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Comment by rooshdi | Hacker News Reader

"Both US-persons and non-US-persons have a right to be free of routinized surveillance. This right does not spring solely from the US Fourth Amendment; it is a human and natural right as well."

This cannot be overstated. Americans are no better than the rest of the world. If anything, being the masters of mass surveillance makes us worse. We're creating the big brother blueprint.

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As a non-US citizen, I've been repeatedly asking this about news stories emphasizing the collection of domestic communications as the bad thing. I thought your declaration of independence say that all humans are endowed with inalienable rights...

One big misunderstanding is that the Declaration of Independence is a legally binding document today. It was a declaration of war on the British Empire; it didn't really matter anymore than a statement of values of people who started the war once it was done with that.

I would look to treaties that we have signed to see what we currently legally state as human rights Treaties in Force [1]. Specifically this treaty: International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights [2]. Just make sure to check if your country is one of the countries that have agreed to the treaty and that the government who signed it is still in power.

[1]: Treaties in Force - http://www.state.gov/s/l/treaty/tif/index.htm

[2]: ICCPR - http://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/ccpr.aspx

Thanks for the links, especially ICCPR! I did know that the declaration of independence isn't legally binding, but it is a statement of principle on which America is founded, yes? Isn't it through some interpretation of it that America feels compelled to spread freedom and democracy outside its boarders? Don't get me wrong, I'm quite pro-American, but it seems weird that the US government is campaigning for our rights when our own governments are trampling on them (which I personally appreciate), but tramples on them (right to privacy in particular) when its own interests at stake.

The Declaration of Independence is rhetoric meant to justify a war. It's ironically contradictory--people talking about "all men being created equal" right before founding a country where blacks were enslaved, Indians were exterminated, women had few rights, and only land-owners could vote. The most sensible way to read that part of the Declaration of Independence is for the narrow statement that "white land owning males in the colonies are every bit as good as white land owning males in Great Britain." That plus Thomas Jefferson having a flair for the dramatic.

"People not in America are equal to people in America" has never been an animating principle of American society. The U.S. has a long and storied history of e.g. intervening in Latin America to keep it a brushfire-free back yard: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_America%E2%80%93United_St...

All that may be true, but as dalek_cannes says, it gives us perspective on how to understand the Constitution. In particular, it informs us that the Bill of Rights is not granting rights to the people, but is instead taking note of certain rights that all people have inherently.

I don't think it informs us of that at all. Even to the extent that it's anything more than rhetorical flourish, it's misleading to read the language in terms of modern understandings or schoolhouse revisionist history. At the time, there was this idea of the "customary rights of Englishmen" that isn't coextensive with "natural rights of all human beings" as we might think of it today. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights_of_Englishmen. These are not "natural rights" in the sense of something you might find if you cut someone open and did an autopsy, but rather rights that arose out of the long-standing, practice of a people and which are enjoyed by those people.

It's quite clear that the Constitution simply recognized customary rights that existed, but that shouldn't be taken as a recognition of universal rights common to all people. Especially in light of all the countervailing evidence in the form of unequal treatment of nearly everyone who wasn't a white English male landowner. That evidence is inconsistent with the recognition of universal natural rights, but entirely consistent with the recognition of customary rights, which since the magna carta had applied to white English male landowners.

This is why the Founding Fathers weren't actually keen on a Bill of Rights. They feared that citizens would come to believe that their rights were granted by the document, rather than just been non-exclusively enumerated in it.

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