Replying to this and an AC reply together, since they deal with the same issues. Also fixed a bad but obvious typo.

I don't disagree with any of this, and didn't mean to make it sound like I do. The bill of rights isn't where our rights come from, but it is where the government's rights come from in the sense that it helps define what the government can and cannot do. Our rights, such as that as being protected from unwarranted searches and seizures, are inalienable and cannot be removed. This illustrates what the government can do, however: it can search and seize when warranted. This has been further enumerated by legislation and case law which we're all mostly familiar with, like needing a warrant issued by the court system in order for private property to be searched or seized.

The argument works like this, then: if the government can issue warrants to show that they can search and seize property, as described in the bill of rights, why can they not issue warrants to search or seize German property? Obviously the bill of rights doesn't describe American land and other things under American jurisdiction quite the same as land and things which are not American or under American jurisdiction.

Right. This is easily shown by the example that an American citizen traveling abroad doesn't suddenly lose his, say, First Amendment rights. They are inalienable. They are not, however, the same. For one thing, foreign jurisdiction must be recognized in some way, often through the use of government-to-government treaties -- foreign laws in foreign lands must be respected, even by American citizens, even when they might contradict the US Constitution. To do otherwise immediately negates any recognition of sovereignty of foreign governments or people, removing them of their self-determination. This also happens in particularly extreme cases, of course, but it's not the norm.

Another example which shows the weakness in your reasoning is the use of customs controls to limit entry into United States' territory. If it's almost universally unconstitutional to be forced to provide identification to the US Government simply for traveling, why, then, do passports exist? How can the US government require identification for American citizens to re-enter their own territory, to regain access to their own property?

The following two quotes (one from each reply) should really hammer home the point:

You both believe that the US government can declare war. There are no real restrictions on the circumstances which the government can declare war -- only that Congress must declare it, and the Executive branch must execute it (and can execute certain actions prior to any declaration, such as defending against attacks, etc). The restrictions largely come at the mood of the nation, ie, who has been elected to Congress as representatives of the people.

How can both of you believe that the power to launch violent military attacks upon other states is within the limits of the Constitution, but authorizing the listening to of foreign communications is not?

Your issues with foreign spying and intelligence operations have nothing to do with your constitutional beliefs or human rights or whatever the fuck. They're disagreements with policy. Domestic spying, and Snowden's actions in regards to that, are another matter.

He's not possibly innocent. He did some stuff that was blatantly criminal; he did some other stuff that was criminal but did so under the guise of whistleblowing. You can't ignore the first just because he might have done some good in his life.

He gave a huge amount of leverage to foreign governments who conduct the same types of espionage and spying against his own country by revealing the extend and mechanisms which his own country conducts its spying operations. Both political leverage, to be used diplomatically, and operational leverage, which can be used to counter legitimate American spy programs or to copy them and use them against America or other targets, like their own people.

Talk about lazy thinking! Where did I ever do anything like this? Get the fuck over yourself.

The point is that having your mail read isn't a human rights violation, and it never will be. Especially when it's read by foreign instutitions in foreign territory.

Many of the programs that Snowden outed to foreign governments intend only to spy on actual enemies who are actually foreign.

You call it a straw man, and then declare it again yourself immediately after? If you think foreign governments should be obligated to the US Constitution, and don't care if they and their people don't want that, then you basically think the rest of the world should be America, junior. Ignoring representative governments and thinking that you have the authority to speak for what their people want is the most authoritarian shit posted anywhere in these comments.

I think it's perfectly reasonable not to care if everything you said above it is true. The major thing punishing him does is serve as a deterrent for people doing stupid things in the future, like how he gave foreign governments a huge amount of leverage to use against the USA and its people. But that's also served by the threat of his punishment since his predicament is so well known.

It would be different to argue for clemency for everything he did, and wishing for some people to be punished while he got off scot-free. As long as you don't believe that, you have a pretty sturdy moral ground to stand on.

I'll help you out. It's the same part that says no Warrants shall issue for Angela Merkel or her cellphone to be seized by the US Government. Or any other German who's not on American soil, for that matter.

They're not protected by the Bill of Rights because they are not under American jurisdiction. Do you really think the USG should be able to get a warrant in an American court, granted by American judges, for American law enforcement to search Angela Merkel's cell phone?

hey buddy, I logged in for you. I'll have the NSA let me know when you have something to say!

