That's one thing that Snowden mentions in his book. You cannot have a fair trial if you are an whistleblower, since that would include revealing/acknowledging the existence of such programs, thing they don't want to do.

That's the ultimate get out of jail free card. Break the law but make sure you attach yourself to something that involves state secrets. As such a court will never touch you.

I wonder if there are "secret" courts - a parallel justice and penal system where such issues are tried and punished, similar to military courts (tribunals/court-martial). I'd say no because when you have this power to get away with breaking the law you have enough power to make sure you're never punished.

The US may have 3 branches of power but they're all attached and under the control of the same "state surveillance industry" trunk.

Secret courts are a thing. Supposedly, they’re just used for NSLs though.

That does sound strange to me, can't there be judges that are not politically strapped but bound to secrecy? I understand that in the US you need a jury of peers, but in the Netherlands we don't, so you could copy that system for such cases? Judges should be independent of the state anyway in a trias politica system [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_powers

Being a whistleblower is not a crime. Whistleblowing is regulated by law. Government agencies have internal processes for people who want to blow the whistle on conduct they may deem illegal or unethical, and it is perfectly safe to do so. Edward Snowden did not go through the proper channels. If he had, doing so would not have led to his prosecution. He broke into computer systems he did not have the right to access, copied information, fled the United States, and illegally released the information he stole about government programs that were in no way illegal, or unconstitutional. Snowden broke the Espionage Act of 1917, and deserves due process.

> He broke into computer systems he did not have the right to access, copied information, fled the United States, and illegally released the information he stole about government programs that were in no way illegal or unconstitutional.

Ugh he didn’t break in, he had access. Also if you know anything about his case or related cases, you’d also know the proper channels don’t lead anywhere. There’s a great frontline documentary called “United States of secrets”

Even the oversight committees aren’t privy to the full details and arguably they are where the proper channels should lead. There’s heads of agencies lying to Congress and the Senate about what is happening. The judiciary can’t rule on constitutionality.... which is part of its job.

The reality is, whistleblowing the way Snowden did was the only way to put evidence in the public, such that the judiciary And public can make a decision.

I dispute that Edward Snowden actually made a formal whistleblowing complaint. He claims he went through the channels, but never specifically stated he actually made the type of complaint that goes to the IG or to the U.S. Congress. We see in 2019 the Executive Branch is going to great lengths to discredit a whistleblower, but it is indisputable that a complaint was made.

I have not heard any statement from Snowden claiming that the government was making false statements about this matter.

The government did publish an email [1] that Snowden sent to a training coordinator, disputing the ability of executive orders to supersede law. It is possible that the government did this as a distraction and it is not actually what Snowden is referring to. Nevertheless, Snowden never gets specific about his whistleblowing attempt, despite going into great details about other aspects of his story.

1. https://icontherecord.tumblr.com/post/87218708448/edward-j-s...

> Ugh he didn’t break in, he had access

Snowden convinced colleagues to give him their passwords: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/11/snowden...

A Google query for "Snowden stole passwords" returns a lot of results.

I think you missed a lot of the phrasing:

> supposedly gained access

He was an IT administrator who had Sudo access to pretty much everything. I’d be careful of a lot of the stuff you read in 2013. There was and still is a concerted effort to discredit Snowden and make people feel he is a traitor.

Example: why did they cancel his passport after his plane left for Russia? (To say he’s a Russian spy)

There’s a lot of examples of this. Highly recommend some of the documentaries on the subject I and some recent discussion on the topic.

Snowden gained the vast majority of the electronic information from scraping web tools he had access to. Recall the "wget hacking tool" controversy, where he used the command line to retrieve internal websites. The removal of that information, and obviously the disclosure of it, was illegal.

The government didn't present a release claiming a substantial portion of the information was retrieved with that password list.

> Edward Snowden did not go through the proper channels. If he had, doing so would not have led to his prosecution.

I'm not sure why you're so trusting of the government that is openly admitting they are unwilling to release their secrets, and not only that but the court system is designed to protect this. From what I heard, he tried to go through the proper channels, and was rebuffed. So it's his word against the government, when we already have substantial evidence of the government lying about surveillance programs time and time again.

