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Comment by vjulian | Hacker News Reader

It irritates to no end when US presidents are not only falsely attributed to government actions but falsely portrayed, even thinly, as masterminding those related plans. Over the course of news cycles it paints the picture of a superman not unlike the absurd hyperbole in descriptions of North Korea’s Dear Leader. In the US, I am not sure whether it can be attributed to laziness or to the calculus of the news establishment, but regardless it is poor journalism.

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It's an election year. Party constituents eat polarizing rhetoric and outlandish takes like it's a breakfast bar. Journalists are happy to stock that bar.

fwiw, it wasn't Biden that created the court it was Merrick Garland: https://www.justice.gov/opcl/redress-data-protection-review-...

Also, not exactly a secret given that it had a PR release and the judges are known. Maybe the secret part is getting in front of them.

The court's functioning is absolutely still a secret to its plaintiffs [EU residents]; its location is a secret, the DOJ refuses to say if it has taken a case yet, or when it will. [That implies it has not published any rulings, or maybe it will never publish rulings]. Its decisions will also be kept a secret, from both the EU residents petitioning the court and the federal agencies tasked with following the law. Plaintiffs [EU-residents] are not allowed to appear in person [not even remotely by Zoom, it sounds like?] and are represented by a special advocate, appointed by the U.S. Attorney General.

I can't see US citizens being told to just trust a secret European court whose deliberations aren't known, yet affects their lives, visas, travels, finances etc.

"Maybe the secret part is getting in front of them." No, they already stated that the EU plaintiffs don't have the right to appear before the court. So they don't get in front of them.

On the "Animal House" taxonomy of double-secret, it's up there.

I think your points are fair and I largely agree with you, but I'd probably use the word "opaque" rather than secretive. Sometimes opaque systems do serve a purpose, other times they're an excuse to undermine rights and liberties. This court deals entirely in classified information (from its mandate) and only produces classified rulings. I linked both of the sources (.gov websites) in another comment. Whether or not that's good enough to remain opaque I don't know. I do know that I'm not a fan of any surveillance state and I'm not confident in the ability of intergovernment watchdogs to spot violations, even gross ones.

Governments shouldn't be able to prosecute people with secret evidence and secret processes in secret locations. You can keep your classified materials secret or you can prosecute someone, but you shouldn't be able to do both. Anything else is categorically incompatible with the liberal democratic principles of accountable government.

As it's said, "Put up, or shut up."

This "court" doesn't prosecute anyone. It's an internal review board for the intelligence agencies. Its function is (purportedly) to prevent the intelligence agencies from abusing their power.

Great, so it’s a police department Internal Affairs office on a whole lot of steroids. I’m sure it’s on the up and up

I don't think absolute statements like this are useful.

There clearly are cases where it is appropriate to prosecute someone with classified evidence. Spying cases are a good example.

The problem is that these exemptions are used too often.

Transparent democratic government is non negotiable, but even from a consequentialist viewpoin it's not clear at all. We had a leaky sieve to documents of all SCI types for president for four full years and the nation hasn't collapsed. Clearly the downsides of unaccountable government are worse.

The thought of US citizens being even for a second treated like how the US government treats non-US-residents is absolutely hilarious. What an utter rude shock.

> fwiw, it wasn't Biden that created the court it was Merrick Garland

But Merrick Garland is a Biden appointee. Don't you think leaders should be held accountable for the actions of their administration?

Of course, as vjulian points out, they aren't masterminding everything that their subordinates do, but they do choose who to appoint and have the power to reverse anything they disapprove of once they learn about it.

> Don't you think leaders should be held accountable for the actions of their administration?

Color me cynical, but people only mutter this when it's someone on the other team. So, in general do I think we should follow that principle? Yes. Do I think people widely believe that enough to hold their own self-interest-adjacent parties accountable? Certainly not.

