[pstop]

I'm actually surprised, I would have figured that by this point, there would have been a revolution, or at least mutterings. The federal government is actually circumventing the law and the justice system in order to illegally incarcerate citizens. The American government is the enemy of the American people by the governments own admission.

It turns out it wasn't Brave New World or 1984, rather it's both, each enabling the other.

I just pray America elects someone who can turn this ship around, rather than doubling down on the stupidity of it all.

[pjc50]

The American people is the enemy of the American people.

By that I mean there are plenty of people who are happy to support this kind of thing so long as they believe it's only being used against people unlike them in skin color, socioeconomic background, religious or political beliefs. America is not strong on solidarity.

On the other hand, the ship is turning, slowly. The war on drugs is being de-escalated, which may provide an opportunity to de-escalate the relationship between the public and the police.

[dmix]

The war on drugs is de-escalating at the civil and state level but not the federal level.

The federal gov is the worrying one. They're the only ones operating with as much secrecy as possible, over-extending executive power, and the biggest reason local police are becoming militarized (via the federal program delivering them military equipment).

[themartorana]

Right, and the militarization of local police forces by the federal government puts those forces under federal control - not explicitly or illegally, but as in this case, they are subservient to - and answer to - the federal government rather than the local population they are meant to protect.

[jpgvm]

The fact they are rolling out what are effectively heavily armoured APCs to local police really worries me.

What possible use could local police have for such heavily armoured vehicles that wouldn't better be handled by SWAT or some other more specialised force?

I don't relish the idea of relatively untrained police officers operating said vehicles in riots etc..

[samspot]

I'm going to apologize in advance for reading your post as "people who don't feel strongly against surveillance are racist bigots".

I disagree. Most of us have not been affected by this personally. We are wrapped up in our own lives, and have disengaged from news sources we don't trust, or are completely beholden to our favorite news source.

To change our thoughts, we need a high profile story of an outrageous use of this technology.

[pjc50]

Unlike some people, I'm not going to call an absence of solidarity bigotry. Not being aware that other people are treated very differently by the same system isn't an offence. It's just, as you say, not being aware due to not being affected.

[meddlepal]

I think you hit on the real problem. Most American's do not really care about other American's problems unless they're very closely related or the other problems are impacting them in some negative way.

I do not see a good way to fix that since that attitude seems to directly spawn from our highly-individualistic vision of society.

[nickff]

There is a great deal of evidence that the great majority of voters (not the same as average Americans,) do not vote on the basis of their own self-interest.[1] The problem here seems to be a bias in favor of entrusting the government with a great deal of power, in the hope of creating a good and stable society. Individualism and collectivism do not seem to have much to do with problem, though one could argue that the public is insufficiently aware of Public Choice Theory, among other problems with collective action.[2][3]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Serfdom

[CamperBob2]

There is a great deal of evidence that the great majority of voters (not the same as average Americans,) do not vote on the basis of their own self-interest.[1]

The "Those people in Party X or State Y are so dumb that they vote against their own interests" schtick really annoys me. Sometimes my own view of my interests may diverge from the author's. I have no problem voting against my immediate self-interest, if I think I will benefit from improvements to society in the long run.

[nickff]

My point was broader than that some are "voting against [their] immediate self-interest, if [they] think [they] will benefit from improvements to society in the long run", as many people may vote on some moral or ethical basis, or believe they are voting in their own short or long-term interests, but be ill-informed.

One example of this is that people in non-farm states support agriculture subsidies just as much as people in farm states, when it is clear that these subsidies are simply a wealth transfer (to the farm states).[1]

[1] http://freakonomics.com/2008/07/24/the-illogic-of-farm-subsi...

[mikeash]

The problem isn't people who don't feel strongly, the problem is people who support it.

Techies tend to think that the US government is off the chain, rampaging on an innocent populace who doesn't like it but can't bring themselves to fight it. Techies tend to hang out with other techies and that's how we mostly feel, so it's easy to conclude that this is how everybody feels.

But a lot of people support this stuff, and that is the real source of the problems we've been seeing since 9/11 (and before, but not as visibly).

Why is the TSA still probing everybody even though we all hate it? Because we don't all hate it. A lot of people really, really like having the TSA around and doing what they do. Why are police getting more militarized and less forgiving even though we all want them to back off and calm down and integrate better with the community? Same answer. Why hasn't the NSA's ubiquitous surveillance been brought to a halt now that everybody knows about it and wants it to stop? Again, same answer.

The American populace is, for the most part, terrified. Look at the incredible reactions to the prospect of bringing Guantanamo prisoners to the US as an example. People lose their minds at the idea. They think that bringing these people into the country, despite the fact that they've been locked up for a decade and would be held in maximum security facilities, would be extremely risky.

