Also cut essential foreign aid, likely to result in thousands extra deaths, fired essential government workers for no reason that then had to be hired back at extra expense, while asking others to send him an email justifying their employment, accessed government records of citizens he should have no visibility into, likely misusing them, made up claims about 200+ year olds receiving pensions, made Grok available to assist in committing war crimes in Iran and Latin America, not to speak of Grok 'undressing' random people on the internet, spent millions on election interference etc. etc.
Why are my tax dollars going to foreign healthcare, education, and food banks when we could definitely use that here?
> claims about 200+ year olds recieving pensions
Elon and a SSA inspector general investigation identified approximately $298 million paid to 24,000 deceased beneficiaries over a period spanning 1998–2019. Some of that money was recovered.
He did nothing. He was an advisor to the president, and his team made reccomendations. Also, there is a GAO that has reviewed all canceled contracts. All of the recipients had the right to protest... unfortunately, most of the NGO's simply had to show up to court to get the contracts back, but they didn't because it was obvious fraud.
And, that grok part? What is all that about? Any AI, can do all of those things? Spending on election interference? So all money donated to political orgs are election interference?
The reasons you seem to hate him, all seem like good things to me?
> Why are my tax dollars going to foreign healthcare, education, and food banks
Because the US wants to have influence around the world to maintain its empire. Mostly using hard power but also some soft power and this is seen as a relatively cheap way to maintain NGO presence in foreign countries that can be used for both.
> when we could definitely use that here?
Agreed, unfortunately that gets called socialism/communism in the US, which means a large chunk of the population will instantly reject it based on labels alone.
> He did nothing. He was an advisor to the president, and his team made reccomendations.
His team did a lot more than that[1][2][3].
"DOGE has gained access to sensitive data about immigrants and farm workers. [A] whistleblower at the National Labor Relations Board claims that staffers observed spikes in data leaving the agency after DOGE got access to its systems, with destinations unknown."
> And, that grok part? What is all that about? Any AI, can do all of those things?
There's a difference between potentially can do and is basically advertised as doing[4]. You can't easily get Claude to do the equivalent, for example. Note that what Grok did was not limited to adults either. But maybe you're fine with that too. Do you think a regular person would get away with that?
For what it's worth, I don't hate Musk specifically. What I hate is this sense that people with his wealth have that they are entitled to just disregard all rules they don't like because they're just so brilliant. Then you have people in jail for things Musk does 8 times a day.
If all he did was put his money towards some cool projects, (which is what I think his admirers think he limits himself to), then be my guest. It's the idea that he can get high as a kite, have some crackpot idea based off of a X post he just saw, pick up the phone and get a crackpot plan in motion, bypassing any kind of normal process or vetting.
I'd be seriously worried that Musk has all kinds of private info on regular Americans as a result of his DOGE scheme, which likely did the opposite of saving money[5][6].
> Why are my tax dollars going to foreign healthcare, education, and food banks when we could definitely use that here?
I somewhat agree. You vote for universal healthcare, or against it?
Either way, addressing communicable diseases in far away places also helps keep them from becoming nearby diseases. It's far cheaper to fund some vaccines in a far away land than deal with widespread disease domestically. And in the end, cutting these things did practically nothing for the deficit. It was a rounding error of spending to save so many lives around the world.
And they want to argue they're instituting a "Christian" nation. How about following His red text words?
Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons. Freely you have received; freely give.
I'm 31, i was too young to vote last time the US tried to pass universal healthcare (Obamacare.) However, I don't like government if you can't tell. So no, i would not vote for universal healthcare. Our system has it's flaws, but it seems to be the best system i've witnessed. Medical debt can't effect your credit score, and they can't garnish you wages to pay it off... so technically it is free? I think what really needs to be done is we need to "decertify" doctors. There's no reason I need someone who went to school for 16 years when i break an arm or feel sick and want some over the counter drugs.
As for the aid thing:
"If the industrial nations really want to help the Africans, they should finally terminate this awful aid.”
Western governments sending enormous quantities of subsidized agricultural products into Africa, harms them more than it helps them. Kenyan Economists took note of when food aid arrived in Kenya, some was diverted by corrupt officials, while other shipments were sold on local markets at extremely low prices. Kenyan farmers couldn't compete with these prices, so their businesses suffered. As local agricultural production declined, the country became increasingly dependent on outside assistance. During the next drought, Kenya would have fewer domestic food reserves, creating another cycle of dependency and killing thousands.
> the US tried to pass universal healthcare (Obamacare.)
Obamacare is not universal healthcare. It's what people with vested interest in maintaining the current system try to paint it as for people who don't like government, so that they conflate mandated private insurance (Obamacare) - because who likes mandates? with universal healthcare.
> but it seems to be the best system i've witnessed
How many systems have you actually witnessed firsthand? Have you spent life uninsured with medical issues before? Have you ever actually had significant medical debt?
> Medical debt can't effect your credit score, and they can't garnish you wages to pay it off
This isn't true across most of the country. It really makes me question your idea "the best system i've witnessed", as you're repeating commonly held beliefs which are not based on reality.
This then only really applies for emergency healthcare, and even then only really to stabilize you enough to send you out the door. Sure seems like the worst way to administer kinda-sorta-not-really-free healthcare. Wouldn't it be better to just provide solutions to remediate and manage issues before they end up in the most expensive form of healthcare, probably over and over?
