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from the classified-[redacted]-[redacted]-case-dismissed-[redacted] dept.
Justice Department lawyers have asked a federal court in Pittsburgh to dismiss a sweeping lawsuit brought earlier this year by a local lawyer against President Barack Obama and other top intelligence officials.
In a new motion to dismiss filed on Monday, the government told the court that the Pittsburgh lawyer, Elliott Schuchardt, lacked standing to make a claim that his rights under the Fourth Amendment have been violated as a result of multiple ongoing surveillance programs.
Specifically, Schuchardt argued in his June 2014 complaint that both metadata and content of his Gmail, Facebook, and Dropbox accounts were compromised under the PRISM program as revealed in the documents leaked by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday October 24 2014, @10:43PM
The alternative to the status quo != terrorism. Neither does it equal chaos. If we accept your assertion at face value, then no social change has ever created any new order, only chaos. Except, the historical record does not agree with you. You do not even need to look at a history book to know that, but simply remember the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Iron Curtain (assuming you're old enough to remember those events). Those two in particular sharply contradict your assertion because they happened almost overnight and with nearly no bloodshed (apart from the Securitate's fight in Romania). There are lots more examples that have occurred within our own lifetimes, such as Otpor's nonviolent overthrow of Milosevic in Serbia.
So, what it rather disappointingly seems you are arguing for is acquiescence and resignation to the increasingly hopeless plight of mankind. Hey, what can you do, right? Pass me another beer and put the game on, eh?
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I'm sure that is so, since we were not talking about my personal wishlist for what a post-status quo world order would look like, but rather my assertion that because the traditional avenues for structured, managed social change ("soap, ballot, jury...") have all been coopted and no longer serve their vital role, stronger measures are required. But since you asked so nicely for what Phoenix666 would like to see happen, here are a few in no particular order:
1. End corporate personhood. Corporations are not natural persons, and do not deserve the rights due a natural person (especially since they suffer none of the penalties for their crimes like imprisonment and capital punishment).
2. Shut down K Street, and permanently end the revolving door between DC and corporations. "Regulatory capture" must be replaced with the rule of law.
3. Break up the big banks, and largely end for-profit banking. Bankers add no value to the world in any way, and allowing them to capture, control, and corrupt our democracies while essentially de-capitalizing our societies is catastrophic.
4. Begin seriously addressing climate change and its threat to human civilization by implementing sound (and economist-endorsed) measures like carbon cap & trade and making the triple-bottom line the bedrock of policy formation.
5. Scrap industrial policy that favors the entrenched and monied and fund and invest in innovation, startups, and entrepreneurs who found new industries and generally make the world a better place (tm).
6. Bring back the high top-end tax rates for the (for lack of a better term) 1%'ers who pay less of their income to taxes than the people in our societies who actually do things. Labor should not be taxed higher than market speculation.
7. Defund and dismantle the NSA and put its leaders in jail for the rest of their lives.
8. Make K thru university education free for all. The student loan industry has destroyed the economic mobility of at least two generations of Americans and threatens to snuff out decades more of economic growth.
9. Make privacy an explicit constitutional right, and, while we're at it, enforce the Constitution.
There are a whole lot more, but that's a pretty solid list for starters. If you think those goals are ridiculous and that the status quo is perfectly fine and sustainable, that's cool. Then we'll all know where you stand.
Washington DC delenda est.