From net neutrality to digital privacy, Congress does diddly | Hacker News Reader

From net neutrality to digital privacy, Congress does diddly

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100 pointsevo_964 comments

Even if Congress were paying any attention to what constituents want (and they rarely seem to), it’s laughable that such a small number of people are expected to faithfully understand the wishes of so many people. Right now it’s on the order of one million regular people per representative!

Moreover, with such a small number of people, buying them becomes “easy”; it just doesn’t take that much money to corrupt a few hundred people. If most people need to work their entire lives to reach a million dollars, does it really take much for billionaires to steer the ship?

Now, if you were to vastly increase the number of representatives, you’d solve both problems. Suppose there were 5,000 members of Congress; then it would take a lot more money to corrupt enough people to change outcomes, and each of them would have to represent a much smaller fraction of the population.

A huge number of representatives would’ve been impractical before the age of the Internet (as you’d need a stadium just to hold a session) but with secure remote access it’s quite feasible to have tons of people logged in at once. And heck, why not designate a Congress-stadium anyway, for rare in-person sessions? If it works for mega-churches, it can work for politicians.

...or because the positions are smaller (and even less salient), it becomes easier to buy off a bunch of smaller reps. If the rep for Chattanooga is corrupt, would you know? Do you even know who they are, right now?

I'm not aware of any academic research on this off the top of my head, but it must exist, that's probably a better reference than a belief that everything changes if we adjust some numbers. That's a very engineer-oriented approach, but it misses that the current crisis (can we call it that) is social. People have to decide they will not support and/or elect unethical morons who say what they want to hear. Until then, it doesn't matter, and you aren't going to be able to reform the system without getting reformers into it, anyway. If you can do that, why is a massive change needed?

Don't mean to be a complete dick about this, but any supporting evidence would be appreciated. You made a logical leap (more reps = less corruption) which is not at all obvious.

It's not academic, but perhaps the founding fathers were onto something. The original constitution set the number of House Representatives to 1 for every 30,000 citizens. It was not until 1911 that the House capped the number at its present 435. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_H...

Yeah, well those guys thought only land-holding males should vote, so maybe they didn't. Did the men designing a system of government for a nation limited to the eastern coast have special insight in what governing 300 million people would look like?

Okay yeah fuck the patriarchy too but they weren't idiots. What they did was no small task and it's.. disrespectful.. to ignore that because they weren't progressive enough for your taste. We could appreciate the fact that they created a system that lets us change the rules as it evolves because they themselves admitted it would be impossible to forsee all the future context needed to make a perfect government. IIRC we've abolished slavery and granted women the right to vote and redefined marriage--we've corrected the issues you mentioned and more. What really kills the whole thing is when we feel the need to circumvent the rules in order to push an agenda down other people's throats. The system was designed to balance a plurality of of factions by preventing abuse of localized powers while at the same time reaching concensus for majority rule.

You mistake criticism for disrespect. I've read Federalist 10, as well. Yes, it's a marvel.

That we've corrected issues over time is evidence that they didn't have all the answers, as wise as they were.

≥That's a very engineer-oriented approach, but it misses that the current crisis (can we call it that) is social.

I've been trying to harp on this point for a while. Any proposed changes to how our government functions and how representatives gets elected isnt going to work because it's addressing something that isn't causing the problems we're seeing. The problem IS the electorate and the choices the electorate is making under its own will.

We are here, because the electorate chose to be. And the portion of the electorate that seems perfectly willing to make uninformed or irrational choices isn't exactly small, and often only counts as a technical "minority" when compared to the over all population.

You might alleviate the problem at best, and most likely only temporarily with any proposed changes. Every change that's been proposed in these discussions always assumes that the presence and amount of rational actors is sufficient, if not the norm. That's not what we currently see.

I'm not saying I disagree in general but, in this case, I don't think the megacongress would help. The issue here is that the vast majority of citizens do not know or care about net neutrality.