The government is partly at fault for this. The government's reaction to 9/11 was basically, "Be afraid! Be really afraid! Holy shit, you guys, you need fear!" Basically the opposite of FDR's approach. "The only thing we have to fear is everything everywhere." But the populace accepted it, and it feeds back on itself to where we're seriously stuck with it. Only if we can change this will we see any progress on all the problems it causes.

[x86_64Ubuntu]

Revolution? You don't really understand revolution if you think the Stingray is going to be the cause of it. Look at what the East German Stasi was able to get away with, and there wasn't a world shattering revolution there.

I wish people would leave the drama to the Young and the Restless and stop implying that the misdeeds of the NSA and other law enforcement in their current state will lead to revolution. You still have clothes, you still have food, the power structure at hand is stable, the key pieces of uncertainty that can foment a revolution are missing. More importantly, you can talk about revolution on a public forum without getting your door reduced to splinters.r

[HelloMcFly]

The casualness with which people seem to expect revolution shows a profound lack of historical appreciation for past revolutions. Life isn't a utopia, but that's not the revolution threshold.

[mikeash]

We value freedom, and therefore we think that people rebel when their freedom is sufficiently curtailed.

Most people value wealth and security, and they only rebel when those are threatened. And not just a little bit: they have to be threatened to the extent that it looks like a worthwhile tradeoff to risk pain, privation, and death just to improve your lot. They really couldn't care less about freedom as long as their lack of freedom doesn't impact their wealth and security too much.

[opendais]

This + a stable Democracy really has a natural safety valve every 2 years. Elections. That, and as long as people can leave the US permanently relatively easily...the people who would seriously consider "revolting" and be effective...they end up in other countries.

If things get bad enough, people will keep kicking out incumbents until things stabilize.

That said, voter suppression is getting worse...not better. So that may slowly close off the safety valve.

Personally, I plan to stick around until/unless I think the chance of me getting arrested is greater than that of being hit by lighting. Then, I'm going to bounce and find another country.

[logfromblammo]

The problem is that going to another country does not put you beyond the reach of the US Government if you are an American. Even if you move your body, it's still difficult to exit the system.

Elections don't seem to be working very effectively. Too many incumbents are gerrymandered into unassailable districts, and are barely challenged in their primaries.

I would also like to have a contingency country, but practically every one that I would be inclined to pick is cheering the US on as it reshapes itself into a police surveillance state.

[opendais]

This is about a revolution level event, not whether you think the process is working.

It provides enough of an escape valve that if enough people who want to revolt feel that way, things would chance before violence started.

You can also renounce your US citizenship which is what truly leaving permanently entails.

[logfromblammo]

Renouncing one citizenship without first acquiring another is a great way to destroy your own freedom of movement and generally undermine your own quality of life. Stateless persons are usually treated according to the amount of wealth they possess. As someone not particularly rich (by Western standards) getting free of the US requires chaining yourself to a less objectionable regime. As might be expected, the countries that people want to live in have stricter immigration requirements.

The "just leave" escape valve is thus not very effective whenever the pressure builds too quickly. Besides that, the smartest and wealthiest people leave first. Anyone left behind is less able and possibly less willing to defuse the crisis.

For most people, they have significant investment in their local community, with financial, social, and reputation capital built up over many years. Abandoning that represents a huge loss, and would require a proportionally large threat to even be worth considering.

I don't expect emigration to change anything, unless some other country miraculously changes its policy to out-freedom the US, and thereby suck all of its brains out.

[opendais]

Renouncing your citizenship and finding citizenship in another country is still easier, safer, and cheaper than starting a revolution.

Anyone capable of organizing and running an effective revolution is capable of leaving the US with less risk & effort.

That is the point you are missing. This is about a revolution & revolutionaries, not "is this easy for anyone? is this best for everyone?"

[reirob]

I guess it is quite difficult to find shelter in another country in order to be safe from extradition to USA. Look what happens with Snowden and Julian Assange.

Sure it depends on how bad USA wants you to come back.

[opendais]

I doubt the US would try to extradite me. I'm not profiting on copyrighted materials or divulging state secrets.

But if I got into a situation like the Goldman Sachs programmer who they are re-trying in state court? I'd say f it and leave the country.

[pjc50]

Indeed. If you want to know what a revolution looks like, look at the middle east. It's incredibly violent, most people are deprived of luxuries and often essentials as well, and there's no guarantees that the good guys will win or even survive.

Meanwhile people underuse the democratic avenues available. No, not street protest but the boring incrementalism of consensus, local politics.

