Of course it will pass. The government will never willingly give up power and will only seek ways to expand it.
Of course it will pass. The government will never willingly give up power and will only seek ways to expand it.
"Today, corrupt politicians put on another dog and pony show while continuing business as usual. Is our democracy secretly a farce? Details at 11."
No. We cannot have our cake and eat it too.
We cannot have unprotected, open borders for decades, and then expect to identify and track foreign internal threats AND not provide the USGOV the means to detect and surveil.
We cannot assume that because we're an HN regular who thinks power corrupts (it certainly does) the cost of that corruption is greater than what we pay if/when a foreign adversary acts against the US.
We simply cannot fulfill our obligations to our citizens or our allies if we cannot protect our home.
We cannot have it all. Welcome to the ugly real world.
Ok, so let’s deport everyone who came in through said unprotected open borders. That’s literally why borders exist. To keep foreign threats… foreign.
Weird how the most prominent example of terrorism on American soil from foreign agents was perpetrated with completely legal non-land-border penetration. Seems like we have locals lot more dangerous than anyone coming through the land border with Mexico to work or seek asylum in the US. Actual foreign terrorists just aren't as ignorant as you want them to be.
In 2023, more than 160 people on the terror watch list have been caught illegally crossing US borders:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/number-pe...
Given that there are 600,000 who were observed entering but got away in 2023 alone, and more were likely crossing unobserved, there's very good odds that they are already here.
And yet we still only have the handful of incidents from foreigners, most of which come over legally anyway. Right wingers have been fearmingering about foreigners for decades. Are they just using illegal entry now when they didn't before and waiting a really long time? You do know domestic terrorism is just as common as foreign terrorism in the US, right?
Okay so your solution is: open borders and heavier government surveillance to balance it? Fantastic.
I think you missed the point.
Exactly, this "open borders" nonsense is a right-wing talking point, like "fiscal responsibility." It sounds great in TV interviews and speeches, but they mysteriously only trot out when there's a democrat in the Oval Office.
is that why the republican mayor of NYC is loudly sounding the alarm on this? my mistake, he is a democrat.
So… close the borders. Completely.
So what? Sorry but this is not even a bad argument, it's just not an argument at all. Most shootings are not in schools, so school shootings aren't a problem? Most drug addictions come from prescribed drugs, so heroin and fentanyl being sold on the street is fine?
Fun fact, "open borders" is a complete myth.
Well, our borders might be legally closed, but with 2.2 million people illegally crossing them from the southern border per year, that is the entire population of Houston, maybe it's fair to say they're closed but effectively open. Coupled with the fact that if you're caught, you can just say you're claiming asylum and you get to stay.
They are not "legally closed", they are controlled. A closed border permits no crossings, which is clearly not the state of reality.
The borders are legally closed everywhere except designated border crossings.
Complete myth is a stretch isn't it? "closed border" doesn't pass the sniff test either.
Those are not the only choices. A border can be controlled.
fun fact, no its not.
Fun fact, all those helicopters, horse patrols, infrared cameras, drones, aid groups, and vigilantes are fake news. Hacker news is better than this, everyone.
Good point.
"Borders with a lot of CVEs?"
No. We can. Protect the citizens' rights. Detect and surveil non-citizens as a result of open borders all they want, but don't trample on the rights of the citizens in the name of safety.
So lets give up the "destructive expansionist ambitions lead to global threats" part
Or, everyone could get off their asses and carry their weight as a citizen in a democracy.
Nihilistic dismissal of the right to vote is lazy.
Nobody said upholding your rights was going to be easy. Organization, affiliation, communication all take work.
Get involved in primaries, for either party! Fewer voters and even more power there.
Yard signs are cheap. Make your own. Make this an issue.
Or, if you need to hear it in Tom Hanks' voice: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-c_ctZ4lUCk
And belief that the masses organizing and voting can have power over Leviathan and its bureaucrats is delusional. They just keep pushing these policies and power grabs until they go through, and/or lie about the components of them. There's no practical check on deep state power such as this in today's so-called-democracy.
You would need some counter-elite faction that already has foothold on power to oppose current power structure. Revolutions (and that's what is necessary to change current policies) never come from the bottom up.
I don't think that American electoral systems allow proper accountability of political leaders. That isn't a criticism of democracy, it's a criticism of a two-party system with no ability for change from the outside.
Decades of a democracy that worked has created generations of complacent people who do not participate, follow the rules, and expect things to continue to work out as they always have. I highly doubt anything except absence of democracy will change this perception.
It's "our" democracy, not our democracy it seems.
The difference between a representative and a true democracy.
A representative democracy would require at least some politicians representing working cutizens.
We do have some of those. The only problem is that they have a rather unfortunate habit of dying.
As an engineer, what I want to see is metrics.
