It is infuriating to see SO many articles, even from publications that can usually be trusted, referring to this legislation as "commendable" or "significant reform". It is far from it, and we can't expect the couch-dwellers to pay attention while the dying gasps of the 4th estate trumpet this kind of non-change.
And let's assume for a second that they did introduce actual reform. All that would happen is that they would go back to pre-9/11 spying on Americans. Let me explain how that worked...
So pre-9/11 the NSA wasn't allowed to spy on Americans (in most cases), so instead they paid the UK's GCHQ to spy on Americans for them and then relayed the intelligence to the NSA for analysis. This was and still is a perfectly legal loophole. There are no limits on cooperation with other intelligence agencies.
When 9/11 happened the NSA got effectively a blank cheque and asked to increase intelligence gathering significantly, so instead of continuing the GCHQ misdirection they simply expanded spying within the US and then legalised it (via executive order at the time, law later).
So the NSA was spying on Americans in the 1990s, they just had to do more legal maneuvering to do it. It just got significantly worse in the 2000s and they dropped even pretending that they weren't. Even if a stronger law outlawed spying on Americans, you'd just see them go back to the GCHQ way.
PS - A lot of Americans seem to want the NSA spying on "foreigners" without realising that that effectively opens the door to the NSA spying on Americans. That way a call between a US citizen and anyone from abroad can be listened in on.
PPS - Don't even get me started on the NSA's spying on behalf of US corporations, that's a whole other can of worms.
But if they don't have to ask, were it to happen, it would be legal.
It's like the recent Smith-Mundt reforms. You no longer have to prevent propaganda from reaching the American public. You just have to not intend for it to reach the American public.
That's why such reforms need to be accompanied by appropriate reductions in NSA's budget. If the NSA required $5 billion a year to sustain the bulk collection of phone metadata of most Americans, then its budget should be cut by $5 billion, if it's now supposedly "ended".
If the budget remains the same or even increases the following year, then clearly something is not right there and the NSA will just use that money to "keep" the program in some other place and through some other methods.
Unfortunately, since the "Defund the NSA" bill that almost passed the House after the first Snowden revelations, I haven't seen any discussion about doing that. The civil liberties organizations should've pushed for a similar law within 3 months afterwards and ensure it passes then.
But the full quote would mitigate the raging hate-on the grandparent is sporting.
Yes, the USA Freedom Act is limited. Yes, it doesn't change all the things we'd all like to see changed. "The perfect is the enemy of the good." It's at least movement in the right direction. Let's try celebrating that, instead of (or at least along with) bitching that it's not movement far enough.
I'm not saying "Yay tyranny!" and to characterize my position thusly is, frankly, shitty discourse.
I'm saying, "Ooh, look: teeny, tiny step back from the level of tyranny we had yesterday. Nice!" I would hope anyone who hates tyranny would see merit in that.
Now, yes, if that's all we get, then being pissed and — more importantly, doing something about it — is warranted. But I choose to look at this as a first step, while you and others appear to regard it as appeasement and a pat on the head.
When you celebrate political theater that reaffirms the status quo with some window dressing you are essentially saying "yay, tyranny".
Dismissing criticism with a flippant "perfect is the enemy of the good" is lazy and thoughtless.
The government has shown no interest in curtailing the vast surveillance apparatus it has built, nor does it show interest in investigating its own abuses of such power.
When people praise such drivel as the freedom act it only sets us all back on the road to tyranny. So yeah, your perspective is detrimental to improving the dire circumstances we find ourselves.
If all I'd said was the quip you quoted, your position might have merit. Instead, you're selectively quoting my rather measured comment and calling me "lazy and thoughtless".
Thanks.
EDIT: You know what I think has people the most pissed off in all of this? That their illusions about America having been a particularly "free" country in the first place are being shattered.
I'm reminded of nothing quite so much as the virulence I've seen in former, incredibly ardent Obama supporters, when they realized how much of a tool he actually was.
Those of us who knew he was a tool from the beginning? Not so pissed when his true colors came out.
