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Terr_ 21 hours ago [-]
> The records also showed undercover agents surveilling a virtual meeting at Hunter College in New York [...] ; a meeting at a labor center in Minneapolis
> The documents indicate that agents made audio recordings of the events.
For anyone else wondering (particularly if you're accustomed to it) it looks like neither NY nor MN are two-party consent ones for recording things.
KennyBlanken 20 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Terr_ 19 hours ago [-]
> Hey Junior Woodchuck Law Expert:
The charitable interpretation is that you meant to humorously qualify what you were about to say next, so that people judge its accuracy in a kind way.
In that case, a trailing "here" (to refer to the speaker) would help ensure people see it that way... as opposed to a weird and unprompted insult.
(The rest of your post already has a subthread for it.)
docdeek 19 hours ago [-]
> one party consent doesn't necessarily authorize you to secretly record a meeting just because you're present.
Isn't that exactly what one party consent laws allow you to do?
13 hours ago [-]
20 hours ago [-]
bulbar 18 hours ago [-]
> He said it was also notable that DHS was using administrative subpoenas, which don’t require judicial authorization, to obtain records.
I find that quite crazy. Apparently no check whatsoever what the executive does.
uchiha7itachi 13 hours ago [-]
Why is this flagged ?
defrost 13 hours ago [-]
Because in the past nine hours some number of HN users clicked on the [flag] option under the submission title.
That is literally all it takes to mark a submission [flagged].
krabat 12 hours ago [-]
flagging should come with a 50 word minimum explanation.
JKCalhoun 12 hours ago [-]
That would allow the rest of us to know the why.
willis936 11 hours ago [-]
That would assume good faith. It wasn't flagged in good faith so all you'd get access to is how bad faith actors construct narratives.
JKCalhoun 11 hours ago [-]
Bad-faith narrative constructs should at least lay bare their bad faith.
willis936 11 hours ago [-]
And require public scrutiny and reputation risking, I agree. Flags are louder than comments yet require no risk. It's a systemic bias against discussion.
newsomix9xl 12 hours ago [-]
Or a drop down of appropriate flagging reasons.
lioeters 12 hours ago [-]
Some of the juiciest discussions on this forum recently are the perma-flagged posts with active comments and high upvotes. The moderation bias (by supposed "crowd" or not) is obvious, there are clear tendencies of suppressed topics. It's like the dark side of the front page.
pandaman 9 hours ago [-]
It's one possibility but what happens to these political threads is, more likely, auto-flag due to having more downvotes than comments. This always catches redditors by surprise because, I figure, on Reddit it's an encouraged behavior.
JKCalhoun 12 hours ago [-]
It still boggles the mind why anyone would flag it.
I mean I get it if you were someone that is a part of the mass spying campaign, but I suspect there are none on HN.
yencabulator 7 hours ago [-]
This sentence pretty much says it all:
> None of those organizations have been charged with any crimes.
magic_interface 21 hours ago [-]
What measures can protesters take against this? With agents actively infiltrating groups, it seems impossible to prevent this level of spying.
CircuitSeuss 21 hours ago [-]
Vet /screen everyone. Cross check personal references, have an onboarding period before introducing new members to anything sensitive, do background checks if you’re concerned about it. There are already experienced community leaders and activists in your network; ask them how they establish trust. Teach people to think more critically about how and why they trust information and people. Make vetting part of recruitment and onboarding processes, and make recruitment work a self sustaining perpetual process with a team of people to support it. After you establish trust, use it. Ask around for feedback about new members.
Accept that you aren't going to always outsmart infiltrators and guard your information silos accordingly. Have processes for auditing threats, removing members. Avoid creating large group chats or exposing names/ contacts without consent. Keep working groups small, and don’t include people who aren’t actively participating. Use encryption, use pseudonyms. Use the basic tools available (Signal, GrapheneOS, Tails, Tor, etc). Don’t retain things like chat history or files you don't need. Give people basic training on social engineering techniques, cyber security (or honestly just how to use a computer 101), operational security, and how to recruit.
Ultimately, retain a good legal defense. You probably aren't doing anything illegal anyway, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a good lawyer and a plan… legal ground is shifting, and you will never have more resources than a motivated agency task force. Get a dash camera, and non-evil doorbell camera. Have a group of friends who will check in on you regularly. If you are discussing illegal shit, don’t do it around people or devices you don’t completely trust. Retain plausible deniability.
andai 21 hours ago [-]
So compartmentalization, limiting blast radius... that sounds oddly familiar.