Bar charts for events the surveillance program helped with:
y = count of terrorist plots stopped, x = time bucket
y = cost of surveillance programs, x = time bucket
y = count of petty crimes caught, x = time bucket
y = count of total analyst caught abusing power, x = time bucket
y = count of total Americans profiles, x = time bucket
y = count of total world wide profiles, x = time bucket
y = count of illegal immigration caught, x = time bucket
Because of metrics, easy tasks in scrum/agile are transformed into monstrous little tasks, spanning five months. Same thing with law enforcement: they find some mentally deranged person in KS, lays a trap to ensnare him in terrorism charges. Yes, 'our dragnet' captured this many number of terrorists (that is, y).
This is not how Scrum, Agile, or metrics work. Incompetent management doesn't need to be generalized into some sort of indictment of things beyond incompetent management.
That’s how every response to this sort of criticism: when people criticize capitalism, response is “that’s not a true capitalism”. When people criticize policies of communist regimes, defenders of communism say that these regimes are not instances of real communism. When majority instances are not supposedly true instances of whatever-is-in-dispute, then one should stop coming up with it-is-not-true-X.
Well when what you're criticizing is a caricature and a strawman, it's perfectly reasonable to point out that you're in fact criticizing a caricature and a strawman.
Specifically, this is the no-true-scotsman fallacy. It should be noted a fallacious argument doesn't mean that a non-fallacious argument doesn't exist for the same claim.
What's to stop them from just making up numbers?
this was a plot point of The Wire, where the mayor ran on a campaign of reducing murders. The murder rate dropped--but a zillion other stats came up, because the officers were fudging the classifications of the crimes to try and achieve the metric goal.
Fictional, but it makes a poignant point about needing to deeply understand how metrics are collected and recorded to be confident in the conclusions drawn from them.
Like Idiotacracy, I believe the Wire is more Truth than fiction
They already do. Entrapment then reclaim they prevented a threat they came up with. Claim on a daily basis that they’ve prevented “hundreds” of 9/11 equivalents and no one presses for proof. Or when a new reporter that doesn’t know the rules does ask for proof, they get “classified for national security reasons.”
So, no. Please don’t give me BS charts and graphs to make it easier for fed-apologists to point and play security theater.
Absolutely.
Their metrics generating and promoting departments will have field day with this. Endless reports, case studies etc, a whole industry will pop up gorging on tax payer dollars for this "metrics" task.
Same
I am pretty sure if one wants metrics one will get metrics. Law enforcement, like corporate management nowadays, is big on metrics.
After all, the big enshittification of internet which is popular topic here is based on metrics of ad networks effectiveness.
While I'm always in favor of accountability and transparency, measuring success by counting things that didn't happen is very difficult even under the most benign circumstances. Mix in politics and careers and it's almost certainly guaranteed to misrepresent the goals and work being done.
Mass surveillance is antithetical to liberty, but direct, concrete harm is hard to identify.
The surveillance complex has been pretty good at using secrecy, and perhaps even good internal controls, to limit everyday impact.
How can we find real harms to win this fight? Or how can we get people to care?
The legal authority to surveil itself should be considered enough harm in my opinion. It fundamentally damages right to privacy, harm caused by the actual surveillance itself shouldn't be needed if the legal system is really designed to protect our rights.
> The legal authority to surveil itself should be considered enough harm in my opinion.
While I'm sympathetic to this viewpoint, one should be clear about the tradeoff. One of the government's primary duties is to keep citizens secure, from crime, terrorism, etc. That is the argument that is used to justify the legal authority to surveil. It's not enough to just say "protect our rights"--the whole point is that there is a tradeoff of rights. Protecting you against crime and terrorism is also protecting your rights--your right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, if nothing else. So one can't just say "no surveillance" and leave it at that; one has to make a case for why the existing tradeoff of rights is the wrong one and should be changed.
Also on the subject of rights, the US Bill Rights recognizes the need for things like surveillance, searches, seizures, etc. That's why the Fourth Amendment doesn't say "no surveillance, period". It just requires that there is a warrant that specifies particular information. So if the proper tradeoff is what the Fourth Amendment describes, that's not "no surveillance". It's just stopping the abuses of the warrant process.
I'm not proposing that we should go full absolutist and also revoke the power for law enforcement to request court-approved warrants that clearly outline what they need to investigate and why.
The laws up for discussion in this thread are largely there to give the FBI a backdoor to surveil the general public without requesting a warrant with clear details on what they're looking for and where they can look.
Personally I have a much higher bar than most and think view the tradeoffs of privacy invasion rarely worth it, though I also don't expect our government to protect me in any meaningful way and would rather depend on my fellow citizens for that instead. There's a whole discussion there related to the surveillance and military state we live in today, but that probably veers way to far off topic.
