There are two versions of the United States.
1. The People of. The ones that benefit from whistleblowers. They are not injured when classified information is distributed - they get valuable insight they don't normally get into the doings of their employees (government officials that take their salary from taxes). The ones upon whose whims the government has power, and allegedly upon whose whims that power can be revoked.
2. The Government of. This is the actual entity of power in the USA, and probably has been forever (though the way the Executive branch reacted to union riots makes me wonder - it was genuinely concerned it was about to be deposed, I wonder if that was a valid fear?) This is injured when word gets out about it breaking its own laws - it makes the USA look bad, it destroys trust and thus the ability for the government to maintain control of the people, etc. This is a living creature and that's what many 2nd amendmenters don't seem to realize, that the government of the USA isn't The People of, it's an organism that will maintain its form by any means necessary. Legal ones are the safest, illegal and immoral ones if needs must. Anybody challenging this power is an enemy of #2, even if they aren't an enemy of #1. Great examples are some of our industry's favorite persons of interest, namely Snowden, Manning. Back in the day it was Civil Rights activists (note I'm not drawing a comparison between current leaks and that era, just saying it's another example of enemies of #2 but not #1).
As per the article, the line "be used to the injury of the USA" is obviously being interpreted by the current administration to mean "to the injury of #2" above.
I'm not sure why people have a hard time grasping this concept, when they grasp the concept of representative democracy (Where you vote for new legislature, or for supreme court appointments, or for executive actions, via proxy of voting for a representative of congress, or a president.)
I can only assume that it's a defense mechanism, where you can blame the boogieman of the deep state when the candidate you voted for does not deliver us to a land of milk and honey, and turns out to be an all-around shitty human being.
Not saying either is right or wrong, but I def align personally with the “more freedom from pls” camp.
The governments policing authority should be pointed at itself alone, and let the results of that trickle down.
But we prefer to conflate stable society needs with a goal of paramount importance (currently “free market trade”) that will implode indeed our mental model of reality if the literal world should have to change.
But it won’t implode humanity itself unless we do it to ourselves.
We need to have a sober debate about enabling more people to escape this daily grind. We’re actively instigating anxiety, mindless resource exhaustion (while pretending financial measures of efficiency alone are achieved literally), living some socialized Stockholm syndrome, sympathizing with the aristocratic captors who are plainly indifferent, because they’re subjected to the same struggle too (but not really)!
Not replying to all you said, but definitely agree - I don't see people as being excited about the limits of our abilities. It's more like people are excited about getting a new Mustang or whichever Ghettoblaster vehicle and annoying others because they are bored and have nothing existential to think about during the day. I don't know how often I just think about humanity or the mind's limits or exploring other times and places growing up - just utter fascination. Now it's just when is the next GTA coming out.
It’s notable that in weeks of democratic debates hitting all sorts of issues, I don’t think I’ve heard anyone get traction by talking about surveillance.
Second amendment-ers are keenly aware of this.
AKA, the life of a militiaman that intends to use weapons to overthrow the USA is, to the USA, the life of a terrorist/rebel/enemy of the state. It's not a constitutionally protected state of existence.
I'm happy I kept reading though, because I thought this bit down near the bottom was insightful:
Authentication, which often involves sharing information about the contents of a forthcoming story with the government, is a common journalistic practice that allows the government to weigh in on any risks involved in publishing the material of which the journalist may not be aware. By turning that process into a trap for journalists and sources, the government is sacrificing an opportunity to safeguard its legitimate interests and tell its side of the story.
The article fails to point out that it was the Obama administration that really turned up the heat on whistleblowers:
https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/jan/10...
I suspect that at the time many Obama supporters simply didn't care. Their guy was in charge and that was that.
Short-sighted to be sure.
Far too few considered the possibility that the opposition was watching and learning what new things might be possible.
https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Side-Inside-Terror-American/dp/0...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Goldsmith
This included a big expansion of the black budget agencies and their power since it was the one thing the exec has strong control over and little public blowback because of the secret courts and classified nature.
