Comment by r3trohack3r
16 days ago
Actually my takeaway from the Snowden leaks was that the government tried really hard to stay within the confines of the law, even if they wildly stretched the legal theory to get there.
https://www.blankenship.io/essays/2020-07-13/
Doesn’t justify what they were doing, or make it legal, but it’s an important distinction when trying to reason about government surveillance programs.
By that use of the phrase, sovereign citizens try really hard to stay within the law.
But this is true, right? The whole movement is based on their legal theory giving them rights to behave in a certian way, and the idea that everyone else wastes that 'right' through ignorance and state manipulation. It's dumb, but not dishonest.
No, the sovcit movement is sourced from actual, literal paranoid schizophrenia and spreads via social media.
Let's consider it through a personal example. Suppose you are on a call rotation, and agree that the on-call engineer can wake you up at 4AM, but only if it's really important, and that the matter at hand has to involve some knowledge that you have, but didn't put on the wiki. Later, you are woken up at 4AM to discuss the results of a football game, and when challenged your coworker defends that they upheld their end of the bargain. They claim that it wasn't specified who it had to be important to, and that once you had been told who won, you had knowledge related to the call that you hadn't put on the wiki.
Would a fair manager consider them as having broken the agreement, or as having tried really hard to comply with the rules?
I would call that wanting plausible deniability (in a different sense than how the phrase is normally used). "Yes we may have a done a bad thing but we believed it was allowed."
You don't have to have a sound legal theory that will hold up in court. You just have to have a sound bite that you can vomit up when someone says "Wait a minute, isn't that blatantly illegal?"
> You don't have to have a sound legal theory that will hold up in court.
What? Why? The natural continuation of "Wait a minute, isn't that blatantly illegal?" is "We're going to sue you to make you stop."
At least in the context of the presidential surveillance program, the ACLU did sue to make them stop. But the program was classified which made getting evidence of the program's existence a crime. The supreme court ruled that they couldn't make a decision without evidence. Shortly after, Snowden leaked the evidence the supreme court had requested. That leak provided the ACLU the evidence necessary to bring the case back to the supreme court and win, "stopping" the program.
21 replies →
Wasn’t this exact route taken? Government got cases dismissed for lack of standing - plaintiff could not prove they were being spied on… because the government wouldn’t reveal anything.
"We're going to sue you to make you stop" is exactly where you deploy the semilegal sound bite. You then use that as the public justification to stall, deny, countersue, delay, appeal, defend, depose and do everything you can to avoid a decision happening one way or the other until you've already gotten and done what you wanted to get and do.
2 replies →