>>382261
Certainly nothing related to crimes of passion or biological or physiological drives, or mental illness-related behaviors, which are all going to be done as irrational decisions where any thought about the consequences won't come until after you've already committed the crime for a lot of the people who commit the crimes, if they ever come along at all.

There are some things where it can work, like, say, speeding tickets, where a lot of people make conscious decisions to break the laws because they decide that the benefit they get out of breaking them outweighs the cost they are likely to pay to do so. Or possibly white collar crime like embezzlement or tax evasion. But in those cases, that is largely dependant on the ability for law enforcement to catch perpetrators--if people don't think they're going to get caught, the severity of the punishment is largely irrelevant.

>>382262
People who break laws don't intend to get caught.

>>382262
But people speed all the time, regardless of whether they'll "get caught". People tend to drive at the speeds they prefer, and often times a traffic cops' job is literally "pick 1 car out of the 7 or so that are going faster than the posted limit". There are times when traffic ticket laws look and feel more like graft than anything, and people violate these laws all the time just so they can be on time to work. I've sat in traffic court and watched other folks go before me, trying to defend themselves against violations of 10 to 25 miles over the posted limit. 25 is usually getting up there but it is not unreasonable nor unheard of, especially on a highway, where in America the posted limit is generally 75 and most cars would struggle to consistently pull 100. After paying a few fines of the court myself, from 100 to 600 dollars or more on minor traffic violations, you get the idea that this is not so much a specific punishment as one that is allotted to anyone who gets caught, and a very significant secondary stream of revenue for the State Governments.
http://www.cracked.com/article_17216_the-5-most-popular-safety-laws-that-dont-work.html

The thing is, is that we do want the law to protect the majority of people from people who would willfully do them harm. This is the thing about Drug and Traffic Laws; the actions in question can lead to horrible stuff. But most of it is not undertaken with that intent, most of the time the people involved are just trying to make money, or get to work on time. That what they do is not approved by law doesn't really affect their needs or wants.

It's weird though to think that the U.S. has gone from one perpetual state of war, the War on Drugs, to another perpetual state of war, the War on Terror, and that both of these have been sticking points for earning cash from the Federal Government.

Obama in 2007: No more spying …

President Obama: We Can't Have…

>>382313
Didn't one of the "founding fathers" people love so much say the same thing as the latter?

>>382317
The point is, Obama is the most obvious liar in modern day politics. Maybe it's because we have so much video of him, its still pretty disappointing.

Also the founding father said it as a way to promote freedom, while Obama is saying it as a way to promote "security" (ie despotism).

>>382325
I'm not sure why anyone expected anything different. First off because A politicians and B as far as I can tell, the US president only has a direct say on military or martial matters, being the commander in chief and all, anything else having to go through congress, and that always ends well.

>>382328
>the US president only has a direct say on military or martial matters
Try a lot more.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATF_gunwalking_scandal

>>382331
I'm not clear on the distinction. Is that not a martial matter?

>>382332
Military, I mean. Running on fumes at the moment.s

>>382332
No it's a legal one, internal, unless we declared war on mexico when I wasn't looking.

Obama used executive privilege to keep Holder out of jail, not exactly a military matter.

>>382325
>The point is, Obama is the most obvious liar in modern day politics.
That is just such an adorably naive statement.

>>382337
Tell that to the personality cult...

>>382338
We've tried but they're really not having any of it.


Dude if you dig into this PRISM thing it really doesn't look like Despotism at all, it does looks like Security for a largely lawless frontier. And I'm still not sure at what point you would've preferred all this had been made clear, when Bush was ordering it or when Obama stepped in to unfuck it. Because from certain angles, that looks like exactly what he's done, taken a Republican Program and made it suck less. And whether you like this or not it is happening because it needs to happen, it is long overdue happening. I'm not a fan of losing all my access to vast amounts of media but it comes down to this, there are people who use the same freedom you and I have to try and hurt and kill innocent people. Our options are to either lock down that freedom or to try and implement a system that still respects it while trying to catch people actually planning to pull shit. This is nowhere near as black and white as you are spelling everything out to be.