> The laws up for discussion in this thread are largely there to give the FBI a backdoor to surveil the general public without requesting a warrant with clear details on what they're looking for and where they can look.
Yes, if we restrict discussion to warrantless surveillance then I think the restrictions ought to be much tighter.
> I also don't expect our government to protect me in any meaningful way and would rather depend on my fellow citizens for that instead.
In some respects this is already part of our legal framework: for example, there have been multiple court rulings at multiple levels that the police do not have a duty to protect individual citizens from crime.
However, the public policies adopted by the government regarding crime can have a huge effect on overall crime rates, which in turn affects how much you
need* a means of protection other than the government's overall police powers. This is more a matter of state and local governments than federal, but even here federal policies have an effect.Also, I didn't limit government protection to police vs. ordinary crime. Government also has responsibility for national defense, border control, gathering intelligence abroad, preventing terrorism, etc.
Also, I didn't limit government protection to police vs. ordinary crime. Government also has responsibility for national defense, border control, gathering intelligence abroad, preventing terrorism, etc.
Sounds like we largely agree on the earlier points, this where it gets to my admittedly less common/popular opinions. I don't agree with standing militaries, if we're under direct threat and our people are willing to fight then the government's role should be to coordinate and supply this effort.
I also don't agree with most border controls, before enforcing solid borders we should have melted down the Statue of Liberty and sent it back to France (who ironically also doesn't believe in sending them your hungry, poor, or weak anymore). We continue to chase our tails attempting to close borders but never seriously consider the motivations leading to mass migration. If we can't feasibly close our borders we need to reconsider whether entitlement programs are worth the tradeoff and sustainable when someone can walk across the border and add to those budgets. I really don't mean to say I have the answer on what we should do, only that there's a fundamental challenge between wanting to ensure access to what we deem as core necessities when all it takes is physically being here and we can't effectively control borders.
With regards to terrorism, I'm of the opinion that terrorism can't be defeated through primarily military means. Terrorism is a form of psychological warfare against a population, you defeat that by not allowing one-off attacks to stoke fear and drive to over reactions. If we only learned one lesson from two decades of war in Afghanistan it should be that, when it comes to non-state actors, cutting off one head does in fact lead to multiple new heads popping up.
> I don't agree with standing militaries
The libertarian in me doesn't either. The realist in me isn't sure we can just stand them down in our current world.
> I also don't agree with most border controls
The libertarian in me would agree with this too, but only in the libertarian version of the US where we don't have a welfare state (which, historically, was the condition under which all previous immigrants to the US came here). You appear to have a similar view.
> I'm of the opinion that terrorism can't be defeated through primarily military means.
I don't think this is true. What is true that, to defeat terrorism militarily, you have to be willing to let your military do whatever is necessary to accomplish that mission, rather than hamstringing it with completely unrealistic rules of engagement. The French, for example, had no trouble defeating terrorism in Algeria militarily. They did it by, for example, not caring about how much civilian collateral damage was caused when the terrorists used civilians as human shields.
The obstacles to, for example, doing in Afghanistan what the French did in Algeria are political, not military.
> Terrorism is a form of psychological warfare against a population, you defeat that by not allowing one-off attacks to stoke fear and drive to over reactions.
Yes, and also by convincing the population, most of whom are not terrorists, that the terrorists are going to lose. If your military gets excoriated in the press every time a civilian is killed as collateral damage, then not just the terrorists, but the civilian population in their country, will understand that the terrorists are not going to lose--because you don't have the political will to defeat them.
To play devil's advocate, if good internal controls are preventing abuse, why start with the foregone conclusion that there must exist "real harms" to find?
Because the FBI has pinky promised to develop those and has consistently failed with violations continuing. There’s also plenty of technical reasons why “good internal controls” are a myth. For example, the CIA and NSA could help out the FBI by secretly trawling through that database bypassing all “controls” using exploits / back doors and sending tips from “confidential sources” and parallel reconstruction being used to prosecute.
Btw we also have similar problems with normal police officers misusing records to spy on spouses and whatnot and occasionally we find out about and the department promises stricter controls and reforms and round we go the merry go round.
How can we find real harms to win this fight? Or how can we get people to care?
Once issue is that people have to understand that even if you have nothing to hide, it doesn't matter. This level of surveillance is all about parallel construction. It's not meant to catch you in the act of doing something illegal, it's meant to give the government the tools they need to build (fabricate, even) a case against anyone they decide to target.
Another issue is the media, and how they will pretty much always toe the government line when it comes to law enforcement. Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers are way too easily painted an enemy of the state.
In general, people won't care until it affects them, and in all honesty, this likely won't.
Acceleration brrr
you mean spying on American citizens without a warrant?
