5 ms·

> Under a Clinton administration, my list would have looked much the same. And the political polarization and bantering continue. But at least there is some tr

by dwe3000 10y ago

> Under a Clinton administration, my list would have looked much the same. And the political polarization and bantering continue. But at least there is some truth in there.

new299 10y ago
The context of the next line is somewhat important: > Trump's election just means the threats will be much greater, and the battles a lot harder to win.
- tomp 10y ago
  I'm not sure I agree with this. Certainly most of these problems (surveilance, assaults on various liberties, etc.) were started/ramped up under W. Bush, but most of them were greately enhanced during Obama, so I have no reason to assume that Hillary might be any better (except better at PR/propaganda, of course).
  - viraptor 10y ago
    So far the surveillance and related laws suck, but to some extent they're controlled and somewhat public. Even before the Snowden revelations, some monitoring was expected, and some was talked about. Of course the scale and depth were a new revelation (tapping private links, etc.), but it existed in some kind of framework that was supposed to be controlled. (Regardless of how well that worked) Since the new potential president is a lot less organised and generally random in his actions, the old framework will be harder to rely on. Who gets the access now? Who's tracked? Who's trusted if he doesn't believe the current agencies? That's still unknown and we may get more secret deals now without clearly defined rules (even if they're not public) Basically we got a chaotic neutral/evil leader now. Anything can happen and I don't expect he'll care about the subtle effects of new decisions.
  - AimHere 10y ago
    One reason for thinking that Trump would be worse is precisely because Hillary and Obama's propaganda machine is good at painting them in a better light. Trump doesn't have to pretend to care about human rights, or war crimes or civil liberties - he outright came out in favour of torture, the killing of innocent people, racial profiling, and said a whole bunch of other heinous things during the campaign. At least with the previous politicians, bad publicity can act as some sort of brake on the violence and the repression and the surveillance, because you have some leverage against a politician's public image. When the next Abu Ghraib-type scandal comes out, Trump can legitimately say 'So what? I said I as going to torture suspects during the campaign, didn't I?'; if it came out under Hillary, she'd be under immediate pressure to shut down whatever happened. Having an openly lawless politician is a shitton worse than having a closet lawbreaker with a good PR machine.
    - tomp 10y ago
      Does this theory work if you apply it to the past? Have Snowden's leaks about surveillance or relevations about Obama's drone programme (killing people, even US citizens, without trial and with a lot of collateral damage) resulted in any change in government behaviour (except more secrecy and extensive supression of leaks/information)? My take on these questions is "no", but I haven't been following the events in detail, so I might be missing some positive consequences.
      - acqq 10y ago
        > Does this theory work if you apply it to the past? Have Snowden's leaks about surveillance or relevations about Obama's drone programme resulted in any change in government behaviour? There were certainly Obama's voters that were disappointed by what Obama did, after he previously spoke differently. They have thought along these lines of the article: "business as usual" ... "problems won't go away on their own" ... and didn't vote for her. The problem is only having a binary choice when the both options don't look good.
      - ethbro 10y ago