I'm not happy about this either but I understand it and I understand why it was done and I even have an inkling of why they just didn't let the American public know.

The funniest thing about everyone screaming conspiracy is the fact that everyone who told them it's a conspiracy looks like they're part of a conspiracy themselves.

No Recordings of Phone calls have been pulled at all. It only stores metadata about calls and even then, that Metadata was only accessed for about 300 cases last year and only in connection with Terrorism. This is hardly the huge affront that everyone is making it out to be.

>>382341
I'll direct you to
>>382337
>That is just such an adorably naive statement.
Because when you think Obama is even a tiny bit better than Bush, you're already past the event horizon of the partisan black hole. Clinton, Bush and Obama are so damn close in what they're actually doing (as opposed to what they're saying see:>>382313) that it would be impossible to distinguish them on actions alone.

>there are people who use the same freedom you and I have to try and hurt and kill innocent people.
Yeah no shit this happens every damn day with criminals, you don't curtail basic human rights because catching them is hard. That's why we pay cops so much money. If NSA can't catch terrorists without breaking the constitution, NSA needs to be bloody fired.

>only stores metadata
That's such an incredibly ignorant statement I can only imagine it being typed up in some politicians PR room. Metadata is your LIFE, it's far far more important than the content of text messages or phone calls, because those can't be analyzed as easily.
http://www.businessinsider.com/what-you-can-learn-from-phone-metadata-2013-7

Guys, can we not turn this into /pol/25096284078. I actually am interested in the technical aspects of what and why this shit happens, but damn near nobody is able to filter out their own political biases to talk about them coherently.

>>382344
>Clinton, Bush and Obama are so damn close in what they're actually doing (as opposed to what they're saying see:>>382313) that it would be impossible to distinguish them on actions alone.

Call me when Obama has a warrantless wiretapping program in place. No, PRISM is not a warrantless wiretapping program.

>>382363
>Call me when Obama has a warrantless wiretapping program in place
What's your phone number?

Protip: Obama never ended Bush's warrantless wiretapping...

George Zimmerman Is Not Racist…

>>382379

...because Bush himself ended it in 2007, moving the program to the jurisdiction of the FISA courts.

You may not be a particularly large fan of that process either, but unlike its previous incarnation it's legally all aboveboard.

>>382386
Different anon here--the fact that it's all legal is the most disturbing part about the whole mess.

>>382363
>No, PRISM is not a warrantless wiretapping program.
Well of course not, cellphones don't have wires you dunce. They're wireless, that's the point. Doh!

>>382386
>legally all aboveboard
That makes it about a billion times worse. Compared to Bush being the village idiot, this would make Obama the equivalent of Malebolgia.
It's like saying "oh bush murdered a guy so he's bad, but obama made murder legal before killing someone so he's ok".

>>382389
I'll be blunt, it sounds like you just have a hateboner for Obama. Are you Rainbow Kid, by any chance?

>>382393
I have a hateboner for every president that's served during my lifetime, the latest one obviously gets the majority of the girth.

>wtf is a rainbow kid?

>>382425
A troll from the older politics threads here. If I recall correctly he was banned a while back

>>382429
Oh I looked it up and it said something about drug use on Urban Dictionary.

I've found this informative for the most part
http://thecriminallawyer.tumblr.com/

>>382775
I spend like 4 seconds there and easily discovered he's an apologist for governmental overreach and law enforcement abuses.

>>382776
I read the same thing and got the opposite impression. He was explaining the way the law works. Whether it's just or fair or moral is outside the scope of his discussion. He is just explaining what is legal. The fact that something is abhorrent does not make it any less legal. Otherwise this whole NSA thing would be a simple issue of prosecuting, firing and/or impeaching the people responsible rather than wringing our hands about it and demanding action from congress.

>>382777
Saying authoritarian and immoral laws are legitimate because they are laws... is not only wrong, but also spineless and pointless to boot. Because we already know this shit and it has nothing to do with the discussion taking place in the nation.

