This ideal is all but gone. Today, the American government baldly proclaims that rights do not belong to human beings, but are conferred only by citizenship. the starkest example of this remains John Yoo's rationale (embraced by the Bush administration) for why the Geneva Convention does not apply to the Taliban: that the rights guaranteed by the Convention were not human rights, but rights granted to combatants of UN member states. Yoo argued that human rights did not exist, and that rights derive solely from citizenship.

To be fair, the roots of that doctrine long preceded the Bush administration, and have continue to grow since. But when I look at framing of debate about rights -- and this applies not only to the NSA spying, but also to the outrage over the fact that the US President would order the drone assassination of, gasp, American citizens (as opposed to the thousands of other non-combatants he has killed in the same way) -- when I see this, it becomes clear that the ideals which inspired the declaration of independence are long since gone.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

In particular:

    ...deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...

These "Rights" are unalienable. They are not to be given away, they are not to be taken away. Governments exist to secure these rights. To help protect these rights, the government may exist... but only by consent of the people being governed.

It may be true that the Russian government does not give these rights to it's citizens, or that these citizens yield these rights to the Russian government. Nevertheless, according to the morals listed in the DoI, the US government is founded on the belief that Russians have these rights, because they are human beings.

Therefore, the US government, when dealing with 'men' of any nationally, needs to respect the unalienable Rights which all men have been granted by their Creator. Anything else is hypocritical.

Edit: after thinking about it, it gets even better. Because foreigners have not consented to being governed by the US, the rights of foreigners not to be spied on by the US government would go even further than the rights of Americans. And yes, I know the DoI is not law. But if we Americans cannot simultaneously claim to believe in it's principles and make laws that contradict it without being hypocritical.

It may be true that the Russian government does not give these rights to it's citizens, or that these citizens yield these rights to the Russian government. Nevertheless, according to the morals listed in the DoI, the US government is founded on the belief that Russians have these rights, because they are human beings.

The distinction one must make based on my interpretation is that the US may believe that Russians have those rights, but it is not the US Government's responsibility to secure them, especially if doing so would conflict with the objective of securing the rights of its own citizens.

The Government's first duty is to its citizens, and it's the duty of citizens to hold its government accountable. It is, therefore, not the least bit surprising to see a different reaction between the idea of a government spying on others versus spying on citizens.

I also did not bother to question the relevance of bringing in Geneva convention arguments into a discussion about surveillance and privacy. If you examine carefully, you'll discover that the Geneva Convention deals with issues of life, liberty, and happiness quite directly in the sense of execution, imprisonment, and torture. Privacy, meanwhile, is a right derived from the US Constitution and not one of those alluded to in the Declaration.

Nowhere do I say that you can't argue that a Government should uphold basic rights of all humans everywhere regardless of citizenship. What you can't do is trot out the first half-phrase of the Declaration of Independence, highlight one example of a legal argument that a non-state entity had flagrantly violated terms of a convention and should not enjoy its benefits, and somehow try to connect that to Americans being really pissed off about being subject to a large surveillance program by their own Government.

no-one is asking the USG to secure anything (though it seems happy to jump in and do so when it suits other objectives) - the issue is direct, willful, and secret violation of human rights considered inalienable by the USG itself.

They are in alienable. That is to say, incapable of being separated from the individual possessing them. Literally, they cannot be alienated (separated) from the person possessing them.

Your real property (home, money, possessions, even spouse, children, or other family) may be taken from you and given to someone else.

The word inalienable refers not to rights which may not be taken, but which can not be taken.

You may be deprived of these rights, but nobody else can take possession of them.

It's a subtle difference, and one few people understand, particularly in the context of natural, civil, or universal human rights, which can be argued to have a moral or socially beneficial basis, but may still be alienable.

There's also a fair amount of debate over the self-evidence, alienability, and/or naturalness of these rights. Of of their status should they become so (say, through technology).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inalienable_rights

That isn't what the parent is talking about. He's asserting that only citizens of the US have granted the US the power to enforce the granting or ceding of rights. Non-US citizens must look to their own governments for such protection.

But, this is more like it:

> Because foreigners have not consented to being governed by the US, the rights of foreigners not to be spied on by the US government would go even further than the rights of Americans

Many thinkers throughout history have noted that states and criminal gangs are effectively the same. They are both inherently violent organisations. Criminal gangs are tiny states; states are large, settled criminal gangs.

The Yakuza in Japan or the Cray family (when they ruled half of London) are examples of intermediate forms: criminal gangs that have taken on some of the role of the state. Rather than arbitrarily robbing people, they instead ask for protection money. This is more than just a polite form of robbery: they legitimately protect you from other criminal gangs. Though I doubt anyone here has had to make the decision, I think everyone would prefer to deal with one predictable criminal gang than many competing unpredictable gangs.

Eventually the gang leaders realise that it's in their own interest to build a stable, prosperous society: its better to be a Caesar than a barbarian warlord. If nothing else, the wine is nicer. Passing laws and promising that even the leaders will abide by them makes the citizens comfortable dealing with one another and makes everyone richer. Once everyone is comfortable with the idea of the law being supreme, the mob might realise they can do away with kings and bring in constitutions and parliaments and so on. Democracy works (and only works) because the mob agrees that these are the set of rules they will live by, and that therefore it's not wise to ignore them.

Still, rights and laws remain contingent on power. Human rights only extend as far as the military reach of states that support human rights. Until we build a world government, the only universal law over humanity is the same as it was in 10000 BC: raw power, physical force, violence. The world as a whole is essentially a lawless realm consisting of about 200 gangs; the only thing that stops everything turning into bloods vs crips is a shaky system of alliances, treaties and, ultimately, mutually assured destruction.

One obvious counterpoint is that France no longer needs to fear Germany because the Germans and French are suddenly BFFs and neither will vote to go to war with the other. The "international community" is slowly coming to resemble a federated state, with one set of laws. But this community is not truly international. Russia and China can violate your right to privacy all they want. Ultimately, this is because they have H-bombs. Likewise, we can violate Sharia Law as much as we like and Iran can't stop us.

My point is this: most of these complaints would make sense if America truly was a world government, achieving legitimacy via just consent of the 7 billion governed. But it's not, and it can limit its citizenship however it pleases. The fact that America was historically built on immigration doesn't give me, a foreigner, the "right" to live there. The very concept is nonsensical - the USG has more guns than me, and so they can decide who's in and who's out. The idea that people should be able to live wherever they want is a beautiful dream but is entirely counter to the way the world is going, and is also horrendously impractical.

I've travelled to China a few times over the last few years and each time the visa requirements have gotten stricter. They've decided they don't need any more foreigners, and I can't contest the morality of this with the CPC because again, they have more guns than me. As the world gets more crowded, other middle income countries will follow suit. The walls are going up everywhere. As much as I, personally, would benefit from the US tearing down its borders and letting me live there without restriction, it doesn't make a lot of sense if they do so and other countries don't.

