[craigc]

It is really sad and disturbing to me how little coverage the CLOUD act has gotten. A law was passed quietly that was snuck into page 2,201 of an unrelated spending/budget bill just before Congress voted on it to allow warrantless surveillance by foreign governments and law enforcement on any US citizen, and not one mainstream media source has written about it. It was signed into law by Trump just a couple days later without a single hearing or debate in Congress.

Please read:

- https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/23/cloud_act_spending_...

- https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/03/responsibility-deflect...

I personally believe the Facebook “scandal” is/was a smoke screen to draw the media attention away from this (4 or 5 year old scandal with regards to data collected for the Government to begin with). No private information was leaked (private messages, chats, etc) from Facebook as far as I am aware. I am not saying Facebook is innocent here – they are far from it, but I can’t stop thinking that the timing is too convenient and too much of a coincidence. Also recall that Zuckerberg liquidated around $500 million of Facebook stock in February.

All of the major tech companies (Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc) co-authored a letter supporting this legislation saying that it represents “notable progress to protect consumers’ rights.” despite the fact that it does the exact opposite. I think it will save them money from drawn out legal battles, legal fees, and the possibility of having to build additional data centers in other countries/continents to replicate and provide access to customer’s data for law enforcement agencies.

The CLOUD act allows access to ANY data including emails, private messages, etc. without requiring a warrant or having to inform the person that it is being collected. It gives additional power to the executive branch as the attorney general and certain members of the cabinet can access data on unsuspecting individuals without having to notify Congress or the Judicial branch. Also data collected from another party interacting with someone else could be used to criminally prosecute them even if they were not under any suspicion or investigation to begin with.

[wallace_f]

The CLOUD act allows domestic or foreign police to collect your data without a warrant, any review by a judge, or any awareness of the individual; and even explicitly allows foreign police to ignore existing US privacy laws applicable to US citizens

>no mention in mainstream media

Terrifying and surreal

[tdhoot]

> warrantless surveillance by foreign governments and law enforcement on any US citizen

Source? I only see that it allows foreign governments to get information on their own citizens, even if that information is stored on US soil.

[tsmarsh]

It’s edge cases like this that make me wonder about the whole concept of nations.

It makes citizens sound like property / cattle.

“I believe my cow pooped on your lawn. I demand the right to inspect your lawn for my cows poop to retrieve the poop. Expect further consultation if we decide you illegally benefited from that poop. I don’t care that you are ok with the poop or that the cow came to your lawn and pooped there of its own valition. In Cowville pooping outside of your allotted pen is illegal.”

Of course when you take that argument to its logical conclusion I may find that I’ve just argued for a firewall / vetting system that would prevent data leaving the national networks ‘illegally’. Maybe I am. Or maybe I’m arguing the other way, that national borders make less sense than ever and freedom of people, ideas and data requires a completely different take on national soverignty.

[vinceguidry]

> It makes citizens sound like property / cattle.

This is, precisely, how polities have always worked. Personal freedom of movement is circumscribed to lawfully prescribed means. It wasn't until after WW2 and airplanes when ordinary people gained the technical capability to move around. Before then, you had to have lots of money and time to travel. Serfs were considered part of the land, they needed permission to leave.

With the Renaissance came the loosening of identification from commoners being a part of the land, to being a part of the city / political region. The concept of people as property never really changed and is intrinsic to the idea of governance, which imposes rules that people must live by, and specifies what kinds of commerce can go on. Citizenship is just the loosening of who owns you from your city to your nation.

Things are changing, quite rapidly, but don't expect the idea of people as belonging to a polity to ever really go away. Governments require tax revenue to operate, and governments that don't have to rely on their citizens for those taxes are governments that don't have to be held accountable to those citizens. (See Russia) Your government is always going to treat you like a belonging, and demand the right to use your efforts for the good of the nation however it sees fit.

[vanderZwan]

> This is, precisely, how polities have always worked. Personal freedom of movement is circumscribed to lawfully prescribed means. It wasn't until after WW2 and airplanes when ordinary people gained the technical capability to move around. Before then, you had to have lots of money and time to travel. Serfs were considered part of the land, they needed permission to leave.