        We wouldn't be having these conversations if the leaks hadn't happened. It was suspected before, now it's known. That's a fairly big difference. Or in other words, speaking about nation state backhaul taps, etc as a threat model before made you a paranoid OpenBSD cyberpunk: now it makes you an average HN commenter.
        bmj 10y ago
        "We" are having these conversations, but in the time since the Snowden leak, have we seen the government move away from the behaviors and patterns that Snowden brought to light?
        ethbro 10y ago
        Big ship, slow turning, etc. It's been 3 years since the initial leaks. It took roughly 2 years between the Washington Post first reporting on Watergate and Nixon's resignation. And that was pertaining to multiple obviously illegal activities. National security and executive orders have a lot more gray area. The most important thing is to keep the pressure on, keep it in the public discourse, and make it uncomfortable for anyone who supports the apparatus.
  - clifanatic 10y ago
    > were started/ramped up under W. Bush Assault on privacy and massive surveillance started as soon as the internet became a household word - which actually happened under Bill Clinton.
- caminante 10y ago
  Except the author never gets around to adding substance to his claims about how EITHER Clinton or Trump would be incrementally worse than Obama regarding "government/corporate surveillance." I think it's off-topic[0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - AnimalMuppet 10y ago
    I think it's assumed, because Bush was worse than Clinton, and Obama was worse than Bush. There's no reason to think that either Hillary or Trump would not continue the trend.
- vanderZwan 10y ago
  That, and the earlier part where he states (emphasis mine): > That alternative narrative would stress business as usual, and continue to obscure the deep social problems in our society. Those problems won't go away on their own, and in this alternative future they would continue to fester under the surface, getting steadily worse. This election exposed those problems for everyone to see.
- dexterdog 10y ago
  What makes him think privacy was not going to be as much or more in the cross-hair under Clinton? I was really put off by his first paragraph. As much as I have distaste for Trump, I don't see that level of power in the presidency.
caminante 10y ago
I homed in on the same quote. Not an informative essay.
bottled_poe 10y ago
Huh? Isn't that statement trying to defuse the political polarization?
- caminante 10y ago
  You're assuming political preferences of the reader. The author's attacking both Clinton and Trump without offering substantive reasons.
  - ooqr 10y ago
    Do you enjoy seeing dead horses beaten?
    - caminante 10y ago
      I don't understand. Can you explain?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
geofft 10y ago
The election is over. Can we stop thinking about this as Trump good = Clinton bad or Clinton good = Trump bad, and worry about the policies of the actual president-elect instead of the possible policies of a past secretary of state? I have my (extremely positive) opinions of Clinton, but they're irrelevant now. If there's something we disagree with Trump on, that's not a pro-Clinton statement because there's no chance of Clinton becoming president in the next four years. Ideally, he shouldn't have to acknowledge Clinton at all to make the point he's making. The fact that he feels obligated to, and that that's seen as a good and moderate statement, is a sign of how uphill the fight to effectively oppose our president's bad policies is going to be. (Although we might also have inferred that from how poorly we're effectively opposing our current president's bad policies.)
idlewords 10y ago
That's literally the opposite point from what you're citing.

