7 ms·

I think Washington has changed Obama more than Obama changed Washington. He's spent seven years in the craziest bubble in America surrounded by people being pai

by jordanb 11y ago

I think Washington has changed Obama more than Obama changed Washington. He's spent seven years in the craziest bubble in America surrounded by people being paid millions to distort his worldview one way or another. A while back he advised some kids in College to never type anything into a computer if they want it to remain private. For him, it probably seems completely reasonable. I doubt he's touched a keyboard since he became president. His daughters are the only teenagers in America who've never been near Snapchat (the Secret Service will keep it that way). And he's literally surrounded by security officers and spooks everywhere he goes. They manage every interaction he has so you can imagine their worldview is going to affect him. I'm not trying to make excuses for him. He's so completely off the deep end nowadays (between this and TPP) that it's heartbreaking as a long time supporter. I hope he leaves the presidency, leaves Washington and spends a few years thinking about what went wrong before writing his memoirs. It would be an amazing insight into the corrosive influence of Washington on a person's integrity.

StavrosK 11y ago
If the president can't speak for online privacy because it's not a part of his world, poor people in the US are just fucked.
- kough 11y ago
  Nothing new here.
teddyh 11y ago
> It would be an amazing insight into the corrosive influence of Washington on a person's integrity. I always liked Václav Havel’s short speech from 1991 where he coined the phrase “power unto death”: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/vl/notes/havel.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/vl/notes/havel.html
- jonesb6 11y ago
  I have hundreds of bookmarks in chrome. I have so many bookmarks that I've essentially stopped making new ones because the back log is simply too large. That speech I bookmarked. Despite the terrible formatting that speech is a work of art applicable to every human being who holds power, whether it's POTUS or the office manager.
  - eru 11y ago
    Try Pocket. That's easier to organize.
    - Estragon 11y ago
      Classic HN response.
  - 0942v8653 11y ago
    > Despite the terrible formatting javascript:var sheet = document.createElement('style');sheet.innerHTML = "body{margin: 40px auto;max-width: 650px;line-height: 1.5;font-size: 18px;color: #3a3a3a;padding: 0 10px;}";document.body.appendChild(sheet); Paste into your URL bar.
  - jcrites 11y ago
    I'd recommend Pinboard.in. If you pay for an account with Bookmark Archive, it will also save a permanent copy of the bookmarks so that you can read them even if the original goes down, and provides full text search over them. There's a nice "Save Pinboard Bookmark" that you can add as a Bookmarklet. Lastly, it has a flag for "Read Later" if you like tracking that intention. It is excellent for solving the information craving that goes, "I could have sworn that I read something about that...", and then actually finding it later, sometimes years later, in appropriate need. I don't use that capability very often, but I love the feeling that I have a permanent archive of all this information.
  - mixmastamyk 11y ago
    Terrible formatting? It's pure html. If it looks bad, you should adjust your browser to improve it, or hit the reader button if lazy.
- edc117 11y ago
  Fantastic speech, thank you very much for sharing.
studentrob 11y ago
> I hope he leaves the presidency, leaves Washington and spends a few years thinking about what went wrong before writing his memoirs. No doubt he will. But let's stay focused on the debate for now. He's still in office. There's still time to share facts with him. He says he has a digital services team. Who holds those positions currently? And who are his technology advisors? What are they saying on this issue? What have they shared with Obama? From Obama's remarks, it sounds like he treats the digital services team more as a toolset, rather than a team of trusted advisors. EDIT: The next PCAST (President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology) meeting will be on March 25 and webcast here [1]. No need to sign up, just visit that page on the date to view. I suggest we all watch this and submit questions to their group in advance. They meet every other month. The last meeting was on January 15, which predates Comey's open letter to the public (Feb 21) about the San Bernardino case, so they have not yet publicly discussed encryption in light of what's happened since Comey's letter. [1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/ostp/pcast https://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/ostp/pcast
willholloway 11y ago
Let's take a moment of deep appreciation for President Obama's decision to not panic after the San Bernadino shooting, reinstate color terror alert codes, spark a ground invasion of Syria, or in any other way overreact. For a brief interlude in American history, we had a president that didn't capitalize on terror attacks politically, or generally set a tone of paranoia and fear. We won't always be this lucky.
- studentrob 11y ago
  I am happy about that. What does any of that have to do with the fact that he does not understand encryption technology? I can appreciate some things about Obama and not others. People aren't all bad or good. I support ideas, not people, just as I hate the game, not the player.
  - willholloway 11y ago
    We almost never say it. I want to say it. As someone who first became politically aware during the post 9/11 Bush era, it's really nice to have an administration in the White House that isn't trying to scare us. We wouldn't live like that in a Trump administration. We would live in fear.
    - digler999 11y ago
      hillary would do the same god damn thing. "but...terrorism!" "Iran is threatening freedom".
      - willholloway 11y ago
        "SCOTT SHANE: Well, five years ago, there were—there was a question about what to do as Gaddafi’s forces approached Benghazi. The Europeans and the Arab League were calling for action. No one really knew what the outcome would be, but there was certainly a very serious threat to a large number of civilians in Benghazi. But, you know, the U.S. was still involved in two big wars, and the sort of heavyweights in the Obama administration were against getting involved—Robert Gates, the defensive secretary; Joe Biden, the vice president; Tom Donilon, the national security adviser. And Secretary Clinton had been meeting with representatives of Britain, France and the Arab countries. And she sort of essentially called in from Paris and then from Cairo, and she ended up tipping the balance and essentially convincing President Obama, who later described this as a 51-49 decision, to join the other countries in the coalition to bomb Gaddafi’s forces." http://www.democracynow.org/2016/3/3/the_libya_gamble_inside_hillary_clinton http://www.democracynow.org/2016/3/3/the_libya_gamble_inside...
jacquesm 11y ago
> It would be an amazing insight into the corrosive influence of Washington on a person's integrity. That's going on the assumption that he had integrity in the first place and I'm no longer immune to considering the possibility that he did not and just played the voters for all it was worth. For instance: someone with integrity would have returned an un-deserved Nobel peace prize.
- karmelapple 11y ago
  Really? That seems very disrespectful to the Nobel committee to me.