>as the entire country talks about how it shouldnt be allowed
>as the entire country talks about how it conflicts with the constitution
>a lone voice emerges to tell everyone that laws are legal

>>382781
>As the entire country cannot into computers

Yeah I'm not super torn up that the proletariat isn't in on this one. Hell, most of them don't know shit about any of this, those that even know it exists.

Dumb people making bad decisions is how we got where we are today.

>>382781
Saying that legally passed laws aren't laws because they go against your politics is childish and intellectually cowardly. If you intend to live in a grown-up world, you need to deal with the fact that the way we get these things changed is to pass new laws that supercede the old ones. You do not get to pretend like the old laws never happened because you find them personally ugly.

>>382791
You can't limit constitutional amendments to old technology. By that logic freedom of speech is nonexistant on TV, radio and so on.

>>382793
> legally passed laws
Plenty of laws have been passed which have been found unconstitutional and removed.

>because they go against your politics
What. What the fuck?!

>>382813
>you can't limit Constitutional Amendments to old technology

Actually that's kind of the point. You can't necessarily limit technology like this because it's grown a little more complex than most people really care to consider, and definitely more complex than the founders ever imagined. The 4th amendment, protecting against unreasonable search and seizure, is the one you're actually worried about being violated, and from there having those violations be used to infringe upon the 1st amendment. And this has already essentially occurred, but in the War on Drugs, not the War on Terror. Reports indicate that while the NSA and the FBI do not like sharing their toys with other Federal Enforcement agencies, these technologies have been used to target Drug Shipments and transporting agents. There has been no public outcry because hey it's drugs and the drug runners are minorities, but hey nobody has to actually mention that or treat it likes it's a real problem, we just keep bitching that the NSA is listening to our phonecalls (they aren't, it's impossible and logistically ignorant, unless you are doing something you know you shouldn't be and then are dumb enough to mention it over electronic communications).

The misapprehension you seem to be under is that this technology goes away if we somehow find it unconstitutional. It doesn't go away, it just morphs into a different form or ends up in a different pair of hands, by necessity. Something of this nature and scale is practically required by the standards of modern crime and law enforcement, simply because the complexities of this information network are incredible. We stand in outrage over the revelation of this stuff but the fact is, it's built within our legal framework, it is a virtual necessity in terms of modern crime, and if we try to bury this or dismantle it then that just means it goes back to the drawing board and gets resurrected outside the public eye in a different form.

The outrage over this is already fueling civil cases and even greater backlash against the government, and is giving this issue a chance to be tried in a court of law. And while it may be found Unconstitutional, the fact is that the way it is designed now, it is not, and while there may have been abuses in the system, they have been law enforcement abuses for other areas of criminal activity that also have questionable Constitutional Moral and Legal Grounds, such as Drugs. But no one wants to talk about that. We're content to just decry the entire system as immoral and illegal because hey! They Shouldn't Be Doing Things That Could Limit My Freedom, And No Discussion Can Be Had That Attempts to Define Where that Freedom Reasonably Begins and Ends. You say it's Unconstitutional but the fact is that it's Legal, it was set up to be A) Legal and B) not without checks and balances, even if they are not directly visible to the public. And it is being Legally challenged right now, meaning that the system still works on some level, even if a lot of it is decrepit bulwark, it still functions. And yet the only real public outcry is not for a redressing of all our continual governmental flaws in a variety of institutions, but to end this one program while making no effort to understand it.

>"If you have a better idea than this, we'd like to hear it."
-NSA Director General Keith Alexander

>>382776
>he's an apologist for governmental overreach and law enforcement abuses
>2nd page of blog:
>It should be clear by now that I’m no apologist for governmental overreach or law enforcement abuses

y'know sometimes you guys seem a little reactionary

>>382818
The DEA thing has made huge splashes but the point is that the NSA gave the DEA the info so the rage is still focused on NSA regardless.

No new technology is needed to treat every citizen like a criminal and break the constitution, once the precedent is set you aren't limited to cellphones.

>2nd page of blog:
If you actually read it you'd notice his entire article talks about how NSA obtains this data illegally, gives it to DEA, and then DEA has to go back and get actual legal evidence to use in court.

