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Comment by yieldcrv | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know the forums where people create bills for laws like the one discuss and think they’re doing good?

I don’t want like paranoia based forums, I want the one where intelligent people are synthesizing laws with the correct lingo, laws that create power for the state and pass it to their favorite senators

I would like to see how they think about things

I don't really buy the perpetual “us vs them” mentality I’m presented with, and maybe there is a more holistic approach to collaborating with their sentiment if there was more communication

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> I don't really buy the perpetual “us vs them” mentality I’m presented with, and maybe there is a more holistic approach to collaborating with their sentiment if there was more communication

I think it's "people who write them $100,000 checks versus people who don't". There is no true collaboration when one side of the argument is shoveling piles of money in to their lap and then we are expected to encourage them to see our side.

reiterating: I want to see their side.

I've lobbied in a variety of countries and stateside political entities successfully, and in the process I realized everyone thinks their cause is just. My ability to bridge consensus is more novel than the ideologies that have gravitated to the far extremes of their respective parties and will never gain consensus. What we have in common is that we all appreciate the influence that surpasses the popular vote, in places we could never be registered to vote in to begin with. So my causes have been enacted in some places, and people doing the same thing believe the same thing about their causes. Nobody sees themselves as the "shadowy foreign influence" in the other country's political process, but sure, the Michael Moore documentary 10 years too late will present it that way.

In this case, I'd like to know what the proponents believe about this particular cause to even do. What are they trying to accomplish beyond "unaccountable secret government court to piss off technologists that have a hobby of paying attention to it"?

> secret government court to piss off technologists

Pretty sure nobody cares about what "technologists" think about it. Technologists will do what they're told, for pay. "Unaccountable secret government" is an obvious aim in itself, for people who think (or know) that they will be insiders.

Here's a talk that may interest you with former Director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center Bill Evanina and Special Agent Charles McGonigal (yes, that one). https://youtu.be/aZdJ6aDsB08?t=5712

They believe these powers are critical for counterintelligence and foreign influence investigations. I think that's not true, but I'm pretty sure they actually believe it.

I'm pretty sure that when sneaking in laws like this, the people who write $100K checks don't even want explicit public support for their positions. Lobbying for public support means intentionally publicizing the thing you're trying to sneakily do. Maybe you convert one person to your side, but in order to do that, you've told five people what you're going to do.

For some opinions, you can't find anyone who publicly holds them who isn't being paid in some way. The best you can do is find a thinktank that is also being paid to support the idea, but which is also being paid to write the apologia that others will repeat parts of when confronted. If you hear politicians repeating the same phrases, google them and you might find the original.

A supportive WaPo/NYT oped will also be written by the thinktank (often signed by a congressperson or celebrity), but if they can't quid-pro-quo into the editorial pages of one of those two, they'll still have a half-dozen on Politico/The Hill that will lead you to a paper.

> people who write them $100,000 checks

Which law enforcement agency is writing $100k checks? There are no commercial interests in Section 702. In fact, if any, they would be against 702 (as Verizon doesn't like having to deal with it).

Law enforcement are a means to an end. They don't lobby for themselves, but other powerful interests lobby on law enforcement's behalf.

Said more directly - powerful people want more law enforcement against the common people and they will lobby for it.

> They don't lobby for themselves

Law enforcement (both agencies and law enforcement personnel collectively separately from any agency) absolute do lobby legislators directly, and the public, for themselves.

Oh, I mean yes they do. But also more powerful groups lobby for law enforcement as well because the security state is good for big business.

It really depends on the kind of business, because one could also argue that surveillance is an additional cost to companies that are forced to help with it by intercepting their customers. Unless those same companies get paid by the government to do so, I'm not a USA citizen so I don't know exactly the situation there.

Common people generally don't like terrorism.

> There are no commercial interests in Section 702.

Oh sure, NSA's budget just sits there never to be used. It's definitely not being used to pay contractors, buy equipment, or build data centers contrary to what we learned from the Snowden disclosures. /s

Congressional committees and hearings? Alternatively lobby groups.

Coffee meets keyboard moment.

Lol

> Does anyone know the forums where people create bills for laws

Call your electeds and let them know of policy areas you’re interested in and could comment on legislation about. Or, if you see a bill, call in the edit.

> and think they’re doing good?

I think they're doing good. These programs are constitutional and there are bad guys in the world. Some things need to be secret.

Let's start there- can we both agree that secrets are sometimes necessary?