[contingencies]

Revolution? You don't really understand revolution... the key pieces of uncertainty that can foment a revolution are missing.

Just last week we saw https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7929817 in which an ex CIA Open Source Intelligence expert shared his view. He explicitly stated, to the UK public in widely read media:

The preconditions of revolution exist in the UK, and most western countries. The number of active pre-conditions is quite stunning, from elite isolation to concentrated wealth to inadequate socialisation and education, to concentrated land holdings to loss of authority to repression of new technologies especially in relation to energy, to the atrophy of the public sector and spread of corruption, to media dishonesty, to mass unemployment of young men and on and on and on. [...] Preconditions are not the same as precipitants. We are waiting for our Tunisian fruit seller. The public will endure great repression, especially when most media outlets and schools are actively aiding the repressive meme of 'you are helpless, this is the order of things.' When we have a scandal so powerful that it cannot be ignored by the average Briton or American, we will have a revolution that overturns the corrupt political systems in both countries, and perhaps puts many banks out of business. Vaclav Havel calls this 'The Power of the Powerless.' One spark, one massive fire.

This speaks to me because personally I was physically in Tunisia for the revolution and it was a powerful feeling. As an obviously foreign anglo-Australian, isolated in the far west of the country where large scale street-level ferment began (weeks before it reached western media), I never felt threatened or unsafe at all. I have also lived in the US .. during which time I saw how much debt and fear, particularly over money and healthcare, ruled the lives of many, how pervasive the systemic imbalances were (homeless alcoholic recent war veterans at the supermarket, through 70% foreclosure rates - that's 70% of all houses in in my suburb), and how inept the response was (ask Google to close the foreclosure map, minor but media-heavy changes to healthcare, etc.)

[aagha]

Sarcasm: Whew. Thank GOODNESS for the Arab Spring. So much democracy arose from it. Those revolutions brought about so much change and made things so much better!

[hga]

As far as I know Tunisia, which is all contingencies is talking about, is doing pretty well.

[pstop]

I have clothes, therefore I should accept whatever I'm told to accept. I'm glad the founding fathers did not think as you. They revolted over taxes on tea, freedom and privacy was paramount. I understand revolution perfectly, and I fear a government that has absolute power, which is any government when you don't have privacy and the government has all your secrets. I fear that far more than I fear any terrorist boogey man.

[aet]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law

[CaptainZapp]

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law

What has that to do with his comment?

For starters he was referring to the East German Stasi.

Nothing to do with Nazis, Hitler, or the third Reich.

In addition: Many people think that whenever Nazi (or equivalent) is mentioned you lose according to Godwin's Law.

This is not so, however, when the reference is actually related to the discussion. For example: You may bring up Nazis in a discussion about totalitarian regime, or Fascism, without falling into Godwin's Law trap.

And to conclude: In a discussion about a device, which enables snooping on a large scale a referenced to the GDR's stasi is certainly not out of line.

[danudey]

The Stasi were active in East Germany, which was essentially a Soviet puppet state, after the end of WWII, so Godwin's law doesn't really apply here (since the Stasi specifically and the leadership of East Germany in general were neither Hitler nor Nazis).

[logfromblammo]

There are mutterings. And they are coming from multiple vectors. Perhaps you should have your political hearing tested? If you have ever tried to buy ammunition for popular cartridge sizes, you could just do the math.

Americans have been predicting and preparing for civil disturbances for decades. For a long time, you had to turn over rocks and poke at the mud underneath to find the people doing it, but now you're likely to have met at least one personally. They will not tell you they are doing it. Firstly, they don't want to be perceived as a kooky crackpot. Secondly, they don't want you showing up to mooch when things go bad. Thirdly, they don't want you to be the one to rat them out to whomever they believe to be their adversary.

It's a lot like figuring out which of your acquaintances is (or are) the closeted homosexual(s).

Ironically, a lot of the increasingly paranoid and increasingly isolationist doomsayers are voting to elect the very people that will bring on the crisis that they fear.

And on the other side of the spectrum, you have people leveraging the new ubiquity of videocameras to reflect even more sunlight into the dark corners of government. They post videos of government employees behaving badly or unlawfully, and file public records requests and lawsuits at every opportunity.

The left-libertarians and the right-libertarians are natural allies against a centrist-authoritarian government, but I wish you good luck getting them to even give each other a polite hello.

And as an American familiar with Churchill quotes, I remain hopeful that we are finally running out of wrong things to try.

[hga]

"Perhaps you should have your political hearing tested?"

Or look outside of whatever cultural bubble he's in?

I knew I'd only have to wait a few hours to come across something like "mutterings". While this is about the aftermath of the ever more likely coming collapse, it's akin: http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/06/22/learning-to-love-clowar...

