I'm pretty much the same. I used to believe in gov and rule of law but when you see how many criminals get off and how selective all these agencies are in whom they prosecute, I am disgusted at how corrupt the whole system has become.

>Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

"Power attracts the corruptible. Suspect all who seek it ... We should grant power over our affairs only to those who are reluctant to hold it and then only under conditions that increase that reluctance."

-- Frank Herbert

But Herbert was also speaking in a context of a rigid social structure. Any leader came not from the masses but an elite social class, royal houses. Even those that seemed to come from the masses inevitably would turn out to be elites in hiding. Or they would quickly step aside to make room for someone of better blood. So the wisdom of the quote is that if one must choose between two princes, the prince that does not want power should ascend over his ambitious brother. It does not mean looking for leaders amongst the lower orders.

Don't worry, leaders who came from the masses get corrupted by the power all right. Both Stalin and Hitler came from quite unprivileged families.

(Godwin law, yadda yadda, but the examples are directly applicable here.)

And then those who are reluctant delegate or are cornered to delegate to bastards.

This quote don't carry us very far.

They always have been corrupt, it’s just that in the past they’ve been better at keeping it quiet and had better PR. The “G-man” fighting organized crime goes pretty far in terms of positive public perception.

However, I would argue the FBI is likely less corrupt now than in the Hoover days when it was a one-man kingdom. More opportunities for leaks of electronic documents, etc.

It's my firm belief that transparency is what will help us as a society to reform these institutions, little pieces at a time, bit by bit. Transparency and liability.

Corruption was built-in, easy, while "we-the-people" have the power to highlight corruption and act on it there's hope to get a better system at some point.

Agreed. This is why "perception of corruption" indexes can be misleading. I came from a country, where, if you ask residents would say there is little corruption. I would argue it's just not visible.

While other countries that attempt to root out corruption in the public way, get the perception of being more corrupt only because the government is transparent about it.

> When I was younger, I respected agencies like the FBI, CIA, NSA, etc. Now I think they are corrupt as hell and we’d be better off without them.

Hear, hear. I'd abolish these institutions long before I abolished the police (and I'd love to reform US police into something basically unrecognizable).

And then we'd need to replace them with new institutions to pick up the slack they were originally set up for. And we'd staff them with the same people because we need their skills. A bit like what happened in Germany post ww2.

In Georgia (a country in Eastern Europe, not a US state) they just dismissed nearly all police officers some time around 2004, without the right to work in police again. The previous police force was corrupt beyond redemption.

Then they hired and trained an entirely new police force, including the top officers. As a result, corruption in the new police force basically does not exist.

I suppose most people in NSA are not renowned cryptographers; it's not they who are most corrupt.

Arguably anyone with the sheer horsepower to play ball at the Equation Group level can see far enough around the bend to feel conflicted about working for the contemporary NSA.

This is obviously speculation but if the NSA was reformed into something that mostly respected the rule of law most of the time, more excellent cryptographers and cryptanalysts would want to work there.

I imagine that the NSA’s ostensible mission of protecting United States communications and compromising the communications of legitimately menacing regimes would be better served without domestic full-take and secret courts.

It's the lack of transparency that's the problem.

At least police are being policed and watched now because of body cameras and the Internet.

It's also the sheer incompetence that's crazy.

My thoughts are that it's a good thing to have agents in the world that can operate in the dark, keeping their actions, and sometimes the consequences, hidden and secret. It's not hard to envision nation state level threats that could be mitigated by illegal assassination of a warlord, or stealing all of a drug cartel's money or so on. That only works in the context of strict oversight and principled direction by an incorruptible chain of command and leadership by elected officials given privileged access.

Take the oversight and principled direction away, and you're left with state funded villains whose activity will almost always run counter to societal well-being.

Our institutions are failing because we eroded and ultimately lost our social cohesion and embraced the cultural balkanization instead of seeking new shared values.

It's bad enough that we don't trust the media, but the CIA being off the leash is horrifying. The war on drugs is a crystallized example of this social failure mode.

> It's not hard to envision nation state level threats that could be mitigated by illegal assassination of a warlord, or stealing all of a drug cartel's money or so on.

This may be true in the abstract, I agree, but out there in the world, you don't have to stray too deeply into kook-dom to realize that, unsettlingly often, we're (the US) the guys responsible for the creation of the conditions in which warlords and drug cartels operate in the first place -- and almost as frequently, of the groups themselves. There are no drug cartels without a War On Drugs, and indeed, the CIA has been shown to be deeply involved in cartel activity itself. (See the Kiki Camarena story, Gary Webb's work, and the story of Sister Dianna Ortiz. All mainstream sources, no whackjobs. The recent-ish Camarena Netflix documentary "The Last Narc" is terrific.) So you could make a compelling case that if we didn't get our hands dirty in these areas at all, we wouldn't need a CIA or NSA to manage the inevitable consequences when the actors involve start behaving in ways we don't like. (I'm told they call this "blowback".) And indeed, this is exactly the point. It's a genius business. It's like the guys in Amsterdam who own both the cannabis coffee-shop and the kebab place next door to it. Revolving door operation. Prints money!

