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Comment by ihsw | Hacker News Reader

> The American people have betrayed the internet. We need to take it back.

You might think my correction of the title is inflammatory but we shouldn't forget: America is a constitutional democracy. If the Americans don't like the situation then they can vote for someone who will enact legislation that reflects that, meanwhile foreigners cannot influence anything (should they?). They got the government they deserve, and they alone carry the blame.

Of course, we can also close our borders and fracture the internet, but is it really necessary? Do we really care about our security and our privacy that much? We got here too, by tying all of our communications infrastructure into America, so we have only ourselves to blame.

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The American political process has four stages: money primary, party primary, general election, and lobbying. The will of the public often doesn't get expressed into policy because:

1. By the time the average citizen can play a role in the process, the remaining choices agree on many if not most important issues (see Obama vs. Romney).

2. Even if the public elects an official who promises certain policies, they can always be swayed later by lobbying (see Obama on privacy).

America is called a constitutional democracy. It started out as a constitutional republic. In practice, it's closer to a plutocracy and has been for some time. The average net worth of a US Senator is ~$10 million. Political solutions will only come about in reaction to technical solutions that we come up with.

I'd posit that the political classes are an evolutionary obstacle for the technical community to solve. If successful, we thrive. If unsuccessful, technology will be owned by the political classes and we're beholden to them until we solve the problem.

> In practice, it's closer to a plutocracy and has been for some time.

You mean since the founding of the republic? http://www.businessinsider.com/american-presidents-republica.... George Washington was worth an estimated $500 million. Adams was a pauper at only $20 million. Jefferson was $200m+ before he went broke. Madison was $100m+.

The average net worth of senators is skewed up by a few wealthy businessmen. The median is around $2.5 million, which is actually not even top 1%. The top 5% mark is at $1.8m. And don't forget: Senators skew married, skew older, skew white, skew educated relative to overall households, and all of those characteristics are correlated with higher income and net worth. The median senator might not even crack the top 5% if you look only at households with white married 60-year olds who all have college degrees and 60% of whom have a JD or MD.

$2.5 million net worth is rich, but it's not "plutocracy" rich. It's "two Google engineers marrying and buying a house and putting money into their 401ks for 30 years" rich.

Whatever you want to call it, this form of government plainly doesn't represent the general population of the country.

What evidence do you have that the general population cares much at all about these revelations?

As rayiner pointed out, President Obama could end any of these programs with a phone call, but even though he hasn't, his supporters overwhelmingly still support him.

>>As rayiner pointed out, President Obama could end any of these programs with a phone call

At least the ones he's aware of. The US government is an extremely massive and complex entity with multiple layers of compartmentalization and secrecy. I bet there are programs that even the POTUS doesn't know about.

The typical voter is a churchgoing middle aged woman. I'm going to paint with a broad brush, but what about the American government do you think is inconsistent with that fact? NSA surveillance? The drug war? The war on terror?

I imagine that technological solutions to the plutocracy would be more effective if aimed at creating mechanisms that prevent the plutocrats from acting against the will of the citizens they are tasked with representing, instead of making it possible for non-plutocrats to become politicians.

Tools that force transparency or promote it by changing the social norms in political offices are valuable, and are most likely to be effective at the city and state level, where it is much much harder to hide behind policies of national security. We're never going to get Congress, POTUS and SCOTUS to be transparent first, especially when any transparency solution will be disparaged as disadvantaging us against other countries. At the national level, people will claim that attempts at transparency are unpatriotic. At the city and state level, it's much harder to make claims against transparency.

Senators aren't supposed to represent the will of the people in the first place. The Senate is composed of elitists by design; if anything, they're supposed to represent the interests of the States.

For that reason Senators were originally elected by state legislatures. It's only been 100 years, since 1913, that senators have been directly elected.

That covers senators, but what about representatives?

<< This.

I don't care if the number is wrong on the net worth of a sitting US senator based on the comment that the actual average is less. If you're net worth is $2.5M because of your position in the Senate and not because you were a smart business person prior too then you're paid for and bought.

I heard Senator Franken vehemently avoiding NSA questions on MPR the other week. He claims to be a proponent of Internet neutrality and privacy, yet his voting and "amendments" he coauthored day otherwise. He's an actor and a comedian first which is why he plays well in the political realm until he's asked direct questions outside of his box of comfort that is the hand that feeds him.

