanded too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore?useskin=vector

What else could have been expected when this fake imitation America started creating the FISA courts and created the treasonous 5-eyes network of circumventing the Constitution like traitors do.

"Secret court ruling" — Land of the free, home of the brave

This is why I laugh at the face of anyone demonising china and on the moral high horse. At least the Chinese government doesn’t lie about their surveillance. It’s far more insidious what the American government does, it just outright lies and indoctrinates its citizens.

The only folks demonizing China are clueless US 'patriots' and I can see it only here on HN since nobody in the world really consumes US news. Rest of the world is already seeing it as better option to US in many ways, but warry of not destroying domestic companies by cheap imports.

What I see from outside is complete full reversal of US and China and their roles in the world regarding politics and security. US has nothing to offer to anybody - backstabbing, frequent changes of policies on morning whims of an old sick man, or very direct economical attacks to closest former allies and threats of military attacks. Plus completely destabilizing global oil transport, massively increasing prices and helping trigger a global recession.

Only an absolute fool would think US has anything positive to offer. In such world, China is by far the least of the evil, role traditionally held by US but not anymore.

FISA court is an insane post-9/11 secret tribunal, a bad idea for these past 25 years.

But at least they were subject to Congressional oversight.

> the Trump administration is illegally withholding a secret court’s findings from Congress

Oops.

>FISA court is an insane post-9/11 secret tribunal,

Wow! It's amazing how the time travelers went back in time after 9/11 just for FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act). It was enacted, and FISA courts created in 1978[0].

All sorts of stupid stuff was done after (and in the name of "anti-terrorism") 9/11. FISA was not one of them.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveilla...

A ruling belongs to the judicial branch.

The article could have been interesting but by fundamentally misrepresenting the structure of the American federal government they made it impossible to take seriously.

> The Trump administration has until November 6 to answer the senators.

How convenient that this is right after the midterm elections. If they maintain control, the republicans can simply decide to ignore this requirement without penalty.

Remind me in February to look back at how much the Democrats have done about it.

Yep this authoritarian movement is much bigger than the parties. We will see, again and again, how much it matters and the go back to the same old game every election and everyone will forget about how they have been played the first time. Im so sick of this corrupt system.

If it's simply not blocking this answer, then it's a win. Doing nothing is better than actively breaking the law.

what was always remarkable about surveillance is that given these immense intrusive powers and a total panopticon, this is still the best they can do.

fentanyl epidemic, mass illegal migration and trafficking, networks of terrible abuse, flagrant public corruption, infiltration of schools and academia, conspiracies to demolish the entire western world, and yet even with total information awareness or some variant, these crimes occur in the open.

the scandal isnt that they are spying, its what they have explicitly chooseb to allow and enable.

What enrages me is the longstanding precedent that the government cannot read your letters without a warrant, but apparently electronic messages that are directly analogous are fair game.

You are assuming they are trying to do the best for citizens or best to abide by the constitution. They are not. In fact they actively try to side step the laws and constitution, and have these kind of secret interpretations ready. Would also like to remind you that no democratic country would allow smuggling of drugs by its own government apparatus but the usa has done that, so the drug epidemic isn't that shocking outcome.

Trump is going to lose. People are tired of his lies.

If that were true, he wouldn't have had a second term. Americans are finally experiencing his fuckery first hand with fuel prices, which is why he is going to lose. The lies weren't much of a concern. Fox News is still I believe the biggest cable channel in the country.

> Fox News is still I believe the biggest cable channel in the country.

Not only is this true, but most of the legacy media landscape also shifted hard to the right (in large part due to massive corporate consolidation) over the past decade, so Fox isn't even especially unique anymore in terms of being extremely right-partisan.

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