> There's no reason I need someone who went to school for 16 years when i break an arm or feel sick and want some over the counter drugs.
This is already a thing and is rapidly growing. Urgent care centers largely staff NP/PAs, which can write prescriptions. Its becoming more common for these providers to have many shifts with only NP/PAs as the highest clinical position instead of having an MD/DO as well. PA's didn't go to school for 16 years.
That said, if I break my arm I'm definitely going to want to go to an ortho if I've had even a slightly significant break. Not healing right will mess you up for life.
Once again, are you sure you understand this system you're claiming is the "best system"? If you don't even begin to understand the basics of the claims you're making, how are you so confident this system is the best? Random internet memes tell you it is so? Yeah, sure, you're more likely to survive some uber rare cancer. You're more likely to die in child birth or due to some random disease, all while spending more to subsidize some billionaires yacht habits.
> sending enormous quantities of subsidized agricultural products into Africa
I can get behind winding down enormous amounts of food aid when there aren't active famines happening. If we're really wanting to help, it would be far better to give aid to help jump start their own food production, enable them to be self-sufficient instead of the corporate farm welfare we had. Defined road maps to taper aid when good infrastructure is in place and well supported would be important.
Its still not exactly wise policy to suddenly one day completely cut it all off. Its also not the only thing that was suddenly slashed. Tons of people reliant on medications to live were suddenly cut off without any possible supplier in the area, among many other things.
You're then also so worried about how expensive these programs were. Its like worrying about how much crushing debt you're in financing luxury cars so you decide to cut back on buying a candy bar every other week. Problem solved guys! We did it! Good job! Applause all around! Just ignore how we've actually increased spending after all these rounds of government efficiency cuts!
Sure seems like the last time we had someone focusing on getting in and cutting wasteful budgets, focusing on actually getting consensus on what was wasteful, we actually managed to have a budget surplus. Who was that guy again? Which party was that?
I give my agents a dedicated system user with their own home. It's not sandboxing - they can still read many of my files (which is actually convenient) and they could exploit local vulnerabilities to get root, of course. But I find it to be a good compromise. I'm not as concerned about the agent turning evil than I am about it doing harm on good will.
They have their own clone of the repo they're working on. And when they're done, I pull their commits from my own git working copy, with my system user, and then push it to my bare repos, which acts both as an easily backupable source and as my CI, with their post-update hooks. The whole "pull from codex, then push to bare repo" is so common that I made for myself a `meat_proxy` command that automates it. I'm some lazy meat.
I recently got very pessimistic about this when I realized that in order for the agent to make meaningful changes, it frequently needs to read all your config files / dotfiles.. even if this is a sandboxed project, it feels pretty bad this config is instantly stored in the cloud out of your grasp. My OpenCode one day was like "and now I'm signing into your local mysql instance with your (plaintext) pw that I picked up last week to make some schema updates... " and I was like, ok we're done here.
I'm now avoiding any cloud-agents until further notice.
They're just going to sell you Docker isolation and call it something else.
I mount only the project folders I want my AI to see, and it has no keys to anything otherwise. If can push and deploy using the same project files but from my host machine, manually.
I use it in a devcontainer. Protects me from most agent stupidity, though not malice. I give it read-only access to git origin and relevant AWS infra, so any remote changes are made by me from the host (manually or scripted), but it is still able to quickly get feedback on changes and look at logs.
I use Incus to manage disposable virtual machines on my Linux host with a couple of scripts to set up a fresh vm automatically for a given project from a base image. So I can run the agents inside in yolo mode without too much worry. They get access to one shared folder between them.
Claude frequently has decided to disable its own sandbox when I've had it running so I absolutely do not trust their implementation. Wrapping with `nono` or `sbx` has mitigated that on my side.
I have also experienced this. Now I run Claude Code (or preferably Pi) inside a bubblewrap instance spawned and controlled by me that the agentic harness cannot disable by it's own choice.
Locally running Docker Sandboxes built with the --clone flag work pretty good for me so far.
The naming is a bit confusing here: these are not containers, this is a completely separate product by Docker using MicroVM-s for sandboxing.
Devex has been good and the isolation is pretty solid this way, the big downside is that it's not open source. If someone releases and maintains an open source implementation that provides similar devex I'll jump ship immediately.
I didn't love any of them, but nono/srt struck a nice balance of convenience + security. I found srt more intuitive than nono. I could basically share my srt with a colleage via a json, while the nono config is more complex. And also noisy with what gets blocked / asking for approval. Some would see that as a perk, I thought it was distracting since a big reason to use a sandbox is to avoid permissions fatigue.
I use Coder with one workspace per project. A workspace is an isolated VM and I let the agents loose there. They can do anything they want in the workspaces but once the code is pushed, it's reviewed by an external agent before being merged. It's not an elaborate setup. It started very straightforward and the basic setup still works for me, but I have been adding some features here and there over time.
Docker works but the part that bit me was not the filesystem, it was the agent needing real credentials and network access to be useful. What I ended up doing is running the CLI agent in a throwaway working copy with only the env vars that one task needs, and treating anything it writes as a patch to review rather than something that lands directly. Curious if anyone has found a lighter option than a container that still stops it from reaching things like ssh keys.
