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Suggested alternative: The "End Political Corruption Proposal" "Given that political corruption is rife in European countries, with great detriments to the hea

Suggested alternative: The "End Political Corruption Proposal" "Given that political corruption is rife in European countries, with great detriments to the healthy function of government, all politicians in positions where they may be engaging in corrupt behavior must submit to 24-7 audio and video surveillance, which will be piped over public platforms for crowdsourcing of corruption detection. All personal communications of politicians and of government bureaucrats will become matters of public record for the same reason. Since we cannot trust a corrupt head of government to investigate their own corruption, or one of their underlings, this kind of public exposure of all politicians and bureaucrats is the only reasonable, rational solution to the problem of endemic government corruption in the EU."

randominsomnia 4y ago
You have my vote.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Supermancho 4y ago
> Suggested alternative: The "End Political Corruption Proposal" I'm probably in the minority on HN, but I think this is a good thing. It should be a matter of course, in a democratic society. Free speech doesn't live solely in digital communication (universally owned by some company) any more than it does in the classified ads in a newspaper.
- worik 4y ago
  It would be world changing, the complete abolition of all privacy. Little drones that followed everybody around, everywhere, broadcasting and storing every thing everybody does, or says, everywhere they go, and what they do. No. I do not recommend it. But the thought experiment is interesting.
  - Supermancho 4y ago
    > It would be world changing, the complete abolition of all privacy. > Little drones that followed everybody around, everywhere, broadcasting and storing every thing everybody does, or says, everywhere they go, and what they do. That's an interesting 0-100% (eclipse all possible free speech possibilities!) imaginary scenario. I don't subscribe to it.
  - atlgator 4y ago
    It's an opt-in scenario. People aren't forced to be politicians.
    - landoftheice 4y ago
      [dead]
    - fanagra32 4y ago
      Politics already suffers heavily from not getting the best-of-the-best. Making it even less attractive to become a politician is unlikely to improve upon that. In the totality of all politicians out there that you have an opinion about, which fraction of them do you like, in terms of thinking they are the right person for the job? Do you think this fraction would improve with that opt-in scenario implemented?
      - hutzlibu 4y ago
        "Politics already suffers heavily from not getting the best-of-the-best" It is repeated often, but is this really true? Number 1 trait of a politician should be honesty and integrity in my opinion - and I don't think that you can increase that factor, just with throwing more money on them. Then you maybe just get more smart people, who are in it for the money and use their smarts and cunning to extract even more money. I think politicians should want that job, because they primarily feel the call to achieve something bigger. So a adequate payrise is alright in my opinion, but I don't want the top managers who run a big compony for profit to also run states. As states are (or should not be) profit orientated, but to serve the greater good of its people.
- dreen 4y ago
  I'm with you. For the duration of you holding public office there should be no expectation of privacy.
kurthr 4y ago
While you're at it there should be a 1 year look back. So if you want to run for election you have to start recording a year earlier so we can compare your actions to that of the other Big Brother^d^d^d^d^d^d^d^d^d^d^d candidates. I do suspect that having a hot spouse and active sex life would become a significant advantage when running.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- totetsu 4y ago
  A lot more of this kind of tongue kissing going on I suspect https://i.imgur.com/w85Pwzb.gifv https://i.imgur.com/w85Pwzb.gifv
germandiago 4y ago
Public position = gate to corruption, license and regulation = gate to corruption. Do not expect the ones who make the laws to make them against themselves. That is idealist thinking. If history teqches something is that the more of those, the more corruption and handing of favors and "legal corruption" pops up. It is not by chance. It is just bc of how incentives are aligned. Those incentives, IMHO, can only be destroyed by strong deregulation and privatization. I dnt know how much of it but certainly a country should not be 45-50% or more GDP going public. Besides that centralized planning (we r going towards that) is usually super inefficient. So it is also a technical problem. More when the peoople to arrange budgets do not pay a penalty even for their corruption in many cases, let alone for their management mistakes. Lagarde is still there and she gets 400.000 eur per year and took the decisios that made us go to these levels of inflation...on top of that she was involved in a corruption case that prescribed (not sure is the appropriate term in english, translated from spanish) I am no economist but I knew what would happen very likely... do they really pull our leg? I think so honestly.
- crashmat 4y ago
  problem is deregulation and privatisation doesn't work either, because then instead of corrupt politicians who make decisions based on greed despite being told not to, you get CEOs and big corporations who make decisions based on profit (essentially greed) because that is their entire purpose
  - roenxi 4y ago
    If you look a bit deeper though; you'll find that greed can lead to good and bad outcomes. People make decisions because in some sense they feel like they will profit personally. That is basically the same as saying they do things for reasons. We know that most people aren't especially principled because they are regularly tested and don't make principle-based decisions. Nevertheless there is a great deal of good in the world. Corporations are greedy, but they operate in a world where it is hard for them to enrich themselves without enriching others too.
    - 4y ago
weinzierl 4y ago
It would be a start to do away with diplomatic immunity.
- pjc50 4y ago
