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Comment by mokus | Hacker News Reader

What concerns me most about this whole situation isn't even the surveillance, though I think that's pretty abhorrent. It's the fact that something so stupendous has been done without any kind of public debate - despite the fact that anyone with two brain cells to rub together can't help but see would at least be a strongly polarizing issue.

From this article it sounds like there hasn't even been much of a secret debate. If they won't consult the people about such an explosive issue, the least they could do is consult their elected representatives. Instead, they just did it, and now they want to sweep it all under the rug and tell us "we thought really hard about it and we decided it was OK - and after all, TERR'ISTS!". I have a sinking feeling that it'll work, though, and that this debate will not really happen anyway since most people don't seem to care.

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From what we've been told, Greenwald has a giant cache of classified documents, and the people who actually know say this is the tip of the iceberg. I highly doubt he's shown all his cards yet, if only to milk this story as long as possible. Personally, my money is on another bombshell this Friday.

There was an extensive public debate about the Patriot act at the time of its passage, and the security proponents won. It's past time that we had another one, but anyone over about the age of 30 who wasn't aware of this wasn't paying attention.

It was opportunistically passed 45 days after 9/11. Very few Americans were in an even semi-rational position to understand or debate the nature of the Patriot Act. The only public discussion was a small minority of people thinking about the future implications, and the other radical majority that was reacting based on fear / emotion (and the lawmakers that passed it were counting on that, otherwise they would have waited a lot longer to pass it).

True, but so what? that's how things are in a democracy. I keep pointing out that a great many people simply do not share the concerns of privacy and civil liberties advocates, and people keep responding that the public is too uneducated or doesn't really understand. The reality is that a lot of people understand the implications just fine but they simply don't agree with the minority viewpoint. So they're foolish and short-sighted, but it'll be a cold day in hell before that changes.

> True, but so what? that's how things are in a democracy.

Using fear and emotion of a recent disaster to push an otherwise controversial law really has nothing to do with democracy. Any type of government would use this technique because it's so easy.

And you should demand your government to be better than that. I know I do. Even if you don't believe they'll listen (fair enough), the moment you stop complaining and bitching about it, is the moment you're saying "well, okay then, if you persist, I give up".

Additionally, I expect human beings to be bound by more than just laws or constitutions, but also by ethics, a will to stand up for what's right and against what's wrong. That's why governments and corporations are not persons. But you are, and as soon as you say "I'm okay with this because it's legal/constitutional", without being able to argue why it is also right (in your opinion, we can still disagree about this, but that's another matter entirely), you fail that test.

Governments and corporations are just agglomerations of persons, who act with varying ethical standards. Treating them as monolithic entities leads on astray into all sorts of fallacies.

As for my own ethical position, I think the US needs a constitutional amendment that creates an explicit right to privacy, rather than an inferred one. But I also think the head of the executive branch is bound to serve conflicting imperatives regarding defensive issues, and that it's foolish to expect government actors to tie their hands hands in fulfilling that mandate.

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