Hacker News Reader

I could not disagree more. The only way to keep the "leash" short is with a great amount of precision in writing laws.

There is no "enforce[ment] in good faith", and the evidence is everywhere. The Patriot Act is used domestically for any and every type of law enforcement investigation, far beyond what it was supposedly intended to be.[0] We've seen civil forfeiture become essentially a license to steal for LE agencies.[1] The government has stretched the meaning of the "exceeds authorization" component of the CFAA to the point of being almost meaningless.[2]

The point is this: the natural tendency of government is to stretch any power it is granted to the absolute max. We have reached a point that an assumption that government will exercise enforcement in "good faith" is simply naive. I assert that there is little evidence to the contrary.

[0] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/post/patriot-...

[1] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/08/12/taken

[2] http://www.justice.gov/criminal/cybercrime/docs/ccmanual.pdf

In a somewhat ironic way I agree with you. However I am speaking from the perspective of what I want the US government to be more like instead of what it is right now. When you have no faith in your government I think you want no leash at all. Put all the details in the laws if you want more power than you already have.

But when you have sufficiently capable and competent actors in government I would lean on the side of trusting and giving the leash.

EDIT: And come to think of it, enormous weight of huge bills / laws I imagine could become a hindrance to a government's ability to do its job. Think about it. What if you inherited a highly complex legacy application that you were not allowed to rewrite from scratch or even refactor it, but were stuck maintaining it. And all that you ever get to do is add more code on top of the old (alot of times bad) code. It seems a cycle of futility. Instead given limited resources of a government I want a lean system where people are allowed to use their judgment and intuition.

>But when you have sufficiently capable and competent actors in government I would lean on the side of trusting and giving the leash.

The elected and appointed members of government change. Their terms expire, they retire, they're voted out.

The law doesn't suddenly change when a bad actor is elected or appointed.

And laws don't generally have expiry dates. The now nearly 100 year old Espionage Act of 1917 is being applied to Edward Snowden, imagine how out of touch laws will become, and how misapplied they will be?

tl;dr: the government changes and the length of the leash doesn't adapt to suit it.

I think there might be different definitions of "enforcement in good faith" here. Your perspective, if I understand it correctly, is "The purpose of this law was presented as fighting terrorism and now it's being used for other purposes, which constitutes bad faith enforcement".

Another perspective is, "Law enforcement isn't doing anything that it shouldn't be doing, therefore they aren't acting in bad faith". Whether they're going after terrorists or drug dealers or money launderers, it's all the same to many (if not most) people. As long as there's no evidence that government officials are abusing the provisions of the PATRIOT Act to settle personal scores or persecute those with unpopular beleifs, most people will see them as acting in good faith. This assumes that actions taken are within a reasonable interpretation of the letter of the law, of course.

I get where you're coming from, or at least I think I do. I just don't think that the issue is so black and white. This may be a case of "The current government isn't doing what I want it to do" as opposed to "We should change the way that the laws are written". And the solution to that is pretty simple: Vote.

The fact is it is being used to persecute people with unpopular beliefs. The evidence is taken out of context or completely false. You just hear very little about its misuse because poor, defenseless, innocent people are targeted. They are not obligated to present the court with information that is true.

> We have reached a point that an assumption that government will exercise enforcement in "good faith" is simply naive.

As if the holocaust wasn't already proof enough 70 years ago.

>Spend less time agonizing over exactly what the law should say, and more time analyzing whether or not the law / eo is being enforced in good faith.

The Patriot Act wasn't being enforced in good faith. In fact, the Patriot Act was being used for drug investigations, not terrorism.

303 points on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8536292

That's a perfect example of a situation where the feedback loop needs to be tightened in government.

The more I think about it the more I feel governments should be alot more nimble than they have been historically. Alot more like an agile development team.

There needs to be just as often "amendments to" or "repealing of" laws that aren't working as originally intended as there are signings of new laws.

Instead we have in government the equivalent of a team of developers working on a project for months or maybe years nitpicking all the details before launching only to find that no one wants the product they spent all that time working on, or that it's out-dated, or impossible to maintain given all the complexity, or that it doesn't work on half the computers people try to run it on.

I would argue that (a) and (b) are exactly what's happening now, and why people are so unhappy with this law: it's overly broad, and it will be applied by organizations that have traditionally given little importance to the boundaries of the law, right to defense, and even human rights.

The leashes are the words of the law and their ultimate interpretation. Everything follows from those words.

Transparency and good faith are ideals that are rare in powerful bureaucracies. Expecting those with the most power in the world to act in good faith is a scorpion and frog tale.

I am only thinking out loud right now, but I'm trying to picture what the US Constitution would look like (or if it would have even been finished) had the founders agonized over all the minutiae they could've consumed themselves with when writing it.