[Citation needed]

From what I have been taught by friends of mine who studied International Migration & Ethnic Relations, people moved around a lot more freely before the nation state came into existence than they do now, because there were no borders to keep them out.

[vinceguidry]

Sure, if you had the money, time and/or motivation. If you didn't, it was extremely difficult to travel. Nobody would trust you, and staying at inns was expensive. Get caught camping in lands where no one knew you, and you're at their mercy.

[bwanab]

I'm trying to imagine in what historical period that would have been. Whether the border was that of a modern nation-state, a principality, or a village the effect would have been the same.

[Maybestring]

What time period is that? I'm not sure what historians consider the first nation state.

[chimeracoder]

> What time period is that? I'm not sure what historians consider the first nation state.

There's disagreement about this, but the contemporary concept of the nation-state is believed to have merged between the 17th and 19th centuries. 1648 is usually given as the earliest date, though that's partly out of a desire to ascribe a specific year to what was actually a slow process.

[wu-ikkyu]

National boundaries are kaput on the World Wide Web.

[liberte82]

Once corporations start deciding it's cheaper to just provide their own healthcare to its workers rather than going through the broken American system, watch out. Corporate fascism is the new feudalism.

[lwf]

This is literally how Kaiser Permanente was founded — pre-paid healthcare for industrial workers, eventually expanded to cover families of workers, eventually expanded as an integrated managed-care offering for companies to offer their employees. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiser_Permanente#Early_years

Kaiser is regarded as one of the highest-quality providers, and the regional health plans it runs are operated as non-profits.

[amoshi]

Something similar happened already. Israel has a special 'Observer' status in the Five Eyes scheme and was provided with raw data from the US.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/11/nsa-americans-...

https://cryptome.org/2013/09/nsa-israel-spy.pdf

[jacobush]

If one or two (million) US citizens data happen to get included, well that’s unfortunate. It’s not against the law in those countries. Purely by coincidence, these other countries can then notify the US government if they see something of interest, some dirt on a US citizen. Now there is something to be concerned about and the US government has cause to look more closely. Outsource all unkempt activity!

[mtgx]

Not just a lack of media coverage, but no debate in Congress either. The bill was sneaked into the omnibus spending bill. That sort of thing is usually reserved for a certain type of bills (and I don't mean just budget bills, sadly) ...

[cmurf]

It's a combination of corporate money in politics, and a nation of spectators, not citizens. The citizens have yielded their participation and power to corporations, on purpose, and many are proud that they've done this, if they care at all.

It's only hindsight being 20/20 that they go, oh fuck that was a bad idea, how did we get here? Complacency.

No one said democracy was easy. It requires constant vigilance. And people are too happy to be entertained by other things. Of course the better system would be the benevolent dictator for a push button operation, the small problem is they're not benevolent for very long.

[buvanshak]

> the small problem is they're not benevolent for very long.

Would it be possible to appoint a dictator, who has no other incentive other then serve the people. For ex, they ll sever every human relation, cannot own property, will have zero privacy, cannot reproduce and have children etc. But they ll be held to the highest honor and their every needs taken care of...

In short, something like the life of a religious saint or a nun.

[spc476]

CGP Grey did a video about political power: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

Short answer: your idea probably won't last long.

[headhunter]

You've described an AI politician. Doesn't sound so bad now, huh?

Will you turn over your leadership to the machines? Humans are so bad at it.

[indigochill]

>Will you turn over your leadership to the machines?

Translates to: Will you turn over your leadership to the humans running the machines?

I like the theory of a perfectly impartial AI dictator. However, I don't believe such a thing is possible since it must be programmed by people and carries any biases (deliberate or accidental) those people program into it.

[evanlivingston]

Power corrupts.

[cmurf]

No.

Read Hobbes' Leviathan, it discusses this. A prerequisite for success the sovereign must establish a state religion, subjects comply or are executed.

And then John Locke, with emphasis on consent of the governed.

And why not the Catholic Church? The pope is essentially what you describe but they have been many bad Popes. Nevertheless as an institution it endures, with and without justice.

A sovereign who is completely selfless would not be a human. So you're necessarily searching for deities or an off worlder. And when they're done? Who then? Sounds chaotic and capricious.

