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Comment by busterarm | Hacker News Reader

Let's be real here. The only "bureaucratic mistake" here is an agent filling out a form improperly in a way that victimized someone. Everything that happened after that is both deliberate and malicious.

If a mistake was made, it should be easy to correct and not be followed by years of fighting to not only keep it from being corrected but to keep it a secret. They've successfully kept most of it a secret, even though the direct victim had their suffering eased.

The indirect and ultimate victims of this, our individual rights and society's ideals, are still suffering.

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This is a very important detail of the whole dreary affair. As surprising as the cause of the whole matter may be, the government after that willfully lied to anyone and everyone, including the judge of the court case, ignored legally binding orders and probably broke several laws. The Paper's Please blog has an excellent timeline of this case:

http://papersplease.org/wp/category/papers-please/

What's amazing is that I'm well familiar with the details of this story, but Wired's reporting of it was so dry and disinteresting that I didn't associate the names or facts with the case I was already aware of.

What's sad is that I didn't even need to know the facts to agree that what you said was true.

I wonder if there are any public APIs for those "TSDB, TIDE, CLASS, KSTF, TECS, IBIS, TUSCAN, TACTICS" etc. databases. Would be interesting to look at the data. What are the acronyms?

select * from TUSCAN.Errorists;

I'm basically agreeing with you, but one of the most amazing things from the court's decision (that didn't make it into the Wired article--bad reporting) is that the FBI agent didn't know that he had filled out the form incorrectly until he was deposed in September 2013.

So I would say that there is more than one bureaucratic mistake that happened here. Nobody went back to Agent Kelley for years and asked, "Hey, man. Why did you fill out this form this way?"

He would have looked at the form, blinked twice, and said "Oh, shit!"--which is what I'm sure happened at the closed court proceedings when he was deposed.

I find it very naive to believe that the FBI agent filled out the form incorrectly. Looks like a bad excuse to me to get over that issue finally.

It rather looks like that she was put on the list just because of an overzealous agent who didn't want to risc anything or maybe mixed up her name. And he didn't care to put that back, esp. after she complained. So they played the national security game for a while.

Probably the reason for that was the level of secrecy the government tried to maintain over the whole thing. It's likely the agent didn't even know the case was happening until he was told to show up in court. He didn't need to know the woman was contesting so no one bothered to tell him nor ask him about it.

When I look at this, I understand why mistakes happen. Checking the wrong box, ok, someone could easily do that. What I don't understand is why the system reacts so harshly to double-down on an obvious mistake rather than simply fixing it and preventing the whole thing from being an issue?

Surely that would be easier than years of litigation, no?

The US government never admits to being wrong. The only way to overcome a confrontation with the US government is to get a newer bill signed into law, at which point you can protect other people from the same adversity but the government will pretend the past never happened and you won't get any kind of amelioration of already-wronged wrongs.

This is the real issue. They want more power while claiming it's in the good hands, so you shouldn't worry. Your private data is safe. Your rights are respected. Your have nothing to worry if you are not a bad guy.

Government constantly shows that it shouldn't be trusted with anything sensitive. It makes stupid mistakes, but never admits that. How many cases happen that nobody ever realizes, because they are swept under the rug?

In the end we all should believe that they are "good" and competent. In spite of them proving us wrong all the time...

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