Comment Re:Meh, I can't bring myself to care (Score 1) 271
So you are claiming I totally misinterpreted you, and it's all my fault because you are a beacon of clarity in an otherwise unclear world?
No, I'm claiming that I think that saying that I'm for anarchy or something similar just because I wasn't absolutely precise is an unreasonable interpretation of my words.
If you want people to interpret you precisely, you have to be precise.
So you don't tell us anything about the Fourth Amendment, except that it's anti-authoritarian and anti-mass-surveillance in spirit?
It's both. Why would go in depth about it in an unrelated discussion?
Anti-Authoritarianism does not gain credibility from Appeals to Authority.
No clue what you mean.
Has it ever occurred to you that a) you should probably read the Fourth Amendment before making claims about it, and b) if the Founders included multiple 'buts' in the Amendment explicitly precluding it from being used the way you think it should be used
The founders couldn't have predicted mass surveillance on this scale. Still, they were opposed to general warrants (and that's with a judge actually providing checks and balances), and likely would have taken measures against it had mass surveillance been used against them (assuming they survived). Given that they took action against other injustices that they knew of at the time, any other interpretation seems unreasonable.
So they set up a totally new level of government, specifically giving it the power to create the very first massive database of every American (aka: the Census), while failing to put any particularly meaningful checks on data gathering, and you're 100% positive their response to a massive database of trivial tweets would be to freak the fuck out?
Read the actual Amendment. And don't do that thing Americans always do where they read it specifically to find out everyone who has ever disagreed with you is a fucking moron. There are multiple ways the Founders could find everything the NSA does is perfectly legal.
They could declare it "reasonable." They could say the warrant issued by the FISA Court is fine. They could declaim at length on how the Fourth Amendment does not apply because it is restricted to the President's Law Enforcement powers of Search and Seizure, and a Military Signals Intelligence Agency (the NSA) is authorized under his Commander-in-Chief powers, in which case the problem with the program isn't that it exists, it's that the President is wasting everyone's time by getting it repeatedly authorized (and re-authorized) by the FISA Court.
Note that the absolute best bet is that they'd disagree. The Founders were not supermen with intellects millions of times greater then those of modern men, able to easily interpret the Constitution. They were ideological assholes just like us. The Federalists (like Washington and Adams) would almost certainly claim you were a fool for even bringing up the Fourth, because to them the Commander-in-Chief power was second only to God. Jefferson was not quite that enamored of the Commander-in-Chiefship, so he'd probably agree with you, but on the other hand he could easily agree with the current US Court system and say that warrants issued by the FISA Court are perfectly valid.