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    No, what the Nobel committee did was disrespectful to all those that won that prize for good reasons. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Nobel_Peace_Prize https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Nobel_Peace_Prize Quoting "Obama said he was "surprised" and "deeply humbled" by the award. He stated that he does not feel he deserved the award,[14][15] and that he did not feel worthy of the company the award would place him in." So if that was his stance he should have refused.
    - bennyg 11y ago
      Everybody says that though.
      - jacquesm 11y ago
        But usually I don't agree with it, in Obama's case I do. It's not as if he brought lasting peace to some place that's been on fire for the last 3 decades, besides the prize was awarded way too early in his first term for him to have time enough to accomplish such a thing in the first place (after only 9 months). My personal view on this is that he mostly received it because he wasn't Bush and they were trying to shame him into doing the right thing (which may have had a point) but I don't think that worked out too well.
  - 11y ago
Grishnakh 11y ago
I'm not so sure about all this. Bernie's been in Washington for decades as a Congressman, so he's been exposed to the same stuff, and his worldview is completely different from Obama's. Before he was elected, Obama had very little experience in Washington; he didn't even serve a full Senate term, and mostly voted "present". He just told us what we wanted to hear, and didn't have much of a record backing up his rhetoric. Hillary, by contrast, has a lengthy record, but it backs up all the worst actions that Obama has shown, but worse. Bernie has an even lengthier record but unlike Hillary there's no indication of corruption and his record is pretty much all good from a liberal perspective.
- studentrob 11y ago
  Note that Bernie and Hillary have both said they believe middle ground can be sought on this issue. As strange as it may sound, the Clintons did the most for the pro-encryption side of this debate. Former President Clinton passed CALEA, which TechDirt points out applies to "manufacturers and providers of telecommunications support services" [1]. Also from CALEA, > (1) Design of features and systems configurations. This subchapter does not authorize any law enforcement agency or office > (a) to require any specific design of equipment, facilities, services, features, or system configurations to be adopted by any provider of a wire or electronic communication service, any manufacturer of telecommunications equipment, or any provider of telecommunications support services; > (b) to prohibit the adoption of any equipment, facility, service, or feature by any provider of a wire or electronic communication service, any manufacturer of telecommunications equipment, or any provider of telecommunications support services. I believe the judge in the San Bernardino case will point to this to deny the DOJ's request to use the All Writs Act to compel Apple to write the special version of the OS. At the very least, CALEA is a strong statement that Congress has already decided that they will not pass laws requiring Apple and others to put backdoors in their phones. That doesn't mean the debate is over, however. Many people still do not understand encryption technology and will blame technologists for standing in the way of legislation that they perceive would have saved us from certain terrorist attacks. Although Bernie has said he's against surveillance, he and many of his most vocal supporters remain uninformed about encryption. I tried posting a couple times in the Sanders subreddit, calling for Sanders to take a stronger position in support of end-to-end encryption [2]. The response was he can't take a position on this because it isn't a major issue. I think that time is fast approaching. Obama hasn't let up, and obviously neither will technologists. It's difficult for a politician or law enforcement official to tell the population that they can't track all communications in the manner they used to be able to, and on the other hand, we technologists cannot simply ask math to stop working. [1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160223/23441033692/how-existing-wiretapping-laws-could-save-apple-fbis-broad-demands.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160223/23441033692/how-e... [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/SandersForPresident/comments/49otvu/the_mass_surveillance_debate_kicked_off_by/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SandersForPresident/comments/49otvu...
spoiledtechie 11y ago
Bull, he was always this way. He lies just like every other politician. Get over your lust for him and see through it.
gcb0 11y ago
in other words, we are OK with the man elected to represent us for a few years to live like an alien. there will probably not be a single American that thinks a bomb proof car in a exaggeration.
- krapp 11y ago
  >there will probably not be a single American that thinks a bomb proof car in a exaggeration. Everyone in the world knows the President's car is a mobile battle fortress. I saw an entire show about it on the History Channel. That's not because he's detached from the people, though, it's an unfortunate necessity of office. The last time an American President rode around in public in a convertible, it didn't end well for him.
  - gcb0 11y ago
    > unfortunate necessity of office and you just proved my point.
eggy 11y ago
I think Obama had that in his character years before he even ran for President, so I think it is an easy out to say he was corrupted by the system in Washington. Basic character doesn't just do a 180. Granted, your ideals may be softened by coming up against those who oppose them, but they do not reverse and hide under the covers. All politicians promise many beautiful things, but they have their agendas. Under Obama drone strikes have multiplied in several nations we are not even at war with, and stayed out of the news for the most part, and he has not been made accountable in the slightest. Through his representatives it has been made clear that he wants Snowden to return and face espionage charges. Even if that is the way to face the government, he did not offer any of his take on it to say otherwise. I am very untrusting of most, if not all, politicians, since I see it is a game for people to gain and feel powerful. I do not idealize candidates in the slightest. Trump polarizes people, and I do not like him in the slightest; I know where he stands though. With Obama his rhetoric and his actions are not in sync.
kobayashi 11y ago
I find your train of thought to be rather belittling and infantilizing of a man who, by all accounts, is quite brilliant (regardless of views on his politics, it's a commonly held position). Now, sure, people are affected by the circumstances in which they live, but you've framed it as though Obama has been hoodwinked by nefarious and persistent forces. Personally, I disagree with President Obama's crypto policies, but I don't assume that he came to his positions out of anything but a thoughtful reading of intelligence briefings and alike.
jonathanmh 11y ago
> I think Washington has changed Obama more than Obama changed Washington. He's spent seven years in the craziest bubble in America surrounded by people being paid millions to distort his worldview one way or another. I completely agree, I bet it's not a great job most of the time and a really different and isolated world.

