Let's put this in its political context. We are citizens of a constitutional republic. A republic, as far as I understand it, implies that a (thoughtful, responsible, .., elected) minority is afforded the delegated power to legislate, judge, and administer.

The 'actual problem' seems to be in the selection/delegation process. The minority that is currently in charge has framed the question as that of "safety and security" vs liberties ("freedoms"). The corporate media (aka "journalists" and "free press") is more than happy to support this thesis. The "people", lets be frank here, were never expected to be a nation of Jeffersons. And it is unreasonable to expect them to be astute techno-political scientists carefully weighing various implications of technology and policy.

Other unelected minorities -- corporations such as Apple, Google, Facebook, ... -- could by fiat choose to only offer goods that preserve our liberties. They chose not to do so and arguably they are not under an obligation to do so. (Note arguably.)

Other unelected minorities -- technologists that work for the above -- have also elected to lend their talents to produce these systems, platforms, and devices that erode our liberties. Again, arguably they don't really have much choice in the matter, as we all must pay the proverbial rent.

So, imho, beyond the cliche that 'a people deserve their government' (which is a congenital defect of a political body), there remains the framework that was intended to select the best and brightest minority that would be entrusted with carefully considering various options. It is this framework that is currently broken. I accuse our so called "free press" for a playing a substantial role in the dysfunction of our political system.

There are other responsible parties for sure, but the press and media play a critical role in knowingly confusing and frightening the majority -- a role known as agitprop in the USSR.

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> A republic, as far as I understand it, implies that a (thoughtful, responsible, .., elected) minority is afforded the delegated power to legislate, judge, and administer.

Elected, yes. Thoughtful and responsible depends on your point of view. For example: there is a substantial contingent of people in the U.S. that want the country to be a Christian theocracy. (Most of these people believe that this is how things used to be, and they want to return to those halcyon days.) And so, unsurprisingly, these people vote for representatives who they think will advance that goal. So, for example, is Roy Moore "thoughtful and responsible"? If you're a member of this contingent then you probably think he is. If you're not, then you probably don't.

Likewise, there is a substantial contingent of people who are scared witless at the thought of terrorism, and think that it's worth trading in the odd civil right to insure that terrorists are not "free" to plot our destruction unmolested. There is a substantial contingent of people who are unrepentant racists who think black people are less than human and the root of all evil. Likewise for Muslims. All of these people not only don't care when "the bad guys" have their civil rights violated by the cops, they think it's a feature. They see the cops as courageous defenders of their point of view against the corrupting influence of pluralism and wussiness. The vaguaries of our electoral system make a difference at the margins (e.g. by gerrymandering) but none of these things would be possible if there were not millions of people who thought that it was good and proper.

The irony is that by blaming the system instead of acknowledging that the outcomes we see are the result of democracy working exactly as intended you are actually contributing to the problem, which is that everyone retreats into their echo chamber and spends their energy vilifying anyone who doesn't agree with them instead of working constructively to figure out how all 7+ billion of us are going to get along on this little planet.

> The irony is that by blaming the system instead of acknowledging that the outcomes we see are the result of democracy working exactly as intended you are actually contributing to the problem, which is that everyone retreats into their echo chamber and spends their energy vilifying anyone who doesn't agree with them instead of working constructively to figure out how all 7+ billion of us are going to get along on this little planet.

But I am not blaming the system.

I pointed out bad faith actors in the system, which in my view, are contributing to the dysfunction of the process, and have poisoned political discourse in this nation. I don't remember the exact date when we crossed the threshold but do remember noting a somewhat abrupt introduction of extreme vulgarity and uncivility into televised political shows at some point in 90s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996

The various POVs you mention are noted and point well taken. But were not these strains of thought present in the 80s, 70s, and before? I haven't watched TV in decades, but the few times I am exposed to it by force (visits to family, public spaces, etc.) my skin literally crawls, regardless of which point of view is being voiced. It's like the planet of the vulgarian apes. Don't you think the public that is exposed to this /garbage/ day after day has been conditioned to act in the same manner?

> Likewise, there is a substantial contingent of people who are scared witless at the thought of terrorism, and think that it's worth trading in the odd civil right to insure that terrorists are not "free" to plot our destruction unmolested.

