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Comment by cottsak | Hacker News Reader

This is an important point.

How do we vote for and elect representatives in sufficient quantities that will throw out privacy and security overreaches like this?

Very few of the representatives in both houses will understand the technical means, underpinnings, and exploit and overreach potential of these bills because they simply don't understand the technology in the middle.

All a party/member needs to do is draft the bill and then cause enuf fear and panic in a sitting parliament for the large majority of representatives to pass it. Are these things even being challenged in parliament? Who objects to this who understands it?

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My theory is none of the parties object to it because its in both their interests to pass it. Labour or Liberal, both do not care about privacy or "digital rights", because it benefits them to spy on citizens.

Recent bias/availability heuristic being what it is this might not be a fair assessment: but my recollection is there has been 1 person ever who’s been able to engage on these topics. I thought it was an independent, but I also thought their name was Scott Ludlum. But a quick Google tells me he was the deputy leader of the Greens so my recollection is wrong on at least one of those fronts.

Which is exactly the problem: A single example that is but a distant memory. No contemporaries that can challenge the status quo.

I think one solution could be to vote in a faceless/anonymous type candidate that simply provides the context/details up for any vote, then votes based on the outcome of a live poll from their constituents.

There would be several tech challenges, but it could provide a more pure form of the people’s will.

You may want to check out the Flux party, they've been around for a number of years now: https://voteflux.org/about/faq/

Thanks for sharing.

Empower third parties to hold the balance of power. We did it last century with the Democrats and it moved the needle on some vital issues. We can do it this century with the Greens.

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