25 years of mass surveillance is enough | Hacker News Reader

25 years of mass surveillance is enough

schneier.com

964 pointsiamnothere358 comments

Surveillance and totalitarian control is a downward spiral of misery and suffering for everyone, even those in power.

It reminds me of some quotes from the Tao Te Ching -

Restriction breeds the disorder it's meant to prevent (ch. 57) The more prohibitions there are in the world, the poorer the people become. The more sharp weapons, the more the state falls into confusion. The more laws and edicts are posted, the more thieves and bandits there are.

The world isn't a thing to be managed (ch. 29) The world is a sacred vessel; it cannot be manipulated. Whoever acts on it ruins it; whoever grips it loses it.

Yet there's incentive structures that push it forward.

It's a classic example of us being dragged along by incentives and emergent patterns against our individual wills and better judgement.

People think it's a conspiracy of the elite, but the last part of your message is true and it makes me wonder to what extent everyone is being dragged along by everyone else and nobody can stop because nobody can stop.

I mean if I were a multi-billionaire, I'm not sure I could do anything. I could piss into the wind with a somewhat larger amount of piss.

I've come to believe that our lack of agency over emergent behaviors in our own societies and economies is a central problem of the human condition.

I mostly agree with your take. The ultra wealthy are entrapped by their own minds & machines of wealth that have tight demands.

And yet they still hold immense power to make our lives shittier. It is far easier to destroy a functioning system than it is to build one from the ground up

And yet the lives of everyone on this board has never been this comfortable in the past.

Do we live in different worlds? I can't think of a single meaningful way my comfort has increased in the past 25 years. In fact, with the rise of the homeless and mental health crises, the encroachment of more and more people who have no business touching computers into cyberspace, the increased relevance of flash mob power on the internet, I would say my comfort has been actively degraded on a fundamental and significant level.

On a broader timescale, we can take a look at the fact that goods which were designed to be affordable and mass-produced have been elevated to refined luxury goods, like the Herman-Miller Eames, as an indicator that material standards have fallen very far. Not the least of which because of an ever-dwindling labor share of capital (beginning in the 1970s), which silently impoverishes working households and degrades their comfort while being completely invisible to an uncareful eye on paper.

Much of the major boons of comfort were established prior to the transition to shareholder capitalism. Things like e-commerce, IoT, online banking, these are for the birds. Meaningful advances are things like HVAC and refrigeration, ubiquitous motorized transport, electrical lighting.

I believe the parent is implying that we sit uncomfortably at home, silently, rather than uncomfortably marching through the streets, demanding. Yet, I say that while uncomfortably sitting in my home, typing on a screen

Mass demonstrations are common and frequent, more than ever. The thing is that these are mild pressures at best. What came from Occupy Wallstreet? The George Floyd protests? The No Kings marches? Anti-ICE demonstrations? They're not nothing and we should continue to have them and participate in them, but we have to recognize them as what they are: background radiation. On their own, they don't affect change or bring about course correction. We clearly need something more, people inside of these institutions, sharks who are going to fight and win against the entrenched powers on their home turf. There's a very limited pool of people who are capable of doing that.

Plenty has come from all those things. But it's those in power who want you to feel like those are fruitless endeavors. That's why their strategy is to overwhelm. Good news takes time to be received and by then your focus will be on something else. But I promise you if you look them up you'll find real progress. It may not be as much as you want, but that's a different thing. Progress is made by small and successive steps. So the strategy to upend progress is to interrupt those steps and make them feel as small as possible. Don't fall for the trap

  > We clearly need ... sharks

I am afraid of sharks, just as I am scorpions. It is in their nature to draw blood. Bloodshed should be the last resort. By putting sharks in power is the problem with the current administration. Replacing with a different shark doesn't reduce attacks, it just changes targets. If sharks must be used, they must be well contained.

There are not more mass protests these days at all… (to ops point)

You have a strong point, and it's probably not the one you want to make.

Non-violent (peaceful, loud, signs) protesting does little to nothing. Historically speaking, what does work is violence, and a lot of it.

Even in the USA, our own labor battles were effectively wars, with the US military fighting against the people. It's where the Pinkertons were created. And it was bloody as hell, until FDR had some sense in making the NLRB to *curb the violence* with peaceful grievances.

When those in power forget the peaceful paths were a compromise, don't be too surprised when violence rears its ugly head.

This is how you get healthcare CEOs gunned down, or ol Scam Altman's house firebombed, or city council person get their house shot up after voting for a data center, or Flocks (YC17) getting destroyed en masse.

I'm just sitting here. And it definitely is getting worse and worse, for everyone. And some people, when you corner them, do unimaginable things.

To add to your point, I'm struggling to think of any non-violent movement in history that wasn't backed by a more violent movement that made the non-violent movement the more palatable option.

Unconditionally embracing nonviolence is not, properly, a goal. Nonviolence is a strategy. It must be conditional on its effectiveness.

Agreed, Viable nonviolent protests are a useful signal that society has not (yet) converted to outright authoritarianism. This is their only use IMO. They cannot effect meaningful change. But their existence signifies we can still effect such a change without resorting to violence.

There is a threshold beyond which change can only come about via violence. I don’t wish to speculate how far away from that threshold we currently find ourselves. I think we’re closer now than we were 10 years ago.

A useful thought experiment is which 80 year period of history would you prefer to live in other than now, with the caveat that you wouldn’t know how things turn out when you lived in that time. It’s easy to pick a single brief moment in history that is in some important ways better than right now. But many of those time periods are bookended by their own periods of strife and struggle. If you had to pick a different time period in history in which to live your life for 80 years birth to death, would you pick any other time than right now? Would you try to thread the needle such that you weren’t eligible to be drafted into the Vietnam war, but still benefit from the economic growth of the 50s-70s? Knowing that the AIDS crisis was still around the corner? And the unrest of the civil rights movement? The impending doom of the Cold War? A world where you rent your phone from AT&T, where your ability to learn about and communicate with the rest of the world list limited largely to passive consumption of limited news sources and books that might be decades out of date if you aren’t in a major metro area? Where your whole town might be dependent on a single employer who might be closing up factories and moving over seas in the 80s, or just plain closing down and taking your pension (and your local economy) with them?

Would you go further back in time and risk the Korean War or the World Wars and the Great Depression? A time when electricity was new and you might very well be using an outhouse as your toilet? When modern sanitation and health laws were in their infancy and debilitating diseases like polio ran rampant?

Would you go back further?

I for one, despite a lot of the issues with today can’t really find a different period of time I would prefer my life to span. I can absolutely identify parts of different times I would prefer to now, but I can’t see myself giving up everything I would need to to actually live in that period of time, and deal with the strife and struggles of the period at the same time.

>with the caveat that you wouldn’t know how things turn out when you lived in that time.

The premise sort of gives it away, doesn’t it? If you don’t know how things turn out you can’t say how you’d respond. Everyone is a product of their time. Some people are miserable, some are resilient.

It's a necessary restriction. Part of what drives modern anxiety is you don't know the future, so it's necessary that while you get to pick a time period where you have perfect visibility into its future (for example, you know that the cold war doesn't lead to the nuclear apocalypse) the person who lives through that moment can't have that knowledge. If you picked the cold war period, it is necessary that you pick it knowing your cold war self would NOT know that, and would be as anxious as their time and circumstances would make them with the information they would have had then, not the perfect* information you have now.

In that respect, all times are equal. There is no rational basis to choose one time over another.

Well if you don't know anything then it is just a numbers game. Most people pre-industrial has a high likely hood of you being a random subsidence farmer. And provided you didn't pick a standout point in history you would most of the time land on and live an uneventful life as a farmer.

And I know plenty of people that would take that kind of life. They would do it today if it didn't completely isolate themselves from society. But atlest in pre-modern times you could trade some random grain or booze for some other goods and pay your taxes with it. But today neither walmart nor the IRS will accept handspun yarn or a sack grain in lieu of money.

There are plenty of people on this board that aren't $200K+ software engineers. The median pay for my local area in the US is $35K at best, assuming it has risen the last few years.

> The ultra wealthy are entrapped by their own minds & machines of wealth that have tight demands.

But only within their minds. They could change their minds, donate or pay enough taxes that their billions would be distributed far and wide. Then they'd no longer be trapped.

Plenty of people make the choice to stop acquiring, stop increasing their wealth, and stop having more everything (kids, houses, cars, pets, hobbies, etc).

It's hard for those who have no choice, and those who've made different choices, to relate to the insatiable appetite of billionaires.

These people also have much more leverage to change the world in substantial, albeit often short lived ways. My family has been hurt by the DOGE cuts. Hopefully it's not a permanent injury. Yet it's very real.

Isn't it like that old story about catching monkeys. You hollow out a gourd with a small hole, tack it to the ground and put a nut in it. The monkey can get its hand in but not out with the nut in their fist. The human can walk over and leisurely whack the monkey because the monkey can't let go.

They act just like drug addicts. More's the pity. They can change but they don't seem to understand that rock bottom is a tough place to be.

The Monkey trap is a very powerful analogy.

It is looking like we are venturing into harder times these new few years for various reasons, as such one has to wonder what things you are still clinging to that can be let go and what is still worth handing on to. Hopefully we don't have to make those choices but it is always handy to keep in mind.

> It's hard for those who have no choice, and those who've made different choices, to relate to the insatiable appetite of billionaires.

If we talk about US, your statement is outrageous hypocrisy.

Median income world-wide is less than 50 cents per hour. Average American person "who have no choice" could start working for like 30+ times more at any moment they want and choose any US government they want.

And how much money from this 30+ times more they have "donated or paid enough taxes" that their several dollars per hour "would be distributed far and wide"? Zero. So we are talking about insatiable appetite of Americans, not Billionaires. Because average American person has literally the same choice you are talking about, and literally choosing "having more everything" instead of "distribute far and wide".

The average American struggles to pay rent, utilities, and food, actually. They can’t just go donate 99.999% of their wealth and still survive like billionaires could.

> The average American struggles to pay rent, utilities, and food, actually.

Do you think your average Billionaire do not struggles to pay for their 500m yacht or flock of supermodels and Hollywood stars?

> They can’t just go donate 99.999% of their wealth and still survive like billionaires could.

They totally can. An average American worker with 12 dollars salary in terms of excess cash is way closer to Elon Musk than to a tantalum mine worker in the Congo who earns 22 cents per hour.

Not 99.999% obviously, but they can easily pay 80%, 90%, 95%, or even 98% of their incomes as fair share to people, who really need it. But they choose not to. They choose to get more rent, more utilities, more food (even if they will literally die from that amount). Or even new iPhone, that has been created by those highly underpaid tantalum mine workers. From the point of view of the average human on planet Earth, average American just as much exploiter as any billionaire.

> but they can easily pay 80%, 90%, 95%, or even 98% of their incomes

Not american but I'd presume food, protection from the elements and healthcare costs arefor the vast majority higher than what's left over even if they only afford themselves the minimum no?

Where I live the absolute bottom segment of housing is proportionally more expensive and the price inflexible because smaller or shitier quite frankly doens't exist or is illegal.

> I'd presume food, protection from the elements and healthcare costs arefor the vast majority higher than what's left over even if they only afford themselves the minimum no?

Obviously no. What a hypocrisy and shifting of blame. "The minimum" you'd get if you are working for less than 20 cents per hour. When you are working for several dollars per hour, you are drowning in luxury comparing to the rest of the world and refusing to pay your fair share to other people, whose work you are appropriating.

> Where I live the absolute bottom segment of housing

That is the same as talking about "absolute bottom segment of housing in which billionaires are living". I mean, duh. Your bottom segment of housing (food, protection from the elements, healthcare) is literally a function of your bottom segment of income, it is not the "minimum".

>Obviously no. What a hypocrisy and shifting of blame.

Obviously yes. Your effort to equate the ability to scale down of billionaires to people who struggle to afford a shoebox appartment and lifesaving procedures if they were to fall ill is ghoulish. "

A lot of those a bit above the minimum do indeed spend more on what were historically luxuries because those luxuries now cost a fraction of their historical price whilst housing and such has typically gotten more expensive.

>That is the same as talking about "absolute bottom segment of housing in which billionaires are living".

It is not in any way shape or form the same because billionaires can go lower.