CircuitSeuss 20 hours ago [-]
Irl network security has its similarities
giardini 20 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
giardini 20 hours ago [-]
IANAL but is CircuitSeuss not committing a crime here by giving the advice:
"If you are discussing illegal shit, don’t do it around people or devices you don’t completely trust. Retain plausible deniability."
Or is it legal to discuss "illegal shit"? Maybe with a lawyer? Maybe with a lawyer present? Maybe "illegal shit" is legal jargon I'm unfamiliar with?
aw1621107 20 hours ago [-]
> IANAL but is CircuitSeuss not committing a crime here by giving the advice
> "If you are discussing illegal shit, don’t do it around people or devices you don’t completely trust. Retain plausible deniability."
> Or is it legal to discuss "illegal shit"?
The answer to that question is extremely jurisdiction-dependent. That being said, in the US the statement you quote is almost certainly not illegal under current 1st Amendment jurisprudence. The main case of interest is Brandenberg v. Ohio [0], which held:
> Freedoms of speech and press do not permit a State to forbid advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.
Indeed, they are not committing a crime here. They are not discussing illegal shit, they are merely talking about discussing illegal shit, and that is still protected by the First Amendment.
defrost 21 hours ago [-]
Know what is and isn't legal protest and keep a sharp eye on anybody offering a hookup to explosives / rocket launchers, etc.
( probably a three letter agency plant )
morgan814 6 hours ago [-]
Take playbooks from large criminal organizations. Protesting may not be criminal, but it is increasingly being treated as such.
Organized crime deals with this stuff constantly. Meet in person. Vet everyone. Being willing to keep lips tight and risk imprisonment.
Posting all over BlueSky is just snitching on yourself. It doesn’t matter if protesting is a cornerstone of our democracy when those in charge don’t care. As the water heats up, protestors will need to reassess how they view their own actions.
The primary downside is that operating like this sucks. It’s inconvenient at best. It requires modifying your own behavior.
giardini 21 hours ago [-]
Especially since it isn't spying.
pudgywalsh 21 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
defrost 21 hours ago [-]
ICE agents have a better budget for this - largely going to waste.
Remember Kristi Noem's $70 million luxury flying weekender with queen sized bed et al? That'd help more than a few disadvantaged children.
pull_my_finger 21 hours ago [-]
I'm no lawyer, but sure sounds a lot like entrapment as much as spying
throwaway27448 22 hours ago [-]
Americans have zero muscle to stand up for the people who actually care for this country.
mlrtime 15 hours ago [-]
What muscle and who "actually care", can you expand on what you're proposing?
arvid-lind 13 hours ago [-]
> account named throwaway* lobs weak rage bait
I don't think they're actually proposing anything.
throwaway27448 8 hours ago [-]
I'm confused why americans don't do literally anything more than vote, read the New York Times, and show up to glorified block parties. Where is the rioting over NSPM-7? Where are the assassinations? Where's the fucking self respect? Of course capital is going to treat americans like the doormat they are.
But yes, continue to shove your head up your ass because that's more comforting than realizing that despite all the propaganda, liberals & social democrats learned absolutely nothing from the weimar republic
csa 6 hours ago [-]
> I'm confused why americans don't do literally anything more than vote
That has been enough for a couple of centuries, and it still may be the path. Sadly, skewed voter participation rates mean that even voting isn’t necessarily sufficient to have a government that more accurately represents the electorate.
> read the New York Times
Most people don’t do this, even liberals. The NYT has lost its magic.
> and show up to glorified block parties.
Fair, but maybe that’s the right amount of protest by American standards.
> Where is the rioting over NSPM-7?
Almost no one knows what it is. If they did, many of them would support it.
> Where are the assassinations?
Well, tried and missed. There are also probably credible failed attempts that have not been publicly announced.
> Where's the fucking self respect?
No shortage of that.
> Of course capital is going to treat americans like the doormat they are.
Sure. That’s capital.
> But yes, continue to shove your head up your ass because that's more comforting than realizing that despite all the propaganda, liberals & social democrats learned absolutely nothing from the Weimar Republic
Hmmm… that’s not really constructive or accurate.
