Comment by mpyne
13 years ago
Also, the Constitution itself forbids "ex post facto" laws, which means you can't be convicted of actions that were not actually crimes at the time you did it.
This is not to say that government should be able to look at private data just because, or that people shouldn't have secrets.
But once you start envisioning people going so insane that they start rounding you up for things that you did which were perfectly fine at the time you did it, you are envisioning things which are pretty far beyond the protections of law and the Constitution anyways.
Or in other words, if things like PRISM could cause society to tear itself asunder in that way then obviously that program must die. But if society does tear itself asunder anyways, then PRISM would be the least of the peoples' worries, some theoretical U.S. secret police would be able to string you up on slights real or imagined, crimes that are completely fictitious, with or without PRISM.
There is absolutely no program that is "safe" to have in a situation that exceptional, so while I see why you would judge a program based on "Would you feel safe if the other Party had this program" (and we may very well fail the NSA's surveillance programs on this test alone), I don't see why you'd judge a program based on "Would you feel safe if the NKVD had this program".
I wouldn't feel safe if we were in any situation so exceptional that we had an NKVD at all. Despite all the complaints about the NSA, they do not have nearly all the elements of the NKVD (neighborhood informants, secret police, etc.), and it may very well be possible that through our separation of functions that NSA can do its job without inevitably bringing down the fabric of society.
> Also, the Constitution itself forbids "ex post facto" laws, which means you can't be convicted of actions that were not actually crimes at the time you did it.
California and a few other states love ignoring this, I believe there's even legislation going up for vote this week that criminalizes exactly this. Until the government is adequately constrainted by its contstituency, we will always have overreaches.
> Until the government is adequately constrainted by its contstituency, we will always have overreaches.
If there's only one lesson I wish people would take away from all this NSA drama, it's this one.
The government is in the end what people make of it, nothing more or less.
Also, the Constitution itself forbids "ex post facto" laws, which means you can't be convicted of actions that were not actually crimes at the time you did it.
Even if you can't be convicted in a court, there's still the potential for intimidation, coercion, and embarrassment due to past activities which were once acceptable but are no longer.
Well as far as I can tell the only additional concern we have in this case is that people might see your 1-900-HOTWINK phone sex calls, given that PRISM itself doesn't actually pull more data than the NSA was able to pull before.
And either way, it's already happening. Remember the sorority president who had her pissed-off email to her "sisters" leaked to the media? Which led to people discovering her Twitter account that showed her to be a racist?
You can't blame that one on the gub'mint; we're already living in that particular brave new world, if people don't want to acknowledge it that's their problem.
What I think will actually happen as far as societal change goes is that we will become used to the idea that people do grow up and mature and stop holding things against them that they said 20 years before.
What I think will actually happen as far as societal change goes is that we will become used to the idea that people do grow up and mature and stop holding things against them that they said 20 years before.
People should be able to say things in private yesterday (not just 20 years ago) and not have it affect them in public today.
1 reply →