Absurd Law

Have you guys seen this?
It’s a good chuckle:

Basically, if the government does something illegal and it’s challenged as being illegal / unconstitutional, the courts can throw out the case for the sole reason that you weren’t supposed to know that the government did it. Very interesting, that.

I mean, of course you’d expect the government to come up with ways of legally protecting itself – it does have a monopoly on the law, after all. But to see it put forth so plainly…

One of the comments:

If a thief broke into my safe deposit box at my bank and stole my valuables, and I discovered the theft before he had time to dispose of the incriminating evidence, would it be a valid defense that the perpetrator did not intend for me to discover his theft until he had taken steps to get away with his crime?

:laughing:

Weird situation, but it makes sense in a way. Like for example, if you buy a bunch of cocaine from me, and it turns out to be baking powder, you can’t sue me- the court can’t take your side or hear cases concerning criminal events like that. So if they are saying that they can’t help you sue the NSA because you got your hands on some Top-Secret information you shouldn’t have, it’s probably along those lines.

Yeah, I would call that evil, and the judge to be acting evilly, at a minimum, through lack of self-knowledge or dangerous stupidity.

This basically means that if any part of the government decides to do somethign illegal it only has to protect itself by intending it to be secret. If they come up with a drug that erases your memory of the last 24 hours, they can knock you out, whisk you off to syria, torture you, maybe rape you for good measure, whisk you back to the US and then give you the memory wipe.

If you remember, they can say, that you were not meant to remember and they can prove this by showing on film they gave you the drug.

Of course with extreme rendition they don’t care if you remember.

He is using the governments intention to not let us know about the activity to defend its constitutionality. He is finding against the ACLU not against someone suing the NSA. And since when did intending to keep secret an illegal activity protect someone from it being an illegal activity. Imagine the guy Selling cocaine, when caught by the cops, saying that he intended to keep the sale secret but that the cops found out because someone was illegally filming the transaction, which took Place in his bedroom, along with his sex acts, and putting them out on the internet. Oh, it was illegal that this non-police third party filmed me doing this so you, the police, can’t do anything. Guess again. And then, of course, it has nothing to do with the constitutionality of it.

I mean, would we buy this defense if it was kill squads, skipping due process on US Citizens, because Snowdon revealed the secret?

Since forever, depending on how you look at it. if I break into your house and go through your personal effects, and find evidence that you’ve performed criminal activity, that evidence isn’t admissible in court. Remember, leaking NSA secret docs and such isn’t just frowned upon, it is illegal. It’s illegal for judges and jurists and journalists and so on to see this stuff or know about it. That’s what makes it complicated- it’s not just the Government’s intention, you getting your hands on a document labeled SECRET:AUSCANUKUS means somebody committed a crime, just as if somebody broke into your house and stole your hard drive. I realize that makes it very hard and seemingly unfair when it comes to investigating intelligence organizations, but nevertheless, that’s how it works. And just like there’s a vested interest in protecting U.S. citizens from secret courts and illegal activities of intelligence agencies, there’s also a vested interest in making sure that people who leak restricted documents (treason, you understand) aren’t encouraged.

I don’t know if there’s a legal loophole or some other way to interpret the situation; I’m no lawyer. I’m just saying, there’s definitely precedent for what’s being said.

As far as how we’d respond to kill squads- the law is still the law, it depends on who was being killed and why, eh?

No. It depends only upon who was killing whom and who is likely to find out.

Snowden made the information public. Once public, all information is admissible.

It’s against the law, that’s the Point. It is against the constitution. You can’t use the fact that they didn’t intend for people to know it was happening as a defense of a practice. You’re missing the Point here. The judge used other arguments to say it was really OK. I doubt these hold, but this thread is focused on the ludicrous defense that since it is intended to be secret and the only reason we know about is because of Snowdon’s illegal reveal, it is OK. That is silly. That argument could be used for any illegal government activity. Hence my Death squads example, to put the idiocy of the argument in perspective.

Death squads, by the way, are illegal. You can’t decide to assassinate US Citizens. Certainly police can make decisions in situ that involve deadly force, but you can’t send out a Death squad.

I find it odd you can’t see the problem with defending a practice by saying we shouldn’t really know about it. That is not a moral defense of a practice. And it is not a legal defense of a practice. It’s sour grapes that are unbelievably being presented as a defense of a practice.

Yes, you can, in the way that I described.  The WHOLE POINT of the problems with the NSA is that they are acquiring information about people in illegal ways, right?  You are worried that they will use this illegally acquired information to prosecute people, right?  You can't use illegally obtained information to prosecute people, right?  Top-secret documents leaked to the public [i]is illegally obtained information, so you can't use it to prosecute the NSA[/i].   I realize that the result of this is that you, in effect, can't prosecute the NSA for anything they don't want the public to know about.  I know it's asinine. I'm just saying that it does make sense legally, at least as far as I can tell. 

As long as it was uncovered through illegal means, yes of course. There needs to be a solution here. But the solution isn’t to just decide by fiat that sometimes it’s ok to prosecute people using illegally obtained documents…because that’s the very thing you’re trying to prevent.

I’m not defending the practice. I’m condemning the practice of using illegally obtained information in court. I’m just condemning it consistently…

I just want to say that I feel like the conservative in this discussion. Though I would guess a lot of liberals would agree. I don’t really Think there is much of an issue here.

I don’t think the NSA thing divides up neatly along political polarization. You get people on both sides saying all kinds of things, which is what makes it a fun issue to discuss.

