Comment by gpvos
8 years ago
> the Electronic Communications Privacy Act only restricts telecom companies from disclosing data to the government. It doesn't restrict disclosure to other companies
Clearly the US has their priorities completely the wrong way.
Part of the American mythology is that government involvement is always bad. It's hard for me to know if this developed because of the myths of the America Revolution, that a small colony won it alone and not because of external factors, and how much is due to people preaching small government politics. Regardless a distrust of the government seems to be ingrained in the American psyche IMO.
Small government just means localized government.
At a more local level, people have much more influence and ability to change problems that they see. At a more federal level, policy is imposed without localities having much/any influence.
That centralization and imposition of policy that half the country opposes is the reason for the political divide that we see today. If the same policies that we argue about so much were implemented at a state level, people would have the ability vote with their feet.
That doesn’t mean some legislation shouldn’t be federal, but there is a reason that the intention was for federal policy to be overwhelmingly agreed upon rather than forced in along party lines.
This is a good summary. The US was designed similar to the EU; each "state" is autonomous, but some things are shared, like currency, etc. Allowing frictionless movement between states is also paramount (and explicitly defined).
The logic being, if a state starts to get out of control, you can just move to another state. This allows states to experiment with various laws specific to the population.
Most of this was undone with the Civil War. As abhorrent as it was, the federal government had no legal power to ban slavery outside a constitutional amendment. The 13th-15th amendments actually banned slavery after the war, not the Emancipation Proclamation. Today, the federal government bans whatever it pleases and uses the commerce clause to skirt the constitution.
Take the drug war for example. Because a group of drugs was federally banned, states were powerless to do anything about it. I think most people would agree that federally banning all drugs ended up being a terrible idea and ruined many lives and families over the course of it's execution. It continues to do so today. If the constitution was actually followed, each state can determine which drugs it would allow. As far as I know, Colorado hasn't devolved into a cesspool of depravity since it legalized pot. Imagine all the hell that could have been avoided if states were allowed to decide which drugs to ban rather than the federal government.
Of course a strong federal government has some plusses as well. It was hotly debated during the country's inception, but the ultimate compromise all the states agreed to is what we got.
Ahaha what? There's no myth that we won it alone. Elementary school texts on the subject lay it out fairly clearly that we did it with the French.
They may talk slightly about the French help but none talk about The Spanish[1] also England was having trouble recruiting for the unpopular war so much so that about ~1/3 of the British fighting forces were mercenaries[2]. The Revolutionary war was won basically because the British Empire was starting to show it's cracks and other countries jumped at the chance to speed up it's demise.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spain_and_the_American_Revolut... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolutionary_War#Rec...
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There are a worrying number of people in the US who believe in American exceptionalism. When the French are brought up by them, it's generally in the context of "We saved their asses in WWII", not "They were vital in our war of independence".
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Probably a bigger myth is that farmers hid out in trees and picked off stuffy Englishmen foolishly clinging to warfare in lines (so why was von Steuben important, then?), which only comes close to describing reality in places like Kentucky where a bunch of partisans were participating in what we might today call guerilla warfare. But even in that case it was less picking off soldiers and more killing your loyalist or patriot neighbors. Warfare in lines was completely logical given the weapons available at the time.
> There's no myth that we won it alone.
Yes, there is.
> Elementary school texts on the subject lay it out fairly clearly that we did it with the French.
Textbooks are a mixed bag, but most I've seen at K-12 levels do mention that the French eventually were involved in some way, but very few give a real idea of the nature, extent (material or temporal), and criticality of French aid. E.g., approximately zero note that France started covertly arming and funding independence-minded Americans before the Declaration of Independence.
But even if the textbooks told the whole story, that wouldn't disprove the existence of a popular myth, it would just make it's persistence more remarkable.
Even if it were factually accurate that we won it alone, the story of the revolutionary war has still taken on mythic status in our society. The revolutionary war is just as much a mythic story as many religious stories.