I am using something similar. I then setup an additional container with Caddy that has the API keys and modifies headers so the AI containers never see them. Pi for example can use this setup.
For SSH I've started migrating from one prover wide key to multiple project scoped keys. I was also using SSH inside the container but realized I could just make commits inside and then eventually push from outside.
I think hardening tips for Docker/Podman could warrant its own "Ask HN" post - not just for reducing exposure to agents but also all the recent supply chain attacks.
I have been kicking the tires on yoloai which seems to automate the "intercept API calls to hide API keys" step and the "sandbox the files in a docker container" step, with support for inspecting the files / diff before applying.
I don't quite have it to a smooth workflow for my needs ("research this codebase and draft a plan we can discuss, with code examples") but it seems promising.
BYD cars are cheaper because China just has the most expertise at building things at scale and because they're making many formerly discrete car parts entire modules, which are cheaper to manufacture.
There's also been plenty of reporting of 'slave like conditions' at Tesla, GM etc.
Slave-like by American standards maybe, not Chinese. In the US Janesville GM pays assembly workers $28/hr in 2008 before closure, and nowadays anywhere between $20-$35 and they enjoy a strong union and good pension.
A few labor lawsuits show that in China Tesla wage starts at ~$4.5/hr while BYD ~$1.7/hr. Tesla also limits overtime to 36 hrs/mo by China labor law, while gov allows BYD workers to clock 441.5 raw hours in a single month. Pension and union is basically non-existent. And the reason why ppl work at BYD instead of Tesla is by clocking monstrous overtime they actually make more despite lower hourly pay.
There are reasons why Tesla consistently ranks in China 1st/2nd by sales. One of them is Chinese workers are the ones exploited by sweatshops and a government only nominally communist so they are paying the price, while Western customers are enjoying good ol' NIMBYism.
No, it can't. If PRC makers NEEDED low wages to undercut pricing vs west sure. But PRC EVs selling far above domestic MSRP, more than enough to cover wage differential, i.e. lower wages isn't doing the undercutting, it's enabling more profitable extraction. Reality is western competitors are simply not competitive regardless of wage differential when most structural competitiveness come from vertical integration. It doesn't help west is paying more to build worse. And paying less to build worse also not going to close gap.
Can be, but likely aren't to any greater extent than in the West without substantial evidence. And so perhaps it should not be the first reason listed for why it's cheaper when there are perfectly reasonable explanations outside of the constant 'China bad, evil' orientalist shtick that just shows how scared we in the West are of actual competition, accustomed to exploiting the world for half a millennia.
> This is a linux driver problem. On laptops designed for windows.
No. It's 'the NVidia way or the highway' problem. NVidia is so full of themselves they refuse to work under anyone's rules (i.e. the Linux kernel where they're constantly trying to work around them).
They're egomaniacs who are so full of themselves, riding high on the AI bubble, they think they're above everyone else in the ecosystem, while utilising all kinds of other people's work for their own benefit.
Look at the way they develop their 'open' Linux drivers where it's just a shim that loads a huge binary blob off the GPU rather than a proper driver like amdgpu has.
Meanwhile they wouldn't be a $5T company without Linux and the wider FLOSS ecosystem.
It's kind of like when Secure Boot debuted and the plan was to allow only Windows with it enabled, then no doubt someone would claim the fact that only Windows can boot with it enabled as a 'Linux driver problem'.
Expect there's about a thousand Postman alternatives on GitHub. And unlike Dropbox you don't need capital for infra so it's easy to make another one. So unlike Dropbox, Postman actually is relatively simple to copy.
I get that's how it feels but I've also seen more SO questions closed off that seemed perfectly reasonable/not duplicates except in the most vaguest sense than I can count.
Many seem to not want to admit it for some reason, but the truth is that desktop environments are an extremely personal, subjective sort of software. One person's nirvana is another's anathema.
This is why I think it's important that there's a wealth of different desktops available to use that represent a variety of different paradigms, particularly in the context of Linux on the desktop. Desktop Linux represents the ultimate in potential to mold the computer to the user instead of the reverse, and it really bums me out to see suggestions or implications that would-be Linux users should just accept a Windows-ish shape or tiling keyboard-driven shape and stop hoping for something more Mac-like (which as an aside, GNOME is not despite superficial appearances).
Can please someone explain the concept of a 'classified interpretation' [of law] to me like I'm 5? I know the concept exists, but I don't really understand how it can be in any way justified in any country that's even pretending to be a democracy?
It's not justified and it can never be. Keeping information secret is only justified if releasing it would put a person in serious danger or compromise a police/military operation. And even then it must be balanced against the public interest in transparency, strictly time limited and narrow scoped (no blacking out whole documents).
I don't see how releasing an interpretation of a law could ever compromise law enforcement. Or actually I know how, it's because it would prove the way they do mass surveillance is illegal.
The problem is modern America doesn't see it that way. Any time the government does something evil they just say it's for "national security" and no one questions them. It's like a Winter Soldier password that makes courts go blank and say yes to anything.
I feel the role of the Press is to root out these stories and publish them.
To me the defining moment of the Press abdicating their job was when the NYTs reported the second gulf war. This was the end of me reading it. The Sunday times was staple reading growing up.
Press increasingly started abdicating their job when journalism was no longer financially independent of the people and institutions it is supposed to scrutinize.