Americans can constrain their intelligence agencies and open their borders as much as they like. They can't force other countries to do the same, which means that these policy proposals are equivalent to "we should make our intelligence gathering less capable than that of China and Russia" and "we should import Latin Americans until our quality of life is equal to that of Honduras". If America wants to reenact the fall of Rome, that's their prerogative, but as a foreigner I wish other foreigners would not cheerlead them as they do so. No America means no "international community" (what can the EU do against China and Russia?), and good luck petitioning China to respect your human rights as a global citizen.

Although you might not believe it, I'm not actually a cynic about human nature or pessimistic about our future. We built stable, peaceful societies in a violent world. Go humanity! But we have to remember that this was not achieved by the divine intervention of the Great God Human Rights, but by working within the universal laws of power. Good can triumph over evil, but as even Jesus said, it needs the "cunning of snakes" to succeed.

I very much agree that the rest of the world is being a bit two-faced, on the one hand enjoying immensely the pax americana which we have wrought and on the other decrying the evils of American imperialism--despite doing damned little to act in a similarly noble fashion.

As much as we may, for example, decry the surveillance of foreigners by the .gov and bemoan the lack of open immigration policies, we cannot do so without also acknowledging that the US is still very much better in these regards than many of the other first-world nations.

The failure of the US is perhaps a sadness, but the failure of the American Dream--were it to come to pass--is far, far worse.

Your apologia is as old as the Roman Empire, and made as little sense then - as Tacitus points out using Calcagus above.

The concept of a 'Pax Americana' is an absurdity given the wars instigated by the US just in the last few decades and manipulation of client states, and while other nation states are no different in many ways in being run for the benefit of those in power, I certainly wouldn't say the US is better in these regards than the majority of western states.

I'd condemn this sort of widespread surveillance no matter who the actor is (and in fact it seems the UK has been just as cavalier in their actions, to take one example). It's a very dangerous centralisation of power and will lead to the growth of a secret state, inimical to the values you appear to find admirable (though the American dream is a rather vague concept and could really mean anything).

Empires are not forces for good, on the contrary normally they civilise the world by subjugating it to their will. In our increasingly connected and mobile world, we should try to see past the concept of a nation state or empire building to universal values of human rights to basic needs, among which I'd place individual privacy fom state intrusion.

We've seen the people voluntarily subject themselves to cataloging and surveillance on an unprecedented scale--Facebook, Twitter, Google, and so forth.

So, honestly, to hell with "the people". You claim that this information gathering is an outrage, that this invasion of privacy is an affront to all things decent.

Fact is, amigo, that fully a sixth of the human race has voluntarily given up their privacy to Facebook and the like in exchange for a cute little garden to play in and communicate with. Sadly, we seem to have forfeited the right that we otherwise would've claimed.

The people have spoken.

I agree that frequent and public sharing of information via twitter etc will in future be considered dangerous, and some people are sharing far too much, much of it out in public. That has no bearing on my individual right to privacy though - just because lots of people engage in public sharing of trivia, news, and opinions doesn't mean they are abdicating the right to privacy on more substantial matters - not many would agree to sharing all their email publicly for example.

The more important point for me is that there is a big difference between me sharing some info publicly, some info semi-anonymously, and then separately private financial info with my bank, numbers called with my phone company, email with google etc, and intel agencies of my country demanding access to all this information in aggregate for everyone, in perpetuity, and sharing it with other agencies and countries, with no effective oversight or even permission.

I see no justifiable excuse for that, not the mirage of a Pax Americana, Islamist terrorists, or any future threat.

  | the US is still very much better in these
  | regards than many of the other first-world
  | nations.

Our weapons are no different than bacterial antibiotic resistances and all the other genetic mutations that have led to what life is today. It does not matter if all seven billion people consented, all it would take is one willing person with a weapon strong enough to subdue the rest of civilization to take power. That weapon doesn't even need to be technology, it could be as simple as blackmailing the people holding the power.

The struggle for life, let alone liberty and privacy, has always been an arms race and it always will be.

According to Elias, monopolization, and especially the monopolization of physical force and violence warranted more self-restraint from both the government and the individual. In "The civilizing Process" Elias talks about "a chain of mutual dependence" which makes people dependent upon each other in order to perform various tasks and achieve their goals. This, according to Elias, explains why societies required more stability, regularity and supervision. Transportation and the development of markets increased human interactions between people who found themselves dependent on each other even without direct contact. This according to Elias has led for the need to coordinate actions and establish the "rules of the game". Playing by the rules meant a growing demand for self restraint.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Civilizing_Process

[2]: http://culturalstudiesnow.blogspot.fr/2012/04/norbert-elias-...

Good can triumph over evil, but as even Jesus said, it needs the "cunning of snakes" to succeed.

The whole quote is: "I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves."

You conveniently forgot the "innocent as doves" part, obviously because it doesn't fit in with the rest of your argument that America must act like a cirminal gang to secure peace. I feel unfortunate to live in a world filled with others who feel the same as you.

"I feel unfortunate to live in a world filled with others who feel the same as you."

Judging by the comments here, I think its filled more with people who feel the same as you. It's not since the 19th century that people like me have been common, though the ideas I'm riffing on were already old during the Roman Empire, who succesfully implemented the only known formula for world peace discovered to date (si vis pacem, para bellum). The 20th century was full of idealistic visionaries who tried flipping this ancient wisdom, with predictable results.

You should feel unfortunate in about two or three decades though: that's when I forecast the West's technological and economic boons peter out and its various infringements of natural law finally catch up with it, and the east Asian nations bring back the old order: national sovereignty over world policing, mercantilism over outsourcing, savings over debt, and good governance over democracy.

Treaties are an implicit social contract. The parties to a treaty are contracting binding social obligations and permissible and expected behaviors. If they were not a social contract, they would have no binding power. They may usefully be understood as a constitution of sorts between foreign powers.

Violating a treaty is violating a social contract. A social contract does not equal a constitution alone.

It's true that's outside the scope of my comment. However, once again referring to the Declaration of Independence, the concluding paragraph includes comments that the notion of statehood includes these rights[1]:

as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.

Specifically, that's the role of the Head of State (The President) and the State Department.

====

Violating a treaty is violating a social contract. A social contract does not equal a constitution alone.

My intent was to draw a distinction between the relationship between the US government and its own people and the relationship between the the US government and non-citizens. My use of the term "social contract" was a reference to the specific Enlightenment concept.

