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This is super valid, and something I spend a lot of time thinking about. The task ahead is monumental, but these are sub-goals. This spawned from an observation

This is super valid, and something I spend a lot of time thinking about. The task ahead is monumental, but these are sub-goals. This spawned from an observation that our representative democracy isn't representative. We worked backwards from what caused that. The mission is cultivated from identifying and attempting to disrupt the viscous cycle of power imbalance. The strongest branch of the U.S. government is supposed to be the voters, not the few but the many, we aim to make that happen. I don't think any of these three points can succeed without the other two. Mass surveillance, if you click through, isn't about mass surveillance. It's about a government not being held accountable to it's own laws, which are meant to be governed by civilian oversight. Our government must follow it's own laws, it must pass laws that are foremost in line with our founding documents and then inline with their constituent's desires. The mechanism for civilian oversight is broken. While reading the ACLU FOIA requests and court documents, it was clear to me that the government wasn't playing by the rules. When you read the reasons the government kept these programs secret on write-ups from leaked documents, it was for fear of being subject to civilian oversight. This isn't how our government was designed to operate.

specialist 6y ago
Preaching to the choir. I'm trying, and failing, to make the point that policy work is real work, and that if you want to make a dent, I encourage you to learn how the professionals get it done. But you don't need all that to get started. Just call your rep, at any level, and get on their calendar. You'll have 5 minutes to make a pitch. You'll probably meet with a legislative aide. Bring some position papers. Weigh in on current (or recent legislation). If there's an upcoming vote, specifically request they vote Yay or Nay (per your position). Then followup with a thank you note. Then do it again.
- r3trohack3r 6y ago
  Sorry I misunderstood you... I appreciate that it is real work, and I hope I don't come across as making light of that. I've spent a lot of time the past few weeks grappling with imposter syndrome while trying to set this up and constantly questioning whether I would be a net positive in this space. I hope I will. Part of shipping was to try to cultivate the relationships to do that learning and bring in resources to fund folks to do that learning, and work, full time. If you have resources that could help me ramp up, I would really appreciate them, and could use mentorship if you know of anyone. On nights and weekends, I've been sitting through days of senate hearing recordings and reading hundreds of pages of court documents over the past few weeks. I do feel that is helping, but there are definitely "meta" parts of this field I'm missing (like legal research). I also feel policy work is different than influencing elections. Part of what we benefit from, as voters, is having representatives handle some of this policy work. When you listen to the first Senate Intelligence Committee hearing after the 2013 leaks, it's clear they are out of touch with who they are representing. When it comes to the Presidential Surveillance Program, that committee knew about it and oversaw it. They were actively involved in keeping evidence out of the courts, preventing citizens doing the policy work necessary to hold them accountable. I don't fully understand how professionals do this, but I do get the feeling these senators had a non-negligible impact on making that surveillance program a reality. Only one senator put truth to power during that hearing, everyone else defended the program and focused on "restricting access" to the database and improving reporting. Many of those senators are still sitting in their seats. An underlying goal of this project is to rally the voting population against the current representatives. I want to understand and be involved in the policy to apply that pressure correctly, but at the end of the day I want our representatives to be driving that policy change. We apply pressure to them, through a downward pressure during their election cycle, to guide them towards doing right by their citizens.
  - specialist 6y ago
    Everyone's faking it. Believe me. Except maybe the judges. Strongly agree that policy work has been separate from campaigning. I've been out of the game, so don't know the current landscape. What's always true is the game continues to change. Improvise, adapt, overcome. Law makers, by necessity, lean on their staff and lobbyists (both the good and bad kind) to navigate policy choices. Any given law maker has a handful of issues that they really care about, for which they are willing to spend political capital. Everything else is in response to public debate. -- I collect books about policy and law making. So much free advice! A really good starting point is Rep. Henry Waxman's The Waxman Report. It'll give you a taste of one person's experience.
schoen 6y ago
I think you should at least talk to people who have a broader range of views about the causes of mass surveillance. I've worked on fighting it for a while and I've come across a lot of different theories about why it exists and persists. A few of them include * international anarchy theory: the world is really dangerous (much more dangerous than the public has any idea of) and so security agencies need to be more powerful than people, including the security agencies themselves, would really prefer in order to combat that danger or keep it at bay; surveillance is one part of the security agencies' toolkit for managing it * international hegemony theory: the U.S. got its current position in the world partly via unsavory means and means that are very poorly understood or poorly remembered by the public (at least in America) (cf. Huntington's "The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion [...] but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.") and there is some reason for the U.S.'s sake, U.S. allies' sake, or the world's sake that the U.S. should continue to maintain this position, including by continuing to use the tools that allow it to do so * realpolitik theory: the U.S. in some sense can't afford to be that much more ethical than other actors because they will somehow take advantage of this * military-industrial complex theory: surveillance is super-profitable for surveillance vendors and contractors, so they want to keep it going * self-perpetuating elites theories: civil servants are accustomed to seeing surveillance activities that they participate in, or whose intelligence products they consume, as part of the way the world works, and they normalize it among themselves while just not caring very much what anyone else thinks about it * non-political theory: currently the ideological anti-surveillance constituency is so tiny that most legislators find it rational to ignore it, as contrasted with other issues that generate multiples or orders of magnitude more passion, contributions, or votes * public support theory: public opinion actually favors current surveillance programs, at least in broad outlines * class conflict theory: someone, or some coalition, is relying on surveillance in order to keep suppressing the lower classes * racial conflict theory: someone, or some coalition, is relying on surveillance in order to keep suppressing racial minorities * other conflict theory: some other kind of powerful coalition finds surveillance important in order to maintain its power * surveillance is actually good theory: sophisticated legislators and other officials have taken a look at the laws and institutions that carry out surveillance in the U.S. today and concluded that they are basically OK under the constitution, are basically subject to half-decent oversight, and represent a broadly politically acceptable trade-off in terms of what they accomplish and the risks they create I think approximately two to five of these are well-aligned with your view that campaign finance reform would be relevant to achieving surveillance reform, but the others aren't so well-aligned. Although I have my own opinions, I don't feel like I know for sure which of these theories are most correct.

