Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomp | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I agree with this. Certainly most of these problems (surveilance, assaults on various liberties, etc.) were started/ramped up under W. Bush, but most of them were greately enhanced during Obama, so I have no reason to assume that Hillary might be any better (except better at PR/propaganda, of course).

View on HN

One reason for thinking that Trump would be worse is precisely because Hillary and Obama's propaganda machine is good at painting them in a better light.

Trump doesn't have to pretend to care about human rights, or war crimes or civil liberties - he outright came out in favour of torture, the killing of innocent people, racial profiling, and said a whole bunch of other heinous things during the campaign.

At least with the previous politicians, bad publicity can act as some sort of brake on the violence and the repression and the surveillance, because you have some leverage against a politician's public image. When the next Abu Ghraib-type scandal comes out, Trump can legitimately say 'So what? I said I as going to torture suspects during the campaign, didn't I?'; if it came out under Hillary, she'd be under immediate pressure to shut down whatever happened.

Having an openly lawless politician is a shitton worse than having a closet lawbreaker with a good PR machine.

Does this theory work if you apply it to the past? Have Snowden's leaks about surveillance or relevations about Obama's drone programme (killing people, even US citizens, without trial and with a lot of collateral damage) resulted in any change in government behaviour (except more secrecy and extensive supression of leaks/information)?

My take on these questions is "no", but I haven't been following the events in detail, so I might be missing some positive consequences.

> Does this theory work if you apply it to the past? Have Snowden's leaks about surveillance or relevations about Obama's drone programme resulted in any change in government behaviour?

There were certainly Obama's voters that were disappointed by what Obama did, after he previously spoke differently. They have thought along these lines of the article:

"business as usual" ... "problems won't go away on their own"

... and didn't vote for her.

The problem is only having a binary choice when the both options don't look good.

We wouldn't be having these conversations if the leaks hadn't happened.

It was suspected before, now it's known. That's a fairly big difference.

Or in other words, speaking about nation state backhaul taps, etc as a threat model before made you a paranoid OpenBSD cyberpunk: now it makes you an average HN commenter.

"We" are having these conversations, but in the time since the Snowden leak, have we seen the government move away from the behaviors and patterns that Snowden brought to light?

Big ship, slow turning, etc. It's been 3 years since the initial leaks.

It took roughly 2 years between the Washington Post first reporting on Watergate and Nixon's resignation. And that was pertaining to multiple obviously illegal activities. National security and executive orders have a lot more gray area.

The most important thing is to keep the pressure on, keep it in the public discourse, and make it uncomfortable for anyone who supports the apparatus.

Snowden forced the government to put in place a whole bunch of new procedures and regulations over the NSA. Much of it is, of course, cosmetic and inadequate, but it works towards slowing down the surveillance campaign and providing some sort of leverage for future lawsuits and the like.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/how-the-nsa-spying...

Except that the next Abu Ghraib type scandal has already occurred under Obama many times over, but no one cares anymore. How about the CIA shoving hoses into detainee's rectums and pumping food in as part of so-called rectal 'feeding'? It's rape, plain and simple, and it's lead to rectal prolapse and anal fissure in some of the detainees.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/dec/09/cia-report-r...

Sure - bad stuff still happens. It gets found out, some people complain, the people in power modify their behavior (sometimes by not being so evil, sometimes by finding better ways of hiding it - the latter can be useful for at least slowing the bad guys down and making their lives more complicated and difficult).

But we are still in the world where the CIA and the President of the USA can be publicly pressured into not waterboarding people anymore. It's never a cure-all, but there's at least some scope for modifying the behavior of the rulers through public pressure.

That's likely to change on January 21st.

If you want to see what a leader untroubled by public condemnation of lawbreaking is like, you just have to cast your gaze towards the Phillipines, where there's a huge upsurge in state-sanctioned vigilante and police murders. How far Trump takes the USA in that direction is still grounds for speculation.

> If you want to see what a leader untroubled by public condemnation of lawbreaking is like, you just have to cast your gaze towards the Phillipines, where there's a huge upsurge in state-sanctioned vigilante and police murders.

Considering Trump has praised the murders already I would say it's anyones guess what happens now:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/03/philippines-ro...

For anyone looking for insight into the situation in the Philippines please read this fantastic photojournal from the NYTimes:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/12/07/world/asia/rod...

> But we are still in the world where the CIA and the President of the USA can be publicly pressured into not waterboarding people anymore.

A world where the President and the CIA can be pressured into saying that we don't waterboard anymore. Respectfully, I think it's naive to think that waterboarding and much worse are no longer occurring at CIA black sites, and that the majority of these activities ever come to light. Obama passed legislation outlawing waterboarding, but what oversight apparatus did he create? Has he punished CIA personnel responsible for torture?

So far the surveillance and related laws suck, but to some extent they're controlled and somewhat public. Even before the Snowden revelations, some monitoring was expected, and some was talked about. Of course the scale and depth were a new revelation (tapping private links, etc.), but it existed in some kind of framework that was supposed to be controlled. (Regardless of how well that worked)

Since the new potential president is a lot less organised and generally random in his actions, the old framework will be harder to rely on. Who gets the access now? Who's tracked? Who's trusted if he doesn't believe the current agencies? That's still unknown and we may get more secret deals now without clearly defined rules (even if they're not public)

Basically we got a chaotic neutral/evil leader now. Anything can happen and I don't expect he'll care about the subtle effects of new decisions.

> were started/ramped up under W. Bush

Assault on privacy and massive surveillance started as soon as the internet became a household word - which actually happened under Bill Clinton.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com