The distinction was drawn in order to help explain to people why reactions to domestic spying are different than reactions to, say, the CIA spying in Pakistan. Domestic spying gets a more visceral, widespread negative reaction because the social contract a between government and its own citizens is highly sensitive. It's the only thing preventing oppression and tyranny-- violations should always result in an immediate flurry of public discourse, political consequences, and push to address the breach. This is not to say that treaty violations and other interaction with foreign actors is not serious-- there was no shortage of outrage about for Abu Ghraib-- but people are one step removed in any such interaction in a way that they are not when the government has offended its own.

[1] Selective quote, yes. But most relevant to the point. The "Supreme Judge of the World" part is interesting and relevant to the discussion in general but I didn't have time to address it.

You're talking about the obligations of the US Government. The US Government clearly only has the obligation to secure the rights of its own citizens.

nkoren is talking about the rights of the US Government. Just look at the language of the very first clause. All men are guaranteed these rights. It makes no mention of citizenship. That the US Government has the obligation to protect the rights of only US citizens does not mean that it has the right to violate the rights of non-US citizens. I don't buy the bullshit that the government can only protect my rights by violating the rights of others. That's small-minded thinking.

I agree with 4891 that nations act like criminal gangs. I seem to be one of very few who believe they shouldn't, though.

No, he is talking about the behavior of the US Government and the behavior of its citizens, and inferring motivating principles from that. Nkoren appears to have concluded that the US and its people have abandoned the founding enlightenment ideals in favor of utter selfishness.

I don't buy the bullshit that the government can only protect my rights by violating the rights of others.

Sorry, but that's just the way life is. Maybe someday we can live in a world without prisons, without police, without armies, and without weapons but until that utopia comes people will infringe the rights of others, and the only way to stop them is return violation. That is not to say that every time a government claims it is acting to protect the rights of its citizens it is actually doing so, or that the violations it commits are justified. Or even worth the monetary cost. Small-minded thinking is not being able to make distinctions between John Yoo, Drone Strikes, and PRISM because you think universal human equality is the only enlightenment ideal that matters.

Small minded thinking is being unable to step out from behind the 'protection' offered by authority figures because the world just seems too scary to you.

If the cost of belief in the rights of humanity to freedom, dignity and self determination is high, that is because the rewards are great.

Stop being cynical, and stop being scared. Look up. The sun is shining :)

Can I just say, I wouldn't say the Enlightenment Ideal is all but gone. It's not even near death.

We, the people, chose leaders and were betrayed. That doesn't just apply to the US, but I'll start there. I believe the people were half-awake...but not completely unaware of who they were electing or what they would lose.

The idealist's battle against tyranny on one side and anarchy on the other is strewn all across the pages of history. Some idealists lost their way. But the ideals, "Safety and Happiness" – really, the entire Declaration of Independence or the UN Declaration of Human Rights – the ideals don't die.

They are self-evident. Like 3.14159 and 2.71828.

Absolutely true. Unfortunately, in my opinion, one of the things that simply does not work in modern democracy is the election system, two-party death march or otherwise: Candidates play to emotion and often outright lie or intentionally overpromise solely for the purpose of attaining office. And it works, every damn time.

They then find themselves either predictably impotent or, worse, they settle in and show their real colors... and usually win re-election anyway.

If enough people continue to fail to understand this, the majority of the voting public will continue to actively subjugate everyone to the rule and whim of dangerously uninterested officials, and those who do understand will continue to find themselves without candidates worth voting for, as these races the world over are overwhelmingly choked with self-serving bureaucrats who have little if any interest in their constituents' (or anyone else's) well-being.

I didn't say when or where, but I do believe that the power to govern invariably flows from the people themselves.

200+ years ago, a large portion of the population would rather die than be dictated to by an implacable and uncaring confiscatory government. Today the population doesn't even realize what they're missing because they have really good cable television, video games, and reality shows.

See my previous comment on the issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5842029

> They are self-evident. Like 3.14159 and 2.71828.

sounds, I'm with you on this one, being intrinsically inalienable -- incapable of being separated -- as in Plato's Republic, where the individual is homeomorphic to the enveloping state(cops, donuts, coffee cups are topologically equivalent therefore flock together) that you conduct your own personal House, COITUS(Congress), SCOTUS, POTUS, and JUDUS founded on the certain conviction that the mathematical constants will be in the sky tomorrow, we can improve our municipal safety officers by serving EQUAL EXCHANGE(tm) coffees:

http://equalexchange.coop/products/coffee

"...But Obama’s Justice Department, like Bush’s, has not been above an opportunistic (and occasionally downright Procrustean) reading of particular statutes to permit whatever it is that the White House wants to do."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5961518

No, we chose leaders who would give us freebies and security vs leaders who would protect our freedoms.

The fact that we have twice elected a President who talks of "fair share" and we don't recognize that language for the trap that it is tells you exactly why we are in this situation today.

The fact that your alternative to re-electing that guy would've been somebody equivalently bad, tells me that there wasn't a lot of choice involved in the first place.

Your betrayal started already before that, with the corruption of choice.

The Simpsons laid it out pretty clearly already some decades ago, and instead it seems to have only gotten worse--from "the lesser of two evils" to "the equivalent of two evils" ...

Doesn't slavery demonstrate that this ideal never even existed in the first place?

There's a big difference between moving toward the Declaration as an ideal as we still were in the time from the Founding until the early 1900s vs completely running away from those ideals as we have since.

This also holds true for all American political history from the founding of the country to the Civil War.

The Civil War started right after the industrial revolution ended. By this time, the balance of power was greatly in favor of the North.

The amazing thing about the Founders, though, was that the admirable forces were able to write the documents.

Compare that to today's "gang of eight" senators who created the immigration bill. That thing was a disaster before they had their first meeting. They had a unique chance to create solid immigration law, but have f'd it up beyond all reasoning.

The Founding documents were philosophical and political works of art. Where are works such as they coming form in today's society? Where are they being enacted into law?

Even the founders debated whether to abolish slavery, but ultimately punted because they felt uniting the states was more important.

That is, it was a tough compromise.

Take a look at the book The Long March (about Lincoln). There was a several-decade long movement before 1864 to abolish slavery.

The book also explores the tensions between slavery and American ideals, and the many complications the tensions produced.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_and_Sedition_Acts_of_1798

Okay, so what about all of us that don't believe in the supernatural? Do our rights come from an all-loving God, or are they creations of man like everything else in society?

One would, I think, be justified interpreting that to mean the physical processes of the Universe from which humankind arose (justified in interpreting the meaning of 'their Creator', not necessarily possessed of an easily established and defended position regarding how rights themselves rose from the primordial soup (which I must admit would make for an entertaining read)). Science had yet to provide an explanation for the origin of life, as I'm sure you know, and we can safely dispense with the defense that these rights come from a god. To suggest they come from the Universe is equally silly, but it's a hell of a lot better than the supernatural.

