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Comment by landemva | Hacker News Reader

From the article, "the agency had cast such a broad surveillance net that large volumes of innocuous First Amendment-protected activity regularly got swept up as potential security threats."

This is funded by unlimited federal deficit spending. Let's reduce their budgets.

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I was going through the white house proposed budget this weekend and there are more than a few call outs (10-20%) that seem superfluous or like they should be handled by private industries as they seem constrained to benefit those private businesses.

Government money also tends to raise all ships^H^H^H^H^Hprices, so many of the social welfare programs - tuition and home buying loans and assistance, for example - have had the effect of raising prices to the point that most people couldn’t afford them without that assistance. That seems like a good indicator that the program has lost its purpose and should be scrapped for a new idea. Getting rid of those would be immediately deflationary for several sectors (good, imho).

As someone on the hook for $116k in deficit, I’d be much happier to direct my tax dollars to eliminating debt and interest payments and reducing inflation than a great deal of what public money is being spent on.

> As someone on the hook for $116k in deficit, I’d be much happier to direct my tax dollars to eliminating debt and interest payments

Our tax returns have a field at the bottom where you can offer to do just that with your tax refund. I suspect it costs them more in ink than the value of any takers.

Always seemed like a “nonono, I didn’t mean to pay down the debt with my money!” kinda thing.

“Ontario opportunities fund

You can help reduce Ontario's debt by completing this area to donate some or all of your 2022 tax refund to the Ontario opportunities fund. Please see the provincial pages for details. ”

In the US, you can give extra money to reduce the deficit. You cannot redirect what you already owe so that it all goes towards reducing the deficit.

So I think your point "nonono, I didn’t mean to pay down the debt with my money!" is moot.

That sort of direction wouldn't be meaningful anyway, since money is fungible.

It’s not like money that was previously allocated for debt service could then be moved to something else. In AZ we can direct about $4k to specific organizations and receive a 1:1 tax credit. That impacts revenues, but not how much those programs would receive otherwise.

They could obviously just issue new debt, though.

You can make tax-deductible donations to certain organizations. This results in them getting more funding than they otherwise would. Sure, redirections may not modify the budget of the US government programs directly, but it does have meaningful impact on the world.

It would be if federal budgets were determined by the allocations people indicated on their tax filings. But that would be a mess if unrestricted.

The government is already wasting half my paycheck, I'm not going to donate more money and hope its spent wisely.

The issue is an inability to budget. If we doubled tax revenue, we would double spending and increase the deficit further.

Indeed, we haven't had a "budget" in years. Now we have "spending bills" instead.

are you in Ontario?

If the tax return said: repay your portion of the debt and you’re off the hook for any future deficit spending or moneys collected to service national debt, I would be tempted to take that offer.

Unless there is default, there’s no reason for the government to not to keep accumulating debt.

Saying that the government is spending too much money is such a triviality. The facts are that there is no serious appetite in U.S. politics today to reduce law enforcement budgets[0], and that reducing the budget of the U.S. Marshals would be unlikely to stop them from using these tools (which they see as a less expensive way to accomplish their objectives).

If you want to stop this kind of surveillance, your best bet is to advocate that it be illegal, with accountability. You can also advocate for a reduced budget, but it's not going to get you very far. If anything, it would tend to lead to more use of this kind of tool.

[0]- There are some agitators on the fringes of both parties for specific reductions to parts of law enforcement that those agitators have a problem with. Whether correct or not, the fact is that these are two disjoint proposals from elements that have no interest in compromising with each other. Neither proposal covers the U.S. Marshals, and neither is going to amount to anything at the federal level.

> advocate that it be illegal, with accountability

I am interested in how that would work on an individual basis, as feds have to agree to be sued and lawsuits typically need to show specific harm. USSC doctrine of qualified immunity knee-caps accountability.

>> your best bet is to advocate that it be illegal,

How does one make reading publicly posted tweets illegal?

One can't, but one can make it illegal for the government to use any product that relies on any sort of social media "fire hose." There can be specific requirements that LEOs are only allowed to use the publicly available websites or apps to find posts on these platforms and can't use a contractor as a loophole.

The police are allowed to "surveil" protected speech, unless you want to ban them from reading the newspaper.

I really don't see the issue. This is information people knowingly release to the public, so the cops are not spying on anyone. A protest is a potential security threat, which is why the cops always show up. I see no evidence this information was abused to try to prevent people from expressing their opinions. What am I supposed to be upset about?

Also, as you very well know, the large majority of the Federal budget goes to social services like healthcare and social security. The entire DoJ budget is a drop in the ocean. Slashing federal budgets will do nothing to eliminate this sort of program but will result in Granny living on the street.

I think we need a term for 'taking public information and deriving nondisclosed information from it'. It isn't really spying, but it's more than just access.

It's not about agreeing or disagreeing, but I think a lot of the debate here is just people arguing the semantics of what's going on.

> I think we need a term for 'taking public information and deriving nondisclosed information from it'. It isn't really spying, but it's more than just access.

Sure, but I don't think that was done here. People were organizing protests by Twit. All the relevant information was made public because the protesters wanted people to show up.

I can imagine similar scenarios that would be a problem, but this seems about as benign as I can imagine.

The cost of adding irrelevant data to relevant data is minuscule. Trying to use a "Rod from God" that is the deficit spending limit to set a finishing nail will only destroy the entire city.

A lot of other more important things would get cut before the marshals felt the squeeze (c.f. other current events like what NYC does with the police and what they cut in order to have more cops)

Then follow the law and penalize already illegal misuse or already illegal collection of data. Any administration that says it’s for civil rights cannot also be for mass surveillance.

That's correct. It's a longer term, monster cultural problem in the US.

We're spending plenty of money to have the nice things our society should have (eg universal guaranteed healthcare; better public transportation), and we're spending it wrong (eg paying way too much for healthcare) and or in many of the wrong places (eg the decades-long war on drugs and its consequences).

Nobody does inefficient government spending (and general spending, our consumers are fiscal idiots too) like the US. We spend more and get less for it than any affluent peer nation.

> fiscal idiots

Ignorant concerning tax policy? I don't think that's what you meant, I think maybe you meant "financial idiots".

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