That's one thing that has annoyed me about the tech world's outrage and objections to the PRISM spying lark. They appear outraged that US citizens are spied on, with the implication that it was ok when non us citizens were spied on. Do I, a non us citizen, not have a right to privacy?
Privacy? If only. We have no rights as human beings, let alone privacy. The worst part is that America claims to have rights over us, where ever we are. It is a disgusting abuse of humanity that American asserts that its laws apply to world citizens, while denying them even the few rights Americans think they have.
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....
> 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?)
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...
> I hardly ever hear the "USA" chant outside of sporting competitions
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 agree with you that many of the things that America has done are gross and contradict "American ideals", but I think you're underselling the power and influence of European nations. Why are they so easily bending to the will of such a belligerent turd?
Because fighting should be the last resort. If you are persevering enough, then diplomacy is enough to resolve most conflicts of interest. Way cheaper and nicer than warfare (and maybe more successful). The "problem" is, it's boring and compromises might come across as bending to the other's will (even though it's not).
I don't think they should wage war, but couldn't they put economic pressure on the US? Revoke the Nobel Peace Prize? Put pressure on the US via the UN?
You, as a non-US citizen, are not protected by our constitution. Nor am I, a US citizen, protected from your government.
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.
The US Constitution is mostly the same. If you're in the United States, regardless of your nationality, you have the right to free speech, the right to remain silent when questioned by police, the right to demand a search warrant before letting the police into your home or automobile, the right to purchase and possess firearms, the right to espouse whatever political opinions you may have, and even the right to refuse to quarter troops in your home. You don't even have all of those rights in Germany!
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.
There is a right to privacy (in case of the German constitution literally, by the way). And I take issue with anyone saying that violating the privacy of non-citizens is totally ok.
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.
If you interpret the right to privacy to entail never having foreign intelligence agencies, you take a position that almost no government in the world actually follows, because almost every national government has foreign intelligence agencies. Holding up Germany as a counterexample on this issue is, in your words, factually wrong.
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.
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.
I'm not sure exactly what your referencing, but if you are talking about all the stuff that's been going down in the U.S., Glenn Greenwald said at the Socialism Conference yesterday that a lot of what's going on isn't legal and has been ruled unconstitutional in the secret FISA court.
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.
What about the Dutch government, and the Swedish government, U.K. government, and Canada, etc.? The EU itself has a data retention law that Germany doesn't follow, but don't the rest of the EU member nations participate?
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.
If you have a definition by which it's not a pest, I'd love to hear it, honestly.
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.
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.
You don’t have to agree with me. That was just an aside and certainly my personal opinion. It doesn’t really have anything to do with the main point I was making.
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.
Yet, I - a non-US citizen - am subject to all your whims and power grabs. You can't simply hide behind the assertion that the US is just another one of many countries vying for supremacy. For better or worse, the US sets the tone and the precedences for all of the Western countries' policies, and to top it off it is by far the most powerful when it comes to the military and secret services. You - a US citizen - might interpret this to mean that things are going well and that "might makes right" and all that, but the moral bankruptcy of such a view should be obvious to pretty much everybody.
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.
So what is your point? That I'm not spending time writing blogs about how broke up I am that foreigners are also being targeted? Ok, I'll go write a blog.
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?
Of course you have grounds to "raise outrage", if you disapprove at what they are doing. If you don't, that's a choice. Whether or not they break the law is irrelevant - they are meant to represent you - if their actions are immoral, it reflects badly on you, in particular if you do not speak up against them or otherwise do anything to reign them in.
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.
> You, as a non-US citizen, are not protected by our constitution.
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.
Sure, but the whole Constitution begins with "We the People of the United States". You can argue that it should include non-citizens, but the constitution itself and subsequent applications are very clear that it does not. It is a somewhat odd proposition to claim the constitution of one country apply to all. Should the rest of the world have stopped drinking in 1919?
(Not a Republican mythmaker who loves torture, just stating the facts)
The purpose of the US Constitution is not to tell people what to do or not do, it is to define very precisely what the US Government can and can't do (and how it should function), and therefore it seems more than logical that it would talk about what the US Government can or can't do to people in general (or animals, or nature).
I don't know where you get the idea that the purpose of the Constitution is only about how the government functions. It is clearly the majority of the Constitution, but plenty of the Constitution is about what people (American citizens) can or cannot do. Constitution says you have to be eighteen to vote, you can't own slaves, and you can't sell booze from 1920-1933.
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.
It is not at all clear that "the people" means "people in general". If they had meant people in general, they could have simply omitted the article, and thereby not referred to any specific group of people.
I think a few of you don't understand my point, so perhaps I didn't explain it very well.
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 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
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.
No, I think you do have the right to raise that issue. That's why we have "international" human rights. But even those didn't all exist from the very beginning. People have to fight to introduce some of them to that list. Didn't the EU recently say that Internet access is a human right?
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.
Actually, the 4th Amendment doesn't just apply to US persons - it's a blanket requirement. The restriction of the various agencies' activities to non-US persons is not because (directly, anyway) of any constitutional issue but rather to do with the division of labour between the various agencies - the NSA (et al) is meant to be doing foreign-focused stuff and the FBI to focus on domestic spying.
Outrage generally isn't triggered by breaking laws; rather, "moral rules" and "disrespect".
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.
Constitution is the highest form of law. IANAL but from what I understand all laws are made in such way that they shouldn't contradict constitution. If laws openly go against the constitution it weakness its position as the supreme law of a state/nation (for better or for worse).
There is another important reason why you, as a US citizen should be worried about spying on non-US citizens. Now that everyone knows about this, other countries are probably going down the same route - in fact, it looks like some already are, and this is going to be net loss for everyone - both US citizens and everyone else.
But a US citizen's rights are not derived from the Constitution. It's clearly hypocritical to say a German has no natural right to privacy. We could declare war on Germany, then we could morally justify violating their rights.
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.
That's not true. The outrage is often mentioned as violation of privacy, as a police state, as spying on innocent people. If it was some rule breaking legal reason, then the FISA courts should make US citizens happy, but it demonstratidly doesn't.
However it appears the people outraged font consider me a full person.
Yes you are protected in civilized countries nobody can read your letters without your consent, no matter your citizenship. It's criminal offence if they do.
"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.
