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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

> This recent disclosure proves, in a Groundhog Day-like fashion, that the FBI is not going to suddenly become good at self-control when it comes to access to our data. If the privacy of our communications—including communications with people abroad—is going to actually matter, Section 702 must be irrevocably changed or jettisoned entirely.

Section 702 looks to be expiring at the end of this year, although the Biden admin has expressed intention to renew it[1][2].

[1]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/03/section-702s-unconstit...

[2]: https://www.npr.org/2023/03/23/1164724089/in-fight-over-key-...

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> Biden admin has expressed intention to renew it

It will be renewed.

"You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you"

- Chuck Schumer

I just wish we had an IC that loved America more than its own power.

Yet time and time again we see these orgs are full of corrupt, evil people.

Pournelle's Iron Law

> Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people":

> First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

> Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

> The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.[1]

Definitely. I think this very well explains how we got to this position.

[1]: https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

>"I just wish we had an IC that loved America more than its own power."

They probably think that they do love their country more than their power, while believing they need the power to protect their country. This may be a sort of 'moral corruption', though not the conventional sort. It doesn't seem 'evil' to me.

Exactly. IC people are humans too, just like the rest of us. It's convenient to assume they are sinister evil bastards (some of them are to be clear, but clearly not all of them), but it's an unhelpful and counterproductive stereotype.

I've known a few people involved in intelligence, and they absolutely believe they were serving and loving their country. It reminds me a bit of being an infrastructure person where when you mess up, everybody knows, but when you're doing your job well, nobody knows you exist. They see a constant and non-stop stream of threats that outsiders don't see, and when a threat is stopped nobody knows about it. I would bet it's not too hard to justify the intrusive capabilities and any "mistakes" made with them when you have that visibility into the successes. Humans are wonderful at justifying what they want to believe is true, and intel is no exception.

The individual intel person is not the problem here. It's a systemic problem enabled by legislation that needs to be addressed at the legislative level.

While they are humans, the gatekeeping in the system ensures only sinister humans will get those jobs.

CIA director admitted to interferring in elections. https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/374372-ex-...

CIA officials told my country's ex-president to stop doubting the voting machines. That's what ultimately convinced me they must have been compromised.

How do you know that they love this country? Pure conjecture. Evidence, however, indicates the contrary; they break the laws to suppress people for power. That's pretty much the definition of evil.

It's also pure conjecture to say that they break the laws to suppress people for power.

Have you ever seen how the bottom-level of people in a huge bureaucratic organization behave? They're not evil, they're just being human. Unless you're prepared to say that at least 65% to 95% of humans are evil[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

It's conjecture, but the fact that a powerful senator like Chuck Schumer fears going against them is enough to convince me that they need to be severely reigned in.

Absolutely, I fully agree. Regardless of whether they are "evil" or not, they need to be reigned in.

He doesn't fear going against them - he's one of them.

There's plenty of evidence that shows how deeply currupted the 3 letter agencies are in this country. The FBI, a Hoover organization, appears to me to be an organization that exists solely to persecute, blackmail and bait populists and small government types, aka the very people bureaucrats hate.

I'm not sure what kind of freedom you advocate for Ben, it certainly doesn't seem to jive with the notion of We the People.

> There's plenty of evidence that shows how deeply currupted the 3 letter agencies are in this country.

So is the large majority of the population.

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

- C.S. Lewis

> The keys of the castle and keep glinted from the belt at his stout waist. [...] Keys to lock out all danger... and, if necessary, Ista in.

> It’s only habit, you know. I’m not mad anymore, really.

> It wasn’t as though she wanted her mother’s keys, nor her mother’s life that went with them. She scarcely knew what she wanted. She knew what she feared—to be locked up in some dark, narrow place by people who loved her. An enemy might drop his guard, weary of his task, turn his back; love would never falter. Her fingers rubbed restlessly on the stone.

-- Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold

Both the Soviet apparatchiks running the gulags sincerely believed they were acting for the greater good. The same goes for the torturers at Guantanamo. Idealism doesn't preclude evil.