Another part of the American mystique is that every politician is for sale via legal bribery where companies donate to their campaigns and get them to do mostly whatever the company wants, totally contrary to the interests of the public.
And somehow people trust those bribing companies more than the politicians?
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It's reasonable and wise to distrust government. What is unreasonable is American blind faith in private industry.
This tracking is a great example of the threat posed by industry to individual citizens.
The term "big business" preceded "big government", and has been far more prevalent.
Big government arose as a response to and check on big business.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=big+business%2...
You leave out another option: Americans distrust government because we see it fail us every day. Corruption, police brutality, inefficiency, politician sleaze baggery...
In general corporations provide a much higher quality service than the government in the US.
It always boggles my mind how 1/2 the people that realize and complain about those things go on to recommend more government and that only they should have effective guns.
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You make a good point about the government, but I don't agree it extends to corporations. Corporations do much of the dirty work of the government.
Defense contractors and mining concerns operate hand-in-hand with the government, training police, researching weapons, running prisons, crunching data. Look at the story of this article: it's corporations doing the dirty work the government isn't technically allowed to do.
Furthermore corporations only submit to greatly reduced requirements for attending to those with special needs, like in wheelchairs, deaf, etc. There are some valuable services provided to them, like closed captioning, but only under passioned support from idealists and with profit incentive.
If we left it all to corporations, only the most able-bodied and well-off people would run the country for the most able-bodied and well-off, forming tight-knit circles to maintain their power and never perceiving the world as a place for living, only protecting power.
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The clever part is that the government in turn is allowed to purchase data from the other companies.
Also, if a government employee does a lookup in their spare time as a private person out of curiosity, it is ok? Or if they ask their friend to do the lookup?
Why? Releasing the data to the government creates Big Brother. I thought we were all against that?
Now you've created a corporate Big Brother, who is hell bent on pure profits and doesn't even have to answer to you in the elections. Is that better?
Yes? Government Big Brother can put me in jail just because a cell phone record said I was near a crime while being committed. Corporate Big Brother can only make money from me.
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Two big brothers: Government and Corporate - lately, in some cases, these brothers have merged.
There is this old theory about that: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_monopoly_capitalism The Marxist as well as the libertarian theories about it probably contain a few valuable insights and a few terrible ideas for fixing the situation, as usual for radical political theories.
Contrasted to Palantir, Facebook, cambridge analytica and private firms working for NSA?
Ironically, governments are somewhat still under democratic control... somewhat.
Corporations are completely authoritarian, and by design.
Well, such a release should of course be limited, regulated and with oversight. But I'd argue that at least police should have some possibility to get at customer data, even without opt-in.
Release of privacy-sensitive data to other companies should strictly be by clear customer opt-in, with clear limits on its use. And even some of that should be forbidden for semi-monopolies such as telecom providers.
Releasing the data to corporations creates a different Big Brother.
To corporations, you have no inalienable rights. They're just more things to be bought and sold.
Actually, not true by the defnition of inalienable right: something of which you may be deprived, but no other person may gain.
It is possible to take from you real or chattel property, funds, papers, etc., and give them to another. Your life (though no longer your organs and tissues), your liberty, your happiness, not so.
Those are inalienable in that they cannot exist seperate frome you.
Definition of inalienable:
That cannot be transferred to another or others: inalienable rights.
https://www.thefreedictionary.com/inalienable
Not subject to sale or transfer; inseparable.
That which is inalienable cannot be bought, sold, or transferred from one individual to another. The personal rights to life and liberty guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States are inalienable. Similarly, various types of property are inalienable, such as rivers, streams, and highways.
https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Inalienable+r...
What would stop the government from just getting this stuff from a third-party who has purchased it?
Nothing, that's one reason why these companies exist. Its corporate surveillance
Probably the same above-named act.
But that act says it's telecoms that can't sell it to the government. Doesn't the government purchase data from other 3rd party entities anyways?
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I'd say only half the wrong way.