If you go through the proper whistleblowing channels and get nowhere, it simply means that whatever it is you tried to blow the whistle on, isn't illegal, unethical, or unconstitutional. You humbly recognize that you were wrong, and go back to work. You don't start betraying your country and flee in the arms of the enemy.

> You don't start betraying your country

I consider Edward Snowden the most patriotic American in my life time. The fact that you consider someone revealing the government not only lying under oath, but eroding our 4th Amendment rights to be a traitor is just mind boggling. Our nation was founded by rebels fighting for greater freedoms, after all. Edward Snowden is simply allowing the public to be more educated about the government in hopes they might enact change. He gave up his citizenship fighting for what he believed in, and it was the US government that villified him.

Whenever an organization is secretive, it is only for that organization to protect itself. I've never once encountered an exception to that rule (although I do believe some must exist).

I just don't understand why you assume the government is trustworthy, when there is extraordinary evidence of them deceiving the public time and time again. This same line of reasoning is what led to the 737-MAX disasters - whistle blowers were ignored and people literally died as a result. The only difference is you assign some sort of authority to the government that makes them infallible.

Or maybe... just maybe... The government knows it’s illegal and doesn’t care.

When Congress found out about what was happening, they didn’t shut it down; They reauthorized it. Why? They don’t care.

Comey lied to Congress about the NSA and got away with it. If you think the government cares about what’s legal and what’s not, you’re sorely mistaken.

And he didn’t “flee [into] the arms of the enemy.” A simple google search will yield tons of results that state his passport was canceled while he was in Russia on the way somewhere else. Some even include quotes from the US government (who love to lie) stating that it’s true.

Snowden, being a contractor, didn't have whistleblower protections. In spite of that, he did escalate the issues he saw (Clapper openly perjuring himself before Congress), and was rebuffed. Since he leaked it, the courts have since found that the NSA was in fact violating the Constitution.

I would say the facts openly disagree with your assertation that if the whistleblower protections aren't enough, then it means the government isn't doing anything wrong.

Your facts are just plain wrong here.

As of a couple years ago the NSA has openly admitted to Congress it is illegally collecting certain information about Americans it isn't supposed to. It openly admits it now because Snowden leaked this. Before the leak the NSA just lied about it to their oversight committee.

The people at the top should be in prison. They violated our rights, lied about it to congress, and got caught.

Or, you realize that it was unconstitutional but that the government doesn't care anymore. And so you do the thing patriots do and sacrifice your life to make the information known.

Snowden is a patriot and an American hero. The traitors are those who didn't speak up, and those in power who allow the violations of our constitutional rights to continue.

If it doesn't go anywhere, doesn't that imply that it is illegal and that there's a cover up going on? Why do you assume that the government can effectively self regulate?

The whole reason we have a separation of powers is because government doesn't effectively self regulate. In to case of the NSA, Congress effectively looked the other way and gave the NSA pre-approval through having the FISA courts essentially rubber stamp everything. So in this case, we didn't really have an effective separation of powers. The courts weren't working and Congress was willing to let them break the law.

That's exactly the case where you go public. You release a little bit of less sensitive information to show you have it, and continue to release information if the state refuses to discuss it. From everything I've read, Snowdon's intent was never to harm the US, but to correct illegal behavior.

Nice one Henry, but remember, no trolling on HN. Dang will blow your whistle if you do!

Pshh

Ah, the Espionage Act of 1917. One of the governments finest attacks on free speech. And it worked. The Supreme Court, in wanting to uphold a conviction against someone protesting a war they almost certainly agreed with, ruled it constitutional.

And do you really think the government will give him a fair trial? No. They almost certainly will give him a secret trial. How are those even constitutional?

And regarding the legality, we have a constitutionally protected right listed in the Fourth Amendment: the protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. The NSA’s indiscriminate spying is a search, no matter what Comey and the government say. If I steal documents off my employer’s computer and never read them, I’ve still committed a crime. Why is it different when the government does it? National security? What security am I receiving in exchange for them stealing data off my computer (and then saying they didn’t)?

>Why is it different when the government does it? National security?

"National security" is obvious doublespeak.

National security does not mean security for the general public, it means security for the incumbent power.

Indeed. Nationa Security is like what HR is to a company. It's there to defend the company's interests, not the employees and it will gladly throw one under the bus if they can legally get away with it.