specialist 6y ago

Preaching to the choir. I'm trying, and failing, to make the point that policy work is real work, and that if you want to make a dent, I encourage you to learn how the professionals get it done. But you don't need all that to get started. Just call your rep, at any level, and get on their calendar. You'll have 5 minutes to make a pitch. You'll probably meet with a legislative aide. Bring some position papers. Weigh in on current (or recent legislation). If there's an upcoming vote, specifically request they vote Yay or Nay (per your position). Then followup with a thank you note. Then do it again.

r3trohack3r 6y ago
Sorry I misunderstood you... I appreciate that it is real work, and I hope I don't come across as making light of that. I've spent a lot of time the past few weeks grappling with imposter syndrome while trying to set this up and constantly questioning whether I would be a net positive in this space. I hope I will. Part of shipping was to try to cultivate the relationships to do that learning and bring in resources to fund folks to do that learning, and work, full time. If you have resources that could help me ramp up, I would really appreciate them, and could use mentorship if you know of anyone. On nights and weekends, I've been sitting through days of senate hearing recordings and reading hundreds of pages of court documents over the past few weeks. I do feel that is helping, but there are definitely "meta" parts of this field I'm missing (like legal research). I also feel policy work is different than influencing elections. Part of what we benefit from, as voters, is having representatives handle some of this policy work. When you listen to the first Senate Intelligence Committee hearing after the 2013 leaks, it's clear they are out of touch with who they are representing. When it comes to the Presidential Surveillance Program, that committee knew about it and oversaw it. They were actively involved in keeping evidence out of the courts, preventing citizens doing the policy work necessary to hold them accountable. I don't fully understand how professionals do this, but I do get the feeling these senators had a non-negligible impact on making that surveillance program a reality. Only one senator put truth to power during that hearing, everyone else defended the program and focused on "restricting access" to the database and improving reporting. Many of those senators are still sitting in their seats. An underlying goal of this project is to rally the voting population against the current representatives. I want to understand and be involved in the policy to apply that pressure correctly, but at the end of the day I want our representatives to be driving that policy change. We apply pressure to them, through a downward pressure during their election cycle, to guide them towards doing right by their citizens.
- specialist 6y ago
  Everyone's faking it. Believe me. Except maybe the judges. Strongly agree that policy work has been separate from campaigning. I've been out of the game, so don't know the current landscape. What's always true is the game continues to change. Improvise, adapt, overcome. Law makers, by necessity, lean on their staff and lobbyists (both the good and bad kind) to navigate policy choices. Any given law maker has a handful of issues that they really care about, for which they are willing to spend political capital. Everything else is in response to public debate. -- I collect books about policy and law making. So much free advice! A really good starting point is Rep. Henry Waxman's The Waxman Report. It'll give you a taste of one person's experience.

schoen 6y ago

I think you should at least talk to people who have a broader range of views about the causes of mass surveillance. I've worked on fighting it for a while and I've come across a lot of different theories about why it exists and persists. A few of them include * international anarchy theory: the world is really dangerous (much more dangerous than the public has any idea of) and so security agencies need to be more powerful than people, including the security agencies themselves, would really prefer in order to combat that danger or keep it at bay; surveillance is one part of the security agencies' toolkit for managing it * international hegemony theory: the U.S. got its current position in the world partly via unsavory means and means that are very poorly understood or poorly remembered by the public (at least in America) (cf. Huntington's "The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion [...] but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.") and there is some reason for the U.S.'s sake, U.S. allies' sake, or the world's sake that the U.S. should continue to maintain this position, including by continuing to use the tools that allow it to do so * realpolitik theory: the U.S. in some sense can't afford to be that much more ethical than other actors because they will somehow take advantage of this * military-industrial complex theory: surveillance is super-profitable for surveillance vendors and contractors, so they want to keep it going * self-perpetuating elites theories: civil servants are accustomed to seeing surveillance activities that they participate in, or whose intelligence products they consume, as part of the way the world works, and they normalize it among themselves while just not caring very much what anyone else thinks about it * non-political theory: currently the ideological anti-surveillance constituency is so tiny that most legislators find it rational to ignore it, as contrasted with other issues that generate multiples or orders of magnitude more passion, contributions, or votes * public support theory: public opinion actually favors current surveillance programs, at least in broad outlines * class conflict theory: someone, or some coalition, is relying on surveillance in order to keep suppressing the lower classes * racial conflict theory: someone, or some coalition, is relying on surveillance in order to keep suppressing racial minorities * other conflict theory: some other kind of powerful coalition finds surveillance important in order to maintain its power * surveillance is actually good theory: sophisticated legislators and other officials have taken a look at the laws and institutions that carry out surveillance in the U.S. today and concluded that they are basically OK under the constitution, are basically subject to half-decent oversight, and represent a broadly politically acceptable trade-off in terms of what they accomplish and the risks they create I think approximately two to five of these are well-aligned with your view that campaign finance reform would be relevant to achieving surveillance reform, but the others aren't so well-aligned. Although I have my own opinions, I don't feel like I know for sure which of these theories are most correct.