That is NOT what 702 provides. 702 prohibits US citizens from being targeted (see: https://www.dni.gov/files/icotr/Section702-Basics-Infographi...)
Bwahahhahahahahahhhahhahaahhaahahahhahahahhahahhahhaahhaahhahahahahhhha
No wait, you’re serious?
Did you not watch the senate testimony? They have illegally spied on millions upon millions of Americans. For things as petty as “I think this girl likes me” or “I’ll show my father in law!”. No punishments much less termination or what you or I would face: jail.
So yeah, that link is a joke. There are no protections against corrupt law enforcement.
Even if the local spying somehow stopped and the billions spent on data centers were shut down, we have the 5 eyes and many eyes programs to reinforce it.
They have “legal” cover by some secret document. It’s easier to fool someone than tell them they were fooled.
absolute power corrupts absolutely
there is no non-corrupt agency
In practice, it provides for parallel construction in order to conduct domestic surveillance of US citizens by bringing a secret action against a foreign correspondent.
If the HPSCI version passes, it will be legal (and presumably, automatic) to target any non-citizen or permanent resident traveling to the US and search "one end foreign" 702 data on them.
Of course, if they're traveling to the US, it's much more likely that they're communicating with Americans (e.g. visiting friends). Which means that scrutiny of Americans' conversations, swept up en masse, will dramatically increase.
If that passes, tell your friends not to visit America. Because if they do, then all your conversations with them are totally fair game for secret government review.
In the old days hackers knew about Echelon and how the five-eyes traded data back and forth so they both didn't "technically" break their own domestic spying laws.
And spying on citizens not suspected of a crime.
There's a potential subversive in each of us! Think of the kids! How will we stop school shootings if we don't spy on the terrorists before they spy on us? How will we know your shoe is unbombed? Freedom ain't free, you know.
The FBI director straight up admits that they violate the 4th amendment routinely, and then begs Congress to not ruin their precious workaround. And yet they will face no punishment whatsoever.
Like another commenter said, many people were probably unconstitutionally charged via parallel construction thanks to this crap.
FBI director in his exchange with Senator Lee [1] claims this : the case law shows that 702 doesn't violate 4A. However, Sen Lee retorts back with 'FISA court doesn't even given standing to people who wants to litigate this'. So, Secret courts, lack of standing is what the relevant case law boils down to: if people are not permitted to litigate, no case law is established or challenged.
Probably some ridiculous claim that "at the time of the founding, they had no way of knowing how readily accessible data would be." Surely, finding 100x the information with 1/100th the effort compared to then must be 4A-compliant.
What ever protections the constitution may have provided in the past have been eroded away to nothing starting with the Massive Expansion of the federal government powers from the Wickard case, everything is down hill from that time period.
We no longer have a Government subservient to the people, we have a people subservient to an unelected bureaucracy.
Free Speech is the next target and it is well on it way to erroding that last freedom using code words of "mis Information", "Hate Speech", "Authoritative sources" and the like
I'd argue the Federal government saw some of its greatest expansions during the civil war, and immediately following. Seconded only by the early 1900s. Ever since the civil war, OG America hasn't existed. The Confederacy was the more original of the two in spirit. But of course, all of the good aspects of the south are clouded by the false claim that the war was over slavery. I'm not pro-slavery, but I'm also not pro-north.
The problem with parallel construction is that it implies the defendant is guilty. However, when individuals have secretly accessed the source of evidence, there is a potential that they planted / altered the evidence that they subsequently "find" through a parallel construction. The prosecution inevitably then suggests that the defendant had sole custody of the resources (which is no longer true) and that anything found there must be theirs.
Or, they simply left the door unlocked when they left, allowing unknown third parties to also access.
Betteridge's law of headlines: any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word "no".
Worsidge's headline:
"Can this headline be answered by the word 'no'?"
Headline: Is Betteridge's law of headlines correct?
Pay careful attention to who is not on that list that opposes section 702. Microsoft, Google and Apple. If they really cared about privacy on their platforms, they would have made that known at some point before this vote.
Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc are also putting up a spectacular dog and pony show in order to convince you they carr about privacy. They don't.
this is tempting but, I think the answer is complicated. You happened to list them in the order of some spectrum ! "surveillance capitalism" seeps out like sewage, but two of those companies are older than the Internet.
No.
aka Betteridge's Law of Headlines.
But we all know that. And it is so much more characters. HN was struggling already.
The FBI has become little more than the enforcement arm of the organized white-collar crime system run out of Wall Street offices with the active support of the White House and the Congress.
This is why, despite the FBI's sweeping surveillance powers, no coordinated prosecution targeting the subprime mortgage fraudsters who brought down the economy in 2008-2009 was conducted - instead, they were all bailed out with taxpayer dollars in a coordinated Republican-Democrat left-right operation. In contrast, little Iceland put 39 of its top bankers in jail for their role in that event.