> Keeping information secret is only justified if releasing it would put a person in serious danger or compromise a police/military operation.
Sure, but the obvious pro-government response is “revealing that the government is doing bad things reflects badly on the government and damages its reputation at home and abroad.”
> “revealing that the government is doing bad things reflects badly on the government and damages its reputation at home and abroad.”
This is -incidentally- how the ancient English "state secrets privilege" got introduced into US law.
In the 1940's, godawful maintenance resulted in the crash of a bomber over US soil and the death of all three of the civilians on board the plane. The widows of the dead civilians sued the government and demanded the accident report. The government refused to provide the report, claiming the privilege because "national security", and courts all the way up to the Supreme Court agreed.
In the early 2000s, the accident report was declassified. Inspection revealed that the only real reason to refuse to release it was to both prevent government embarrassment and to avoid having to pay out -IIRC- nearly a quarter million in 1940's USD to the widows.
Given its enormous potential for unchecked abuse, along with the fact that the first ever invocation of it was abusive, courts should refuse to permit its use.
There is also a genuine case for National security in that - during the Second World War - releasing that information would (IMO) let the enemy know what maintenance was being held back, in bombers.
Wars quickly replace one another, how unfortunate!
Or we have just independently rediscovered why most regimes seek the justification of some external threats to strengthen their power over their population, 1984 style.
The planes in question would have been obsolete by that point, also those planes from WW2 would have already been widely distributed among allied (including Soviet) countries
Yes, perpetual wars can be used as a tool of domestic control. The benign use is the rally around the flag effect. More harmful is using them as justifications to do anything without oversight. It’s one of the patterns shown by the vast majority of dictatorships and totalitarian governments. One of the aspects of fascism in Umberto Eco’s definition.
> ...releasing that information would (IMO) let the enemy know what maintenance was being held back, in bombers.
Nah. A single fucked-up maintenance shop is a single fucked-up maintenance shop. You can gut-check this by noticing that bombers weren't routinely falling out of the sky.
FedGov simply didn't want to be deeply embarrassed and wanted to try to wiggle out of paying a quarter million 1940s USD to the widows. Because they were unwilling to admit to their negligence and face the consequences, they did deep and lasting damage to the US justice system by introducing a mechanism that lets FedGov conceal nearly any evidence for any reason by uttering the words "state secrets privilege".
If the enemy could track back the bomber to the shop that maintained it based on the information in that report, they
a) Already knew that it crashed.
b) Already knew if any other bombers maintained by that shop had crashed.
As I said, bombers weren't routinely falling out of the sky. And as I suggested, releasing a declassified report that only covered the reason for the crash revealed nothing that the enemy didn't already know.
c) were learning that other bombers maintained by that shop were at high risk of being poorly maintained.
The enemy thanks you for your cooperation in telling them where possible weaknesses are
edit:
While the FedGov absolutely abused the privilege in Reynolds to hide negligence, from a pure intelligence standpoint, operational maintenance audit trails are rarely "harmless" information to hand to an enemy during a War. (Cold or otherwise)
> Keeping information secret is only justified if releasing it would put a person in serious danger or compromise a police/military operation.
I think that’s A reason to keep information secret. The other is if it would reveal sensitive sources and methods (e.g., capabilities that it known, would impact the ability to use those methods).
Not saying the legal interpretation falls under that, but just mentioning it.
Imagine, for example, a case is about someone disclosing the location of nuclear arms to their spouse. Maybe even accidentally. If they are brought up on charges about this, national security doesn't want the fact that a case is about nuclear weapons to be public information. They further don't want it disclosed who was told about them (as the spouse wouldn't be subject to charges). That's basically where a secret interpretation and ruling would ultimately enter. The courts can't disclose what the ruling was nor what the case was even fully about.
Why can't they? They can redact names of individuals in a case like that. "Oh some person who was married to some other person who works for some agency knows where nukes might be". That's not a risk.
They could even redact larger portions of the case and still release the interpretation in some form.
Because it's very hard to stop accidental or incidental information leaks. For an opinion to be rendered, generally they also attach the case facts which lead to that ruling. Heavy redaction means it becomes almost impossible to use that ruling as precedent but also runs a real risk of exposing state secrets. For example, which judge made the ruling? Well if you get that you can start pulling information about the days the judge was active and a short list of the people the judge was hearing cases for.
All it takes is 1 accidental redaction or someone who did something silly like using a black highlighter on a PDF and now where the nukes are stored is public information.
There's also simply information that can be gleaned just based on the location that the hearing is taking place. This came from x court in x district, well then it's likely a nuclear silo is roughly in that county or surrounding counties.
Sounds like if one desperately wants some sort of excuse, this can be shoehorned to anything and everything. Exactly what 3 letter agencies would say to keep doing whatever nasty dirty unlawful and unconstitutional things they are doing on whims of current set of people in power.
Its still pretty lame and shows vast incompetence on all levels. Maybe I am a bit naive but correct solution is to tackle underlying problems, not just give up because thats what you basically suggest.
I’ll assume that there’s some fake district we can create in the system to attribute such things to, since normally the courts are in districts which may be too specific on their own.