This is the only POV that I find unacceptable. This view -- propagated from on high from -- is the factual "blaming the system". The clear subtext of this manufactured view is that our system is fragile and inadequate in face of enemies and needs corrective measures that alter the very nature of our system. Yes, the people were scared, but it was not the people who pulled the Patriot Act out of God knows where and passed it without even an attempt at deliberation.

They could have been offered other remedies, but were not. They could have been reassured by national leadership that we can prevail without disfiguring our national character, but were not.

Americans torturing and torture shows on cable TV.

Disgraceful.

Wagging fingers is one of the more boring forms of political discourse, and no matter how unacceptable you find an opinion, you will never finger-wag someone out of one.

You are wagging fingers also, and therefore boring.

Honestly, I've been finger-wagged out of an opinion or two, so "never" is too strong. Frankly, I challenge you to name any form of "political discourse" that regularly changes opinions. In my experience political discourse in general rarely accomplishes anything other than preach to the choir and cause opponents to dig in.

I'm not telling you what to do, which is a necessary component of the finger wagging. I do enjoy when people accuse me of the actions they are taking, though. Very human. Very, very human.

In my language, finger wagging is scolding someone, for what they've done (or failed to do). It's not telling them what to do.

You were certainly wagging your finger at a fingerwagger.

> But I am not blaming the system.

You wrote:

> The 'actual problem' seems to be in the selection/delegation process.

That sounds like blaming the system to me.

Problem "in", not problem "is".

(In case you're interested, Pierre Sallinger touches on the post '72 role of the media in the selection process in his 1995 c-span interview: https://www.c-span.org/video/?67372-1/ps-memoir [edit: jump to 44:56])

That seems like splitting a pretty fine hair to me.

As a system administrator: No. It's not. A broken system and a system being misused are two entirely different things. It could be suggested that a system is broken if it can be misused and indeed an ideal system will be incapable of misuse. But I've never met one yet.

Do you claim here that elections (who votes, where, how often, in what conditions, for whom, for what, etc.) aren't part of "the system"? That probably isn't your intention, but you seem to hold the parenthesized conditions blameless, offering instead some sort of caricature of a Trump voter for criticism. Incidentally, if the participation of all those apparent cretins is "democracy working exactly as intended", how should we characterize previous elections in which they did not take part?

I was referring specifically to this:

> The 'actual problem' seems to be in the selection/delegation process.

ISTM there are problems in that process. Even if there aren't, there could be, and preemptively declaring such out of scope certainly wouldn't help solve those.

One has long suspected the insidious idea that the Founders etc. did such a Good Job that we mustn't criticize any current incarnation of the institutions and traditions they created. One used to hear this silly idea from "strict constructionists", but recently it seems to come mostly from devoted supporters of the status quo.

Of course there are problems in the process, but they pale in comparison to the fact that there are vast and fundamental differences in people's quality metrics, and even in what they mean by words like "freedom" and "equality" (e.g. is allowing gay marriage "equal rights" or is it "special treatment"?) So the whole premise of electing reasonable people to run the government is doomed from the start because Americans don't agree on what "reasonable" means. No amount of tinkering with the process is going to fix that.

This.

The free press is not objective, or benevolent, or ethical. Yes, parts of it may have started that way, but today's free press is merely free, in that it can and will say anything, within legal bounds. It ends up saying whatever gets the most eyeballs.

We need a better way to disseminate factual information to the public. Sadly, I have no idea how to do that.

Some donor-funded news sources are quite good.

https://theconversation.com/ has African, Australian, French, UK, US and global versions (but the African, US and global editions seem not to be donor-funded), Creative Commons licensing, and no advertising (but it does have sponsors).

I wonder how it would cope with a billion readers.

We were supposed to be nation of 'Jeffersons', or at least educated people with skin in the game. Only educated and land owning males were allowed the vote.

I'm sure part of the reason non land owners, slaves, women, etc. were not allowed to vote was in order to keep a certain group in power, but there have been many writers who correctly predicted what happens when everyone is allowed to vote:

"A democracy can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury."