> Idealism doesn't preclude evil.

Unchallenged idealism is the root of many evils. If you are convinced of your own righteousness, its very easy to “ends justify the means” almost anything. Its the danger of even a well-motivated person ending up with a cultivation or otherwise in an ideological echo chamber.

I agree. I think it’s just laziness or being asked to square a circle. During the post-9/11 period there was immense political will and pressure to stop terrorism, and it’s really fucking hard to stop that while abiding by the constitution, so they chose to break the constitution to stop terrorism.

Is it theoretically possible to stop terrorism/catch and guys to the same extent without breaking the constitution? I think so, but it would probably require a lot more boots on the ground, and a lot of creativity and smart thinking from individuals to be able to get as good outcomes as you’d get from just looking at data when you aren’t supposed to.

Wasn't Osama bin Laden a CIA operative that worked against the soviets? Maybe the correct move would be to not train and arm extreamists?

No. According to the Mujahadeen who did work with CIA, ObL was considered an "extremist" even among them because he expected to go to war against the US immediately after they were done with the Soviets. According to them, he didn't want anything to do with CIA.

This is why America was conceived to be a country where the central government can only exercise enumerated powers; because the framers knew that every organization eventually becomes run (at one point or all subsequent points) by corrupt, evil people.

Any system of governance that depends on an unbroken chain of good people is bound to fail, and fail much sooner rather than later. The only sustainable safeguard against it is to make sure that said system of governance is limited in what it can do.

> This is why America was conceived to be a country where the central government can only exercise enumerated powers;

> because the framers knew that every organization eventually becomes run (at one point or all subsequent points) by corrupt, evil people.

That doesn't logically follow, given that the state governments can exercise more than just enumerated powers. And at the moment, quite a few of them are really, really fucking evil, with a few more being highly corrupt.

It makes a lot more sense when you view that separation of power as a compromise made to deal with the problem <one 'evil, corrupt'[1] federal organization in conflict with another 'evil, corrupt'[1] state organization>[2] as opposed to some weird conflict between <'evil, corrupt' federal government versus the people (but the 'evil, corrupt' state governments get a free pass or something..?)>.

The question of 'who gets residual powers' isn't some 250 IQ bit of brilliant statesmanship and foresight, it's a just a decision that quite honestly, has gone either way in plenty of different countries, and none of them are in any quantifiable way worse off for it.

[1] Your words, not mine. I think it's a pretty childish moniker devoid of all nuance, but when in Rome...

[2] Which is actually the lens through which the founders viewed things. [3]

[3] And they have been proven so, so wrong by history. As it turns out, in a high-speed communication society, party unity tends to override these kind of extra-organizational struggles. It's why the party of states rights complaints incessantly about federal tyranny, but only when it doesn't control the presidency.

The federal government's powers are enumerated while everything else is left to the states. You may not like that the OP presented the federal government as corrupt but that doesn't negate the point. There is no accountability at the federal level. The federal government has turned into a mess of alphabet agencies whose sole purpose is to grow. They are not elected but write the laws. Congress has abducted their responsibility. There is recourse at the state level.

> Congress has abducted their responsibility

Because it's happy with that state of affairs, and you keep voting them in.

> There is recourse at the state level.

No, there isn't. Not at the state level, nor at a more local level. We're at a point where even municipalities aren't able to rein in their police departments!

> Because it's happy with that state of affairs

All it will take is an embarrassing data breach like Bork's video rental records and they'll pass legislation to cover their asses.

They won't care. They'll spin it as fake news, a political attack against them. I believe the phrase of the day is 'Election Interference'.

The thing with being shameless is that scandal rolls off you like water off a duck's back.

> you keep voting them in

I do not keep voting these people in.

> municipalities aren't able to rein in their police departments

Where are you seeing this? Seems like there's been fairly significant changes and individual officers are being held accountable. I'm genuinely curious if you have examples.