by jordanb 11y ago

StavrosK 11y ago

If the president can't speak for online privacy because it's not a part of his world, poor people in the US are just fucked.

kough 11y ago
Nothing new here.

teddyh 11y ago

> It would be an amazing insight into the corrosive influence of Washington on a person's integrity. I always liked Václav Havel’s short speech from 1991 where he coined the phrase “power unto death”: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/vl/notes/havel.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/vl/notes/havel.html

jonesb6 11y ago
I have hundreds of bookmarks in chrome. I have so many bookmarks that I've essentially stopped making new ones because the back log is simply too large. That speech I bookmarked. Despite the terrible formatting that speech is a work of art applicable to every human being who holds power, whether it's POTUS or the office manager.
- eru 11y ago
  Try Pocket. That's easier to organize.
  - Estragon 11y ago
    Classic HN response.
- 0942v8653 11y ago
  > Despite the terrible formatting javascript:var sheet = document.createElement('style');sheet.innerHTML = "body{margin: 40px auto;max-width: 650px;line-height: 1.5;font-size: 18px;color: #3a3a3a;padding: 0 10px;}";document.body.appendChild(sheet); Paste into your URL bar.
- jcrites 11y ago
  I'd recommend Pinboard.in. If you pay for an account with Bookmark Archive, it will also save a permanent copy of the bookmarks so that you can read them even if the original goes down, and provides full text search over them. There's a nice "Save Pinboard Bookmark" that you can add as a Bookmarklet. Lastly, it has a flag for "Read Later" if you like tracking that intention. It is excellent for solving the information craving that goes, "I could have sworn that I read something about that...", and then actually finding it later, sometimes years later, in appropriate need. I don't use that capability very often, but I love the feeling that I have a permanent archive of all this information.
- mixmastamyk 11y ago
  Terrible formatting? It's pure html. If it looks bad, you should adjust your browser to improve it, or hit the reader button if lazy.
edc117 11y ago
Fantastic speech, thank you very much for sharing.

