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Comment by riazrizvi | Hacker News Reader

The USA is a country of laws. It's possible that people submitting packages are submitting illegal malware; spyware, ransomware, software to steal crypto money, or run illegal ticket-buying bots. Ethical oversight is baked into the institutions through governance structures. Institutions aren't perfect. Also there tend to be more complaints in the media about a country's institutions than in regions where there is not a free press. So the voices complaining online don't necessarily correlate with where the problems most lie.

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Describing the US as a country of laws is a little funny. The mere existence of laws does not imply much.

Your examples are even weirder. How would such malfeasance justify clandestine observations? That is clearly disproportional, thus unethical.

Claiming governance structures were "baked into" institutions is pure hopium. Democratic oversight means, there must be transparency enabling you as a citizen to detect and react to misconduct, at least by proxy.

The "free press" isn't free to report and investigate such subpoenas, obviously.

If law enforcement was never allowed to engage in clandestine operations then it would hamper their ability to build a case against and/or apprehend criminals. Case in point, organized crime syndicates.

This is why the majority of your fellow citizens disagree with you and are fine with the current state of affairs.

That seems like kind of a fabricated boogeyman, though. I have an extremely hard time thinking of anyone I know whose been affected by an organized crime syndicate, but I can immediately bring to mind a whole host of injustices suffered at the hands of government agencies, from bogus tickets to civil forfeiture to imprisionment for victimless 'crimes' (and that's not even accounting for blanket stuff like xkeyscore or spending my tax dollars on nonsense like the iraq war - all arguably way worse than any criminal organization without government backing could ever hope to inflict)

What about a ransomware, phishing or data breach victim? Cybercrimes are often committed by organised criminals and investigating them seems like the most obvious reason for the DOJ to issue a subpoena to PyPI.

This is my high school buddy’s dad:

https://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/watchdog/2013/12/...

Three of my teenage friends were in his basement when the FBI kicked down the door and stormed in armed to the teeth.

Perhaps you’re fine letting thieves and murderers get the upper hand but the rest of us are not.

Consider yourself lucky that criminals haven’t had much of an impact on your life.

Sorry, what point are you trying to make?

A very basic one: organized crime does in fact exist (contra to claims of bogeymen) and law enforcement benefits from clandestine investigations.

It is a trade-off. The downsides have been enumerated ad nauseam on hacker forums for decades and compared to the reality of organized crime comprise just a small percentage of the ill effects experienced in a relatively low corruption society like the United States.

No one is trying to claim organized crime does not exist. They are claiming that the harms from organized crime may not be as bad on the whole as the harms from some of these laws intended (at least in part) to combat it.

This does not, of course, mean that the harms to certain individuals from organized crime aren't worse. But governing based on a small number of emotional anecdotes, and ignoring the broader harms being perpetrated to placate that vocal minority, is deeply irresponsible.

What is deeply irresponsible is ignoring the benefits of clandestine operations by law enforcement in a vain attempt to adhere to some kind of free and open source information ideology.

I think where you and I might be diverging here is in our definitions of 'thief' and 'murderer'.

I don't see a difference between, say, a capo that orders a hit, and a member of congress who votes for a foreign 'police action' - save for that the congressmember has much, much higher numbers.

Same goes for a bank robber vs. a bank exec who gets a multimillion $ payout from bailout funds - we're impressed if the bank robber cracks a million - but it's like "that makes sense" when the exec walks away with eight figures of tax dollars.

I don't know anyone whose been killed by a mob hit, but I know soldiers who have lost their lives to bullshit foreign wars, and literally everyone who pays taxes lost money to the villains in 2008.

I believe criminals have had a huge impact on my life - they just all got there through 'legitimate' channels, which IMO makes no difference to whether I'm poorer or people are dead.

> whose been affected by an organized crime syndicate

I can’t think of anyone I know who has been affected by holes in the ozone layer. Must be a fabricated government boogeyman designed to force me to buy an inferior fridge.

Law enforcement agencies have been quite effective in controlling them over the last few decades (that and they’ve been replaced by foreign drug cartels..). It was probably quite different back in the 60s or 70s

> I can’t think of anyone I know who has been affected by holes in the ozone layer. Must be a fabricated government boogeyman designed to force me to buy an inferior fridge.

There are many [1] counties in California that come immediately to mind - but I digress.

I'll readily admit that things have changed - organized crime was indeed a much bigger problem in the past - but I might argue that even then the fault lay not with a lack of enforcement, but the existence of really, really dumb laws (prohibition). I might further argue that what organized crime is still problematic, is also a legislative rather than an enforcement issue (current prohibition, which we euphamize as the 'war on drugs').

Even if it's enforcement that's doing the work of eliminating the effects of organized crime on actual citizens - the potential for harm is way bigger from an organization with a monopoly on violence, a state mandate, and practically unlimited coffers.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_California_wildfires

In a lot of ways, being 'a nation of laws' means the officeholders can evade any kind of personal responsibility by asserting that they're just one cog in the legal gear wheel. Which one? Well that can take years of litigation to establish.

Of course, the idea is that people are corruptible whereas laws are clear and neutral, but reality falls far short of this ideal. Any system can be gamed and ultimately captured; the more widely accountability is distributed, the less the probability of its timely application.

> Ethical oversight is baked into the institutions through governance structures.

Kind of a shocking assumption to make. Over the past several decades it has become increasingly apparent how our governing structures have no inherent relationship with ethics.

You’re extrapolating incidents that are being called out in the press to improve the system onto vast legislative infrastructure that is operating day after day for 100’s millions of people in this country.

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