We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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One law for them, another for you Almost uniquely amongst nations, the United States takes upon itself the super-ownership of its subjects even when they are not within the territory over which it claims sovereignty. Even if you live and work outside the USA, you are required to file tax returns and have US tax liabilities. It would appear Americans cannot escape the enveloping grasp of their government and its rules anywhere on this planet.
And yet as soon as you step outside the USA, even though US subjects retain their tax liabilities to the state, it would appear they loose any constitutional protection from its excesses.
Whilst in many ways the USA offers the world a splendid example of defended civil liberties, in so many other ways the freedom Americans assume is theirs is really an illusion.
The state is not your friend.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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The common-law tradition in this country is mixed on the issue of privacy with respect to NSA wiretaps. Kerr at Volokh has written more extensively about this, but, in short – the presupposition of extensive privacy rights against this class of wiretapping is not there in past court decisions.
Hell if they can’t even be bothered to give us the scant protection of some tame judge issuing a court order, then clearly the US government is out of control and the notion we are protected is, like the guy writes, an illusion.
Not quite true that a US person loses all constitutional protection. The difference is thus:
The NSA cannot spy on US persons (which includes citizens, but all immigrants and anyone inside the US, citizen, legal immigrant, or not). However, it is also equally the case that for many electronic communications, one cannot determine who is making them until they are captured and decypted, and one signal contains many conversations and communications at a time. The NSA could refuse to capture any signals that might contain, even as one of many, many messages and communications, something being communicated by a US person. However, they don’t; that would make signals intelligence work nearly impossible.
Purely domestic communications cannot be wiretapped at all without a warrant. This is, naturally, because of a guarantee that all parties, no matter who they turn out to be, will be inside the US and thus not eligible for spying without a warrant.
In the case of purely international communications, signals are allowed to be captured, but after capture, they must be decrypted and any communication from a US person must be discarded within 24 to 72 hours. This is an absolute legal protection against spying on a US person without a warrant, but not legal protection against having communications within a foreign area being wiretapped. (Since it is unavoidable that your conversation will be added to signals which clearly fall within the NSA’s purview.)
Now, while a US person has absolute legal protection against spying without a warrant, there is no absolute legal protection for the communications partner of a US person. In the past, communications whose endpoints were both domestic and international were not tapped at all, without a warrant for the US party. This mean, for example, that a known terrorist, whose calls were tapped in general, could freely make calls to any person inside the US who did not have an outstanding FISA warrant, without the NSA tapping them.
Apparently, that policy has changed. The NSA now allows tapping of signals travelling between international locations and domestic, with the proviso that the US half of the conversation must be discarded (and not saved) within 72 hours if there is no warrant. However, the purely international part of the conversation can be saved without a warrant– so long as the international party is not a US person. (Citizen or legal immigrant when outside US borders.)
It is thus untrue that a US citizen “loses any constitutional protection” once stepping outside its borders; one loses some protection, that against having a signal containing one’s communications being tapped, but one retains the protection against having that communications stored, records made of it, or being used.
“Almost uniquely amongst nations, the United States takes upon itself the super-ownership of its subjects even when they are not within the territory over which it claims sovereignty”
This is because American’s self-identity is based on ideology and not geography or inheritance. True Americans can come from anywhere but it is their devotion to American ideals that self-define them as Americans.
One of the side effects of this concept is that one does not cease to be American or have American responsibilities merely because one is outside the jurisdiction of the US as a political entity.
The NSA will prove to be much ado about nothing considering that the operation was conducted under the oversight of both congress and FISA courts.
Well my idea of devotion to the American ideal does not include allowing the US state to tax and regulate people worldwide.
I really don’t understand your opposition to spying by security agencies. Don’t you want them to catch terrorists, hunt them down and kill them, by any means necessary?
Americans don’t really have any Constitutional protection inside the US either. The difference is the the government still gives lip service (at least, much of the time) to the Constitution inside.
It is possible for an American to escape US taxes, but they have to take all their money with them when they leave and never come back.
Why would any sane American want to trade US taxes for British or French ones?!?
Because that is not the choice on offer. Unless there is a double-taxation treaty in place, you can end up paying both.
I got the impression that, thanks to the very close intelligence relationship between our countries, the NSA and CIA subcontract their spying in the US to GCHQ when it was politically expedient for it to do so, thereby enabling the US government to say that it doesn’t spy on US citizens without warrants, etc. That’s why about half of GCHQ’s budget is paid by the US government. However, I could have got hold of the wrong end of the stick. It’s always difficult to know what’s going on in the secret world, by definition.
“Well my idea of devotion to the American ideal does not include allowing the US state to tax and regulate people worldwide.”
For several years, I had permanent residence in Belgium, working for a Belgian company, and was paid in local currency. I paid all my taxes in the “community” in which I lived. My wife, a Dutch subject, had a U.S. Green Card, so was also required to file U.S returns.
In 1992, I attended an expat group dinner, whose keynote speaker was a Michigan Congressman. When the attendees raised the issue of double taxation, the congressman stated that he could not go back to his Detroit constituents and tell them that he supported allowing “rich” expats to “shirk their responsibility to their communities.” Jackass.