  This is a complicated one, because it runs the risk of both harassment of diplomats under fake crimes and also the elevation of real petty crimes to diplomatic incidents. The Okinawa business is difficult enough _without_ real diplomatic immunity. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-42048473?ocid=socialflow_twitter https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-42048473?ocid=socialfl...
ajsnigrutin 4y ago
I'm totally fine with raising their paychecks by a factor of 10 for their loss of privacy if we implement this... the amount of money we'd save elswhere dur to less corruption would be a few orders of magnitude higher.
- cft 4y ago
  You don't even need to raise it that much. One can implement onlyfans.com business model when their electorate pays to them for access to their cam feeds.
  - cafeinux 4y ago
    The richer would be the ones that do things on their livefeed that attract people. Do you want politicians orgies? Because that's how you get politicians orgies. The poorer politicians would be the perfectly honest and completely boring ones, not a great way to encourage honesty.
    - b112 4y ago
      Do you want politicians orgies? Now wait, let not be too hasty here. We should whiteboard this out. There are a lot of moving parts, and shutting down an idea too soon, would be wrong. So to start, uh, just wondering, which politicians? Also, what would they be wearing? Again, only asking for an accurate framing here.
      - mikrotikker 4y ago
        Lauren Boebert is secretly a total hottie. But I really wanna see Mitch McConnell shake what he got.
        Loughla 4y ago
        I know that HN isn't supposed to be for jokes, but legit, I assume that a naked Mitch McConnell looks like the nudist alien scammers from futurama. https://futurama.fandom.com/wiki/Sprunjer?file=Srunger.png https://futurama.fandom.com/wiki/Sprunjer?file=Srunger.png
pjc50 4y ago
We never did find out who leaked the security camera footage from inside a "secure area" of Matt Hancock, UK health secretary, kissing his aide: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/matt-hancock-kiss-leak-video-evidence-b2057285.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/matt-hancock-... A horrifyingly large amount of UK political decision-making that should be minuted is instead carried out secretly on whatsapp.
- blitzar 4y ago
  Your two statements seem to be a contradiction - decision meetings should be public, but the meeting where you are getting a blowie from your assistant on the sofa in your office should be private?
  - themitigating 4y ago
    What does the second act have to do with corruption or information that is useful for the public?
    - JacobThreeThree 4y ago
      When a government official doesn't abide by his own lockdown rules, that's corruption.
      - themitigating 4y ago
        why? If a politician votes for a law that reduces the speed limit to 50mph then is caught speeding is that corruption? I think corruption is when someone abuses their position of power. This isn't abuse they just violated their own rules.
        LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
        It's corruption because they know they won't be punished. If more laws were objective (like speeding) and politicians were as surveilled as everyone else it wouldn't be an issue.
marginalia_nu 4y ago
All of this would be fixed, and more, if we brought back Athenian style ostracism by public vote!
- clnq 4y ago
  It would also make banishing political enemies far more effective.
pmlnr 4y ago
This is whataboutism and derails the conversation. These two things are unrelated.
- roenxi 4y ago
  1. Why do you think 'whataboutism' is a bad thing? It is comparison. Comparison is a fine tool for reasoning about policy. Not the end of the conversation, but something to consider. 2. The corruption of EU politicians is a major concern. If they think so little of privacy that they are willing to vote for laws like this, then they should certainly have to defend why they get any privacy at all. Corruption in government is one of the most damaging things happening in our society, and total surveillance would make it easier to detect & prove when they are lying.
  - pmlnr 4y ago
    > The corruption of EU politicians is a major concern Yes. I never said otherwise. > then they should certainly have to defend why they get any privacy at all That's the funny bit: they won't. They - and their family - will have the same if they use the same platforms. Which is why I firmly believe this isn't about corruption, this is about false beliefs and zealots who genuinely believe the internet and open communication is bad.
    - headsoup 4y ago
      Except that these platforms often have 'government' specific offerings that are not the same as everyone else.
  - FrustratedMonky 4y ago
    In the US whataboutism is used to justify current crimes because in the past someone else did not get charged. It is a way to dismiss current crimes made by 'my side' because 'whatabout' that time 'your side' got off. It ends up reducing what can be criticized to the lowest common denominator, because you can't criticize anybody if anybody had every done it before.
shadowgovt 4y ago
I know he was American and not European, but "When a man assumes a public trust, he should consider himself public property." ~Thomas Jefferson
contravariant 4y ago
Saying that if we start scanning all chats for illegal activity then we should also require all communications of politicians to be part of public record is not exactly the strongest argument. I mean those systems are already in place, at a minimum you'd have to argue they're ineffective or not as intrusive. And your hyperbole is not doing you any favours on that front.
CuriouslyC 4y ago
This would be delightful. Being a politician should be a curse that the dedicated bear for the good of humanity, not cushy job and badge of pride.
- xpe 4y ago