> it is not the "minimum".

The alternative is no housing (or often moving in with parents) so i'd argue it is. i'll remind you that a tent on the sidewalk isn't exactly legal everywhere.

If you’re going to go after Americans then I guess anyone around the world not living in a run down shack in the middle of nowhere without water and electricity is also taking advantage. Americans are well off compared to a lot of places but not the whole rest of the world, not even close. Get some perspective.

Where did you get that 50 cent statistic from? The closest I could find was a dataset from 2006-12 where the median per-capita income was $4k. Even if you extrapolate to working 40h a week and 52 weeks/year (which you can’t, because there’s some correlation between having lower income in this dataset and working part-time), that is still around $2/hr.

In https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-hourly-earnings I could not find a single country even close to what you have said, except for Burundi at $0.6/hr. The rest are all $2 and up.

> They could change their minds, donate or pay enough taxes that their billions would be distributed far and wide. Then they'd no longer be trapped.

They pay giant amounts of tax. The people not paying tax, or costing negative tax, are who you mean.

Do they?

The 2021 ProPublica tax leak showed the 25 richest Americans paid a "true tax rate" of roughly 3.4% on their $401 billion in wealth growth between 2014 and 2018, because their wealth grew without triggering realization events.

Try seeing how much net tax a government employee pays. It's in the negatives. Or a benefits recipient.

Sure, undoubtedly. But, also... you don't have to make a ton of money to pay more than 3% of your income.

To be clear, I don't pretend to have preferences. I'm idealistically libertarian, but I think that nukes have ruined the right to bear arms, propaganda has ruined free speech, and central banks have ruined currency. I'm a demoralist, I guess, to coin a term.

“Net” is not relevant, nominal tax rate matters, and billionaires are the biggest tax dodgers by far, stop trying to blame poor people and civil servants for your weird hangups.

> “Net” is not relevant

If it's not relevant then just give every government employee a million dollars a year raise, but on the condition that it's taxed at 100%. Then you've raised all the taxes you need and the private sector doesn't need taxing.

> billionaires are the biggest tax dodgers by far

Even if this is true (no evidence cited, of course) they still pay the most tax in terms of dollars, and their businesses generate far, far more tax downstream as well.

> stop trying to blame poor people and civil servants for your weird hangups

I'm not blaming them. I'm just judging them by your standard. Get a better standard, and don't call it my "weird hangup".

A parent of your comment cited a ProPublica study that references real tax return data that showed billionaires paying an effective tax rate in the single digits. If their accumulated wealth were regarded as regular income, they should be paying 37% on most of the gains. Look it up yourself.

If you look at “net” like you want to, sure, they pay far more in tax dollars than pretty much anybody, but they are able to legally dodge paying tax on most of their wealth accumulation because if the way the IRS treats unrealized capital gains.

Imagine doing away with income tax and replace it with a wealth tax payable in whatever wealth you have. % of your house, % of your investments etc

The government employee at least earns their salary by actual labor.

Whereas anyone on the "top N richest" list is a parasite on all the people who produce wealth.

> The government employee at least earns their salary by actual labor.

They may or may not do much useful - government tends to grow regardless of output, because it doesn't need to earn its money. All you know for sure is a government employee pays no taxes, and so contributes nothing to anything like roads, public services, etc etc, and takes taxes away from the people who are net contributors.

I didn't even see the actual problem with this originally: wealth is not what is or should be taxed. If shares I own go up and I don't sell them, I don't have anything to tax. It's only when I sell them that I should be taxed.

> wealth is not what is or should be taxed

But why not?

Well said, I have exactly the same thoughts.

However, overcoming these forces is something people did successfully in the past. I think right now we are just in a cycle of mass confusion caused by the technological revolutions, which prevents us to see clearly (as it happened in the past as well).

Without alignment we just drift by natural forces of a system in place in whatever direction. When we adapt and if the world survives, this should not be an issue.

The problem of billionaires is that they are one level below from the top in abstraction of a society. They are required to play by the rules of the state designed by someone else, and they lack the knowledge and experience to go one level higher and think about the policies and rules for society itself - and this is much harder than doing business, and requires completely different skills.

Because of these factors, we see them being able to hoard wealth but unable to influence the system in any positive way, except for the ones which the system was already designed for (create jobs, innovate, etc.)

Honestly, my worry is that the longer we put it off the more likely any revolution or change will happen more chaotically. It should be organized, with strong leaders. But if that fails, I think Reverend King has a famous quote about the unheard. And I think that ends up being chaotic and bloody. I don't want that, I hope we've evolved enough to do transitions of power peacefully, or at least as peacefully as possible

Hold on. Panama papers. Epstein files. CointelPro -> NSPM-7.

There absolutely, without a reasonable doubt, is a conspiracy of the elite -- the billionaire class.

The idea that all billionaires work together is hilarious. No real adult could possibly believe such nonsense.

Any adult who has been paying attention has no doubt that enough of the elite do collude to call the duck a duck.

In the real world it's hard enough to get 5 people on the same page about anything. The idea that dozens/hundreds of people with billions of dollars who are in business against each other in many cases are secretly colluding with any effectiveness is a joke. If they were, zuckerberg, larry and sergey would have been squashed in the 90's/00's by the elite of the time. Sam Altman would have been crushed years ago. Obama or Trump would have been put in their place, probably both. Look at all the billionaires all of a sudden kowtowing to Trump. The billionaires just got beat real bad in NYC.

Billionaires just don't have much power. This isn't a movie.

This seems to contradict itself. You first claim that there's no organization but then you claim billionaires have no power because of the more powerful above them. Hierarchy is organization, so which is it

No, nothing above them. No power. That's the point. In a couple years Trump will be gone and he'll be kowtowing to others and so on.

There is no group in charge. No one is in charge.

If that is true then we all are in charge and it is up to all of us. As you agreed elsewhere, cooperation exists.

If there's no power then why did so many line up to bring gifts and kiss the ring of a certain vindictive, convicted felon turned President?

Just because no one is in charge, it doesn't mean favors disappear and it doesn't mean no one can throw a wrench in your system.

It really sounds like you're trying hard to define a square circle. Your argument isn't even self consistent because what you described sure sounds like someone has power...

Nope. It's perfectly consistent. No one has much power at all. No one is in charge, there is no greater power sitting above us all calling all (or even most) the shots. To use someone else's term, there is no cabal.

You seem to conflate "no one is powerful" with "no one has any power in any situation at all".

  > You seem to conflate "no one is powerful" with "no one has any power in any situation at all".

The problem is not this, it is your claim that all power is equal, that there is no imbalance. No one is claiming God, only men

Never said equal, just that no one has much. It's just not that hard of a claim to understand. No need to twist oneself into a pretzel.

How many billionaires attended Biden's inauguration or donated to Biden's projects? How many for Trump 2?

I never said nobody hoped to be powerful, or increase the level of power they have. They just don't have much, and they can't/don't coordinate like some conspiracy theorists believe.

As a class, they steer things through emergent behavior and overlapping self interest in certain areas. As individuals, they can’t afford to trust each other without leverage.

Nobody said anything about ALL billionaires. You are the only person suggesting that.

The idea that an aggressive handful of them can't, won't or don't work together is even more preposterous than your strawman that all of them do.

"the billionaire class".

Whether they meant all or most, those words certainly don't mean a handful.

Poor people door all the same shit, just on a smaller scale.

The scale is the problem; their money is orders of magnitude more damaging.

Poor people do it at scale too. Millions of pockets of poor people doing the same shit on a smaller scale adds up.

Will add Chapter 46.

"When the Tao is present in the universe, The horses haul manure. When the Tao is absent from the universe, War horses are bred outside the city."

I would consider surveillance weapons against the people. I think this reflects all manners of international governance nowadays.

Also Chapter 17.

" When the Master governs, the people are hardly aware that he exists. Next best is a leader who is loved. Next, one who is feared. The worst is one who is despised."

If you don’t trust the people, you make them untrustworthy."

The world is not a thing to be managed huh?

Great essay. The Patriot Act may have been the obvious turning point but the FBI had public data collection programs even earlier. The goal was keyword watching of all network traffic. The desire for more collection is baked into government. It is hubris that leads powerful people to think if they only had more control they could stop all ills. The deceit of power makes people believe it doesn't matter what the outcome is if the goal is noble. That is why the founding fathers put restrictions on government power. The people that run it will always fall for the same traps of power because they are just like everybody else.

So yes, it is high time to discuss how our rights apply in a digital age and put some reasonable restrictions on the power available to government.

It's a great write up thankyou. I propose we build and distribute easy to use services designed to run on our own devices, in our own homes, to take full advantage of 1st and 4th amendments, then distribute these services widely with billboards so that people have alternatives and can take advantage of these protections.

You mean the 3rd amendment, right?

Third Amendment is about not quartering troops. Fourth Amendment is protection against warrantless seizures.

https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-3/

https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-4/

Gotta take the "not" out friend.

I'm pretty sure 1st and 4th are the ones GP meant.

The 1st amendment (free speech) in order to protect the right to host the service in the first place and the 4th one (unreasonable search and seizure) to protect against surveillance.

Not sure how the 3rd (lodging of soliders in peacetime) would be relevant.

I mean 1 and 4. But you have me thinking about what 3 could mean in the future....and....I would be thrilled to provide a service with my compute to usa solider in need if that's what the future holds. Providing quarters meant food and beds back in the day, but I could see how this could translate to general web services, coms, ect in the future.

We are trying, but the interop of these self hosted services currently suck. Fediverse is hard to get in to unless you have many users or you just have to join a popular instance. Who knows what they do in this instance, and it turns back into a loop.

I just don't think it's gotten to the point that anyone is interested. I wonder if we did do a better job that the aggressive filtering and monitoring wouldn't naturally move down the stack.

for example we could completely obviate Facebook by having a standard mechanism for something like an rss feed. individuals or organizations could publish my stream(s) from their own leaf connections, set up cloud instances, or pay someone to host them. there could be a whole ecosystem of readers with various UIs and policy filters. people/organizations could add value by aggregating trusted streams or filtering them for content some people might find offensive. and at the end of the day it doesn't require people who just want to use it to set up persistent networking and storage.

in any case we just got suckered into handing the keys to the internet to companies like Meta and Google, which make vast amounts of money to control the discourse in corrosive ways. all because we bought into the notion that nothing is real unless someone is making a buck off it.

having a standard and a whole space of compatible programs doesn't preclude people from making lifestyle money selling filters and aggregators and content, but it kind of removes the Meta-style leverage over the whole system.

Fediverse doesn't actually solve a problem I have. I'm not on xitter or instabook or myspace and don't want to be. The one saas i really need is email, which is 1. Already decentralized and 2. Getting harder to self host every year due to the escalating war between slopspammers and security measures.

Signal solves the async messaging and phone surveillance satisfactorily for my "threat model".

I host my own mail, I really did not have any issues for around 3-4 years i've used it. As long as you get your records correct imo it is also very easy to host and use, though Google keeps sending me TLS reports every day.

How about this, but also send them usb sticks with loads of data available on them that they thought was "private" including surveillance footage taken from flock cameras etc. That might be good motivation to be more aware. Not sure about the legality of this though lol

> One of the many legacies of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 is the government-wide shift from targeted surveillance—such as individual wiretaps or pen register/trap and trace orders—to mass surveillance techniques—such as tapping into the internet backbone or mass collection of telephone or internet metadata.

In other words, we gave the terrorists the victory by accepting being terrorized at the country level from a single act and destroying a lot of our freedom. Yeah us.

There’s lots of questions around who was actually behind 9/11, looking at who benefited the most is helpful. We may never know the truth but we know who the real “terrorists” are, because they’re terrorizing everyone now.

It isn't going to stop until it becomes a national security issue. If your can spy on your citizens , your enemies can potentially gain access to the same surveillance and hit high profile targets.

We live in war times and will soon see it happening

When those in power regard the people as the enemy their natural allies are other governments with similar attitudes. So you don't need to wait until another government gains access, you offer it instead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes

  > your enemies can potentially gain access to the same surveillance

Which has already happened. Though it is less obvious if high profile targets have been blackmailed or coerced. There's at least signs that some have. Even if not foreign governments, Epstein certainly had leverage

Proposal: limit access of these camera networks to local jurisdiction. Just like rip-stop fabric and cell walls, boundaries are required for stability, and making it where federal agencies have eyes everywhere is far too dangerous.

