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Comment by autoexec | Hacker News Reader

I'd always assumed that we had three letter agencies whose entire job was to keep this sort of thing from happening, but it seems that none of them are concerned about protecting our government's secrets or even our democracy. What good is the panopticon if the watchers are asleep on the job?

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Those agency can do their security work as long as there are laws and mandates about that.

But those agencies cannot do anything if an elected/named official decides to work for an adversary, since those agencies are under command of the elected/name official.

That's why democracy is beyond the scope of those agencies.

Those agencies are "fences" to protect a teenager from doing mistakes. But it cannot protect the teenager from setting himself on fire.

In my view, democracy was always vulnerable if the people or elected official can be convinced of whatever.

> Those agency can do their security work as long as there are laws and mandates about that.

My understanding was that they routinely do their work far outside of the law. Because such agencies have demonstrated a willingness to violate the constitution of the US, lie to both congress and the president, overthrow the democratically elected leaders of sovereign nations, perform acts of torture, rape, human experimentation, assassination, etc. it seems odd that they'd suddenly shy away from taking any action now.

I only learned recently that during his first term, Trump didn't take the president's daily briefing from the CIA, but instead paid a private intelligence service to prepare one. With all the talk about draining the swamp, ending the deep state, releasing / attempting to release Kennedy assassination and Epstein documents, revoking security clearances, it seems like there would be means, motivation, and opportunity, so to speak.

I hadn't heard that he'd paid an outside agency for them, but I did hear that he had the attention span of a toddler and in order to get him to read them at all they had to change the briefings to include a lot of exciting pictures and very short bullet points or write as if they were telling him a story instead of delivering a report while also adding his name as many times as possible in the text.

I'm not racing horses, but it seems like Dems took a similar attitude toward this administration to the polls, and found out. Underestimating folks is so dangerous. I'm just paying attention.

They’ve all been either fired or out in a leash as musk collects all the PII and secrets in every agency & department and feeds it into a private subnet of his AI. His minions are certainly doing that.

The template here is not Nazi Germany but Pinochet. The CIA have backed right-wing authoritarianism everywhere else in the Americas, why not in America itself?

"Supporting democracy" in Latin America always meant anti-communism, even to the extent of ending free elections.

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