If all they do is foreign activity like that, then no, probably.
But that's not what Schneier wrote. He specifically calls out indiscriminate bulk surveillance of foreign citizens as "overreach", even without making a distinction between U.S. allies and adversaries.
Again, I'm not interested in having yet another discussion about exactly which data the NSA is or isn't allowed to collect accidentally or deliberately on U.S. citizens. If you think there have been a paucity of discussion threads about that, feel free to start another one.
> No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
> Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.
What does this even mean?
> Article 25.
> (1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
Sounds pretty cushy.
> Article 27.
> (2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.
You're literally violating peoples' human rights when you torrent that music!
> Article 29.
> (1) Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.
What does this even mean?
The UDHR is a supremely silly document. It takes a grab bag of things that are desirable within a particular society, and elevates them to the status of human rights.
And in addition, it is written from the perspective of people who would like their particular form of society to continue unhindered.
As a variety of libertarian fond of endless arguments with multiple other varieties of libertarian, I know from many long and pointless discussion threads that the UDHR is not even consistent with itself. Article 25 implies that someone, a person not mentioned directly, would be violating "everyone's" human rights by failing to provide them with scarce resources at his own expense. It authorizes slavery and/or theft in the name of social security. As a human right.
It's fine as an aspirational declaration of principles, but as a foundational legal document, it sucks.
I also know from the aforementioned pointless libertarian arguments that a "universal declaration" of anything is doomed from the start. You're going to have a hard time even getting 7 billion freewilled humans to even agree that we all live on the same planet.
That's a bullshit response. Buried in the middle of his comment is a glaring contradiction in HN's supposed support of the UDHR: the document hints at freedom from surveillance (one might stipulate), but directly demands support for moral and material rights for authors and artists. Virtually nobody on HN agrees with Article 27.
So, rather than moving the goalposts: 'rayiner was rebutting the proposition that the UDHR demonstrates a right for people around the world to be free from any surveillance. Do you disagree with him? If so, how do you square it with this site's overwhelming support for piracy?
First, my response wasn't meant as argument, it was meant as inquiry. With his "citation needed" rayiner questioned the notion that privacy against foreign governments was a right, someone pointed at UDHR, rayiner gave some grounds UDHR shouldn't be used for that. My question was accepting that premise (here); it was not intended as a statement that we have to use UDHR if he failed to come up with something better.
Second, you should be entirely aware that not every participant on this site is obligated to hold the views of the majority.
The question about Article 27 is interesting. It's poor to focus only on the second part of it, though. The entirety reads:
(1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the
cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and
to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
(2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the
moral and material interests resulting from any
scientific, literary or artistic production of which he
is the author.
I would say I agree with it, but point out that nothing in the UDHR specifies mechanism, and I think that our systems which purport to be implementation of part (2) overreach in ways that interfere with (1) (and/or just generally suck). As it happens, I don't think piracy is a great way of dealing with that overreach, but what we're seeing in that debate is the tension between people wanting to protect a particular (possibly aggressive) interpretation of one right and those wishing to reclaim a particular (possibly aggressive) interpretation of another.
Sorry, I wrote poorly. My objection is to the "flight to abstraction" that always seems to happen on threads like this: you have a specific critique of the UDHR that we can actually get our heads around, and instead of pursuing it, the thread pivots to an abstraction that no productive discussion can occur around. I could just as productively suggest a universal right to hair coloring products.
rayiner responded to "people have a right to not be indiscriminately surveilled by every country that they don't live in" with "[citation needed]", which would seem to indicate that this should not simply be a moral position one would individually hold but should be backed up by some source. This would imply either the existence of appropriate sources or the non-existence of human rights (or at least human rights we have so far discovered). Demanding that we find sources he deems acceptable, without any insight into what he deems acceptable, may be good rhetoric but is not productive conversation, and I reject your characterization of my prompt for more clarity as the unproductive act in the discussion.
Edited to add:
You really think arguing about arbitrary other clauses of the UDHR would be less of a rabbit hole than trying to pin down what the participants in the discussion mean when they say people do or don't have rights?
I wouldn't. Human rights delineate rights by species rather than moral capabilities. I am willing to recognize, respect, and defend the rights of anything also willing to do the same for me. This proceeds logically to the point where I can rationally say that pulling the power cord out of an AI's computer is more analogous to an abortion than to a murder.
After sufficient analysis, I reached the conclusion that arbitrary capriciousness is worse than deliberate cruelty. It is worse to allow someone else to die as a consequence of your actions without ever considering what his life is worth than it is to murder him after deciding that his death is worth more to you. That seems a little out of step with traditional morality, but then again, that is what created the world in which we live now.
That's not a ridiculous framework, but I think your application of it is misguided. Unless you think that there exist agents with those moral capabilities that we're overlooking, or countries made up entirely (or even primarily) of those lacking those capabilities then "human rights" is a correct label, to a pretty good approximation for our discussion here and others are going to better understand what you mean if you use the term.
It isn't really a matter of who we may be overlooking. Though in that case, any species that passes the mirror test deserves additional scrutiny for its members to determine if they are or are not people. True AI does not yet exist, but it will, and once it does, we might want to have something better than Asimov's Laws in place. We might create new biological species. There is also the indeterminate probability of encountering personhood-compatible aliens.
