702 was briefly extended, not renewed. It's not clear yet what renewal will look like, there are several proposals going through the legislative process.
It isn't. They just ran out of time since their deadline was Dec 31st. We still don't know what what 702 renewal will look like since it's still being debated.
Yep. It’s atrocious and deeply worrying behavior by a state that seems to have forgotten that their rights are a blessing from their citizens and not the other way around.
The principles of the enlightenment underneath western civilization are…
Higher power / natural law
v
Irrevocable natural rights of individuals
v
Revocable rights given to the state for the common good
…
We can revoke the government’s mandate to rule us at any time. I understand people may have forgotten, or don’t know or have the background to understand, or maybe even don’t care. But that doesn’t change anything about the natural order or founding principles.
The system we are currently headed towards:
State
v
Subjects
This is monarchy / totalitarianism, and while it may be done for all the right reasons, it’s stepping backwards in terms of what’s good for the world, the progress of civilization, and is a failure to learn the profound lessons of the enlightenment that unleashed the greatest period of technology innovation and unrivaled economic expansion in history.
A considerable catch is when revocation happens, what takes its place?
Authoritarianism is looming in the US and elsewhere; I worry about the efforts to "burn down the corruption" being replanted with a new authoritarian replacement.
This is always the concern. Anyone who seriously studies social science shares this perspective with you.
But these changes don’t usually happen until we have atrociously difficult or insanely outrageous behavior from the government, or conditions that are incredibly poor. People don’t make these kinds of changes easily and will argue for the status quo until the very, very last opportunity generally. At that point it is an inevitability…
Citizens are all slaves of one corporation or another so speaking their minds is not within their power.
IMO, this is the most infuriating aspect about the censorship push of the past few years. They've already been suppressing freedom of speech using people's livelihoods as a covert form of blackmail... But that wasn't enough and so they had to break the pretense and engage is overt censorship.
Literally everyone who works for a corporation engages in regular self-censorship. This implies that they believe that they may be reprimanded for speaking their thoughts. As someone who has actually spoken their thoughts, I can tell you that it's more than just a belief! The consequences are real.
The executives responsible stepped over the line and should be tried and jailed.
> Citizens are all slaves of one corporation or another so speaking their minds is not within their power.
Speak for yourself! I work in the private sector and I can’t think of any way my speech is circumscribed by that - unless of course I tried to discuss politics in the workplace, which is simply frowned upon because it’s cringe.
Well of course you have complete free speech so long as it falls within approved narratives which support the status quo. Just wait until you start paying attention and begin to develop contrarian opinions, share them online anonymously (keep all these ideas online, never IRL), watch your real life career prospects mysteriously dwindle... Then we can talk about free speech.
I’ve been reading about negligence around controls of this process for over 15 years.
If folks don’t know already they should realize that section 702 was only passed after it became public that this surveillance was already happening with questionable legal authority.
Didn't the FBI director literally just give testimony to the effect of "if we have to demonstrate probable cause we would not be able to get these 'warrants'"?
I can’t believe the reveal that FBI used section 702 to target January 6 participants wasn’t enough to get at least one faction in the House to vote against reauthorizing the bill last week. (I will play any card I can if it gets warrantless spying stopped.)
I guess Big Brother trumps petty partisanship concerns.
NYT had an article a few months ago (I submitted it here) attacking Republicans for turning against the FBI and saying this would put an end to sedition 702. Guess that was them panicking over nothing.
No republican will ever go against the spooks except if they are personally targeted by them (Trump). Even then, Trump wants a fanatically loyal group of spooks to act as his secret police. He's only temporarily against them.
Your only options to vote for if you dislike mass surveillance are hard left progressives (Bernie Sanders, Ron Wyden) or libertarians (though the ones who run with the republicans are unreliable on this issue).
The Democrats have been cozying up with the "deep state" more than Republicans in the last decade. Look at the origin of the Russiagate hoax and all that followed.
FBI is currently involved in the government effort trying to jail him for hundreds of years.
Trump's lawyers can't even get an answer as to which government agencies are involved in his prosecution, so you know, so that they could subpoena to get evidence in his defence.
It's not looking like these agencies will let Trump be president again, one way or another.
Trump threatened to pull out of Nato, and pissed off a lot of people. This week legislators passed a law banning a president from being able to do that.
Where did you hear this? Is discovery in his case different from discovery in any other legal case (prosecution is required to share all information they are preparing their case with, so that the defense can prepare a defense.
Or did he/one of his loyalists just /say/ that? I'm genuinely curious because I thought all legal defenses were allowed to read the discovery.
If your implication is that Trump is somehow truly against the spooks, just remember how eager he was to deploy federal marshals to cities like Portland and Seattle to round up protestors. Look to his past comments about the spooks. Before he was on their shit-list, he would make comments like this:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-insists-...
On top of that with the leaked classified documents that Trump exposed that compromised the agents in the first place it is probably a good reason to keep tabs on him to make sure he isn't working with a foreign agent. He should receive all the same treatment as any other citizen of course but let's not pretend Trump is an angel. He's gotten himself into a lot of shit.
I think where you are off track is that you don't realize that the Floyd protests were headed by people working directly with the spooks, just like the J6 protests. Perhaps why spooks get involved, to derail these things.
I don't know if either of the protests accomplished anything, as populist causes.
It's still a 50/50 what Floyd actually died from, since there were multiple contributing medical factors. Billions in economic damages from the looting/shut downs during the protests in these cities, something like 20+ were killed during the riots. The police are still funded.
Despite his rhetoric, in hindsight, Trump was politically savvy enough not to take the bait and send in the army to restore order. Which Miley was Chomping at the Bit to refuse. Trump would be in a prison cell today at best.
The J6 protest, turned into riot and delegitimized Trumps legitimate claims of election irregularities. No meaningful signature check has been done to this day.
Trump is currently beating Biden in polls, so he might be back.
> Perhaps most alarming, one FBI employee had to be immediately retrained after admitting that he seemingly hid many incidents of abuse by always recording queries as not involving US persons, even if "the facts indicated otherwise."
Get your gpg infrastructure in place, comrades. Find those old motherboards and dubious laptops and airgap them.
The final line will come down to whether or not we can do math of our own choice on machines of our disposition.
We can safely assume they are already doing anything they want, it's just that laws are coming slowly to normalize survelance so they can't tell us just yet. Vote for those laws to learn more.
At the same time, there are legit cases where foreign nationals/states were interfering into those events (eg BLM movement was amplified by Russia) in the hopes to destabilize US. Unless there’s enough metadata to identify specific foreign actors, how can FBI fight that? And I am sure there are spies/agents who became naturalized US citizens - how to detect those??…
