to assume that everything companies tell you about security and encryption is an intentional (legally bound) or unintentional lie.
to realise that there are shadow laws that we are not aware of that govern these things.
Simply make unelected people have lifelong careers within governmental organizations. Snowden talks about this in his book. Yeah a new ~puppet~ figure head gets elected every 4 years. But what about all the layers of folks who actually perform the "Government" actions? They are the same people for decades, they say yes or no to actions you can/cannot take, they influence in their every choice they true meaning of policies...
Early in the history of the country, we experimented with evicting the entire government when party changed hands, all the way to individual post offices. It turned out to be ridiculously inefficient. It turns out institutional knowledge is extremely important, and institutions are generally terrible at writing everything down that the next person will need. Imagine trying to conduct a business with 95% turnover every 2 years.
As a result, we intentionally established standards for employment and safeguards against arbitrary firing of unelected bureaucratic officials. The elected officials have control over setting policy and, in the long-term, deciding the criteria by which the unelected officials retain their jobs.
None of this implies that the unelected officials are unaccountable. They are held accountable by our elected officials. But that process does require the elected officials to do their homework and, to some extent, understand the Chesterton's fences that exist in the system. A failure mode I observe is that we seem to keep trying to solve the problem by electing conspiracy nuts who are then basically ignored because they try to approach the problem of reining in unelected bureaucracy from the "Why don't you show us the secret UFO tapes?" direction instead of the "The president needs a full accounting of how many terabytes of data have been stored for terrorism fighting purposes" direction.
It's a feature when positive, and a bug/liability when the institution is criminal/rogue . The NSA/CIA/FBI have (presumably knowingly) broke the law and using shady techniques. Which is of no surprise -- it's in their DNA to be secretive, shady, and create and exploit loopholes.
James Garfield’s assassination was over his refusal to give a patronage job. That lead to a backlash against patronage in general.
Jobs as patronage continued at the lower level for a long time. In many states, the most powerful political official was the Postmaster General because he controlled the jobs.
At the federal level it still continues in various forms: appointments to military academies require congressional sponsorship, Supreme Court justices hand out clerkships based on ideology, etc.
When people talk about the civil services reforms being inspired by efficiency, they usually are talking about the British civil service (Northcoat-Trevelian report) or Chinese civil service.
But those are very different things than the American civil service.
America never really had a civilian civil service in the “Yes, Minister” sense of the phrase.
It was quite a hard path over decades to finally admit a reality that was obvious since decades. That realization has far more impact to mankind than petty politics.
Who has time to worry about privacy breaches and mass surveillance when aliens are real?
It would be harder to imagine an easier psyop to pull off. The only thing that strains credibility is that apparently it works.
On the other side, it is novelty to force western governments admitting that some flying object is surpassing our own technology capacities. That is a window opportunity into open science, into discovering what is powering them.
It is OK that your interests are more aligned into holding someone accountable, many other people on this globe are more interested in other topics. That's basically it.
Yes, as the kind of foolishness the people who should be holding government accountable are distracted by instead of doing their jobs.
> It is OK that your interests are more aligned into holding someone accountable, many other people on this globe are more interested in other topics.
Indeed. It is a very useful lack of focus that maintains the status quo.
Nah, the smart ones know they're not. They're just keeping up appearances.
Somewhat like those stories about being chased by wolves through the snow. Once in a while one who got ideas is tossed out as a distraction (Liz Truss, anyone?).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoils_system
It was reformed for a reason! Putting politicians in charge of all hiring and firing turned out to be bad for everyone.
Unions work when the group they are bargaining with has competing interests. When the union negotiates against itself everyone else suffers.
The difference with police unions is that they work in the inverse - we're in danger when they do work. Police hold us hostage by doing their jobs (badly) and offer mob-like protection.
I'll also just that I see the police union as a perfect example of what I called a US mafia style union. In Nordic countries you can't behave like this and get away with it in a union and there are pretty strict rules for what is and what isn't a legal strike.
The rational is that you always get road assistance when needed. Never trust that conversations inside a modern car are private.
https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/professorn-myndigheter-bo...
I feel like if that were exploited at scale, we could see a huge number of criminal indictments etc., of the sort of behavior that's technically illegal but nobody enforces, but would suddenly be exposed through such an effort. Of course if they took it to court they'd have to discuss how they got the evidence.
But the fact that we're not seeing this makes me think it's not as bad as we think, that some amount of discretion is used, or that there is just so much data that nobody is acting on most of it.
I frankly think the more scary abuses of the post 9/11 era are things like Guantanamo. The idea that they can round up people and hold them indefinitely, with no or little due process. If someone does warrantless surveillance and brings a case against you based on that information, the expectation is you can challenge it. If they falsely claim you did 9/11, then... Less so.
This might or might not be true, but let's say it is. But what then in 10 years when something you do or are becomes the next Red Scare?
I personally think the resurgence in the last few years of "tough on crime" political rhetoric is another similar wave. The people who want to lock up the homeless or whatever. People demanding more incarceration of petty criminals. Judges are frequently described as weak if they let someone go due to insufficient evidence. If we start thinking due process is for chumps and that we need to lock everybody up no questions asked, I think mass surveillance can be a terrible input to that system.