Orwell is claimed to have written his books directed at the other side of the Curtain, but in fact, he was merely predicting the effect of power at the hands of the few self-elected (due to randomness -> wealth --> power).

"All animals are equal, some animals more equal than others."

I think we have to face the fact that we cannot unring this bell. There will be holding actions against things like Flock but in the end they will fail, and at best we will have a loosening of the laws that Flock is being used to enforce and more draconian enforcement of the laws that remain.

Like many on this site I'm in violent agreement with Schneier and have been ever since "security theater" entered the lexicon. But this is a hopeless fight.

Are you advocating for inaction? If so, what do you wish to achieve?

I would advocate for a shift of power by creating greater individual rights over their data (as their irrevocable property) , and greater oversight and consequences for those in power (ab)using the data.

It's one thing for our data to be out there such that a NSA employee could stalk their girlfriend, it's another thing for said person to be allowed to gracefully "retire" rather than be put in prison.

> I would advocate for a shift of power[...]

This is not advocating, this is wishing. It is as meaningful as "advocating" that you were rich and that Elon was poor, or "advocating" that you should be six inches taller.

I am from the UK and we are quite far down the surveillance and control mentality (Flock actually seems a greater system of surveillance then what we have here but if such a system was created, the push back would be less). But a lot of people here are slowly beginning to see the benefits in self defense and gun laws that mean you are not dependent on the police, this kind of logic where people have want autonomy and policing becomes less popular as the inevitable abuses or neglect happen is something that creates change.

I don't think it inevitable that this continues.

I do not know a single person in the UK who wants US style gun laws.

There is significant pushback against surveillance.

Many are, perhaps not as far as guns yet but wanting self defense and self defense weapons. I think a movement of increasing rights to self defense could mean people are less supportive of surveillance where their own self defense deters crime rather then an expensive and rights destroying leviathan that only acts retroactively.

I hope so any way.

Im sure people thought the same thing among all the different power structures and technology and cultural norms throughout history, and yet how many of them still stand today?

“Temporary” surveillance powers are never temporary.

NSPM-7 is about to make mass surveillance magnitudes more oppressive and ever-present.

At this stage I'd settle for echelon era surveillance and consider it a win...

Ad tech/tiktok has proven its possible to deduce what people are think at scale from subtle signals, now sifting info at scale is possible thanks to LLMs and a large portion of everyone's online history is likely to become vulnerable to store now decrypt later attacks. Get rid of cash, force identity verification for every online service, sprinkle some flock cameras on top and you've got a complete surveillance state. Oh and of course you need some goons to scare people into compliance & later in some self-censorship for good measure. We could call the group "Frozen water".

...and we're basically already there on all of it except perhaps the "decrypt later" on https (and even that has rumours).

Genuinely don't think this is stoppable anymore.

how not? All of this is "soft" control, if tomorrow 75% of the people in any country decided "this can't keep on going on", all relevant public buildings would be occupied everywhere and the relevant government imprisoned promptly.

On a more positive note, the fact that this doesn't happen indicates things aren't that bad right now. No amount of KYC or age verification can stop large amounts of angry people who want one thing.

People sometimes bring up China - which isn't relevant because people still remember being extremely poor, thus being grateful to the Party - or one of those dictatorships as counterexamples for this, but see the Arab Spring (food got more expensive -> revolutions), Nepal recently... etc.

>if tomorrow 75% of the people in any country decided

No kings protests was a very respectable effort....peaked at 2.3%.

Even the current administration inept as it is is basically home free on this one. Senate neutered, Courts sidelined, Treasury subjugated, loyalist in charge of military, JAG core silenced, secondary personal goons squad established and lavishly funded, Social media captured, Stats department dismantled, Cult of personality created, common enemy created (immigrants), distractions for the masses arranged (culture wars, UFC on whitehouse lawn), truth undermined (prez spouting nonstop lies & AI), oligarch class established, surveillance normalized, norm of kiss the ring & pay tribute established.

Dunno about you but to me that looks like US democracy is so cooked the kitchen smoke alarm has gone off & everyone was too busy doomscrolling to notice.

Hope I'm wrong but that list looks pretty fuckin comprehensive to me. Hell they even somehow managed to throw in a roman salute...

>On a more positive note

Yeah sorry...above isn't exactly that

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_2026_No_Kings_protests#T...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3.5%25_rule

no kings only 2/3 of the way there

Can't say I entirely buy it in this case, but interesting rule of thumb anyway. It sure didn't feel like regime change was imminent if it were a little bigger.

Marching on a street holding placards with permission from the police is a very different thing than an angry mob marching into the town hall searching for officials.

Think more like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Nepalese_Gen_Z_protests

The thing about most US protests is that they are almost entirely performative by now. Marching with a sign simply doesn't do anything.

Actual serious protests would involve stuff like massive strikes, for example, and other disruptions that actually hurt.

No need to decrypt https, the other end of your connection does that and hands the info over to governments

Yay cloudflare!

> One of the many legacies of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11

I see this more as an excuse used by a small corrupt elite wanting to enslave the people. The problem is that you do not have a real democracy in the USA. The current orange clown brigade shows this best (corrupt to the core), but it is not really much better with other roleplaying administrations.

Sooner or later people will realise this too, even the not too terribly bright.

I don't know why Trump's existence is evidence the US does not have a "real" democracy. As a group, we voted for him, and he went to the Oval Office. That's democracy.

There are certainly governments outlawing political opponents in the first world, but that's not the US.

When the same guy wins when he gets the popular vote, and wins when he doesn't, that may technically be "democracy" in the sense that a vote occurred and votes were counted, but it clearly isn't fair (and it isn't, it isn't designed to be. If it were fair, the people might do something crazy like vote in a populist demagogue...)

And yes, I would say that regarding the other side too.

That's just the way the US system is set up. You can't win the presidency by doing really well in the five largest states.

Yes, it was set up that way to keep slave-owning states in the union, which one assumes should no longer be an issue.

I don't think you should be able to win the presidency by doing really well in the five largest states necessarily, but I definitely don't think you should be able to win the presidency by only doing well in a couple of swing states.

No, it wasn't to keep slave owning states in the union. You're confusing the 3/5th compromise with the electoral college. The reason we have 50 little elections instead of one big one is to keep the largest states from dictating policy to everyone else.

Whenever you have voting you have swing votes. That's just Democracy. If it wasn't swing states it would be swing voters nationwide.

"There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. I know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy. Remember this. Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they've already enlisted in the cause. Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward. And then remember this. The Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empire's authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege. Remember this. Try." -- Karis Nemek

"Surveillance is the business model of the internet; companies like Google and Facebook constantly spy on their users’ behavior."

A few oversized websites acting as intermediaries is not "the internet"

The internet is a medium. Internet subscribers pay for access to the medium

The www is one use of the medium

These mass surveillance intermediaries operating websites are not even the entire www

But they aim to intermediate access to the rest of it

Any subscriber can use the medium and they don't have to conduct surveillance

For example

They can sell widgets

They can buy widgets

Commerce

They can also use the medium _noncommercially_

The "business model of the internet" is subscriptions. We pay for access to the medium

The (most successful) business model of the www (so far) might be advertising. That could change

But the www is not the internet. The internet is a medium, not what travels over it. It's not advertising, it's not content

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/government-election... Here's a fun little interview. They had a program that apparently worked, for much cheaper than Michael Hayden's program (I think Trailblazer). Got shelved apparently due to "not expensive enough". 9/11 happens and Binney contends his ThinThread program could have stopped it. You don't want more dragnet surveillance; even beyond the abuses, it leads to it being harder to catch things

Enough? They're just getting started...

I suspect that Mass Surveillance is here for good, and the real project is to regain control of who gains the power and benefits. There are dozens if not 100s of ways that mass surveillance can improve human life. There are also as many where it can be abused to create suffering. I think the real issue is we're trending to the latter. In order to safely continue down this path we (USA) need:

1. EU style governmental pushes to defend digital rights. Data needs to be our own property that we can lend, but can never give up our right to revocation.

2. Stricter controls, and stricter still penalities, need to exist against misuse and abuse. Many of the stories of abuse of data are most stark in their lack of repercussions, some of this is police unions, some of this is "deep state" people who scratch eachother's backs and grant eachother free accesses and immunity. Some of this is a voting issue as in we need to make it known to our candidates that it matters to us, and then push real political power in their hands.

Just to help the imagination of all here's where mass surveilance could plausibly add good to society, all stemming from legitimate use:

1. Criminals like porch pirates can be caught using a neetwork of Ring cameras

2. A lost pet/child can be identified and found by drone surveillance

3. Usage data of roads can be updated in realtime

4. Trends and Sentiment could be used to guide the government intra-elections improving the way government serves us

5. Police officers can avoid risky situations using drones as eyes instead of putting their own bodies in harms way

> EU style governmental pushes to defend digital rights.

No, I don't think we need Chat Control in the US or our government forcing ISPs and CDNs to block whole swaths of the internet just because a soccer game is on TV.

Fair points, I did not mean undermining encryption or privacy, I meant like GDPR and right to erasure.

It'd be even better if there was some form of royalty structure on our data used by companies. It'd be nice if I, at least, received a royalty check each time a data broker sold my data to the CIA.

"I want the good stuff from an authoritarian dictatorship without the bad stuff"

It will never work like that.

I hate the EU, The projected was designed by American and European liberal intellectuals. It's an attempt to make Europe a group of Federated States that roughly all have a liberal constitution. To say the EU is something so different from the USA is crazy.

All of your positives are possible without mass surveillance.

6. who controls and accesses the data will change over time

7. authoritarians and evil men can have a one-stop shop to know where to round up political opponents

8. power becomes increasingly entrenched and concentrated

9. See 7

Your points are, essentially, always true of all power for all time. (Or mostly true of most power for most of time)...

Humans have frequently created systems which contradict steps 6-9, or atleast from Monarchy to Democracy. Constitutions, legal systems, laws et al. have generally served as barriers to abuse. The question is how do we continue to uphold and increase the value for individuals and decrease the expected return of abuse.

> one-stop shop to know where to round up political opponents

>> Your points are, essentially, always true of all power for all time

yes, there are very famous examples of good record keeping leading to invaders or coups having an easier time killing people who they don't like.

>> Humans have frequently created systems ... as barriers to abuse

we have systems that law abiding people abide by. Again, when those people change to not-law-abiding, it is a problem that we've not solved.

> There are dozens if not 100s of ways that mass surveillance can improve human life.

There are dozens of ways living in a cage can improve human life.

You won't be exposed to dangerous ideas and you might get a calorie allowance. There's little danger of an unwanted pregnancy, and you might be given labor-related chores or exercises to occupy your time.

The danger with all of these systems is what happens when they are abused. That's not a matter of if, just a matter of when.

We are building a cage around society. It's so slow you don't realize the shackles being placed around your ankle and your neck. But one day, when it's too late to protest, the switch will be flipped.

We're already living in 1984. We are always just a few election cycles away from 1934.

One specific example: device attestation and Web Environment Integrity, combined with the internet being increasingly controlled or mediated by a handful of middlemen who would absolutely love to turn this on (Cloudflare, Apple, Google, etc) but if they do it too early there’ll be revolt.

It’s had a couple attempts that got shot down so far, but the pushback gets weaker as time goes on, and as the troublesome/less-compliant generations age out and get replaced by generations who’ve grown up accepting this stuff as the water they swim in.

1. Cameras don’t prevent porch pirates. They give you a video after the fact of a masked person taking your package. Small theft is prevented by more equality in society, and a stronger safety net. (Source: the lower crime rate in other countries)

2. Lost pets are not being found by drone and camera surveillance. They could, but the system doesn’t give a shit about your dog. Children, maybe. I guess i’m ok with deploying a fleet of drones during a search and rescue operation. As long as there is transparency so it’s not done for other reasons, and they are grounded when they are done.

3. You just need one of those pressure sensitive wire strips across the road to do this. It’s a largely solved problem that doesn’t involve mass surveillance.

4. I am just guessing what this means, but government doesn’t do things that are wildly popular by polling, so why would they react to some ai surveillance sentiment analysis?

