Hacker News Reader

Comment by sarciszewski | Hacker News Reader

If I were to dedicate any time to helping anyone, I feel like my time would be better spent helping the Tor Project than helping the US Government.

I know I'm not alone here, either.

View on HN

Tor was started at the Naval Research Laboratory. There are smart, hard-working people in government service. The politicians, however, often have monied interests involved in preventing efficiency (pork barrel politics).

Because of the pork barrelling, you will definitely meet people at every level, but especially at lower levels, who play "rice bowl" politics:

"woah, there's paperwork to fill out for that, and it's my job to fill out that paperwork. Don't you do that until I fill out this paperwork."

Ok, how long will that take?

"I can probably have it done in a week."

It's a single half-sheet of paper, are you sure it will take a week?

"Yeah, maybe two."

But from the politician's perspective, a job's a job, so he'll have that job for a long time.

I share the philosophy, but a) this isn't volunteering, it's a job, and b) massively streamlining service delivery helps a LOT of people.

They're not facilitating spying or drone death, and they're actually cutting traditional overpriced shitty contractors from the mix, which is good.

There are a lot of really complex, systemic factors that can help explain why the government has gotten to where it is. I'll just note that on my project, I work with a lot of really awesome contractors every day.

Have you replaced any terrible ones? ;)

On the flipside, I'm not sure how much this vouch counts, considering you previously worked on the WP core and it takes a long time for the WP core to change anything (e.g. the minimum PHP version). Maybe your standards for "slow bureaucracy" and others' are different?

That's totally fair; I've done minimal work around government, and I don't claim to be an expert on this at all. I just know that successful contractors are rewarded disproportionately for their ability to navigate bureaucracy. Also, that was especially the case with healthcare.gov.

It's really not fair to lump all of government in with the NSA. "Helping the US government" in the case of the digital service means things like making it easier for immigrants to apply for a green card by building a web application that replaces paper forms. What the digital service is actually doing is helping US citizens receive government services more efficiently. Which is completely different from "helping the government" the way you phrase it.

> It's really not fair to lump all of government in with the NSA.

Does the US Digital Service hire people who strictly refuse to assist in any way with any of the operations of the NSA, CIA, FBI, DHS, DEA, or any other oppressive agency?

If so, I'd reconsider, but I don't think they would hire me under those terms. And if they did, they wouldn't appreciate me saying "Fuck off!" if they tried to assign me to one of the projects to prop up one of these agencies?

I can't answer that, you'd have to ask them but everyone I spoke to at the digital service said their work was specifically delivering government services to citizens. I don't think they work with the FBI, CIA, DEA, DHS etc. It's not a catchall organization that works with every federal government department.

Okay, thanks for the clarification. If I join them and suddenly end up unemployed/homeless, HN will know why.

> I don't think they work with the FBI, CIA, DEA, DHS etc.

Just a small note, immigration is DHS.

(Member of USDS) - The answer is no, sorry. We prioritize assignments based on their potential to do the most good for the largest number of people, and do not pressure anybody to work against their conscience. But we can't reconcile rigid individual pre-conceived ideologies with the need to run a coherent and diverse group.

Consider the opposite scenario: should we hire somebody who "strictly refuses to assist in any way with providing government handouts to undeserving moochers?" Such a person would be an obvious liability, given current priorities.

If I hired the first group and not the second, then we'd become an explicitly partisan and ideological operation, that still has to work with a Democrat administration and a Republican Congress. That's a whole new level of pain that I need like a hole in the head.

The broader USDS family is focused on delivering better services. But one area we're starting to focus more on is policy itself. One thing that struck me about the federal government is just how little internal harmony there exists between agencies. Just because the NSA does or says something doesn't mean everyone here agrees with them or even really has to support them. Because the USDS HQ team is located in the White House (and OMB), there exists the ability to engage directly with decision-makers and influence policy and (at least sometimes) the behavior of agencies.

Fwiw, the US Government is pretty big. And it's not like we all get secret decoder rings and meet up once a year to figure out how to trick the public in the next year.

There's a lot of organizations with a lot of different goals.

As I said in another post, the scope of my boycott is the entire government. :)

Up to you, of course. But I've worked with a lot of good people doing a lot of good work for the people of the world.

When Clapper and the rest of the SIC rots in prison for their lies against the American people, and Snowden and Manning are free, I'll reconsider. Until then, I'll walk my own path and do good my own way.

Why not boycott the US entirely, then? The American public is also part of the government to the extent that they vote and participate in public debate. And I'm sure most government agencies knew just as much as the rest of the country about what the NSA was up to before Snowden.

Best of luck avoiding roads, sewer, the mail, air traffic control, etc, and all their side effects :)

Paul Syverson (one of the authors of the Tor design paper - https://svn.torproject.org/svn/projects/design-paper/tor-des...) actually came by the GSA about a month ago to talk about privacy. The geeks are listening.

Until they indict James Clapper for perjury and grant Snowden immunity, I refuse to assist the government in any way beyond paying taxes.

http://www.hasjamesclapperbeenindictedyet.com

https://fas.org/blogs/secrecy/2014/01/clapper-ssci/

He didn't understand the question? I find that really hard to swallow.

