logoalt Hacker News

notepad0x90yesterday at 9:29 PM3 repliesview on HN

mass surveillance is explicitly unlawful in the US. it is in the bill of rights. By definition it is injustice under the law. Even for terrorists in the US they have to go through a FISA court and get warrants.

Consider this, the bill of rights stipulates that a soldier cannot be stationed on your property in times of peace, but in times of war it will be allowed. It makes exceptions for times of war. but even in times of war, 4th amendment's search and seizure protection don't have an exception. Even in times of insurrection and rebellion. To deliberately violate that for personal and political reasons, that in itself is treason. With that intent alone, even without action, it invalidates all legitimacy that government has. If a clause in a contract is broken, the contract is broken. The bill of rights is the contract between the people and their government that gives the government its powers to rule, in exchange for those rights. With the contract explicitly, deliberately and with provable malicious intent broken, the whole agreement is invalidated.

I'll even say this, the US military itself is on the hook if they stand by and let this happen.


Replies

kelseyfrogyesterday at 9:36 PM

On the hook for what?

The current US government has a fundamentally different ontology for the derivation of human rights.

Wheras you and I likely agree that human rights are inalienable due to them being derived from the universe nature of human experience, the administration believes that human rights begin and end with them, the state. When they're the one able to affect the world with violence, it doesn't matter who's on the hook. The US electorate thought they could heal a status wound by authoritarianism instead of therapy and everyone else is paying the price.

show 1 reply
Nevermarkyesterday at 9:38 PM

> I'll even say this, the US military itself is on the hook if they stand by and let this happen.

That would most definitely not be the Constitutional recourse. Or a sensible approach. If that happens, the Constitution is past tense.

Congress and the Supreme Court are the recourse. If they don't hold up the Constitution then violence or even a non-violent military coup, however well intended, are not going to put the splattered egg back together again.

The last two and a half decades have seen all four presidents, congress, the Supreme Court and both parties allow blatantly unconstitutional surveillance become the norm (evolving an adaptive fig leaf of intermediaries), and presidential military actions entirely blur out the required Congressional oversight. That the weakening of loyalty to the Constitution has been pervasive on those serious counts, is one of the reasons it has been so easy to undermine further.

When governing bodies become familiar with the convenient practice of "deciding" what the constitution means, without repercussions, that lost respect becomes very hard to reinstate.

show 1 reply
pikeryesterday at 9:31 PM

Right, which is probably the point made by the negotiators on behalf of the US Government. "We don't want Anthropic's standard, we want the Constitution."

show 1 reply