[btilly]

I do not like the title, but the central point is good.

The real problem with PRISM is not that you, individually, are going to be targeted. It is that the tools have been put in place to subvert the political process by personally targeting anyone with views that are inconvenient for those of influence. These tools may be being used fairly now, but based on past history, we cannot assume that they will continue to be so.

And the past history to look at is not even that of distant times and places. Take a look at how the FBI under Hoover tried to affect the political process in the USA with COINTELPRO.

[graeme]

Very good point. I lived in Cuba for a few months. I was surprised to find that people were very open and vocal about their discontent with the economic situation.

I eventually figured it out. Those people didn't matter. They weren't doing anything. Just venting steam.

As soon as someone tried to actually change things, that's when they get bopped on the head.

Most of us aren't activists. But we depend on them to drive change. If they get stifled, we get stifled.

[alan_cx]

Christ, imagine if Hoover had today's tool available to him. Imagine the reach and power of McCarthyism.

I guess many would suggest that is exactly what we have right now. Just more subtle, opaque, and deniable.

[rayiner]

> I guess many would suggest that is exactly what we have right now. Just more subtle, opaque, and deniable.

I can't see how anyone who has studied American history could think that what we have now even approaches what existed at the time of McCarthyism. McCarthyism required a level of public acquiescence and homogeneity of thought that could only exist under the threat of Soviet domination and nuclear holocaust. The bogeyman of terrorism doesn't have nearly that kind of grip on the public consciousness.

Heck, just look at the wars that were justified by the two fears: Korea (36,516 Americans dead) and Vietnam (58,209) versus Afghanistan (2,229) and Iraq (4,488). Not to minimize the causalities of those wars, but if you can measure the power of a scary idea by the number of U.S. soldiers that die before the public puts a stop to the war, then there is no comparison between the specter of communism versus the specter of terrorism.

[flyinRyan]

But communism was a made-up threat, just like terrorism is. They can ramp up the fear factor any time they want and now they have all that infra in place to support it.

[rayiner]

An aggressive, expansionist power with nuclear weapons pointed at us was not a "made-up" threat. Neither is international terrorist organizations conspiring to attack us. Both are factually verifiable threats.

Reasonable people can disagree about the appropriate responses to those threats, but it's factually incorrect to say they are "made up."

As an aside, for those claiming that terrorism poses no threat because it kills so few people, I'll offer the example of the Beltway Sniper attacks. More people probably died in traffic accidents in the D.C. metro area than were killed by the Beltway Sniper. But the chilling effect on everyday life was so much greater. It's hard do convey to someone the feeling of putting gas in your car on a sunny weekend day with the hair on your neck standing up because even though you know that there is a negligible chance of your being the victim of a sniper attack, the possibility scares you in a way that the possibility of death through heart disease, or hell the certainty of death through old age, cannot.

[flyinRyan]

I see the nonsense works pretty well on you.

>expansionist power with nuclear weapons pointed at us was not a "made-up" threat

At the time of McCarthyism this wasn't really what was going on. What was going on was that capitalists were afraid communism would work. They saw rich and powerful people getting killed or displaced and the "plebs" running things and they were going to make sure it couldn't happen here.

>Neither is international terrorist organizations conspiring to attack us

International terrorist threat conspiracy theories. Nice. You mean the global terrorist group with all kinds of secret cells hidden under ever rock? Yea, that was all made up bullshit. Al Quaeda is a name we made up to be able to apply our own RICO laws after the first WTC bombing. And you may not realize it, but terrorist groups tend to hate each other as much as they hate anyone else. They are religious extremists after all.

>but it's factually incorrect to say they are "made up."

They are either utterly non-existent or so small as to be ignorable.

>putting gas in your car on a sunny weekend day with the hair on your neck standing up because even though you know that there is a negligible chance of your being the victim of a sniper attack, the possibility scares you in a way that the possibility of death through heart disease, or hell the certainty of death through old age, cannot.

What you are describing is irrational, emotional response. None the less, we can't make policy decisions about how you feel. And the media is largely to blame about this. The reported news should be proportional to the effect. The Boston marathon bomb should have been a byline on the local Boston news if it was mentioned at all.

[btilly]

Let me ask you. Do you personally know anyone who lived on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain during the cold war? Were you living in NYC during 9/11?

For me the answer is yes to both. Communism was not a made up threat. Nor did it just impact a few rich people. The Soviets took control of hundreds of millions of people, and maintained control with tanks and guns. For instance ask any Czech who was around in 1968 how fun that was.

As for 9/11, someone flew those planes. (If you're one of the morons who thinks that missiles were used, then go talk to one of the millions of eyewitnesses who watched the second plane fly low and slow over Manhattan - half my workplace at the time was on a balcony and watched it.) Osama bin Laden took public credit. Al Qaeda was both real, and had appeared in lots of stuff before that. After 9/11 they had great branding.

This is not to say that the threats were considered realistically. The domino theory under which we fought in Vietnam was invalid. Supporting every anti-communist power we could just because they were anti-communist lead to our supporting everything from genocide in Cambodia to military coups in Chile.