I believe you can more easily push change at the local level. Our federal government is a monstrous, unstoppable force.

> This is why America was conceived to be a country where the central government can only exercise enumerated powers; because the framers knew that every organization eventually becomes run (at one point or all subsequent points) by corrupt, evil people.

This is false.

America was reconceived as a country where the federal government had enumerated powers because it started as one where the federal government had no powers and could only act by ad hoc unanimity of the constituent states, and that failed hard, and the particular idea of, and particular set of, enumerated powers chosen was a compromise among the Framers who were called to fix the failing system, and whose preferences ranged from a much more powerful central government (the Hamilton and, less extremely, Pinkney plans) to a vastly less powerful one (the New Jersey plan), and did not represent a shared common vision, contrary to the later-constructed mythology.

Taking this mythological common vision, and then constructiong a rationalization for it, and then presenting it as the original plan of government for America falsely projects into a hotly debated contentious compromise created to deal with particular exigencies arising under the earlier plan into a kind of perfect divine revelation of government, which it very much was not and was not viewed as by participants in the process.

Great stuff... Now knowing what you do, could you speculate how would the current powers of the intelligence committee be viewed by the participants in that process?

I think the general opinion would be, to borrow from King Louis’ Head (by way of Alexander Hamilton, as imagined by Lin-Manuel Miranda): “Do what you want, I’m super dead”.

Though, among those regarded as Founding Fathers, that might be most particularly the view of Thomas Jefferson, who wrote: “On similar ground it may be proved that no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation. They may manage it then, and what proceeds from it, as they please, during their usufruct. They are masters too of their own persons, and consequently may govern them as they please. But persons and property make the sum of the objects of government. The constitution and the laws of their predecessors extinguished them, in their natural course, with those whose will gave them being. This could preserve that being till it ceased to be itself, and no longer. Every constitution, then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force and not of right.” (Letter to James Madison, Paris, Sep. 6, 1789)

Are suggesting we abolish the Constitution and create a new one?

> Are suggesting we abolish the Constitution and create a new one?

No, that was Thomas Jefferson saying that.

I’m saying asking “what would the founders think?” is asking an irrelevant question, as well as an unanswerable one.

The current Supreme Court and their fixation on originalism would strongly disagree with you.

Originalism is a mode of interpretation that focuses on how words of a legal enactment would have been understood when written, which is a distinctly different question than what the authors’ opinion would have been of something.

Dragonwriter has a great response. My short and sweet answer is, the constitution is a living document for a reason and people ~250 years ago couldn't possibly plan for a world where cell phones exists (or think about the intricacies of that world). That doesn't mean all their work goes out the window, but it means their work does not hold the answer to everything. Trying to define the constitutionality of regulating telecom with words written that couldn't conceive of that world, probably has a few flaws.

Somewhat ironically, the US Constitution convention was unconstitutional for this reason.

It was drafted to be binding with 9 out of the 13 states signing on in direct Defiance of the unanimity required by the previous Constitution. It was somewhat a moot point because all 13 colonies ended up eventually signing,

I think that's why there is so many checks and balances betweent the different branches of government. The FF knew that politicians (humans?) are bound to be corrupt and try to centralize ever more power (and money) to themselves.

Quote context:

New Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Tuesday that President-elect Donald Trump is “being really dumb” by taking on the intelligence community and its assessments on Russia’s cyber activities.

“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Schumer told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.

<https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/312605-schumer-t...>

Not sure what this context adds, but ok.

What the context adds is that the quote comes from a political attack against the intelligence services, rather than attempts to legislate restrictions (the context in which the quote was submitted in this thread), requirements, regulations, of regulatory actions through the executive, or court decisions through the judiciary. Of which there is ample history of each.

Oh, so disagreeing with their conclusions might trigger vengeful retaliation, but actually threatening their power will not?

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I was curious about the quote: was it in fact legitimate, and when and in what context did it originate. And shared what I found.

Otherwise my comment stands for itself.

But thanks.

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