(And, no, I'm not a Republican, nor a Libertarian. I just realized a long time ago how corrupt the American political process is, and engage with it with that principle in mind.)
I've just heard similar reports on French radio. For some reasons, they forgot to mention that nothing has changed concerning the surveillance of non-US citizens.
This leads to a question: in the movie Citizenfour, Snowden explains that the NSA uses british surveillance system when they need information that they can't legally obtain in the US. I'm wondering, under this new "freedom act", can the NSA legally query the british system to access information about US citizen?
In the end, they probably couldn't have asked for a better outcome. Collection continues, warrants are still unnecessary if you go about it the right way.
Russ Tice, a Bush-era NSA whistleblower, claims Obama's phones were tapped by the NSA starting in 2004 [1]. If true, questions would be raised. Could they have some leverage on him? That's just speculation though, and wouldn't give Obama an excuse for supporting the illegal [2] NSA programs.
As a law-talking-guy, I can say: this is really, really bad. It's really unusual to see such a split (4-1-4) in such an important decision, and it's tough to say for sure what the law actually is now. One thing that's clear: this doesn't bode well for American democracy UNLESS the legislature takes the clear signal the Court appears to be trying to send and crafts new law to fix the problems this decision creates.
The signal the Court appears to be trying to send is "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press". It's not a new message, and not new that Congress is inclined to abridge it.
Corporations enjoy a legalized fiction as persons, but I don't think their role as citizens has been questioned enough. Non-citizen natural persons aren't allowed to make political donations. Should international corporations who funnel their profits to offshore entities be treated as persons as well as having the speech protections of citizens?
Citizens, by birth or going through the effort of naturalization have a bond to their nation. And so we trust that collectively, the political speech from those citizens serves the long term interests of the nation. Corporations have no such bond, so an essential element that is provided with live citizens is missing.
No, but many useful, protected forms of speech and the press require money. Congress couldn't constitutionally shut down the New York Times by making it illegal for them to purchase ink.
Paper is not speech too. Radiowaves is not speech. Electrons is not speech. IP addresses are not speech. Speech is an abstraction, which is realized with material means - including, yes, money. If you ban technical means with which speech is achieved - including banning using paper, or ink, or IP addresses, or money to achieve speech - you are infringing freedom of speech. If you have theoretical right to speak, but are prohibited from spending any money on it, you right remains only theory and can not effectively be realized, and as such worth nothing. If you're allowed to publish your views but aren't allowed to pay for an ad - what use it is, who's going to read it? Limits on spending on speech is effectively limits on speech, plain and simple.
I would love to think that way as well, but it looks like most justices (not just the majority) do agree that there is a free speech issue at play here (without saying "money is speech", however). Reading the majority opinion and Breyer's dissent ("collective good should overrule free speech"), I'm inclined to agree with majority as in the current political climate the alternative is much scarier.
Additionally, ACLU did file an amicus brief in Citizens United case (although the law in question was much more unambigious restriction of speech) in favour of Citizens United and while they did not do so in this case, there does seem to be an internal split on the matter:
An analogous situation may be access to abortion: opening an abortion cleaning is not the same as getting an actual abortion, but restricting the clinics severely curtail the options available to women (I can't find the citation now, but this was the logic used in a recent decision in a federal court about an AZ law). Keep in mind that abortion is a non-enumerated right, in theory enumerated rights like free speech are held to even tighter standards.
Ezel vs. Chicago (also from a district court, but drawing on SCOTUS precedents) is also similar: while the right to open a shooting range is not equivalent to the right to bear arms, the court ruled that since a Chicago requires range practice in order to receive a firearm license, the city must allow ranges within its limits. So far there isn't a clear scrutiny standard set for the second amendment, but it seems to be converging on "heightened scrutiny" which (again) is less than the strict scrutiny standard applied to the first.
Don't get me wrong, I am not happy about money in politics, but I am not willing to jeopardize the right to free speech (or general way individual vs. collective equation is evaluated in regards to constitutional rights) to fight it.
