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Comment by nemo44x | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. The spectrum is owned by the public which is managed by an elected government of the people. If a protest were to be judged by elected officials, or those appointed by them, to be in danger of harming citizens then taking actions like blocking access to the wireless spectrum for communication and organization purposes would be within the public good. I should think they would explain why this decision was made.

Because these are elected officials or appointed by these elected officials, if the public found their judgement to be wrong or unfair, they can elect someone else to judge it.

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Public squares are also owned by the public and managed by the government. Does that mean the government should be able to pick and choose which viewpoints are valid enough to use the public square, for the sake of the public good?

They already do. You are given a permit and if it's judged to be out of hand and a threat to the public then they can and do force the crowd to disperse. This happens all the time.

So, one manner in which rights are violated is justification for another? The idea of that a "permit" could be possibly required to exercise one's "rights" is a nonsensical Orwellian sleight of hand - if something is a right, then one does not need permission!

Your comments seem to be advocating for democratic totalitarianism, which is directly opposed the concept of individual rights.

You sound like an anarchist.

If you want to organize a group of people to use a public facility you need to request a permit. This is so that proper actions can be taken to make the event safe and to ensure that others have not planned access to that resource for that day.

The state can not refuse to give a permit because of the content of the protest or organization - that would be a rights violation. However, if the gathering becomes unruly and dangerous to the public then of course it can be broken up. You are now violating the rights of others and that's where your rights end.

Society and civilization does not survive in chaos.

Any advocating for distributed power is going to sound like "anarchy" to someone thinking in a centralized paradigm. But despite our tendency to explain things by creating singular narratives, society is not a top-down entity.

"Dangerous to the public" is simply one of the standard refrains used by groups in power looking to suppress others under the color of law. It's easy to argue that dissent should be contained when you're part of the majority.

Democracy is distributed power. Dissent has its voice in a democracy but should also respect that it is a not a majority opinion. It should work to peacefully persuade enough of its virtue to become the oppressive majority. Otherwise it's totalitarianism.

Democracy is distributed voice, but its power is centralized. It invites every one of us to fashion ourselves as mini-autocrats, and then bicker over which specific top-down vision should be implemented.

> It [dissent] should work to peacefully persuade enough of its virtue to become the oppressive majority

The existence of my rights does not depend on my ability to convince a majority that I have those rights. Your assertion sounds like someone who comfortably enjoys the power of the majority, lording it over the oppressed.

> Otherwise it's totalitarianism

Democracy and totalitarianism are orthogonal, but most adherents of democracy seem to fall back on totalitarianism, because they mistakenly believe that having a voice is sufficient freedom. In actuality, tyranny of the majority is still tyranny. Which is why we have the concept of rights that can be appealed to beyond whatever the local mob decides.

There's more than one kind of power. Democracy has one power available to it - the ability to make people submit to the laws they pass and enforce.

There's another type: the ability to do things and reshape the environment in the ways you want. Call it "agency" instead. Democracy isn't necessarily conducive to fostering agency.

That's policing actions, not the content of the messaging. Obviously setting fire in a movie theater is something policed, because it's not a purely communicative action.

No offense, but, I would never want you in any position of power over me.

No offense taken but I'm not sure why my statement provoked a response like yours.

I stated that the people delegate these types of decision to elected officials. Their job is to protect the people. If, in some instance, they judged that a protest was in danger of harming the people and cutting cellular spectrum to that protest was the most effective method which could immediately relieve that danger, they could and should take it. And lastly, they should explain to the public why they took that measure.

The people can then judge if it was a good decision or not through the democratic process. Which I have apparently limited my potential vote count by 1 if I ever decided to run.