In fact a lot of the older people I've talked to think "net neutrality" means the government can censor partisan comments on the internet.

True, time to call it internet freedom instead.

> buying them becomes “easy”;

That's precisely why systems where powers are concentrated among the hands of the few are bound to fail.

Go down the path even more and you land at direct democracy, where every citizen can vote on any legislative decision. Corporations can not buy half the people.

Because it can be a lot of work to dive into the details of a decision every citizen could delegate his vote to someone he trusts - delegate his vote in general, per topic (economical decisions to Betty, foreign affairs to Tom) or just for a single decision. You can change your vote delegation any time. This is Liquid Democracy.

Our current parliaments are just a special case of Liquid Democracy: You delegate your vote on all decisions to a single person but you can choose only between a handful of people and are not allowed to change your choice of delegation for the next 4 years.

Different Pirate Parties all over Europe tried to establish this new concept of democracy but I am afraid it was not well understood/they did not explain it well enough.

The Athenians had real problems with direct democracy. Plato is still relevant:

Plato rejected Athenian democracy on the basis that such democracies were anarchic societies without internal unity, that they followed citizens' impulses rather than pursuing the common good, that democracies are unable to allow a sufficient number of their citizens to have their voices heard, and that such democracies were typically run by fools. Plato attacked Athenian democracies for mistaking anarchy for freedom. The lack of coherent unity in Athenian democracy made Plato conclude that such democracies were a mere collection of individuals occupying a common space rather than a form of political organization.

Corporations don't need to buy off half the people, they just need to convince a winning minority to go along, which you've made easy because you've divided all of your political issues into things people pick and chose not out of expertise but out of ignorance. There are other issues like control of the agenda which aren't obvious but hugely relevant to controlling democracies.

Was Prop 8 in Cali, with lots of outsiders weighing in on limiting other people's rights a good thing?

This is my macabre favorite story about Athenian democracy:

The news of the victory itself was met with jubilation at Athens. Their joy was tempered, however, by the aftermath of the battle, in which a storm prevented the ships assigned to rescue the survivors of the 25 disabled or sunken Athenian triremes from performing their duties, and a great number of sailors drowned. A fury erupted at Athens when the public learned of this, and after a bitter struggle in the assembly six of the eight generals who had commanded the fleet were tried as a group and executed.

Sucked for those generals. Win the battle, lost men due to storms, then you get executed because the mob is angry and some orators know how to harness that. Modern direct democracy wouldn't be voting on executing people, but you can see where things can get just as twisted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Arginusae

spoiler: the Athenians lost the war. Turns out getting rid of winning generals cause you're mad is dumb.

Plato preferred aristocracy; how many people do you think would like to live under a government that abandoned any pretense and outright called itself an aristocracy?

Does that make his criticisms of democracy any less valid?

Well, yes, for two reasons:

1. If democracy is bad, we should have some other system. Surely we should take into account the proposed alternative when we consider any criticism of democracy itself.

2. Implicitly any reference to the writings of Plato is burnished by the image of "wisdom of the ancients," so it is worth considering the flaws of these philosophers' work.

Direct democracy has flaws, we do have another system: representative democracy.

The Greeks were certainly wise, but my main point is this is not untrod ground, we've got at least 2000 years of experience to draw from.

Athenian democracy also frankly looks pretty different from direct democracy as is being proposed in this thread since it was made possible by the existence of slaves who did not participate. The Greeks were wise (or I guess we should say the ones whose writings we still read) but they were humans and products of their time.

Democracy is still better than any alternative

> Corporations can not buy half the people.

They can get them for free. See Fox News and Facebook.

Corporations can not buy half the people.

You don't have to buy anyone just influence.

You can buy influence by: building a media platform that everyone uses, buying a media platform that everyone uses, building a media source, or buying a bunch of media sources. Or most economically buying a handful of the most valuable Influencers, because most people love to love someone, and the platforms for Influencers are infinite now.

