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Comment by zmblum | Hacker News Reader

What about the following paragraph is not clear?

"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 Warrants shall not be issued, 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."

Am I missing something? Of course the problem is that it's near impossible get something like this to the SCOTUS. The only real possibility is more whistle blowing.

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That is written for you to learn in 5th grade civics class and feel good about your country and your government. But is not for those printing & spending hundreds of billions of dollars.

well, no, that was written by government leaders attempting to protect civil liberties from future government leaders. It just didn't work.

Oh? I thought it was written by a bunch of guys (these days we'd probably call them "insurgents" or somesuch) who had recently been fed up with a government that was unreasonably searching them, etc., and didn't want it to happen again.

I'm not sure why people are upvoting your comment.

Actually, I do know why. It's a depressing disenchantment with government.

They don't understand that government is not going anywhere, and that government can be as good as it can be bad.

The quote zmblum posted is brilliant, and it is an example of what Good Government is capable of. It is not just for your 5th grade civics class. It's for RIGHT NOW. Read the quote, understand and respect it and its authors, and take action. The government is not just them, it's also you, and sitting on the sidelines being cynical is supporting them.

Tongue-in-cheek.

They don't understand that government is not going anywhere, and that government can be as good as it can be bad.

No way in hell. Where, in either the future or the history books, is the saintly leader who will counterbalance a Stalin or a Mao?

Gandhi?

I think the point is government that is not necessarily led by a single person. Though the president of the US is the 'leader,' he does share power with the Supreme Court and Congress. Just because everyone likes to point to the president when things go wrong doesn't mean there aren't others that share in the blame...

The current problem with the system is that: 1) the Federal government has grown too large, and 2) the US is ruled by only two political parties that are both (at their core) about the status quo and not all that different from each other.

May I suggest that the current US political debate is virulently polarizing and unproductive?

Perhaps the issue Good Governance vs Bad Governance would be effective/useful? (as opposed to the current axis of big vs small)

As was said by Deng Xiapong "it doesn't matter if the cat is white or black.."

Joe's Good Governance is Bob's Bad Governance. People fundamentally differ on what the government should do; there's no "right answer" that everyone could agree on if only they'd sit down and discuss it reasonably.

True for debates on Governance, but it can't be completely true for specifics and tactical matters. Matter of fact its pretty much the only way you can bring intelligence, experience, vision and ability to bear. True, some things are not clear cut, at which point you can debate.

Besides, even what you said is a sensible start, yet most of America seems far from having a sensible debate about Governance. From outside, every thing that happens is twisted into some sort of attack vector for ... I don't know what.

>As was said by Deng Xiapong "it doesn't matter if the cat is white or black.."

..because "Parkinson's Law works everywhere." - Mikhail Gorbachev

I hadn't read that quote though, thanks for pointing it out - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinsons_Law

the irony is that Quote 1 - China Quote 2 - USSR

Big government has more chance for corruption because the system ends up growing ever-more complex. Parts the of the system that are useless never get culled, they just keep finding ways to retain minimal amounts of relevance, while attempting to maintain or increase their funding levels.

It's harder to have 'good government' when there are more ways for it to fail.

Which is great and fine in a theoretical world. You guys just had your economy blow up. IT doesn't matter if its big or small. It matters if it works. Ignore size.

Ok, so you determine that it isn't working. Then you try to figure out how and why so that you can fix the problem and you find out that it's death by a thousand cuts.

I'm not so delusional to think that there will be some magical shrinking of the government, but you seem to be telling me that it isn't a worthy goal, which I disagree with. You can have the goal of making the government work now while at the same time trying to trim away the useless pieces.

I have no issue with a smaller government. I just don't see how smaller or bigger government are worthy goals IN and OF themselves. It just needs to be working government.

The debate about big vs small govt. is one of many, pointless hand-wavy, ideas used to harm your debate.

Is it wrong to point out that something is being used to obfuscate discussion, polarize opinion, and detract from getting a solution?

>The government is not just them, it's also you, and sitting on the sidelines being cynical is supporting them.

One can be cynical without being resigned. Cynicism is recognition of the depth and breadth of corruption and not necessarily equivalent to apathy.

But you're right that the corruption we see in the government is a reflection of our own corruption. The mess we now find ourselves in wouldn't be possible without generations of self-deception, apathy, and twisted values. We let ourselves be conned into building the world that the founding fathers warned us against. We'll likely only wake up when survival itself is at stake.

Yes, you're missing something (actually I'm sure you're not). The government has evolved to a state where they've decided they can do anything, anything they want, in the name of whatever they want to use for justification, in the rare case where they deign to justify.

They're not afraid of terror or drugs, they aren't afraid of anything.

The authors of the Federalist Papers were against a specific enumeration of rights because they feared that those would become the only rights that citizens had. They now seem prescient in retrospect.

The Bill of Rights was horrible for America. It turned the Constitution from something where the people tells the government what it can and can't do, into something where the government tells people what bones they get thrown.

I don't think that's fair. Sure, the Constitution is in tatters but without the Bill of Rights I think we'd have lost even more freedom. At least folks have rallied around and protected some elements (guns, religious freedom, free speech to some degree).

In some sense, the Bill of Rights could be considered a premature optimization. Rather than waste time having the people and the government come to an agreement in an agile way, through multiple iterations, on the things the first 10 amendments cover, they just decided to preempt all that debate and bill-making and bill-overturning and list the things that were off-limits. Didn't turn out that way though.

And like all premature optimizations, maybe it wasn't such a good idea.

The problem with the Bill of Rights is that it refocuses grievances from "where do you, the government derive the power to do such things?" to "what fundamental citizen right is being violated in this case?" Which sounds OK but it's just wrong.

The latter question is relevant in terms of inter-citizen disputes like theft, but in terms of government intervention the former is the appropriate one. Unfortunately it's usually the latter that gets asked.

While I think they had a very good point, how much has the 9th amendment actually protected?

Troxel v. Granville was based on an unenumerated right.

I'll have to look that one up. As far as I know, it's pretty rare.

Lets look into the precedents. Modern interpretation used by courts is that automated weapons didn't exist when 2nd Amendment was written. The same way it will be with email didn't exist back then.

It doesn't matter that rifles of the time were the assault weapons of the time and the meaning of "papers" of the time can be extended to email.

It doesn't say a thing about "electronic communications". Which gives prosecutors, the FBI, and the national security state a large opportunity to blow smoke.

Difficulty of amending the US constitution is a double edged sword.

The key here is that the data is obtained via a 3rd party. Once you as an individual share any information with a 3rd party you lose any expectation of privacy. In the digital world there are specific carve outs for email, but not much else.

These actions are terrible, but completely legal.

That paragraph was written before 9/11. Everything is different now. </sarcasm>

I see the bits about your house, person, papers and effects, but which part covers a datacenter?

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