The fact that you have something like 1/2 the citizens working and subsidizing the other half, along with our 24 hour news cycle that cannot be trusted anymore than Pravda at its worst, and I think we will probably look back and realize allowing everyone a vote is a bad idea, or no better than a monarchy or some other rule by a select few.

Not that I have a better idea, though

> We were supposed to be nation of 'Jeffersons', or at least educated people with skin in the game. Only educated and land owning males were allowed the vote.

What states include being educated as an input to their voter eligibility determination?

The presumption was that being a land owner was correlated with education. If not formal education, then at least an active interest in being informed about current affairs.

The current voting system doesn't help. A national popular vote for president under IRV and proportional representation for Congress are necessary parts of the solution.

irv would be nice, but I feel like campaign finance reform would help more.

If there's one thing standing in the way of campaign finance reform, it's everyone involved in campaigns and the financing of them.

The problem is that we're not exchanging freedom for security, we're exchanging freedom for the empty promise of security and the reality of a police state.

I'm still calling "mindless".

To give another example:

If the US were to outlaw all forms of encryption, we would have less privacy AND less security:

Less Privacy: all communication is now readable by a third party in the middle

Less Security: all banking information is now transmitted in plaintext

A locked phone is a lot less interesting to a burglar. If the convenience of touch ID means more people lock their phones, that's not an empty promise.

How many people lock their phones against burglary?

how many people lock their phones for any other reason?

I only lock my phone in case it's lost or stolen, I don't lock it to keep the government out of it, since pretty much everything on my phone is available in Google's Cloud services (except for my password protected password manager), which the feds can gain access to with a valid search warrant.

One. Me.

Huh... why? I mean, burglars and hackers are usually very different people, and the former usually doesn't care about what's on your phone, just your phone. I grant however, that you could have a particular situation perhaps relating to your work which might alter that.

The people stealing it usually want to resell it. They'll wipe it. The hackers want the data on it, esp if they can unlock it, since it might be valuable in itself or connected to your online accounts that they trade on black markets. A subset exists between the two which are people that might target you personally just to snoop, a grudge, incidentally to grabbing information you have on your business that's the actual target, and so on. Best to simply cover each one with whatever protections you need so the attackers' motivations and probability aren't something you need to guess.

You think a thief won't go through an unlocked phone they stole? Even if they don't, the person they fence it to will.

I think whatever is on your phone would be of little or no interest to either party.

Even the dumbest thief has a smartphone and knows it can contain information at least as valuable as the phone itself, and maybe even nudie pics.

The average burglar wouldn't know that, and wouldn't have anything they could do with that information. They're a drug addict who wants shit to fence for a fix. Burglary of the average residence is an insanely stupid crime with enormous risks and penalties.

Thieves sell the phone on to people who know how to exploit what is on your phone to try to get access to your accounts and money.

How would your phone give them access to any of that? All of that kind of thing is inevitably protected by more security layers they won't be able to break, and meanwhile, the phone itself is worth something once wiped. Worse, the longer they fiddle with your phone, unwiped, the longer they risk someone tracking that phone.

They're burglars, not masterminds.

What I heard is phones are often sold off by burglars to organized crime who do know how to exploit the phone to its full potential (and not get tracked, and properly wipe it and resell it after properly copying off the data/login credentials which is sold to another party, which then package the data with other data and sell that, and so on).

Wish I had some better sources. All I could find from a quick google search is that the market rate for full personal info is $20 -- that is certainly something you can get with email inbox access (which is enough to get Amazon login which would have your full address etc etc)

Keep in mind most services only needs your email address and browser cookies for full access, only banking services etc are 2FA.

? Who are the large numbers of people you speak of, who decided perceived "safety and security" are more desirable than freedom? Far as I can tell the general public had no say in the legislation, and the legislatures who pushed through the Patriot Act reassured their constituents that the abuses we're witnessing were not under the realm of possibility. Meanwhile the Feds techniques of warrant-less intervention and forced entry of suspects phone have yet to yield measurable results.

The general public is mindless to the extent of surveillance and the aggregation of that data, the vast majority are certainly unaware of the possible unintended consequences of wanton disregard for the 3rd, 4th and 5th amendments. Only a third of Americans can even name all three branches of government, to believe they're informed on matters they don't understand on a technical or philosophical level is badly overestimating the American Public.