Re: Will Amnesty International be taking up the case of DavidCarruthers of BetOnSports?

[Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu]

On Fri, 21 Jul 2006 16:05:55 CDT, Brian Loe said:

Hmm... Brian replies to the list, to an e-mail I sent directly to Brian
and *NOT* the list.  OK.

> Really? You gave up your right to defend yourself, your country and
> your fellow man's rights. The right that rated the highest for these
> "guys", with the exception of freedom of speech and religion!

Be *very* careful here - are you using the singular "you" referring to me
personally, or the collective "you" referring to the population as a whole?
(Particularly important since later on, you imply this has been going on for
150 years since Lincoln was president - 110 or so of which I wasn't around to
have given consent to "give up" anything...)

(Here, I had to fill Brian in on who Jose Padilla was - Brian was apparently
unaware that Padilla was a US citizen)
> > Note that he first had a chance to talk to a lawyer on March 3, 2004 - almost
> > 2 whole years after being taken into custody.
> >
> > (I'm not saying he's innocent - he's quite likely guilty.  But at least
> > once upon a time, we gave people a fair trial with legal representation,
> > after actually *charging* them with something...)

> I'll bet that if it was even remotely likely that he wasn't guilty
> there would have been more noise about it

I notice that Brian carefully lopped out the part where I pointed out that
CNN.com alone carried 850 or so references to the case, with multiple
press releases by the ACLU and other organizations.  It's *NOT* like there
wasn't noise about it.  And the last I heard, our legal system was *NOT*
based on "he's probably guilty, he can rot in jail till we get around to
charging him with something".

(Here, I'm filling in Brian on who Yasser Hamdi was).
> > American citizen, captured in Afghanistan in 2001, not charged with anything
> > and denied access to lawyers for over 3 years.  This one *did* go all the
> > way to the Supreme Court, which finally ruled the Administration had to do
> > *something* with Hamdi, like actually charge him with something...
>
> Fuck him. Wrong place, wrong time.

OK, so if a member of *your* family got tossed into solitary confinement for
3 years, and wasn't charged with anything, because they were "wrong place,
wrong time", you'd be *OK* on that?

> > For those who aren't familiar with northern Virginia: Falls Church is
> > close enough to DC that it's a subway stop on the Orange Line - and
> > there's 2 stops even further out. Manassas National Battlefield is some
> > 30 miles out from the Mall.
> >
> > Suspending habeus corpus because there's a enemy army entrenched and
> > encamped less than 30 miles from your seat of government is *slightly*
> > different than doing it because of some ill-defined "terrorist threat".
>
> How close is the pentagon?

> From Osama bin Laden? Some 8,000 miles, if he's still in Afghanistan.

If you care to point at some *SPECIFIC* threat that's closer, feel free
to do so.

(For the list - Brian tried to imply that since Lincoln "suspended the
Constitution", the current activity was justified.  I pointed out in my
reply:

1) He suspended habeas corpus, not the Constitution.
2) At the time, Lee's army was in Falls Church and Manassas - less than 30
miles from the capitol.  Doing something drastic because there's an enemy
army that close is *far* different than doing something drastic because of
some vague undefined threat.
3) And on top of all that, it still doesn't mean it was *right*. Expedient,
maybe. But except for the most extreme Machiavelli followers, "expedient"
and "right" are two different things.

> > You're asserting that it's perfectly acceptable to hoodwink the population
> > in general, by saying that a program is for something, getting the people's
> > consent to it on that basis, and then use the assent to do something totally
> > different.

> Uhhmm... yeah. DUH! Are you truly ignorant of how politicians do
> business? You have kids so you can't be that young...

The fact that something is done that way does not make it morally clean and
righteous.

> Was it a LAW that STATED what monies they were going to raise and what
> they were to be spent on? If so, its not acceptable. If you just
> believe it because some politician said it was so then you're an idiot
> and deserve what you get.

Oh, so *now* we have a requirement that the written law of the land be
*followed*?  That's progress at least - we'll come back to this.

> > > They told us a bunch of stuff about how we need to remain vigilant and
> > > fight this war against terrorism until its conclusion... I still don't
> >
> > "We have always been at war with <terrorists>" - where is the "conclusion"?
>
> What's your point? Terrorism is just the current hobgoblin...

