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Comment by ctdonath | Hacker News Reader

Just more noise for the NSA to sift thru and for well-paid legislators to ignore.

Americans: there's something called the Fourth Amendment. What we need is a free straightforward how-to guide to filing suit over this wholesale monitoring[1], such that thousands of individuals can act on for mere court filing fees. Overwhelm the courts with it, creating a proliferation of contradicting verdicts, forcing the Supreme Court to address it on terms of 300,000 individual citizens vs NSA. Rather than pouring vast sums into a single case with a couple carefully selected plaintiffs and hoping for an unlikely perfect outcome, crowdsource it.

Just a recurring thought.

[1] - which the Founding Fathers would certainly enumerated rights against had they been able to conceive of such pervasive intrusion on "papers".

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This won't work. Even if you had individual standing (4th amendment violations were actionable on their own due to bivens, but not so much anymore due to later precedent. For the most part, federal agencies don't count as a whole), your plan to flood the courts would fail.

They have multi-district litigation panels, etc, meant to manage the process of thousands of claims that are not class claims, and are spread out all over the place.

Americans elect their legislators. If enough people in their district don't like what they're doing, they can put someone else in office. It's a beautiful system.

And careful what you ask for re: a SCOTUS ruling.

The problem is the "tyranny of the majority". Those who don't understand the issue squash the interests of those who do. Fortunately, the Founding Fathers wrote a Constitution which focuses on protecting and facilitating the rights of individuals such that no majority can (in theory) suppress them. For the issue at hand, getting enough voters in enough precincts to take a dominating stance on something as obscure as NSA spying is unlikely; a system as beautiful as the one you note is the one whereby a single person can stand up and say "you can't do that!" and, duly adjudicated, be left alone.

Yes, asking for a SCOTUS ruling is playing with fire in a hay barn. I'm just annoyed that for all the ink spilled on this (and other such topics, see 2nd Amendment) there is precious little actual court activity addressing it, with most of it decided by either extremely big money or guilty-as-hell defendants grasping at straws; the legal system should be reasonably accessible by pretty much anyone without having to shell out big bucks for lawyers more interested in preserving their symbiotic relationship with the courts.

Isn't that exactly the problem this is trying to solve by educating the users of various websites?

What, call this number and say something vague about opposing surveillance and supporting a law with an extremely vague name and no link to the actual content thereof?

A momentary tsunami of opinions will soon pass, vs the persuasive job-preserving quiet comments of a few people who know everything. I don't want to knock this effort as all efforts in the same directions help; I'm concerned that it will have little effect, vs the potential of grossly under-used objective tools of actual laws enforced starting with first principles (the Constitution).

Educate users? Start with an up-front link to the actual text of the law, with explanation of how portions of it apply and how it has real teeth vs an agency protected (sometimes with force) by extreme & legal secrecy.

I'm suspect of bills named as vapidly as "USA Freedom Act" with little addressing of its content. More like a legal Rorschach test, eliciting what individuals want to see and then asking them to act on what they imagined it is.

A broken system more like, where nothing can change until a critical mass of people is sufficiently pissed off. Proportional representation or GTFO.

> Americans elect their legislators. If enough people in their district don't like what they're doing, they can put someone else in office.

Do you think Americans have liked what "their" legislators have been doing for the past 10 years, for example? PATRIOT ACT, SOPA, CISPA, NDAA, hello?

What positive changes has voting brought you?

> PATRIOT ACT, SOPA, CISPA, NDAA, hello?

Then you tell me... why do legislators who support those things keep getting re-elected? You can hardly blame them for supporting things that (apparently) have the support of most of their constituents. And if you think the reason is that not enough people know/care... well isn't that the whole point of this banner campaign?

> What positive changes has voting brought you?

Seriously?

> Then you tell me... why do legislators who support those things keep getting re-elected? You can hardly blame them for supporting things that (apparently) have the support of most of their constituents.

Nice sophistry there. Do you think raping the public's privacy is part of their election campaigns? "If you vote me into office, I promise to rape your privacy extra-hard!" --> "Yayyy! Here, have my vote!" .. or something?

this would be great!

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