Likewise this time around, Al Qaeda was not a force in Iraq. (Well, not until we invaded, and then people who wanted to freak us out began calling themselves Al Qaeda.) I do not believe that our response has been proportionate to the threat.

But do try to keep facts in mind. In the Cold War we did face communist countries. We do face terrorist organizations today. Those are not made up.

[rayiner]

> None the less, we can't make policy decisions about how you feel.

You shouldn't make policy decisions based on how you feel. However, you should make policy decisions based on how people feel. The former is something that can cloud our judgment. The latter is rationally reacting to a natural phenomenon that exists in the population.

Designing security policy in a way that ignores the fact that people fear, and have their lives disrupted by, sudden random death in a way they do not fear natural, predictable death, is a luxury akin to that of designing an airplane in a world where gravity does not exist. Yeah, it would be easy to design airplanes in a world where gravity was not a thing, but that's not the world we live in. You can't ignore natural phenomena just because you don't agree with the reasons they exist.

[dctoedt]

> But communism was a made-up threat

I'll bet you haven't lived through or studied much 20th century history, because it appears you've not heard of:

- the brutal North Vietnamese conquest of South Vietnam, and its invasions of Laos and Cambodia in the process, to say nothing of the violent Communist takeovers in the latter two countries;

- the Cuban attempts to export armed revolution to Central- and Latin America, and then even Africa (viz., Angola);

- the North Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950;

- the Soviet Union's savage crushing of would-be democratic governments in post-war Eastern and Central Europe in 1945-48;

- Stalin's 1939 non-aggression pact with Hitler, widely thought to have been intended to let the Germans and the West fight each other to exhaustion, after which Stalin could have his way with Europe.

Sure, maybe deep down the motives were just nationalism dressed up in communist ideological clothing; poTAYto poTAHto.

[btilly]

Some of these examples are good, others not so much.

Consider the first one. The conquest, while brutal, was merely the finale of a horrible civil war that was going on before we got there. And a military dictatorship that was only able to maintain power because we supported it really wasn't a legitimate government no matter how you slice it.

Now Laos I grant you. But the conquest of Cambodia put an end to one of the worst genocides since WW II. The Khmer Rouge killed 20% of the country. Unfortunately after they were evicted from power, the USA took the approach that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" and supported their attempts to retake power for decades.

There is a lot of legitimate room for debate about that one.

Some of the others, of course, I'm in full agreement with you on. But you really should have just stuck to your best examples. (That would be the crushing of would-be democratic governments in post-war Eastern and Central Europe.)

[dctoedt]

> But the conquest of Cambodia put an end to one of the worst genocides since WW II.

You're referring to the 1978-79 invasion of Khmer-Rouge-governed "Democratic Kampuchea" by (the by-then unified) Vietnam, about which you're absolutely correct.

In contrast, I was referring to the 1970 North Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, which led to the U.S. incursion there, which in turn touched off protests in the U.S., including the one at Kent State.

> [Referring to South Vietnam:] a military dictatorship that was only able to maintain power because we supported it really wasn't a legitimate government no matter how you slice it.

A lot of Vietnamese immigrants to the U.S. would strongly disagree with you. Drive around the Little Saigon area in Houston (or numerous other cities). You'll see plenty of South Vietnamese flags flying. This, even though it's been nearly 40 years since North Vietnam completed its conquest in April 1975.

There's a selection bias at work here, of course; the people who fled South Vietnam and came to the U.S. were, by and large, people who were aligned with, and benefited from, the South Vietnamese government.

Still, it speaks volumes that so many South Vietnamese fled -- by small boat, and who knows how many of them drowned at sea or were killed by pirates.

The North Vietnamese had heavy logistical support from the USSR and China. After Watergate and Nixon's 1974 resignation, the U.S. Congress -- controlled by the Democratic Party, whose base by then was heavily influenced by left-wing "peaceniks" -- cut off logistical support for the Saigon government. (Foreign policy wise, the Democratic Party of today is very, very different from that of the 1970s.) The cut-off of U.S. support was pretty much game over for South Vietnam.

Some argue that the quick collapse of the Saigon government suggests that the government didn't enjoy broad popular support among the South Vietnamese people. Another possible explanation is that the South Vietnamese were tired of war and saw no point in sacrificing their lives in the face of overwhelming military force.

I do think there's considerable room for argument that, after the Japanese surrender and evacuation from Vietnam in 1945, the U.S. should have backed Ho Chi Minh and his Vietnamese nationalists, instead of supporting a return of the French colonial rulers (who were booted out after losing the French-Indochina War 1950-1954). There's also no question that the Saigon government was far from ideal.

But I don't think there's any dispute that --- on the whole --- the (Communist) North Vietnamese government was far more systematically brutal than was the South. Indeed, systematic brutality seems to be a common and recurring theme among Communist governments. Which goes to my original point.

[beedogs]

They really just need something to remind us once a generation or so. Then we all rally against whatever new bogeyman is presented. A huge chunk of our money is spent 'neutralizing' this new 'threat', and things go back to some new 'normal' for a little while.

[f1nch3r]

I agree with the author's point. I'd like to add that the problem right now isn't that you'll be individually targeted. But a mechanism has been created that depends on benevolent rule. The loss of civil liberties tends to be looked at myopically.