IMHO, liberals have really dropped the ball in terms of presidential candidates since Obama. They also dropped the ball by leaning hard into DEI and extremely lax immigration enforcement — two policies that are not widely supported as implemented.
A consequence of those decisions is that voters in swing states had to choose between the lesser of two evils, and it wasn’t necessarily clear to those voters at the time which one would be worse.
There are some folks, Buttigieg being one, who are talking the right talk. It really just boils down to whether the democrats can be unified in promoting universal policies that help everyone (rather than niche groups) and vote accordingly.
“Liberals” in the US can be somewhat snowflaky, so I’m not sure how likely that is to happen. That said, the ham-fisted policies of the current administration may unite them. Time will tell.
nozzlegear 8 hours ago [-]
Why would we throw away our institutions after just a term and a half of a bad president? We haven't even made it to the midterms yet, where Trump and the Republicans look pretty likely to eat shit. Calling for assassinations and riots is entirely reactionary.
ikiris 21 hours ago [-]
A significant portion probably support it.
blooalien 21 hours ago [-]
> A significant portion probably support it.
The truly terrifying thing is that entirely too many actually do cheer this madness on (and far worse). It's almost as if we've learned absolutely nothing from the mistakes of history (except maybe how to repeat them, only "bigger and better"). I guess we're gettin' a Dystopia, whether we want one or not...
zombot 16 hours ago [-]
What do you mean by "it"?
pudgywalsh 21 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
throwaway27448 21 hours ago [-]
See? This comment is precisely what building a state around voters who care more about aesthetics than semantics looks like.
pudgywalsh 21 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
t-writescode 21 hours ago [-]
Cringe is too powerful of an anti-motivator.
Reminds me of when people wouldn’t listen to others because they had tattoos.
usernomdeguerre 21 hours ago [-]
Agreed, too many people are willing to thought-terminate when the messenger doesn't fit their ideal. It's why propaganda groups signal boost bad faith or poor arguments (and argumentors), to inflict this sort of self-righteous ennui.
what 20 hours ago [-]
People with tattoos have bad taste and poor judgement.
pudgywalsh 21 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
t-writescode 21 hours ago [-]
Why? They went to medical school and passed all the exams. Maybe they just like art.
what 20 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
defrost 21 hours ago [-]
Count Binface has a Classics degree and a Real Job as a scriptwriter and speechwriter.
ButlerianJihad 21 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
pickleglitch 12 hours ago [-]
I mean, they've been saying they were going to do this. They didn't even try to hide it. Independent journalists have been covering it for a year or more.
orcul 21 hours ago [-]
Small wonder.
KennyBlanken 21 hours ago [-]
Unconstitutional domestic spying in the US is a tale as old as time. Time and time again, the "patriots" can't help themselves. Gotta "protect the nation" by...uh...completely throwing out core constitutional rights. And they're surrounded by people who also have no problem with it.
I think most people don't remember that US postal inspectors used to primarily concern themselves with the distribution of erotica. And most people probably still don't wonder "gee, why is the USPS able to email me a picture of whatever I'm about to get in my mailbox?" Answer: the USPS stores a high resolution, high-dynamic-range image of every single piece of mail that passes through a high-speed sorting machine. And let's just say that you should try opening up some of those images in an image editor and mess with the curves/levels...
Hoover's FBI was spying on damn near anyone who had a remotely liberal viewpoint. If your parents are dead, submit a records request to the FBI to find out if they had an FBI file. Decent chance that if they were liberal, the FBI has something on them. Here's another fun fact: a huge number of FBI agents are Mormons. Our FBI is infested with Christian religious cultists. The idiots who show up on your doorstep to try and preach their religious values. Those people. They become FBI agents.
During the "occupy wallstreet" era state cops posted a photo on social media from inside the state's "command bunker", of a projector screen showing the output from a laptop displaying some sort of live status map or the like. I don't remember what the event was. It was a web page. In the browser bookmark bar was the facebook page for the city's "Occupy Wallstreet" facebook group along with another group that was clearly a liberal/progressive FB group. The state has a surprising number of violent white supremacists and curiously, none of those were in the browser bar...
Many years later, right around the time of the George Floyd protests - someone near a college campus snapped photos of university cops loading one of their patrol vehicles - a pickup truck - with bricks - in a back alley.
