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>The book makes it clear that the Secret Service is constantly underfunded and sorely lacking in modern technology, with agents sometimes having to use their pe

>The book makes it clear that the Secret Service is constantly underfunded and sorely lacking in modern technology, with agents sometimes having to use their personal car to transport the people they're protecting because their official cars aren't working. Maybe the answer is to cool it with the idea that government officials all need to have large personal protective details. Isn't that the job of the police? And aren't they all just citizens of this country? If it's not safe for various politicians to walk around in the streets, then maybe they should do something about that because it means that it is unsafe for everybody.

throwaway1777 4y ago
I like your take but politicians do have a target on their back that the average citizen doesn’t.
- TheRealPomax 4y ago
  But not one so big that every one of them needs multimillion dollars worth of protecting. A handful absolutely do, the vast majority don't. They will be perfectly fine. They might catch an egg or cake, or in the rare instance a fist: they'll still be fine.
  - sjsdaiuasgdia 4y ago
    As far as I am aware, the vast majority of politicians in the US do not receive Secret Service protection. "every one of them needs multimillion dollars worth of protecting" is a straw man. Of course the vast majority of politicians, which includes a lot of city council members of tiny towns and so forth, do not need a 24hr security detail. And they don't have them either. It happens for the handful, not the majority. Which seems to be what you want, but your tone is frustrated or angry.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    Unfortunately, that is increasingly changing. The covid pandemic, for example, has led to a massive increase in threats to everyone advocating for containment measures, and so do the advocates of other political issues impacted by conspiracy myth spreaders and/or the far-right (e.g. 5G rollouts, single-payer healthcare, gun control, immigration). Having been the target of about five dozen death threats myself as a political commentator/activist here in Germany, I can tell you the political climate drastically devolved over the last seven years, and police is nowhere near the security system it should be. In my case it took over four years until the main perpetrator was identified, arrested and subsequently sentenced to almost six years in prison[1]. And for what it's worth, it's not limited to politicians, journalists and activists - even ordinary doctors can be driven to suicide [2], or YouTube streamers such as the infamous Drachenlord [3]. [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSU_2.0 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSU_2.0 [2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa-Maria_Kellermayr https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa-Maria_Kellermayr [3] https://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/kommentar-wer-dem-drachenlord-die-schuld-gibt-hat-nichts-verstanden_id_182210847.html https://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/kommentar-wer-dem-d...
    - TheRealPomax 4y ago
      That's a problem with a different solution, though. Loads of people in other countries issue the same threats, but because they don't readily have access to ranged weapons, and specifically firearms (and every legal firearm that they do have are registered with the police), those threats are just that: threats. Of course, we know the problem there, and everyone knows the solution, and everyone knows that solution cannot happen in the US, even if in the past it might have been possible to solve. So by all means, protect the ones who really need it, but in a lot of cases, the solution to someone whose agenda is so controversial that they need secret service protection during elected visits to adversarial places (rather than being compelled to do so because of the office you hold) is to go "we're not going to protect you for personal activities. If you want to walk into a lion's den, expect lions. If you don't like that, maybe consider that you don't need to rile people up"
      - mschuster91 4y ago
        > Loads of people in other countries issue the same threats, but because they don't readily have access to ranged weapons, and specifically firearms (and every legal firearm that they do have are registered with the police), those threats are just that: threats. All my examples were from Germany, a country with very strict gun control. And yet, Drachenlord got haters literally every single day shouting at or vandalizing his property, attacking him physically, swatting him (the first conviction of swatting in Germany was for a Drachenlord hater). LGBT people or people "looking foreign" routinely get beaten up with fists. Gun control is a relevant issue, yes, but it's only a very small part. >If you want to walk into a lion's den, expect lions. If you don't like that, maybe consider that you don't need to rile people up That's pure victim blaming with a healthy dose of "chilling effect" applied and I'm sad to see such a take on this site. Speaking the truth, advocating for democracy must be protected at all costs.
        TheRealPomax 4y ago
        > That's pure victim blaming with a healthy dose of "chilling effect" applied and I'm sad to see such a take on this site. Speaking the truth, advocating for democracy must be protected at all costs. quite the overreach: by all means, have your opinions and spout them, and by all means, request local police protection because that's what police is for, but if you're so divisive that need the US Secret Service to protect you: maybe you don't. There are very few people who should qualify for that. Don't pretend I'm saying no one deserves protection, I'm saying almost no one deserves USSS protection.
  - gizmo686 4y ago