Correct. Money is commerce. While it is true that people have as much freedom to engage in commerce as they have to speak, candidates for public office do not.
I can offer a candidate as much money as I please, as is my right, but in the interest of providing equal protection under the law to the voters, the public may choose to prevent the candidate from accepting more than a certain amount from a single source.
Campaign contributions limits are not restrictions upon the rights of the public; they are restrictions upon the privilege of representing other people as part of the government. If you wish to retain your unlimited ability to speak as a private individual, do not enter the public sector.
The same principle, applied by the courts elsewhere, would also strike down laws preventing public servants from engaging in certain forms of political activity. After all, they have freedom of speech as well, don't they?
I think that the most likely and most damaging response to this will be a decreasing engagement by career politicians with near-the-median people and increasing engagement with wealthy patrons. The interests represented will shift accordingly.
You're looking at it wrong. Nobody gives the candidate a suitcase packed with dollar bills, not usually anyhow. The money is spent on ads, materials, events, etc. Now, if I spend money on expressing my point of view that X is true, and the candidate Y happens to make the point that X is true centerpiece of his campaign, can you prohibit me from expressing my point of view? I never gave a dime to Y, I may not even have met Y once, but we happen to agree on point X. That is the question which Supreme Court is deciding - can my freedom of speech be restricted if it benefits some politician? I say if you value your freedom of speech, you can answer anything but "NO!". Otherwise, you'd be able only speak about nonsense things like celebrity gossip and lolcats - as soon as you get to serious things, there would be a politician whose view aligns with yours or is opposite to yours, and as soon as that happens, your speech would be either contributing to her campaign or to her opponent's, and you'll be banned from speaking on the grounds of the limits to campaign contributions.
>>> would also strike down laws preventing public servants from engaging in certain forms of political activity
This is not the same. While everybody has right to free speech, nobody has right to be a public servant. So once the person resigns from his public servant position, she has full right to speak her mind. But while occupying that position, certain restrictions - taken voluntarily as condition for this assignment - may apply as long as you want to keep that position. You have the full right to make face tattoos and avoid bathing, but if you join customer service in a bank, they may not accept you unless you look and smell in a way that don't make their clients faint. And if you are being appointed the head of the IRS, it's better that you avoid political campaigning as long as you are in that post. Not that it is easy to achieve, as it turns out, but we should at least try. When we are employed, we give up certain freedoms - freedom to choose where we are, what we do, what we say, to some measure, etc. - in exchange for money. Not all employment requires this, but some do, and it's nothing out for the ordinary. We are not employees of the Congress, however - on the contrary, the Congress are employees of the citizens.
If you are referring to in-kind donations, elections laws require that such donations be treated as though the donor wrote the candidate a check, and the candidate endorsed it right back over to them in exchange for the goods and services actually rendered.
Direct support to a campaign and political advocacy are two different things. This is why I can believe that the Citizens United case was not completely ridiculous, and that this one is beyond reason. Your right to free speech ends at the tip of your own tongue. If you give your words to someone else, he might not be able to speak them.
In the same way, if you give control of some money to someone else, they will be the ones responsible for how it gets spent, not you. They may be under different contractual and legal obligations.
As is the case for people seeking public office. They must follow rules that ordinary people will probably never even need to know.
>>> Direct support to a campaign and political advocacy are two different things.
No, not really. Giving candidate the money to buy ads and directly buying ads is essentially the same thing from any aspect that may interest us.
>>> Your right to free speech ends at the tip of your own tongue.
This is obviously false. If that were true, we could not have free press, or free TV, or any electronic or paper media. What we would have is what people in USSR had - they were free to talk about politics in their own kitchen, but once they said anything in public or tried any political action, they were suppressed. This is not freedom, this is a mockery of it. And Founding Fathers clearly never intended to treat freedom of speech that narrow - as a freedom to produce any sounds you like with your throat and tongue. For a functioning democracy, much broader freedoms - freedoms to publish your opinion as widely as you can and engage in discussion with as many people as you can, and exercise any political actions you can (excluding violence and other rights violations, of course) - are absolutely necessary.