They came up with some laughable excuse that their sharp-eyed officers spotted a bunch of loose bricks in a sidewalk a full block from University property and decided to scoop them all up to do a favor for the city. Riiiiiiiiiiiiight....
nmeagent 18 hours ago [-]
> Our FBI is infested with Christian religious cultists. The idiots who show up on your doorstep to try and preach their religious values. Those people. They become FBI agents.
So what? I'm not a Mormon myself, but I've met and worked with a number of them in the federal government who are provably decent people. I imagine they abide by their oaths to protect and defend the constitution in about the same proportion as the general public. Do you have any evidence to the contrary besides their alleged 'idiot' status? To put it mildly, I think you're showing a bit of a bias here.
Hikikomori 17 hours ago [-]
The mormon mafia is a thing.
neworbit 20 hours ago [-]
The US has surveilled political factions that they've considered potentially subversive or corrupt machine politics - right and left wing - for ages. RICO prosecutions against politically motivated corruption are long overdue, and should definitely land on both parties because the grift seems to be the order of the day. But that doesn't happen without actual investigation of the political machine - and incidental local low level conspirators are mostly patsies for the people calling the shots. I applaud the protestors for wanting to change things, but shake my head at the naivete of thinking that being a martyr for the Instagram cameras is the way to do it.
chneu 19 hours ago [-]
I have no idea where Americans get the idea that this isn't standard operating procedure at this point.
Literally the US has zero civil rights when it comes to privacy. There are so many loopholes and gotchas thanks to fear mongered panic laws that the government will never give up.
Every decade or so the government invents a new(or just reuses an old one) enemy, lately it's them brown islams, and Americans will happily give up another right.
Patriot act!
solfox 22 hours ago [-]
Imagine being so hungry for power that you justify this.
nmeagent 21 hours ago [-]
Imagine being such a sucker that you think it's remotely justified.
beej71 21 hours ago [-]
The War Department even released a film about it in the 40s titled "Don't be a Sucker".
Just to be clear, I am talking about the suckers, marks, and rubes in the United States that believe blatant fascist propaganda and are so unbelievably and completely stupid and deluded as to support undermining the rule of law merely so that their political tribe can 'win'. You have learned nothing from history, future accounts (if we live through this) will paint you in a very poor light, and you should all be absolutely ashamed of yourselves. Unfortunately for you and I both, we will all likely suffer greatly due to your failings. Thanks.
JKCalhoun 12 hours ago [-]
Thank you.
19 hours ago [-]
lenerdenator 21 hours ago [-]
COINTELPRO, part two.
We need to make it unappealing to act upon the intelligence gathered through means that weren't a part of legitimate criminal investigations. Introduce consequences for those who do the collection at the local, state, and federal level. Require these findings be destroyed. In other words, all of the stuff we didn't do when COINTELPRO was uncovered.
The more we do in the next two-to-three years, the less we'll have to worry about in the long run.
krapp 21 hours ago [-]
"We" did do all of that when COINTELPRO was uncovered, at least ostensibly. We had committees, we changed laws, we established judicial ovesight, we "reformed" the system.
As Snowden demonstrated later, none of it mattered. This government has engineered itself to be for all intents and purposes immune from the will of the people. And that was back when the government at least pretended to care about the rules, and "checks and balances" and the like.
lenerdenator 12 hours ago [-]
And how many people were put in prison for COINTELPRO?
krapp 10 hours ago [-]
None. And obviously there's no chance of anyone being put in prison for gestures vaguely in the direction of the dumpster fire that is this administration.
Remember the President has carte blanche power of pardon over all federal crimes and thanks to SCOTUS is themselves immune from prosecution for any crime committed in office. If you want that level of accountability for the government you have to start with a Constitutional convention and remake the entire system from the ground up.
lenerdenator 6 hours ago [-]
> None. And obviously there's no chance of anyone being put in prison for gestures vaguely in the direction of the dumpster fire that is this administration.
Only if we allow it. It needs to be made an issue.
This month, Missouri had two things on the ballot that would have been a Trumpist's dream to get passed:
1) a revision of the state constitution to make any citizen-proposed ballot measure require a majority in each of the state's congressional districts to pass - which would have effectively killed citizens petitions for ballot measures.
2) introduction of a cap on property taxes and the introduction of a state sales tax, with the latter being aimed at eventually replacing the state income tax.
