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Comment by BitwiseFool | Hacker News Reader

The trouble is, how do you effectively oversee an agency that specializes in lies, misdirection, cover-ups, coercion, and blackmail?

I also worry that our three letter agencies have collected an immense amount of dirt on Millennials and Gen-Zers. It's not hard to imagine blackmailing politicians or releasing dirt on candidates running on a platform to curtail or rein-in such agencies in order to prevent them from getting elected.

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It's known that the FBI was spying on and blackmailing civil rights activists like MLK Jr. They even tried to coerce him into suicide. They were never held accountable for this, so why would they stop? And without anybody to hold them accountable, what would stop them from doing this to elected officials too?

Yup, and a lot more - the wider program was COINTELPRO

And more recently the Congress[1] and a presidential candidate[2] —that we know of. Much we may not.

But even Congress doesn’t have the will to do anything about the apparatus. What chance does the public at large have to have their constitutional rights protected?

[1]https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/01/the-dan...

[2]I'm sure some people will find no problem given an unsympathetic person, but it's still wrong.

Congress is also likely a lot easier to manipulate/control (in a general sense).

> our three letter agencies have collected an immense amount of dirt

This is something I can't help being reminded of any time there's "breaking news" about a political candidate and some taboo subject, even today. It seems at least naive to believe it never happens. I don't think it's too wrong to say that political candidates today either have very clean histories or "play nice" to some extent with these agencies.

Obama was clearly sopping to them, arguably due to their role in tracking down Osama Bin Laden, etc.

But the support was extensive, and essentially a blank slate. And not just drone assassinations.

Edit: almost forgot - President Bush Sr. who used to be the Director of the CIA!

> Obama was clearly sopping to them

What does this mean? Feels like a typo but I can't figure out what the intended sentence was.

I don't read a typo. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sop (second noun definition)

But it was used as a verb.

The beauty of English (one of the sluttiest languages in the world) is you can verb anything. And there is no académie to come arrest me for it! Muahaha

"Sopping to" still does not have any common accepted meaning though. So, if you want to communicate with other users of English it might be a good idea not to use that phrase. You want both your listeners and you to agree on what it means and as far as I can tell only you know that.

Sigh, the word sop already has a verb form - you're making progressively less sense with each subsequent reply. If you want to "smith" a new expression, it might behoove you to spend more time at the anvil.

Apologies for the less common words. Other examples: Buttering them up. Giving away the farm. Rolling out the red carpet.

Essentially giving them whatever they wanted without asking any hard questions.

I don't think you are correct. Google ngram viewer supports the idea that any occurrence of the phrase 'sopping to' is so rare as to be probably an error.

You can usually "sop up" == "soak up" something which leads to the common "sopping wet". You can also have a "sop" == "morsel".

"Sopping to" makes no sense in English.

Sources: google ngram, wiktionary, merriam-webster, concise oxford 1971

And yet, you’re the only one complaining. Have fun!

Actually I was not complaining. I was trying to help: both you and anyone else reading that might believe your assertion that "sopping to" has the meaning you believe.

This is an oddly defensive response considering the time they took to etymologically dig into an expression that I and likely 99% of native English speakers have never encountered, despite your claims of it being a perfectly cromulent word.

> "Sopping to" makes no sense in English.

English definitions are descriptive instead of prescriptive. In this context, an English dictionary will describe how words are used in practice rather than prescribing how they should be used in theory. It stands to reason that English dictionaries are likely to have holes in their definitions, especially in cases where words are used in novel ways.

It helps to keep in mind that a person’s written or spoken English is correct if other English speakers -- some, not all -- correctly interpret the words as having the communicator’s intended meaning. This particular case is just someone verbing with a noun, which is a common practice in informal English.

I invite you to show any evidence that anyone else has ever used "sopping to" in this sense. That's exactly my point.

In addition the "verbing with a noun" is a red-herring. Sopping has meanings related to being small or wet/absorbent. So, you could verb that noun all you wanted and succeed only in confusing your audience. That's the best thing to keep in mind: are you communicating or obfuscating.

Whatever floats your boat, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Think outside the box. (I’m not in a box, though...?) Not everything needs to be so literal.

Which is also the reason why a lot of the TikTok "but I'd rather CCP have my info than US agencies" is so infuriating. As if China isn't looking for influence with younger up-and-coming politicos. The utter lack of understanding from how much information about you the analysis of just "metadata" is that what can be learned from the actual "data" that data hoarders can collect is just mindblowingly naive to me.

They’re dismissing it because using TikTok now is fun (or at least interesting) and those other things you’re talking about are not - and they can’t do anything about them anyway.

They're dismissing it because they're like a flamingo with their head deliberately in the sand. Critically thinking about things makes their head hurt.

What does China have to do with the evils of the US intelligence community? Why even bring them up? What does potentially seeking influence with people have to do with blackmailing people or other COINTELPRO activities that were used to disrupt civil rights activists?

i wasn't bringing in China just for the sake of it. if you read enough threads here on HN, you'll see people making comments "i'd rather the CCP have my data than the TLAs of the US, since the CCP has no jurisdiction". it's a strawman privacy argument. invasion of privacy is bad regardless of the "who" is doing it. all of the pervasive tracking that is occurring has so many levels of knock-on effects that just get ignored or overlooked or whatever other term for being allowed is just not a good thing and should be something not allowed.

It seems weird to target tiktok (or china for that matter) when everyone hoovers up and sells your data as a matter of fact. Everyone. And they all have bad intentions. What's so specially trustworthy about american fuckery over chinese?

please see response to sibling comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37770386

Yes, i agree that abuse is bad regardless of the perpetrator. No argument here.

so it's not weird. the weird is that you felt i was targeting when i was just providing a very specific example?

> The trouble is, how do you effectively oversee an agency that specializes in lies, misdirection, cover-ups, coercion, and blackmail?

You destroy them—it's the only way to guarantee accountability.

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