I allowed cooler heads at the dinner to prevent me throwing vegetables at that buffoon. I still regret my restraint. Damn parasite @*#^$%$#* *@*$^#&*@#% . . . .
F
The government of the US has been out of control since the hysteria surrounding the Depression of the 1930’s, followed by the wars which began with the Japanese attack of 1941 and which have continued around the globe all through the ’40’s and ’50’s, lulled until the Vietnam conflict of the ’60’s and ’70’s, and then picked up again in smaller venues until the Middle Eastern conflicts which began with GW1 in 1991, continuing to today.
During this period, the statist/collectivist theory of society, and the state’s pre-eminent position as the primary agent of social and economic justice, as been dominant. Many people don’t understand that the state of emergency declared during the 2nd world war was only allowed to expire in the ’80’s while Reagan was in office.
This particular intelligience activity by the NSA may or may not turn out to be legal, and even justified to some extent, but it is a flea bite compared to the enormous power and wealth that the state at all levels has gathered unto itself in bits and pieces over the last several decades.
There are so many rules, regulations, obscure legal provisions, and administrative processes buried in the myriad of laws passed each year, that there is no longer any aspect of human life the state does not intrude upon.
The amounts of money involved in this, and therefore the levels of corruption, influence peddling, and slush funding occurring, is literally beyond the comprehension of any ordinary person. Even though our currency is badly devalued compared to the money I grew up with, there are TRILLIONS of dollars being spent yearly, and no one has any idea where sizeable amounts of this money actually goes.
If, and it’s a big if, the citizenry can be roused to begin to question this situation successfully, and undertake some effective remedial action to reduce the size and scope of state power and activity, it will take decades to untangle the maze of legislative and legal snarls that have been woven.
My children, and my grandchildren, will face enormous challenges to sustain, and reclaim, the heritage of liberty that has been so seriously eroded by the prevailing doctrines of the 20th century.
Fortunately, like the Wizard of Oz, the man behind the curtain has been seen, and much of the smoke and flash that obscured these collectivist ideas has been exposed. A great challenge awaits those free men and women who will accept no less than a fully human life.
Almost anywhere. US citizens resident in the Commonwealths of Puerto Rico or the Northern Marianas pay only Commonwealth taxes and do not owe US Federal taxes. Puerto Rican taxes are similar to US, but Northern Marianas is a tax haven with very light taxes.
A trivial exemption, but perhaps one that can be expanded upon.
The program of intercepting telephone and internet communications of persons in the US to persons outside the US is perfectly legal under US law. Authority for this surveillance derives directly from the US Constitution under the Presidents powers to protect the US from foreign attack.
In fact, this very program is reported to have led to the capture of one Iyman Faris, who was in contact with Khalid Sheikh Muhammad planning to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge and possibly the Hudson River tunnels.
It is my belief that this program also helped greatly in tracking down and capturing the Khalid in Pakistan.
Now, what would have happened if this plan had been carried out?
This is not theoretical, this ACTUALLY HAPPENED, what would the alternative have been?
Ivan:
“Don’t you want them to catch terrorists, hunt them down and kill them, by any means necessary?”
No. Because that requires them to have an arbitrary power to determine who is a ‘terrorist’. Would you advocate the abolition of the rest of the criminal law–all that stuff about clearly defined offences, fair trials, constitutional protections and so forth–on the basis that the government can be trusted to do whatever it sees fit to deal with those it identifies as ‘criminals’ and we don’t like ‘criminals’?
When did “terrorist” become a magic word that the utterer could rely on to induce hypnotic suggestibility and uncontrolled rage in so many otherwise rational people?
Yes, legal. That was what the man said in his article in fact and that is exactly the problem if you share his (and my) utter distrust in the US (or any) government.
When did “terrorist” become a magic word that the utterer could rely on to induce hypnotic suggestibility and uncontrolled rage in so many otherwise rational people?
It’s following a grand tradition of “western” governments – anarchist, communist, terroist… in some alternative world views there’s environmentalist too.
Perry you are lowering the tone of the blog.
The word you want is LOSE repeat LOSE.
Loose means ‘not tight’ in which case the correct form would be ‘loosen’.
When the people of Britain went overseas to America and their government tried to tax them in order to help the war to keep the French out of America that was a BAD thing.
But apparently some commentators think that when American people go overseas and their government taxes them for no apparent good reason then that is a GOOD thing.
“Americans don’t really have any Constitutional protection inside the US either.”
What? I always enjoy being lectured from abroad about how Americans are being held hostage by our government. It ain’t perfect but I can’t point to another that’s any better. The Australians still have balls but it appears the British are content to become Belgians in the next 25 years. Sigh.
Now it’s your turn to say “you’ve been brainwashed!”
Sorry but that is just mindless nationalism. This blog constantly bemoans the state of British civil liberties yet you seem to think that if we therefore point out how things are far from rosy in the USA, that means we must think things in the UK are better? Wake up.