But the resulting material would be like, (XXXX meaning redactions)
XXXX was accused of XXXX
Tried before judge XXXX in XXXX District court
The evidence was XXXX XXXX XXXX
The witnesses were XXXX XXXX XXXX
They were found (not) guilty
If anything could be unredacted it could potentially (?) be the bare fact that it was about nuclear secrets but you can’t really reveal anything else without giving majorly risky facts to bad actors.
The redactions of every document could require many full-time very security-cleared clerks (or take years to do if understaffed) and is of the highest importance since a single failure to redact, or operational error, may reveal the whole secret thing. Mostly, all the things need redacting, so either whole documents, or everything but the prepositions and articles is redacted.
Since it sounds like the concern here is about the public’s interest in monitoring to make sure no abuses are taking place (which is a value I do share), what part of this aim would be served by a redacted report like this?
> Because it's very hard to stop accidental or incidental information leaks.
It's really hard if it is in your interest not to stop accidental information leaks, because it is easier to bulk classify everything and blame this difficulty. There is no incentive to stop accidental leaks if you can always hide everything.
ok, so put a disclosure time on ruling. how how much time should pass so that information is non risk anymore? So you know that nukes locations got leaked, so what do you do? do you relocate the base? if not how sure can you be that this information is not accuired by enemies? So if you do not realocate the base you accept that this is acceptable risk. So might be that publishing the ruling is also acceptable?
A federal court tried to conceal the identity of a judge who has been reprimanded.
Claude was able to work out who it was in less than 10min based on stringing together facts that remained and seemed irrelevant. Journalists uncovered the identity independently using different means. (The ability of Claude to do this was not revealed until the other journalists had gone public and confirmed the identity.)
> Imagine, for example, a case is about someone disclosing the location of nuclear arms to their spouse.
The location of most US nuclear weapons are public. Moreover, if you suspect that the location of some you intend to be secret may have been compromised then the obvious sensible response is "move them" rather than "keep even the legal theory of the case a secret forever".
This is why the primary ones whose location is intended to be a secret are on submarines -- submarines are easy to move around.
2 parties bring up what they believe is the legal justification for their position in dispute and a judge rules on which is the correct position. If a party thinks the judge got the ruling wrong (interpreted the law wrong), they object and appeal.
If you look at the history of secret interpretations / rulings, they are more like "retention of communications by the government is a pre-interception act". No specifics, very broad legal definitions of what it means for everyone's communications to be retained (and in this case, probably analyzed by AI systems for risk).
From warrantless wiretapping to extra judicial renditions, the US government has been a rogue state for sometime. Now they just have low-grade criminals and racists running the show, buddied up with media owners, O&G and the mic.
I am the first generation out of a dictatorship, the belief some folks have in their democratic processes always amazes, there is no law when secret courts and secret warrants are a thing.
Yet for some strange reason folks think secret agencies are bound by the same laws as regular police officers.
At least in nazi Germany, the state was explicitly designed like that. Most people should never come into contact with the prerogative state and spend their lives in the normative state, as capitalism doesn't work well in a prerogative state. You need to believe that punishment doesn't come arbitrarily in order to follow the rules.
But of course, things are very different in the prerogative state, where actions have unclear consequences.
I can get the idea that for some cases it can be in the public's interest if specific court hearings are closed, or if it's secret that certain court hearings or entire cases even exist. There is a lot of potential of abuse (and a documented history of abuse), but at least the idea makes sense
But I can't see a public benefit to keeping the principles such a court uses secret
It’s a pretty obvious outcome. Attorney-client privilege applies to the executive branch of the government as much as it applies to anyone else, and not just in national security matters.
No one is giving the real answer to this question which is that these laws touch on the legality of capabilities the US does not want to acknowledge it has, and so it won't. Secret information in the US is like glitter - if you touch it, it spreads to you too.
It's not just "here's this law about spying in the abstract," which can be talked about in the open; it's "we're using the MIND READER 5000 under Title XVII powers delegated by the President to the Mind Reading Organization to conduct mind reading on persons X, Y, and Z." The legal briefings and rulings on the facts will by necessity reveal the nature of the technology or technique in question, and so, they are classified. If I recall correctly it was a big deal for the ACLU to get a lawyer a security clearance so they could interact with these courts, but I could be misremembering.
The real problem here is that if someone files a claim against the government and the government wants to keep the facts of the case a secret, you still need the case to have an outcome, and then you have two options.
The first is that you assume whatever is being kept a secret is something that doesn't favor the government, and then the government loses the case by default. This is the more reasonable option, because it mitigates the perverse incentive for the government to declare something a secret whenever it makes them look bad. But it has the obvious problem that then the government would lose some cases it should have won if the information could be published.
The second is that you assume whatever is being kept a secret is something that favors the government, and then the government wins the case by default. But that doesn't solve the problem -- you then have members of the public losing cases they should have won if the information could be published. And doing this makes the perverse incentive worse.
So why do we accept the second one instead of the first one?
Oftentimes the government drops the case. When people get convicted for things they did on Tor, and don't settle, the government often drops the case so they don't have to reveal how they got information about activities on Tor.
When Germany, which doesn't play by the same rules, got DiDW and then Boystown, that was quite revealing on how authorities can break Tor.
That's when the government is the one bringing the case to begin with. The issue is, if the government e.g. kills your spouse, why should the perpetrators get off scott free because the perpetrators want to keep something a secret?