> National security" is obvious doublespeak.

Just change one vowel and it becomes about right: nOtional security.

> programs that were in no way illegal, or unconstitutional

I noticed you didn't say unethical.

It doesn’t really matter. It’s wrong. The Fourth Amendment is a thing regardless of what the government does or says.

The government is responsible of applying the Constitution. If they don't apply it, then the Constitution doesn't really matter.

> Edward Snowden did not go through the proper channels

I will disagree. Releasing all the information to the public is the only proper channel.

> information he stole about government programs

Copying information is in no way similar to stealing.

> It's a frustrating situation because intelligence agencies obviously do need to keep secrets while at the same time they can use this as justification to keep anything they want secret, even when there is no real national security concern with revealing the information.

I agree and think the way to improve this is to codify into the relevant laws that:

1. If the government claims "state secrets" they have a burden of proof to demonstrate a reasonable probability of specific and tangible harm actually occurring.

2. The judge must evaluate whether the secrecy is justified using a 'balance of harms' weighting that considering the degree and probability of harm to the other party, the public and the constitution.

3. In cases where the judge determines a state secrets exception is justified, the other party may propose remedies that allow the case to proceed while mitigating the harm. The judge may appoint a special master to determine if mitigation is possible.

4. The government must demonstrate a reasonable probability that the information which would be publicly disclosed isn't already known to or assumed by the specific target(s) they are operating against.

The last point is key. It means if the justification for the state secrets exception is to preserve spying against foreign powers and/or terrorists, the govt must show that the relevant foreign powers and terrorists don't already know (or assume) the secret info anyway. For example, Russia and China certainly know that the NSA is doing stuff like Upstream 'full take' because they do it too. We also already know that terrorists already assume that every form of electronic communication can be tapped. Thus, the only people who don't know the "secret" aren't the bad guys but the general public who aren't the supposed target of this anyway (because these spying programs aren't legally supposed to be used for criminal investigation).

I think much of the time, the reason the govt wants to keep these things secret isn't to keep it from the bad guys but rather to keep the voters from finding out and pushing congress and the courts to actually do their job and stop unconstitutional programs.

We have FISA courts which allow the government to file charges against a private individual in a way that protects state secrets. Why are citizens not allowed to use these same FISA courts to file suit against the government? With properly authorized attorneys representing both sides cases involving state secrets can be argued. Not allowing citizens to bring cases to these courts is to create two forms of law: one for the people and another sort of law only available to the government to be used against the people. Certainly there must be some standard that says the law must be available to all people or else it isn't justice.

Wouldn't it already be the case, if one can in theory only be damaged as a suspect under these rules, that someone has to keep checks and balances?

I mean, however problematic an arrangement for legal defense in this setting is, at least they must have a very high bar of acting on it, if any action could reveal too much.

Also, if the only legal defense would be that the evidence was acquired illegally, that's a pretty weak defense, especially if it was simply defined to be legal. The minor problem of damages incured despite being not guilty already existed before--a door broken to search your house will not be repaired by them either way, I don't think.

The major problem that amounts to a concpiracy theory of controling politics, influencing supreme court judgement and cetera may be conciderable, but in that case, what's a lawyer going to do about it, huh?

> 1. If the government claims "state secrets" they have a burden of proof to demonstrate a reasonable probability of specific and tangible harm actually occurring.

This is a terribly bad idea, if you consider the Curry-Howard-correspondance between proof and programm, and the constructive logic approach of proof by construction. That's a stretched metaphor, perhaps, but it's very real, considering that one often waits how things play out.

Just like wikipedia let's everyone edit, see how it turns out, and revert later--which can be messy or impossible if several legit edits were made meanwhile.

>It's a frustrating situation because intelligence agencies obviously do need to keep secrets

They have abused the power to such an extent I think it reasonable they be stripped of it. It is like taking away a person's rights to own a gun after they commit a violent crime with one. Regardless of what arguments can be made that they need one, their past abuse means the need is now completely ignored.