"Yet increasingly, I have to wonder how much of a win Cloward-Piven would be for them. As things stand, those that have helped guide the decline such as Obama, Eric Holder, Harry Reid, and their accomplices such as the disgusting Lois Lerner, will never see the inside of a courtroom. Once a true collapse hits, the color of legal legitimacy that both gives them authority and makes them for the moment untouchable is washed away. With the old order’s restraints gone, whose to say those that midwifed the collapse shouldn’t swing listlessly against the backdrop of a crow-filled sky?"

There's a lot more where that comes from, from people who e.g. know Obama launched his political career in the home of a domestic terrorist who estimated that, after his '60s era revolution succeeded, a full 1/10 of the population would be so resistant to reeducation that they'd have to be killed outright. 25 million then, obviously quite a few more now.

And I'd guess most of the US residents reading this should really pay attention to the following, especially per the misattributed to Trotsky quote, "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested to you"

One of the things that's on the table if the US devolves into a second civil war is the relatively simple expedient of killing Blue cities: http://www.bob-owens.com/2013/01/shock-the-system/

Or as Dean Ing put it in his 1981 novel Systemic Shock (http://www.amazon.com/Systemic-Shock-Dean-Ing/dp/0812500385), about an attack on the US by forces significantly less capable than the Soviet Union:

"The American public had by turns ignored and ridiculed its cassandras: city planners, ecologists, demographers, socialists, immigrants, who had all warned against our increasing tendency to crowd into our cities. Social stress, failure of essential services, and warfare were only a few of the spectres we had granted only a passing glance. We had always found some solution to our problems, though: often at the last moment. Firmly anchored in most Americans was the tacit certainty that, even to the problem of nuclear war against population centers, there must be a uniquely American solution; we would find it.

The solution was sudden death. A hundred million Americans found it."

Take out enough of the really big transformers, for which there aren't many spares on hand, deprive big Blue cities of power for a few weeks, and the situation will be ... significantly changed.

I'm not looking forward to any of the above, if for no other reason than that I depend on civilization providing a reliable supply of pharmaceuticals to stay alive in the face of a chronic medical condition (and any time now that'll be true of my parents, right now it's looking like that's now going to be true for my father), but I do believe in keeping my eyes open.

[mpyne]

I'm more surprised at a couple of things:

a) The stated justification for why it must be secret from defense attorneys. This isn't "sources and methods" of intelligence, this is tapping cell phones, hardly something no one thought the cops can do. And more to the point, what are crooks going to do, switch to landlines?

b) The Federal LE agency involved in grabbing the records set aside for ACLU. The U.S. Marshals are, if I understand right, the law enforcement arm of the Federal courts themselves, so were they enforcing a Federal magistrate's order when they seized the records?

c) The reasoning they use to say the search is reasonable; I know the law and technology have not mixed well with digital comms, but it would seem to me that if you have to MITM or otherwise actively communicate with and interfere in the operation of a person's cell phone, that you've performed a search, even if you only end up grabbing metadata. And the Smith v. Maryland exception used for NSA wouldn't seem to apply here either, as LE is going out to grab the same metadata themselves instead of obtaining a private entity's similar records.

[hvs]

History shows through numerous examples that people are willing to put up with significantly more egregious activity from their governments before they do anything about it. And in many cases, they still never do.

[r00fus]

Do you not think this fear/caution is warranted based on history?

[joshlegs]

I don't think electing any one person is going to have an effect. The problem is that at this point, it's systemic corruption at nearly all levels of government.

[PhasmaFelis]

Revolution sounds like a magical cure-all for bad government when you're chatting around your buddy's dining table, but in practice it tends to be excruciatingly horrible. Lots and lots of innocent people get killed or brutalized (by both sides--revolutionaries aren't known to make fine distinctions between murderous jackbooted thugs vs. guys who think maybe the old regime was okay sometimes); lots more suffer from the loss of utilities, emergency services, and general civil order; and even if the rebels win, it's basically a coinflip whether the new government is actually any better than the old one.

The Revolution hasn't happened yet because the closer one gets to putting it into practice, the more apparent all of this becomes. You don't get a revolution when things are bad. You get a revolution when things are so inhumanly awful that mass death and chaos starts to sound like a step up.

[Shivetya]

The sad part is that they not just doing it in this case but also in the IRS case. Why they are not being called on it for both by the same groups is not reassuring when it comes to fixing this behemoth

[CalRobert]

In fairness, if you're the type who doesn't like this sort of thing but doesn't really feel like going to jail, emigration is the more appealing option while it remains available.