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Comment by bradenb | Hacker News Reader

Here's where I get depressed about this whole thing: how will we know change has occurred? I mean, say in the best case scenario the government admits it was wrong and promises to stop the monitoring programs. How exactly are we supposed to know it has happened? I don't see why they couldn't simply start up a new secret program using the exact same resources and keep it from the public eye.

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A good way to do it would be to radically downsize the federal government and return back to limited constitutional government. The less money they have, the less stuff they can do. Return power (and tax revenues) back to the states so that the people of that state can have a more powerful influence in state/local politics instead of everyone pleading, fighting, and begging at the national level in Washington.

And since radical downsizing won't happen voluntarily, as both political parties are corrupt and incompetent, the only way I can see this happening is for the government to continue borrowing and spending money into oblivion, which will ultimately trigger an economic default. At that point, there will be no money for new secret programs.

The less money they have, the less stuff they can do.

Iran-Contra, anybody? And the president that was in charge was a small government hero.

Ah yes, starve the beast. That's working out well.

Except they never starved anything. Government expenditures did not decline in any meaningful way.

It's almost as if there's a trend that people who go on and on and on about their commitment to "small government" principles suddenly abandon those principles the moment they're in power.

It's almost as if every politician does precisely that.

The US national debt is denominated in dollars. The US government decides what a dollar is. There's no way they can default. Just trigger hyperinflation.

Sure, that's the "technically correct, but practically worthless" answer. Trigger hyper-inflation and then what? It surely won't be "business as usual" afterwards.

That's why they do it progressively enough so you dont see prices jumping up too fast. But be sure that they do, from year to year...

If everyone started encrypting everything, it would matter less. Simply encrypting your email doesn't obfuscate everything, though, since subjects and recipients are still visible. But it's a start.

Until they put you in prison for not turning over your private keys.

Which they have done repeatedly, as in the case of the "Total Information Awareness" program.

companies should never have to lie on the spying statistics (but maybe need to hide some specifics)

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