5. This isn’t mass surveillance. Like #2, a deployed drone to look around a corner or scan a building before entering is using technology but it’s momentary. If it became a problem where it was being over used we could deal with it as a separate issue.

Porch pirates are not stealing because they're hungry. They're antisocial asshole criminals.

Yes. Inequality creates antisocial asshole criminals at a far greater rate than more equal societies.

But even if you disagree, you must still agree that antisocial asshole criminals will find ways to steal and get away with it, cameras or no.

In a just and equal society, criminals would be prosecuted and convicted for the economic violence of theft.

Inequality is a useless measurement used to excuse antisocial behavior. The inequality between Bill Gates and I has increased exponentially in the past 20 years, yet I'm significantly better off than I was then back then. Inequality is a feel good measurement thats fundamentally the wrong target.

Because the inequality between you and gates is there but you are above a threshold where you are comfortable. Your needs are met, you feel some sense of security in your position.

If inequality is the wrong measure? Fine. Deep poverty, perhaps? Lack of opportunities and hope for rising out of poverty, maybe? However you feel best describes people who are not “significantly better off” than 20 years ago. Because most of america would say they are worse off than 20 years ago.

> In a just and equal society, criminals would be prosecuted and convicted for the economic violence of theft.

That doesn’t solve the problem tho. Because even if you jail someone for life for petty theft, the funnel is still there creating more petty thieves.

To be clear - i am not absolving people of their crimes. It’s still wrong to steal someone’s packages. I just don’t think that more enforcement is the right way to make it happen less. I say attack the upstream problems first, deal with the downstream effect last.

Surveilling the entire population also has basically nothing to do with solving either upstream causes or downstream effects.

power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. technology is unlocking unprecedented levels of power. make no mistake mass surveillance = power, nothing else. any benefit to society is accidental, not the goal. we don't need this kind power in hands of nobody.

If roles are reversed, and those being watched were responsible for safety and security, little would change. The human race being what it is, the same tools would still be in place and in use in much the same way.

The protest is more about who watches the watchers. And neither will trust the other.

There's no good ending to this, and you're probably correct that we're likely heading that way anyway, but the only rational choice at this point is to resist as much as possible - best case, it buys us time for some way out to appear; worst case, it delays the shitshow.

Anything that can be done to frustrate both the government and the private companies pushing for it should be done. Every lever should be pulled. No compromise should be accepted, because it's just setting up the stage for the next compromise where the other side stays where it is and the "middle point" just gradually moves toward them.

25 ? She must be new here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_Unite...

I think the problem is twofold:

One, the move to digital lives made digital surveillance necessary. It wasn't enough to check attendance at the local mosque/far right rally. Then, the counter-move to encrypted communication meant law enforcement now had to rely on metadata.

Second: A wanton disregard of the treasure that is digital data. Most people just don't seem to care. LG is snooping on you? I bet they won't see even a 10% drop in sales next year. When the citizenry as consumer blasts their data everywhere, it's hard to argue as parliamentarian that those same people want it protected. Now people use Apple Watches and Amazon Alexa in their own bedrooms! People say they want their data safe guarded, but their actions suggest otherwise.

  > A wanton disregard of the treasure that is digital data. Most people just don't seem to care.

I think the problem is a bit more subtle. People do seem to care but feel powerless. In addition to that, complexity is high. When you tell people what is possible with massive data they label you as a conspiracy theorist because it's much easier to believe that Facebook is listening to you with a microphone than piecing that information together through thousands if individual pieces of data (especially when you're more likely to notice the hits rather than the misses). So now when they do record everything you say it feels like nothing changed.

It's exhaustion, it's impotence, it's desolate. But that's different than apathy. People care, they are just overwhelmed

Even if you trust all current actors, the tapes of forever.

The extremely detailed "Metadata" they have on you will still exist in your children's time.

No Comrade Premier, it has only just begun.

Hear, hear!

Mate I am afraid the world governments are just starting.

mass surveillance is like nuclear weapons.

it will never go away.

I’d venture it was enough the first day.

Wasn't carnivore in the 1990s?

No it is not, and it will get worse. No matter who is in power, power stays. And power by definition is the capacity to control and plunder without restrictions

All these years reading about liberty and philosophy has taught me that the only way out is to make money and disappear, be an eagle, watch the lions eat the sheeple from the top of a mountain, because the sheeple don't want to be freed and worse yet, they will point at you as if you're an outlier, a misfit, a problem that must be fixed by force, their 'democratic' force

So fly high, find your peak and watch from there, we only have 100 years to live as we please, not to spend it fighting for those who don't want to be saved

Do like Nero, let the world burn and enjoy watching, from afar...

Maybe an unpopular opinion, but it's not enough. The threats are real and active.

> It says that the government “will prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender and anarchist” and “will use all the tools constitutionally available to us to map them at home, identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa.”

So, Democratic candidates who are looking like they will win a seat this midterm cycle are going to get arrested for "domestic terrorism".

That's inline whit some of the goals of the people behind Project 2025 are calling for.

Can you be more specific?

As a trans woman, enough is enough! I’m tired of us being made into the scapegoat while literal pedophiles and sexual criminals not only walk free but gain ever greater power and idiots keep blaming us for their problems as they close their ears and stomp their feet’s on the ground

As a fellow trans woman, we've been the scapegoat for reactionaries, at least documented, since the rise of the Third Reich. And if we're honest, probably before that.

Fixing society-scale problems is really hard. Being angry at people who make you feel a bit weird inside is easy. People reliably choose easy.

I'm not going to pretend to understand your stuggle, but I will echo it through my lens. I am not trying to hijack your point, inasmuch support it with my view.

I uses to think that it was about fear of the unknown, or as you've said "Being angry at people who make you feel a bit weird inside".

I now firmly believe that it's a modern form of tribalism. Having an "other", whether as a scapegoat, a fear inducing device, or a target is simply too convenient to ignore. Whether or not one is a globalist is orthogonal to the fact that people ultimately decide, or evolve to see through a different lens.

I would say it slightly differently: humans themselves are tribalistic, and politicians are looking for ways to tap into that to gain and hold onto power.

One look no further than Vietnam for how the government learned to use intranational xenophobia to manipulate different slices of the public into identifying as separate groups that could then be played off of each other. Since then, there has never been as successful a political movement, because we have been turned against each other by state-driven manipulation. AFAIK, this is well-documented policy intended to “maintain civil order” (i.e. prevent the revolution that is so richly deserved).

"tribalism" is a dog whistle

but... but the bathrooms! and the children's sports! /s

it's still baffling to me how incredibly irrelevant niche cases dominate the entire discourse.

Because Republicans get fucking dog-walked on any issue of any importance. The only things they can ever even come close to claiming "victory" on are irrelevant nonsense that no serious person gives a fuck about.

There are now more bills attempting to "solve" the problem of trans girl's in sports (and it is girls, to be clear, trans boys are never an issue) than there are trans girls in sports. It's fucking pathetic.

The funny thing about that is - it's a solved problem. The reason you heard about it for a while is that they hadn't tightened up the rules yet. As with anything, problems are highlighted, they are studied, and new rules are put into place to account for what was learned. Right wing media of course discovered a boogeyman that was so useful they will be using it for years still, even if it doesn't exist.

It wasn’t a problem to begin with. Meta studies recently showed trans women have no biological advantage over cis women after HRT, certainly nothing than cis women don’t have biological variation within anyway. All the rule updates did was exclude and further marginalise an already marginalised extreme minority. There are very few trans women to begin with, fewer of us still are competing in sports. Nothing was studied here, the people who made the rules aren’t scholars, they’re bigots. They’re using us as a distraction from their poor governance.

And as a fellow enjoyer of HRT, I assure you it didn't enhance shit for me, beyond what I was hoping to get: longer, more full hair, boobies, and smoother skin.

My muscles are gone y'all. Like I've had to buy more breaker bars and larger tools so I can keep working on my cars, otherwise I simply could not break bolts anymore.

I used to be able to do 12 pull-ups, and I did get de-trained but now I can barely manage a single one. I lived and did cardio in the mountains for years and now I get winded up way easier. Maybe the politicians making these rules should go on HRT before making unsubstantiated claims.

Btw, feel free to reach out to me I love connecting with fellow trans women in tech :)

Emailed!

I've had to explain to people that lifting something as simple as a case of bottled water can be genuinely difficult after eight-ish years of feminizing HRT.

It's gradual, it's not all at once and I am still slightly taller and heavier-set than the average American woman, so I do have an advantage through having more mass, but anyone that's larger than the average American woman will also have that so it's not really an advantage, just a fact of having a larger body.

Same. You’re further in than me, but it was so alarming at the start when my body looked the same and my remembered priors in strength and cardio capacity, were at my testosterone-dominant baseline. If I didn’t know to expect the steep drop in strength or hadn’t been on HRT knowingly I’d have been incredibly alarmed and probably visited a dozen doctors. I’d look at objects, say to myself, pfft, easy, and be humbled immediately. TBH it’s incredibly affirming and men have been pretty sweet helping me with lifting objects and opening jars.

Yeah, you have to conjure a really weird scenario for there to be any advantage.

Something like waiting until male puberty is already pretty far along and doing extensive strength training and then transitioning and competing immediately in a sport that puts a heavy premium on strength. I think most sports already have rules that would prevent this.

For someone following a more normal transitioning trajectory, there would be zero advantage; probably a significant disadvantage.

A blanket ban is just pure bullying, especially for childrens' sports (which are primarily a social activity, not a consequential competition). Individual sports can have rules to prevent the (primarily hypothetical) abusive cases without preventing children from participating in normal social activities. No one is saying that someone who's 200 lb of solid muscle and started HRT a month ago should be able to compete against girls in football or powerlifting, but pickleball, sure go for it.

> A blanket ban is just pure bullying, especially for childrens' sports (which are primarily a social activity, not a consequential competition).

That I think is the core issue. Way too many people try to live way too hard through their children. Wherever you look, either in the US or (where I'm from) Germany... you'll find absolutely absurd behavior from completely unhinged parents. Just yesterday, that was a topic discussed here [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49686134

Except for in Norway, apparently. https://www.ft.com/content/0fe0455d-8633-4e1a-ab8f-f8cd94d60...

"After HRT" is the key word. The new regulations I am referring to had to do with how soon after was sufficient to remove advantages due to residual testosterone. There were other regulations which were total horse shit to your point.

I would agree that the number of people we are talking about is very small. It was to begin with a very niche issue.

> trans women have no biological advantage over cis women after HRT

As someone who's been into weightlifting and only casual observer-like in regards to testosterone therapy, this doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. After taking TRT/Steroids a person retains a good deal of the muscle/strength they gained even after cessation ... It surprises me to hear that this wouldnt carry over to sports where muscle/strength/power matter.

Additionally, you have to realize that a major concern on the right is that academia itself has become ideological to the point where only politically acceptable studies can be 1) studied and more importantly 2) published. There's a lot of people out there afraid to speak what appears to them (and their work) to be truth for fear of the backlash and career consequences.

Quite the contrary. If you want to publish something going against "the narrative" (if something like that exists in the first place) has never been easier than now. Proper keywords and the far-right and their pseudomedia are going to give even the worst quackery a time in the spotlight - just look at RFK Jr.

> Additionally, you have to realize that a major concern on the right is that academia itself has become ideological to the point where only politically acceptable studies can be 1) studied and more importantly 2) published. There's a lot of people out there afraid to speak what appears to them (and their work) to be truth for fear of the backlash and career consequences.

Oh complete and utter twaddle.

Academia trends toward progressive views because the more educated you get, assuming you have principles and employ critical thinking consistently, the more ridiculous the positions of the right tend to look. You cannot look at the totality of climate change data and go "well clearly it's not man made" unless you either don't understand it, or cherry pick it to oblivion. You can't look at the history of Austerity politics, deployed both here and in the UK by our respective free market goblins (Reagan and Thatcher) and hold that it's good for anyone at all apart from those who are already wealthy.

This boogeyman of BIG SCIENCE holding down all the conservatives is complete and utter dreck. Show me literally one example of it. Show me one individual who's life was ruined and their career decimated to uphold ideological ends.