That *is* the point.  The use of "current hobgoblin" to justify something,
like (for instance) not wanting to obey a *law* that FISA warrants be obtained.
(Remember? A few paragraphs back, you said that not following the law isn't
acceptable...)

And calling it "the current hobgoblin" isn't answering the actual question,
which was "So what defines victory in this war on terrorism"?

> > That should give you pause right there.  But I guess maybe they have *reason*
> > to complain when there's a leak indicating they're doing something illegal or
> > immoral in the name of "protecting" us....

> Governments can not be "moral". Things sometimes need to be secret
> because the leaking of that information tips the government's hand or
> endangers people. That's just common sense.

I didn't say the government was moral.  I spoke specifically of an *action*
taken by *actual people*, acting as agents of said government.

"I was just following orders" -- every guard at Auschwitz.

> > And how, exactly, do you know I *haven't* had a problem with them before now?
> Logs of this list should suffice.

Well, this list only goes back some 8-9 months...

http://www.linuxbox.org/pipermail/funsec/2005-September/000084.html
http://www.linuxbox.org/pipermail/funsec/2005-September/000228.html
http://www.linuxbox.org/pipermail/funsec/2005-September/000270.html
http://www.linuxbox.org/pipermail/funsec/2005-September/000279.html

http://www.linuxbox.org/pipermail/funsec/2005-October/000587.html
http://www.linuxbox.org/pipermail/funsec/2005-October/000778.html
http://www.linuxbox.org/pipermail/funsec/2005-October/001124.html
(OK, I didn't actually *say* I agreed on that one...)

http://www.linuxbox.org/pipermail/funsec/2005-November/001654.html
http://www.linuxbox.org/pipermail/funsec/2005-November/001656.html
http://www.linuxbox.org/pipermail/funsec/2005-November/001660.html

http://www.linuxbox.org/pipermail/funsec/2005-December/001858.html
http://www.linuxbox.org/pipermail/funsec/2005-December/001873.html
http://www.linuxbox.org/pipermail/funsec/2005-December/001900.html
http://www.linuxbox.org/pipermail/funsec/2005-December/002307.html
http://www.linuxbox.org/pipermail/funsec/2005-December/002313.html

http://www.linuxbox.org/pipermail/funsec/2006-January/002875.html
http://www.linuxbox.org/pipermail/funsec/2006-January/003001.html
http://www.linuxbox.org/pipermail/funsec/2006-January/003328.html
http://www.linuxbox.org/pipermail/funsec/2006-January/003572.html
http://www.linuxbox.org/pipermail/funsec/2006-January/003555.html

http://www.linuxbox.org/pipermail/funsec/2006-February/004284.html
http://www.linuxbox.org/pipermail/funsec/2006-February/004590.html
http://www.linuxbox.org/pipermail/funsec/2006-February/004595.html
http://www.linuxbox.org/pipermail/funsec/2006-February/004617.html
http://www.linuxbox.org/pipermail/funsec/2006-February/004662.html
http://www.linuxbox.org/pipermail/funsec/2006-February/004699.html
(I think *that* one is a good sum-up of government use of technology)

http://www.linuxbox.org/pipermail/funsec/2006-March/005676.html
http://www.linuxbox.org/pipermail/funsec/2006-March/005688.html
http://www.linuxbox.org/pipermail/funsec/2006-March/005698.html
http://www.linuxbox.org/pipermail/funsec/2006-March/005820.html
http://www.linuxbox.org/pipermail/funsec/2006-March/005847.html

http://www.linuxbox.org/pipermail/funsec/2006-April/006067.html
http://www.linuxbox.org/pipermail/funsec/2006-April/006110.html
http://www.linuxbox.org/pipermail/funsec/2006-April/006377.html

http://www.linuxbox.org/pipermail/funsec/2006-May/006892.html
http://www.linuxbox.org/pipermail/funsec/2006-May/006900.html
http://www.linuxbox.org/pipermail/funsec/2006-May/006983.html
http://www.linuxbox.org/pipermail/funsec/2006-May/006994.html
http://www.linuxbox.org/pipermail/funsec/2006-May/007051.html
http://www.linuxbox.org/pipermail/funsec/2006-May/007111.html
(I was wrong on this one...)
http://www.linuxbox.org/pipermail/funsec/2006-May/007126.html
(It was Minnesota)
http://www.linuxbox.org/pipermail/funsec/2006-May/007276.html

Fuck it.  It's pretty obvious I have a fairly long-standing problem with them. ;)

> > Quoting a past American president - making it quite clear that I think it's
> > our moral obligation to question the Administration's actions:
>
> Sure is, where are your posts from before Bush was President? I think
> it would be more accurate for you to say, "making it quite clear that
> I think it's our moral obligation to question thIS Administration's
> actions."