Sorry, but you're backtracking. Here's the original:

He revealed domestic spying in the form of telephone metadata, which you think should not be a crime because of its unconstitutional or immoral nature. He also revealed US government intelligence activities on foreign targets, which is both moral and constitutional. Doing one does not absolve him of the other, no matter how hard you wish to imply it.

Remember the Emailocaust, when the Nazis read the letters of 6 million Polish Jews? Wait, no, it was that other thing they did.

If you want non-Americans to be protected by things like the American Bill of Rights, then they have to abide by some other rules, too. Pretty sure that the universal jurisdiction which you're arguing for in order for that to happen is much more authoritarian than anything I've ever done. It will also get you laughed out of any other country you suggest it in. Pretty hilarious that you think the solution to the world's problems is expanding American rule of law.

You should probably just let other peoples' governments speak for themselves. I'll spoil their answer for you: they think spying is impolite at worst, not some tragic human rights violation.

If you relied on VoIP, would you like the option to pay maybe $1/month extra to have a 1Mbps fully-QoS'd channel to guarantee that your VoIP traffic always gets through no matter how badly intermediate networks between your modem and VoIP provider might be? That's one of the use-cases the EUP offered as a justification for having to allow some degree of traffic prioritization.

If you choose the right VoIP.

As long as ISPs are not allowed to intentionally degrade non-premium traffic on the back of direct-peering deals, I see no fundamental problem with it.

So they won't intentionally degrade specific traffic. They'll just allow for the creation of the network equivalent of slums. This isn't about QoS, or "enhanced" anything, as the providers are already capable of doing that. It's about large, powerful corporations leveraging their positions to increase their power. Increasing their power via the marketplace by becoming better providers would be accessible.

Why would you want the government to shift the power of the marketplace from consumers to these corporations? Instead of the market of consumers at large choosing things like "hey, I want VoIP service" or "I'd like to watch television via the internet" or "I like this new thing that has yet to become popular", consumers at large would see choices like "I'd like to choose the same thing as MSNBCComcastTimeWarner".

Skype? Netflix? Hulu? Nope. Have fun with Vongo and the thousands of other forgettable services pushed by content-providers which have come and failed miserably. Anything sensitive to bandwidth or latency like a Skype, instead of creating and setting a market for new products, will have to first be filtered through their lieges for approval.

In theory, maybe.

This would provide an incentive for providers never to improve their base service, since they would then be required to provide that same level of service across the board. Why would they ever give it away for "free" to already-paying customers when they can place a massive new premium on it? Especially when sharing a tiny nibble of the new pie to a few already-paying customers means they'll have to give that nibble to everybody, every day.

Instead of an open infrastructure which is equally accessible, it will statutorily create pay-for-access with a "basement" tier shouldn't get worse than the current status quo. That might seem fine now, but think about what it would be like if this were allowed to happen during the dialup days?

A "fast lane" net neutrality is the opposite of net neutrality. Every lane will be a "fast lane", ie, mostly monopolized toll roads run by corporations which have already shown no qualms in leveraging their positions of power to crush competition and squeeze consumers.

Looks like it's the opposite to me. He's complaining that he's forced to purchase upgrades to the latest and greatest major versions of his OS, and purchase hardware that it says it will run on, just for a security patch.

Al-Awlaki does ring a bell. Like I said, if Snowden were in a place like Yemen, where apprehending him was impossible because he was protected by a group of people who were openly hostile to their own government and the US government, sometimes conducting open warfare or terrorist operations, then the United States might try to have him killed.

He's not, though. Even if he were, it would be so unlikely as to almost be unthinkable. He's not violent. He can't cause any more direct harm. He has no real options on the table, considering just about every other nation in the world would be more than willing to extradite him. It's not even worth a huge expense to try to apprehend him.

The idea that Snowden would be assassinated by the USA, especially without serious attempts at his apprehension, is absurd. There's no other way to put it. The only thing I can say about it is that everyone is lucky the US government has so far successfully filtered out people who would consider it feasible or a good idea or legal.

If anyone can make a leap of logic from the dubiously legal killing of al-Awlaki to justify a killing of Snowden, then they are part of the problem. They're miles apart.