There are many, many examples of left-wing ideology causing harm to researchers, professors, and the like. If you are in academia, you must submit to the left-wing group think or you will be cast away. Literally takes 10 seconds to research.

https://www.campusreform.org/article/professor-punished-oppo...

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/09/elite-academia-...

Also a weightlifter (masters olympic weightlifting, nationally ranked). TRT and steroids are actually the opposite. Once you go off of them, your body starts to revert, muscle mass is lost, and often by more than you started with (because the body's natural production rates change with supplementation). It does take time, which is why sports regulatory bodies typically require specific time periods of hormonal therapy before they can participate, but their bodies will eventually adjust.

Sports regulatory bodies still test for hormonal PED, but their concerns have long swayed away from them because of the fact that they are so easy to detect and have the built in disadvantage of potentially altering your life negatively outside of sport. The current concerns have shifted to peptides and other forms of PEDs, because they are much harder to detect because they are 1) often naturally occurring but in smaller quantities, 2) don't actually directly act on the musculoskeletal system, but rather trigger natural processes that act on the system, and 3) often have half-lives dramatically shorter than most drug tests can even account for, and therefore require near continuous monitoring.

Agreed you lose your peak, however once a steroids user you will mostly retain more mass than a natural. It only takes a fraction of stimulus to retain mass versus adding it.

The extrapolation I'm making, and admitting it's an extrapolation, is that a sexed at birth male competing in womens sports will have had a developmental period of hormonal advantage over females which follows them regardless of gender identity.

So here’s the thing with that. My testosterone is in the cis female range. Has been for a while. I strength trained for years and even after having started estrogen. I continued going to the gym while on HRT and my capacity kept decreasing rather than increasing. So I looked into this. Because visibly I still had the muscles I’d gained. To actually activate said muscles, you need testosterone. That’s how it works. No testosterone = the muscles never activate = they atrophy away. While I looked the same in terms of muscles that I had while I was doing 12 pull-ups, I quickly came down to being able to do 0 unassisted. Now the visible bulk is also reducing because they just never get activated. A cis male on steroids still has testosterone after cessation. Hence the muscles they gained can retain stimulus for activation. I’ve been tracking my body comp through DEXA scans for years now and after starting HRT, within a year I was at the higher end of cis female muscle mass and had lost kilos of muscle throughout my body. Can I still beat most cis women at lifting? Yes. Only because I’m trained, not because I lived for years under heavier testosterone influence. I cannot outlift or outrun trained cis women, only untrained ones. I am unable to outlift my brother who is completely untrained. I used to be able to hold my own arm wrestling with cis men but now I know it’ll be foolish to even try it because even cis men with zero training ever have arms twice my size and active testosterone stimulus to be able to activate their muscles.

The ideology is too tied in with their identity, so you’re not going to persuade them of anything lol.

Yeah I'm guessing if someone walked up to you and crowed a bunch of "common sense" that don't align at all with your own lived experience and understanding of how your own body works, you know the one you're living in and actively in the process, with the assistance of medical doctors, of modifying, you'd be pretty unconvinced of that too.

That doesn't mean people who know what they're talking about are "ideological," it means you're talking out your backside.

Or it means you are delusional and they are talking common sense.

So the broken records are just coincidence? There's no need to study this a priori, just let them compete and see all records get broken. I don't see why people even discuss it. Just let women not win anything for a few years and this discussion would be over.

The paper you are thinking of did not show this, but that the evidence - of males who had weakened themselves with testosterone suppression having no athletic performance advantage over women - is low to very low quality. Such low quality that this hypothesis is not supported.

They do it because it wins them elections. It's a 90/10 issue and national democrats are on the losing side.

Yeah, I don't get this. If they're niche irrelevant issues that affect ~nobody, why not just concede them? Republicans could hardly dominate the discourse with these topics if there was nobody to discourse against.

> Yeah, I don't get this. If they're niche irrelevant issues that affect ~nobody, why not just concede them?

Because there's about 1% of people who are trans in the US [1] and most other populations, on top of that come a further about 1.7% people who are somewhere on the intersex spectrum [2].

Democrats aren't willing to throw literally millions of people under the bus. Republicans aren't just willing to cast them aside - they are knowingly driving trans people to extinction.

[1] https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-ad...

[2] https://www.ohchr.org/en/sexual-orientation-and-gender-ident...

But this is not throwing millions of people under the bus. At least according to this thread, there are fewer trans women in sports than bills stopping them. If this issue does represent throwing literally millions of people under the bus- driving them to extinction-, why are you saying upthread that it's niche and irrelevant?

Bostock affirmed core civil rights to transgender people in housing, employment, etc. The fights now are about other things (not "rights") and as such, are much more unpopular. In fact, a majority of people, even on the right, support the core rights affirmed by Bostock.

> In fact, a majority of people, even on the right, support the core rights affirmed by Bostock.

A majority of people support wage hikes [1], anti-trust laws [2], higher taxes for the rich [3], at least a general responsibility of the government for healthcare insurance [4] and even a full or barely restricted right to abortions of pregnancies [5].

But neither of this gets done despite bipartisan support, because Republican megadonors and their networks heavily keep the GOP in line. And for trans people, it's the same. The anti-trans rhetoric in the GOP gets pushed primarily by Evangelical influence groups, the rest of the GOP does not care, and neither do the voters.

[1] https://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/issues/economic-justice...

[2] https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/47798-most-americans-oppos...

[3] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/19/most-amer...

[4] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/12/10/most-amer...

[5] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/public-opini...

This isn't a fight we can avoid by retreating. They would just advance and the same battle would happen on different ground. If we abandon the trans, the culture wars will be about the gays. If we abandon the gays, the culture wars will be about blacks or hispanics or jews or god only knows. There's something to be said for picking firm ground to fight on, but there will be a fight and it cannot be won by retreating.

Why am I being interpreted as advocating for abandoning the trans? I don't want to do that and I don't need to be convinced by my empathy for gays or blacks- I care about trans people themselves! I'm saying if an issue doesn't matter- according to the trans people in this thread- and it's a losing issue, why are we insistent on fighting it anyway? Who benefits from this?

It'd probably be best to give an example of an issue you're talking about. I thought you were saying to concede trans topics altogether.

Hmm, yes, I see that and that the person I was responding to is getting read the same way, but not clear why that's the case. We're both in this conversation under [1]. The sports issue is the one that's 90/10 [2], while the bathroom one is maybe in the neighborhood of 60/40 [3]- I do think there is a chance of winning ground on the latter and should have been more specific. But nobody is saying there's 90/10 in favor of transphobia- a substantial majority views trans people favorably[3].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49712333

[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/08/11/most-amer...

[3] https://prri.org/press-release/new-survey-finds-strong-major...

Because then they'll move on to the next victims and in having surrendered without even a fight you've granted them momentum for no good reason whatsoever, and you'll have fewer allies left too.

Is there a reason to believe this is how things work? Rather than "within a democracy as long as 'trans rights' means something that most people disagree with, it will be harder to advance the pro- side of the issue"? Is there evidence of 'momentum' being a real thing in politics, as opposed to the 'pendulum' that I've witnessed over the last decade?

Everything related to the right wing and fox news? We never had a big "swing left" - clinton was the democrats showing they can do economic conservatism as well. Modern acceptance of trans folks isn't a pendulum, most of the people espousing anti-trans views weren't pro trans 5 years ago.

Trying to abstract history into major shifts that are attributable to inanimate objects is just very ludic fallacy.

I'm confused by this. Are you saying that everything related to the right wing and fox news is evidence that momentum is a good model or that trying to model history with momentum is fundamentally fallacious? If the former, you've really got to be more specific- was firing Tucker Carlson evidence for momentum somehow? Did Republicans conceding gay marriage or Trump conceding abortion give Democrats momentum?

Sorry for being confusing, I was saying the latter - that these are reducing history to some game that can be understand with rules when it is nothing like that.

If you go back 15 years or so, you hear the exact same "concerns" about gay people pretty much word for word. Now that they're no longer an acceptable target for most people, they've moved on to regurgitating the same baseless fear mongering but targeted towards trans people. If society manages to progress further, they'll eventually come up with another group to serve as the "other" that they can blame everything on.

they're already shifting to immigrants for that reason.

As someone who struggles with my position on some of these topics, one of my major self criticisms/fear is the tyranny of the majority. Even if (and that's a hypothetical if) my values would reject transgenderism, my values of freedom and fairness conflict with forcing another human being onto a specific path, especially with the use of force (government). So even if 90% are cisgendered (I didnt look up the real stat), that doesn't mean we vote to make our world cisgendered... A right and fair leaning is to create the freedoms we'd want if the tables were turned.

I say this all to say it surprises me how many republicans I know are pro freedom until it hits certain topics... Pro 2A and anti-(an adult can choose a different hormonal profile for their own body) is an odd pairing in my mind. Pro free-speach like Alex Jones / Citizens united but anti-(choosing to wear clothes or other adornments/appearance of the other gender) is an odd pairing in my mind.

> even if 90% are cisgendered (I didnt look up the real stat)

The real stat is much higher than 90%, in case you were curious.

The number of people abject enough to end up with transphobic views is thankfully nowhere near that. Most people, as it turns out, are not creepily obsessed with other people's genitals. Most people also aren't driven by a horrible urge to find minorities to torment. Though those who are would sure claim otherwise, of course; trying to normalize their awfulness is part of the playbook.

I don’t have a strong view, but I don’t think that should baffle you, you think the reaction comes from nothing at all? One side is pushing to “wedge” (sort of) into a very low level space so that it cements itself at a foundational level and there’s no repeal or return from it - all or nothing view. The other side picks up on that and doesn’t want to let big changes go unchallenged. It’s a pretty understandable process. The niche cases allow the challenging party to present evidence for a consequence or concern that’s difficult to convey.

HN does this constantly with the surveillance, bring up one case of police abusing it, it’s exactly the same thing.

> HN does this constantly with the surveillance, bring up one case of police abusing it, it’s exactly the same thing.

Because in this case, we're talking about maybe a few dozen (if that) relevant cases in trans youth [1]. With police/secret services abusing surveillance... it's huge enough that LOVEINT [2] is a term, and at least 50 cases were serious enough to be brought under official investigation [3].

[1] https://glaad.org/fact-sheet-for-reporters-transgender-parti...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/08/02/how-pol...

I’m just saying the process is exactly the same and shouldn’t be surprising. I don’t think we need to go into why one is less harming compared to another and that makes it okay to dismiss concerns.

> I don’t think we need to go into why one is less harming compared to another and that makes it okay to dismiss concerns.

Well... one is a niche problem barely impacting anyone. The news reports surrounding the topic of trans youth in sports are all focusing on less than a handful of students. The other is a problem that can be found across the planet with an insane amount of cases never making it to light because no one ever does audits - or if there are audits done, they get circumvented by shared accounts like in this infamous case in Germany [1].

[1] https://www.zeit.de/news/2022-05/12/nsu-2-0-beamter-berichte...

One of the trans acceptance movement's main problems comes, as is often the case in politics, from some of its most militant and passionate activists. To put it simply, those extreme activists overreached and annoyed people. That's not the fault of trans people in general, but it explains some of the backlash and the focus on niche cases.

Basically, the activists I'm talking about overreached by:

- Pushing for speech control around preferred pronouns

- Being overrepresented among Reddit mods, thus becoming to some extent the "face of censorship" for many highly online people

- Equating the mere act of disbelieving trans people's chosen gender identities with out-and-out bigotry of the KKK kind

- Talking about a mythical "trans genocide" and getting angry when people questioned its existence

- Pushing for equal bathroom access long before the American public had actually been made ready for something like that

Etc.

So what we have now in the highly online discourse is essentially a battle between niche militant trans activists who seem to illogically believe that they are on the brink of being put into extermination camps, on the one hand, and niche militant anti-trans fanatics who exaggerate the relatively rare cases of trans people doing bad things for the sake of pushing an overall anti-left agenda.

The militant trans activists I speak of seemingly just can't stop themselves from continuously providing people who actually hate trans people and people who just hate the left with more and more ammunition by having a prominent online presence while saying a mix of untrue and highly questionable things.

Before anyone jumps in with an angry reaction... yes, if it's not already clear from what I wrote, I also think that the right has a problem with insane deluded militant people.