  Be careful what you ask for. There's no good reason that public service should be a "curse". Humans are not angels, and we should not build systems that hold out some unrealistic expectation that they are. Too often politicians are viewed as "saviors of the people" only shortly before they become "corrupt villains". If we want to attract competent public minded people, we need to do a lot of deep thinking and system design to get there. <personal pain point> One good place to start is to get rid of this idea that every citizen's input is equally informed, sane, reasonable, actionable, legal, or thoughtful. In a democracy, every person hopefully is afforded certain rights, such as due process and free speech, but this does not mean what you say is "free from consequences". The corollary is that not all ideas have to be given equal consideration. Some people say batshit crazy things sometimes, and frankly, these kinds of comments make life hell for many public servants. School boards come to mind. Speaking, personally, I would like to be a public servant, in some regard (again), but I don't think we have realistic processes in place to really gather thoughtful feedback from the public. Until we do, public servants have to deal with a lot of informed nonsense. I think software developers and UX people might not realize how skilled and motivated we are at building systems that actually work. I'm not saying that we build the right thing all the time. But so many government processes are fundamentally broken in terms of information processing. I'm not saying that they are broken by e.g. the tropes like "lazy people in government". I'm saying that the systems are (anti) designed (or evolved) in such a way that they're so painful that driven people get driven out. If you think of a government as a way of processing citizen input in a way that is consistent with budget constraints and laws, it seems that many government agencies are not built using the principles that so many of us take for granted: system design, failure analysis, testing. This isn't just government problem, of course ... it is characteristic of large organizations of all kinds. Democracy does not function well when too many people are simultaneously uninformed and yelling. This crowds out informed people trying to have a discussion. </personal pain point>
- 4y ago
javajosh 4y ago
You say this in jest, but it's a good idea. The more power you have, the less privacy you should have. This would be an appealing catch-up mechanic in society. I would vote yes.
- sowbug 4y ago
  If reality TV and US politics are any indication, then today it's the reverse: the less privacy you have, the more power you have. Beware the peculiar human creature who craves attention from strangers.
  - javajosh 4y ago
    Media exposure is not the same as loss of privacy. Fox "News" hosts have a ton of exposure. But they also have a ton of privacy. We know this because it was noticable when they lost their privacy in the Dominion lawsuit discovery. Their (previously private) texts to each other admitting openly lying to their viewers, that they themselves saw through Trump's obvious and destructive lies. And it was, is, a fantastic look behind the curtain, even if their primary victims won't/can't ever see it. (Just like none of them watched the 1/6 hearings.) But it's still a very good thing that we need more of.
    - sowbug 4y ago
      I understand the difference. If we required politicians to stream their lives 24/7, then the unintended consequence would be a government run exclusively by Instagram influencers who already stream their lives 24/7. I get your point about sunlight on secrets. But limiting our governance to the pool of people I see on TikTok seems like a high price to pay. (This is just a 2023 rephrasing of the age-old concern of electing someone willing to be a politician.)
twinge 4y ago
This could be labeled "sousveillance", watchful vigilance from underneath: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance
qwertox 4y ago
I have thought for some years now that any country wanting to implement some kind of restrictions or surveillance should start with politicians and authorities first. With some select authorities being exempt from this due to national security. For example, if a country wants to implement the installation of state-owned anti-harassment "spyware" on their citizens phones, then this would first apply to politicians and those who work for the government, like anyone employed in a city hall or the traffic authority (normal citizens working there) or the like. This would run for 5 years, while citizens have the right to attempt to hack these systems without repercussions, in order to ensure that the security is up to the highest standards. If after those 5 years the politicians and government employees are ok with it, if no major security concerns exist and the benefit has shown to be an obvious one, then it could be up for debate to implement this new technology.
- Spoom 4y ago
  > With some select authorities being exempt from this due to national security. I fear your carveout would quickly become an "Inner Party" situation, with those with real power declaring themselves exempt due to "national security" reasons. Imagine then that anyone in any position of authority but not real power would be subject to the surveillance as an "Outer Party" member. I get that the intent is to show the people in charge the negative consequences of such policies, but I don't think that's the worst that could come of this.
  - AvAurora 4y ago
    You understand that there is already an inner party, not in a conspiracy sense, but in a privacy sense. Yo have to actually argue why partial transparency is way worse than full obscurity.
  - rhodorhoades 4y ago
    That’s exactly the kind of fallacy these politicians would use to argue against this kind of thing ;)
    - 4y ago
EGreg 4y ago
If all meeting by public officials on duty were recorded (as police officer bodycams now are) then we would avoid tons of wars and geopolitical conflicts. We’d realize these guys are bozos who didn’t actually even understand each other and should be replaced by diligent teams who have to develop better frameworks. THESE POLITICIANS OWE US THE PEOPLE to do this IN ALL COUNTRIES. Instead of shaming us into supporting their “unprovoked and unjustified” wars.
krunck 4y ago
That's a start. Governments need to be 100% transparent in all things. Government officials should have nothing to hide. All meetings are open, all documents are accessible to all, all communications are recorded and open. Convert the NSA into an agency which watches government 24x7. Any government official that is found to hide/obscure information from the public gets three strike after which they are out. For life. Workers who actually deal with confidential/personal information on citizens are the ones with the privilege to work without such monitoring.