studentrob 11y ago

> I hope he leaves the presidency, leaves Washington and spends a few years thinking about what went wrong before writing his memoirs. No doubt he will. But let's stay focused on the debate for now. He's still in office. There's still time to share facts with him. He says he has a digital services team. Who holds those positions currently? And who are his technology advisors? What are they saying on this issue? What have they shared with Obama? From Obama's remarks, it sounds like he treats the digital services team more as a toolset, rather than a team of trusted advisors. EDIT: The next PCAST (President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology) meeting will be on March 25 and webcast here [1]. No need to sign up, just visit that page on the date to view. I suggest we all watch this and submit questions to their group in advance. They meet every other month. The last meeting was on January 15, which predates Comey's open letter to the public (Feb 21) about the San Bernardino case, so they have not yet publicly discussed encryption in light of what's happened since Comey's letter. [1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/ostp/pcast https://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/ostp/pcast

willholloway 11y ago

Let's take a moment of deep appreciation for President Obama's decision to not panic after the San Bernadino shooting, reinstate color terror alert codes, spark a ground invasion of Syria, or in any other way overreact. For a brief interlude in American history, we had a president that didn't capitalize on terror attacks politically, or generally set a tone of paranoia and fear. We won't always be this lucky.

studentrob 11y ago
I am happy about that. What does any of that have to do with the fact that he does not understand encryption technology? I can appreciate some things about Obama and not others. People aren't all bad or good. I support ideas, not people, just as I hate the game, not the player.
- willholloway 11y ago
  We almost never say it. I want to say it. As someone who first became politically aware during the post 9/11 Bush era, it's really nice to have an administration in the White House that isn't trying to scare us. We wouldn't live like that in a Trump administration. We would live in fear.
  - digler999 11y ago
    hillary would do the same god damn thing. "but...terrorism!" "Iran is threatening freedom".
    - willholloway 11y ago
      "SCOTT SHANE: Well, five years ago, there were—there was a question about what to do as Gaddafi’s forces approached Benghazi. The Europeans and the Arab League were calling for action. No one really knew what the outcome would be, but there was certainly a very serious threat to a large number of civilians in Benghazi. But, you know, the U.S. was still involved in two big wars, and the sort of heavyweights in the Obama administration were against getting involved—Robert Gates, the defensive secretary; Joe Biden, the vice president; Tom Donilon, the national security adviser. And Secretary Clinton had been meeting with representatives of Britain, France and the Arab countries. And she sort of essentially called in from Paris and then from Cairo, and she ended up tipping the balance and essentially convincing President Obama, who later described this as a 51-49 decision, to join the other countries in the coalition to bomb Gaddafi’s forces." http://www.democracynow.org/2016/3/3/the_libya_gamble_inside_hillary_clinton http://www.democracynow.org/2016/3/3/the_libya_gamble_inside...

jacquesm 11y ago

> It would be an amazing insight into the corrosive influence of Washington on a person's integrity. That's going on the assumption that he had integrity in the first place and I'm no longer immune to considering the possibility that he did not and just played the voters for all it was worth. For instance: someone with integrity would have returned an un-deserved Nobel peace prize.

karmelapple 11y ago
Really? That seems very disrespectful to the Nobel committee to me.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  No, what the Nobel committee did was disrespectful to all those that won that prize for good reasons. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Nobel_Peace_Prize https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Nobel_Peace_Prize Quoting "Obama said he was "surprised" and "deeply humbled" by the award. He stated that he does not feel he deserved the award,[14][15] and that he did not feel worthy of the company the award would place him in." So if that was his stance he should have refused.
  - bennyg 11y ago
    Everybody says that though.
    - jacquesm 11y ago
      But usually I don't agree with it, in Obama's case I do. It's not as if he brought lasting peace to some place that's been on fire for the last 3 decades, besides the prize was awarded way too early in his first term for him to have time enough to accomplish such a thing in the first place (after only 9 months). My personal view on this is that he mostly received it because he wasn't Bush and they were trying to shame him into doing the right thing (which may have had a point) but I don't think that worked out too well.
- 11y ago

Grishnakh 11y ago

I'm not so sure about all this. Bernie's been in Washington for decades as a Congressman, so he's been exposed to the same stuff, and his worldview is completely different from Obama's. Before he was elected, Obama had very little experience in Washington; he didn't even serve a full Senate term, and mostly voted "present". He just told us what we wanted to hear, and didn't have much of a record backing up his rhetoric. Hillary, by contrast, has a lengthy record, but it backs up all the worst actions that Obama has shown, but worse. Bernie has an even lengthier record but unlike Hillary there's no indication of corruption and his record is pretty much all good from a liberal perspective.

