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> and yet people are willing to believe police are corrupt but so unwilling to believe it about politicians

My impression of most citizens is the exact opposite: that police are seen as mostly good people stuck with a hard job (and a few bad apples here and there), and that politicians are seen as two-faced snake-oil peddlers (with a few good apples here and there).

My take is a little more nuanced, in that I'm more interested in good and bad systems and institutions, rather than good or bad people (as if there's such a thing).

There's a lot of disagreement about a lot of the examples you mentioned. Serpico was talking about the police receiving envelopes of cash, which is universally considered to be bad. The TSA, phone metadata and the rest don't seem to be as clear cut.

People tend to give the government the benefit of the doubt, moreso than they do the police. But unlike with the police, you can take direct action to remove bad actors in government. Vote, and convince others to vote. There's an election coming up soon. I don't agree with you on policy, but I want you to exercise your franchise all the same.

Voting is not generally regarded as direct action, it's representative action.

Voting is the very definition of indirect action. Actions within representative democracy are not direct ever, but either agreeing, or begging. To vote with a politician is to say you agree; to "email your congressperson" is to beg.

Personally, I never vote, because to play a rigged game is to be complicit in its outcome. If you vote, you can't complain about anything the government does -- you agreed with the existence of the system as a whole. Sometimes your team wins and sometimes your team loses, but to play the game, lose, and complain is merely to be a sore loser.

It is perfectly possible to take direct action to stop police injustice. The Black Panthers are a good example. It's also possible to take direct action to stop surveillance. The Tor Project is a good example.

Don't vote. Don't play a rigged game. Take real action and make real change. Stop begging and take control of your life.

It's unfortunate that people capable of being well-informed decide to inform themselves in anti-government ideas up to abstaining themselves from the most effective, durable contribution society is able to to give as a whole. Sure, direct individual action and activism is very helpful, but doesn't replace electing good representatives and politics isn't going anywhere, it's only human nature and has been with us since the onset of society.

Sore loser, are you kidding? Politics is a game, yes, but played by politicians. I'm not playing any game when I make an informed decision to vote for what I think is, well, less bad. I can complain all I want and do, regardless of my vote. It's my right to vote and then it's my right to complain when things are wrong, they're separate responsibilities and one doesn't infringe on the other. I think you need to view politics with a bit more nuance, because you're a big part of the problem, that is: we need less citizenship dropouts.

> I'm not playing any game when I make an informed decision to vote for what I think is, well, less bad

Sure you are. You're playing the voting game. Your team tries to mass agreement for some candidates, the other team tries to mass agreement for other candidates. This agreement comes with the knowledge that you are handing your autonomy, and your right to complain, off to the winner of the game.

If you lose you have no right to complain. You knew the risks.

>Sure, direct individual action and activism is very helpful, but doesn't replace electing good representatives

Direct action is exactly a replacement for representative action. Action can only ever be one of those two things. Similarly, representation is a replacement for direct action -- if you delegate your power to someone else, you cannot exercise it.

>I think you need to view politics with a bit more nuance, because you're a big part of the problem

I think you need to stop confusing yourself with nuance and realize that you're the problem -- you're handing over your autonomy to these people that are using you to build careers on corruption and subjugation.

Stop confusing yourself with the trees and look at the forest.

In what way does "the creation of the TSA" violate the 4th amendment?

The creation of it? Probably not.

What the TSA actually does in practice, though?

A government agency that routinely searches and seizes the property of every citizen who passes through its doors, presuming guilt on each of their behalves, and subjecting you to advanced body scanning technology -- that jibes with the fourth amendment to you?

Edit: I think I read too much into it. I agree that the GP should clarify that the routine execution of the TSA's mandate is (in my opinion) clearly unconstitutional, but if the federal government had simply created an agency that did nothing, that would not necessarily violate the fourth.

I am moderately sympathetic to the notion that airport security checkpoints cross lines.

However, airport security checkpoints existed before the creation of the TSA - it wasn't "the creation of the TSA" that started it.

Further, the mandate of the TSA is much broader than running airport security checkpoints. Removing the unconstitutional pieces would not leave us with "an agency that did nothing".

It is perfectly within the rights of an airport to disallow guns on their airplanes, just as it is my right to disallow guns in my home.

With the advent of the TSA and the enforcement of its policies, now the government is searching my belongings before every flight, and the room in which the airlines could compete on features like privacy, is gone.

Even if buckeroo bob wanted to start his own airline that was full-size-shampoo friendly, they no longer can, because the government disallows it completely. If Virgin airlines wanted to eliminate the invasive body scanners and compete on convenience, they could not, because the government has decided that it wishes to scan the contents of every bag and person.

Per http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jun/12/travel/la-tr-airline..., the US government placed requirements on airport security since the 70s.

"[1972:] The FAA in December issues an emergency rule requiring all passengers and carry-on baggage to be either screened by metal detectors or searched by hand and requiring airports to station armed guards at boarding checkpoints."

"[1974:] The 1974 Air Transportation Security Act sanctions the FAA's universal screening rule, which spurs U.S. airports to adopt metal-detection screening portals for passengers and X-ray inspection systems for carry-on bags."

And progressively more as we go on.

