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Comment by devx | Hacker News Reader

> “there have to be basic levels of trust and cooperation, a respect for institutions and deference to common procedures. By deciding to unilaterally leak secret N.S.A. documents, Snowden has betrayed all of these things.”

It's funny that he can't see he's arguing against himself. Snownden would've never done this if it wasn't the NSA that was breaching everyone's trust. Manning also wouldn't have leaked those documents, if he didn't think war crimes were being committed.

Why should we be the ones to trust the government, when the government has zero trust in us, and therefore wants to spy on everyone, when it really should be the other way around. Privacy for citizens, total transparency for the government.

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>>when the government has zero trust in us

Oh, please.

You know, I know and the governments know that somewhere between 0.1% and 1% of the population is a danger to the rest because of our fanatically held opinions.

(Considering my jokes regarding nuclear weapons etc, I'm probably in a few registers myself and continuously checked. I just hope I won't be sued for mental damage caused by being so boring. :-) )

The main problem is not that there is a lot of spying, the problem is that there is no one verifying and controlling the watchers.

It seems to be the only solution to have watchers and someone verifying what the watchers do. To e.g. avoid blackmail of politicians etc. (This has happened before in USA.)

Edit: True, drenei/conanite. You'd want the creativity used in complaining instead used in finding ways to make good controls of the watchers. How to select them democratically while still making certain they are silent/competent.

Edit 2: This seems to jump up/down with votes. :-) My point is not that internal spying is good, just that it is needed. The only solution is to make it work without risking a 1984 situation, since the internal spying is potentially as dangerous as terrorists.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

There is something verifying and controlling what the watchers do (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellige...). The problem is, that system hasn't been effective at stopping the abuses some of us would like stopped.

It's nice how the ancient Romans had an appreciation of the problem of infinite recursion. Suppose there was an independent institution overseeing the US FISC. Who would watch that? And so on. Is there a solution to Quis custodiet ...? Perhaps a multi-pronged separation-of-powers approach, but that hasn't worked out in practice, either.

Is there a solution to Quis custodiet ...?

Yes. It is oversight by the public at large.

Wow, I'm not sure what position to take here.

On the one hand, spying on everyone is definitely not a power the State should have in a non-militarized situation.

On the other hand, the world simply isn't working right if I personally am not on a few watchlists for the stuff I've read and written on the Internet.

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