    Most politicians do not get secret service protection. Only those in the line of succesion, former presidents and family of the above. The handful of congresspeople in leadership get special protection from capital police. Most elected congress people only get special protection if there is a specific concern. https://www.secretservice.gov/about/faq/general https://www.secretservice.gov/about/faq/general
phpisthebest 4y ago
General rule for me is If any person has soooo much power we need a dedicated team of people to protect them continuously, that person has too much power and the solution is not ever-increasing amount of security, but ever decreasing amount of power to that individual
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  I wonder how big Musk or Bezos's security teams are?
  - safety1st 4y ago
    Who cares? The perennial mistake is believing that if any of these guys get capped, it's some irreparable loss to society. It's not. Let them play the odds of life like the rest of us do. A society that depends on strongmen isn't a free society.
    - hotpotamus 4y ago
      Oh you're singing to the choir on that stuff. Don't get me started on who we can and can't feed into the woodchipper because I'm already rate-limited. I'm just always surprised when people limit their thinking (and I'm not saying the post that spawned my response was guilty of that, though it's possible) of the powerful in society to government officials.
    - petsfed 4y ago
      I think there's merit to at least forestalling rule-by-assassination. Like, yes, I would not mourn a lot of people who end up having protective details. But I absolutely don't want to live in a world where all it takes to change a policy is one particularly motivated sociopath. Keep in mind that John Hinckley Jr's assassination attempt on Reagan wasn't out of disagreement with Reagan's policies, it was to impress Jodi Foster. A nobody's obsession with an actress is really, REALLY not the thing we should allow to materially affect our civilization. I think there's a good argument to be made that the WWII-era Japanese government became the one capable of its atrocities in China specifically because assassination was so frequently employed to check to its power.
chucksmash 4y ago
> Maybe the answer is to cool it with the idea that government officials all need to have large personal protective details. Isn't that the job of the police? So like Shinzo Abe? Edit: I picked Shinzo Abe because it was a recent example I felt people would be familiar with, but honestly it seems like any notoriety at all is dangerous. Someone assassinated MLK Jr's mother[1] while she played a church organ. Relying on the general reasonableness of other people doesn't seem to scale at all. [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/22/obituaries/m-w-chenault-44-gunman-who-killed-mother-of-dr-king.html https://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/22/obituaries/m-w-chenault-4...
- nivenkos 4y ago
  Or Olof Palme.
  - mc32 4y ago
    On the other hand... Indira Gandhi.
    - bakul 4y ago
      She might have escaped her fate if she had replaced her Sikh bodyguards with non Sikhs after Operation Blue Star that removed a militant Sikh religious leader and his followers from the Golden Temple in Amritsar.
  - seunosewa 4y ago
    J F Kennedy
- sgjohnson 4y ago
  Shinzo Abe is actually a very good example, because his tragic death occured in a country where violent crime basically doesn’t exist and where it’s virtually impossible to acquire any kind of a firearm (I am aware how far 3D printing has come) This would of course be far worse in a country that’s very familiar with violent crime and where everyone and their dog has at least 1.2 firearms, like the United States.
vt85 4y ago
[dead]
hotpotamus 4y ago
Bruce Schneier once said something that really stuck with me. He was talking about the culture of the DHS I believe and how their mission was "Never Again" in the wake of 9/11. But never is basically an impossible standard to meet, and the result was that we get security theater instead. I would imagine you can also soak up a near infinite amount of money and effort trying to achieve never again. Zero Fail sounds like the same thing.
- mc32 4y ago
  'Never' and 'Zero' programs are all aspirational. We want Zero pedestrian deaths, but we know it's not possible (even in back in the age of horses), but still something we should aim for within reason.
  - mwint 4y ago
    It's that "within reason" that people get hung up on.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
macinjosh 4y ago
Indeed, these very same people who demand a well-armed and trained _personal_ security detail are the very same people who enact laws to deprive the convenience store worker from having a firearm to defend themselves with while working in the middle of the night.
rqtwteye 4y ago
"Maybe the answer is to cool it with the idea that government officials all need to have large personal protective details." I lived in the DC area on and after 9/11. There was a huge increase of governmnent officials having drivers and flying private jet "for security reasons"
munificent 4y ago
> Maybe the answer is to cool it with the idea that government officials all need to have large personal protective details. It's just a numbers game. Some very small fraction of people are mentally broken and may develop a psychotic fixation on a particular person. The more publicly known you are, the greater the chances that a crazy person will pick you. You and I don't need security people because only a few hundred other humans know we exist. The odds of one of them being a murderous psychopath are vanishingly small. Millions of people knew who John Lennon, Ronald Reagan, and Rebecca Schaeffer were, so they rolled the dice enough and lost.
DerekL 4y ago
> Isn't that the job of the police? The Secret Service are police (that is, they're a law enforcement agency).

throwaway1777 4y ago

I like your take but politicians do have a target on their back that the average citizen doesn’t.

