And this is true around the globe, independent of evidence politician demand ever crazier methods (while at the same time usually reducing both the paychecks and numbers of police officers). I wonder how we, the people, can protect our democratic systems from these dangers?
Stop trading freedom for security?
Politicians will always tantalize you by proposing you <limit guns, limit speech, limit privacy, etc.> for <fewer deaths, fewer suicides, fewer terrorists, etc.> but if you let it go forever, you'll find all your freedoms have been traded for safety.
Most innocently, because the number of people worried about this remains relatively low, and regularly gets overwhelmed by other groups. That's how democracy works, obviously, but it alarms me because privacy is a partially unrecoverable resource; even if people organize and win, a great deal of damage may have been done.
More cynically, though, because it feels like many of our democratic systems don't work on this problem.
By its own admission, the CIA violated its charter - and in many cases federal law - numerous times from the 1950s to 1970s. These events were documented internally in 1973, but no one appears to have faced consequences, and the "Family Jewels" weren't publicly released until 2007. Also in the 1970s, the Church Committee concluded that the NSA had conducted illegal surveillance, failed to shut it down when instructed to do so, and then followed up by lying to Congress about the entire mess. It also concluded that no one could be prosecuted for this, essentially because the tracks had been covered too well to convict any specific individual. The history of other Five Eyes nations in not substantially more comforting, as a look at e.g. UK practice in Northern Ireland will testify.
Today, the state of privacy law in the US isn't even known, because much of it is decided in secret court hearings with no one but the government present. National Security Letters help ensure that the public can't object to state surveillance by forcing private citizens to keep it secret, and interfering with basic access to counsel for the recipients. James Clapper gave testimony to Congress that was prima facie perjury, for which he faced no consequences. The list goes on at enormous and alarming length.
I don't know what we do about this. Voting for candidates who oppose war and surveillance is good, but they generally perform poorly, the ones who do well often seem to reverse course after election, and the ones who follow through (like Wyden and Udall) are frequently stonewalled and outright lied to by intelligence services. It feels alarmingly like we've created a surveillance system which operates independent of any democratic decisionmaking, and no longer know how to walk it back.
Besides, if firearms can stop government corruption, how come police violence is still a thing in the US? If citizens can overpower the military with firearms, they should at least be able to overpower corrupt cops.
It is inevitable that collected information does create ambitions. This is why the anti-terror legislation of the last decade was a catastrophe. Societies will pay with trust successively and we already see the first effects of that.
Systems which rely on benevolent leaders fail. The solution is systems of checks and balances.
For example, in the US, the Supreme Court is often seen as the arbiter of constitutionality. If the legislature or the executive can get the Supreme Court, then, to give its approval to a limited, innocuous-seeming version of an abuse, it can then point to that as a seal of legitimacy — and the tactic frequently succeeds, mollifying what would otherwise become public outrage.
An example is the Supreme Court resistance to, and final acceptance of, FDR's New Deal policies. When the court finally relented and allowed Roosevelt to proceed, it took the wind out of the opposition, which might otherwise have put a stop to it. Instead, similar policies have proceeded without opposition ever since, and finally gained acceptance by both sides of the political establishment.
In the end, the only check on abusive government is the people, which must be able to identify tyranny and have a will to oppose it by either voting the bums out, resisting their abuses directly, or forcing them out if necessary.
Overall I don't find much of merit to that argument, as it is appears built from the weird notion that the state is the spawn of the devil and all its acts are made for the enslavement of mankind, slightly ignoring the fact that a state is actually a bunch of people with fairly boring jobs related to different sorts of accounting.
I'd be less inclined to say, "spawn of the devil… for the enslavement of mankind," than "parasitic beast bent on survival at any cost." (If it were less parasitic, fewer accountants would be needed.) Like a tapeworm, the government parasite doesn't require malice to be harmful.
Bureaucracies and people in power will, by nature, try to increase their power. That doesn't mean everything happens immediately. The purpose of checks is to increase the pool of people who must consent to an expansion of power. By setting up competing pools of power, the system can be made more resilient to a string of bad leaders.
Obviously, no system will survive an endless supply of idiots. But systems which rely on competent politicians tend to fail when the first dummy comes up.
So, in other words, we're screwed. Sounds about right.
That's a symptom of the people in power having too much power over the ones doing the checks.
Make the people checking fear a bad decision more than they fear your country's leadership. (Of course, it's easier said than done.)
No contrivance of checks and balances will let you escape from the basic duty of making sure bad people don't get power of something important.
A balance is a tool that simplifies a task, nothing more.
Defining "bad" in this context is where the advice becomes useless. "Constitutional respect and restraint" is a dog chasing its tail, since the question is punted to the meaning of constitutional respect and restraint.
At the end of the day, certain types of people will always be drawn to power. And the people in power will inevitably have certain undesirable traits in common. The solution to this is, in part, testing for tyrannical tendencies in elections. But it's also in having systems in place that impede fast, fundamental decision making of the type that turns democracies into tyrannies.
Keeping those not appropriate is out is still the task, even if "appropriate" varies strongly with the precise context.
And without a deep discussion on what precisely is appropriate for all the contexts the state operates in, insistence on bureaucracy is merely (intended or not) a codification of conservatism.
That's actually the point. You get a group of people together to agree on who are the good people. You put them in place. You then install mechanisms to ensure that original view of "good" propagates, with changes being heavily guarded until a consensus similar to the original one re-appears.
Governing isn't about good and bad. It's about amongst whom consensus must be formed to produce action. Expanding the pool of necessary votes is what checks and balances accomplish.