The limit is that you have actual secrets to protect, whether codes or names. You don't want these public because everyone could destroy you then. Secrets are a necessary evil. Managing secrecy as a function of some more or less independent entity — three-letter agency, direct governmental body, army... — is a balancing act, to put it mildly. Ever since the dawn of time, and periodically throughout history, you hear this tension between the visible power (gov) and the hidden figures ("deep state", when some independent agency grabs too much power, and they all do, that's how they 'die' and get reformed historically).

This is one of the oldest and hardest problem in managing a 'country', a vast group of people, in the face of potentially hostile foreign powers and nefarious actors in general (including, and sometimes especially, within).

I feel our epoch (with internet, mobile, 24/7 on, hyperbuzz, etc) is vastly increasing the complexity and difficulty of this topic. It's likely to make those in charge of secrets paranoid, with reason, even assuming the best of intents.

TL;DR: wish it were as simple as that.

It's not clear that secrets are a necessary evil. They are, however, greatly desired by exactly the kind of people who definitely shouldn't be allowed them. So that's a bad sign.

Inappropriate reliance upon secrets is a recurrent security design mistake. Remember passwords? Well not so much remember, we still have passwords, and they're still terrible. Compare a FIDO Security Key. No secrets, much better.

If I'm wrong and some secrets are truly necessary we're still best served by restricting ourselves to just those secrets and not creating a Matryoshka doll of secrets kept for their own sake and little more.

>If I'm wrong and some secrets are truly necessary we're still best served by restricting ourselves to just those secrets and not creating a Matryoshka doll of secrets kept for their own sake and little more.

Therein lies the problem. How can you restrict secrets to "just those secrets" when you can't ever find out what the secrets are and you are promised that "this secret is definitely one of THOSE secrets, honest."?

This line of reasoning doesn't hold up at all. The best practice advice 'avoid security through obscurity' has nothing to do with what you're talking about. Also, FIDO absolutely relies on secrets: that's what a security key stores.

I'd be interested to hear how you think law enforcement and intelligence could still work without confidentiality.

Although the typical design for a FIDO key uses what is technically a symmetric ("secret") key that's an implementation detail and the purpose of the FIDO device is to maintain asymmetric (private) keys.

If you've been under the impression that FIDO is just a shared secret system like TOTP then I've got great news, it's much cleverer than that. By not relying on secrets the system is robust against total incompetence by a relying party. If say Facebook paste all the U2F credentials they have for your account into a public Pastebin, not only can that not be used to attack your Login.gov account secured with the same FIDO key, it can't even be used to attack the Facebook account the credentials are for.

Military intelligence services actually rely heavily on analysis of public information. The value of the exciting and expensive Hollywood-style secret agent is mostly in their ability to do stuff, mostly illegal and immoral stuff, not a benefit to collecting intelligence.

You've totally lost me, and it's not because I misunderstand FIDO. The private key you refer to must be kept secret or the credential is compromised. Yes, this is undoubtedly better than passwords, because the system automatically prevents credential re-use across services and is more resilient than a password hash, but it still requires secrecy. You're not providing an example of a system that functions without the need for secrecy, you're providing an example of a system that uses a very tightly controlled secret, known only to the party that needs it i.e. the FIDO key. Sounds a bit like the principles of need-to-know and compartmentation used by intelligence services...

Open source is useful, to be sure, but so are informants / agents, and the safety of those sources and their continued usefulness is completely dependent upon secrecy. If that's too Hollywood then consider undercover law enforcement.

Something is a _secret_ only if at least two people know it. This makes a tremendous difference because now either of them might betray the confidence, a _private_ fact can't be given away by anybody else, it is yours to keep private or not.

Society blurs this line a lot by telling people things are "Private" when in fact they're only a secret, and then there is an opportunity to betray them. This happens for payment cards for example, bank representatives have been known to tell even a court of law that bank employees can't find out your PIN, so if a PIN was used it proves the customer was negligent or actively participated in the transaction. In fact, of course, the PIN is a secret, so the bank and thus its employees are aware of the customer's PIN and an insider could in fact perform transactions using PIN verification despite no negligence by the customer.

I'm not sure what you're talking about. I suppose we have different backgrounds.

- I've never heard a single ranking officer in the army or intelligence circle or the judiciary branch ever claim that "it's not clear that secrets are necessary" — you'd be right many don't think it's an evil though. (I've personally interviewed such people among others for research, many times between 2006-2014, and this question was central to some discussions because we were indeed designing political regimes).