Because in practice it often doesn't work out that way. Republics and representative government, especially in their modern conception from the 18th century, were not simply a different way of appointing kings and their subsidiary advisors with broadly defined powers of "protection" over people under vassalage at their discretionary interpretation. Elections in most modern states don't confer that kind of supreme rule. It is the primacy of law, which constrains leaders from encroaching like that, and applied objectively to citizens in regards to their own rights and responsibilities that drives most countries you and I would probably say we'd like to live in. What you're describing isn't too tangibly different from the Spartan ephors.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/08/25/non-english-speak...

http://www.inquisitr.com/3428608/london-mayor-sadiq-khan-to-...

That's what effective method rational has resulted into. I would rather have them go by the book, than what they imagine to be effective.

The UK has a very different view of what "free speech" is. In effect the UK does not have free speech. This would be unconstitutional in the USA.

As for the first link, although it's absolutely crazy (especially considering that the "less vulnerable" people likely subsidize most of the police force) we do live in a society and someone has to make the decisions. These people are elected or appointed by the elected. If we don't like it we can protest and run another candidate and elect them.

It honestly sounds like pragmatism from a police force that has been decimated by budget cuts made by elected representatives whose electorate simply doesn't want to pay the taxes required to fully fund a police force that can service everyone. You can't have it both ways. If it bothers you then vote for someone who says they will increase the budget by other cutting programs you don't value as much or by raising taxes.

Take action through the democratic process to invoke the change you'd like to see and shape the world. The people passing policy you don't like certainly have and are the authority precisely because they have. But there's nothing stopping you.

Thanks. I mean it.

>Take action

I am, by speaking up here.

> Thanks. I mean it.

What do you mean?

"Their job is to protect the people" is a recent and paternalistic innovation. Better, IMO, is to write and uphold a set of laws that provide the best framework for human flourishing. This means deliberately not protecting people from certain risks, where the costs in terms of other values outweighs the benefits of risk reduction.

Like, the US would be safer if we confiscated every gun and made gun ownership illegal. It'd be a worse country to live in, though, according to our own values. It's not worth the trade - we care about more than simple safety.

I mean that in an immediate threat sort of way. For instance, if someone robbing a bank it's the governments job to protect the citizens by apprehending the suspect. It's not the citizens job to protect themselves from immediate danger.

Flooding in Houston - it is the governments job to help people to safety. It isn't their job to buy them a new home if they didn't purchase insurance.

In your original post you said "they [the authorities] judged". In the case of a bank robbery, it is the bank owners who are seeking protection of their property rights. It's not analogous to picking sides to stop a protest in the public square when multiple sides have a stake in it. The bar for abridging freedom of speech in the U.S. as a precipitating cause of immediate danger is very high.

I agree it would have to be an extraordinary circumstance. When a protest becomes violent it is no longer a free speech issue though. If jamming radio frequency communication was somehow the best way to stop a bad situation from getting worse then it would be appropriate to do so. But it should be justified.

Honestly, I struggle to come up with a scenario where jamming public internet access would be the best course of action. But hypothetically I don't see it as a violation of human rights to temporarily stop people in an area from communicating through the Internet on public airwaves if it's a reasonable and effective countermeasure to preventing disaster.

Honestly, I struggle to come up with a scenario where jamming public internet access would be the best course of action

Happy to hear it. But it's pretty important to me and I think most other people that any government vested with the power to do that be required to legislate - through legislative representatives into the supreme law, not via FCC or other cabinet regulations - an exact and generalized criteria that can't be tainted by discretionary judgment or classified information without criminal accountability. It's not easy to formulate - as it shouldn't be.

This sounds to me a lot like abdicating personal responsibility for physical safety to governmental organizations. Like, it's absolutely your job to protect yourself from immediate physical danger. Protecting others is supererogatory.

You're parsing now. Protecting yourself from an immediate threat is of course your responsibility. However, the government can hold the person liable for any harm they caused you. So immediate is a poor word as it can be easily misinterpreted and that's my fault.

What I mean for example is it's not the citizens role to form a mob and hunt down a suspected criminal. That's the governments role.

I disagree that "the US would be safer" if we had no guns.

Coming from a place where public ownership of firearms is banned, I can tell you that criminals can do what they want with just the might of their clinched fists.

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