>>> if you give control of some money to someone else, they will be the ones responsible for how it gets spent, not you
This is false, too. If you give somebody money and say "I want you to hire a killer to murder this guy", you both would be part of criminal conspiracy. That's how mafia bosses get jailed.
>>> As is the case for people seeking public office. They must follow rules that ordinary people will probably never even need to know.
People seeking office have same rights as everybody else - because they are everybody else. Any citizen can seek office and has right to do so. When in the office, they have to accept certain limits that come with the job, but when seeking office they are not under any obligation yet, and have absolutely equal rights with any random citizen. All those "campaign finance" laws are just a futile populistic attempt to control political discourse, and Supreme Court is routinely shutting them down as infringing people's liberties, and rightfully so.
I am not able to comprehend the confusion of ideas required to formulate such opinions.
Just from what I see here, there are contradictions. Political candidates are at once both ventriloquist dummies and freewilled adults. Donors are potentially liable for fraudulent campaigning. Challengers and incumbents should play by a different set of rules.
I'm sure that we both consider ourselves fortunate that the other is not a Supreme Court Justice.
You have a right to speak to those who choose to hear you (to wit: not be punished for doing so). That is the point of the ruling in question: Citizens United made a film (acknowledged by the court as none other than a 90 minute campaign commercial directed at a particular candidate) and accepted money to "speak" (via pay-per-view, prepaid by corporate supporters) to those who made a deliberate and positive effort to listen; current law forbade them from doing so, and there was no other way to allow it while preserving the bulk of the abridging law without instilling a "chilling effect" on other lawful political speech (which would be deemed so by voluminous case-by-case analysis, there being no bright line).
So is it OK for Congress to ban New York Times from distributing their paper? After all, they still can speak as much as they want, and if you want to listen to them you can come to their office or to their homes and listen, and nobody has right to be heard beyond that?
This is the kind of knee jerk panic comment I expect to find in the comments section of NYT, not voted up on HN.
Why is this "really, really bad?" You talk about how bad this is with a bunch of FUD language about how this is a threat to democracy and there are a bunch of problems with this decision but you never actually explain why.
I don't necessarily approach this as the worst thing that has ever happened, and not everyone here does either, so it might help to explain something you seem to assume everyone knows.
Same here. Perhaps it's my exceptionally wry (and inappropriate sense of humor), but I rather wish it were cloaca. Just imagine the logo opportunities!
A startled pigeon, looking over its wing, tail up in the air, clearly exposing its backside...
...this is why I'd never get hired as a marketer or designer, never mind the fact I'm no artist.
Ha ha! Oh wow! I just ran a google image search to see what you were talking about...
Knowing what a cloaca is beforehand, and then searching for it anyway on Google produces some truly curious results. I was trying to mentally prepare myself for what I may be about to see, because I couldn't imagine what might be on the other side, that would prompt your reaction. The only thing I could think of was some bizarre new form of bestiality that lurks in the shadows of taboo obscurity.
It turns out that most of the images are of obvious medical or scientific origin. I don't even know why pictures of humans show up in the search. I saw lots of pictures of various reptile junk which was totally expected, and none of it was being unceremoniously violated by unscrupulous human beings, so thank god for that!
Apparently there's a medical condition, "Persistent Cloaca Perineum", which is frequently misdiagnosed as "Imperforate Anus with Rectovaginal Fistula." The pictures that depict the condition are mostly de-identified newborn infants, and they originate from edu domains, but in a google search without proper context, they're kind of unexpected. I guess you learn something new every day...
This is just flatly bad advice. Entity selection and the decisions that come with it should be made very early in the process or it can have very negative unforeseen consequences down the road.
Education and clarity is important in any new business venture, especially one that involves multiple parties. If nothing else, a good buy-sell agreement is crucial in avoiding misunderstanding and back blood if one party wants out.
