Your comments in this thread are repetitive and totally devoid of content. The one above is a non sequitur that is unnecessarily aggressive.

I think it is you not paying attention if you haven't noticed yet that Democrats and Republicans are nearly the same and equally blunderous and corrupted. They both support war, surveillance, mass incarceration, mass deportation, drug prohibition, and more. Barack Obama was a terrible president, so much so that I'm not sure even Trump will do worse. At least Trump seems to attract more scrutiny.

I'm not saying republicans are corrupt. Democrats are corrupt. I can work with corrupt. Republicans are crazy and dangerous. Keep fiddling while Rome burns. Hopefully no one will be aggressive to you...but then you never really had to worry about that did you?

Why do you make that assumption about me?

I get your gripe with the GOP. We all do. But your posts don't have much depth or add anything new to the discussion.

My posts are the discussion. Everyone keeps saying that they don't like party politics. I'm saying that, like it or not, if you want to do something about mass surveillance you will have to do something in the Democratic party, because the Republican positions on a host of other issues will be antithetical to some other position that you hold dear. Want to support NASA? They don't. Think homosexuals should be able to marry? They don't. Think that life evolved on earth? They don't.

What I meant by the last line of my comment, is that the Republicans are willing to do some really bad stuff to the least powerful among us in service of their ideals. It isn't going to effect you and me. It's going to effect the people that clean my building. There are more issues on the table than mass surveillance. If you ally with the Republicans on this issue you empower them on those issues. We need strategies to break the Republican party, that can only be done by a massive coordinated defeat and then causing irreparable fissures between their coalitions.

Would you please stop posting uncivil and/or unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? We ban accounts that do that.

Would you please stop using HN for partisan battle? That's emphatically not what this site is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We just had an election where millions of people had a huge impact on the Republican party by rejecting the candidate selected by the establishment (Jeb) and overwhelmingly preferring the candidate the establishment fought tooth and nail to torpedo.

On the other hand you have the party who rigged their primaries to ensure that their neoconservative warhawk could be elected. Which one do you think you could have an impact on?

Jesus, that's dumb.

On surveillance? I genuinely don't know. Across Bill Clinton, Obama, Hillary Clinton, Pelosi, Feinstein, and the rest, there's really no evidence that the Democrats are any more open-minded than the Republicans.

From a federal government perspective, the intelligence community is a tool; it's not a terminal goal (where I think one party is obviously more reasonable than the other), it's an intermediate step to achieving terminal goals. Neither party seems interested in restricting their power (even to restrict the power of their opponents) or to give a damn about the incidental harms caused by surveillance tools.

This is why I get so irritated by the argument that mechanical approaches to privacy are techno-solutionism. The same people pursuing strong encryption lead the political fight, but they're viciously opposed by both parties. On surveillance, anything resembling the political establishment in either party has proved utterly immovable.

I agree with you that techno-solutionism, as some might call it, is a big part of the solution. I just think that the Republicans are so wrong on other issues that there is no point allying with them on any issues. There's more to American life than surveillance. It's huge, but so is the voting rights act. (That's just one example. I won't beat you up with more.)

You are right, the foreign policy elites in both parties are largely homogenous. That being said, I don't think that it's possible to build a coalition with the Republicans that doesn't betray something else that you hold dear. I think that you have a better chance of building a coalition inside the democratic party that can move the center of power away from the foreign policy elites.