[buvanshak]

>A sovereign who is completely selfless would not be a human.

All human beings have survival instincts. But we manages to build soldiers that are willing to risk their lives for random stuff. Right?

In such way, it might be possible to build, or grow, generations of such people, completely selfless..

[mtreis86]

Random stuff isn't what soldiers risk their lives for. Many see their community as an extension of their family. Others are idealistic. Some didn't realize the risk. It isn't random though.

[buvanshak]

> Random stuff isn't what soldiers risk their lives for.

I mean orders from higher authorities. Are the soldiers given reason or entitled for one? They are just supposed to obey, right?

[freeflight]

While it might not have been your intention, you pretty much described the Hitlerjugend there, indoctrination of children for a "bigger cause".

Even if the cause might be a good one, we still value our individuality over mass enforced and indoctrinated conformism. It might be anything but harmonic, and quite chaotic, but individuality gives us a diversity of ideas and views, thus enabling adaptability, which is one of homo sapiens sapiens biggest advantages.

[golergka]

The most horrible and bloody dictators had only the best intentions in mind. The most bloody and horrible ideology in the world – communism – was driven by idealists.

I'll always take a corrupt politician over a benevolent dictator.

[KozmoNau7]

>"The most bloody and horrible ideology in the world – communism"

Please provide some support for that deeply subjective statement.

https://aeon.co/essays/the-merits-of-taking-an-anti-anti-com...

[AnimalMuppet]

Most bloody? That's objectively true, in terms of total body count, and especially total body count of their own citizens. (Most bloody in terms of deaths per person per year that they had the opportunity to kill is probably the Nazis - although Cambodian Communism, if considered separately from all of communism, probably tops even the Nazis.)

Most horrible? It doesn't seem unreasonable to use body count of a country's own citizens as a proxy for "horror".

[KozmoNau7]

You're lumping a lot of different ideologies together under one umbrella term, even though 1) they were wildly different in practice and implementation, and 2) most of them only paid the tiniest bit of lip service to what Marx envisioned, and 3) were actually just good old tyrannical dictatorships, falsely using the promise of communistic ideals to pacify the populace.

Did you read the article?

I've found it a very common tendency to lump everything free market capitalists don't like as "communism bad!" and "socialism bad!", which I guess stems from decades and decades of cultural indoctrination, fueled by the military industrial complex.

For instance, an anarcho-communist is very far from whatever haphazard centrally planned mess was in place in the USSR at any given time.

[buvanshak]

>I'll always take a corrupt politician over a benevolent dictator.

Am I wrong in saying that if you have enough resources, corrupt politicians and authorities will let you dictate the affairs under them?

So a dictator, as you say exerciser their power to enforce their own agenda. While a corrupt politician sells them off to the highest bidder, to enforce what ever agenda they have...

The only thing better in that scenario is that the "highest bidder" may have an incentive to not kill droves of people, since they probably have a business to run, and that often require people..Also, business does not really have an ideology or a philosophy. It just need to grow its profits..

[AnimalMuppet]

In "A Reply to Professor Haldane", published in "Of Other Worlds", C.S. Lewis said the same thing as golergka. Lewis said that a robber baron may be satisfied with enough money (though I must say that history doesn't supply much hope of that). The robber baron may get lazy. And maybe, since on some level they know that what they do is morally sketchy, they may repent. But an idealist who holds their ideal or political theory with the force of a religion is far worse, because they commit their horrors in the name of doing good, and so their benevolent impulses seem to them to be temptations - something to be resisted in order to do what is "good".

[buvanshak]

In other words, a fool might end up doing more harm than a really cruel person. Of course.

> But an idealist who holds their ideal or political theory with the force of a religion is far worse, because they commit their horrors in the name of doing good, and so their benevolent impulses seem to them to be temptations - something to be resisted in order to do what is "good".

We are talking about a benevolent dictator here. If you are saying that they ll resist their benevolent impulses, how are they a benevolent dictator in the first place?

[acqq]

The problem, independent of the ideology, is the quality of “checks and balances” which protect the human and other rights of the citizens.

And as we see, even in the USA as we speak it’s easy to take some rights from the people without too much fuss (just enough distraction).