- You seem to confuse "secrets", the general idea of hidden information (e.g. a Christmas gift, the location of a weapons repository, the name of a lover) with secrets as a security device (PIN codes, passwords, the layout of a physical key). The former are content, the latter are means to restrict access (meaningless in and of themselves). You seem to argue that the latter can do better with less "remembering" (security practices, FIDO, etc), and sure go for it; but that has nothing to do with the former, actual secret information (content) which you seek to protect by way of such security devices.

- My point was about secrecy as a function of States, well before digital computers even existed, and well after. Modern computing compounds effects but doesn't change the nature of institutions. You'll always need to secure 'dangerous' stuff. I'm not sure how you envision a hostile invading army on your ground, but if you picture that suddenly many red lines appear clearly.

I'll tell you the dirty secret: the less they have an actual enemy to fight, the more they idle, the more "these people who desire secrets" become threats to the wider population — people report that it's such a parallel world view as an insider that focus can get fuzzy, undetermined, self-harming. This is why historically you see many governments pretty much making up enemies: a mundane observer would tell you it's to a classic to unite the population (or your base versus rival groups), but a historical perspective shows it's also to curb the 'natural deviance' of all the shadowy things in a State, to focus them for good when their idling becomes too evil.

None of this black and white. Nothing's fundamentally changed with computers or electronics — it's more game theory, math, and obviously philosophy, psychology, than whatever implementation of a system throughout history.

For another round at not-so-simple-secrecy-management, consider now corporations, first between them, then in interaction with States. You'd think it's all new, unseen before. Go read some account of the 16th century or even before. See how this is just part of human nature. As I tell myself, "deal with it".

> It's a frustrating situation because intelligence agencies obviously do need to keep secrets

Or do they? I mean, it's not that there can not be advantages to doing so, but then the same can be said about torture, about killing "dangerous" people without a trial, about censorship, ..., or in short: There can be advantages to any of the things that authoritarians like (as long as they themselves aren't the target, obviously).

But still, we have recognized that we are better off as a society if we make all those things illegal, because the good that comes from them is outweighed by far by the bad. Maybe we should come to that same conclusion about "state secrets"? Maybe we should realize that they are inherently incompatible with democracy, and that having them damages democracy so much that we would be better off accepting the risks of not having "state secrets"? Or, to at least reconsider how far they can go/how they can be used? Like, I dunno, maybe you can have state secrets, but not for longer than three years, and you can not convict someone based on secrets? I don't claim to know what the right balance would be, just throwing out random ideas, but my point is that it seems to me that the damage done by the concept of state secrets warrants reconsidering whether they are actually worth it.

You know what I find the most frustrating? The totally illegitimate laws that allow these state secrets to exist are 100% public. Most of Snowden's revelations could be infer in the text of laws stating what the NSA can do.

I think there is the mentality that progress depends on ~~superheroes~~ whistle-blowers whereas I think that a sane and functioning network of privacy defense non-profits and appropriate public education could have prevented this situation to begin with.

> illegitimate laws

Now there’s an oxymoron.

It is a very sad democracy when you confuse legitimacy and legality. Slavery, apartheid, death camps were legal.

Let me sing you the song of my people. Once upon a time, a french government surrendered to the German invader and changed form to stop being a republic. A colonel (de Gaulle) decided to stop obeying their orders, claiming he was a servant of the French republic, and claiming it was now alive in a government in exile in London and never surrendered.

The legal mainland non-republican government declared him a traitor and his supporters terrorists. They were serious about that and killed many of them.

At the end of the war, de Gaulle won and declared the mainland government "nul et non avenu" (void and never happened) which cancelled all the legal acts it took. People who during all that time followed the rule of the law were considered traitors to the nation, especially if they (as the law mandated it) denounced Jews or people helping them to German authorities.

This is what we are taught in history class: following the law is not enough. You also have to think further than that. In some cases, the right thing to do is illegal.

Legitimacy is the same as legality, by definition. Neither of them have anything to do with what is right.

If you compare the definitions in say a dictionary[1][2][3], they have high overlap, but are not the same.

Phrases illegal law and illegitimate law have different meanings. While the first seems an oxymoron and the second may be, both seem to be legitimate descriptions of objects in existence.

