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Comment by psaintla | Hacker News Reader

Does it really have to be that cynical? Don't you think it is entirely possible pre-2008 Obama's opinions were formed with the same information as the rest of us and post-2008 Obama received more information (national security briefings) that completely blew away his belief system? I don't agree with much of what the Obama administration has done regarding domestic and international surveillance but I always feel like we should give ALL Presidents a little slack when it comes to these things because they have two burdens that the rest of us do not. Information and the responsibility to act on that information.

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Good point. I used to be more sympathetic to that line of reasoning. It's tightly coupled to the argument for the existence of state secrets... granting the state the power not to act in a fully transparent manner.

How might any institution act if it wanted to earn the credibility to behave in a way that was non-transparent to its constituents?

A firm might pay out consistent dividends or go public and comply with the additional regulatory requirements. A government might declassify information as quickly as possible to prove that information was classified judiciously (once the classified status was no longer needed).

In the US, there is still lots of classified information that is decades old. Clearly the government feels no need to earn its credibility when it comes to what information may be classified and for what purpose (or for how long). For a long time this was fine b/c the public had no good reason not to trust.

Things like WikiLeaks and Snowden's leaks have given us insight into the kinds of things that are classified. The most damning in my opinion were the WikiLeaks revelations that information was classified during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars that effectively filters out bad news from the information available to reporters. This is not judicious use of secrecy, it's using secrecy to achieve a propaganda motive.

Snowden's leaks reveal more than just the existence of a secret program, they reveal that the program was deliberately extralegal and far-reaching in a way that normal legal and law enforcement processes would never have allowed to happen.

It comes down to the question of whether we value (at a basic level) the rule of law, or if we prefer to be ruled by a trusted council of elders that makes secret decisions on our behalf without any kind of transparency or accountability.

I agree with your points, I'd personally prefer full transparency over anything else but that is something that needs to be hashed out by the legislative branch, which conveniently gets very little blame. If any of us have an issue with the way government surveillance is performed we shouldn't be looking at the President, we should be looking at Congress since they control the budget and can pass laws to limit actions they find are in legal grey lines.

> we should be looking at Congress

I 100% agree. However I am not sure whether what the NSA has been doing had any kind of congressional oversight. It certainly should.

If so it took about 3 days.

http://c-spanvideo.org/videoLibrary/transcript/transcript.ph...

See the question and non-answer at 17:36.

The first time I saw that live on C-SPAN my heart actually sank. It was huge wasted opportunity for the people, through their direct donations to a candidate, to make things better. In that moment the President-Elect proved one of two things: he had no idea what was going on, or he willfully misrepresented the notion of reform through the election. A third possibility is even more frightening, something or someone changed his position for him.

But more than that, the President-Elect laughed it off as a joke, as if asking a question about the state of intelligence reform was the same thing as asking the contents of the PDB, as if the plebs simple weren't entitled to a straight answer on something affecting the function of 'their' government. And this wasn't a nobody asking, it was Candy Crawley (I believe, the transcript did not state that but her first name was given as Candy.)

We elected an former Constitutional scholar as President, and he appointed a Civil Rights division lawyer as Attorney General, and they have seriously damaged both the Constitution (whose spirit remains the saving grace of this nation) and Civil Rights and Liberties.

You realize The President got his very first intelligence briefing the day before that press conference right?

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/11/05/obama-to-rec...

I'm sure I noticed that in my Reader, yes.

It's a combination of hubris and intentional ignorance on the part of OP and others like him.

It's really fascinating to see otherwise intelligent people completely unable to challenge their own beliefs about the nature of the world.

Is Obama simply reacting to new information he has been made privy to since becoming the president? Is it possible that there are genuine threats to America that are not made public? Is it possible there are realities of foreign affairs that we may not understand?

No, the world is just as I conceive it and Obama is a liar prone to malfeasance.

Accepting otherwise would challenge the safe bubble of the reality I have constructed. One where everyone fundamentally shares my value system and I have the necessary information and skills of deduction to construct an accurate conception of reality.

I wonder if it's something particular to technically skilled people. They have a knack for figuring out things that most people in society don't care for or don't have the aptitude for so they assume that that applies to all things, even things outside of their sphere of experience or aptitude.

Your comment reads like some kind of passage from scripture, offering humble ignorance of reality and blindly placing trust in some entity to take care of your best interest.

In the real world, it's clear that institutions become corrupt. Enron is one example. So is GroupOn. So is the NSA.

I suppose you think we should not let our faith be shaken by the revelation that corruption has been found in some NSA programs. The Catholic church has made a similar argument about why its members should still continue to support the institution even though it was found that it systematically placed priests accused of child abuse in other parishes.