Now I get to balance how much I love learning things I didn't know with the terror of learning things that scare me more.

Thanks for the information.

The 4th amendment does not ban searches and seizures without a warrant. It bans "unreasonable" searches and seizures without a warrant. If the founders hadn't meant for the courts to try and distinguish between "reasonable" and "unreasonable" searches, they wouldn't have used the word. But they did--they embedded this balancing between privacy rights and the needs of law enforcement in the very text of the 4th amendment.

All of the programs you mentioned, phone metadata collection, the TSA, fall within the recognized contours of what the Supreme Court has recognized as "reasonable" searches.

Now, that's not to say that the Supreme Court's interpretations are the best ones, or that people can't advocate for a different interpretation. What it does mean is that the people supporting these programs can do so with the entirely good faith belief that they are not violating clearly established Constitutional law.

If you want to get into the heads of founders you should read further up where it says that the document delegates powers to the state, rather than granting rights to the citizens.

So what you should be looking for is a delegation of the right to search with out a warrant, it's not there.

There is also no explicit delegation of the power to search with a warrant. By your reasoning, the federal government never has he power to conduct any search. Which renders the 4th amendment gibberish, because why prohibit "unreasonable" searches and set out the requirements for a warrant in that case?

The Constitution gives the federal government sole authority over national security, from both domestic and external threats. That was in fact one of the purposes of creating the federal government (the states' trouble in putting down Shays' rebellion). It also gives the federal government authority over interstate commerce. Ensuring the security of planes from terrorism is right at the core of what the federal government was created to do.

'It bans "unreasonable" searches and seizures without a warrant.'

It bans unreasonable searches and seizures, period.

Hopefully, a warrant will only be issued when the search is reasonable, and a search with more oversight and checks will be more reasonable than the same search without.

The Fourth Amendment does not demand a warrant for every search. Only on Internet message boards has this not been a settled issue since before our grandparents were all born.

To understand why the Fourth Amendment governs both searches and warrants, it's helpful to read up on what a "General Warrant" was at the time of the founders. Hint: they often didn't really have much to do with generating evidence.

The Amendment has two goals: first, to give the courts, rather than Congress or the President, authority in determining what a valid search is, and second to ensure that no branch of government could arbitrarily generate a piece of paper authorizing police to turn someone's house inside out.

I think you misinterpreted me. I didn't say every search must have a warrant. I said every search must be reasonable, and that a warrant makes some otherwise-unreasonable searches reasonable.

At what point in history did searches without a warrant expand from border searches and searches by consent, and when did a standard of "reasonableness" come to mean "it doesn't need a warrant?"

A problem is - who would vote to fund a police-oversight agency, and how would you prevent regulatory capture? You risk ending up with another rubber-stamp FISA style oversight court that does little but pay some salaries out of the general fund.

>I don't understand this.

There are six stages of moral development.

The first, which you'll see in small children, is to act merely to avoid punishment. This is a small wrapper around classical conditioning. Acts associated with things like pain are bad.

The second, which you'll see in slightly older children, is to act to be rewarded. By this stage, morality is now a wrapper around operant conditioning, and children are able to seek out things they want.

The third is social convention; things are moral if people are okay with your doing them. By the time a kid is 12 or 13 they're probably in this stage if their development is normal.

The fourth is authority. Things are moral if an authority says they're moral. This comes with the realization that the people in your life aren't important just because they're the people in your life, they're important because they were appointed by some authority. A teacher is a representative of a school system, and a principal is a higher representative of that system. Police are representatives of governments. Politicians are higher representatives of the abstract idea of governments.

There are two other stages, but the classification breaks down at this point and they represent more what the psychologist writing the paper thinks more than what actually exists, because almost nobody gets past the fourth stage.

Most humans are entirely content to backend all of their reasoning on authorities.

For most people, it's impossible for the government to violate laws. The government is the law. And further, it's not wrong for the government to violate laws. They're the government. They create morality.

Finally, outside of the entire argument I've made up to this point in my comment, people pick politicians -- not in a meaningful sense, but they join the team surrounding the politician. A politician is either on their team or not. Politicians on the other team are corrupt all the time -- but not politicians on our team.

My only hope is that eventually people wake up and realize no politician, no police officer is on their team.

But I'm not holding my breath.

That's pop-psychology gibberish.

...that's Kohlber's moral development, which is in every introductory psychology textbook and has been central to developmental psychology since its publication in 1958.

Do all the things you think of as "pop" come from the 50's? Have you heard this great new pop singer Elvis lately?

Elvis' music may be old, but it's still pop. Pop doesn't only mean "popular right now".

> What I find fascinating is that there is less natural conflict of interest in being a police officer than there is in being a politician.... and yet people are willing to believe police are corrupt (and some are, no doubt) but so unwilling to believe it about politicians

Politicians make more money and work in a safer, friendlier environment. Perhaps that makes some people see them as having less reason to be corrupt?

I'm not sure that politicians are viewed as less corrupt than police. Here in the UK anyway, during the whole stupid plebgate thing, there was a real puzzle as it was very hard to judge who was more likely to be telling porkies.

Maybe it's just because people believe the police are ever-so-slightly easier to change than the federal government, which seems far away and immovable.