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/legitimate

[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/legal

[3] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/illegitimate

Ok, my bad, I was not aware that legitimate could actually be synonymous with legal. In my native language, legitimate globally means that it is the general consensus in society, something that ideally the law tries to capture but it is actually importantly distinct from legal and is never used in replacement of it.

Interesting.

Congress could rule that the copying/filtering method is illegal and that Henning’s method of mirroring is the only acceptable practice. Then we don’t care so much about the specific means. I’m not a huge fan of ombudsman/czar positions but I think it would make sense to have some sort of privacy advocate within the executive and maybe even a house committee on the topic. It’s abundantly clear at this point that when it comes online communications we are no closer today to addressing issues of privacy, encryption, online free speech, than we were thirty years ago when the battles over clipper were fought.

The GA probably has the power to bring up such a charge, but they don't need to do it within this case. Then again, in practice they probably don't, if they are like the German General Staatsanwalt bound by orders and thus see no evidence for any wrong doing.

What's Henning’s method of mirroring? Couldn't find it with a quick google.

Also worth mentioning that Judge TS Ellis III is the same activist judge who gave Paul Manafort a ridiculously lenient sentence due to living "an otherwise blameless life." This is a judge whose jurisprudence should probably not be taken seriously.

>they can use this as justification to keep anything they want secret, even when there is no real national security concern with revealing the information.

Aren't these secrets revealed to the judge, who then decides if the intel agency is justified in state secrets defense? At least that is a check and balance.

Even if this does happen, a judge would (justifiably) be heavily inclined to take the advice of the intelligence community on whether or not the secrecy rating is warranted.

If the state can keep secrets from me, I can keep secrets from the state. You'll pry my encryption from my cold, dead hands.

Isn't this the definition of a deep state?

Why do people think deep state is a conspiracy theory?

> The "state secrets" firewall means that the public has no ability to police government surveillance.

The public can change the composition of the Congress, which has oversight and lawmaking authorities over domestic intelligence agencies.

id argue one cannot change the composition of congress. political propaganda is regulated through the big 3 media outlets, and is a one-way monologue reinforcing certain values and priorities. Congressional candidates respond only to the cash that is required to secure their elections, and thus their real constituency is comprised almost entirely of corporate interests.

>id argue one cannot change the composition of congress.

I hope that if term limits ever become a thing, it would only take a few elections of well informed voters to start making the change.

I think that congress is supposed to be a fluid body of people that are supposed to represent the population, and change as the population's interests change.

What we have now is career politicians making it to congress, and then milking it with all the donations, re election groups and lobby groups funneling them money making it very hard to actually enact any real change.

Even if one or two people make it to congress that are young and full of ideas/change they cannot get anything done because they are vastly outnumbered by the old fogies still writing policies like the 1950's.

While terms limits solve one problem, it creates a far bigger one. Most well meaning “good people” have to sacrifice their career in order to serve in Politics. Yes, it is a career. But what is wrong with it? What do you think they should do with rest of their life?

Moreover, it takes more than one term to achieve any meaningful change. Things like Obamacare didn’t just start with Obama. Major changes takes 10+ years.

Congress/senators should be under better scrutiny, yes. Don’t let them become corrupt, prevent insider trading etc. but terms limits is not the solution to this problem. In my opinion I think term limit would rule out “poor people” from ever trying to run for office.

Your point is valid here, but I'll mention that the type of people you feel would possibly be excluded are very likely already excluded by the current system.

Congress should have oversight over TLAs, but unfortunately the converse is the case.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/31/cia-di...

Why is this comment being downvoted?

What alternatives are there other than achieving meaningful representation in government e.g. Congress?

Because often people who don’t get their way can’t believe their ideas didn’t win and much prefer saying democracy is broken.

It's being downvoted because it's utterly fallacious. The democratic process has been captured by mass media and turned into a simulation of choosing change. Divisive bikesheds are played up to the max, while the fundamental substantive issues like this are off the discussion table. Any candidate that dares to break rank and bring them up gets labeled "fringe" and memory-holed by the maintream media.

The ultimate alternative is going to be voting from the rooftops, when we've finally become fed up with the results of their corruption.