Imagine the public tried to do that. Sorry, IRS/DoJ, the defendant is refusing warrants and subpoenas because it's a secret and without that you can't prosecute them.
There are whole laws that are classified and cannot be discussed in open court. Ignorance of the law is no defense when you are charged with violating a law and that’s still true in the USA even if the law is classified and you are not authorized to know what it says.
Is there more to this than the Wikipedia article says?
While it does say:
> Gilmore also complained about being subject to "secret law", when the airlines and government refused to show the directive under which they were requesting ID.
nowhere does the article say the courts commented on the complaint, let alone ruled on it.
Nor does the article say anything about "Ignorance of the law is no defense when you are charged with violating a law". The reason given was instead:
> there was no constitutional violation because air passengers could still travel without identification if they instead underwent the more stringent "secondary screening" search.
I'm not saying your wrong, just that the article you offered as evidence doesn't go as far as your claims.
The Wikipedia article is poor, but I cannot not edit it as I attended parts of the trial and in fact discussed the suit with john before he filed it so by Wikipedia’s rules I can’t edit it. Anyway a lawyer would be a better person.
John’s appeal is online. Section [10] of the decision discussion describes being subject to a law he cannot have access to. The judge saw it but could not discuss it in court, with the plaintiff (John Gilmore) or even his lawyer. Also the orders (law) are agreed by the court to be arbitrary, changing day by day and being arbitrarily different between airports. But since the Airport personnel knew them tht was good enough for the court.
And though the discussion mentioned that he could take a bus or walk, the conclusion, [21], said that his rights were not violated at all, both the bus precedent and the legality of being subject to unknown law. The brief Wikipedia page mentions only the former, though the latter was the primary factor of the complaint.
Whether they can do that or not, in this case it was due to acknewledgedly arbitrary and capricious secret rules dictated by government personnel to the airlines, not decisions by the airlines themselves.
Unless your position is that one of the legally legitimate principles of free business is whether to follow the law or not.
Depends on the business. You cannot have a bar or restaurant behaving like that with some racist/xenophobic/whatever shit like that, you would get your license revoked rather quickly.
Not sure if airliners are regulated like that, but 'free business' is not anarchy by any means, unlike you suggest.
Really what it is is they had a lawyer say, "We can justify massive spying on citizens via [long long list of arguments and precedents]", the security apparatus would like to keep the veneer of legality that provides and knows if what they were doing was known there would be massive backlash and the law would be changed to make it more clearly illegal so they keep that interpretation secret. Basically going on the logic that they don't have to tell Congress or the Courts how they screwed up the 4th Amendment and it's not their job to fix it.
Read it as classified misinterpretation of laws, so that they can do illegal things and claim this loophole when caught.
Usa has constitution and its government more or less side steps it in many things. Might as well have no constitution. Usa is a jungle for practical intends and purposes compared to europe or any functional democracy. This is the problem with allowing interpretation of law rather than taking law as it is written. Someone somewhere can interpret it in completely twisted way and throw away the spirit of the law.
A good faith answer to the question; classification hinges on damage done to the United States if it is released. So for example, a law might constraint or enforce the usage of a capability against an enemy, and this, of course would hang on some sort of spectrum also probably defined in law or in an agency interpretation. The agency interpretation is also probably classified and so as you start applying that spectrum, you enter gray areas and niches, and extremes, and so you have to ask a lawyer to disambiguate. And so this lawyer's interpretation is now the fulcrum on which employment of classified US capabilities is based. So therefore, teleologically this lawyer's interpretation has to be classified because it all goes back to whether public knowledge of this capability will damage the United States interest. if you know what the lawyer's interpretation is then you know the spectrum if you know the spectrum then you know the capability then you can damage the United States.
There are a couple of people with sober takes on this article and you’re one of them. The rest seem to have decided long ago that the entire military is full of mustachio-twirling evildoers, and building their whole mental model of what’s going on with that as the foundation of it.
The facts of the matter are probably much closer to what you’re saying, but some people have become so radicalized (including those who got that way due to Trump-era buffoonery) that they can’t accept even the possibility that most of the actors are operating to protect our collective legitimate best interests.
Most of the people in government and the military are not political appointees, are not political hacks, and are doing tough and sometimes high-risk jobs, from a motivation other than evil. On the other hand, many politicians are motivated mainly by political partisanship and will do anything to try to score political points, including trying to cause outrage about what’s being kept secret, even if it’s been explained to them why it must remain secret.
You’re government agency, and you ask your lawyers about how the law operates given a particular set of circumstances.
In response, the lawyers provide you with advice about how they think the law applies to this situation, and what findings they think a court would make given the evidence etc available.
Information subject to attorney-client privilege (as this information would be) is exempt from release under FOIA anyway. Dropping a security classification on top adds protections against unauthorised release by insiders.
Sometimes there are good reasons for this, such as to protect particular technical capabilities that are easily circumvented if adversaries know that they exist, or to protect human sources who might end up dead if found out. Other times, there are no good reasons to do this but without knowing all the circumstances it’s impossible to tell either way.
To really blow your mind, there is an entire system of classified patents. Some technology is too important to publish but corporations still need to patent it. But when Lockheed wants to sue Boeing over infringement of a classified patent they need to go to a classified court were the patent can be litigated without anything being revealed publicly.