We have new information, and so it's perfectly reasonable to reconsider our previous worldview. Sure we can just accept the institutional response at face value, but if we hope to reform the system we ought to be critical and expect actual change to occur.

You haven't actually considered that the system is reasonable as it is. Which is the hubris that I'm talking about.

I don't blindly trust institutions. But I also don't blindly distrust institutions when the system they perpetuate has merit.

Life is quite good in America if you're in the middle class as compared to the standards of living in the past and around the world.

I'm careful with my judgements as I understand that I don't fully understand all of the realities and circumstances and interests at play. I can only look at the result, which from my perspective is quite good relative to what I know about the world today and in the past.

Are there serious problems in society? Yes.

I went through a stage of cynicism when I was in middle school through high school so I can appreciate your perspective.

You know the 'middle class' is people making 250K+ right?

In most countries the middle class are doing fine and live well.

It appears that high school and middle school have done their job of building trust in US institutions. Yes, it's completely alright that Mr. Obama went from constitutional scholar to repeatedly lying to the public about the scope of surveillance in the country.

Remember the debate he wanted to have about surveillance but just forgot about having for 5 years? How about the rinse wash repeat of Grenwald says you're doing X, we're not doing X, here's your documents proving your doing X.

Ends justify the means right? Middle class is doing well, ghetto don't matter! Just wave a flag and say you're free!

That's not the definition of middle class. It's usually put at households making more than $100k.

You're simply wrong.

And you haven't actually considered or responded to my argument. In fact this is exactly what I'm talking about. Hubris and intentional ignorance.

Wikipedia says: "Depending on the class model used, the middle class constitutes anywhere from 25% to 66% of households."

Fewer than 5% of Americans make more than 250k/yr. So either that is not the cut-off for middle class, or a huge percentage of the former middle class is now lower class.

It's the middle class, not middle income quintile. It would seem to be pretty ridiculous to me that more than 5-10% of America were doctors, lawyers, etc.

Perhaps in the US it's the middle class includes the working class but in my estimation middle class means you still derive most of your income from working but you own a decent portion of the means of production.

If the middle class means households making 100K then I would estimate that a couple working as tech support and a caregiver are middle class rather than working class.

To me it works like this:

  You derive your income from capital: Upper class
  You work and own a decent portion (5%+ unless public) of your employer: middle class
  You work: working class.

eg. My mom was a phone operator, my dad was a mechanic, they're working class despite making more than $100K inflation adjusted.

"It's the middle class, not middle income quintile."

I made no claim to the contrary. But if we are looking at income figures to try and guess class, 1) we're going to be doing a poor job if we're missing at least 4/5 of middle class people, 2) we're going to be talking about something other than what everyone else means when they say middle class, or 3) the situation has changed and it's a recent development that so few people are middle class and the models haven't caught up. If 3, we've either seen tremendous immigration/reproduction in the lower classes (somewhat possible in the small, but a five-fold increase would mean the earlier figures were pre-1900, which is unlikely) or we've seen a lot of people leave the middle class in a downward direction - which doesn't say good things regardless of how well the remaining middle class is doing. If 2, we might be able to have a meaningful discussion but it's likely a different one than most people in the discussion thought we were having. If 1, we should pick better numbers or simply refuse to include income in driving our estimates.

I think it's an intentional political doublespeak that people who are making a median wage think they are middle class.

Thus policies for the 'middle class' are policies they identify with despite those policies not actually being particularly well suited to their economic situation.

IIRC I believe 90% of Americans think they are middle class, even from a quintile perspective this is probably skewed.

The more reasonable "100k+" number that others have cited is still all in the top 20%, so while there may broadly be some inappropriate conflation of "middle class" and "most people" or "median income", that's not most of what's going on here.

Speaking of blinders, this sentence illustrates the pair you are evidently wearing:

> I can only look at the result, which from my perspective is quite good relative to what I know about the world today and in the past.

You are judging the state of the entire system by the level of personal comfort you experience and your heavily biased view of history.

It sounds to me like you are judging America's actions to be morally superior simply because America enjoys a high standard of living. I'd argue that a high standard of living out to result in a high moral standard for our institutions and officials.

A good test of this hypothesis is this: if Hillary Clinton runs for President, what would be her take (support or oppose)?

Unlike Obama the Senator, as Secretary of State she would have served on the National Security Council and would have been privy to much of the same intelligence info. Therefore, if she's still opposed on surveillance issues vs. Obama, that would be a very telling sign.

Well, to be sure, the job always seems to turn their hair white.

On the other hand, I'm easily cynical enough to wonder whether a modern president's staff hairdresser is expected to have an unusual degree of skill with dyes and bleaches.

Or:

Before election: dye hair, look energetic.

After election: don't bother dyeing, look like you're settling into the position.

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