The important thing about the structure is that humans are not automatically considered people with rights. The defining characteristic is the moral capability. If you cannot or will not support the common-law structure, it will not support you in return. That creates a significant burden on the civilization for identifying its predators and parasites, and deciding what to do with them, but we do this all the time anyway, in the form of criminal investigations and jury trials.
But in order to keep everything from collapsing on itself in the current system, you really do have to assume that all humans are people with rights until they have proven otherwise beyond all doubt, because even if they are not upholding the fabric of civilization today, they could start tomorrow. Species groups like great apes, pachyderms, corvids, and cetaceans show potential, but so long as you have to keep the crows off your crops with force rather than a politely-worded notice, they won't have any standing to complain when they get shot.
The primary case for a framework not specific to humans is AI, but I wouldn't rule out the possibility of an extraordinary mutant bonobo or business school graduate somehow qualifying as a person.
Sure. But then it remains the case that "human rights" is a good approximation, and I think we're not yet near enough the point that it ceases to be that consciousness raising is more important than effective communication - so I'd encourage you to at least accept (and possibly use) the term, except where explicitly marked as an aside.
My point is that its silly to hold the UDHR as some evidence of social consensus given how many on this board alone would disagree with many of its provisions, especially libertarians.
Ultimately, a right is more than an aspiration. Its a social norm so established that other people will defend it on your behalf. At the global scale, pretty much the only thing that meets that standard is the right of groups of people not to be exterminated by genocide. That's the only thing that will get the international community to take up arms.
"My point is that its silly to hold the UDHR as some evidence of social consensus given how many on this board alone would disagree with many of its provisions, especially libertarians."
Right, my intend had been to grant that (at least for this thread).
"Ultimately, a right is more than an aspiration. Its a social norm so established that other people will defend it on your behalf. At the global scale, pretty much the only thing that meets that standard is the right of groups of people not to be exterminated by genocide. That's the only thing that will get the international community to take up arms."
It strikes me that there is a tremendous gulf between use of "human rights" in the sense of prosecuting people for violations or using force to prevent them, where we need broad agreement to exist and want it made explicit; and use of "human rights" in the sense of "I believe these are things all humans are entitled to", which one would like to see elevated to the former level but might not be there yet. When we're talking about what our government's behavior should be the latter is relevant, as abiding by norms strengthens them.
Norms that aren't enforceable aren't "rights" they are aspirations or opinions. The UDHR has lots of aspirations, stating that people should be provided the basic necessities of life, but without real buy-in, those are just someone's opinions.
Moreover, talking about "rights" which are mere aspirations makes the argument of "we shouldn't do X because it violates peoples' rights" utterly impotent. "We shouldn't spy on other people because I believe that people are entitled to privacy." Okay, and your beliefs are special because? If you can't cite some concrete basis, either in law or broad and deep social consensus, you're just expressing your opinion, but trying to make it seem more authoritative than an opinion.
That's a good point. I would say that society is, or at least can be, what we make of it. In this area we've most of us given the decisions for surveillance and other hostile activity to politicians and bureaucrats. It doesn't necessarily have to be that way.
Wow! What a lawyerly thing to write! Without some authority ("Patry on Surveillance", anyone?) our lives are open to anyone with money or an agency to pick over, pick apart and monkey with.
Some rights stand on their own. In another, more civilized age, they were termed "God given".
Couldn't you make the same trollish comment about any human right? Say we are talking about your right to not be tortured. Would you be able to provide a "citation" in your defense? What would be an acceptable source in your opinion?
You seem to have skipped the most important part in your constitution: Human rights don't come from a piece of paper, they are not given to you by a government. They are innate.
If you really are an American, you will stop with the whole "Americans have rights, foreigners don't" argument.
Ok it's in the declaration of independence, but congrats for being a smartass:
"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."
There's no such thing as innate rights. Only the rights that we decide to give each other, define in some sort of governing document and then enforce.
You brought up a specific question about torture, I assume because you see it as an innate right to not be tortured. It's no such thing though, it's a right clearly defined by the 8th Amendment (in the US at least).
You can stomp your foot and declare over and over again as much as you want that there are innate rights, but just look around at the actual evidence in the real world and you will see that there is no such thing. The rights you have are the ones defined and enforced by society.
No joke, genius. By innate what we mean is that we should agree to protect them no matter where the person happened to be born. You sound like a sociopath, unable to grasp this concept that is intuitive for everyone else.
Basically the only right we've agreed to protect for everyone no matter where they were born is the right of a people to not be exterminated by genocide. That's just about the only thing that will compel the international community to act.
Now, maybe there are other things that you think we should agree to, but the fact is we haven't. So I don't know why you say that this concept is "intuitive for everyone else" when everyone else, quite obviously, hasn't agreed to your world view.
But that's not what Schneier wrote. He specifically calls out indiscriminate bulk surveillance of foreign citizens as "overreach", even without making a distinction between U.S. allies and adversaries.
Again, I'm not interested in having yet another discussion about exactly which data the NSA is or isn't allowed to collect accidentally or deliberately on U.S. citizens. If you think there have been a paucity of discussion threads about that, feel free to start another one.