Comment by dm2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dm2 | Hacker News Reader

I don't know what information they are trying to suppress but in my opinion gag orders are wrong and the US government should have to thoroughly justify any action that goes directly against the US constitution.

Say the plans for the US Navy's railgun, or advanced nuclear specifics, or advanced drone technology, or time-travel technology is leaked out, should the US government be able to do everything in it's power to wipe that information from the internet to ensure that it has the #1 military in the world?

I don't know the answer to that question. But I do know that if a terrorist group got that information and used it to cause massive amounts of destruction that people would have wished the US government did more to protect it's military secrets.

The Patriot Act really messed things up.

Does anyone have a solution? Does it involve getting more ethical people into congress?

I have a solution, and it's called Online Voting. We are probably one of the few online communities that can actually make it happen, yet it's never even mentioned. Start by testing it in select states, then if it's successful move towards implementing it nation-wide. I have proposed it before but people just tell me how it's impossible because of security. There HAS to be a valid solution, being able to validate your votes, having numerous checks in place, having open-source code, I don't know, but hopefully someday we can all work together to make it a reality.

We could even work to eliminate Congress eventually, have every single thing that normally goes before Congress voted by individuals. Yes, the president could overrule votes (such as building a spaceship for trillions of dollars), but near unlimited transparency just seems to be the obvious answer. There will be a ton of resistance, because those in power don't want to give up power. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think we should at least try it.

The problem is a cultural one, not a technical one.

What makes you think this community of people who work for the very companies that are being gagged, backdoored, surveilled and bribed are the ones who are going to fix it with a magic voting program? This community can't even come to a consensus to admit that Dropbox quite obviously has the hands of the Powers That Be rammed firmly into its asshole now (I apologize - maybe Condoleezza Rice had a revelation after advocating for the invasion of Iraq on false premises, and now deeply cares about the security of the world's porn backups).

Besides, I'd argue the system we have now is better, because it's hard to forge votes when you have hundreds of people across many municipalities counting votes and thinking for themselves. If you implement a national voting system in software, it would be much easier to corrupt by virtue of being centralized.

We don't know what happened, that's the problem.

FTA, "To make matters worse, the government won't disclose its reasoning for requesting the gag, effectively shutting the public out of the courthouse without any explanation."

It's idealistic to think that no information should be able to be quashed by the government, but it's not idealistic to think that their motives for doing so should be made public.

I had the "motives made public" line in there but moved it to the top of my comment.

Suppressing leaks of top-secret military technology is acceptable, suppressing secrets that could harm the image of the US government or individuals because they did something bad is something that shouldn't be allowed.

People must be accountable for their actions, otherwise they are cowards.

I think a more subtle solution (a thus politically viable) would be to attach a filter to the front of the current political system. Right now, we get sports stadium style debates filled with sounds bites, pretense, and timely rhetoric, which encourage showmanship over substance. A cooler, internet based debate system could crowd source better policies and politicians. An interactive system for judging the debates and commenting could increase exposure and decrease apathy for the "voters".

It could be a platform where people "run" and "vote" on candidates. Debates could be structured in some sort of tournament system, where winners are determined by voters who are directed to them evenly. The debate topics could be decided on before hand by the voters, once again by voting their interests. At the end of it, there would be a few filtered candidates, who would have a series of well formed and observable views on each of the topics defined by the voters. The whole system would have no legitimate political tie in, but the win there could be used to prefilter their conventional run, and provide a history to go on.

There are some substantial details I overlooked there, a big one being how to make sure the votes are legitimate. But if enacted, I think it would take our political system a long way towards a true democracy.

We don't need to speculate, the ACLU article said the gag order was about preventing the companies from revealing the grand jury subpoenas to the people who's information was requested. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with suppressing secret information or the Patriot Act. And it seems like a reasonable step for some investigations, where tipping off the target of the investigation might end it before it could really begin.

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