One would, I think, be more justified interpreting it properly just as you said--the Creator is humankind itself, like everything else in society. All (nearly all?) notable political theorists have built their analyses of social states on the premise that there are fundamental rights agreed to be important for all persons, for which humankind organizes governments/societies to protect and guarantee in the pursuit of justice. (I can't think of a notable theorist who has argued otherwise, but would be interested in knowing of one.)

Their appeals to the supernatural aside, the founders are certainly the creators of the rights of which we still believe we are endowed.

No, it's equally supernatural.

> One would, I think, be more justified interpreting it properly just as you said--the Creator is humankind itself, like everything else in society.

Rights come from your neighbors willing to fight to protect your "rights" whether its your right to life or your right to property.

And that's why rights are not universal. I'll take up arms to defend my neighbors, but not people in China or Russia.

Americans should not underestimate the damage this scandal has done to the American 'brand'. Growing up, I was the Americophile of my friends. I loved American culture, I aspired to live the American dream, I fully intended to pursue American citizenship later in life.

This is only the latest in a long line of realisations, but my view couldn't have changed more. I don't even want to visit the US again, let alone pledge my allegiance to it.

I've abandoned my intentions of living in the US, or even just visiting there solely because of this scandal. Not because of some deeply hurt morale or feeling, but because i simply wouldn't feel safe in the US anymore.

I've been on the web for a very long time now, have read all kinds of chemistry, pyrotechnics and bomb-making newsgroups and websites and contributed to them.

I've visited a school with over 50% muslim students and lots of my friends are muslim.

I consider myself close to a maker, loving 3D Printers and Arduinos, Quad-Copters and the like...

I post my political views openly on Google+ and Facebook and discus it via Twitter and Mail...

I'm afraid to the extent i'm targeted and what would happen if I tried to visit the US.

This is more a case of the straw that broke the camel's back for me, but I consider it a watershed moment nonetheless.

Privacy is a fundamental human right, enshrined in Article 8 of the ECHR, and one that I value dearly. Now it emerges the United States has been willingly violating my right to privacy for years.

Rather than rectifying the matter, officials are saying it's okay because I'm not a US citizen — non-citizens obviously aren't entitled to human rights — and focusing their attention on punishing the person responsible for bringing this to my attention.

That is unforgivable in my eyes.

In the end everything went fine, here I am, back, still got my laptop. Except those fuckers now have my mugshot and fingerprints on file. Funny thing, had I said that 10 years ago, you'd think I did something wrong and ask "huh for real? what did you do? what happened?" ... well, I entered the country, I left them no choice! :-/

Now I would not even want to visit again. TSA alone would be enough for it not to be worth it.

US is like that kid in school who used to be popular and when he got beat up by that bully, everybody wanted to help him. But after that beating he never recovered and became so paranoid and creepy that even his friends abandoned him and now he himself is a bully and everybody ignores or hates him - if he is going to need help again nobody is going to give a shit.

Our system of government started out with nobel ideas and it's served reasonably well for a long-time, but the decay and corruption are really starting to set in. It may also be the case that the divisions in this country are becoming so sharp that it's not even possible to talk about one government that truly represents America as one cohesive whole.

EDIT: I still believe that Americans - the people - have freedom and courage in their blood and some of them will think of something smart and innovative to change the course.

I last visited the States in 2007 for a friend's wedding and had all 10 of my fingers scanned at immigration when I arrived. I found the whole experience hugely irritating and wanted to say: "My own country doesn't even have my prints on file and you're taking all 10 fingers and treating me like a fucking suspect when all I'm here to do is spend some tourist dollars and celebrate my best friend marrying one of your citizens?".

It really pissed me off and I had the feeling then that I'd not readily be coming back to the land of the free any time soon. The Snowden revelations have simply sealed it for me. As things stand now, I have zero interest in ever setting foot in the US again.

Which is tragic because the American people themselves are generally lovely. We had a great trip in 2007 and my best friend's wife (who now lives with him and their 4 yr old son in the UK) is one of the most smart, fun and kind people I know.

I want to love you America but damn you're not making it easy at the moment!

The US internet industry will be lucky to recover, if indeed it is even possible at this point.

No foreign business or government or municipality paying attention will ever trust high-value confidential data to Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook, or Microsoft ever again.

Remember that all of these companies have substantially more customers outside of the US than they do who are US citizens.

Even if PRISM/MARINA/MAINWAY are provably dismantled (fat chance), we have demonstrated an innate untrustworthiness at the highest levels of government, from both red and blue. Trust is incredibly easy to destroy, and famously difficult to rebuild. We've now got video of them lying under oath - what's to stop them building another in the future and lying about that one, too? We (both US and "foreign entities") would have to be stupid not to expect them to do so, given what we've learned in the last month.

In this case, the regeneration of trust simply won't happen. We'll see tons of national commodity services spring up in dozens of industrialized countries simply because our leaders have destroyed our industry with their reckless, short-sighted, fear-based warmongering.

Indeed, Snowden's disclosures will be the proximate cause of grave and irreparable damage to US interests, industry, and national security. The problem though, is that the root cause of this damage is shitty, warmongering, fear-driven leadership that is willing to shred every last semblance of the enduring values of this country to game the fickle court of public opinion, pretending to pursue security but instead ushering in a totalitarian nightmare that had been previously confined only to fiction.

We passed from the realm of "incompetence" into "malice" territory some time ago— and if you think that's exaggeration, I urge you to review the disgraceful treatment of Bradley Manning at the hands of the US military prior to even being granted a trial.

Sadly, I am vividly reminded of George C Scott's incredible performance as General Turgidson in Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove", explaining excitedly to those assembled in the Pentagon's War Room why it'd simply be best for the USA to launch a nuclear first strike, immediately killing hundreds of millions of people (including dozens of millions in the US)—to preserve American values. The mind reels at the scale of the irresponsibility of these decisions undertaken in our name and on our behalf. There's a damn good reason why they teach the system of fallible humans and interlocking governmental checks and balances to every ten-year-old child in social studies class.

(A corollary to these conclusions: the corporate rulers of this country, should they wish to continue existing, must dismantle the Nash equilibrium formed by the MSM/GOP/Democrats, lest continued destructive collusion between the only two currently viable parties in the US completely destroy the nation's remaining competitive advantage in the global marketplace.)

Few countries stand up to the US, and if they dare, they get threatened. How vile is it to say to a country that they are to co-operate or get bombed back tho the stone age, or deny them aid or trade, which America knows mean food and water? Might as well just bomb them. How vile is it to kidnap people and torture them, then hold them indefinitely with out open due process? How vile is it to send flying killer robots over foreign soil to blow up families in order to kill one single person? If that isn't terror, I don't know what is. Essentially Americans treat foreigners like slaves, subhumans with less rights than proper humans, or "Americans".

But most Americans think this is a justifiable fantastic demonstration of American supremacy and power. They absolutely love it when America "kicks ass". They love all the military power. They love that other countries bow to America, out of fear. Its all "USA, USA, USA".

