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Comment by jonhohle | Hacker News Reader

Why shouldn’t all public transactions be public? IRS and personal taxes may be legitimate since it’s, well, personal, but we are all “shareholders” with equal stake in all other payments. This is the perfect use case for public ledger. We should all have access to all of this data. All outflows should note which bill authorized that expenditure, every bureaucrat that’s involved with spending it. If I’m getting $600 in income tracked as a free citizen, I want the even more accountability for anyone spending that amount on behalf of the government.

There’s almost certainly no clearance requirement for what they’ve looked at already. Maybe HIPAA. I’m not sure why one executive branch org has any more or less right to access this data than any other.

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While I am in favour of radically open records for government and private sector alike, consider what hostile governments' intelligence agencies can do with a detailed budget when deciding where to draw the line.

Everything about this should worry patriotic Americans*, because this does look like a fantastic opportunity for everyone else on the planet to spy on your government at the top level.

* also anyone in a country that has a military or economic relationship with the USA: we're still impacted even though we don't have a say in it

Regarding military and security, you are right. Unfortunately that means all superfluous spending becomes military and security.

This is philosophizing, and it isn't even on topic.

The laws are broken, so regardless of what you think "should" be legal, it isn't. They are being selectively enforced, though, and that's both the problem and probably the thing more worth your philosophical energy. Is that okay, when a criminal operation is too wealthy and influential to be held accountable?

> The laws are broken, so regardless of what you think "should" be legal, it isn't. They are being selectively enforced, though, and that's both the problem and probably the thing more worth your philosophical energy. Is that okay, when a criminal operation is too wealthy and influential to be held accountable?

All the laws have been being selectively enforced for decades. The people who were previously running these departments may have written the right incantations and negotiated a consensus with the departments that are supposed to watch the watchmen, but they had no more accountability to the average citizen/voter than the people who are moving in now.

The voting public no longer cares about "legal" versus "illegal", because they recognise that those categories have no bearing on anything relevant. This has been brewing for years, but the establishment benefited too much from subverting the rule of law to fix it. At this point they've made their bed.

The laws have been selectively enforced and it has led us here, yes, and it does mean that broad support of the bureaucracy has justifiably waned.

Was it okay then, when it was a bureaucratic governing class encamping in the public coffers? Is it okay now, when it's a single vulture capitalist harvesting the public coffers?

What's "okay"? My position is that the current state of affairs is far from ideal, but also not significantly worse than what came before, and so I'm suspicious of the motivations of anyone who's selectively concerned about public accountability now.

To to drain the swamp you probably have to dive into the swamp, or at least get your feet muddy. Every successful reform/anticorruption programme I can think of has involved giving a few trusted people some fairly extraordinary powers - special prosecutors, special judges, special task forces and the like. Sometimes the end result is no better, or is even worse, sure. But I'll take trying something that might work over letting the prior status quo continue indefinitely. And I don't think the system would ever have been capable of reforming itself while staying within its bounds.

OP was philosophizing. Why would anyone need any kind of clearance to access non-classified data. If they’ve been given permission by the head of the executive branch, what more authority do they need?

They had access to both financial and personal data. This included for example social security numbers and bank accounts. Sure, more financial data being public would be nice, but the current dataset as it is can't be made public safely and definitely needs clearance.

After all the database leaks I've seen in the news, we should probably assume all SSNs have been leaked by now.

Is that not how audits work?

By assigning random people with no experience and criminal work history to an internal system with no data restriction on personal information scope? No, that's not how they work. What are you even asking?

You’re confusing the point. The data accessed so far is not classified. Where does a clearance requirement come from?

https://archive.md/y7LWE it's already been confirmed that they access classified information in usaid and social security / Medicare elsewhere.

Vetting might be a better word, and a more general term, than clearance.

Nearly all the jobs I’ve had working with data have required vetting - including a criminal background check. This is not the same thing as obtaining a security clearance.

Go ahead, put some legislation in place. I'd love to see transparency as the Swedes have where you can see how much tax your neighbour has paid. Or at least how much subsidies which company received. I'm sure rich people will LOVE to know the competition got half what they got... Btw, did Trump's tax returns get published yet?

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