Read his own words:
>We have given the government amazing intelligence-gathering powers on the understanding that it won’t be used against our own citizens, and won’t be used for law enforcement.
That is precisely what NSA is doing.

>>382824
The thing you need to understand is that constitutionality isn't based on your own personal understanding of the language in the constitution, it is based on the interpretation provided by the courts. The courts have ruled behavior like this constitutional in the past. That means that it would almost certainly do so in this case as well, which means that regardless of what you feel and regardless of the actual words in the constitution, this stuff is constitutional. Because the Supreme Court's opinion is the only opinion that matters in matters of constitutionality.

So again, when you say "He does a whole page on how the NSA illegally gets this information," because it betrays your ignorance of how law works.

The government is run almost entirely be lawyers. Do you seriously think that if this were illegal, the Republicans wouldn't have already started impeachment proceedings for Obama over it? The fact that a lot of them are in favor of domestic spying would not get between them and the chance to take Obama out of office, even if they had to cut off their own noses to do it.

>>382826
>The thing you need to understand is that constitutionality isn't based on your own personal understanding of the language in the constitution
Actually yeah it is. Jim Crow laws were constitutional until decades of public outcry after public outcry, test case after test case from people like you and me made sure they weren't.
Constitutionality is based 100% on the interpretation of constitution by every American that reads it, and his willingness to bring cases before the supreme court.

>Because the Supreme Court's opinion is the only opinion that matters in matters of constitutionality.
Wrong, and also our current supreme court has not yet ruled on the constitutionality of NSA shotgun spying.

>the Republicans wouldn't have already started impeachment proceedings for Obama over it?
The hell would they? This is not a partisan issue, Obama can easily wash his hands of the matter long before impeachment occurs because he didn't even start this. Why are you even mentioning republicans and Obama when this is a case of citizens (ACLU etc) and NSA?

What is happening is that people are trying to bring this case before the supreme court.
https://www.eff.org/cases/jewel
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/07/new-lawsuit-is-broadest-challenge-yet-to-nsa-spying/
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/what-the-three-largest-nsa-lawsuits-are-fighting-for
http://www.policymic.com/articles/48195/aclu-nsa-lawsuit-prism-violates-the-first-and-fourth-amendments-of-the-constitution
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-07/17/nsa-dragnet-lawsuits
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/aclu-lawsuit-nsa-prism-surveillance-92840.html
I have no idea how you missed this, maybe you were too busy taking part in us-vs-them party logic to think for yourself.

>>382828
>The hell would they? This is not a partisan issue, Obama can easily wash his hands of the matter long before impeachment occurs because he didn't even start this. Why are you even mentioning republicans and Obama when this is a case of citizens (ACLU etc) and NSA?
Because we are living in reality, not Rational World. The Republican anti-Obama movement is so strong that there is absolutely zero chance that they would not be impeaching him if they even suspected that they could tie him to doing something unconstitutional, even if it is something unconstitutional they agree with. The fact that they have not is all but proof positive that there is zero legal standing for challenging the legality of these actions.

>>382830
We can't know that's not just what they want us to think.

>>382831
Look, Descartian reductionism resolved this whole thing ages ago--you can only operate based on the world that your senses present to you. You will never be 100% sure that the universe you are experiencing is the real one, but to do anything but treat it as though it were would be insane. Yes, they could be pulling the wool over our eyes, but if so they have done a job so effective that it is indistinguishable from reality. The simulacrum has become the hyperreal.

>>382830
>The fact that they have not is all but proof positive that there is zero legal standing for challenging the legality of these actions.
Have you read the rest of that comment listing the active lawsuits? Or even the part you linked?

See:
>he didn't even start this
PRISM can't be tied to Obama.

>>382824
>NSA obtains data illegally then gives it to the DEA

>The Reuters article everyone’s citing quotes former DEA agent Finn Selander as saying “It’s just like laundering money — you work it backwards to make it clean,” in reference to a practice called “parallel construction.” He makes it sound like law enforcement obtained its trial evidence illegally, and then went back and tried to think up a way to make it look admissible. That would indeed be cause for much concern. And you’re kidding yourself if you don’t think that’s something police do on a daily basis.

