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Comment by emilsedgh | Hacker News Reader

Watch the US government make such examples of every whistleblower and even this level of accountability which is purely driven by personal consciousness of individuals to become ineffective in fear of harsher and harsher prosecutions.

Sad indeed. US intelligence agencies have gone rogue and public doesn't really care.

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If you gauge public perception by what the media says then that may be true.

Watching the intelligence community go full nuclear to undermine and destroy a democratically elected interloper president in coordination with the media is something that can't be unseen to many Americans.

It is becoming a less controversial view that an inappropriate amount of power is consolidated in the permanent unelected government employees.

> something that can't be unseen to many Americans

If the short/midterm/longterm response from "many Americans" is to be at all coherent/effective, then what they believe they saw had better jibe with reality.

Universe One: a cabal of chess hustlers cheat by surreptitiously moving a piece to their advantage. An anon films it and sends it anonymously to all the other chess players in the park.

Universe Two: a cabal of chess hustlers cheat by surreptitiously moving a piece to their advantage. An anon films it, then the film becomes part of a conspiracy theory that the players wearing red hats only ever lose because the non-red-hat-wearers have rigged the game against them. Anon creates an anon podcast that fuels the conspiracy theory for the half of the players who wear red hats.

In which universe would you guess the players have the best chance of banding together to throw the cabal of cheaters out of the park and return peace to the chess community?

Or an even simpler question-- if you were a chess hustler who cheated by subtly moving a piece, which universe would you choose to maximize your chances of escaping unscathed?

> Watching the intelligence community go full nuclear to undermine and destroy a democratically elected interloper president in coordination with the media is something that can't be unseen to many Americans.

Why does everything have to be about Trump? Public’s lack of support for Snowden, Assange and Manning was well before Trump.

>Watching the intelligence community go full nuclear to undermine and destroy a democratically elected interloper president in coordination with the media is something that can't be unseen to many Americans regardless of how you felt of trump.

I know you'll and half the US will never accept it, but Trump was only destroyed by his mishandling of COVID and his fulminating paranoid conspiracy theories about the election. He stood a chance at re-election, otherwise. There was no deep state/intelligence community/media conspiracy against him, his real enemy was always himself and his own ego.

> There was no deep state/intelligence community/media conspiracy against him

I mean, if it was successful, you wouldn't even know.

I could say the same thing about the magic rock I keep on my front porch to ward off tigers. But the absence of tigers on my porch isn't evidence that my magic rock works.

Ok, but intelligence has a history of doing things like this, and have undeniable unimaginable power. Quite a bit more capable than your rock.

People forget that for two+ years the intelligence community had the media reporting on some Q-annon level conspiracy that the president was colluding with the Russian government. If you recall most every story at the time was based on "unnamed sources", who do you think those sources were?

Why couldn't it be both?

Occam's Razor. The Democrats weren't stealing the election, social media put up with Trump for years until his posts crossed a line, and Trump was throwing money at the military industrial complex. There's no need to invoke a massive conspiracy to explain the end of Trump's first term. He sabotaged his chance to unite the country under his leadership with COVID by making it a partisan wedge issue, because he wanted to run on the economy, and his ego couldn't handle mail-in ballots (which, thanks to his efforts to undermine his own base's faith in them, were almost entirely Democratic) turning his apparent victory around on him, so he cracked. His personality and ineptness at politics are sufficient to explain things.

What does democrats stealing the election have to do with the FBI investigations? Those are two separate topics.

> US intelligence agencies have gone rogue

Do you know have examples of situations like this? Most controversies that I am aware of have been enabled by Congressional facilities (e.g., PATRIOT act) or Presidential executive action (e.g., various executive orders).

> public doesn't really care.

The public can't do much because it has given too much power to intelligence agencies already. Today, the left and right almost unanimously hate intelligence agencies, but their power is entrenched.

Case in point: the Constitution is irrelevant to intelligence agencies. They genuinely believe they can operate completely outside of it and face no punishment, so they frequently do. What can an American citizen do at that point?

And who even wants to speak out against an intelligence agency if it'll put you on a list?

> What can an American citizen do at that point?

They can elect someone that can give the agencies a hard time. I guess every time that happens though, we get a one term or less president.

Elections don't work to stop things like this. As mentioned, the agencies are far too entrenched. They literally bypass our most sacred laws and structures as if they don't even exist.

If we kept interlopers in power long enough, it could start to work. Four years or less is probably not enough time for this to work.

Intelligence agencies would certainly would blackmail or suicide any domestic element that poses a serious threat to them, since historically they don't have a problem doing this to random people.

Sure, but the more often we elect interlopers, the less often they can use that tactic without being obvious about what they are doing.

Wait, what gives you the impression that intelligence agencies care about being inconspicuous for stuff like this?

The fact that they suicide people is basically a running meme. There is nothing to hide. Everyone knows that intelligence agencies pull this shit. It surprises no one we all know they will continue to do it.

If sentiment against IA becomes really negative, they'll have a hard time doing particularly egregious stuff. Right now, plenty of people are totally fine with IAs.

> If sentiment against IA becomes really negative, they'll have a hard time doing particularly egregious stuff.

Why? What/who will stop them and how?

If 100% of people think IAs are villainous, IAs will have a hard time recruiting capable people, so they will shrink and be less efficient. It will be easier to litigate against them too, since they have less of an ability to subvert the legal process with fewer people working for them, and fewer people being on their side. Congress will be more able to act and more incentivized to act against them if the rest of the country is united in disliking IAs.

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