randominsomnia 4y ago

You have my vote.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Supermancho 4y ago

> Suggested alternative: The "End Political Corruption Proposal" I'm probably in the minority on HN, but I think this is a good thing. It should be a matter of course, in a democratic society. Free speech doesn't live solely in digital communication (universally owned by some company) any more than it does in the classified ads in a newspaper.

worik 4y ago
It would be world changing, the complete abolition of all privacy. Little drones that followed everybody around, everywhere, broadcasting and storing every thing everybody does, or says, everywhere they go, and what they do. No. I do not recommend it. But the thought experiment is interesting.
- Supermancho 4y ago
  > It would be world changing, the complete abolition of all privacy. > Little drones that followed everybody around, everywhere, broadcasting and storing every thing everybody does, or says, everywhere they go, and what they do. That's an interesting 0-100% (eclipse all possible free speech possibilities!) imaginary scenario. I don't subscribe to it.
- atlgator 4y ago
  It's an opt-in scenario. People aren't forced to be politicians.
  - landoftheice 4y ago
    [dead]
  - fanagra32 4y ago
    Politics already suffers heavily from not getting the best-of-the-best. Making it even less attractive to become a politician is unlikely to improve upon that. In the totality of all politicians out there that you have an opinion about, which fraction of them do you like, in terms of thinking they are the right person for the job? Do you think this fraction would improve with that opt-in scenario implemented?
    - hutzlibu 4y ago
      "Politics already suffers heavily from not getting the best-of-the-best" It is repeated often, but is this really true? Number 1 trait of a politician should be honesty and integrity in my opinion - and I don't think that you can increase that factor, just with throwing more money on them. Then you maybe just get more smart people, who are in it for the money and use their smarts and cunning to extract even more money. I think politicians should want that job, because they primarily feel the call to achieve something bigger. So a adequate payrise is alright in my opinion, but I don't want the top managers who run a big compony for profit to also run states. As states are (or should not be) profit orientated, but to serve the greater good of its people.
dreen 4y ago
I'm with you. For the duration of you holding public office there should be no expectation of privacy.