>But that’s not what “parallel construction” means. It means “dammit, I have this evidence that I cannot use. Is there another way to go get this evidence that is lawful? Why yes there is! Let me go do that now.”

The only thing I'm seeing here that is technically illegal is the information sharing between the various branches (which is not surprising. Various Government branches have also accused the NSA of being stingy with its' info). And the Constitutionality of it is being challenged in court by outside entities. Meaning that it is operating under a codified set of laws that can be challenged by an open system and that it is still technically a part of our system that was reached reasonably (no matter how many people don't want to believe that).

What bugs me about your stance is that you seem to be assuming that this is just whole-heartedly full-stop illegal and that there's absolutely no reason that this program, if found illegal, will stick around. But the things this program is doing are on some level a necessity in modern criminal enforcement. As much trouble as I have with the U.S. government, I'm glad it's them doing this and not other factions. This technology exists. Now it is known. If we shut this down, the question is not "is it constitutional", the question is "who and what will fill that gap in electronic surveillance?". Because somebody will and it may not necessarily be our Government.

>>382868
>But the things this program is doing are on some level a necessity in modern criminal enforcement.
Treating every citizen as a suspect has never been necessary, and has always been the wrong thing to do.

>>382875
IF YOU HAVE A BETTER WAY TO POLICE THIS INFORMATION NETWORK THEN PLEASE TELL SOMEBODY

This is not treating everyone as a suspect. This is attempting to discern what is going on inside a public information network that allows both legal and illegal things to occur. The phone networks have already been cooperating with police in this manner for years. They can listen to my phone calls and emails? IF YOU ARE USING THEIR INFORMATION NETWORK THEN THAT ANSWER IS YES. You are not suspected of anything. We are all being put through the dragnet because the dragnet is the only way they could figure out to make this work. If you have a better solution for catching cyber-criminals that doesn't involve stuff like Tiered Internet Levels or more authoritarian locks on basic devices, I'd like to hear it. Everyone would like to hear it. Because as it stands, this is the option.

>>382878
You're taken as a given that we agree that it needs policing, or at least, more policing than it had in the 1990's. I have been given no evidence that suggests that to be the case other than hand-wringing from luddites.

What crime can you be charged with if you're being harassed by someone, shove them out of your way, they trip, and fall down and smash their head a flight of stairs nearby doing so?

What crime does that become if you then position the body to make it look like a serial killing and then proclaim you're the killer, but the evidence shows you weren't, and the death you actually were somewhat responsible for was an accident?

It's involuntary manslaughter and obstruction of justice, right?

>>382880
Chances are that in that case, the jury would be easily convinced that you were guilty of murder, since you went to so much trouble to obfuscate what really happened. Without a witness to corroborate that you did it on accident, and after having signed a faulty confession, they would assume you were an unreliable witness in regards to whether or not you did it on purpose, too.

>>382878
>POLICE THIS INFORMATION NETWORK
What the fuck, since when did information need to be policed? Have you read the 1st amendment? It's right there at the top.

>catching cyber-criminals
Has absolutely nothing to do with PRISM.

Also "cyber criminals" are not some kind of impossible new foe, the dragnet approach is not needed to catch them. We've been catching hackers using good old police work for three generations.

While PRISM disturbs me greatly, I would not be opposed to discussions and proceedings aimed at making it and programs/directives similar to it more palatable without gimping their purposes or stepping on due process. Naturally it's a two way street, the public needs to be informed about technology in general (computer illiteracy is inexcusable at this point), and the gov't needs to take steps to ensure their programs aren't COINTELPRO replicas in the making.

>>382918
As long as it's transparent, I am willing to deal with it existing. But secret programs are not okay. They take away our ability to vote against the people who make decisions we disagree with, which is in no way acceptable. We essentially have no representation in these matters if we are not informed. Taxation Without Representation was enough for us to start a war over--I can't see any way they would think that Investigation Without Representation would be okay.