It's true that an entity like the FBI is needed to police white-collar crime, because otherwise corporate conflicts over market share etc. would soon escalate into violent conflict (e.g. Mexican drug cartels, Prohibition-era alcohol distribution gangs, etc.), but they've become an organization that does more to protect the extremely wealthy white-collar criminals from prosecution than to gather evidence that would put them in jail. The fact that top-tier FBI officials so often 'retire' to lucrative private positions in Wall Street firms should serve as solid evidence that the organization is corrupt.
As far as why they want to retain warrantless surveillance powers that don't require them to go before a judge and leave any kind of evidenciary record in support of that surveillance, well, would STASI have wanted to do that in East Germany, either?
Trump's mentor Roy Cohn was directly involved in the Lansky gang and their blackmail of Hoover. FBI repeatedly ignored and covered up Epstein victim reports and countless other similar blackmail rings. It's about control, not safety, and phones just made it scale.
Meanwhile it is completely legal for the US alphabet boys to spy on foreigners. They don't need any warrants or anything like that.
If you're living in the West then you're in American jurisdiction for all intents and purposes - if they are interested in you - they will get you. And you have no rights or protections whatsoever. Your own government won't protect you.
My country has extradited our own citizens to the USA before and will do that again.
It really sucks that there's no second democratic pole. The only alternative to this is to live in an authoritarian country like Russia or China where you have even fewer rights and freedoms.
Does the vote really matter? Will the FBI actually stop their unconstitutional actions?
Hint:
No.
I hope that the Government Surveillance Transparency act gets some legs. See: https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-daine...
At least in turn, we could get a level of insight into how much these warrants are used, and keep those in power accountable.
Spoiler: no.
US? Stop spying?
That's a textbook case of "lol. lmao even", if I've ever seen one.
Spying in the Land of the Free®?
Paranoid government will do what paranoid government does. They jump on any improbable event to justify the paranoia.
Governments regularly do this. One of the greatest losses for privacy advocates over the last generation is this brand of nihilism making the issue electorally useless.
s/regularly/rarely
It's a generalization, there's always occasional exceptions to the rule.
The point is it’s not a rule. It’s a meme that results from misunderstanding the bureaucratic imperative and oversimplifying into a monolith the complexity of politics and power competition.
The amount of written law in the US gov has grown exponentially since the 1970s.
https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/20190903_R43056_5083d3b...
The only time it slowed has been during brief gov shutdowns. As this report explains this includes plenty of non rules and administrative stuff and does count repeals but anyone who has followed Congress knows that the bulk of those bills is new spending and new rules imposed on civilians/business. It's rarely ever reducing the scale of gov.
And to repeat another post I made recently, the staffing and funding for US federal regulatory agencies has grown near exponentially since the 1970s (edit: or more accurately a consistent upward trendline)
https://regulatorystudies.columbian.gwu.edu/sites/g/files/za...
Why should the government be shrinking when our population and the complexity of our society + economy is growing?
They should be minimal in their powers over the people and the bureaucratic waste they produce, but that doesn't mean they are shrinking. They can grow their administration workforce to accommodate the growing population and economy without adding new powers and while gaining efficiencies. Plus, the federal government should be very minimal, while not infringing on state's rights, which isn't the case any longer, unfortunately.
Sure, the disagreement stems from one’s presumption of what “minimal” means.
Minimal is defined in the Constitution. It explicitly says we give the federal government limited powers and no more.
It defines a proscribed set of powers but doesn't say the use of those must be minimized. On top of all of that all the powers currently used have either been ruled constitutional, are untested extensions of tested uses of powers, or haven't been challenged/are currently being challenged, we can all have our own opinions about what the Constitution does and doesn't allow but within the system defined the only opinion that directly matters is the Supreme Court's. Everyone else's only gets filtered through their selection and ... optional shall we say extra-constitutional means?
Ultimately my stance is the founders weren't perfect, their creation isn't some mystical perfect system handed down from on high [0] so we shouldn't weld ourselves into some imaginary form of what precisely they would or wouldn't want. They're dead it's our country now we have to live with it in a world they couldn't even imagine. Even the groups that do try to lay claim to the founders original vision are cherry picking their favorite version of the founders and their ideas.
[0] Remember their first try at it, the Articles of Confederation fell apart in 4 years and the Constitution was a broad overreach of the mandate that the convention was even convened for.