> That only works in the context of strict oversight and principled direction by an incorruptible chain of command and leadership by elected officials given privileged access.

Respectfully, this is impossible. Human beings cannot do this. No one is incorruptible, and there are too many people with an interest in meaningful oversight never existing, starting with these little mafias themselves. The real-world record bears this out: there is no meaningful oversight, from congress to FISA to your local cops using StingRays. They're just not going to tell you what they're doing. And if you bother them too much about it, well, let's just say don't get on any small aircraft. This is an open secret in DC. Look, even Chuck Schumer knows: "Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you."

As I've said in other threads: if you ask a bunch of people to get world-class-good at lying, stealing, betraying, and murdering, and they then start doing those things to you, well, there's no one to blame but yourself.

The warnings against the CIA came as early as the Doolittle report [0] during the Eisenhower administration (see Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes), and Peter Kornbluh's Bay of Pigs Declassified documents the intention of Kennedy's state department to rename the CIA and strip it of its covert action capacity in the aftermath of the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation.

But really, you could go as far back as Nietzsche if you wanted to ignore another perfectly apt warning:

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes back into you.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doolittle_Report,_1954

This is all very well expressed.

Hey thanks so much, that's nice to hear.

My pleasure:)

>> by an incorruptible chain of command and leadership by elected officials given privileged access.

Nope. All chains are corruptible. Nothing should ever be based on the idea that some core group of people is above reproach. That is the stuff of superhero movies. Realworld trust systems must be built on the basis that everyone and anyone might be a bad actor. All nodes should have oversight. All actors should be accountable to multiple levels of supervision. Everything should be documented. Those who become corrupt need to be detected and removed. When dealing with classified information the process will operate more slowly but must still take place.

On the obverse, we could just eschew hierarchies of power altogether. No nodes to supervise in that case, and everyone is directly accountable. Of course we long ago crossed the Rubicon, and we're simply riding the momentum to the inflection point wherein we are all doomed.

Injecting more naive rationalist bureaucrats into the system won't quell its demise. Those who have the greatest leverage over world outcomes have no interest in remedying even an iota of the social decay. And those who directly act under the dictates of the moment of those people have only self-interest to motivate them. Those of us at the bottom are onlookers, helpless to move the inertial mass away from its predestined impact, or blind to it - either by deliberate delusion or by ignorance and perhaps both. All of this because we allowed the reins to be taken by mere men, unprepared to pilot the immeasurable potential of mankind responsibly.

> All nodes should have oversight.

This is a lovely way of phrasing something that I have been thinking about.

Basically that low accountability systems are really bad across the board. If they work for one generation (as in a benevolent dictatorship) then that’s nice, but it’s not a long-term solution.

We need a parity chip on everything.

I think that systems that require oversight to fight off corruption aren't stable in the long-term. Almost inevitably the executive and the oversight get corrupted in the same way. And then they end up perpetuating themselves. The only real solution seems to be to 'randomly' reset the system once in a while.

The superhero approach might (arguably) be valid in some cases -- I'm thinking of Lincoln, Washington, and FDR.

But an institution must be larger than a single person. Because if you want something to last longer than about 40 years (which is about the maximum amount of time a superhero can be super) you have to have succession.

It's also notable that those "greats" had in common a vision larger than themselves. Selflessness and an annihilation of ego, in service of a larger project, seems to be a requirement for getting yourself to that superhero status in the first place.

Lincoln, Washington, and FDR was good presidents, but they where not saints.

FDR tried to manipulate the supreme court by increasing the number of judges.

Lincoln engaged in secret manipulating of the media.

Washington was a slave owner.

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

https://observer.com/2014/11/abraham-lincoln-as-media-manipu...

>It's not hard to envision nation state level threats that could be mitigated by illegal assassination of a warlord, or stealing all of a drug cartel's money or so on.

Its hard to envision any foreign nation state level threat that is more dangerous than domestic state police that surveil, torture and murder people completely outside the law and the Constitution.

You wouldn't wipe your phone turning it in, even a work phone?

Their phones were to be surrendered as part of an investigation. Wiping them is destroying records.

It’s different if you’re just returning a work phone, or preparing to sell or transfer a personal phone.

When members of a group do it more or less en masse, it implies that they have something to hide.

> Their phones were to be surrendered as part of an investigation. Wiping them is destroying records.

Yeah, isn't that very literally obstruction of justice?

Only if they decide it is, or if a judge is willing to learn that their entire family decided to commit seppuku while they were at work.

As a routine practice, yes. If my phone was subpoenaed (or likely to be in the future), wiping my phone would be against the law. I would only do so if the risk was worth it.

You have risk.

FBI agents - not so much.