It isn't altogether different than the use of private judges for celebrity divorces. Divorce proceedings are a matter of public record, unless you agree to hire your own judge and then everything can remain out of the public eye. Technically, these are arbitrators but very often are recently retired judges who agree to abide the current law.
That makes more sense than secret laws. Suppose you invent a better way to control nuclear explosions and get more bang for the buck.
Sensibly, I would think not patenting it would be the better path, but if you/your company wants to profit from sale to the government, any patent must remain secret.
I thought patents had to be published for anyone to read? Isn't that the tradeoff of our freedoms, in exchange for a "limited" time monopoly on the idea, you have to publish the idea.
I think the most charitable argument for keeping it secret is: “it would expose capabilities and methods that if made public would allow our adversaries to avoid detection / change their methods”
I don’t agree with this rationale. On the other hand there is a tension between operating effective counter intelligence operations against nation state actors operating against your interests within your borders and free and open society. I’m not sure where the line is but my perception is we’re way beyond it.
different countries have different platforms or mechanisms where interpretations of law are discussed, in Belgium for example there are "rondzendbrieven" by which say judges discuss how to collectively misinterpret the law.
from a US perspective, isn't this diametrically opposed to the concept of "void for vagueness"? : the moment the interpretation of ostensibly non-vague law is under discussion by professionals is the moment said law is invalidated.
Any government side stepping law by interpreting law in any different manner than how it is written is breaking that law. In my opinion laws should not be interpreted at all and parliament should make any bug fixes rather than allowing courts or administration to interpret laws in any other way other than how its written down in the law.
I get why that may reflexively seem right but such a blanket proscription would go off the rails and lead to unintended consequences you definitely don't want. It's simply not possible to write a law both specific enough yet broad enough to cover all cases. You or I can read a plainly worded law and think "There's no way this can be misconstrued, gamed or subverted" and, sadly, we'd be wrong.
> parliament should make any bug fixes rather than allowing courts or administration to interpret laws in any other way other than how its written down in the law.
It's certainly possible to theory-craft completely new and different governance, legal and justice systems from scratch which have different sets of constraints and trade-offs, but then it's a long conversation and unrelated to the existing U.S. system. If we limit ourselves to starting from what the existing U.S. system is and proposing modifications which are actually both constitutionally and logistically possible, then forcing all interpretation and clarification to be passed by congress would require monthly revisions, immediately breaking an already dysfunctional congressional system.
I think it's worth mentioning that in the U.S. system, judges interpreting application of laws passed by elected representatives is a feature not a bug. The U.S. system was designed to be adaptive and self-gating, so each of the three branches of the government have built-in checks and balances on the other two. Setting aside current politics, on a long time-horizon like the last ~50 years, I think the U.S. justice system, as imperfect as it is, is actually serving its designed purpose far better than the other two.
Usa is a common law based system where court judgements also serve as precedent rulings. It is more or less regarded as law even though its not passed by parliament/legislature.
There is another system, civil law based systems where law is passed by parliament and doesn't depend on any court precedents or court interpretation.
Might as well have just courts and call it as adaptive system instead of acknowledging that is isn't a good enough system. Europe has done better in this regard. Checks and balances hardly works in usa. Plenty of news on subverting various constitutional guarantees is example that it failed to work.
Proper democracy needs properly functioning non-lazy legislature. Making vague laws and calling it a day and leaving it for judges and lawyers to interpret based on whichever way the wind is blowing isn't democracy.
Legislature can also work 40 hours a week. Things can be more functional rather than dysfunctional. Active democracy and direct democracy where people can veto laws if necessary, in case representatives collude to pass draconian laws, would be the best kind of democracy. Only that can prevent erosion of rights.
You wrote "All laws are interpreted". If I put an asterisk on "interpreted" that can change the meaning you actually intended. Laws should not be interpreted. People need to learn how to properly use words with its actual meaning and write laws that are non-ambigous. Its not hard or impossible to write proper law in simple and easy to understand way. Feel free to interpret any law with its original meaning of the word and sentence structure. If it leaves room for interpretation, it is a vague law and not a good law.
> that can change the meaning you actually intended
Laws aren't made by one person. When everyone votes on them, they agree on the language because of how they interpret the words on the paper. The meaning is what the words on the paper say, which is interpreted by different people to mean different things before they even become law.
May be start attaching dictionary too as an appendix to law so that words are not interpreted the wrong way. Not having to explain meaning used to be common sense before double speak. But I guess now we need to idiot proof laws.
I beg to differ. It is very easy if you know language decently. The limiting factor is not language but the understanding of what the law maker is trying to achieve. An analogue would be a good programmer and a bad programmer. Give them both same task description. Good competent programmer will most likely program exactly what the program needs to do and never breaks even for edge cases. Bad programmer on the other hand will most likely write a program that doesn't work accurately. The good programmer understood the objective. Every law can be written in easy to understand language and if the law is well written then it won't be vague.
I guess when you have secret courts, it's something that starts to make sense.
I still can't understand how a government can work with some courts where everything is secret. That's something almost literally lifted out of The Process, but the Kafka book is an allegory for a kind of madness, not something that works.
> I don't really understand how it can be in any way justified in any country that's even pretending to be a democracy?