I agree that it is our country and we get to shape it as we wish. But we should build on what came before. The Constitution is pretty damn good but obviously not perfect. I believe that the identifying feature of the Constitution isn't so much the words on the page but the underlying message. The whole of the Constitution espouses an idea that we, as a people, and individuals will agree to live under laws of the defined government IF the government stays in the bounds defined in the Constitution. If the government breaks their end of the deal all bets are off. In that sense SCOTUS constitutionality rulings are meaningless. If ruled constitutionality is different than the people's understanding of the Constitution it creates a sense of tyranny. If there are too many rulings that people feel are unconstitutional they will not tolerate it. The Constitution says it is the right of the people to replace their government. It doesn't say it has to be peaceful.
I would much rather see people participate in their own governance and take back control of the government peacefully before it is intolerable. However, history makes me fearful of a possible violent upheaval.
We are building on what came before, the decision for a more powerful federal government isn't particularly new. Pooling the resources of the many states has a lot of benefits (and the states traditionally opposed to that benefit the most from federal dollars).
Those are all explicitly extra constitutional and the ones I euphemistically referred to. The methods for changing the constitution systematically within it's own rules are through Convention or Amendment.
I'd be more charitable to the devolution of powers if the expressed preferred outcomes of that devolution of power didn't so often tend towards the repression of various groups. There's the OG slavery, segregation, voting rights, and the modern day antitrans/gay panics and to gut things like the voting rights act to prop up gerrymandered governments... but now we're tending towards topics that wind up [dead] due to flame wars.
One of those powers is to rely on interpretations of the Constitution by SCOTUS and to pick SCOTUS’s interpretation when it comes to conflict with an HN commentators’ interpretation.
So this is still just putting the cart before the horse.
I was expecting to find that federal employment has grown faster than the US population, but it looks like that's not the case. Since 2000, the federal workforce seems to have grown about 14%, while the overall population increased by about 20%.
If you go back further it’s even more stark - there are 5% fewer Federal employees than there were when Clinton took office, overall population is up 30% and real GDP is up like 120%:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1cCLR
I wouldn’t imagine a government needs to scale proportionally to the population much like a business shouldn’t need to scale proportionally to its customer base. Most businesses should be able to handle twice as many customers with fewer than twice as many employees.
You may be assuming there isn't a connection there. Could it be that our society and economy are growing more complex because the government continues to grow?
More government agencies and employees create more rules. More rules almost certainly play into the growing complexity of both our society and economy.
Population growth is nothing new, its only the last 60-80 years that we've really cranked up the size of our government.
I am absolutely confident that our society and economy aren’t growing more complex exclusively due to government growth. The whole virtue of capitalism is that it finds increasingly niche ways and outright novel ways to change the world, that’s by definition net new complexity. I’m comfortable attributing the vast majority of complexity growth to that.
Not only is the population growing exponentially but one would reasonably expect the complexity of the overall economy would go up exponentially even with linear additions to the population (each new person is N new possible economic relations).
I can’t believe this argument is being made in good faith, but just in case: do you not realize that the number of laws need not scale with the size of the population? Especially when that growth is less than an order of magnitude?
I said size of the government, not size of the code. Both were mentioned in GP's comment.
It's a real shame. Legislating isn't a full-time job naturally, but we've made it so by turning it into one of the most lucrative careers. We judge congress perversely by output of new laws.
Most legislative action happens at the state and local level where it’s not particularly lucrative.
If anything we should probably make it more lucrative so that the already well off aren’t the only ones who can afford to do it.
Even federal legislative service isn't lucrative.
Biden made the bulk of his wealth only after being vice president and writing books / speaking. And he was a senator for multiple decades!
Being a federal senator is a middle class salary: https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/politics/a31265187...
Presidents make ~$400k.
And before someone points out the "ancillary" financial benefits to being a legislator: (a) most of those are illegal if discovered & (b) typically the big money is made after retiring or losing office, by leveraging connections.
I absolutely agree that the U.S. government has gotten more powerful since WWII almost monotonously. The times of honest reduction were in the 1990s and, potentially, now.
That said, I would be careful about conflating the volume of rules and staffing with power. The bureaucratic imperative will drive a bureaucracy to expand. But it also does that to others, the net effect being a lot of intragovernmental arguing that diminishes the state’s actual power.
That doesn’t make the bureaucracy less annoying. Just less powerful. In fact, part of the present problem stems from it being easier for politicians to create blocking bureaucracies than to liquidate the ones they don’t like.
what are rules, but merely (legal) attempts to make the rule-maker more powerful ?
You've got to be kidding me. Here's one: coordination. Everyone drive on the right. That wasn't done to make anyone more powerful; it was done to prevent stupid crashes.
Here's another rule: don't fly you plane past its spec. That isn't to oppress the pilot. It's because the plane wasn't designed to be flown harder.
One can explain the phenomenon and understand the history yet it's not wrong to say governments (or any other large org really) rarely give up power and only ever do so under coercion.