There certainly were large movements of support against Germany. There were even plenty of men who crossed the border into Canada or traveled to the UK to volunteer, and there were even men who went to Finland to fight against the USSR in the Winter War of 1940. This kind of "world police" behaviro is definitely a fairly common thread in American history, both unofficially by volunteers and officialy often driven by the same undercurrents which drove the men to act independently in the first place. There were even official American expeditions to fight against the Bolsheviks in the Russian revolutions in 1918.

That said, it should be easy to see that these same undercurrents and social movements aren't unique to any particular movement, with some much stronger than others, and the "world police" interventionist tendencies of the USA and American civilians are just that: undercurrents. In addition to those that volunteered to fight in WW2 early, before America's official entrance, there were also a large number of Nazi sympathizers. People with German ethnic heritage make up the largest single demographic of America even today, with memories and ties to Europe much stronger half a century ago. Coupling this with tendencies for Americans to voice their opinions adds to the "world police" caricature.

I only bring all this up because I think it's an injustice to history to take the "world police" superpower caricature of the USA today and apply it to its actions around the time of WW1 or WW2. Calling America's entrance into both wars anything other than a reluctant, late entry due to the strong isolationist tendencies of the vast majority of America is simply wrong. America was basically dragged, kicking and screaming, into both wars, and are probably a major cause for the Cold War-era interventionism.

that said!

I don't think it's surprising at all that the US focused so much on Europe early on. Nazi Germany's industry and power were a huge threat to established industrial powerhouses, with many others with important manufacturing, manpower, and resources already under its control. With access to these, Germany was even more of a threat to the UK and USSR. If the UK fell, especially, hope of a decisive victory against the Nazis would be lost.

Japan had already conquered most of its goals, and already had access to most of the resources it needed, and most of this was a region which is more defensible and has less ease of transportation (thanks mostly to the ocean, large numbers of islands, and tropical jungles). Almost none of it was industrialized. Losing Australia was a threat, but not an entirely serious one. I just don't think that what happened -- focus on Europe, smaller focus on defending areas just off of Australia like the Coral Sea and the Solomon Islands -- was surprising.

Sorry, but that's not torture. Manning was placed in isolation and was often treated by his jailers to the utmost of the letter of the law. Disrespectful or humiliating, maybe, but that's true of all imprisonment. Especially when the prisoner is flippant and disrespectful to begin with. Men who cannot read minds were in charge of keeping him locked up and were rightly concerned about the potential for him to hurt himself and he worsened an already worse situation by brushing off their concerns. I might have sympathy with that if he were just some scared kid who couldn't take the army life and was unable to look his superior officers in the eyes anymore, but he was a scared kid because of the treasonous behavior he engaged in.

He tried to refuse wearing an anti-suicide smock, complaining of it being uncomfortable! How is that torture?

Regardless of any of that, I still don't see how it's very applicable to Snowden, and you've failed to answer it. Considering Manning's crimes were so much more reckless, and considering he faced the consequences under the UCMJ instead of the law that most Americans are familiar with, and considering the greater sympathy shown by the American public towards Snowden, it's much more likely that Manning would be treated far worse than Snowden ever would.

I don't see you saying anything that disagrees with that, aside from untruthfully claiming that Wikileaks "sorted through" the information released to them. Wikileaks released documents completely unredacted, in bulk, only withholding some so that they could stay in the news cycle. Information they released was only "sorted through" after an outpouring of complaint. Considering Manning's involvement with the planning behind these actions of Wikileaks, and considering the lack of any kind of historical basis for having faith in Wikileaks' competence and behavior, he absolutely did release these documents to the public. He tried to disseminate them as far and as fast as possible to the greatest number of people. This is in stark contrast to Snowden's behavior, who released documents to notable newspapers with vast amounts of experience in reporting and confidence in their ability to break the story while withholding sensitive details which might be dangerous.

If someone walks up to you and punches you in the face, you should not thank them for failing to stab you, you should expect them to be able to be punished for their crime. Conversely, if you walk up and punch someone in the face, you should expect the same of yourself. Since Manning was treated harshly, but according to law, and certainly not torturously, I don't really see how it should scare Snowden off other than the awareness that he would likely face a trial.

No they haven't.

Seeing as how you don't even care to do more than imply what you're trying to say, I guess it will go on as it has been.

what the hell is going on in this thread?

Nazi Germany declared war on the United States, not the other way around.