These were surefire things in a state that has gone to Trump three times, right?
Wrong. Both failed by over 75% in today's political environment. Almost nothing gets 75% of people to agree on it these days when put to a real ballot-box vote, but these did. Why? People don't like the idea of being shut out of government and having to pay more for things. Trumpism is, if nothing else, a promise to do both.
Find the pressure points, find the language that people speak, and don't let up on it for a damned second. You can do that with government accountability after all of this, and we must.
enquirewithin 21 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
grebc 22 hours ago [-]
Freedom.
protocolture 22 hours ago [-]
Not really a new phenomenon.
Actually one of these stories I found super amusing, apparently back in the day the Australian government got it into their head that all they really needed to break up the communist Indonesian government under Sukarno was a cunningly deployed pamphlet pointing out the contradictions in their philosophy.
So they made the pamphlet, had agents distribute it at a communism convention, and uh nothing came of it. Because everyone else there had similar pamphlets.
Imagine using the term "commies" in 2026 and expecting to be taken seriously.
enquirewithin 21 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
fragmede 21 hours ago [-]
Making things less bad for poor people isn't automatically communism. Use your words, be expressive. It doesn't have to have a one word label, but if you must, how about Zohranism?
jojobas 20 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
iamnothere 12 hours ago [-]
It’s just that “commies” is a stupid pejorative out of the 1950s. It sounds antiquated, convinces nobody, and only people who already hate communism will listen to you. It’s like Dems who refer to Republicans as “Rethuglicans” or Republicans who call Dems “Democraps”, or like lefties who call everyone to their right a nazi.
There’s also something about shortening “communist” to the childish “commie” that makes you sound less serious, IMO.
jojobas 20 hours ago [-]
Imagine being incensed by use a pejorative term used towards a movement that almost always killed more people in peacetime than even fascists.
Remove outliers like Hitler and Pol Pot and you can drop "almost".
shigawire 20 hours ago [-]
Oh no... Anyway let's feed, house, and heal our population like the Bible says.
jojobas 20 hours ago [-]
Let's also shoot anyone we don't like with poison gas shells, take hostages from our own population and work a few hundred thousands to death for good measure.
Watney-0717 17 hours ago [-]
[dead]
SadErn 20 hours ago [-]
[dead]
giardini 21 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
defrost 21 hours ago [-]
One investigative record showed DHS used administrative subpoenas to obtain “wire transfers from various financial institutions to and from” SEIU, one of the largest unions in the US. Investigators also requested that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York provide financial data from the Communications Workers of America, an international union, the records showed.
That doesn't sound at all like what you are describing.
AlexAplin 20 hours ago [-]
The attendance was clandestine and performed by actors that misrepresented themselves to gain an intelligence advantage. I'm not sure what else you would call it.
Terr_ 20 hours ago [-]
They also tried to nudge-nudge-wink-wink suggest they would help with violence, unprompted.
20 hours ago [-]
nxobject 20 hours ago [-]
> If the meetings are open to the public then anyone can attend (i.e., "spy") on them.
It’s the systematic, motivated, and targeted collection of data that makes it spying. When the KGB takes photos of licence plates of people leaving a military base, we call it “spying”. Replace this with Homeland Security and a neighborhood organizing meeting.
> The documents indicate that agents made audio recordings of the events.
For anyone else wondering (particularly if you're accustomed to it) it looks like neither NY nor MN are two-party consent ones for recording things.
The charitable interpretation is that you meant to humorously qualify what you were about to say next, so that people judge its accuracy in a kind way.
In that case, a trailing "here" (to refer to the speaker) would help ensure people see it that way... as opposed to a weird and unprompted insult.
(The rest of your post already has a subthread for it.)
Isn't that exactly what one party consent laws allow you to do?
I find that quite crazy. Apparently no check whatsoever what the executive does.
That is literally all it takes to mark a submission [flagged].
I mean I get it if you were someone that is a part of the mass spying campaign, but I suspect there are none on HN.
> None of those organizations have been charged with any crimes.
Accept that you aren't going to always outsmart infiltrators and guard your information silos accordingly. Have processes for auditing threats, removing members. Avoid creating large group chats or exposing names/ contacts without consent. Keep working groups small, and don’t include people who aren’t actively participating. Use encryption, use pseudonyms. Use the basic tools available (Signal, GrapheneOS, Tails, Tor, etc). Don’t retain things like chat history or files you don't need. Give people basic training on social engineering techniques, cyber security (or honestly just how to use a computer 101), operational security, and how to recruit.