Sure, let's start there. And then how exactly do we get to the current debate, which is more "Secrets for me, but not for thee"?

There's the rub. "Secrets for thee" would mean giving secrets to the whole world- enemies and all. They do eventually become declassified which seems like a good compromise. Transparency without giving a freebie to the enemy.

That's not the rub at all. No one is "giving secrets" to anyone. The debate is whether to further allow and expand the power of the government to prevent anyone else from keeping secrets of their own. We started from the premise that secrets are necessary sometimes, right? I fail to see the connection.

Secrets like "what are the codes to the nuclear weapons" or "what are the identities of our spies in foreign countries", sure. Secrets like "we served a warrant to this entity for this information", no. I don't think such secrets are ever appropriate. The government should not have the authority to stop any entity from disclosing information they didn't agree in advance to keep secret.

When you sign up to have top-secret clearance, you're agreeing that you are to keep that information secret, and you wouldn't have obtained the information otherwise; you can always choose not to apply for that clearance and then not get the information.

Secret warrants should not exist. The concept is fundamentally flawed and irreparable. If you receive a warrant you should always be entirely within your rights to publish it verbatim.

Separate from that: the entire concept of compelling an entity to collect information is also fundamentally flawed and unfixable. Serving a (non-secret) warrant to gather information an entity already has is perfectly reasonable. Compelling an entity to gather information they otherwise would not have gathered is not reasonable.

What if disclosing the warrant causes the target(s) to change their behavior and cause harm?

> Secret warrants should not exist.

I disagree, and so do the courts.

Keeping warrants secret can also cause harm, by preventing oversight. Even if you take a "balance of harms" approach (which I don't agree with in general if it doesn't take deontological prohibitions and fundamental rights into account), in general I think the ability to have secret warrants with correspondingly minimal oversight is far more prone to abuse than any added benefit it might theoretically provide.

Among other things, secret warrants eliminate the ability of a party affected by a warrant to contest the legality or scope of the warrant. Secret warrants also prevent the public from having oversight of governmental overreach and abuse.

The US legal system is not and should not be designed to maximize the discovery and conviction of criminals at all costs. (Though observation of its net effects might suggest otherwise.) The US legal system is and should be designed to presume innocence, and to not presume that anyone targeted by law enforcement is a criminal. Your argument is focused solely on whether someone will change their behavior in response to knowledge of a warrant and whether that will prevent the conviction of a criminal. Having to obtain warrants at all also makes it harder to gather evidence; having to target specific individuals rather than a fishing dragnet of everyone makes it harder to gather evidence; many things make it harder to gather evidence, and that's a feature, not a bug. It's the reason why "if you have nothing to hide" arguments are invalid.

> I disagree, and so do the courts.

Disagreement is not an argument, and a statement of the current status quo is not an argument. If you want to argue "that's the current law" then my response is "I know, it's wrong and needs fixing", and we're done.

The status quo for several centuries were that secret warrants could not exist. This changed opportunistically in response to an event that made people fearful, even though there's zero evidence that these expansive and easily abused powers would have done anything to help stop that.

>>Secret warrants should not exist.

>I disagree, and so do the courts.

If you live in a more hostile environment where there is no accountability from the police and they routinely shake down, physically harm and jail innocent people using these powers, for personal and political benefits would you still support that? What happens if the US finds itself in that same hostile environment?

Have you taken into consideration how bad faith players would abuse power and how to keep them from doing it? Where's the checks and balances when nobody knows what's going on?

> What if disclosing the warrant causes the target(s) to change their behavior and cause harm?

I don't care. My rights being secure is far more important to me than some hypothetical criminal getting away with a crime.

That belief is not supported by evidence[1] and must be weighed against the more typical scenarios where state-sponsored criminals obtain evidence unlawfully and then lie about it[2]. If they can't build a case against you, even with made-up sources and manufactured evidence, they'll just steal your stuff[3] or detain you indefinitely[4] anyway.

Can we start there instead - can we both agree that the legal system should obey the law?

  [1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/nsa-program-stopped-no-terror-attacks-says-white-house-panel-flna2d11783588
  [2] https://www.hrw.org/report/2018/01/09/dark-side/secret-origins-evidence-us-criminal-cases
  [3] https://www.splcenter.org/20171030/civil-asset-forfeiture-unfair-undemocratic-and-un-american
  [4] https://www.aclu.org/documents/indefinite-detention

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