TheRealPomax 4y ago
But not one so big that every one of them needs multimillion dollars worth of protecting. A handful absolutely do, the vast majority don't. They will be perfectly fine. They might catch an egg or cake, or in the rare instance a fist: they'll still be fine.
- sjsdaiuasgdia 4y ago
  As far as I am aware, the vast majority of politicians in the US do not receive Secret Service protection. "every one of them needs multimillion dollars worth of protecting" is a straw man. Of course the vast majority of politicians, which includes a lot of city council members of tiny towns and so forth, do not need a 24hr security detail. And they don't have them either. It happens for the handful, not the majority. Which seems to be what you want, but your tone is frustrated or angry.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  Unfortunately, that is increasingly changing. The covid pandemic, for example, has led to a massive increase in threats to everyone advocating for containment measures, and so do the advocates of other political issues impacted by conspiracy myth spreaders and/or the far-right (e.g. 5G rollouts, single-payer healthcare, gun control, immigration). Having been the target of about five dozen death threats myself as a political commentator/activist here in Germany, I can tell you the political climate drastically devolved over the last seven years, and police is nowhere near the security system it should be. In my case it took over four years until the main perpetrator was identified, arrested and subsequently sentenced to almost six years in prison[1]. And for what it's worth, it's not limited to politicians, journalists and activists - even ordinary doctors can be driven to suicide [2], or YouTube streamers such as the infamous Drachenlord [3]. [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSU_2.0 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSU_2.0 [2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa-Maria_Kellermayr https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa-Maria_Kellermayr [3] https://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/kommentar-wer-dem-drachenlord-die-schuld-gibt-hat-nichts-verstanden_id_182210847.html https://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/kommentar-wer-dem-d...
  - TheRealPomax 4y ago
    That's a problem with a different solution, though. Loads of people in other countries issue the same threats, but because they don't readily have access to ranged weapons, and specifically firearms (and every legal firearm that they do have are registered with the police), those threats are just that: threats. Of course, we know the problem there, and everyone knows the solution, and everyone knows that solution cannot happen in the US, even if in the past it might have been possible to solve. So by all means, protect the ones who really need it, but in a lot of cases, the solution to someone whose agenda is so controversial that they need secret service protection during elected visits to adversarial places (rather than being compelled to do so because of the office you hold) is to go "we're not going to protect you for personal activities. If you want to walk into a lion's den, expect lions. If you don't like that, maybe consider that you don't need to rile people up"
    - mschuster91 4y ago
      > Loads of people in other countries issue the same threats, but because they don't readily have access to ranged weapons, and specifically firearms (and every legal firearm that they do have are registered with the police), those threats are just that: threats. All my examples were from Germany, a country with very strict gun control. And yet, Drachenlord got haters literally every single day shouting at or vandalizing his property, attacking him physically, swatting him (the first conviction of swatting in Germany was for a Drachenlord hater). LGBT people or people "looking foreign" routinely get beaten up with fists. Gun control is a relevant issue, yes, but it's only a very small part. >If you want to walk into a lion's den, expect lions. If you don't like that, maybe consider that you don't need to rile people up That's pure victim blaming with a healthy dose of "chilling effect" applied and I'm sad to see such a take on this site. Speaking the truth, advocating for democracy must be protected at all costs.
      - TheRealPomax 4y ago
        > That's pure victim blaming with a healthy dose of "chilling effect" applied and I'm sad to see such a take on this site. Speaking the truth, advocating for democracy must be protected at all costs. quite the overreach: by all means, have your opinions and spout them, and by all means, request local police protection because that's what police is for, but if you're so divisive that need the US Secret Service to protect you: maybe you don't. There are very few people who should qualify for that. Don't pretend I'm saying no one deserves protection, I'm saying almost no one deserves USSS protection.
- gizmo686 4y ago
  Most politicians do not get secret service protection. Only those in the line of succesion, former presidents and family of the above. The handful of congresspeople in leadership get special protection from capital police. Most elected congress people only get special protection if there is a specific concern. https://www.secretservice.gov/about/faq/general https://www.secretservice.gov/about/faq/general

