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Comment by joemazerino | Hacker News Reader

We are at that point in history where your financial moves will have direct impact on your life. The small fish even, those who donate $100, are no longer too small to cancel.

This is a tragedy. Leaked, hacked data being used to fire and harass everyday people is a slippery slope that we are already slipping down.

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There are parallels between this event and the takedown of the British National Party. Around 2009 an insider leaked their member list, in a similar fashion. The same year antifa was activated to protest the BNP. From my recollection, antifa where always considerate enough to inform the police when they planned to protest a protest, or clash with a political group like this. The clashes with police help the story spread. It is the physical manifestation of an ideological conflict. At the time, I was generally supportive of antifa (remember, they where brand new then, although technically founded earlier, they had been dormant for a long time). However, despite the BNP declining into irrelevance after this, they where replaced by UKIP, and the far right, in Britain, has probably never been bigger than it is today. The publicized clashes between antifa and the right, ended up beeing useful recruitment propaganda to both sides. To the people on the right, it was proof that the far left was dangerous and intent on suppressing opposing political views. And vice versa.

At what point do platforms like GiveSendGo anonymize payments for real? (realize this is potentially a leading question about cryptocurrency mixers, but maybe there's a way to implement this with regular currencies)

I'm all for traceability, but I can't see donating anything through GiveSendGo if all my data is going to be leaked. Same with Kickstarter. They're just creating a honeypot/target for hackers.

you can't. not until the AML laws get repealed.

The payment processor was hacked as well, and all payment data, including card data was leaked.

Amazingly, the entire 5GB archive was made available to journalists for "research", who then began promptly dialing everyone for "comments".

Twitter refuses to this day to take down tweets that include personal data, despite their policy on hacked data.

> Twitter refuses to this day to take down tweets that include personal data, despite their policy on hacked data.

It's actually even worse than if they just never enforced their policy on hacked data. What they actually do is selectively enforce it, apparently based on which side of the political spectrum would benefit. For example, remember that they did take down all of those tweets about what was on Hunter Biden's laptop, citing that policy as justification.

ooo what about some kind of zero knowledge proof that proves citizenship but nothing else.

Using leaked, hacked data that reveals a member of government contributing materially to a movement for the purpose of engaging in illegal activity against the government is not what I'd call a slippery slope...

By that logic every member of Canadian (and even other nations governments) who support BLM, Antifa, etc should be fired as well.

If they were political staffers for a party that opposed such things, they would be.

If they were contributing to a campaign by one of those groups to break Canadian law, then yes.

Laws are written and imposed by the government, and a government employee actively supporting the breaking of the law is simply unacceptable. That's not how we do things in Canada.

Can you imagine a scenario where such a donation both:

1) Contributes to a “law breaking” cause

2) Still aligns with your views?

It’s easy to talk about the correctness of this when the infringement seems pretty harmful/disruptive.

But social change is often messy, and protests often move into a grey area that is not so easy to judge. Whether you agree with this particular action, it raises much bigger questions than the current unfolding event.

I can absolutely imagine such a situation, but my position doesn't change.

For government, there's only one impartial way to deal with this: Either it's legal, or it isn't. Any moral or ethical judgment will happen later after the movement succeeds or fails, but for the time being you either work with the law, or you leave the government. If you're found to be working against the laws of the land, that's more than ample reason to be kicked out of government.

> Either it's legal, or it isn't

In justice there is enormous scope for discretion and mercy. That used to be a value common on the left, no longer.

That's never been the case for a member of government working against their own government (left or right or anything). You can't keep someone around who works against the very organization they purport to work for.

> That's never been the case for a member of government working against their own government (left or right or anything)

Will you elaborate on what you’re trying to say here? Are you implying that a different legal framework is applied to government officials than that applied to civilians?

> You can't keep someone around who works against the very organization they purport to work for.