kurthr 4y ago

While you're at it there should be a 1 year look back. So if you want to run for election you have to start recording a year earlier so we can compare your actions to that of the other Big Brother^d^d^d^d^d^d^d^d^d^d^d candidates. I do suspect that having a hot spouse and active sex life would become a significant advantage when running.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
totetsu 4y ago
A lot more of this kind of tongue kissing going on I suspect https://i.imgur.com/w85Pwzb.gifv https://i.imgur.com/w85Pwzb.gifv

germandiago 4y ago

Public position = gate to corruption, license and regulation = gate to corruption. Do not expect the ones who make the laws to make them against themselves. That is idealist thinking. If history teqches something is that the more of those, the more corruption and handing of favors and "legal corruption" pops up. It is not by chance. It is just bc of how incentives are aligned. Those incentives, IMHO, can only be destroyed by strong deregulation and privatization. I dnt know how much of it but certainly a country should not be 45-50% or more GDP going public. Besides that centralized planning (we r going towards that) is usually super inefficient. So it is also a technical problem. More when the peoople to arrange budgets do not pay a penalty even for their corruption in many cases, let alone for their management mistakes. Lagarde is still there and she gets 400.000 eur per year and took the decisios that made us go to these levels of inflation...on top of that she was involved in a corruption case that prescribed (not sure is the appropriate term in english, translated from spanish) I am no economist but I knew what would happen very likely... do they really pull our leg? I think so honestly.

crashmat 4y ago
problem is deregulation and privatisation doesn't work either, because then instead of corrupt politicians who make decisions based on greed despite being told not to, you get CEOs and big corporations who make decisions based on profit (essentially greed) because that is their entire purpose
- roenxi 4y ago
  If you look a bit deeper though; you'll find that greed can lead to good and bad outcomes. People make decisions because in some sense they feel like they will profit personally. That is basically the same as saying they do things for reasons. We know that most people aren't especially principled because they are regularly tested and don't make principle-based decisions. Nevertheless there is a great deal of good in the world. Corporations are greedy, but they operate in a world where it is hard for them to enrich themselves without enriching others too.
  - 4y ago

weinzierl 4y ago

It would be a start to do away with diplomatic immunity.

pjc50 4y ago
This is a complicated one, because it runs the risk of both harassment of diplomats under fake crimes and also the elevation of real petty crimes to diplomatic incidents. The Okinawa business is difficult enough _without_ real diplomatic immunity. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-42048473?ocid=socialflow_twitter https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-42048473?ocid=socialfl...

ajsnigrutin 4y ago

I'm totally fine with raising their paychecks by a factor of 10 for their loss of privacy if we implement this... the amount of money we'd save elswhere dur to less corruption would be a few orders of magnitude higher.

cft 4y ago
You don't even need to raise it that much. One can implement onlyfans.com business model when their electorate pays to them for access to their cam feeds.
- cafeinux 4y ago
  The richer would be the ones that do things on their livefeed that attract people. Do you want politicians orgies? Because that's how you get politicians orgies. The poorer politicians would be the perfectly honest and completely boring ones, not a great way to encourage honesty.
  - b112 4y ago
    Do you want politicians orgies? Now wait, let not be too hasty here. We should whiteboard this out. There are a lot of moving parts, and shutting down an idea too soon, would be wrong. So to start, uh, just wondering, which politicians? Also, what would they be wearing? Again, only asking for an accurate framing here.
    - mikrotikker 4y ago
      Lauren Boebert is secretly a total hottie. But I really wanna see Mitch McConnell shake what he got.
      - Loughla 4y ago
        I know that HN isn't supposed to be for jokes, but legit, I assume that a naked Mitch McConnell looks like the nudist alien scammers from futurama. https://futurama.fandom.com/wiki/Sprunjer?file=Srunger.png https://futurama.fandom.com/wiki/Sprunjer?file=Srunger.png

pjc50 4y ago

We never did find out who leaked the security camera footage from inside a "secure area" of Matt Hancock, UK health secretary, kissing his aide: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/matt-hancock-kiss-leak-video-evidence-b2057285.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/matt-hancock-... A horrifyingly large amount of UK political decision-making that should be minuted is instead carried out secretly on whatsapp.

