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If you don't think that the people are being oppressed right now, what do you think the odds are for someone using this infrastructure to oppress the citizens of the United States on a large scale?
We're not going to be oppressed anytime soon. The right wing love to paint the US government like it's run by Saddam's Ba'ath Party, but that is not what is going on.
"Those paranoid of the NSA's information gathering ability"? If you want to see paranoia you should look at the proponents of the surveillance state and those in the US government. According to them every American is a threat and a suspect terrorist - that's paranoia if I ever saw it. Why should we trust the government when the government clearly doesn't trust us? What shred of credibility do they have left?
Stealing personal records of all kinds counts as oppression in my book. As for the odds that the surveillance state will be used against us on a large scale, I'd say 100%. As it stands now, the government has (among other powers) the power to collect, organize, and examine all of your personal records, torture you, imprison you for the rest of your life, and kill you, all with the stroke of a President's pen. If the government wishes to do so, your file will be examined and every decision you ever made and every contact you ever had will be used to build up a case against you. No matter how flimsy the case is, remember that it's all at the discretion of the President, who does it all in secret. With a stroke of a pen, he can order you kidnapped and put into a military prison, where you will remain for the rest of your life, possibly being tortured and forced to sign a false confession. An alternative option for the President is using the information as a pretext for killing you.
This sounds extreme, and the government has yet to do all of these things, but the fact is under the legal and policy structures Obama has put into place, there is nothing stopping the government from doing all of these things. In fact, under the policies put into place, if the government decided to launch another Holocaust, it would be perfectly legal. Recall that the President has assumed the power to indefinitely imprison people and kill them, which is exactly what happens in a death camp. If that's not a sign that there's something wrong with this government, I don't know what is.
Would a government intent on protecting the basic freedoms of its citizens claim such powers and erect such legal structures? Absolutely not. Would a government intent on attaining total power and control over its citizens claim such powers and erect such legal structures? Yes, it would, because without those powers such a state could not exist. This viewpoint draws on a fundamental lesson of history - there can be no security without freedom; when our freedoms are lost, everyone's security is undermined.
Even if government can protect you from terrorists, once your freedom is lost there is zero protection from the government, a state of affairs that always breeds a different and far more dangerous kind of terror - the terrorism that emanates from totalitarian governments, which claimed an estimated 262 million lives in the 20th century.
This is on top of totalitarian government's proven failure to keep us safe from terrorists. PRISM and all the post-9/11 violations of our freedom did not help to prevent or catch the Boston bomber, and the Boston bomber was only caught because a man violated the shelter-in-place order, went outside, and saw something amiss. Yes, not only did the police state policies fail to prevent the Boston bombing, they wouldn't have even found the bomber at all if everyone complied with police directives. The Boston bombing isn't an isolated incident of this type - even after 12 years of poking, prodding, and groping the public, the TSA has failed to catch a single terrorist. Also, despite claims of "dozens of plots" foiled by PRISM, its proponents have only pointed to one such plot we can examine, Najibullah Zazi's bombing plot, a claim which doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Although PRISM was used to intercept Zazi's emails, authorities could have easily obtained a conventional warrant to access that information. This casts serious doubts on the other plots they claim were foiled, and conveniently they have not revealed any examinable details. Plus, even if dozens of plots were foiled by PRISM that could not have been foiled by conventional means, that pales in comparison to 310 million innocent people's information that was stolen under this program. Assuming that there were 3 dozen plots foiled (36), and assuming there were 5 people involved in each of them, PRISM's "hit rate" is 0.0000581%.
0.0000581% - that's pathetic by any standard. For some perspective, the chance of a given NSA agent being struck by lightning within his lifetime is 172 times greater (0.01%) than the chance that he will gain terror plot information from a given subject of his surveillance.
After all this, the bottom line is that trading freedom for security and erecting a police state simply doesn't work - the terrorist threat remains unchanged, but the threat from government greatly increases. If you want safety, choose freedom.
It's pretty clear this administration has used the power of internal agencies against the people. They have also turned their eyes towards citizens as the real threat to them and their corrupt grasp of power.
Government has become all themselves. This governments intent in all it's activities is to protect itself and not the American way of life. The average American citizen has become a liability to government.
The infrastructure has already been used to oppress the citizens of the U.S. on its largest and most important scale. Government employees and government contractors have colluded to attempt a disenfranchisement of the U.S. voters in 2012.
It's all over the news and nobody in the government has any idea what's going on. And if they don't know what their own employees are doing, just how the hot times can we expect the government to know what their contractors are doing? Congressional Committee Chairmen can't even get FOIA documents as directed by law.
"Inside the Cave" shows that, "Obama for America didn't hire your typical political staffer. They went directly to Silicon Valley and data analysts in the Fortune 500 and academia. One used to work at Pixar. Another was a high energy particle physicist."
"Inside the Cave" described the four new technology tools his group created:
• Narwhal: Synchronized data from multiple sources to build complete profiles of supporters
• Dashboard: Enabled supporters to connect with supporters near them and take action from home
• Call Tool: Allowed supporters in nonbattleground states to use their home phones to call voters in battleground states
• Stork: Transferred data from vendors to databases for querying
So now we know that all information regarding any citizen is controlled by sycophants of the progressive left, which hates anything that smacks of not liberal left. These are the troops... the brown shirts as it were. This is Team O'men. 2012 was just practice.