“Militant” trans activists? How is just using someone’s pronouns “speech control”? It’s no different than using a name. If trans people tell you who they are, just believe them, it’s not that hard. There’s nothing mythical about the ongoing trans genocide. Genocides don’t just happen in gas chambers.

https://translegislation.com/

I am not going to say much more here because I’m fairly certain none of this will get through to you given the tone of your comment. Trans people are far more likely to be victims in washrooms than to be perpetrators.

It's cooled down a lot in the last few years, since peak woke passed. But I think that a few years ago, there would have been serious danger of being fired at many companies in the US if you refused to use a trans person's chosen pronouns. Now, one might say, this is just a matter of basic politeness... why wouldn't you use them? However, consider the situation if a white coworker started insisting that people refer to him as black, and you could get fired for not referring to him as black. For the sake of a better comparison, let's say that the white coworker was doing medical treatments to increase skin melanin, hair curliness, and so on.

As for trans genocide, I mean sure, you can make an argument that there is a trans genocide by really really stretching the meaning of the word "genocide" or by using certain parts of highly technical definitions of "genocide". But when trans activists speak of "trans genocide", they are trying to appeal to the emotional resonance of more popularly central examples of genocides, ones with mass killings. If we use the common meaning of the word "genocide", the one that is intended the vast majority of the time the word is used, there is no trans genocide.

As for washrooms, note that I never said that I'm against trans people using their chosen genders' washrooms. What I said is that many trans activists pushed to do this long before the American public had become ready for something of that nature, which contributed to a backlash against the trans movement in general.

"Trans genocide" is a ridiculous term and insisting on it is doing us no favours (and I say this as a trans woman).

https://www.lemkininstitute.com/red-flag-alerts/red-flag-ale...

One example that I had personally run into is when the person was offended when they were referred to as "them" because being gender neutral is, apparently, "erasure" (I didn't get a chance to ask what they think about languages with no gendered pronouns).

> Now, one might say, this is just a matter of basic politeness... why wouldn't you use them?

because enough people don't have any basic politeness left any more, to the contrary, they're actively pissing someone off.

> However, consider the situation if a white coworker started insisting that people refer to him as black, and you could get fired for not referring to him as black.

That one has been a thing for far longer than the entire trans issue, with it peaking in the rise of rap/hiphop music (and leading to the term "whigger" [1]). It eventually sort-of sorted itself once it was no longer edgy to troll people with such moves.

> If we use the common meaning of the word "genocide", the one that is intended the vast majority of the time the word is used, there is no trans genocide.

The common meaning is "a group of people, almost always the national majority, tries to get another group of people extinct". Given that trans youth already have among the highest suicide ratios, it is likely that policies restricting trans youth lead to more trans youth attempting suicide - and guess what, there's proof of exactly this happening [2].

> Pushing for equal bathroom access long before the American public had actually been made ready for something like that

Part of that is the ridiculousness in how many bathrooms are built. On festivals (portapotties), airplanes, trains and most if not all toilets for the disabled, there is no such thing as gender segregation at all - you wait in line, enter the next free booth, do your thing and that's it. Pretty much everyone has used a gender-neutral bathroom at least once in their life, chances are high you used one of them in the last 12 months.

There is no reason at all why toilets cannot be converted to "equal designations". I'd even go as far as to say that "equal" bathrooms are safer for everyone, simply because the facility will be higher frequented.

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

[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2024/09/25/nx...

It's not while, it's because. They have to create a "threat" that's of the same "magnitude" as their actual crimes, vectoring out from the subjective origin of "traditional" man/woman identity and relations. They do that by casting transgenderism not as the benign and modest personal identity that it is, but as the same kind of sexually aggressive comportment as their own; something that you do or perform willfully instead of what you are compelled by natural and intrinsic impulse to be.

The first step in defeating it is untangling the action/identity conflation.

You are: someone who is biologically non-female, but whose gender identity is that of a woman.

He is: a businessman and politician.

You do: upstanding, normal folk things.

He does: reprehensible shit like assaulting teenagers and bragging about "grabbing [women] by the pussy."

Hopefully people are able to see who in this comparison is in the wrong.

Taking hormones activates the genes responsible for making someone biologically a woman. That's kinda the point of taking them.

Right. Hormones cause an insane amount of changes. The texture of my skin, my scent, how much oil my skin produces, the haemoglobin in my blood, the size and strength of my muscles, how much fat my body stores, and where it goes, how attraction feels, how emotions feel, what I find rewarding. Certain physical attributes do require different interventions but the vast majority of sexually differentiated traits are decided by the dominant sex hormone in the body, not by the XX/XY genes. See: XY females for instance who have non functioning androgen receptors. When we talk about biological women, it’s also ignoring intersex variations. Biology is way more complex than we make it out to be.

If that's not biological, what is?

https://tr.ee/ttp-read

If it helps, ^^have a brochure explaining all of the ways folks are dramatically misunderstanding us right now. :(

You're not a scapegoat you're fodder for a social warfare diversion to enable the treasury to be looted by both parties while the economy collapses. DC's puppeteers don't give a shit about anything unless it starts with $

What in the enlightened centrism?! All 3 branches of government are controlled by conservatives, as is the fourth estate.

Sorry you’re right the old men with a D on their nameplate in DC really love and care unlike the “other” side.

Of course, because by the new definition, the leader is "peak American", so everything in collision with his view is naturally "anti-American".

The usage of the term "anti-American" by anyone in a public role should be rejected as insufficient definition and unfit for a representative to use. On the spot, immediately.

Is it anti-American to brush your teeth after breakfast? or rather before? Is both American? Neither of it?

When Trump calls Democrats "enemies from within," that's anti-American.

When Trump refuses to peacefully transfer power to his victorious opponent and instead plays "heads I win tails you cheated," that's anti-American.

When Trump sends the FCC chair to suppress speech "we can do this the easy way or the hard way," or yucks it up with the president of El Salvador over suspending Habeas Corpus, that's anti-American.

The "American Experiment" isn't an empty concept, but it is about democracy and law and rights as opposed to conservative cultural values, and when people in power start to argue that the former must be sacrificed for the latter they certainly deserve to be clowned on. Not because they are wrong to imagine an American Ideal, but because they have its contents exactly backwards.

While I understand the intention of what you're saying, you're still attempting a definition of the term "anti-American", which needs no definition as the term should be rejected as a whole.

I mean, to pick what is perhaps the easiest example, wanting to abridge speech is anti-American by its very definition.

It is possible to have a thing that is anti-American. So I'm not sure what good it is to reject the term altogether.

It could e.g. be "anti-democratic" by a universal definition of democracy and civil liberties which no single country then gets to fork and redefine...

Let's suppose you had your way and the cultural concept of America as a set of ideas and values related to democracy was erased. Would the universal non-national concepts of democracy and civil liberties have been able to inspire Mike Pence to stand up to Donald Trump on January 6th?

Sorry, I don't know what this conversation is about. This is not about a "concept", it is about the label itself.

When the term "anti-American" is used, it is a placeholder for "against my values". Noone is ever anti-American himself, it is only a label applied upon others.

That's why IMO it should be rejected when used by people in a public role, see original comment.

You are free to think otherwise, which I may then label as "anti-American" in passing, while quickly moving on to you mentioning Mike Pence and some random conspiracy I have /s

Again, /s/s/s/s

"Trump is misusing a term, better roll over and let him do it!"

Gross.

Which is not what I'm saying, I'm saying to NOT let him use this term.

How can you miss this fundamental aspect of what I'm repeatedly stating?

"Sad."

its encoded in the US constitution, so its anti-american.

it can be anti-other things too, but its certainly anti-american

Ah, I see, it's the same as "un-American", only without being a word too onerous to use (yet) due to obvious historical implications.

> The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), was an investigative committee of the United States House of Representatives created in 1938. Their goal was to investigate alleged disloyalty and subversive activities on the part of private citizens, public employees, and those organizations suspected of having communist ties. It was abolished in 1975.

I'd heard of this but didn't realize it went on for decades.

Turning it around, I'd say persecuting political enemies for being "un-American" - or as a recent book declared, "unhuman" - is a very un-American thing to do. At least according to the values for which the nation stands (or supposed to stand).

> I'd say persecuting political enemies for being "un-American" - or as a recent book declared, "unhuman" - is a very un-American thing to do

Dude. Dude. You've said yourself: this Congress committee went on for almost four decades. And before it, it was Yellow Peril, or anti-Irish sentiments, or manifest destiny with its "the only good Indian is a dead Indian". So, no, it's a very American thing to do, has been since the foundation of the US and arguably from even before than that.

I'm not sure what point your trying to make? I would also say trying to abridge speech is generally "un-American" as well as "anti-American." Are you trying to differentiate between the two terms? Or are you saying because HUAC existed half a century ago that nothing can possibly be considered un/anti-American?

Not really. America stands for something, they wrote a whole document about it.

There is a big difference between being "American" and being something like "German" because Germany has existed for so long as different governments and the thing that ties it together is not an ethos, but an ethnicity. Being American is different, there's no ethnicity that makes one American, there is only it's ethos. The ideals written in the declaration of independence are American values.

And that's the weak link of tying ideals and values to a location like a country:

The group elected to lead and represent this location also represent ideals and values, so THEIR ideals and values become inseparable of the location they were elected to represent.

For a certain period in the mid-1900s, "German values" meant something different than it did before and after, because Germany was represented by a different leader...

> And that's the weak link of tying ideals and values to a location like a country

My entire post is about exactly how this is not the case, American values are defined in a document[1].

[1]https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcrip...

And what I'm trying to explain is, that this paper doesn't matter if it is represented by someone who doesn't uphold its content.

Germany had the Paulskirche-, the Bismarck- and the Weymar-Constitution, all of them before that certain Leader elected into power. He got to define who is worthy/unworthy, decide how to read the document his party represents and change the definition of "un-German"

The words on the paper represent the ideas of what it means to be American. Trump has nothing to do with that. His actions, when the do not align with that paper, can be described as "anti-American".

The US has had a total of _one_ government and what it means to be American is in the founding document of that government. To be German is to lay claim to a history and cultural lineage that is filled with many different governments and even different states all-together.

The US has distinct regional and cultural identities as well, to be a Texan means something more akin to being German. Texas has a history that extends beyond the US. One can be American and Texan precisely because they are describe a different thing.

To be American is to ascribe to a certain set of ideals and, as far as someone isn't living up to those ideals, they are "anti-American".

Technically, the US has had multiple governments: the original 1781 Articles of Confederation qualifies, as it had a Congress (although a weak one).

What I read is "what it means to be American" is more clear in ideology and values as "what it means to be German", and I can only wholeheartedly disagree with that.

As someone who is neither born American nor German, I can tell you that both terms describe a subjective feeling and not objective facts. Moreover, they are terms to create unity/solidarity among those who identify with them and exclude those who don't.

Unlike of course someone born Italian telling you that it's clear for everyone what it means to be anti-Italian: ...don't know, doesn't eat pasta or sthg...? /s

> this paper doesn't matter if it is represented by someone who doesn't uphold its content.

Not at all...that's when the paper matters the most, because the electorate can see that the person in charge is not upholding our values, purely in contrast to the document. The document sets the baseline. Writing things down has value.

Germany specifically hasnt existed for very long. its a younger country than the US, but it was made to combine people of an ethnicity

That kind of gets at my point. To be "German" means something different than being "American".

It's just the idea that vague terms get misused so much I demand the specific. "Anti" anything can just mean you aren't "pro" it enough, or not pro a particular version.

So for restricting speech, you could say not honoring the first amendment or something like that.

I think about this because sometimes people or ideas are described as "problematic". Sometimes for very good reason, but sometimes you find out the speaker has trouble being specific. I like to hear the specific reason when I can to understand the facts or logic. Sometimes these classifications come third hand.

I mean, there are American values. The country was built around the idea of limiting the federal government's power, and adherence not a person, but to a set of values (like freedom of speech). We're explictly founded on the concept of rule of law.

Through that lens, it is very clear what anti-American means: adherence and loyalty to a person instead of a set of values, expansive government overreach, erosion of individual liberties, including the ability to express dissent.

It was also built around a process by which those values can be codified and changed to reflect changing times, i.e. the amendment process. Which we have forgotten about entirely.