I understand where you’re coming from on the one hand, but I can’t help but feel this is an extremely dangerous sentiment on the other.

“Working against” can be defined very broadly, and at least in some circumstances, people in the public arena are there to do exactly that, but this is usually framed as working for something. Elections tend to shift who sits in those positions.

To someone with opposing viewpoints, it may be seen as “working against”.

If this staffer had rolled their own truck out to join the convoy, that’d be one thing. But automatically equating a donation to an act akin to the same seems like the start of a slippery slope at best.

Would you feel differently if this individual had donated to the party affiliated with the goals of the convoy instead of the convoy itself? At what point does donating to a party become an act worthy of discipline? It’s worth noting that I’m not familiar with any rules/regs specific to a public official and the donations they make, so I’m genuinely curious here.

Don’t get me wrong: I in no way align with the goals of this convoy and admit to feeling a tiny bit of satisfaction at what happened here.

But if I take my personal feelings out of it, the whole situation makes me very uncomfortable.

> Are you implying that a different legal framework is applied to government officials than that applied to civilians?

There's no legal framework to apply. This person isn't being jailed or charged with a crime. They're just being expelled from their government position for a specific reason.

> “Working against” can be defined very broadly, and at least in some circumstances

Almost anything can be defined broadly, especially a short comment on a forum. I'm not defining a legal framework here, or coming up with a legally airtight document (such a document would be thousands of pages long). This is a comment on a forum to discuss a particular event where someone was ejected from government for financially supporting a campaign to commit illegal acts. We're also talking about the Canadian government here, not the Belarusian government.

> They're just being expelled from their government position for a specific reason.

Granted the story is about a political employee being fired but it's in the context of people's fundamental freedoms being taken away with no judicial process and no recourse. That is an egregious abuse of power and threatens everyone, not just the supporters of the maligned cause du jour. 20 years ago when the draconian anti-terrorism laws were being brought in across the world it was predicted that it would lead to the crushing of political freedoms and this is an example of that occurring. Back then it was islamist terrorism, now terrorism is being extended to include practically anything that the illiberal left doesn't like.

> break Canadian law

Tiananmen Square protesters broke Chinese law but China violated their human rights. China was in the wrong regardless of how much popular support they manufactured.

Was the activity found to be illegal by a court where the defendant had ability to defend themselves with assistance of an attorney of their own choosing?

In the not so distant past, a staffer supporting white supremacists financially would get you an invitation to certain BBQs or a pat on the back.

Today, it's increasingly (although not universally) a liability. I'm OK living in a world with consequences for supporting secessionists and white supremacists.

No idea why this is flagged. The organisers of the occupation and the GoFundMe are known to be white nationalists or neo-nazis. https://globalnews.ca/news/8543281/covid-trucker-convoy-orga...

You seem to be implying that the protestors were white supremacists, do you have a source for that claim?

Take a look at the organizers:

1 - Tamara Lich, secessionist and founder of the Maverick Party which has some unkind words for immigrants https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/jay-hill-wexit-top-gu...

2 - BJ Dichter - Promoter of the "political islam" and "great replacement" theory https://globalnews.ca/news/8543281/covid-trucker-convoy-orga...

3 - Pat King - Member of far-right hate group Canada Unity https://globalnews.ca/news/8543281/covid-trucker-convoy-orga...

Well, as a first generation immigrant myself, I myself completely oppose the current policy of stuffing an increasing amount of newcomers into the same infrastructure, same overcrowded cities same number of hospital beds, etc. This is a race to the bottom where everyone suffers.

I myself moved to Canada because it used to be a society where you can play by certain rules and get a better life quality than in my home country where people lost trust in each other, government, or the rules. This is very rapidly ceasing to be the case. If you look at Indian subreddits, you can see plenty of disenchanted people realizing that being middle class at home is better than sharing a condo with 5 other people in Canada. I see many Russians and Chinese coming back because the bang for the buck is just not there anymore.