by dwe3000 10y ago

> Under a Clinton administration, my list would have looked much the same. And the political polarization and bantering continue. But at least there is some truth in there.

new299 10y ago

The context of the next line is somewhat important: > Trump's election just means the threats will be much greater, and the battles a lot harder to win.

tomp 10y ago
I'm not sure I agree with this. Certainly most of these problems (surveilance, assaults on various liberties, etc.) were started/ramped up under W. Bush, but most of them were greately enhanced during Obama, so I have no reason to assume that Hillary might be any better (except better at PR/propaganda, of course).
- viraptor 10y ago
  So far the surveillance and related laws suck, but to some extent they're controlled and somewhat public. Even before the Snowden revelations, some monitoring was expected, and some was talked about. Of course the scale and depth were a new revelation (tapping private links, etc.), but it existed in some kind of framework that was supposed to be controlled. (Regardless of how well that worked) Since the new potential president is a lot less organised and generally random in his actions, the old framework will be harder to rely on. Who gets the access now? Who's tracked? Who's trusted if he doesn't believe the current agencies? That's still unknown and we may get more secret deals now without clearly defined rules (even if they're not public) Basically we got a chaotic neutral/evil leader now. Anything can happen and I don't expect he'll care about the subtle effects of new decisions.
- AimHere 10y ago
  One reason for thinking that Trump would be worse is precisely because Hillary and Obama's propaganda machine is good at painting them in a better light. Trump doesn't have to pretend to care about human rights, or war crimes or civil liberties - he outright came out in favour of torture, the killing of innocent people, racial profiling, and said a whole bunch of other heinous things during the campaign. At least with the previous politicians, bad publicity can act as some sort of brake on the violence and the repression and the surveillance, because you have some leverage against a politician's public image. When the next Abu Ghraib-type scandal comes out, Trump can legitimately say 'So what? I said I as going to torture suspects during the campaign, didn't I?'; if it came out under Hillary, she'd be under immediate pressure to shut down whatever happened. Having an openly lawless politician is a shitton worse than having a closet lawbreaker with a good PR machine.
  - tomp 10y ago
    Does this theory work if you apply it to the past? Have Snowden's leaks about surveillance or relevations about Obama's drone programme (killing people, even US citizens, without trial and with a lot of collateral damage) resulted in any change in government behaviour (except more secrecy and extensive supression of leaks/information)? My take on these questions is "no", but I haven't been following the events in detail, so I might be missing some positive consequences.
    - acqq 10y ago
      > Does this theory work if you apply it to the past? Have Snowden's leaks about surveillance or relevations about Obama's drone programme resulted in any change in government behaviour? There were certainly Obama's voters that were disappointed by what Obama did, after he previously spoke differently. They have thought along these lines of the article: "business as usual" ... "problems won't go away on their own" ... and didn't vote for her. The problem is only having a binary choice when the both options don't look good.
    - ethbro 10y ago
      We wouldn't be having these conversations if the leaks hadn't happened. It was suspected before, now it's known. That's a fairly big difference. Or in other words, speaking about nation state backhaul taps, etc as a threat model before made you a paranoid OpenBSD cyberpunk: now it makes you an average HN commenter.
      - bmj 10y ago
        "We" are having these conversations, but in the time since the Snowden leak, have we seen the government move away from the behaviors and patterns that Snowden brought to light?
        ethbro 10y ago
        Big ship, slow turning, etc. It's been 3 years since the initial leaks. It took roughly 2 years between the Washington Post first reporting on Watergate and Nixon's resignation. And that was pertaining to multiple obviously illegal activities. National security and executive orders have a lot more gray area. The most important thing is to keep the pressure on, keep it in the public discourse, and make it uncomfortable for anyone who supports the apparatus.
- clifanatic 10y ago
  > were started/ramped up under W. Bush Assault on privacy and massive surveillance started as soon as the internet became a household word - which actually happened under Bill Clinton.
caminante 10y ago
Except the author never gets around to adding substance to his claims about how EITHER Clinton or Trump would be incrementally worse than Obama regarding "government/corporate surveillance." I think it's off-topic[0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- AnimalMuppet 10y ago
  I think it's assumed, because Bush was worse than Clinton, and Obama was worse than Bush. There's no reason to think that either Hillary or Trump would not continue the trend.
vanderZwan 10y ago
That, and the earlier part where he states (emphasis mine): > That alternative narrative would stress business as usual, and continue to obscure the deep social problems in our society. Those problems won't go away on their own, and in this alternative future they would continue to fester under the surface, getting steadily worse. This election exposed those problems for everyone to see.
dexterdog 10y ago
What makes him think privacy was not going to be as much or more in the cross-hair under Clinton? I was really put off by his first paragraph. As much as I have distaste for Trump, I don't see that level of power in the presidency.

caminante 10y ago

I homed in on the same quote. Not an informative essay.

bottled_poe 10y ago

Huh? Isn't that statement trying to defuse the political polarization?

caminante 10y ago
You're assuming political preferences of the reader. The author's attacking both Clinton and Trump without offering substantive reasons.
- ooqr 10y ago
  Do you enjoy seeing dead horses beaten?
  - caminante 10y ago
    I don't understand. Can you explain?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

geofft 10y ago

The election is over. Can we stop thinking about this as Trump good = Clinton bad or Clinton good = Trump bad, and worry about the policies of the actual president-elect instead of the possible policies of a past secretary of state? I have my (extremely positive) opinions of Clinton, but they're irrelevant now. If there's something we disagree with Trump on, that's not a pro-Clinton statement because there's no chance of Clinton becoming president in the next four years. Ideally, he shouldn't have to acknowledge Clinton at all to make the point he's making. The fact that he feels obligated to, and that that's seen as a good and moderate statement, is a sign of how uphill the fight to effectively oppose our president's bad policies is going to be. (Although we might also have inferred that from how poorly we're effectively opposing our current president's bad policies.)

idlewords 10y ago

That's literally the opposite point from what you're citing.