What Trump and his followers mean by it, though, is that any disagreement with Trump on policy, strategy, tactics, procedure, or belief is anti-American. The way they use the term "anti-American" is anti-American. Therefore the term outside of context is meaningless. It's been coopted, twisted, and perverted.

Is it exists, something must be antithetical to it.

(Truth is its just rhetoric and it doesn't mean much of anything. That's why its main use is as a cudgel).

Clearly, the southern Indian Ocean and a tiny slice of the Antarctic coast are the most anti-(US of) American.

It only involves a swathe of South-East Asia and China once you are inclusive of South America... ;-)

I disagree.

I would define confidently that Anti-American is aligned with Anti-Constitutional. By definition, it is this nation's founding document and treatise.

An the Supreme Court's ultimate role is to affirm or deny nebulous case law as aligned with the Constitution.

For you that might be a confident definition, for others it might not mean "anti-constitutional" but "against the declaration of independence", for even others it might not create any clear association at all.

That's because something being "American"/"anti-American" is not sufficiently defined in this context. It triggers a highly subjective assumption of what it means, allowing people to evoke "us vs. them" solidarity without actually taking a position.

Example: I can (probably) break your assumed association by stating "women owning credit-cards is anti-American". It (probably) doesn't fit your mental model of what being "anti-American" means, but women were in fact not allowed to own credit cards in US until 1974. So my definition might be more in-line with the era of the constitution than yours.

That's a blunt example. Now imagine I use "anti-American" in a context of "law and order" and then keep talking. People instinctively glance over it because they create the meaning by taking their personal association of being "American" and invert it. You may feel like agreeing but I might actually say the complete opposite of what you think.

That's why IMO the phrase should be rejected from people in a public role.

If you will not say what something is against, then it is by definition for nothing.

on edit: fixed grammatical error, based on bad keyboard gesture moving stuff around.

> When Trump refuses to peacefully transfer power to his victorious opponent

When did this happen? I didn't realize Biden wasn't inaugurated. I could have sworn he was the President for 4 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_January_6_Unit...

I'm skimming the "Aftermath" section and I'm not seeing where Biden's inauguration was cancelled or Trump retained power or anything else? If Trump "refused to peacefully transfer power" how was power peacefully transferred to Biden exactly on schedule the same way it's happened in every other election?

I do see this happened on Jan 7th though:

> 7:10 p.m.: Shortly after Twitter unlocked Trump's account, Trump released a video statement condemning the violence at the Capitol, saying that "a new administration will be inaugurated" and that his "focus now turns to ensuring a smooth, orderly, and seamless transition of power" to the Biden administration.

    The American people deserve to know that President Trump
    and his advisors didn’t just ask me to pause, they asked me
    to reject votes, to return votes, to essentially overturn the election.
    To keep faith with the oath that I made to the American people and
    to almighty God, I rejected that out of hand
    and I did my duty that day.

    - Vice President Mike Pence

This is why the Jan 6 crowd was carrying around an improvised gallows and chanting "hang Mike Pence." The crowd was there to serve as a pretext for what Trump wanted Pence to do, but Pence refused to do it so the self-coup attempt failed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot

Show me where this happened in every other election.

That the fate of our entire democracy briefly rested in the hands of Mike Pence is bad enough in and of itself

The peaceful tour of the capital by pro American demonstrators (sorry, peak Americans) interrupted the proceedings. They were very close to pulling off a strategy of having the senate override the vote, if they hadn’t reconvened before midnight and had Pence left the Capitol like secret service were urging him to do.

Anyway this argument has occurred a thousand times on these boards so if you saw January 6 as peaceful and harmless I can’t change your mind.

that an inssurection was stopped doesnt make it a peaceful transfer of power.

the thing about the US system is that the president doesnt do the transfer of power. they just lose power on a certain day, and congress grants it to somebody new

If you go far into the user you’re replying to’s post history, you’ll find them unambiguously referring to the Jan 6 crowd as terrorists. They are very aware.

I know there’s a pretty strong norm against dragging people for their posting history here, but that’s in service of maximizing light vs. heat and I feel like pretending to be ignorant of recent events in order to relitigate something unrelated in the comments is wholly unproductive.

> you’ll find them unambiguously referring to the Jan 6 crowd as terrorists.

While I wouldn't agree with that, there is no contradiction between that claim and Trump himself "not refusing" to "make a peaceful transition of power" (putting aside the downthread arguments about how the transition of power is actually made).

> pretending to be ignorant of recent events

Disagreement on interpretation is not the same thing as ignorance.

When a coup fails, that doesn't mean it didn't happen.

You are literally claiming the Jan. 6 murder of police officers was "peacefully transferring power".

It was never claimed that it was successful.

> The "American Experiment" isn't an empty concept, but it is about democracy and law and rights as opposed to conservative cultural values, and when people in power start to argue that the former must be sacrificed for the latter they certainly deserve to be clowned on. Not because they are wrong to imagine an American Ideal, but because they have its contents exactly backwards.

From the many responses on this thread, it appears that many either don't want a defintion of "pro-American" or "anti-American" or "an American Ideal" or don't have one but these are core to your point.

How would you define each?

if you're explaining, you're losing

> When Trump calls Democrats "enemies from within,"

He did not say this.

Please spare me the part where you show me the things that you think establish the claim. I have already seen them and they do not establish the claim. At best you are intentionally conflating "Democrats" collectively with specific individuals who happen to be part of the Democratic party.

I could continue on with the rest but you get the idea.

While the exact point at which it becomes "anti-american" isn't clear there's certainly a category of rhetoric in which people peddle subservience to the state (usually dressed up in obfuscating words, like they'll use "society" instead of "the government") that is undeniably "anti-american" except perhaps by some obtuse technical interpretation of all the words. And I will die on the hill that those who peddle such ideals are bad people and ought to be looked down upon the same way we'd look down upon someone peddling phrenology as a basis for racism.

It's like the John Birth society are back in charge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_Un-American_Activities_C...

I'm pretty sure that's the idea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unhumans

History sure does rhyme

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_Nothing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Scare

Don’t give them any ideas.

If unsure, ask the House Un-American Activities Committee.

(P.s. don't ask any questions that they don't like, that would be Un-American).

Im not quite following. Things can be mislabeled as anti American, but everyone has some idea of whats anti-American in principle. Anti free speech for example is anti American.

How that gets applied is a matter of debate. But I think all public officials should agree with that.

Its kind of a fundamental thing to have an idea about the nation’s values. If that’s too taboo for someone then they are quite literally anti American. Having a country means organizing around a core set of values. We can debate what those are but arguing you can’t stand for anything?

I'm Muslim. Born in the US. I've seen politicians and right wing public figures call my entire faith anti-American. One of them just had a nice memorial for their one-year since their death.

The term may have had an agreed upon meaning at some point, but not anymore.

Edit: it seems like most right-wing people conflate "non-Christian" with "anti-American". i don't know what's worse; the fact that these people say and think it, or the fact that their constituents don't know the difference.

It doesn’t have to have an agreed upon meaning. My point is its not inherently bad to think something is anti-American.

In fact, treating the very idea of judging something as “anti-American” as inherently illegitimate is quite literally anti-American. Its saying Americans shouldn’t be allowed to have opinions about what their country stands for.

Fundamentally I agree. But my point is that while it isnt inherently bad to think of something as anti-American, it is bad when politicians use that terminology to create divides and further their agendas. My statement about Islam being anti-American is just one example.

Honestly I think because there is no agreed upon meaning, the term "anti-American" is meaningless and means whatever the speaker/listener wants it to mean, and is just used to score political points.

"Enemy of the people" is also not inherently illegitimate - I mean, the people can surely have enemies, right?

But words and phrases like that have a history of actual use and the resulting connotations.

I’m as atheist as they come and I see the tenets of Islam — as widely practiced throughout the world, and self-reported in a litany of surveys — to be clearly anti-woman, anti-freedom, anti-free speech, pro blasphemy-law, et al … and as a result, anti-American.

Charlie Hebdo was not that long ago. Anti-women practices are the predominant norm. The list of regressive and oppressive political norms is practically endless.

Nothing here absolves Christianity or any other religion of its crimes either, but (1) the sexism is on another scale entirely, and (2) we’ve been far more successful as a global society of separating those religions from their political aspirations.

> the sexism is on another scale entirely

Several nations that are predominantly Muslim have had female heads of state before the US has. If your perception of Islam is based on how Middle Eastern countries practice it then you are only looking at the countries that choose a theocratic way of ruling. Islam mandates that women (and men!) cover certain parts of your body but the most populous Muslim country (Indonesia) you'll see women in hijabs wearing short sleeves or low cut shirts.

Additionally, Christians are the predominant voice on many female-regressive laws in the US, such as the overturning of Roe. Women have been arrested for having miscarriages. If that isn't "anti-woman" i dont know what is.

> we’ve been far more successful as a global society of separating those religions from their political aspirations.

Have we though? Just a few years ago right-wing politicians were complaining that the woke left wanted to cancel Christmas. As mentioned above, Christians won the lobby on overturning Roe. Christians won the lobby on banning same sex marriage.

A religion taking over a country isnt every citizen bowing down to that religions faith. Its everyone in the country being subject to that religion's laws and beliefs regardless of your faith.

What I'm saying is literally The usage of the term "anti-American" by anyone in a public role should be rejected as insufficient definition and unfit for a representative to use.

Especially when glanced-over mid-sentence, the term evokes the inversion of your idea what being "American" means, without ever clarifying whether your assumption is correct.

Me saying "the liberties of the banking sector are deeply anti-American, we will revert those changes to relieve the increased tension they cause in American households" might evoke an association of "less debt" or "owning a home" in a listener, while I might actually mean "women shouldn't be allowed to own credit cards" (because they weren't until 1974 and MY American values are some form of "vanilla constitution")

100% agree. Also because the view, preferences, and cultural norms of America change over time. A law should not rely on such a dynamic definition.

Heh, now as an Austrian, why does that all sound so familiar?

> The police, "suspecting the conflagration to be the first of a series of Communist acts of terrorism", have arrested a number of Communist leaders.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/1933/mar/28/leadersandreply...

Huh.

another important part isn't just the ideology targeting - it's the directive for local and national law enforcement for form Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) targeting individuals and organizations in this vein. JTTFs are already mobilized and targeting people - see https://atlpresscollective.com/2026/06/12/federal-prosecutor...

I think of that poem, First They Came:

  First they came for the Communists
  And I did not speak out
  Because I was not a Communist
  Then they came for the Socialists
  And I did not speak out
  Because I was not a Socialist
  Then they came for the trade unionists
  And I did not speak out
  Because I was not a trade unionist
  Then they came for the Jews
  And I did not speak out
  Because I was not a Jew
  Then they came for me
  And there was no one left
  To speak out for me

replace 'Jews' with the current minoritized target demographic (ie immigrants of any stripe) and we're already fairly far down that list. see the case of David Huerta for the targeting of unions: https://www.courthousenews.com/los-angeles-labor-leader-arre...

This is the outcome that every privacy advocate has been warning about for decades and being increasingly challenged by people who were fine with it as 'they have nothing to hide and do no wrong'.

No, Dem candidates are safe. The culture wars benefit both parties and their billionaire owners.

The culture wars are explicitly a tool of the right to provoke fear, anger, and hate against others.

The left gets trapped in it because every single culture war issue (LGBQT+, racism, feminism, reproductive rights, freedom from religion, etc) are responses to the rights reactionary drive to claw back rights from everybody who is not a white male christian.

> The left gets trapped...

Nevermind the wedge driven when moderates who think of themselves as being on the left agree with the idea that past weak attempts to nudge things leftward "went too far", or that there actually is an issue with "government waste". Sir/Ma'am - you are complicit in moving the Overton window to the right.

I've been called a "shrill far leftist" and a "fascist appeaser" so does that make me a centrist? Any labeling I may apply to myself is for convenience of packaged assumptions about my values.

> moderates who think of themselves as being on the left agree with the idea that past weak attempts to nudge things leftward "went too far"

Examples please? Not a challenge, I just am not pickup up what you're laying down.

As for "government waste" of course it exists but to various degrees and in various areas. For example, Medicare fraud is estimated $60 billion to over $100 billion annually. That doesn't mean we should get rid of it -- it means we'd be well served to invest a fraction of that amount in preventing such numbers.