(Which, BTW, sounds to many non Americans like "Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil". We even see the the fist punching the air, which again looks a bit like a Nazi salute. If Americans reading this can change one single thing, please stop that. It a very scary thing to see. Or do average Americans know this already, and like it as much as the Germans did?)

Of course, the US has abused the rest of the world so much, that it knows that it has literally zero god will. Note how even the UK is reaching out across the world to forge new alliances. America doesn't have allies at all. Its has lackeys who fear it. There is no respect or love, just fear.

Saddest of all, and I have tried to say this many times before, is that the good in America and Americans is fantastic. There is a baby in this bath water. Yeah, we will lap up America's blue jeans, music, movies, internet, (not the cars, they are crap!), porn, diet coke, burgers, hot dogs, space program, silicone women, etc, etc. Every American I have ever met has been decent. A bit annoying, but basically decent.

Please, Americans, sort your country out before it falls like every other empire. I don't want Chinese porn....

I hardly ever hear the "USA" chant outside of sporting competitions that involve some type of US national team, and just about any country is prone to outbreaks of patriotic fervor in those situations: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/90/World_Cup...

Watch some of the videos from gatherings and rallies leading up to last years presidential election. Anytime any single heckler tried to make a scene, they were immediately drowned out with the "USA!" chant.

As a US citizen it's embarrassing and frankly, idiotic.

I have no grounds to "raise outrage" at my government for spying on foreigners, much as I might disapprove. They don't break any laws when they do that. Moral rules, yes; disrespect to our friends and allies, yes; laws, no.

When they spy on US citizens, they tear up our Constitution in doing so. The outrage is less about the spying - although that is obviously very important - and more about the laws they are breaking.

You, as a US citizen, are most certainly protected from my government by the German constitution. Not when it comes to all basic rights in the constitution (only Germans have freedom of movement, freedom of labor and freedom of association), but most are universal and apply to every person.

The US constitution is out of date and simply wrong on this point. Human rights are universal and every human has them. Citizenship shouldn’t come into play. (I really hope that when it comes to freedom of movement, labor and association the limitation on Germans can also be lifted one day. For now the pest of nationalism lives on and makes lifting those limitations a practical impossibility. To me it seems clear that morally it is very wrong to have such limitations.)

Oh, and by the way, breaking moral rules is a hell of a good reason to raise outrage. I don’t understand why you seem to think that something being legal is reason to not be outraged.

Spying is a corner case. Every country spies on every other country. Do the Germans wiretap international communications? Absolutely: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundesnachrichtendienst Have they ever spied on their own people? Even worse: their own journalists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundesnachrichtendienst#Spying_...

The question is what "spying on other countries" actually looks like, and one of the legal barriers is that, well, if you're spying on Americans in America then you're not really spying on other countries at all, so let's make a rule that US citizens are exempt from NSA or CIA surveillance. Does this mean US citizens are exempt from being spied on? Of course not! That's what the FBI is for!

If there's a human right of "not being spied upon", it's violated by every country that spies. Germany is factually one of them.

I do not want to claim any kind of superiority – that is very clearly not the case. The German government consists of many, many people who do not respect privacy at all and are disgusting scumbags. No question about that.

I just want to say that from a moral point of view the statement that it’s ok that non-citizens have no right to privacy is totally bankrupt and idiotic.

IMHO something I deem immoral being legal and happening is actually worse than it "just" happening. It's adding insult to injury, if you will, and of course it makes it much more likely to happen again, or even more and more.

Link to video: http://youtu.be/Uulv4ve6RJ8

Skip to 45:00 and watch for a couple minutes if you're interested in hearing just that. Though if you have time I recommend watching the whole thing.

What I said was general, I wasn't thinking of anything in particular.. but thanks for that link, I will be sure to listen to it in full when I have time.

FWIW I do feel that American citizens should have to 'participate' just as much in these schemes as the rest of the world, if these schemes are to exist at all.

I suppose what I can't figure out is why the reaction is devoted solely at the U.S., when it seems Germany is the only major Western society that cares that deeply about it.

Wikipedia:

Nationalism is a belief, creed or political ideology that involves a voluntary accepted or coercively imposed mode of identification with individual persons and a nation.

George Orwell:

http://www.george-orwell.org/Notes_on_Nationalism/0.html

I'd say identifying with anything other than oneself is even bigger a delusion than identifying with oneself, and since it's so widespread, calling it a pest is actually polite.

I do think, though, that nation states are a fundamentally bad model for governance and both too large and too small. I’m not sure what could replace them (and not a fan of pre-nation governance models), though something like the EU can provide some (tiny and obviously deeply flawed) hints at how to approach the “too small” problem, I’m not so sure what to do about the “too large” problem.

I'm a EU citizen and as such subject to yet more surveillance from my home countries and that's bad enough in of itself. However, the EU does not project its power outward at such a massive scale as the US does. In effect, the sum of US policy, international role, and military action means that I am subject to the US at all times, yet I do not have "real person" status.

Germany is by far not perfect, and has its own share of secret service scandals to look back on, but at least the German constitution grants fundamental rights to every human being, not just citizens. In an era where state and corporate powers are used so abundantly, so disproportionally, and with so much moral corruption, this kind of constitutional scope is clearly the way to go forward. Yes, citizens need special protection, but that doesn't mean everybody else is just a bag of meat. In fact, as a member of the civilized world, I kind of expect the many host countries I travel to to protect me as well.

The US lulls other Westerners into the illusion that you're our friends, yet this is evidently an absolutely one-sided pact. You take for yourselves sweeping rights and powers without oversight (both external and, let's not kid ourselves, internally as well), and you expect other people to bow and be exploited. Your response to this as a US citizen cannot with any ethical justification be along the lines of "well, if you can't make us stop doing this, you are too weak and deserve everything we deem appropriate".

Even if you're not interested in ethics, and you really should be because it has everything to do with protecting groups of people you are not a part of, you could at least view it from a practical perspective: this attitude is incredibly damaging to the Western civilization as a whole. Whether you like it or not, we're going to need each other moving forward.

Personally I feel America is in a crisis right now, and I'd prefer to focus my energy on fighting something I actually have a legal basis for fighting and might win. We aren't talking morals, we are talking LAW.

Do you think that if we lose this in America, that will still be able to carry on and fight on your behalf?

Not all "morality" turns into law, nor is all law based on morale principals.

Personally, I feel outraged when "my" government acts immorally towards foreigners just as much as when they do to citizens and residents. The distinction means nothing to me.

EDIT: I'm Norwegian, but I live in the UK and I've got plenty to be outraged about with respect to UK law and GCHQ etc. I haven't been politically active in about 20 years other than posting stuff online, but this is the first time I've started considering getting politically active again.

This is a myth, recently revived by Republicans to justify "enhanced interrogation techniques" (ie, abominable torture methods that used to qualify as 'war crimes').