Correct link: https://www.amazon.com/Terror-Presidency-Judgment-Inside-Adm...
https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/90qn1h/ecuador_wi...
https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/90qn1h/ecuador_wi...
https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/90qn1h/ecuador_wi...
https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/90qn1h/ecuador_wi...
Even HN sometimes compares The Intercept to Infowars https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17582751
from
http://change.gov/agenda/ethics_agenda/
https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://change.gov/agenda/ethic...
yet:
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/06/assange-snowden-seek...
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/30/opinion/sunday/if-donald-...
https://www.longislandpress.com/2017/01/14/obamas-legacy-his...
https://www.whistleblower.org/in-the-news/salon-jane-mayer-o...
And so on, and so forth. Let's not pretend this didn't happen and rewrite history just to engage in partisan scapegoating. Let's not normalize revisionism, too.
(edit: I say that because your comment was greyed out when I started writing my reply, which is just intended to elaborate on what you said)
If you accept that premise, I think we have to develop systems that are humane and self-referential.
Even good thoughts sometimes require incubation in private. Mass surveillance restricts learning, communication, and down the road thinking, to such a degree, it's like outlawing books with more than 10 pages. Humans as we cherish them today -- ones with agency and spontaneity -- cannot exist in such conditions, meaningful social progress will stop.
At best you can try to limit who has the surveillance tech, but to do that you have to have the surveillance tech, eh? The problem is circular.
So, since we cannot (I believe) do without the surveillance, can we remove the chilling effect?
For example, in Star Trek the computer always knew where everyone was (unless the script called for a mysterious disappearance) and no one felt stifled, eh?
This isn't just a principle of a party but a natural law. This is displayed in liberal politics also. Life is a fight using powers as a utility, hard and soft powers. Liberals tend to bank on using the powers of certain ideologies, many as vague as conservative ideologies, in order for those ideologies to survive. Some use the soft power of love which may prove sometimes to be fittest when that power gathers enough political support, some use the hard powers of war and competition which may seem fittest in some occasions. And of course, love and warfare is seen and used in both/all parties even when they don't seem to realize it, sometimes hypocritically on the surface but often when you look deep enough, you see the forces of natural law shining through and it's not just love and war against each other, it's just organisms which may be ideological, biological, etc competing in what some would view as a thermodynamic machine racing towards entropic neutrality.
But to say only conservatives employ 'survival of the fittest' is such a vast simplification.
even if they are usually conflated or found together, aren’t they pretty much different things?
Here's more context from Risen's article, which was written in December, 2016:
> Criticism of Mr. Obama’s stance on press freedom, government transparency and secrecy is hotly disputed by the White House, but many journalism groups say the record is clear. Over the past eight years, the administration has prosecuted nine cases involving whistle-blowers and leakers, compared with only three by all previous administrations combined. It has repeatedly used the Espionage Act, a relic of World War I-era red-baiting, not to prosecute spies but to go after government officials who talked to journalists.
> Under Mr. Obama, the Justice Department and the F.B.I. have spied on reporters by monitoring their phone records, labeled one journalist an unindicted co-conspirator in a criminal case for simply doing reporting and issued subpoenas to other reporters to try to force them to reveal their sources and testify in criminal cases.
> I experienced this pressure firsthand when the administration tried to compel me to testify to reveal my confidential sources in a criminal leak investigation. The Justice Department finally relented — even though it had already won a seven-year court battle that went all the way to the Supreme Court to force me to testify — most likely because they feared the negative publicity that would come from sending a New York Times reporter to jail.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/30/opinion/sunday/if-donald-...
" 'iMessage communications are end-to-end encrypted and Apple has no way to decrypt iMessage data when it is in transit between devices,' the guidelines state."
I would say it is the other way around, FB and Google can access the content of messages, Apple can not.
