In some areas, a radical distinction between private persons and government officials is acknowledged in existing law and opinion. Thus, a private individual’s ‘right to privacy’ or right to keep silent does not and should not apply to government officials, whose records and operations should be open to public knowledge and evaluation.
There are two democratic arguments for denying the right to privacy to government officials, which, while not strictly libertarian, are valuable as far as they go: namely (1) that in a democracy, the public can only decide on public issues and vote for public officials if they have complete knowledge of government operations; and (2) that since the taxpayers pay the bill for government, they should have the right to know what government is doing.
The libertarian argument would add that, since government is an aggressor organization against the rights and persons of its citizens, then full disclosure of its operations is at least one right that its subjects might wrest from the State, and which they may be able to use to resist or whittle down State power.
— Murray Rothbard (via conza)
If you want to know just how crazy fear over PRISM-like surveillance has made the Internet, take a look at DuckDuckGo. Thanks to the National Security Agency leaks and some well-timed media appearances, the private search engine is having its best traffic week ever. Visitors to the site made a record 2.35 million direct searches on Wednesday — a 26 percent increase over the previous week.
For anyone using Google Chrome, this is a cool/fun modern version of “Pong” to play. I made it as far as level 8 (once the left/right reversing ‘power ups’ were implemented, I had a hard time keeping up).
“Grounding all airplanes would surely eliminate airplane hijackings. We could round up millions of people of one ethnicity or religion to help prevent terrorist attacks (and of course we did just this with the Japanese population in World War II). Republicans and Democrats are against torture, though, in the Bush administration, Republicans sometimes played fast and loose with the definition of torture. Still, one can hypothesize a potential benefit from certified full-out torture as on the TV show 24. But just because you can hypothesize a benefit from the tactic doesn’t make it right.”
Yeah…because the people who call themselves “government” care so much about their tax cattle’s phones being stolen.
It couldn’t be that the people calling themselves “government” instead want to legislate the power to deactivate anyone’s smartphone via “kill switch” at will.
Physically, the NSA has always been well protected by miles of high fences and electrified wire, thousands of cameras, and gun-toting guards. But that was to protect the agency from those on the outside trying to get in to steal secrets. Now it is confronting a new challenge: those on the inside going out and giving the secrets away.
We already mentioned how terrorist supporter Rep. Pete King has said that journalists reporting on government leaks exposing blatant abuse of power should be prosecuted, and rather than admit that he misspoke, he appears to be doubling down… by flat…