Most of the representation drawbacks to current systems you mentioned are intended to be safe guards against human whim, and to mitigate the power of super Influencers, originally the church. A substantial portion of the bureaucracy, forced slowness, involved in current systems are also deliberately placed for the same reasons.

When I look for causes for the current issues regarding ineffectiveness of parliaments, beyond their structure, I think that the huge change in the PERCEIVED ease of communication is having huge impacts on the actions of delegates. While all of us communicate a huge amount more than 30 years ago, I believe that generally we convey less. What is actually being conveyed by the current communication tools is relegated to the most compelling. The most effective communications are usually the topics with the most emotion charging them, because emotion conveys the most information in the current deluge of communication.

All of that hyper emotional and constant communication nearly paralyzes delegates, and also pushes all of us towards divisiveness because "for and against" become almost completely dogmatic as a result of level of emotion embedded.

> Moreover, with such a small number of people, buying them becomes “easy”;

Not to ignore your point, but there's actually substantial contention in the Political Science field about the impact of money. Does money flow to views, or do views flow to money? It's a difficult topic to study and is certainly not settled. Fun to delve into.

> buying them becomes “easy”

Are the People paying them enough though?

A talented trader, entertainer, or athlete can easily make ten times what we pay our President or the average Congressperson, yet the latter have vastly greater levels of responsibility.

If you want to know what a society values, then look at what they are willing to pay for. It looks like the public is not willing to pay for effective leadership.

Unfortunately a lot of people are angry at politicians and will be dead-set against paying them any more than current levels. But are we not putting ourselves in a vicious cycle of:

relatively bad pay for politicians -> incompetent leaders -> angry people -> bad pay for politicians?

Btw, a lot of countries have had issues with petty bribery of the police. How do you think they solved it? By doubling the pay of cops, not demonizing them for taking bribes.

Unfortunately, adding a bunch of people probably can't get the result you want.

Imagine adding nodes to a fully connected graph (complete graph). The number of edges grows exponentially. That's sort of how congress, or any meeting, is. Each additional person adds a burden to the communication and negotiation costs.

As a result of that, and the fact that a party is most powerful if they always vote as a block, you see a tendency to vest power in party leadership (majority/minority leaders), or committee leaders. Adding a bunch of extra people would presumably amplify that.

>Even if Congress were paying any attention to what constituents want (and they rarely seem to),

They are listening to their electorate.

Congress is becoming a non factor. The amount of pettiness and partisianship over the past few years had made Congress into the de factor weakest branch of government. Most of Obama's legacy was executed via executive order and guidance given to executive departments, a year into the Trump administration and we are seeing the same thing.

The other big decisions (gay marriage, citizens United, etc.) are being made by the courts, and despite the fact that Congress has to confirm judges (which is less daunting now that the judicial fillibuster is removed) Congress has become so partisan that you can get anyone confirmed with 50 Senators (+1 VP for a tiebreaker).

We have so many pressing challenges ahead and we need new laws for this country to adapt, it's disheartening to see that Congress is not up for the task.

We get the Congress for which we vote.

The problem isn’t Congress—most people are happy with their own representatives. The problem is us. If we took 10 random people from New York City and ten from rural Alabama, they wouldn’t be able to get anything done either. Why are we surprised that the people those people elect can’t work together?

I personally think we need a civil libertarian movement. The abuses of the federal government are beyond ridiculous at this point. We are fighting over political differences while everyone's liberties/rights are legitimately being eroded.

Congress is subservient to the Military, the Federal Reserve, and even relatively small-time players like Healthcare/Big Pharma.

How many congressman are actually crying foul that Afghanistan, etc., are unconstitutional wars that are not approved by congress--a constitutional right of congress.

Congress also has the right to issue and regulate currency, but even that we leave up to a private bank that has Wall St's best interests in mind--not the taxpayers.

These kinds of constitutional injustices could go on and on.