The most important articles of the Bill of Rights don't refer to "citizen" but to "people" in general. Here's the full text of the 4th Amendment, most relevant in this case

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

(Not a Republican mythmaker who loves torture, just stating the facts)

I think a lot of people are viewing the Constitution how they want it to be (a set of ideals about liberty and even then only the ideals they espouse) and not what it is (a legal document with centuries of practical use). You can say America is not being moral actors about how they are treating foreign people who don't live within its jurisdiction, but the Constitution has very little to do with this issue. To say it does is cherry picking what you like about the document without acknowledge the realities of it.

The US government is on the verge of becoming a totalitarian regime.

The US government is on the verge of throwing out the Constitution & just doing whatever the hell it wants from now on.

The US government is on the verge of declaring that there is no such thing as a law, only some rules it has decided to enforce to its own benefit

You want Americans to focus on fighting this, using our laws and Constitution as a legal basis, or do you want us to waste our time gnashing our teeth in front of the Fox News crowd that foreigners - which to the Fox News crowd means, "al Queda, Mexican drug cartels, smugglers, etc" - are having their email read?

In WWII there were a lot of sacrifices made so that Hitler & the Nazis didn't win. The war was more important than the battles or the individuals.

Spying on foreigners is an important issue. It just isn't the most important issue right now, so you'll have to take a backseat for a while. If we don't block this for Americans, you have absolutely no chance of having it blocked for you.

> The US government is on the verge of throwing out the Constitution & just doing whatever the hell it wants from now on.

> The US government is on the verge of declaring that there is no such thing as a law, only some rules it has decided to enforce to its own benefit

The US government is rampantly, and problematically, violating its constitution and its founding principles in a dozen different ways. But this much has always been true. Are we closer to a totalitarian regime than when we imprisoned all Americans of Japanese descent, or when we threw people in prison for speaking out against World War I, or when COINTELPRO and MKULTRA were going on?

The bulk of the system remains safely in place. A government on the verge of throwing out the constitution does not have a Supreme Court throwing out federal laws.

I think being able to use anonymous speech should be a human right, too, if it's not already, and a right to reasonable privacy. If there are no proper legal structures internationally for that, then maybe there should be.

Net neutrality is also not a law in most countries, but seeing how carriers are increasingly salivating at abusing their power so they can charge different content providers for their content, maybe we should be looking at net neutrality becoming some sort of international law, too.

A certain strand in the US considers the constitution an almost sacred document. Their outrage is less about laws being broken, and more about a perceived violation of sanctity. I'm fairly confident they don't feel the same way about e.g. driving 5mph over the limit.

But we can't pretend they have no such rights. And I'd contend that this does violate the US organic law, although this is a minority opinion. It depends on how you define "all men" and rationalize the fact that every human right existed before any government ever did.

However it appears the people outraged font consider me a full person.

Polish constitution (in Polish, but I'll translate):

http://www.msw.gov.pl/portal/pl/193/24/Konstytucyjne_wolnosc...

Article 49:

"Zapewnia się wolność i ochronę tajemnicy komunikowania się. Ich ograniczenie może nastąpić jedynie w przypadkach określonych w ustawie i w sposób w niej określony." = "[The state] ensure everybody has freedom of ommunication and secrecy of communication, this can only be limited in cases specified in the law, and in a way specified in law".

Article 37:

"Kto znajduje się pod władzą Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej, korzysta z wolności i praw zapewnionych w Konstytucji. Wyjątki od tej zasady, odnoszące się do cudzoziemców, określa ustawa. " = "Who is on the Polish territory - has the same rights and freedoms as Polish citizen. Only exceptions are specified in the law".

The exceptions are mostly about the right to be elected to government etc.

Poland isn't particulary civilized country, this is really common sense.

Uh-huh. You've been watching those candid videos where they interview stupid Americans haven't you? Of course you probably realized that they are always filmed in heavily populated areas and there is always a cut between every interview. You know why? Because you can find ignorant people in any crowded place anywhere in the world. It's just more funny when it's Americans.

Many couldn't find where they lived if you pointed it to them on a map. I had a neighbor who thought Amsterdam was a city next to Athens, Georgia (US State) and even after explaining where it was, that it was part of Holland, he asked me how the Germany trip was when I returned.

And yesterday, the Indian gas station owner was flabbergasted that I knew about and where his home town was (Goa - relatively well known at least I thought). He actually asked 'how do you know that' and I wanted to say because I'm not a zombie.

He actually asked 'how do you know that' and I wanted to say because I'm not a zombie. I occasionally get the similar question 'how do you know these things', and my response is, depending on context of course, 'how do you not know these things?'.

[1] http://www.nationalgeographic.com/roper2006/pdf/FINALReport2...

In our increasingly connect world, does it even make sense to define rights based on where a person lives, or what country they happened to be born in? We should expect the same basic rights (right to a free trial, right to a free press, protection from torture) to apply to all people even if citizenship of a nation confers certain privileges.

So then this argument that "we don't spy on our own people", implying that "we have no data on our own people" is potentially misleading to the extreme.

Of course, NSA already spies on Americans, but other countries (Canada, Australia, UK, and others) might not be so "brave", and they could be getting data about every one of their citizens from NSA, which makes it just as bad as themselves doing all the spying. So the "legal boundaries" of these spying agencies are effectively useless.

And this hurts so much, because the internet is perceived to not be bound by countries and borders, while still residing mostly on US soil. But the rules for spying are most certainly governed by borders; This leads to this weird asymmetric situation where one particular domestic intelligence agency is able to collect almost all international data.

What we really would need is citizenship for data. In a way, it does not make sense that Facebook owns my data. My data should be my own, and thus be governed by whatever jurisdiction I happen to live in.

Or put differently, one way out of this is to host your own email, backup, syncing, etc. That way the data is yours, and governed by the same rules as you. This is what I am doing.

Or maybe, Google should split up into several legal entities that each are accountable for the data for one country. But clearly, that would just leave us all flocking to Iceland or the Vatican or something like that...

Pretty much this exactly. I don't think any part of our legal frameworks for security amongst the nations is really prepared for the migration to the Internet.

Yes this would be crazy with todays infrastructure but in 10 - 20 years when internet is as previlent as electricity and everyone has many terabytes of space it's definitely viable.

I really hope some smart minds are working on something like this in light of these revelations.

I know that's a bit of an overstatement but it's particularly amusing to see Snowden sheltered by two of the world's most enthusiastic users of surveillance, namely Russia and China.

FWIW I'm in the UK, where we're a lot luckier than most in terms of accountability, oversight and convention, but don't have an explicit constitutional protection against unreasonable search and seizure. That said, it often bemuses people in Europe to look at the US and see almost no protection for what we understand as a basic right of "privacy".