Ultimately, retain a good legal defense. You probably aren't doing anything illegal anyway, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a good lawyer and a plan… legal ground is shifting, and you will never have more resources than a motivated agency task force. Get a dash camera, and non-evil doorbell camera. Have a group of friends who will check in on you regularly. If you are discussing illegal shit, don’t do it around people or devices you don’t completely trust. Retain plausible deniability.
"If you are discussing illegal shit, don’t do it around people or devices you don’t completely trust. Retain plausible deniability."
Or is it legal to discuss "illegal shit"? Maybe with a lawyer? Maybe with a lawyer present? Maybe "illegal shit" is legal jargon I'm unfamiliar with?
> "If you are discussing illegal shit, don’t do it around people or devices you don’t completely trust. Retain plausible deniability."
> Or is it legal to discuss "illegal shit"?
The answer to that question is extremely jurisdiction-dependent. That being said, in the US the statement you quote is almost certainly not illegal under current 1st Amendment jurisprudence. The main case of interest is Brandenberg v. Ohio [0], which held:
> Freedoms of speech and press do not permit a State to forbid advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.
[0]: https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep...
( probably a three letter agency plant )
Organized crime deals with this stuff constantly. Meet in person. Vet everyone. Being willing to keep lips tight and risk imprisonment.
Posting all over BlueSky is just snitching on yourself. It doesn’t matter if protesting is a cornerstone of our democracy when those in charge don’t care. As the water heats up, protestors will need to reassess how they view their own actions.
The primary downside is that operating like this sucks. It’s inconvenient at best. It requires modifying your own behavior.
Remember Kristi Noem's $70 million luxury flying weekender with queen sized bed et al? That'd help more than a few disadvantaged children.
I don't think they're actually proposing anything.
But yes, continue to shove your head up your ass because that's more comforting than realizing that despite all the propaganda, liberals & social democrats learned absolutely nothing from the weimar republic
That has been enough for a couple of centuries, and it still may be the path. Sadly, skewed voter participation rates mean that even voting isn’t necessarily sufficient to have a government that more accurately represents the electorate.
> read the New York Times
Most people don’t do this, even liberals. The NYT has lost its magic.
> and show up to glorified block parties.
Fair, but maybe that’s the right amount of protest by American standards.
> Where is the rioting over NSPM-7?
Almost no one knows what it is. If they did, many of them would support it.
> Where are the assassinations?
Well, tried and missed. There are also probably credible failed attempts that have not been publicly announced.
> Where's the fucking self respect?
No shortage of that.
> Of course capital is going to treat americans like the doormat they are.
Sure. That’s capital.
> But yes, continue to shove your head up your ass because that's more comforting than realizing that despite all the propaganda, liberals & social democrats learned absolutely nothing from the Weimar Republic
Hmmm… that’s not really constructive or accurate.
IMHO, liberals have really dropped the ball in terms of presidential candidates since Obama. They also dropped the ball by leaning hard into DEI and extremely lax immigration enforcement — two policies that are not widely supported as implemented.
A consequence of those decisions is that voters in swing states had to choose between the lesser of two evils, and it wasn’t necessarily clear to those voters at the time which one would be worse.
There are some folks, Buttigieg being one, who are talking the right talk. It really just boils down to whether the democrats can be unified in promoting universal policies that help everyone (rather than niche groups) and vote accordingly.
“Liberals” in the US can be somewhat snowflaky, so I’m not sure how likely that is to happen. That said, the ham-fisted policies of the current administration may unite them. Time will tell.
The truly terrifying thing is that entirely too many actually do cheer this madness on (and far worse). It's almost as if we've learned absolutely nothing from the mistakes of history (except maybe how to repeat them, only "bigger and better"). I guess we're gettin' a Dystopia, whether we want one or not...
Reminds me of when people wouldn’t listen to others because they had tattoos.
I think most people don't remember that US postal inspectors used to primarily concern themselves with the distribution of erotica. And most people probably still don't wonder "gee, why is the USPS able to email me a picture of whatever I'm about to get in my mailbox?" Answer: the USPS stores a high resolution, high-dynamic-range image of every single piece of mail that passes through a high-speed sorting machine. And let's just say that you should try opening up some of those images in an image editor and mess with the curves/levels...
