This isn't a new phenomenon either. This has been documented [0] time and time again [1].
[0] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/fbi-white-supremacists-i...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/27/white-suprem...
ref: https://media.defense.gov/2021/Jan/08/2002562063/-1/-1/1/PLA...
Let say we have the worst case scenario where a bunch of criminals successfully enter the capital building and occupy it. Is the best response to send the army, or as many police units as needed to apprehend the criminals and put them in jail?
By sending the army what we are saying is that there existed a creditable scenario that the people attacking could have taken control of the US government and ruled over the nation.
The National Guard is not the Army, it's a dual-purpose force that is both a reserve for the Army and a reserve for civil authorities during emergencies including civil disorder.
> By sending the army what we are saying is that there existed a creditable scenario that the people attacking could have taken control of the US government and ruled over the nation.
No, even if we were talking about the Army proper, an existential threat to the government is not the criteria under the Insurrection Act for their use to disperse insurgents.
The militia, armed forces, or both may be used (among other scenarios authorized in law) against “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” which “opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws”. 10 USC Sec 253.
History is full of examples and dead bodies where the military has been used against its own people who oppose or obstruct the execution of law. It many countries it also follows a period of regret and new laws in order to prevent something similar to ever happen again. Just because the government has a law that gives them authorization to send the military in order to secure a building, it doesn't mean it is a good idea.
Would the military trained personnel have done a better job during the capital attack than the police trained one?
The Guard is a force whose missions include support for Civil authorities during disturbances, and it's training, equipment, organizations, planning, etc. reflect that.
And, quite arguably, that are better than, and trained better than the police for, dealing with large scale civil unrest.
https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-elections-racial-in...
https://www.ideastream.org/news/what-national-guard-training...
The fact that you have to reach back that far, given all the more recent problems with conventional police, seems to illustrate my point.
[0]https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/hidd...
The GOP has been doing a large scale equivalent of swinging nunchucks around in public. The problem isn't that sometimes it swings around the wrong way and whacks someone they didn't intend to whack. Well, no, it is, of course that's a problem. But the more fundamental problem is that they're recklessly swinging an unpredictable weapon in public in an effort to be intimidating in the first place. And the problem is that people who didn't feel personally threatened by this behavior just sat there and came up with sorry excuses to try and rationalize it. This is deeply antisocial comportment that should have no place in the top echelons of civil society.
verifiable voting
I think literally anyone on this site could invent a more reliable and common-sense approach to voting.
This is all just fallout from a fallible system that has little trust.
But I think you'd taking the results too far. You'd have to hack into hundreds or thousands of machines within a single state to change its votes. Worse, you have to do this in a way that looks plausible. You're talking about a major conspiracy that would have to take place. And if Russia is going to change votes why wouldn't China, Israel, or others? So they would have to all organize together so they don't undo one another's work. And that would have to happen without us (NSA, FBI, CIA) finding out. You're talking about a conspiracy that would be very difficult to pull off and require high amounts of organization.
Hacking a computer is easy. Hacking a thousand computers in a room full of people that are worried about their computers being hacked? Different story.
The problem with verifiable voting is that it has to break one the properties of American democracy, the secret ballot, or else it doesn't really work. As a voter, I want to see that a) it was recorded that I voted, and b) what my vote was. In the case of invented voter fraud, both A and B need to be possible, but making both of those possible mean it's possible to show who I voted for. Who I voted for is a secret, and is one of the central tenants to American democracy. I can talk about supporting candidate A in public and vote for candidate B in private and a lot of properties follow from that.
The challenge isn't technical, it's a social problem, and technical measures won't solve social problems.
This problem might have a technical solution though. First, each voter generates a private key and publishes the corresponding public key. Then implement a homomorphic vector addition, everybody submits their vote as an encrypted vector, and then you somehow add the vectors together homomorphically, i.e. the addition can be done without decrypting them first.
You need some kind of way to prove that each vector corresponds to a legal vote (i.e. increases the vote total of at most one candidate by at most one vote.) Then you need some way to decrypt the encrypted vector sum using some amalgamation of everybody's public keys, but without allowing to decrypt subtotals for particular subsets.
You can publish all the encrypted votes received and the decrypting amalgamation, so anyone with the capability to download and process a large data set. Anyone can check that every vote was cryptographically approved by a distinct pre-registered voter and the votes were totaled honestly.
If we assume an upper bound of 1 billion voters, each 1 kb of encrypted vector size adds 1 TB to the raw vote data. Based on existing "clever" cryptosystems that do similar things (e.g. ZK-snarks), it's reasonable to guess we won't need more than 100 kb per encrypted vector. So an entire 1-billion-voter election could be processed by a small storage cluster with 100 TB, you can't verify it on your laptop, but the technically inclined could verify the vote themselves for probably somewhere around $1,000 - $20,000 of hardware and sysadmin time.
I don't know if there's existing crypto math to do this, but I'm pretty sure it at least hasn't been proven impossible.
The kind of crypto primitives needed for this kind of system might be found someday.
They killed hundreds of millions of people. You could be raped of tortured at any time.
It is not white supremacist. It is anyone with power.
Right now in the US, the antifa movement is as violent or more violent than anyone else. Certainly the Guardian is not an unbiased source.
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-01-07/dc-riots-c...
Which doesn't mention anything about Mayor Bowser refusing offers of assistance - only the Capitol Police. Indeed, it cites her asking for assistance on December 31st in preparation.