> As a result, the Committee itself became complicit in an act of public deception.

Good, let's imprison them all for perjury then, not just Clapper.

No, they already knew the answer to the question which he fully understood, and he lied about the program because it was top secret, and they were using a public hearing to try and out the program. They already knew about the program and even so if they wanted to truly find out without breaking national security they could have held a closed door session.

I'm wondering about the sources of laws and norms about "oversight". On the one hand, Congress and committees have a subpoena power and individual members have an immunity for what they reveal on the floor. On the other hand, the Executive manages to enforce security clearance requirements against individual Congressional staff (not against the members themselves, I believe -- though they get them to follow procedures for information security that are analogous to what a regular government employee would do).

And the committee members seem to have a pretty strong tradition of keeping classified information secret -- but isn't that just a tradition? Couldn't a member just decide that the public ought to know something in particular and hence reveal it? Is it a tactical decision about hoping to achieve better cooperation with witnesses and sources in the long term?

(I'm also wondering where the whole concept and structure of oversight comes from -- I think historically and constitutionally it has to do with the budget power but it seems like it's developed pretty far beyond that.)

So you admit he lied to Congress and the American public, but think it was justified? What do you think would have happened had Clapper told the truth?

> "They chose to make these statements in public that weren’t accurate," Wyden added. "They could have declined to answer the question in an open hearing. They have declined to answer questions in an open hearing before. At that hearing, he declined to answer other questions."

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2014/mar/11/...

Declining to answer is the same as admitting it exists, which he wasn't permitted to do.

It is no matter anyway, the chairman knew the answer to the question before it was asked, and he just wanted to expose the program, which Clapper wasn't going to allow to happen. Just because you are able to chair a public committee doesn't mean you also have the right to expose top secret government programs you happen to not like.

In Citizenfour, Snowden specifically highlights Clapper's testimony as one of the factors that solidified his decision to go public. Clapper not only deceived the American public, he quite literally was one of the reasons the program was ultimately exposed.

And I'm glad it was exposed. Spying on every single one of your citizens' interactions and logging that information indefinitely in secret for later inspection has no place in a free society.

Re: declining to answer, other questions were presented in advance for that very hearing and declined in advance by Clapper – they were not asked, and they were not entered in to the record. See the parent Politifact article for sources. Did declining those questions expose secrets?

Most of what Snowden revealed wasn't illegal and metadata collection has been deemed OK long ago and written about at length previously.

> Did declining those questions expose secrets?

Unsure, but not relevant to the parent argument.

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals at the federal level ruled that the metadata collection program "exceeds the scope of what Congress has authorized" and is therefore not supported by law, i.e. illegal. This happened on May 7th, 2015 and is public record.

Great, but Clapper testified in 2013.

It was illegal then and it's illegal now. The circuit court didn't say "as of May 7th, 2015 this is illegal"; they said that the NSA exceeded the scope of surveillance authorized by Congress in October of 2001.

That isn't relevant to him having to lie to an open commission about a top secret program they already knew about.

You claimed the metadata collection program was "written about at length" and viewed as "OK". This is evidence from the judicial branch of the US government it is not, in fact, viewed as okay.

Paying taxes is by far the greatest submission you could do to support the regime. Taking the govertment's money to help social services is far more noble than sending the govt a check that is used to buy spies and bombs.

My thoughts exactly -- I would much rather be helping raise awareness of government surveillance and developing measures to abate it, instead of giving them even more technological power. The front-end of services like healthcare and immigration can be improved all we want, but that doesn't affect any fundamental change in the way things are done (it's a fancy website, but you'll still be waiting 5-10 years for your green card). I struggle to see why anyone who is technologically savvy would want to do this.

There's literally millions of pending green card applications. You don't think good IT would help?

On a much smaller scale, I still remember the thrill of renewing my vehicle registration online, as compared to the slow, slow, slow DMV.

Why do you want the government to be more efficient, so they can purchase more bombs, build more black sites to torture, have more cash to hand out to 'moderate' Syrian rebels?

You want to further empower a government which seeks complete domination of its citizens and of the world.

Let me guess- anarchist?

Does it matter? You have no real response than childish name calling. Instead you rather forget the awful crimes the US engages in on a routine basis, as if helping them free one hand isn't the same as assisting the other hand in murder and torture.

Since when was "anarchist" name-calling?

I have no real response because I have tried to have discussions with your ilk a million times and we will simply never see eye to eye.

It is a label, which combined with "your ilk" is not a productive tone to adopt.

To be fair, howterrible's tone is arguably far worse - he makes accusations that he must want [insert negative extreme not backed by evidence], and goes more in depth as with trying to connect silverstorm with malformed reasoning.

At the least silverstorm phrased it as a question in wait of an answer, which is a lot more civil than the outright hostile attack that aimed more to accuse than to enlighten.

That's a great point, good IT would definitely help. But it doesn't seem like we're making any real movement towards replacing the current bureaucratic mess with well-designed systems. Then again, I didn't know there were alternatives to the DMV until this very moment.

It's a big government. One project at a time... :)

I would disagree with that in the abstract. Delays in workflow can be addressed, or at least surfaced, by better back-end tech and reporting, and 18F's repos are public on GitHub.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com