This law is rational given that the (any) state permits itself clandestine operations. These operations, from what I understand, are not very well described by the involved agencies legal prerogatives, at best hinted at somewhat. There’ll always be a state within a state, a law for citizens and another for state powers and the two can’t mix.

What this shows you is the real rationale of the state, on which its hard power is built, instead of the moral rhetoric on which its soft power and social consensus relies. Of course the state is not going to allow a dissenting citizens actions to compromise its power beyond what is completely out of its hands. This ruling is a very explicit example of that.

Whether its’ absurd or not comes down to what you believe the ruling principles are, what kind of logical chain you’re knitting. From a straightforward ethical-constitutional perspective it seems absurd, but strategically and practically it would be absurd to rule otherwise.

You can not compare the state with a burglar, because the state is the agent that determines whether something is going to be tolerated or not. Ultimately the three branches of state are one.

It’s been surprising to me in the past how explicitly powerless the citizen is when facing the state here in Holland. A guy was recently killed by a bullet to the neck fired by a cop who tried to shoot him in the leg. The guy was unarmed, but he refused to comply with the police who thought he was armed. It was ruled that the officer in question had done nothing wrong. That seems absurd to me - he should at least be reprimanded for being a terrible marksman and not knowing that or something - but in situations like this you always see that the court kind of panics and takes the only route available to it that doesn’t create the risk of destabilizing an already unstable state authority.

The dissent and disservice of the whistleblower is the fundamental fact on which the state must orient itself, otherwise it lacks the capacity to follow through the logic of its power. Bringing any high ranking official to his knees (such as Nixon) weakens the the state and forces it to become brutish and insidious. Honor is of the greatest importance.

If you’re going to address the power of the state at all, you have to recognize that you’re addressing a fiction that’s been agreed upon as the modus operandi. The state is always “absurd” in its self-defense. After all, who is going to protect the authority of a supreme court if this court does not protect the authority of the branch that protects it? You can’t address power, which is nothing besides the will to enact itself and never receptive to lesser power, with appeals to laws, it will just change or reinterpret the laws. A revolutionary movement that appeals to laws is thus often damaging to the legislation, as it causes a struggle over the legitimacy of these laws. If a revolution does not kill the old system it will make it stronger for better or worse.

So my natural answer to this conundrum is that to influence the state, the citizen has only one option – appeal to the values as they live within the current population, and not to the document of the law. The law is a derivative of values. It can not create value or manifest them where other values have proven to be more important to the momentum of whatever is in play at any given moment. Laws can facilitate the production and propagation of the value genus they derive from, but time erodes the significance of laws, so contra-entropic forces have to be applied to government to restore its beneficial effect. To American standards, I am conservative toward the spirit of the law and retro-progressive toward the letter.

I know I’m right, but that doesn’t mean that no one of those who were ignorant of the grounding logic of a state has to acknowledge that. Just staying away after your points have been proven invalid is something everyone does once in a while, but as a rule its not graceful.

It is only an issue for God-wannabes.
“The highest purpose of the government is to maintain its power!!” (preached for years during the 70’s and 80’s)

…bullshit.

A state is all or nothing. That is the absurdity.
Absolute trust in the state is the only way for a state to be absolutely benevolent.
Why you ask? Because of the otherwise lingering incentive to suppress.

You know what else the govt can do? Something similar, but that encompasses more, that they’ve had up their sleeve for a long long time??

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_ … ted_States

See this is exactly what I mean. It was instated in 1976, by Nixon’s successor, obviously as a result of Watergate.
Look at what happened to Caesar was assassinated. “Away with the tyrant” was the idea, but what sprouted from it was a lineage of tyrants.

What’s the lesson to be drawn? The government is here to stay, in some form or another, and it must have security that it is carried by the majority of the people. That is always a prerequisite to stability.

The government is stupid, so it is not going to stop until it has the power that it feels it needs. It is going to increase its hold over public opinion if this opinion is radicalizing toward dissent. It is going to chill out somewhat if people get involved in constructive government work.

But the flaws in the system right now (from a perspective of human self valuing) can not be repaired without really stitching some issues back together to form a rational constitution. I’m a retro-constitutionalist, If the New Deal was a Constitution 2.0, I want a 3.0 that is more like the template of the first one. But it has to evidently include racial equality of rights and rights for women and all that. Gay marriage and stuff like that should be left up to the city or parish or whatever where they want to get married. All non-basic moralities should be left up to the region in which they’re practiced - for the single reason that if not, there will necessarily be a dissent in many many many parts of the empire. Dissent dies when the state is totally invisible except in the correction of three types of crimes - inflicting bodily harm, theft and lying in the courtroom. These are the only three of the ten commandments that make sense from the perspective of a state authority.

I think we can basically re-write the state like that. We can’t fight what it does now but we can fight why and how it will do in the future what it says that it does now. Its prerogative is to exist as justifying its own power. For that it requires justifying values, a constituency, a reflection in the form of a mandate. It will always value its citizens in terms of its prerogative.

The prerogative of the state is to have the permission to exist. Whether it does this by appealing to the values it was at its foundation meant to represent, or by simply forcing people to comply, is of course of grave importance to us humans, but not ultimately to the states logic. We, or our ancestors rather, have created this logic again and again. The logic has now acquired nuclear weapons so we are basically stuck with it. There has to be a state, and ideally, this state has the perfect mandate.

We are never getting rid of the state. If we try to get rid of it, it will try to get rid of us.

We are the state dude.