phpisthebest 4y ago

General rule for me is If any person has soooo much power we need a dedicated team of people to protect them continuously, that person has too much power and the solution is not ever-increasing amount of security, but ever decreasing amount of power to that individual

hotpotamus 4y ago
I wonder how big Musk or Bezos's security teams are?
- safety1st 4y ago
  Who cares? The perennial mistake is believing that if any of these guys get capped, it's some irreparable loss to society. It's not. Let them play the odds of life like the rest of us do. A society that depends on strongmen isn't a free society.
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    Oh you're singing to the choir on that stuff. Don't get me started on who we can and can't feed into the woodchipper because I'm already rate-limited. I'm just always surprised when people limit their thinking (and I'm not saying the post that spawned my response was guilty of that, though it's possible) of the powerful in society to government officials.
  - petsfed 4y ago
    I think there's merit to at least forestalling rule-by-assassination. Like, yes, I would not mourn a lot of people who end up having protective details. But I absolutely don't want to live in a world where all it takes to change a policy is one particularly motivated sociopath. Keep in mind that John Hinckley Jr's assassination attempt on Reagan wasn't out of disagreement with Reagan's policies, it was to impress Jodi Foster. A nobody's obsession with an actress is really, REALLY not the thing we should allow to materially affect our civilization. I think there's a good argument to be made that the WWII-era Japanese government became the one capable of its atrocities in China specifically because assassination was so frequently employed to check to its power.

chucksmash 4y ago

> Maybe the answer is to cool it with the idea that government officials all need to have large personal protective details. Isn't that the job of the police? So like Shinzo Abe? Edit: I picked Shinzo Abe because it was a recent example I felt people would be familiar with, but honestly it seems like any notoriety at all is dangerous. Someone assassinated MLK Jr's mother[1] while she played a church organ. Relying on the general reasonableness of other people doesn't seem to scale at all. [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/22/obituaries/m-w-chenault-44-gunman-who-killed-mother-of-dr-king.html https://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/22/obituaries/m-w-chenault-4...

nivenkos 4y ago
Or Olof Palme.
- mc32 4y ago
  On the other hand... Indira Gandhi.
  - bakul 4y ago
    She might have escaped her fate if she had replaced her Sikh bodyguards with non Sikhs after Operation Blue Star that removed a militant Sikh religious leader and his followers from the Golden Temple in Amritsar.
- seunosewa 4y ago
  J F Kennedy
sgjohnson 4y ago
Shinzo Abe is actually a very good example, because his tragic death occured in a country where violent crime basically doesn’t exist and where it’s virtually impossible to acquire any kind of a firearm (I am aware how far 3D printing has come) This would of course be far worse in a country that’s very familiar with violent crime and where everyone and their dog has at least 1.2 firearms, like the United States.

vt85 4y ago

[dead]

hotpotamus 4y ago

Bruce Schneier once said something that really stuck with me. He was talking about the culture of the DHS I believe and how their mission was "Never Again" in the wake of 9/11. But never is basically an impossible standard to meet, and the result was that we get security theater instead. I would imagine you can also soak up a near infinite amount of money and effort trying to achieve never again. Zero Fail sounds like the same thing.

mc32 4y ago
'Never' and 'Zero' programs are all aspirational. We want Zero pedestrian deaths, but we know it's not possible (even in back in the age of horses), but still something we should aim for within reason.
- mwint 4y ago
  It's that "within reason" that people get hung up on.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

macinjosh 4y ago

Indeed, these very same people who demand a well-armed and trained _personal_ security detail are the very same people who enact laws to deprive the convenience store worker from having a firearm to defend themselves with while working in the middle of the night.

rqtwteye 4y ago

"Maybe the answer is to cool it with the idea that government officials all need to have large personal protective details." I lived in the DC area on and after 9/11. There was a huge increase of governmnent officials having drivers and flying private jet "for security reasons"

munificent 4y ago

> Maybe the answer is to cool it with the idea that government officials all need to have large personal protective details. It's just a numbers game. Some very small fraction of people are mentally broken and may develop a psychotic fixation on a particular person. The more publicly known you are, the greater the chances that a crazy person will pick you. You and I don't need security people because only a few hundred other humans know we exist. The odds of one of them being a murderous psychopath are vanishingly small. Millions of people knew who John Lennon, Ronald Reagan, and Rebecca Schaeffer were, so they rolled the dice enough and lost.

DerekL 4y ago

> Isn't that the job of the police? The Secret Service are police (that is, they're a law enforcement agency).