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Comment by quacked | Hacker News Reader

We all know it's happening. What, if anything, could the voting public do to remove the ability of the intelligence community to spy on citizens?

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Accept that as a society we do not have some cosmic right to perfect security. Recognize that the price of freedom is that from time to time some of us get blown up. Acknowledge that life owes us no guarantees and the best system is still going to look messy and wrong.

How to do that? I have absolutely no idea.

Organize society into smaller morsels; this tendency of the centralized state will not be eradicated - states can be modelled as creatures seeking self-preservation, and knowledge into their citizens’ lives reads as something that will further that (even if it doesn’t).

Realistically that won’t happen save for some terrible calamity. The voting public will certainly play no part in this going away.

Demand direct democracy.

Or in other words: nothing probably?

Meh. Switzerland voted for vastly expanded surveillance powers a while ago. (Some) political parties portrayed those who voted against this as unpatriotic and careless. It did the trick.

I honestly don't see an issue with having people vote directly on bills. Everyone's got a smartphone and Amber Alerts have a mechanism to disseminate information widely and quickly (something that cannot be ignored or at leasts documents receipt of the voting expectation). Winning an election should not entitle any political actor or party 4 years to run amok with zero accountabillity other than losing the next election.

I can see an issue. Someone makes a bill called the Save Puppies Act with terrible stuff in it and everyone votes for it without reading the bill. No one has time to read every bill. Potentially it could be done with a few bills during presidential election years.

Bills should have to be summarized like scientific papers do in the abstract. It can be boiled down to its substantive parts but the whole nature of the game (particularly with those omnibus-style bills) is to obscure included and unrelated provisions desired by lobbyists and establishment politicians who are earning their next paycheque.

This already happens quite a bit with the referendums required to amend state constitutions in the US. Maybe not quite as nefarious, but they sneak in unpopular stuff, and the ballot summaries don't mention those parts.

How about ranked choice voting... That would be a good start.

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