I'm definitely glad to see Schneier in the position he's weaving into. He's a great advocate and I support his views, perspectives and ideals to revert the damage and system that is now in place. I hope that I can tell my grandchildren Alexander and the posse under and around him were publicly shamed and stripped of all honors and decorations the United States of America has unfortunately afforded these puppets. Many of these traitors (of the American people) need to be made public examples and placed into the same solitude and torture the whistle-blowers have been subject to.

Why do you say you have to be a successful businessman or else be bought and paid for to accumulate that much? We're at the tail end of a decades long stock market boom and a decades long boom in housing prices. My parents have a $1.5m house in Virginia. My dad started with a $120k house and traded up a couple of times over 25 years. It was just a great time to be a professional with a little bit of cash flow. No need to sell a startup to Yahoo or take any bribes!

Looking at it another way, the median net worth of freshman congressmen is $1m. Do you think you need to take bribes and engage in dirty insider trading to double that in 10-15 years?

Median senator age is 62. Most Senators are highly educated (many from highly-paid professions such as legal before they became highly-paid senators) and married.

Thirty years of high income (100-150K family income in today's dollars) with 10-15% saving and investing in the market can easily result in a net worth in the low millions, not including inherited investments, long-term real estate property appreciation, etc. People in their 60s have seen an incredible appreciation over the past 30 years in most sectors (Just the S&P Index itself is over 9% annualized over that time frame).

Long story, short, $2.5M is not by any means exorbitant for retirement age people with an educated and successful life.

It would be a bizarro world where we would want idiot paupers to be Senators, or even a socio-economically equivalent demographic.

I think most government workers, elected or not, would find the idea that you work in government for the money amusing to say the least.

I think the only way to address this concern is to have a net-worth pre-public servant and a report showcasing annually going forward. I fully understand that success is not tied to any one or individual facet of life in general - however being highly educated has no bearing on being highly moral or even fundamentally believing you're actually serving the greater good of the people. It may mean you have an indelible way of speaking a good speech or understanding the game of chess that it seems our government is playing against the masses.

I'd like to think that all Senators have their caucus at heart, but I've lost a lot of faith in these sort of people over the years. When they reel on simple questions around these topics it doesn't help.

I am not sure that correcting "the US government betrayed us" to "the American people betrayed us" is quite fair. For instance, the last time the American people elected a new president they elected a candidate who promised the most open government ever, who defended the need for whistleblowers, and who criticized his predecessor for warrantless wiretapping. The elected representatives of the American people held hearings in which they asked the head of the NSA whether his agency was engaging in certain activities and he said, on record, that they were not. (He lied.)

Perhaps the will of the people actually IS being subverted.

Obama's approval rating among democrats, the people that voted for him, is 75-80% depending on the poll.

Obama might have lied about transparency and whatnot, but people don't seem to have elected him on that basis. They elected him for his views on healthcare, social welfare, abortion, etc.

Thought experiment: look at the tiny number of democrats complaining about the NSA issue, then think about what would happen if Obama instead had done a 180 on Social Security, abortion, etc. You think his approval rating among democrats would be 75-80% if he had signed legislation to dismantle Social Security?

Why do you come to Hacker News and repeatedly remind everyone how insignificant their opinion is, how ostracized they truly are, and how much more right the "churchgoing middle-aged woman" is than the dirty nerds?

If you like it here so much, why don't you stop insulting your audience and start proposing solutions?

Nobody should be insulted to hear that they're not special and that their political opinion doesn't count any more than those of middle aged women in Des Moines. That's a beautiful thing. That's democracy.

Note that I generally only point out that HN-ers have minority views in response to comments along the lines of "the USG doesn't represent the people" or "the US is not a democracy" or similar hyperbole.

Finally, understanding your insignificance is part of the solution. Politics is about building coalitions. Echo chamber nerd rage will have zero impact on the status quo. Reaching out to groups with votes might.

Democracy is not a beautiful thing. Democracy is tyranny of the unsympathetic majority.

And everything else is the tyranny of some minority, which is worse.

Monarchy - Tyranny of the hereditary minority

Oligarchy - Tyranny of the rich minority

Communism, libertarianism - Tyranny of the philosophic minority

Anarchy/tribalism - Tyranny of the physically strong minority

Why should everyone have to live by the same rules? In a country the size of the US, a 1% minority (as a random unrelated example, the percentage of Linux desktop users) is still more people than several of the states. Why not let that minority become its own majority in its own political sphere? That makes a lot more sense than forcing the same rules upon everyone whose birth left them in a particular geographic location.