Hoover's FBI was spying on damn near anyone who had a remotely liberal viewpoint. If your parents are dead, submit a records request to the FBI to find out if they had an FBI file. Decent chance that if they were liberal, the FBI has something on them. Here's another fun fact: a huge number of FBI agents are Mormons. Our FBI is infested with Christian religious cultists. The idiots who show up on your doorstep to try and preach their religious values. Those people. They become FBI agents.
During the "occupy wallstreet" era state cops posted a photo on social media from inside the state's "command bunker", of a projector screen showing the output from a laptop displaying some sort of live status map or the like. I don't remember what the event was. It was a web page. In the browser bookmark bar was the facebook page for the city's "Occupy Wallstreet" facebook group along with another group that was clearly a liberal/progressive FB group. The state has a surprising number of violent white supremacists and curiously, none of those were in the browser bar...
Many years later, right around the time of the George Floyd protests - someone near a college campus snapped photos of university cops loading one of their patrol vehicles - a pickup truck - with bricks - in a back alley.
They came up with some laughable excuse that their sharp-eyed officers spotted a bunch of loose bricks in a sidewalk a full block from University property and decided to scoop them all up to do a favor for the city. Riiiiiiiiiiiiight....
So what? I'm not a Mormon myself, but I've met and worked with a number of them in the federal government who are provably decent people. I imagine they abide by their oaths to protect and defend the constitution in about the same proportion as the general public. Do you have any evidence to the contrary besides their alleged 'idiot' status? To put it mildly, I think you're showing a bit of a bias here.
Literally the US has zero civil rights when it comes to privacy. There are so many loopholes and gotchas thanks to fear mongered panic laws that the government will never give up.
Every decade or so the government invents a new(or just reuses an old one) enemy, lately it's them brown islams, and Americans will happily give up another right.
Patriot act!
We need to make it unappealing to act upon the intelligence gathered through means that weren't a part of legitimate criminal investigations. Introduce consequences for those who do the collection at the local, state, and federal level. Require these findings be destroyed. In other words, all of the stuff we didn't do when COINTELPRO was uncovered.
The more we do in the next two-to-three years, the less we'll have to worry about in the long run.
As Snowden demonstrated later, none of it mattered. This government has engineered itself to be for all intents and purposes immune from the will of the people. And that was back when the government at least pretended to care about the rules, and "checks and balances" and the like.
Remember the President has carte blanche power of pardon over all federal crimes and thanks to SCOTUS is themselves immune from prosecution for any crime committed in office. If you want that level of accountability for the government you have to start with a Constitutional convention and remake the entire system from the ground up.
Only if we allow it. It needs to be made an issue.
This month, Missouri had two things on the ballot that would have been a Trumpist's dream to get passed:
1) a revision of the state constitution to make any citizen-proposed ballot measure require a majority in each of the state's congressional districts to pass - which would have effectively killed citizens petitions for ballot measures.
2) introduction of a cap on property taxes and the introduction of a state sales tax, with the latter being aimed at eventually replacing the state income tax.
These were surefire things in a state that has gone to Trump three times, right?
Wrong. Both failed by over 75% in today's political environment. Almost nothing gets 75% of people to agree on it these days when put to a real ballot-box vote, but these did. Why? People don't like the idea of being shut out of government and having to pay more for things. Trumpism is, if nothing else, a promise to do both.
Find the pressure points, find the language that people speak, and don't let up on it for a damned second. You can do that with government accountability after all of this, and we must.
Actually one of these stories I found super amusing, apparently back in the day the Australian government got it into their head that all they really needed to break up the communist Indonesian government under Sukarno was a cunningly deployed pamphlet pointing out the contradictions in their philosophy.
So they made the pamphlet, had agents distribute it at a communism convention, and uh nothing came of it. Because everyone else there had similar pamphlets.
There’s also something about shortening “communist” to the childish “commie” that makes you sound less serious, IMO.
Remove outliers like Hitler and Pol Pot and you can drop "almost".
It’s the systematic, motivated, and targeted collection of data that makes it spying. When the KGB takes photos of licence plates of people leaving a military base, we call it “spying”. Replace this with Homeland Security and a neighborhood organizing meeting.