Liability protection is also hugely important. What startup doesn't need a bank account? Separation of entity an personal assets and liability is a big deal and should be meticulously maintained and documented from inception. This discipline is hard to pick up late in the game, and there's no reason for it.
Also, if your attorney is recommending a C corp as your best choice of entity, you either have a very unusual situation or a bad attorney.
Interesting article, Mr. Stross. I think it's great to see so many people hungry for the next new thing, out hustling and working hard to try to make it happen.
As awareness of startup culture grows, it is necessarily going to attract some goofiness. That's OK. Not every idea is a good one, and not every good idea is going to work. We need these stories to make the successes stand out so much brighter.
You may be right, but I hope you're not. I see things like Pebble's success on Kickstarter, Amanda Palmer bringing more attention to the idea of crowdsourcing funding for something that is every bit today's poetry, and see the spread of the paradigm shift we all already value (or else we wouldn't be here). I think it's right to be nervous, but I am cautiously optimistic that hacker/maker/startup culture is an attractive alternative to the existing production model.
I always appreciate your thoughts, but nowhere near as much as I would appreciate a new Laundry novel. Thanks for the good times.
I was in the web/dotcom 1.0 biz from early 1995 through late 2001.
I am reading the news these days with a strong sense of deja vu for late 1999.
Kickstarter and crowdsourced funding is great news for artists, but I don't see it scaling much bigger than AFP and "Iron Sky" without attracting fraudsters. Again: hacker/maker culture is great, it has brought us great things in the past, and I expect great things to come of it in future, but it's not delivering huge new industries on the scale of a Google or Facebook or Apple. (Making stuff with atoms instead of bits is intrinsically slow, energy and matter intensive, and hard to scale up exponentially.)
But this isn't about artists making a living. If this guy was talking about crowdsourcing to fund his next book of poetry I'd be all in favour. But instead, he's talking about building some kind of bullshit hosting/purchasing storefront with the idea of raking off a percentage of gross from a market that died of natural causes three quarters of a century ago.
Thinking you can set yourself up to rake off a chunk of the value in each exchange in a particular field is the sort of wishful thinking that gave us the Feb 2000 bust.
I appreciate how your experience in the late 90s has given you a heuristic for picking up on the signals and leading indicators of a bubble, but I question how relevant it is in this case.
The poetry blog post is just one bad idea that a couple guys had in an attempt to gain a small amount of funding from a notable startup indicator. That's not to say that there aren't more small teams with laughable ideas out there, but I think it's important to note that nobody gave them money. I suspect they went home empty handed because the folks who manage VC funds did learn from the mistakes of the 90s, even if a new generation of wantrepeneurs have no clue.
Which brings me to my point. The niche based thinking expressed by the poetry disruptors and many others is an expression of the realization that individual programmers have the ability to work alone to create products and businesses that are capable of supporting them financially in much the same way that a sole proprietorship would in the physical world.
I'm fairly certain that this wasn't possible in the 90s without outside help, but I think that it explains a lot of the misguided enthusiasm from people who want to build lifestyle businesses, but don't realize that venture capital is not the way to go about it.
Not only is poetry dead as a market, it's arguably even deader as a form. The profession of poetry is all about making the connections you need to get a book published, at which point you can work (for pennies) at a community college teaching poetry, and have as good a right as anyone to introduce yourself to chicks as "a poet." You can't be utterly illiterate, though, unless you're a protected minority.
But "Poetry," capital P, is an entirely different and quite solid business. I wouldn't at all count this startup out. It's called a vanity press, honey! The profession of fleecing people who want to be Poets may not be the oldest, but it's got to be at least fourth or fifth.
(It's also worth noting that before, I don't know, 1850 or so, the distinction between a vanity press and a real one was by no means clear. Plenty of reputable authors invested in the production costs of their early works. It was almost embarrassingly easy for a good writer to acquire a reputation based on one work - Dr. Johnson went from nobody to lion after one 300-line poem, his imitation of Juvenal's Third Satire. Of course, the tennis court had a net then.)
Burn it all and start over, I say :)