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I've talked multiple times over on Tumblr — particularly this longer post about how modern liberalism (or at least the strain typified by Michael Munger in the interview linked at that post) is about opposition to exactly that. To quote Munger:
And as I put it in my post:
And I'd argue it's why so many opponents of Trump, right and left, struggle to find any vocabulary to describe why people follow Trump beyond "cult of personality" — because they've so internalized Weberian rationalization and this liberal view that they can't really even recognize actual human leadership as anything but some kind of pathology.
Yeah, I don't think that's it, unless "actual human leadership" is code for "personalist strongman". Trump is the argument by demonstration against charismatic leadership, but left-of-center people have their own favored leadership figures as well. Obama was and is highly admired, Sanders has his own faction of die hard, etc... Any argument that rounds off to "they're intimidated by how cool we are" is probably wrong.
Where they recoil from Trump is his staggering lack of character combined with his rejection of limits or accountability. It doesn't help that his loudest supporters tend to be quite reactionary and openly cheer for authoritarianism.
I feel like I'd appreciate this argument more if I hadn't lived through electing a "Constitutional law professor" who proceeded to approve of wholesale spying on the contents of almost everyone's Internet traffic --- see Snowden, et al, and Clapper lying to Congress about it. Or approving extrajudicial drone strikes on underage American citizens in foreign countries.
If anything, I don't like much about the Trump administration, but I feel like "the system" is doing a much better job making known and criticizing his actions.
That's not what Snowden showed. Like, not even close.
Clapper gave the correct, classified answer to Congress after the unclassified, televised to the public, hearing was completed.
That is certainly what Snowden showed. The usual sternlightian argument is to point out that they only collected it wholesale, they didn't actually look at it except through their keyword system. I do not find that particularly reassuring.
Nope. Still wrong. Please just educate yourself on this. I've been over this with you before. There's a nice PCLOB report and everything that detailed how it actually worked. You just need to read it. As a quick check to see if you have read enough to have any idea how any of it works, what is the meaning of "specific selection term" and what role does it play in this supposed "wholesale collection"?
Nothing, because "specific selection term" was about call data record collection, which they were doing wholesale (the "Pre-2015 Bulk Collection Program"). The PCLOB report claims that they've stopped doing that wholesale as of June 2, 2015, instead requiring only CDRs up to two hops of a "specific selection term".
Charitably, your comment is acknowledging that there is a difference between the CDR program and the program that collected the contents of internet communications. Moreover, your comment acknowledges that this conversation is about the program that collected the contents of internet communications. To all of this, I agree.
Now, you're telling me that you've read the PCLOB report on the program that collected the contents of internet communications, the program that is the subject of this conversation, and you can't find anything about specific selection terms in it?
Yes, those are obviously two different programs. The CDR program was actually revealed slightly before the big Snowden reveal, though I believe it turned out Snowden was the source of the earlier leak as well.
The NSA was tapping the communications between datacenters of Internet providers, and by doing so they obtained access to all such communications. Any filtering they did according to selectors was done AFTER they had the data.
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