And as far as shifting the Overton Window to the right, that has been the Right itself, via culture war bullshit.

Look, sir/madam, I have no tribe, no political party, no religion, no beliefs that I'm unwilling to change when presented with compelling evidence. I've tracked US politics likely longer than you've been alive. I understand how the game is played and this Red vs Blue is a master class in political manipulation. And the culture war is the key tool used to render it.

So you telling me that I'm the reason why the Overton Window is shifting right is a tell that you're the confused one.

I could have been more clear in my writing, but I was adding to your point of things that trap the left. The "Sir/Ma'am" was addressing a hypothetical left-ish "moderate" who gets trapped into criticizing other on the left by conservative talking points - not accusing you personally. I have no idea what your politics are.

My politics are based on secular humanism and that we all effectively live in a commons.

I'm rabidly anti-partisan but align with Dems because they are the least worst option.

> gets trapped into criticizing other on the left by conservative talking points

One thing I'll concede about the Right -- they excel at defining the language and debate and the Left is almost always playing defense.

But to be a broken record here: the Culture War is the only thing the Right has to offer in the realm of political debate. It's a cheap and nasty, yet incredibly effective tool to manipulate people to vote against their own interest by their induced fear, hate, and anger.

And in the 30s germany started branding things as being anti-german, we all know where that led us. This isn't a new play book by any means. Seeing so many comments debating terminology worries me, we should be discussing the implications.

yes probably, and ive been calling this as their playbook for about a year

Make no mistake, this is not some sophisticated conspiracy. This is pure laziness and abuse of power. They have been using "domestic terrorist" as a button to slap anytime they dont want to be questioned. the phrase no longer means anything besides "this person questioned authority"

ICE has used it to label people they shot for videoing them. Note that they knew the video evidence existed and labelled them anyway, assuming they would be able to avoid court altogether and prevent the video evidence being seen. In at least one case, this didnt work and the victim was correctly identified as such.

So this isnt hypothetical. It is a playbook being used right now, and people are testing the waters for how much they can get away with.

The red scare of the 1950s was ridiculous enough, but at least the Soviet Union was an actual threat. We are now at a point where “pro-transgender” is the new threat?

The administration doesn't like it, therefore it's a threat. Similar to negative news, which are fake, and contrary opinions, which are woke propaganda.

Many symptoms of undercover fascism.

> but at least the Soviet Union was an actual threat

The 'threat' was also the reason many working class Americans had generally higher standard of living than they do today

Sure, if you conveniently drop the qualifying word "radically". But that's not what was said. What was said specifically included the word "radically" for a good reason. Radical anything is a threat.

Are you familiar with the concepts of propaganda and lying?

This is the kind of sarcasm on HN that will draw a ton of comments. Good job on really nailing the psyche of the HN community.

I may have issues detecting sarcasm. I hope to god this is sarcasm… because these kinds of takes are rampant on this site.

> Poe's law is an adage of Internet culture which says that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, any parodic or sarcastic expression of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of those views.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

Oh yeah. For that reason (I guess an unpopular opinion?) I have always been a fan of the /s.

Phew, as an anti-American, radically pro-transgender Marxist-Leninist I should be safe; bloody anarchists.

The politicized take on this is not correct. More importantly, it's not helpful.

When the "left" (Democrats) had power recently in the U.S., they were very happy to try to criminalize the protected speech of their enemies. Their tack was to define speech they didn't like as "hate speech", which luckily isn't actually a thing in the U.S., legally. But they were trying to make it happen.

I don't mean to defend one or the other side, merely to point out that this is a non-partisan issue.

Please cite specifically what the Biden administration did to curtail people’s right to freedom of speech.

I’ll wait.

Lololol ok:

Biden: The Biden Administration's promulgation of a Title IX interpretation that, among other things, would have compelled certain kinds of speech:

https://speechfirst.org/case/title-ix/

One example of many: it would have been a punishable offense to refuse to use someone's preferred pronouns. This is what's called "compelled speech", and it's when someone says to you, "Say $THING or else". It's very reasonable for governments to prohibit saying certain things (like national security secrets, for instance, or other people's bank account login info), but thus far forcing people to say things they don't believe has been a bridge too far.

And, happily, compelled speech is a bright line the Americans have, so far, managed not to cross. Everyone should be trying as hard as we can to not cross that line.

You may not see the harm in this particular instance, but establishing "we'll just force them to say it and punish them if they don't" as a tool in any government's toolbox is a very, very bad idea.

Ah, and I should mention Biden's new Title IX rules became law on August 1, 2024 so they weren't "would". Thankfully, we only had a few months under this particular imposition on our basic rights and push never came to shove.

Harris: https://nclalegal.org/opinion/kamala-harris-free-speech-task... Clearly wanted to criminalize speech she didn't like

Walz: https://www.cato.org/commentary/actually-tim-walz-first-amen... Same

Why are these supposedly serious violations funny to you?

Most of what you cited is about what a policy might imply or what someone’s rhetoric might lead to. Also, I don’t know if you knew this, but Walz was never part of the Biden administration.

Are you similarly bothered by the actual First Amendment violations the Trump administration has carried out?

The White House excluded AP reporters because the AP wouldn’t adopt its preferred “Gulf of America” wording. A federal judge found that unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination: https://www.ap.org/media-center/ap-in-the-news/2025/ap-wins-...

The administration targeted pro-Palestinian students and faculty with visa revocations, detention, and deportation efforts because of their political advocacy. A federal judge ruled that unconstitutional: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-backed-targeting-pro-...

It targeted Perkins Coie with loss of federal access, contracts, and security clearances over the firm’s clients and political associations: https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-judge-temporarily-blocks-tr...

It canceled more than 1,400 humanities grants based on viewpoint. A federal judge found that violated the First Amendment: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-judge-rules-huma...

It canceled billions in Harvard research funding in an effort a federal judge found violated Harvard’s First Amendment rights: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-unlawfully-canceled-h...

Many of these Trump cases involve the government actually imposing penalties on people or institutions because of protected speech or association, not just an argument about what a rule might eventually imply.

This is not something you get to pretend is equivalent across “both sides”.

I appreciate you engaging.

Several things:

> Walz was never part of the Biden administration.

I made a claim about the scarequotes(left), not about the Biden administration specifically. You asked about Biden. They were going for succession, you know!

> Are you similarly bothered by the actual First Amendment violations the Trump administration has carried out?

Yes

> AP reporters not allowed

The executive has leeway here, it's not clear exactly how much. Biden wasn't inviting Breitbart in, for example. That a judge found something doesn't mean much, supremes finding something would be meaningful.

> Targeted pro-Pal students

Specifically, pro-Pal foreign students. The Americans are right now in the process of figuring out when their rights apply to foreigners and when they don't. Often, the fed's tack is: we ask you at the border if you support terrorist organizations. If you say "yes", we don't let you in. Turns out you support HAMAS. That's a terrorist org, it's on our list. You lied. Goodbye! So in many cases it's not about speech per se, but rather whether you lied to the feds. And if the "unconstitutionality" thing here holds up, well then...I guess USA decided free speech applies to foreigners in the country. But until very recently that was a murky issue. Maybe still is, idk.

> Perkins Cole

"Liberals" do the same thing. Look at Biden pressuring for debanking of crypto people [https://www.forbes.com/sites/tonyaevans/2025/12/06/feds-bowm...]. Or jawboning Meta. I think it's less salient when left does it because they have captured the majority of institutions. So it looks like business as usual. It looks "legit". Except...it's just Blue enacting its will through e.g. the Fed, or whoever it is that regulates banks.

>Canceled grants

Here, I'm an expert! I'm an academic who has been negatively affected by all this. What some district court judge found is irrelevant, so I'll ignore that (just in case: district court judges are small potatoes and their rulings do not have precedential value). What I will say is: the situation had gotten WAY out of hand. The feds were funding a bunch of batshit crazy stuff that was CLEARLY just fraud and woke virtue-signaling. A lot of good stuff got canceled too, which is sad. That good stuff probably had batshit crazy woke signaling in their grant write-ups because that's the only way you could get funded! Which is sad. Should the admin have used a scalpel rather than a sledgehammer? Yes. Should the humanities be getting much less funding and producing far fewer graduate students? Yes. Even graduating from a top (~Harvard) program, humanities graduate students have something like a 10-25% chance of a "real" (professorship) job. And that might be Northwest Arkansas State Community Daycare College.

> Harvard

Harvard was made an example of. Fair? No. Did they break the law A LOT, just like everyone else? You betcha! Did they definitely discriminate in favor of Pal against Israel? Yes, certainly did. Did the admin handle it in the smartest way possible? Definitely not.

> Trump actually did bad things, not "might"

You have to understand: the "speech" climate in academia has been so, so bad for ten years - and that's because of the "liberals", not Trump and co. It's been insane. The speech restrictions were REAL. People got FIRED. Many more people KEPT QUIET ABOUT REAL SCIENCE THINGS FOR FEAR OF PUNISHMENT. Things are better now, crazier but better. You can talk kinda. The institutions are still >80% captured by Team Blue, but there is a breath of fresh air. A waft. One needn't be fearful all the time.

And I should say as well: the "thou shalt speak the wokeness" thing is, for most disciplines, merely an academic exercise. Lip service. You're a physicist: so what? "Trans women are women". Okay, fine, whatever - I believe it, I don't, I support it, I don't, it has nothing to do with fermions.

But imagine you study humans, and human behavior: suddenly, everything has real stakes. "Black people and white people are different!" --> fired. "Evolution is real and it affects behavior systematically" --> fired. Carole Hooven, for instance (driven out, not fired - cheaper that way).

One final word:

There is an extremely important difference between the tantrums of the present administration and the tack that Biden and Friends were taking. The present administration shows no signs of trying to make its infringements permanent and systematic. The previous group was trying to do precisely and exactly that. Which is much, much scarier to me.

This is untrue. Throw out your TV.

See below! It is true :0(

That is extremely unlikely. There are definitely some people in Trump's camp who would love to do that, including probably Trump himself. However, Trump does not have enough public or institutional support for him to risk doing something that blatant.

ACLU will have a field day.

That's already too late.

> So, Democratic candidates who are looking like they will win a seat this midterm cycle are going to get arrested for "domestic terrorism".

It would be fascinating to revisit this comment with you after the midterms and see whether your beliefs have changed in any way.

You read a passage talking about groups of people who provably commit real violence and advocate for more of it, establish "autonomous zones" in cities as part of protest actions, attempt en masse to impede physically the lawful actions of legitimate federal LEO, and explicitly promote agendas that include the destruction of fundamental state institutions; and you imagine that this will be applied to establishment candidates with good chances of winning in a democratic process. This appears to be based on nothing more than your personal impression of the POTUS. I find that to be completely and utterly unreasonable.

Benjamin Song should be all the evidence you need to illustrate that the phrase "domestic terrorism" is completely appropriate to describe things that are actually happening. But there is so, so much more of it.

I find it ironic that in the US, there's this social movement against Flock cameras - which have shown real results in tracking down criminals - while everyone walks around all the time with a personal tracking device in the form of a smart phone. That's wayyyy more invasive than cameras along roads.

Don’t be That Guy please. This tired talking point gets walked out in every privacy discussion. Both things can be (and are) bad at once, but just because one problem exists doesn’t mean that others aren’t worth solving.

In any case this article is about the whole spectrum of mass surveillance, not one specific company.

Phone data requires some actual process to access. It should be more restrictive than it is, but I don’t believe the information is made available to random police officers who can search for whatever they want with no real justification.

The problem with Flock isn’t the cameras, it’s the system built on them that gives panopticon powers to any random law enforcement officer.

No argument with that, agreed.

Stop posting this bullshit argument. the people arguing against Flock are the same people who argue for privacy rights around cellular phone data, availability of encrypted messaging etc. It's thanks to them that the government still needs to get a warrant instead of just doing a search.

Anyone making this argument of yours is also smart enough to be aware of the privacy efforts. Pretending not to know about them is bullshit.

Or uh yeah they're just cameras on public roads, and provide a net benefit to society. I'm sure you weren't triggered by these cameras a few years ago, when it wasn't part of the current "thing to be mad about".

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