However, people seem to think Americans should be more concerned about other people's rights than their own, when the real problem is the violation of everyone's rights. Despite this, all anyone is really interested is their own rights, which is quite obvious considering the central complaint here is that Americans are wrapped up in themselves while the rest of the world has the same issue. How is that rational? Your rights are being violated, and that's supposed to matter to me more than the fact that my rights are being violated by my government in the same way? Yes, it's selfish, but it's also self-preservation. If people don't stand up for themselves when they need to, they will not be around to stand up for anyone else later.

Many of us wring our hands at the various European financial crises; many of us worry about North Korea's potential to harm its neighbors; many of us anxiously watch for improvement in Middle Eastern politics. But just like anyone else, when we find out things where we live are worse than we thought, we look inwards to our own problems; that they effect others is terrible, but it's irrational and unreasonable to expect that to be our primary motivation.

What he is saying is that the American discourse over these violations — violations perpetrated by agencies within America upon as you say everyone's rights — tends to dehumanize anyone who isn't American. It seems that if the NSA had been using their Prism dragnet to target only non-Americans, then there would be no public outcry at all — as if the real outrage is the fact that American citizens might be the target of these blatantly illegal and wide-reaching abuses of power.

Perhaps, as you say, this is simply the American public "looking inwards" to it's own problems, but I'd argue that this is not your own problem. It's everyone's problem, and we all deserve equal treatment.

I'm just not sure how the voting system should work, because current voting systems mostly produce poor results.

I am reminded of Childhood's End where humanity is forced to grow up under alien guidance. Somehow we need to figure out a way to grow up as a species in a similar way.

there's not the same enshrined "us v them" attitude that you see so often in american countries.

really, it's a thing. americans come off as extremely insular.

We the foreigners that buy into the american dream always think of the latter as the "american attitude" whereas US gov and corporations always go for the first. And they only coincide in very restricted contexts, basically in fewer and fewer contexts as the world changes and becomes more homogeneous. To "win the war" when you're well above everyone else tends to equate to playing fair most of the time, you just use what you have and what you have is always better so you always win, but when the economical and cultural ground levels, if your goal is still to "win the war", you end up playing dirty and forgetting about human rights and values.

...the USA's attitude will only change when they wake tf up and realize that there is now war to be won, it's just about competing in a healthy "jungle". The current US gov's attitude to everything seems to us foreigners similar to your classical story of the PTSDd Vietnam war veteran that gets home after the war and keeps fighting imaginary wars, butchering his family and blowing up the neighborhood in the process, just because that's all he's good at.

Now we know factually (previously assumed) that it happens in the US as well, I think most people here in the US are just surprised it is also happening to them. That was the last place people assumed privacy, as a citizen. You'd expect intel agencies in every country to gather as much information as possible unless the people of that country object loud enough, I am not for it at all but it is the new game.

I am sure this is also happening at gov't levels all over the world in addition to private companies. Business ideas and data stolen everyday, gov't intelligence agencies sifting right off the lines.

The age of digital privacy just seems to be over sadly, too many technology tools to not abuse out there. Changing it will be difficult, encryption doesn't even help. Personal servers, computers etc are the easiest thing to get into. The only real protection would be at the service/cloud level and having stronger security/monitoring like financial + trading markets have. But then you have the situation where gov't intel agencies just go to them to gain access. Not even sure how to change it. Explicit protections in the Constitution are footnoted away with executive orders and fear based legislation.

The permanent record your teachers used to warn you about, that exists now for real.

Americans are in a tricky situation now. Who do you elect at this point to make things right? Does it even work? I think we've reached a major milestone here. I'm both frightened and curious as to what will happen. I believe what we do now will define our lives for decades to come.

(I'm not talking about spying on political leaders, the military etc - everyone does that to everyone else. But it seems that most Americans think it's perfectly fine to invade the privacy of ordinary people on a massive scale, just as long as those people don't hold a US passport.)

How long? I think this has been happening for some time now. There's no mechanism for watching the watchers. Furthermore as software developers we know that there's always an unaudited path to the data and people _will_ access it for their own benefit.

Bloomberg had access to how Goldman-Sachs uses Bloomberg's terminals so Bloomberg employees took advantage. The NSA can see Bloomberg, Goldman-Sachs and every financial firms' queries and transactions, all telephone calls and all e-mails, all internet surfing (for starters), where they eat lunch and what road they drive home on. NSA employees will be tempted (or possibly allowed or even encouraged) to take advantage.

And what better way to get money to pay for unauthorized or secret black operations? There may be much happening right now that is completely unauthorized (even by NSA) and completely out of the purview of those who supposedly are in charge.

We may never, ever see the size of this iceberg. It could be spawning sizable financially autonomous mini-icebergs that continue to function even after this one has been melted down. This is a fscking nightmare scenario.

The American dream didn't even work out for most US citizens. Merely the upper class. The rest of the world bought into practical consumerism more than into a diffuse dream.

But, sure, I also feel there is two kind of people, and if you are not an US citizen, you are screwed.

Better? Depends on who you are, I guess If you are part of the lower classes you have far better support systems available pretty much anywhere in Europe, with the exception perhaps of a couple of non-EU/EEA states. But just like the US, there's huge differences depending on where you are.

For me personally and based on my values I would be crazy to give up my EU passport for the US one when EU passport gives me right to live in countries like Finland or some other European countries that seem to be not only more free/democratic than the US but are also wealthier and have better health care, education, lower crime rate etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_intelligence_agencies

And that really hurts, hurts us all.

Also I'm surprised people are acting like the being a corporate scumbag is something weird. Corporate scumbags are by their very definition corporate scumbags and must behave scumbaggy.

For an American like myself, domestic spying is scary for the same reason. The US government is my local government. They run our children's schools. They make me send in reams of silly tax documents. They make me wait in line at the DMV. They patrol the streets of my neighborhood with guns. When I call 911 (the emergency number), it's the US government who answers. In short, the US government -- my government -- is in a great position to abuse the knowledge gained from spying. It's this immediacy that heightens fear of domestic spying.

Another thing to note is that there is a subtle but important distinction for Americans between the CIA and the FBI. The connotative equivalent of the FBI is the police and the connotative equivalent of the CIA is the army. Thus, watching the CIA spy on Americans feels ominous and sinister. It's the spying equivalent of martial law.

What Americans don't realize, I think, is that for foreigners it is an issue of respect. That is, the underlying context of domestic spying outrage is that US citizens were _not_ outraged by foreign spying; that it's perfectly acceptable to spy on the foreigners as long as we protect our own privacy.

In the end, privacy is about perception. To those who, like me, feel their privacy is being violated, please continue to make your feelings heard, both inside and outside the US. The more voices (especially tenacious ones) the better.