blitzar 4y ago
Your two statements seem to be a contradiction - decision meetings should be public, but the meeting where you are getting a blowie from your assistant on the sofa in your office should be private?
- themitigating 4y ago
  What does the second act have to do with corruption or information that is useful for the public?
  - JacobThreeThree 4y ago
    When a government official doesn't abide by his own lockdown rules, that's corruption.
    - themitigating 4y ago
      why? If a politician votes for a law that reduces the speed limit to 50mph then is caught speeding is that corruption? I think corruption is when someone abuses their position of power. This isn't abuse they just violated their own rules.
      - LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
        It's corruption because they know they won't be punished. If more laws were objective (like speeding) and politicians were as surveilled as everyone else it wouldn't be an issue.

marginalia_nu 4y ago

All of this would be fixed, and more, if we brought back Athenian style ostracism by public vote!

clnq 4y ago
It would also make banishing political enemies far more effective.

pmlnr 4y ago

This is whataboutism and derails the conversation. These two things are unrelated.

roenxi 4y ago
1. Why do you think 'whataboutism' is a bad thing? It is comparison. Comparison is a fine tool for reasoning about policy. Not the end of the conversation, but something to consider. 2. The corruption of EU politicians is a major concern. If they think so little of privacy that they are willing to vote for laws like this, then they should certainly have to defend why they get any privacy at all. Corruption in government is one of the most damaging things happening in our society, and total surveillance would make it easier to detect & prove when they are lying.
- pmlnr 4y ago
  > The corruption of EU politicians is a major concern Yes. I never said otherwise. > then they should certainly have to defend why they get any privacy at all That's the funny bit: they won't. They - and their family - will have the same if they use the same platforms. Which is why I firmly believe this isn't about corruption, this is about false beliefs and zealots who genuinely believe the internet and open communication is bad.
  - headsoup 4y ago
    Except that these platforms often have 'government' specific offerings that are not the same as everyone else.
- FrustratedMonky 4y ago
  In the US whataboutism is used to justify current crimes because in the past someone else did not get charged. It is a way to dismiss current crimes made by 'my side' because 'whatabout' that time 'your side' got off. It ends up reducing what can be criticized to the lowest common denominator, because you can't criticize anybody if anybody had every done it before.

shadowgovt 4y ago

I know he was American and not European, but "When a man assumes a public trust, he should consider himself public property." ~Thomas Jefferson

contravariant 4y ago

Saying that if we start scanning all chats for illegal activity then we should also require all communications of politicians to be part of public record is not exactly the strongest argument. I mean those systems are already in place, at a minimum you'd have to argue they're ineffective or not as intrusive. And your hyperbole is not doing you any favours on that front.

CuriouslyC 4y ago

This would be delightful. Being a politician should be a curse that the dedicated bear for the good of humanity, not cushy job and badge of pride.

xpe 4y ago
Be careful what you ask for. There's no good reason that public service should be a "curse". Humans are not angels, and we should not build systems that hold out some unrealistic expectation that they are. Too often politicians are viewed as "saviors of the people" only shortly before they become "corrupt villains". If we want to attract competent public minded people, we need to do a lot of deep thinking and system design to get there. <personal pain point> One good place to start is to get rid of this idea that every citizen's input is equally informed, sane, reasonable, actionable, legal, or thoughtful. In a democracy, every person hopefully is afforded certain rights, such as due process and free speech, but this does not mean what you say is "free from consequences". The corollary is that not all ideas have to be given equal consideration. Some people say batshit crazy things sometimes, and frankly, these kinds of comments make life hell for many public servants. School boards come to mind. Speaking, personally, I would like to be a public servant, in some regard (again), but I don't think we have realistic processes in place to really gather thoughtful feedback from the public. Until we do, public servants have to deal with a lot of informed nonsense. I think software developers and UX people might not realize how skilled and motivated we are at building systems that actually work. I'm not saying that we build the right thing all the time. But so many government processes are fundamentally broken in terms of information processing. I'm not saying that they are broken by e.g. the tropes like "lazy people in government". I'm saying that the systems are (anti) designed (or evolved) in such a way that they're so painful that driven people get driven out. If you think of a government as a way of processing citizen input in a way that is consistent with budget constraints and laws, it seems that many government agencies are not built using the principles that so many of us take for granted: system design, failure analysis, testing. This isn't just government problem, of course ... it is characteristic of large organizations of all kinds. Democracy does not function well when too many people are simultaneously uninformed and yelling. This crowds out informed people trying to have a discussion. </personal pain point>
4y ago

