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Comment by wonderyak | Hacker News Reader

Many of us are calling for changes, many people thought electing Obama would facilitate this change. I think these people are the most upset of all; the man ran on a campaign of change ...

There is a general concensus among people across the political parties that things are broken. Congress is not good, the President is not doing a good job and problems are mounting.

The majority realizes that the system is broken (ish), things are bad, the government should be doing something about it instead of prolonging the status quo -- and yet we can't get any meaningful change going.

I just don't understand it.

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You guys need to do what we are doing in Brazil, protests every day until government change its position and create a true agenda, and a new pact with his people.. its working over here.. the government are doing now in weeks things it use to take years to do..

We live in a age where polititians are completely obtuse from the people who elect them..

we live in the age of schizophrenic democracies.. the people are much more evolved and sophisticated, and they are still doing the same sort of politics it use to work in the past..

well, we need to make them hear a clear message, they need to hear that things have changed, we changed for the better, and if they insist in not listening to us.. let them know that or they do it, or we will make it work in other ways..

but making them know we are not just that silly harmless sheap that accepts everything anymore.. and that consumism its not enough anymore.. we want and need more.. they will listen.

at least we are having a good experience overhere.. they are aware of us, of our needs and our expectations.. finally!

The election of Obama did facilitate a lot of change within NSA. It simply wasn't the type of change you all thought it would be, but it is an improvement in most respects compared to 2007's DoJ and DoD.

How so? At most he required they get explicit legislative authorization, which they did, rather than potentially being more easily struck down by the courts. Pretty much continued doing the same things as far as I can tell.

A significant paring down of the "watch lists" used by NSA (and TSA too, it seems), the revocation of the previous definition of 'torture', scrapping some of the surveillance programs of no useful intelligence value, stuff like that.

Certainly there is more that can be done, but I think if this whole affair is indicative of the reaction to be expected then I'm not surprised people avoided making oversight of these programs a loud and noisy public debate.

Ah. Those are things meaningful to those suffering directly but not to those designing security systems, which is what particularly concerns me.

I still think a Gingrich or Tea Party level congressional revolution in 2014, bipartisan, focused on "re-establishing effective oversight of the military/intelligence apparatus", should have reasonable odds of going through. There are enough districts which don't financially benefit from this (and a lot which are going to be hurt by it, like Silicon Valley and Redmond), that a number of junior congressmen could probably get elected on it (assuming they're not otherwise psycho).

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