This but it is not only traditional media gatekeeping. Google pulled the plug on Tulsi Gabber's ad account without explanation and she is suing Google over it.

"Google ad set up got them approved everything was ready to rock and roll I was the most googled candidate of the night as I have been for every debate that I've participated in the issue was during that first debate you know what while that peak period was happening our Google ad account was suspended by Google with no explanation whatsoever."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5o-zqII6eQ

Furthermore; democracy relies on there being meaningful communication and an at least somewhat unbiased sampling of popular opinion.

So firstly on meaningful communication: Under the guise of freedom of speech nowadays falsehoods, and even more critically just plain noise is pervasive; the freedom to shout nonsense is inhibiting the freedom to hear a reasonable and diverse set of opinions and facts. Most (loud and repeated) messages are by corporations and other groups too; because that channel simply has more resources - and that's unfortunate not because corporations are intrinsically evil (which they aren't), but because people are intrinsically social and groups of people often quite the reverse; so that corporate "speech" in the form of campaign finance typically is plainly corruption - albeit legal, even if most of its constituent individuals are reasonably moral people. In short; we know the evils of censorship and have robust traditions to at least oppose that; but we do not have similar traditions vs. overload and deception, and indeed our (entirely reasonable) protections against censorship make us more vulnerable to these rising problems. Is there a solution? Who knows; but any solution certainly is not on the public radar yet let alone nearby.

Secondly on democracy: It's pretty plausible that democracies undeniable success in the past centuries may have benefited in part be due to the uncanny wisdom of the crowds. But that effect has risks and flaws (a quick google finds e.g. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140708-when-crowd-wisdo... discussing some of those). And as it so happens, simply because we communicate so much nowadays, we're always bombarded with what which constituency will vote / should vote / thinks / etc; in ways that would have been simply inconceivable a century ago. And exactly that kind of information turns out to critically undermine the wisdom of the crowds. Polling (and in general political commentary not on the substance but on the shifting political winds themselves) is poison to democracy. The more people know about how others vote and how they should vote... the worse they vote collectively. Democracy's decision making advantage is being eroded without any malice or election manipulation required; it's an entirely natural social process that indeed may well be the ultimate root cause of the polarization of US politics.

We're not going to get congress to do much good until we can get democracy to work again; and we won't be able to do that until we have some way to address these fundamental, underlying weaknesses we currently face. Almost by definition if you can get one party on board, there will be another that's opposed - and a cacophony of voices shouting factually inconsistent statements, lies, disagreements, lobbying to the point that no unbiased sampling of voters will ever exist. So whether people have thought about it or not; everybody realizes that grand benign national changes are utterly beyond the divided, impotent congress that suggesting they do more then keep the lights on (and even that is pushing it nowadays!) is so naive as to come across as almost insincere.

The result of Citizens United was the death blow on American democracy. First, companies can put as much money as they want on elections, second, rich people control companies, and third, foreign countries also control companies. Put this together and the USA has no functioning democracy anymore, it is at the whims of billionaires and/or foreign powers.

There are many things more important than money, so either money doesn't break the system, or if it does, it's at least countable and potentially to be held accountable. It just makes sense to make that explicit.

If money is so powerful, why is Michael Bloomberg not going to get the democratic nomination?

Really influence is a commodity which can and is bought and sold (see enorsements) and money may be used to purchase it but the two aren't identical. You can't just compare budgets and pick a winner unless both have comparable strategies and influence.

It brings to mind a quixotic approach of trying to value influence quantitatively. Like trying to figure out how much value could be extracted from a celebrity endorsement.

Money, and the threat of money are both factors. There are bigger fish than Bloomberg.

Because Bloomberg is not the only one with a lot of money trying to get the presidency.

The public who cares about this have no say in all of the other seats of the house.

Ideally and in my fondest wishes, you're right. In practice however, I think it has become a game only people with vast sums of money can play.

With the state secrets firewall, you have no idea whether or not you should change the composition of Congress.

> The public can change the composition of the Congress

In theory. In practice, Congress members are not selected by a public electorate, but rather by careful gerrymandering practices paid for by corporate interests designed to benefit themselves financially. In the USA, you have no choice of your elected leaders.

Correct, technology and money make it possible for politicians to select voters, instead of voters selecting politicians.