I will (when time allows) be stopping my use of American cloud services one by one as a result of this scandal. Gmail, Dropbox, and so on. It will take a while for me to write/borrow my own implementations, and self host them, so that all my stuff works the same way (or similar enough). It was nice while it lasted, but I'm now going to have to start taking my skepticism of US law seriously, and avoid coming into contact with it where ever I can.

[1] http://politicomaniac.net/category/internationalism/

One way to define what the law is, is that it's the will of the strong imposed upon the weak. In the Middle Ages for example the "strong" were barons who imposed laws upon the peasants through their men-at-arms.

Today we have various competing legal systems fighting either for global control or defending their local "sovereignty". When we reach the point of one global legal system, we will have found a winner.

Bingo!

From wikipedia:

With the emergence of a public sphere and integrated economy in the 18th century, a broader sense of identification with one's country began to permeate society. In England, the early emergence of a patriotic nationalism can be traced to the period 1740-1790 and was spurred on by many of the writers and leading intellectuals of the day. Many symbols of national identity became widespread, such as the Union Flag being increasingly adopted as a national flag, the composition of patriotic songs such as Rule, Britannia! and the creation of John Bull as the personification of Britain by John Arbuthnot.

The movement intensified and became overtly political with the late-18th century American Revolution and French Revolution; specifically the ultra-nationalist party in France during the French Revolution

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationalism#History

How do the ancient Spartans not count as a prime example of nationalism? They had a very clear self-identity aligning with their nation.

Before that nationalism, people were not global citizens, quite opposite: their circle of life was even smaller (in a geographic sense). Cities, city-states and small kingdoms. England alone was a patchwork of small quarreling kingdoms ( http://www.thehistoryofenglish.com/pics/heptarchy.gif ).

So the rise of nationalism widened people's perspective, it was a step towards larger geographical areas being united and living in peace within themselves.

So the nationalism was progress. Maybe Germans started to fight wars against the French. But at least now you have countries and larger scale organization, not just a patchwork cities and city-states and local warlords fighting their local neighbours.

See this map from 1713, for example: http://victoriavane.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/western_euro...

Even of the smaller states, many were parts of larger empires for most of their existence, though the control might shift back and forth between empires.

E.g. Germany did not exist as a united country, sure, but the Holy Roman Empire (not to be confused with the Roman Empire) encompassed most of the smaller countries on the territories of present day Germany and at various times part of Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Austria, France, Switzerland, Poland, Croatia, Slovenia, Czech Republic. Even within the Holy Roman Empire, many of the constituent states were at various times larger than their succeeding present day European states (though there were also many smaller states).

Nationalism in many instances erected substantial new borders in Europe in places where borders meant little to ordinary people before.

This varied by area. Some nation states developed early (England, France, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland), while other areas was dominated by city states much longer, like Italy and Germany that did not become a nation states before around 1870.

For the most part these countries were monarchies whose territories waxed and waned with the power of their ruling houses, where the idea of a nation with a specific government did not develop much earlier than elsewhere. Their development into nation states in fact largely happened as they contracted into core territories with common cultures and languages and the power of their monarchs was put under increasing challenge.

As for Germany and Italy, while they did not become nation states until late in the game, a large part of that was that they were part of empires and other kingdoms long before.

The Holy Roman Empire (not to be confused with the Roman Empire), the West Roman Empire, the Ostrogothic Kingdom ("heir" to the West Roman Empire, including Italy), the Frankish (Carolingian) Empire, the Bysantine Empire (East Roman Empire); Habsburg Spain; Habsburg Austria; the original Roman Empire.

The period of scattered small autonomous city states was a historical "blip" of not much more than two hundred years due to a temporary political and military vacuum caused by the constant tug of war of various of these larger empires.

The core areas of Germany and Italy had been dominated by organized larger scale governments for the most part of the preceding two millenias (depending on region) before nationalism existed.

No, there are better reasons to think Norway is hilariously patriotic.

You can have multiple transnational republics, based on ideas. :)

We wear blue jeans, drink Coke & eat McDonalds. We favor American companies (hands down) when we make purchases

Well, thanks, but as an American I'd rather if people didn't have this subservient attachment to the U.S.

> George Bush famously proclaimed: “You’re either with us, or against us”. He asked foreigners the world over to choose. The wholesale spying on “foreigners” says how we chose made little difference at all..

redeemed the views to me.

Maybe we should just create the "terrorist party", as in, we are all terrorist in the eyes of the US, so we might just have to get comfortable with the label.

This might all be 'news' to the tech community - but Libertarian circles have been talking about this trend towards totalitarianism since what, the 70s? It might feel like it all started after 9/11, but this framework has been building up for decades. In fact, it's the natural trajectory to unopposed empire.

The only thing I hope is that foreign nations accept us liberty loving Americans into their arms when the expatriation wave begins and are able to distinguish us from the assholes. It's coming - just look at the uptick in expatriation: www.nestmann.com/expatriation-statistics There's even publications dedicated to this like www.sovereignman.com and www.escapefromamerica.com/about

Economic Freedom: http://www.heritage.org/index/

Democracy Index: https://portoncv.gov.cv/dhub/porton.por_global.open_file?p_d...

Human Development Index: http://hdr.undp.org/hdr4press/press/outreach/figures/HDI_Tre...

Gun Freedom: http://www.freeexistence.org/gunindex.html

Press Freedom: http://en.rsf.org/press-freedom-index-2013,1054.html

Drug Freedom: http://www.freeexistence.org/drugindex.html

Various other stats: http://www.eiu.com/default.aspx

Just notice the trends - which countries are you seeing at the tops of most of the lists?

So while I'm glad the realization has been had, and the childish notion has been discarded, I'm really worried that this is some kind of common idea among educated non-Americans. Is the ability to read newspapers or follow politics (actual politics, not the circus of party politics) of any kind in that much of a decline?

[...]

The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon,

A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills,

Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?

The radio says, "They are just deportees"

Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?

Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?

To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil

And be called by no name except "deportees"?

This is some time after 1948. Then, just as now, there were people who saw non-citizens as barely humans, in the US and everywhere else. But then there was Woody Guthrie as well, and the many people like him who saw the human in the foreigner.

What has changed in recent years is the reach of the mightiest power, and sheer number of people who find ourselves in the wrong end of its struggle for control.

Why I will never take seriously foreigners' reactions to our wars, surveillance, human rights violations, etc:

You people, and the governments and central banks who represent you, keep buying our debt and financing all of this. The US Government would be incapable of funding these programs and wars at low cost without YOU stepping up to the plate every single auction to buy up our treasuries at ridiculously low yields.

I'll believe your outrage when I see action behind it.

[1] http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/ti...

We see the trend. A... -- I seldom haul out this word, but I will now -- "neo-Fascist" [1] regime absorbing a potentially exponential increase in information while seeking to increasingly restrict our access to and control over same.

That is, I think, in good part what it boils down to.