<story><title>Why discussions on cyber snooping have been so painful for us</title><url>https://medium.com/surveillance-state/f77088fd4c28</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>furyg3</author><text>You are interpreting this precisely backwards.&lt;p&gt;These &amp;quot;Rights&amp;quot; are unalienable.  They are not to be given away, they are not to be taken away.  Governments exist to &lt;i&gt;secure&lt;/i&gt; these rights.  To help protect these rights, the government may exist... but only by consent of the people being governed.&lt;p&gt;It may be true that the Russian government does not give these rights to it&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;Therefore, the US government, when dealing with &amp;#x27;men&amp;#x27; of any nationally, needs to respect the unalienable Rights which all men have been granted by their Creator.  Anything else is hypocritical.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;s principles and make laws that contradict it without being hypocritical.</text></item><item><author>Goladus</author><text>It would, perhaps, be enlightening to quote the entire sentence from the US Declaration of Independence:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;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.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;In particular:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    ...deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
In other words, I give MY government the power to arrest, prosecute, employ various armed agents to use against ME  if I violate its laws.  I&amp;#x27;ve made no such tacit contract with France, or Russia or Singapore or China or anywhere else.  Russians spying on me may be violating a treaty, but they&amp;#x27;ve made no implicit social contract with me via a constitution or other set of laws.</text></item><item><author>nkoren</author><text>The Declaration of Independence states that &amp;quot;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.&amp;quot; Gendered language aside, the idea of the founders was clearly that rights derive from one&amp;#x27;s innate humanity, and do &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; derive from government largess. This was the ideal which provided America&amp;#x27;s inner light; for all of America&amp;#x27;s mis-steps, the proclamation of this core ideal fanned the flames of some sort of tendency towards goodness.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;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 &lt;i&gt;human&lt;/i&gt; 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.&lt;p&gt;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, &lt;i&gt;American citizens&lt;/i&gt; (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.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Goladus</author><text>Backwards or forwards, my interpretation is less an oversimplification than the parent.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;It may be true that the Russian government does not give these rights to it&amp;#x27;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.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;s responsibility to secure them, especially if doing so would conflict with the objective of securing the rights of its own citizens.&lt;p&gt;The Government&amp;#x27;s first duty is to its citizens, and it&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;Nowhere do I say that you can&amp;#x27;t argue that a Government should uphold basic rights of all humans everywhere regardless of citizenship.  What you can&amp;#x27;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.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why discussions on cyber snooping have been so painful for us</title><url>https://medium.com/surveillance-state/f77088fd4c28</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>furyg3</author><text>You are interpreting this precisely backwards.&lt;p&gt;These &amp;quot;Rights&amp;quot; are unalienable.  They are not to be given away, they are not to be taken away.  Governments exist to &lt;i&gt;secure&lt;/i&gt; these rights.  To help protect these rights, the government may exist... but only by consent of the people being governed.&lt;p&gt;It may be true that the Russian government does not give these rights to it&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;Therefore, the US government, when dealing with &amp;#x27;men&amp;#x27; of any nationally, needs to respect the unalienable Rights which all men have been granted by their Creator.  Anything else is hypocritical.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;s principles and make laws that contradict it without being hypocritical.</text></item><item><author>Goladus</author><text>It would, perhaps, be enlightening to quote the entire sentence from the US Declaration of Independence:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;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.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;In particular:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    ...deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
In other words, I give MY government the power to arrest, prosecute, employ various armed agents to use against ME  if I violate its laws.  I&amp;#x27;ve made no such tacit contract with France, or Russia or Singapore or China or anywhere else.  Russians spying on me may be violating a treaty, but they&amp;#x27;ve made no implicit social contract with me via a constitution or other set of laws.</text></item><item><author>nkoren</author><text>The Declaration of Independence states that &amp;quot;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.&amp;quot; Gendered language aside, the idea of the founders was clearly that rights derive from one&amp;#x27;s innate humanity, and do &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; derive from government largess. This was the ideal which provided America&amp;#x27;s inner light; for all of America&amp;#x27;s mis-steps, the proclamation of this core ideal fanned the flames of some sort of tendency towards goodness.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;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 &lt;i&gt;human&lt;/i&gt; 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.&lt;p&gt;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, &lt;i&gt;American citizens&lt;/i&gt; (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.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dredmorbius</author><text>&lt;i&gt;These &amp;quot;Rights&amp;quot; are unalienable.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;They are &lt;i&gt;in&lt;/i&gt; alienable.  That is to say, &lt;i&gt;incapable of being separated from the individual possessing them.&lt;/i&gt;  Literally, they cannot be alienated (separated) from the person possessing them.&lt;p&gt;Your real property (home, money, possessions, even spouse, children, or other family) may be taken from you &lt;i&gt;and given to someone else&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;i&gt;inalienable&lt;/i&gt; refers not to rights which &lt;i&gt;may&lt;/i&gt; not be taken, but which &lt;i&gt;can not&lt;/i&gt; be taken.&lt;p&gt;You may be &lt;i&gt;deprived&lt;/i&gt; of these rights, but nobody else can &lt;i&gt;take possession of them&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s a subtle difference, and one few people understand, particularly in the context of &lt;i&gt;natural&lt;/i&gt;, &lt;i&gt;civil&lt;/i&gt;, or &lt;i&gt;universal human&lt;/i&gt; rights, which can be argued to have a moral or socially beneficial basis, but may still be alienable.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s also a fair amount of debate over the self-evidence, alienability, and&amp;#x2F;or naturalness of these rights.  Of of their status should they become so (say, through technology).&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inalienable_rights&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Inalienable_rights&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>