javajosh 4y ago

You say this in jest, but it's a good idea. The more power you have, the less privacy you should have. This would be an appealing catch-up mechanic in society. I would vote yes.

sowbug 4y ago
If reality TV and US politics are any indication, then today it's the reverse: the less privacy you have, the more power you have. Beware the peculiar human creature who craves attention from strangers.
- javajosh 4y ago
  Media exposure is not the same as loss of privacy. Fox "News" hosts have a ton of exposure. But they also have a ton of privacy. We know this because it was noticable when they lost their privacy in the Dominion lawsuit discovery. Their (previously private) texts to each other admitting openly lying to their viewers, that they themselves saw through Trump's obvious and destructive lies. And it was, is, a fantastic look behind the curtain, even if their primary victims won't/can't ever see it. (Just like none of them watched the 1/6 hearings.) But it's still a very good thing that we need more of.
  - sowbug 4y ago
    I understand the difference. If we required politicians to stream their lives 24/7, then the unintended consequence would be a government run exclusively by Instagram influencers who already stream their lives 24/7. I get your point about sunlight on secrets. But limiting our governance to the pool of people I see on TikTok seems like a high price to pay. (This is just a 2023 rephrasing of the age-old concern of electing someone willing to be a politician.)

twinge 4y ago

This could be labeled "sousveillance", watchful vigilance from underneath: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance

qwertox 4y ago

I have thought for some years now that any country wanting to implement some kind of restrictions or surveillance should start with politicians and authorities first. With some select authorities being exempt from this due to national security. For example, if a country wants to implement the installation of state-owned anti-harassment "spyware" on their citizens phones, then this would first apply to politicians and those who work for the government, like anyone employed in a city hall or the traffic authority (normal citizens working there) or the like. This would run for 5 years, while citizens have the right to attempt to hack these systems without repercussions, in order to ensure that the security is up to the highest standards. If after those 5 years the politicians and government employees are ok with it, if no major security concerns exist and the benefit has shown to be an obvious one, then it could be up for debate to implement this new technology.

Spoom 4y ago
> With some select authorities being exempt from this due to national security. I fear your carveout would quickly become an "Inner Party" situation, with those with real power declaring themselves exempt due to "national security" reasons. Imagine then that anyone in any position of authority but not real power would be subject to the surveillance as an "Outer Party" member. I get that the intent is to show the people in charge the negative consequences of such policies, but I don't think that's the worst that could come of this.
- AvAurora 4y ago
  You understand that there is already an inner party, not in a conspiracy sense, but in a privacy sense. Yo have to actually argue why partial transparency is way worse than full obscurity.
- rhodorhoades 4y ago
  That’s exactly the kind of fallacy these politicians would use to argue against this kind of thing ;)
  - 4y ago

EGreg 4y ago

If all meeting by public officials on duty were recorded (as police officer bodycams now are) then we would avoid tons of wars and geopolitical conflicts. We’d realize these guys are bozos who didn’t actually even understand each other and should be replaced by diligent teams who have to develop better frameworks. THESE POLITICIANS OWE US THE PEOPLE to do this IN ALL COUNTRIES. Instead of shaming us into supporting their “unprovoked and unjustified” wars.

krunck 4y ago

That's a start. Governments need to be 100% transparent in all things. Government officials should have nothing to hide. All meetings are open, all documents are accessible to all, all communications are recorded and open. Convert the NSA into an agency which watches government 24x7. Any government official that is found to hide/obscure information from the public gets three strike after which they are out. For life. Workers who actually deal with confidential/personal information on citizens are the ones with the privilege to work without such monitoring.