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Comment by belorn | Hacker News Reader

Sweden is fairly well know for its public access to official records, and any email sent to an official position in government is part of the public accessible record. Politicians however all have private emails and are users of instance messages services that are not part of the public record. Public access is also only for the public role in government, not for example the role of being the party leader.

Would it be a good thing or bad thing if this was scaled up so email servers and instance messages services was all public if the message involved a member of a political party, without allowing any back channel or ways to avoid the public record?

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It is a cat-and-mouse game. In the UK, when email rules started getting enforced, politicians moved to WhatsApp and then Signal. If Signal becomes subject to enforcement, they will probably find other ways; and the collateral damage will likely be that everyone's messages will become fair game even more than it already is.

The reality is that backchannels have always existed. People used to meet discreetly or through emissaries; or had phone calls from secure lines; etc. There is so much that we will never know, even about times that are well-documented.

To be honest, I am not a big fan of "thoughtcrime" being pursued. Let them be racist if they want to; we should make sure the population is smart enough to reject racism on its own. Maintaining a working democracy requires some violence, sure, but if we over-use it it will stop being a democracy.

I largely agree with you, but the problem is when they try to get away with being racist in private and hide or obscure their views in public.

What is phenomenally stupid is that the UK is a major player in demanding encryption backdoors.

Same thing in the Netherlands. I believe our previous prime minister (now secretary general of NATO) even used an extremely old phone which can only keep a 20 message history to have a “plausible” excuse why he can’t comply with the requirements.

These types of shenanigans were even named after him, “Rutte doctrine”.

He might have just been hooked on snake.

I do think politicians should waive some privacy rights when elected. Same thing for their bank accounts and other assets.

> I do think politicians should waive some privacy rights when elected. Same thing for their bank accounts and other assets.

This would make surveillance laws socially much more acceptable. The politicians will claim:

- "We are surveilled anyway, so we can pass surveillance laws against citizens, too.", or

- "The citizens really ask for surveillance laws against specific groups (in this case: politicians). So, we will, of course, give the citizens what they want and pass surveillance laws against potential terrorists/child abusers/[whatever is currently fashionable]".

If you consider privacy or the right not to be surveilled to be important, this better should hold for the enemy (politicians).

> “The citizens really ask for surveillance laws against specific groups (in this case: politicians).”

?? The root of the idea is not bi-directional. Politicians have a particular type of job: public service. It’s this “job” that requires the transparency.

And not transparency into their public life. Though, as a public figure if your private life becomes embarrassing, or salacious you’re guaranteed to have news hounds on your trail. Not least because your public service rivals will use whatever they can to discredit you in the court of public opinion.

It’s the same for the work product. All of the material of governance should be the “property” of the people governed.

Can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen.

> Though, as a public figure if your private life becomes embarrassing, or salacious you’re guaranteed to have news hounds on your trail.

This is like: if you engage in anti-social behaviour or plan some crime, you deserve to have hounds (law enforcement agencies, intelligence agencies) on your trail because of surveillance data that was gathered about you.

> Can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen.

This is like the political argument: "If you have nothing to hide, why are you opposed to the new surveillance law?"

In the first instance, I was making a statement about human nature, and not a moral justification.

And in the latter my statement is true by definition. A tautology.

Really, I don’t know what you were hoping to accomplish with those similes, but they’re simply not equivalent logically.

But I understand you disagree.

In this email leak, it is all emails from members of the party, not just elected officials. It is also emails sent from the outside to party members. Is that going too far? In term of transparency, allowing the public to see everything that happens and communicate within a political party would give some insight in what kind of people a party is made from.

It is definitely an interesting discussion to have in where the lines should be drawn in transparency and public insight into political landscape and behavior inside it. In Sweden, every person, regardless of position, has their income as public information. How much a person pay it taxes is also public information, so in some sense you can guess how much assets a person own and how much they have in the bank based on what they declared.

It wasn't so long ago in America that having a private email server was actually the main complaint about a presidential candidate. Everyone knows that they all do it one way or another.

That was never the "main complaint". It was just a complaint or the most convenient complaint at the time.

Conservatives are vibe haters. They feel something is wrong and will figure out how to justify their feelings. The email server was just one of many excuses to dislike Hillary. But it was never the "main" one. It was just one that gained a lil traction.

Hillary also caught crap for Benghazi, her husband, her aides, her outfits, etc. It never ends with conservatives because how they feel is as important as reality. They'll find anything to justify their vibes.

I think transparency in government is really important, but I don't think making ~all communication between officials public is the way. For the well behaved people it has all sorts of funny second-order effects, like people being reluctant to ask questions which might make them look silly in case they're taken out of context. For the poorly behaved they'll just work around it.

You cannot prevent private communication. It is just not possible to stop people from finding ways to exchange information in nonpublic ways.

Sure, you can make it the law, but technically there are infinite ways to get around it, including ones that are impossible to get rid off, like using the shared folders on systems that are non-publik for safety reasons.

They did this in the Netherlands and the result is that politicians started sending voice notes...

You also sometimes need to be able to just discuss stuff, privately. Not all phrases uttered in the context of government do well when interpreted by the general public.

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