Canada's solution to it is to welcome and embrace anyone who's willing to put up with the steadily lowering life quality, for the sake of generating returns on the previous generations' investments. I don't think this is correct, I don't think this will end well, and I don't think it's fair to call anyone objecting to it "far-right" and "immigrant-haters".

I think what you're saying is that we need to invest in infrastructure to support our growing population, which is not a controversial statement.

Please forgive me, but you seem to indicate that the quality of life in Canada is falling and that immigration is the cause. Does this mean that you believe that you yourself reduced the quality of life in Canada for Canadians?

I for one don't agree with this. One simple reason is that I don't buy the premise.

I'm not aware of any evidence that the quality of life of Canadians is degrading in any way that correlates with immigration, and certainly not aware of any causative explanations. Here are a couple of (totally imperfect) financial metrics for purchasing power and Gini coefficients that seem stable.

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/200728/cg-b0...

https://www.oecd.org/social/income-distribution-database.htm

My grandparents immigrated from Italy, and so I'm (at least historically speaking) recent product of immigration. I don't feel right making the argument that, up until my grandparents came here, immigration was OK, but afterwards, we should have shut the door. Feels a bit too convenient of an argument, especially when, generations later, their offspring (hi!) are occupying many of the medical services and infrastructure you say are crowded.

Your grandparents came at a different time with different skills from a poorer place relatively speaking.

If new immigrants are finding the quality of life to be lower than expected because rents are higher and opportunity to buy a house is lower than your grandparents era you have to agree that the quality of life may be the same for newcomers. Plus the quality of life in China and India is higher than ever.

If you're saying that the quality of life in China and India is rising, bully for them! An ideal world would see immigration primarily motivated by preference and not poverty or oppression.

I would, however, suggest that "quality of life" doesn't begin and end at house prices but also is tied to e.g.: civil freedoms, which you'll find Canada scores much higher than either you examples here by large margins in any (incomplete/flawed, etc...) freedom index [0].

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

The bottom line is I don't see evidence for Canada's "fall from grace" and even less for it being tied to immigration.

The sentiment is Canada/west use to be golden ticket/easy mode for privileged immigrants who were top of their respective societies, i.e. one was better off driving taxis in Canada than be a doctor in China. But over the last 10-20 years, QoL of even high-income in west is feeling more and more inferior than staying in the "old country". Caveat being which "old country". If your from Italy that's stuck in it's own western devolution cycle, you won't feel it. But if you're Chinese, Indian, or from some other rapidly developing economy, and see their peers get wealthy back home, live like kings due to purchase power and income disparity, without all the racial drama of multicultural societies - there is serious FOMO. Meanwhile 2nd gen PoC kids raised in western societies are grinding through 6 figure jobs like a chump while dealing with intersectional drama * . Right now, the feeling is being top in PRC or India affords better life on multi-generational scale than being high-income (6 figure) in the west which still won't guarantee your kids won't be grinding.

* It's hard to emphasis the value of not dealing with being a PoC / feeling like an outsider. It's a kind of "freedom" available back home that for many outweighs western liberal values like free speech etc.

As I said to the other commenter, if the QoL is rising in other nations, bully for them! Quite sincerely. No one is twisting your arm to move anywhere, and I think it's wonderful if you're born in a country you don't feel an obligation need to move from to evade poverty or oppression. That's the case for me and I would love if it was for everyone.

The "drama" of multicultural societies as you state it, however, is known as freedom to many others. Ask any Uyghur. If you're indifferent to this, then your values are fundamentally different to those of Canadians as laid out by our Charter of Human Rights, and you might not enjoy living here by our laws.

Do you also believe BLM protest were marxist, because the organizers were trained marxists (their own words)?

Can a white-supremacist help an old lady a cross the street because of his kindness or does he always have an ulterior white-supremacist motive?

What are the demands from the protesters that make this protest white-supremacist?

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