If you want to be very picky, the rule Mr Garland invented was in response to a Biden executive order [1] [2]. The executive order is long, but section 3 is pretty succinct and clear. If Mr Garland implemented an opaque system then I can predict one of two scenarios occurred, maybe both:

1. All of the information the court receives is classified and should never have been leaked in the first place, so no one should know. That means the way someone does know is because of the watchdogs inside the intelligence community.

2. Mr Garland is openly defying the President through process and appeasing someone (maybe the intelligence community).

1: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2022/10/14/2022-22...

2: https://www.state.gov/executive-order-14086-policy-and-proce...

Thanks for the link to the executive order. Now that I've read it, I'd say that an opaque system seems to be exactly what Biden wanted.

The EO repeatedly says that results and procedures will be "classified" and "consistent with the protection of intelligence sources or methods".

And the complainant not being able to represent themselves is mandated by the EO: "a special advocate will be selected by the Data Protection Review Court to advocate regarding the complainant's interest in the matter".

Your comment only serves to further illustrate the mystic of the US Office of Dear Leader. To what degree, if at all, did Biden drive the profiling, search, evaluation and selection processes? I feel fairly confident in guessing that you don’t know. Unelected long-tenure “officials” run the US government to a degree that you’re perhaps not appreciating. Journalists not reporting on them or their actions, and instead maintaining a ruse is shoddy and shady.

In this case I do not understand your point.

President Biden created this court via his executive order privilege in October 2022¹.

"" By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows: ""

Did he write it all. Did he come up with it all. Probably not.

If the criteria is that you cannot hold a politician responsible unless he or she has written the laws or orders themselves that they vote on, then no single politician in at least a western democracy can be held responsible for anything.

It is their responsibility, as democratically elected representatives, to take responsibility for how they vote, what the sign and whatever orders they are issuing.

¹ https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/executive-order-14...

No. You’re ignoring the root cause, drivers, and the realities of government. Arbitrarily applying a “buck stops here” mentality not only stymies the generation of useful analysis but helps to maintain the opaqueness of that which you’re investigating.

Are you advocating that the "deep state" is running every country and that the politicians have no importance and influence and will do whatever the "dark cabal" tells them?

Does this extend out to CEOs as well? Clearly, they must be in a much similar situation?

I sense that your response is in bad faith, intended to win perceived debate rather than further discussion. Assuming it is not in bad faith, then I agree at least that a business-organization example might be apt. To that end, would I be pleased by a management consultancy that fails to identify root causes and drivers and hands me a superficial org chart as their finding? [Edited for clarity and typos]

Yeah same, after the Colorado state level judges took Trump off the ballot, people I considered intelligent were saying “Biden this is an ironic way to convince people the election wasn’t stolen”

like, do they not realize these are completely separate governments? is this the general understanding amongst Americans

do they really believe there is a perpetual unfalsifiable plot where the President is not only undermining the judiciary, but the judiciary of a separate sovereign institution, 1 out of 50 that nobody thinks about, and based on political leaning

and even if its just hyberbole? why? why not criticize the judges themselves, the rationale of that state’s due process, why not attribute such collusion to the governor

its all so dumb, people are dumb

Your comment is related to the Politico articled cited, not the actual techdirt article, right? (the techdirt article has 0 named mentions of Biden or Obama, and only one of 'former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page').

Yeah, Politico's use of "Biden's court... Biden's proposal" is annoyingly lazy DC shorthand for "the Biden-era DOJ/DHS/FTC/etc."

Correct. I saw that someone had linked the original article and therefore skipped directly there.

How is this a false attribution? The court was authorized by an executive order from Joe Biden.

That’s a largely meaningless statement if your aim is to understand who is driving what, and why.

No, it's an extremely meaningful statement if your aim is to understand who is driving what. Without Biden's signature, there is no court.

That doesn't mean Biden had anything to do with creating the order besides issuing and signing it. But it's accurate to say Biden created the court. Nobody forced him to sign.

I believe you are confusing formalities with realities.

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