But most people are bombarded with the injustices of the latest Trump tweet, or the inhumanity of mansplaining.

Definitely agreed that Congress is not executing their congressional rights as strongly as they should. The unauthorized wars combined with the fact that it's a guarantee that AUMF will continuously be approved is just one example.

Congress is simply too worried about toeing the party line and their own reelection to understand it's collective power.

We're surprised because in the past people in Congress have worked together, and in some cases have done good things by working together.

You are also wrong about people from New York and Alabama; on some issues, Americans are mostly in agreement with each other, but that is not reflected in Congress. Net neutrality is an example of an issue the majority of Americans agree on, across all political perspectives. Social security and medicare are supported by a large majority of Americans. You would not know it from the people in Congress, who have managed to turn all the above and more into partisan issues despite the broad agreement by their own constituents.

Do you think it would be better to have more localized state/city governments? Couldn't that solve some of the issues of congress being in gridlock so often?

Speaking as a non-american closely following US politics, it appears you get the Congress for which you don't vote as well.

The amount of partisanship on one side of the aisle (first example that comes to mind: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/07/us/politics/syria-bombing...) and the fact that there are very few congress members who don't fall in line to their party means that no matter which party you vote for, you're getting what you're getting now.

Well, if you can gerrymander the vote, then your vote may not count as much as others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering

Like many things in life Gerrymandering has cons and pros. We know the cons, but the pros are people who would otherwise be unrepresented (by being a minority in a majority district) get to have a voice.

The major con is that it's the politicians who decide the boundaries rather than a neutral party (say semi-random boundary selection within certain bounds)

"if you don't vote for a lizard, the wrong lizard might get in" -- Douglas Adams, roughly. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/162557-it-comes-from-a-very...

This statement, or variations of it, such as "We get the politicians we deserve", are trite and don't capture the complexity of our social system and the power structures that exist within. It's meaningless.

Good. To quote Lao Tzu, "The more restrictions and prohibitions there are, the poorer the people will be."

Were they talking about net neutrality or digital privacy at the time?

Partisan gridlock is a long way from wu-wei. They may bear a superficial similarity but the situation we currently face is not really a choice between more rules and regulations and fewer. It is the difference between running a well-ordered state justly and efficiently, and leaving the most clever and ruthless individuals to carve out their own stakes unchecked.

Maybe it would help to just assume a completely adversarial model in every facet of technology so that stuff like this becomes a non-issue in the long run. At least for privacy, I don't see much point in any legislation one way or the other. Does it even matter if a piece of paper says that some agency can or cannot intercept something ? I feel that it would be better if everyone just came to terms with the fact that loss of privacy is generally implied unless proven otherwise (i.e. rigorously). Debating over specifics of this phone case or that precedent seems so short sighted. Like if you are sending postal mail, how much expectation of privacy do you have, irrespective of what the law says ?

Anyone have thoughts on exams that require a passing grade to serve in Congress? I.e. demonstrate certain levels of knowledge in order to participate in certain conversations with new bills listing requirements at top thereby eliminating the ability to vote if that Congress person has not met the minimum?

I realize this may be a bit off topic but my thought is that if more people in Congress (or other agencies/departments/commissions) understood technology they may behave differently, same goes for other areas.

Thoughts?

Ignoring the fact that this is never going to happen, it also is a unrealistic expectation. Not everyone can be a expert on everything but has to trust their colleagues and staffers on how to vote on some issues.

The problems with Congress isn't stupidity (not that they aren't stupid), it's corruption. There's no quiz for that.

Beyond that, considering the history of tests as a precondition for participation in American politics...funny that it comes up as often as it does. Plus, if there was a test, isn't that something that'd quite possibly be on it?

Is there any evidence that there's corruption in US congress?

Call if what you will. If Congress is serving corporations rather than the people that could lead to trouble.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobbying_in_the_United_States

One should view with great suspicion any limit on anyone's access to government. Limits are easily bent to suit the will of whomever is in power.