For 2016. they're prepared with...
(1) Better Social Targeting
(2) Real-Time Analytics Overtakes Polling
(3) True Digital Integration
But the answer to the OP is, now with Progressive supporters so completely ingrained in Progressive policies with Alinksky tactics, Team Obamaland is in place, ready for control after 2016 from Chicago/Honolulu HQs. It won't matter who the President is, or who's in Congress. The bowels of governement are - and will continue to be - controlled by Progressives.
"Those paranoid of the NSA's information gathering ability"? If you want to see paranoia you should look at the proponents of the surveillance state and those in the US government. According to them every American is a threat and a suspect terrorist - that's paranoia if I ever saw it.
Some paranoia is actually legitimate though, and in this case some citizens are paranoid of the government and in other cases some citizens are paranoid of the situation with our foreign policy, with the latter giving an excuse for the government to spy.
Why should we trust the government when the government clearly doesn't trust us? What shred of credibility do they have left?
[b]People should always be skeptical of the government, however, there is one interesting thing to debate, is the government really afraid of us, or is this spying infrastructure there for security, or is this spying infrastructure for abusive political tactics? Or maybe even a combination of those?/B]
Stealing personal records of all kinds counts as oppression in my book.
Who is really stealing from us, the government or the corporations? Or have we volunteered our personal information to the corporations? Or did the corporations volunteer to the government? The issue more complex?
As for the odds that the surveillance state will be used against us on a large scale, I'd say 100%. As it stands now, the government has (among other powers) the power to collect, organize, and examine all of your personal records, torture you, imprison you for the rest of your life, and kill you, all with the stroke of a President's pen. If the government wishes to do so, your file will be examined and every decision you ever made and every contact you ever had will be used to build up a case against you. No matter how flimsy the case is, remember that it's all at the discretion of the President, who does it all in secret. With a stroke of a pen, he can order you kidnapped and put into a military prison, where you will remain for the rest of your life, possibly being tortured and forced to sign a false confession. An alternative option for the President is using the information as a pretext for killing you.
The infrastructure for abuse is certainly there, [COLOR="rgb(0, 100, 0)"]However, aside from a few cases, it hasn't been used for large scale oppression, just yet, at least not enough to start riots, or a civil war, or a mass migration.[/color]
This sounds extreme, and the government has yet to do all of these things, but the fact is under the legal and policy structures Obama has put into place, there is nothing stopping the government from doing all of these things. In fact, under the policies put into place, if the government decided to launch another Holocaust, it would be perfectly legal. Recall that the President has assumed the power to indefinitely imprison people and kill them, which is exactly what happens in a death camp. If that's not a sign that there's something wrong with this government, I don't know what is.
IMO, it's a sign of either a brainwashed population, forgetful population, or simply a runaway government where the government has obtained a private police for themselves
Would a government intent on protecting the basic freedoms of its citizens claim such powers and erect such legal structures? Absolutely not. Would a government intent on attaining total power and control over its citizens claim such powers and erect such legal structures? Yes, it would, because without those powers such a state could not exist. This viewpoint draws on a fundamental lesson of history - there can be no security without freedom; when our freedoms are lost, everyone's security is undermined.
Agreed
Even if government can protect you from terrorists, once your freedom is lost there is zero protection from the government, a state of affairs that always breeds a different and far more dangerous kind of terror - the terrorism that emanates from totalitarian governments, which claimed an estimated 262 million lives in the 20th century.
Agreed
This is on top of totalitarian government's proven failure to keep us safe from terrorists. PRISM and all the post-9/11 violations of our freedom did not help to prevent or catch the Boston bomber, and the Boston bomber was only caught because a man violated the shelter-in-place order, went outside, and saw something amiss. Yes, not only did the police state policies fail to prevent the Boston bombing, they wouldn't have even found the bomber at all if everyone complied with police directives. The Boston bombing isn't an isolated incident of this type - even after 12 years of poking, prodding, and groping the public, the TSA has failed to catch a single terrorist. Also, despite claims of "dozens of plots" foiled by PRISM, its proponents have only pointed to one such plot we can examine, Najibullah Zazi's bombing plot, a claim which doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Although PRISM was used to intercept Zazi's emails, authorities could have easily obtained a conventional warrant to access that information. This casts serious doubts on the other plots they claim were foiled, and conveniently they have not revealed any examinable details. Plus, even if dozens of plots were foiled by PRISM that could not have been foiled by conventional means, that pales in comparison to 310 million innocent people's information that was stolen under this program. Assuming that there were 3 dozen plots foiled (36), and assuming there were 5 people involved in each of them, PRISM's "hit rate" is 0.0000581%.
Agreed.
0.0000581% - that's pathetic by any standard. For some perspective, the chance of a given NSA agent being struck by lightning within his lifetime is 172 times greater (0.01%) than the chance that he will gain terror plot information from a given subject of his surveillance.
Agreed.
After all this, the bottom line is that trading freedom for security and erecting a police state simply doesn't work - the terrorist threat remains unchanged, but the threat from government greatly increases. If you want safety, choose freedom.
Agreed.
Replies in bold with some color-coded replies.
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