Because the last time we did that, the minority decided we should have have segregation, Jim Crow, etc. Federalism was killed in the U.S. by states tying their own sovereignty to the losing side of the civil rights war.

I'm not saying that the hypothetical 1% to which I referred should decide things for anybody else, or that they should all be isolated in one geographic area.

Even if all the voters hate the surveillance state and want it gone, what do you do when the anti-NSA candidate in your district disagrees with you on war or abortion or monetary policy or...? Every informed voter has to weigh all of a candidate's (professed) views, and chances are any vote they ultimately cast is a compromise of some sort, so you end up with representatives that are collectively a jumble of contradictory opinions. Thus it's hard to put the onus on the voters for any particular policy outcome (especially when it's an outcome that's been deliberately kept secret).

The government of the US is an okay system for managing the varying interests of its geographic groups (the States), but it's not really set up to reflect the will of the US people on any particular issue.

Which makes me think maybe the government should be broken up functionally as well as geographically. Imagine you could vote for separate Presidents and legislators in each of the departments of the Treasury, Defense, Education, et al and make them negotiate equally amongst themselves when their purviews intersect. Then you could get the anti-NSA candidate elected to President of Defense or President of National Intelligence without worrying about his opinions on abortion or drug policy or whatever. And then you could legitimately say "The American people betrayed/saved the internet."

Imagine you could vote for separate Presidents and legislators in each of the departments of the Treasury, Defense, Education, et al and make them negotiate equally amongst themselves when their purviews intersect.

This is something I would also like to see. There are many conceivable ways of partitioning responsibility; geographical partitioning has historical momentum, but there's no reason it has to be the only way.

LOL, Constitutional Democracy by butt. When you have the ability, as an elected official, to receive money from "campaign sponsors" and do not have to disclose where it came from what you have is not a democracy but a puppet regime dressed up as the peoples choice.

Well then we're safe, because campaign contributions to candidates in Federal elections in excess of $200 must be disclosed to the FEC:

http://www.fec.gov/pages/brochures/fecfeca.shtml#Disclosure

Corporations, labor unions and foreign nationals are also forbidden from donating to candidates' campaigns.

If you're thinking of Citizens United, it doesn't apply to elected officials "receiving money".

Re 'Super PACs not permitted to coordinate directly':

There is an important difference between "not permitted to" and "don't".

Again, if the original comment was meant to imply that candidates could legally receive significant quantities of money from anonymous sources to finance their campaigns, that's flat wrong.

I'm not sure what argument your comment is meant to respond to. Candidates and PACs sometimes run afoul of FEC regulations? Who's saying they don't? That's a big jump from a regime of legal anonymous direct contributions implied by the original comment.

Legalities are irrelevant, what is important is the reality of the system. Widespread illegal bribery with little to no enforcement is not a better situation to be in than widespread legal bribery; the situations are functionally equivalent.

The American people tried that when they first voted for Obama, who said all sorts of pretty things about rolling back the surveillance state.

I sometimes play this game: Imagine Obama (or whoever) is running again [EDIT: by "again" I mean their original campaign, in the past], and they make campaign promises to do exactly what they end up doing in their actual administrations. Would they be nominated and elected? I like to think not, but Americans are so partisan I have my doubts.

"And if elected, I will arrest and prosecute more whistleblowers than all administrations before me combined, I will record the metadata for every call that every American makes, and much of the actual contents, and all emails. I will kill innocent women and children as collateral damage in CIA drone strikes, and blame them for not having better parents. And I'll buy a puppy for my daughters."

>If the Americans don't like the situation then they can vote for someone who will enact legislation that reflects that,

Like who? Red? Or Blue?

I think you have confused America with the idea of America.

Technically, the US is a republic. Though all states choose to elect representatives via a democratic process, it's not a strict requirement. This is reflected in the culture in washington as well, where representatives are more working for state and corporate interests than individuals.

The American people are only now beginning to understand what is going on thanks to Snowden's leaks.

? I have just always assumed that's the kind of stuff the NSA did, after all, what else would they be doing? So the Snowden revelations were more disappointment than shock.

Your fundamental mistake is that "someone" doesn't enact legislation.

They got the government they deserve, and they alone carry the blame.

Condescension doesn't help.

> America is a constitutional democracy. If the Americans don't like the situation then they can vote for someone who will enact legislation that reflects that

Hahahahahahahahaha

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