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Comment by mpyne | Hacker News Reader

> Or, more precisely, we don’t know if they obey laws.

Do you know that any agency in the U.S. obeys laws? Do you verify this everyday, across the entirety of the USG?

That was always the striking thing to me about these leaks as compared to the NSA investigated by the Church Committee, is that in this case you see an NSA actually trying to comply with the law. This is why MUSCULAR is only overseas, or why only phone metadata was being collected, and only after legal approval by FISC and the FAA by Congress in 2011, and why all their slides talk about "USPERs" and non-USPERs.

If you want change in what NSA is permitted to do then the law is a great place to start. If nothing else it would make it clear to the rank-and-file NSA employee (the same ones Snowden went to bat for on his NBC interview) that there are new, clear boundaries instead of reliance on court orders and Supreme Court precedents.

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We have a wonderful system of checks and balances. It does, however still require competent people to run them. It so happens that in the legislative brace we have an intelligence oversight committee. It is chaired by none less than Senator Dianne Feinstein from the great state of California.

Unfortunately she has acted more like the biggest cheerleader and defender of the NSA rather than a "check" or "balance." Now the good people of California will have a chance to vote (or not) for her reelection should to 80 year old choose to run again in 2019. In the mean time they can write to her to let her know of their dissatisfaction (I've done so - got a reply as well).

Of course one could choose instead to just complain on internet chat boards and ignore the political process and then continue to wonder why our politicians are not reflecting the will of the people. And why we don't have good oversight. Next time you vote (you do vote, right?) please spend at least as much time reviewing a non-partisan voter guide like that produced by the Secretary of State as you do on the latest episode of "Silicon Valley".

Remember - in a democracy the government is only as good as the people we elect. And reelect. And reelect. <sigh>

NSA trying to comply with laws? What? No. Trying to comply with US laws maybe. The rest of us out here that make up the majority of the world have the NSA breaking our laws with impunity. We don't get a say or a vote, we just get to hear the anguished cries of Americans worried that US laws may have been broken.

> The rest of us out here that make up the majority of the world have the NSA breaking our laws with impunity.

When the rest of the world starts upholding things like First and Second Amendment principles even for their own citizens, I will worry more about the U.S. reciprocating by extending Fourth Amendment principles to those who seek to harm the people of the U.S.

But that is still a long ways off it seems. Are women in takfiri-controlled areas able to freely protest or even attend schools yet?

The ironic thing is that you say you don't even "get a say", but you do. Our President has had to focus attention on foreign intelligence programs to try and appease non-American audiences, precisely because of the fact that non-Americans "get a say", which is something that the Chinese and Russian leadership will never have to worry about. Do you protest SORM to Putin? If you've ever (directly or indirectly) used a .ru site, or a site hosted in Russia, you should.

> I will worry more about the U.S. reciprocating by extending Fourth Amendment principles to those who seek to harm the people of the U.S.

Fourth Amendment (and Fifth Amendment) protections protect the US from a government pretending to be protecting them from "people who seek to harm the people of the US" without actually doing so.

While the direct targets are the most obvious victims of denials of due process protections, the more significant victim is the public at large -- due process protections increase the cost of security theater so as to limit the extent to which it is easier for the government to cut corners and engage in show punishments of scapegoats for propaganda purposes rather than do the hard work of finding the real guilty parties.

And for real, organized, enemies against which legal process is inadequate, well, that's what declarations of war against specific enemies. But permanent, open-ended, unconstrained war -- and arbitrary executive use of war-appropriate processes -- against whomever the current executive thinks might be a threat is another thing altogether.

This is a good point.

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