The quote from said president, for the benefit of those who didn't get to
see the URL:

"To announce that we are to stand by the president right or wrong is not 
only unpatriotic and servile, but it's morally treasonable to the 
American public.  Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or 
any one else.  But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant 
or unpleasant, about him than about any one else." -- Theodore Roosevelt

Looks pretty invariant with regards to which party is in power.  And I cited
enough URLs in the first note to demonstrate I certainly have been pretty
consistent in objecting to *this* administration.  

Unfortunately, my local outgoing e-mail archive only goes back to 30 Sep 1999,
so it's easier to track down things I wrote since then, and then find the
matching public archive entry.

But since you insist (man, trying to get Google to cough up *old* stuff of
yours when you post as much as I do is a *bitch* - and then many of the
archives of things I wrote back then have vanished in the mists of time.
There's lots of places that ran mailing lists 10 years ago that have since
vanished.)

http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/15.08.html#subj12
1993.  And writing about Big Brother and state/federal powers.  And Bill
Clinton had been in office some 8 months.

http://64.233.187.104/search?q=cache:6Rv1MJxrrN8J:lists.arin.net/pipermail/naipr/1997-July/001935.html+valdis+kletnieks+owns+integers&hl=en&lr=&strip=1
1997.  And I'm only semi-facetiously suggesting that the US Govt might
claim ownership of integers...

http://www.mhonarc.org/archive/html/ietf/2000-07/msg00178.html
OK, Clinton was a lame duck, but Bush Jr wasn't elected yet.  Sendmail 8.11
came out 2 days after I posted this. And I was advocating using crypto in
yet-unreleased software to piss off the Echelon crew.

Sep 12, 2000, I posted to the Incidents mailing list at Securityfocus, and made
the comment:

  3) For some people, the issue is not "securing attachments", it's "preventing
  traffic analysis".  The difference is crucial if you happen to have moral
  objections to things like the FBI Carnivore or NSA Echelon systems.

Yep, dissing Clinton's program again. :)  (Unfortunately, the archive at
SecurityFocus only goes back to 2002, and archive.org doesn't have a copy).

Here's an interesting one - I'm commenting about catching dumb terrorists:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=21449&threshold=1&commentsort=0&tid=103&mode=thread&pid=2268081#2276691
I had *no* idea that less than 6 hours later, Osama bin Laden would try it again...

(And before you complain about the sparcity - how much of what *YOU* wrote
in 1996 is still online in an easily accessible form?  *Especially* things
you didn't plan to need to reference a decade from now :)

> And really, your posts that show you've complained about this
> administration before really doesn't disprove my point. We didn't get
> to this point overnight - we didn't get here with this administration.

And your point is what, exactly?  That one was required to disagree with
the previous administration in order to disagree with this one?  Or that
anybody who disagrees with this one can't possibly have disagreed with
the previous one? or something else?

> This started with Lincoln and as continued since - sometimes slowing
> down, but never reversed completely. Did you not have an opinion
> before Bush took office or were things just that great?

Oh, I certainly had an opinion.  Regarding Clinton.  Regarding Bush Sr.
Regarding Reagan.  Regarding Carter and Ford too (although that pesky 26th
Amendment meant the first presidential election I could vote in was Reagan's
first term).  I definitely remember thinking "Important people in Washington
shouldn't break into doctor's offices to make people look bad" even if I was
a bit fuzzy on who Daniel Ellsberg was (hey, cut me some slack - the whole
Pentagon Papers/Ellsberg/Watergate/COINTELPRO thing wend down when I was
still a pre-teen.. ;)

"To the ordinary guy, all this is a bunch of gobbledygook. But out of the
gobbledygook comes a very clear thing: you can't trust the government; you
can't believe what they say; and you can't rely on their judgment. And the
implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in
America, is badly hurt by this, because it shows that people do things the
president wants to do even though it's wrong, and the president can be wrong."

                        -- HR Haldeman, to Richard Nixon

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