It’s incredibly wrong to say this. More modern states fail due to gridlock and fragility than violent coercion.
Individual actors rarely give up power without coercion. That doesn’t mean the system as a whole doesn’t ebb and flow as interests diverge and align.
Why are you LARPing based on first principles? Just give examples:
* Trump's First Step Act. E.g., title III-- can no longer use restraints on prisoners during pregnancy-- and IV-- reducing mandatory minimums for drug felony convictions
* Trump's Affordable Clean Energy rule which removed caps on emissions
* Clinton's repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act back in 1999
* Carter's Airline Deregulation Act back in the late 70s
* the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963
If I searched my memory for five minutes a day I'd have a list of hundreds by the end of a week.
I get that domain expertise doesn't magically apply outside a domain. But how is HN this special level of asinine when it comes to the simple history of legislation in the U.S.?
Reading the thread with your interlocutor is like reading someone claim that C only has global scope. What could they possibly have read to convince them of such a thing?
The Patriot Act (2001), The Homeland Security Act (2002), The Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) (2002), The National Defense Authorization Act, The Affordable Care Act (2010),The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) (2015), The Real ID Act (2005),The USA Freedom Act (2015), The Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity (2021), The Economic Stabilization Act (2008), The Executive Order on Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity (2013), The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) (1978), The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) (1994), The Bank Secrecy Act (1970), The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (2002), The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (2008), The Executive Order on Protecting Public Health and the Environment and Restoring Science to Tackle the Climate Crisis (2021), The Executive Order on Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity (2013)
FISA is an example of what you are arguing against, unless you are arguing that is a net increase in power because the restrictions on government power came packaged with a government power to prosecute government agents who violated the new limits, which is kind of silly.
(You may be confusing the 1978 act with the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, the War on Terror act undercutting the FISA limits, which is kind of like confusing the 18th and 21st Amendments.)
Nobody claimed governments never expand their powers. The contested statement was "government will never willingly give up power." Examples of governments curtailing their powers were provided. That they also increase their powers is unremarkable, uncontested and frankly obvious given you can't decrease something that was never increased.
Wait, I thought pithy statements containing some element of truth counted as theses? They were oversimplifications all along?
what are some recent examples of governments giving up power?
I’ll pick a negative one: antitrust. Government retreated from its enforcement duty and powers for a few decades. In the vacuum, private interests asserted themselves.
Great example. Another one is state governments joining a union or federal system, such as US states joining the Union or European states joining the EU, and becoming bound by federal/EU law.
This doesn't really count as freely joining, since half of them were forced to join by a bloody war.
In the South, do they generally consider themselves as forced to re-join the Union, rather than having been forcefully prevented from leaving?
I don't think it is revisionism and maybe I am wrong on this, but wasn't it the Confederacy who attacked the Union at Fort Sumter which kicked off the US Civil War?
It's my understanding the Union was more or less ambivalent to the Confederacy and figured they'd let things lie then the Confederacy attacked.
I don't know enough history to say whether the Confederacy was forced to re-join or whether the states asked to rejoin in light of their government collapsing (Davis fleeing Richmond, etc). My guess would be that it was more of a failed state situation where the US had dibs on propping it back up.
Let's not forget that other half joined freely a different union. So the argument doesn't change at all.
What? Joining the EU absolutely increases government power. It lets the government do things by saying "europe makes us".
Or lets the local government or whatever party say "ohhh how wouldn't we have increased your well-being if not for them darn Europeans so just elect us one more time then we'll show them for good". And this line works so well, regardless if the respective party did or tried anything on the European level or not. It's the cultivated helplessness in some circles, that EU was some remote and abstract place where "things" happen and no one, not even your own representatives there, can move an inch. Same whether you're German or Luxembourgeois, it's the ideal material for promoting your own party and keeping the voters dumbed down.
That's an interesting way to look at it; governments merging into even larger entities is them giving up power?
The "government" isn't a unified mind. It's a group of individuals looking to further their career and (rarely) pursue a cause they care about. If two governments merge their law-sets into one, they aren't losing anything - the people involved are simply being promoted and gaining a broader peer influence with more vertical growth opportunities.
YIMBY reforms
Weed legalization (NYS doesn't count)
Gun laws
Weed legalization is just trading of one authority for another. The government expects to be able to exercise their revenue collection authority over it in exchange for their authority to ban it.
That's true in the no-homegrow states, but it's a significant new set of entitlements.
Also, the gun stuff is a huge win for reduction in state power.
We have a whole category for it in the US and one of the two major parties devoted to it: Deregulation.
Boy, they got you good! There's no such thing as "deregulation." There's only rearranging regulation to protect the incumbents against competitors which would try to arise in an actual capitalistic system.