studentrob 11y ago
Note that Bernie and Hillary have both said they believe middle ground can be sought on this issue. As strange as it may sound, the Clintons did the most for the pro-encryption side of this debate. Former President Clinton passed CALEA, which TechDirt points out applies to "manufacturers and providers of telecommunications support services" [1]. Also from CALEA, > (1) Design of features and systems configurations. This subchapter does not authorize any law enforcement agency or office > (a) to require any specific design of equipment, facilities, services, features, or system configurations to be adopted by any provider of a wire or electronic communication service, any manufacturer of telecommunications equipment, or any provider of telecommunications support services; > (b) to prohibit the adoption of any equipment, facility, service, or feature by any provider of a wire or electronic communication service, any manufacturer of telecommunications equipment, or any provider of telecommunications support services. I believe the judge in the San Bernardino case will point to this to deny the DOJ's request to use the All Writs Act to compel Apple to write the special version of the OS. At the very least, CALEA is a strong statement that Congress has already decided that they will not pass laws requiring Apple and others to put backdoors in their phones. That doesn't mean the debate is over, however. Many people still do not understand encryption technology and will blame technologists for standing in the way of legislation that they perceive would have saved us from certain terrorist attacks. Although Bernie has said he's against surveillance, he and many of his most vocal supporters remain uninformed about encryption. I tried posting a couple times in the Sanders subreddit, calling for Sanders to take a stronger position in support of end-to-end encryption [2]. The response was he can't take a position on this because it isn't a major issue. I think that time is fast approaching. Obama hasn't let up, and obviously neither will technologists. It's difficult for a politician or law enforcement official to tell the population that they can't track all communications in the manner they used to be able to, and on the other hand, we technologists cannot simply ask math to stop working. [1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160223/23441033692/how-existing-wiretapping-laws-could-save-apple-fbis-broad-demands.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160223/23441033692/how-e... [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/SandersForPresident/comments/49otvu/the_mass_surveillance_debate_kicked_off_by/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SandersForPresident/comments/49otvu...

spoiledtechie 11y ago

Bull, he was always this way. He lies just like every other politician. Get over your lust for him and see through it.

gcb0 11y ago

in other words, we are OK with the man elected to represent us for a few years to live like an alien. there will probably not be a single American that thinks a bomb proof car in a exaggeration.

krapp 11y ago
>there will probably not be a single American that thinks a bomb proof car in a exaggeration. Everyone in the world knows the President's car is a mobile battle fortress. I saw an entire show about it on the History Channel. That's not because he's detached from the people, though, it's an unfortunate necessity of office. The last time an American President rode around in public in a convertible, it didn't end well for him.
- gcb0 11y ago
  > unfortunate necessity of office and you just proved my point.

eggy 11y ago

I think Obama had that in his character years before he even ran for President, so I think it is an easy out to say he was corrupted by the system in Washington. Basic character doesn't just do a 180. Granted, your ideals may be softened by coming up against those who oppose them, but they do not reverse and hide under the covers. All politicians promise many beautiful things, but they have their agendas. Under Obama drone strikes have multiplied in several nations we are not even at war with, and stayed out of the news for the most part, and he has not been made accountable in the slightest. Through his representatives it has been made clear that he wants Snowden to return and face espionage charges. Even if that is the way to face the government, he did not offer any of his take on it to say otherwise. I am very untrusting of most, if not all, politicians, since I see it is a game for people to gain and feel powerful. I do not idealize candidates in the slightest. Trump polarizes people, and I do not like him in the slightest; I know where he stands though. With Obama his rhetoric and his actions are not in sync.

kobayashi 11y ago

I find your train of thought to be rather belittling and infantilizing of a man who, by all accounts, is quite brilliant (regardless of views on his politics, it's a commonly held position). Now, sure, people are affected by the circumstances in which they live, but you've framed it as though Obama has been hoodwinked by nefarious and persistent forces. Personally, I disagree with President Obama's crypto policies, but I don't assume that he came to his positions out of anything but a thoughtful reading of intelligence briefings and alike.

jonathanmh 11y ago

> I think Washington has changed Obama more than Obama changed Washington. He's spent seven years in the craziest bubble in America surrounded by people being paid millions to distort his worldview one way or another. I completely agree, I bet it's not a great job most of the time and a really different and isolated world.