If Congresspeople aren't doing a good job, it is on us attempt to convince our representatives to change their minds. If that fails, it is on us to vote them out, and to convince others to vote in superior candidates.

Aside from being unconstitutional (http://www.heritage.org/constitution/#!/articles/1/essays/5/...), it’d be undemocraric and tyrannical. If people wanted to be governed by people who had more book learning they’d elect them.

Sure, unconstitutional and undemocratic. But I don't see that the "undemocratic and tyrannical" argument applies any more to a test requirement than it does to the existing constitutional age requirements for holding office.

they are democratically elected, this would be questionable.

American democracy is designed to elect a geographically representative legislature. I wish it could also elect an ideologically representative legislature.

Currently, I really appreciate how Senator Ron Johnson is fighting to give small business the same preferential tax treatment given to corporations by early drafts of the tax bill [1]. And you guessed it, he's doing it because he spent much of his career as a small businessman, unlike most congresspeople [2].

I have no idea how to achieve more of this, I don't think an exam would help at all!

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/27/us/politics/senate-tax-bi... [2] https://www.ronjohnson.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/biography

That's not what Ron Johnson is doing at all. The changes in pass through rates are, quite literally, the worst part of the bill.

Large businesses (C Corps) pay corporate tax and then when shareholders profit from their shares (either via dividends or cap gains) they pay individual income taxes.

Small businesses (LLCs and S corps) don't pay corporate taxes but individual shareholders pay individual income taxes like above.

What this bill does (and Johnson is trying to do more of) is create a whole new system for shareholders of LLCs and S Corps so that they don't even pay regular income taxes but a new tax at an even lower rate.

This isn't giving preferential tax treatment to small businesses that corporations already get. It's creating a whole new thing that shouldn't exist in the first place.

A more practical approach would be to have an aptitude test for general voting (higher score means heavier weight for the vote). Additional requirements could be added to gate voter eligibility such as having paid more federal taxes than consumed via welfare in a given year.

All of these would, however, be unconstitutional, including the original proposal in the thread.

Wow not only wildly unconstitutional but given the wild imbalance in educational outcomes and just raw availability of educational resources anything like that is pretty much a new round of Jim Crow laws. And why spend any resources improving the education of this new second class groups because even if you slightly improve their lives their votes are worth less. Just an all around horrible idea.

Self driving cars will obsolete road rage just as machines can better administer lucre than avaricious humans. c.f. any or all of recorded history. Democracy is a very analog 18th century mechanism for collective resource allocation. Designed by candle light, its grossly obsolete in these times and could easily be replaced by an ERP type apparatus. It sounds like the start of a good Sci-Fi novel. As do any of the last 24 mos.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

― Upton Sinclair

How unusual. A link to a paywall on hacker news.

> In the case before the court, Timothy Carpenter’s cellular provider supplied investigators a record of his smartphone’s whereabouts. The pings placed Carpenter in the vicinity of several armed robberies in Ohio and Michigan. Now behind bars, he is asking the justices to find this a violation of his Fourth Amendment right to be safe from warrantless searches of his private domain.

What is this bullshit?! Next a guy will murder somebody in the woods and return home in a bus. And the bus driver cannot tell the police he saw the guy on that route at such time? Have people gone insane over "privacy"?

The alternative is to allow the government to be able to search anyone's entire location history for the past decade at its own whim, without requesting a warrant.

Amendment Four: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

> The alternative is to allow the government to be able to search anyone's entire location history for the past decade at its own whim, without requesting a warrant.

The ISP/cellphone company can choose not to give the history.

> Amendment Four

Nowhere does it say that third parties cannot provide information about you. Location data using cell tower usage is not the user's "person, house, paper or effect". It belongs to the operator.

> The ISP/cellphone company can choose not to give the history.

NSL's have shown us that they can't

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusionary_rule

Doesn't apply because this doesn't violate any rights.

That is the question before the courts...

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