It sounds like you’re joking, but I can’t tell. Of course, there is such a thing as deregulation, it has a definition and history that doesn’t match your operative word choice of “rearranging”.
To your point, I have no doubt that some deregulation has been spin for regulatory capture and/or anti-competitive behavior. Unfortunately, perhaps especially for the environment, that’s not an accurate summary of all deregulation, nor of the US conservative party’s official stance on regulation.
https://legiscan.com/US/legislation?status=passed
A few times this year in the US at the federal level, for starters.
One could argue that every peaceful transition of power is the current government giving up power to the next government.
Even Roe v. Wade was a “giving up” of power by the federal government to guarantee a right to abortion nationally.
Does revoking a previous ruling really count as giving up power? The government had the power to say this is banned. They still have the power to say this isnt banned. It doesnt seem like any power has been lost. They just decided to use it in another way. They could change the decision tomorrow. That wouldnt be any more or less power. They are still using it to enforce their rulings.
Yes, removing a limitation counts as giving up power.
Didn’t you see the Portland Oregon thread earlier? Oregon has done a ton to legalize drugs, muzzle the police (can’t pull people over for ghetto cars anymore as one small example), and generally reduce the amount of power that the government has over your day to day life. Ron wyden tries every day to reduce mass surveillance and similar risks for Oregonians
You do get governments willing to give up power if you elect progressive democrats or libertarians. Republicans lie hardcore about wanting to do this though. Republicans used to be the party of federalism, now they’re the party of “unitary executive theory”
Anyone with the idea that governments never give up power is so pathetically unobservant that I honestly don’t want them voting in our elections.
Interesting that you have a carve out for progressive democrats but all Republicans are bad. There are "unitary executive theory" camps in both parties. Seems to be a more dominant idea in the Democrat party than Republican from my view. Democrats vote as a block on almost every bill in congress. Democrats have also been behind most expansions to executive power in the last 100 years.
They also carved out an exception for libertarians, which in the US are basically all republican.
The border.
Nihilism and expressions of futility are not the same thing, fyi. In this case, if the original poster were nihilistic, they would not care one way or another about privacy. It would be meaningless, like everything else.
And the original poster remains correct about power. Power is never willingly given up by an institution (it can, however, be given up by individuals, when they decide that there is something more important than power). That is why we (assuming USA, here) have divided government, so power cannot ever be concentrated in any one branch. In this case, the hearing on 702 is being held by one branch, congress, to decide whether to limit or expand the power of another branch, the executive. It’s an important distinction; without that separation there really would be no hope to restore basic privacy.
The self checkout tsa is the opposite.
Only because we have been boiled to be ok with it.
It used to just be x-ray and a bag scan. Now it is a backscatter plus a pat-down if required plus a bag scan. If you get flagged on either, your hands get swabbed down as well. The tech and number of searches is only going to increase over time as more contracts get in on the TSA grift.
I have zero doubts at some point they will also begin domestic device scans ("just plug the handy USB-C into your device and hang tight for a few while we ~~download all its contents~~ search for terrorism!) like they already apparently do for international flights under the guise of national security and making sure you aren't plotting something.
The self-service TSA booths are to save money on their minimum wage security staff, not to relax security. It increases the amount of surveillance they can pack in by putting you individually through a chokepoint.
Think of what you could do if you could lock people into a booth by themselves as they do tasks to be let out. I am being a bit hyperbolic but singling out a person in a potentially enclosed box opens the door massively to techniques such as strip searches (you don't even have to move rooms, how convenient, thanks TSA!) and illegal searches (ugh, really, just let us do it. It'll take 3 minutes and besides, no one will ever believe you that we asked because it's just us here), etc.
Then you get into the fun tech that is opened up by having a person isolated such as bomb detection through analyzing residue in the air, far more cameras that can be analyzed by AI/ML ("your left eye twitched 27% more than average: TERRORIST") and analysts at scale, mandatory facial recognition and other biometrics collection (a big issue with facial rec is making sure no one interferes, it's very easy to detect a face when there is only one in the room and you can have the perfect solid color background)
Hey kids, welcome to the TSA escape room! Can you solve our puzzles before you miss your flight?
I am aware I am mildly dumb. Metal detector! Hah!
Discard this attitude. It is defeatist resignation, and it is indistinguishable from the opposition.
3 month old account pushing unproductive defeatist nihilism. If you pay attention you'll see this in every thread about the US and users somehow think it's worth upvoting.
American Exceptionalism means the power is derived from being able to make exceptions to the rules.
That’s clever wording but I think it isn’t right? I thought American Exceptionalism was the belief that the US is an exception to the rules.
Actually, the idea that being an exception to the rules and having the ability to make an exception to the rules are the same, or one implies the other, is pretty interesting and might be worth elaborating on.
Not true at all. This isn't Game of Thrones.