You're not misunderstanding. It really is against everything most Americans think their government is allowed to do. To your question, the 'classified' part is what you think it is: secret. 'Interpretation' is the tricky part.
Unfortunately, laws and regulations aren't exactly clear and over time situations change so one important role of the court system is interpreting how, when and whether the words in a law apply in a specific context. Courts at different levels do this all the time as cases with unique situations arise. Sometimes it's as simple as deciding if a horse counts as a vehicle in a state law which says "no vehicles on this type of road." Assuming that ruling survives appeals without being overturned, the judge will have justified the basis and, hopefully, some clear reasoning for why a horse does or doesn't count as a vehicle. That judge's ruling then becomes part of the "precedent" (aka 'body of case law') attached to that law. In effect, such precedents become part of the law since they can clarify if and how the law applies in certain situations.
So whether some action is or isn't against a law can't solely be determined by just reading the law. You have to do some interpretation, which includes looking up any relevant precedents and weighing them. A single prior ruling from one local municipal court has low weight. The main job of the Supreme Court is resolving conflicting precedents set by lower courts, so a SCOTUS ruling has a lot of weight and multiple SCOTUS rulings over time, each successively refining and narrowing (or occasionally reversing) their prior interpretations, carries maximum weight. All of this happens in the open and, in the long run, I think SCOTUS manages to eventually get most things, if not perfect, pretty close to right.
Hence, the answer to "Is this legal" can be a bit tricky when the law is new or there aren't decades of court precedents. So lawyers have to do research and assess how a court would probably rule on a given situation. That's called "a formal legal opinion" and it's provided in writing, usually including research and justifications, like references to existing case law, as well as legal reasoning supporting the opinion. Anyone can hire a lawyer to research and assess if X action violates Y law (but if you get sued for relying on the lawyer's opinion, they won't be on the hook - you will). It's called an opinion because that's really all it is.
When a govt agency wants to know if they're allowed to do X under Y law, they ask the justice dept to assess and provide a formal opinion just like any company might ask their corporate counsel to. This is often routine but can be very consequential. Where this can go horribly wrong is when these govt lawyer opinions are classified top secret. For example, we all know torturing prisoners is against U.S. law, so in the 2000s the military and CIA asked the Bush Justice Dept to provide a secret legal opinion on whether certain 'enhanced interrogation' techniques met the legal definition of torture. And they got what they wanted, a written legal opinion that waterboarding isn't torture. The Obama Justice Dept issued a secret legal opinion that droning a teenaged American citizen in Somalia, who posed no exigent threat (but had the wrong Dad), did not meet the legal definition of murder. After it happened and was no longer secret, Senator Rand Paul was the only politician willing to stand on the floor of the senate and say killing a U.S. citizen without any legal due process was first degree murder authorized by a sitting U.S. President. While it's true his Dad was sort-of a terrorist (the real terrorists were happy to use him for propaganda but being an American, they never really trusted him). The dad was arguably an enemy combatant and maybe you could make a case he was an "exigent threat", but the kid wasn't and didn't. Reasonable people can differ on acceptable levels of 'collateral damage' (aka killing foreign innocents) but U.S. law is clear, non-combatant American citizens who aren't a clear and immediate threat are a hard, bright line. They get a judge and jury, not a drone.
Senator Ron Wyden is on the Senate intelligence committee, so he gets oversight on what intelligence agencies are doing and sees the secret legal opinions they're relying on. And he's saying the U.S. govt is relying on a secret legal opinion to do something in secret which is obviously, very, VERY wrong - but he's forbidden from telling us what it is because they made it top secret. For context, Ron Wyden has been a Senator and on the intelligence committee for a while and is pretty much a straight-shooter, not known for hyperbole or politically-motivated grandstanding. He'll call out his own party when he feels they're seriously wrong and he gets no benefit from making a big deal over this. His own party isn't supporting him and wishes he'd shut up about it. Yet for the last six months he's been signaling "DANGER, DANGER" in interviews, speeches and in writing over and over again - so I'm going to assume whatever it is is way beyond the Snowden revelations and probably in the neighborhood of the worst things we can possibly imagine.
The perverse thing is that the pretense for keeping it secret is to prevent 'foreign adversary governments' from knowing what it is, but it's clearly about domestic spying on U.S. citizens - and Russia and China probably already know exactly what it is (and are like, "Hmph amateurs, we've been doing that to our citizens years").
Usa is functioning in a way that is not how it is supposed to function in a democracy. There should not be anything hidden from any elected representatives as long as they are a citizen.
Civil law based systems are a more sane alternative to common law based system that relies on precedents. Law should be discussed in legislature and legislature must oversee and fix the law appropriately rather than make vague laws and leaving it to judges or others for interpretation. Due to not relying on precedents, the law is also easy to understand and apply and follow and enforce in civil law based systems. Cases also takes less time overall compared to common law based justice system.
Elected representatives are the authors or developers of law. Everyone else is users of law. Users cannot be allowed to change interpretation of law as anything other than how it is written.
Law made for horses and then vehicles got invented and law needs more clarity? Ask legislature to discuss and add new law for vehicles or modify existing law to also handle vehicles.
> The perverse thing is that the pretense for keeping it secret is to prevent 'foreign adversary governments' from knowing what it is, but it's clearly about domestic spying on U.S. citizens - and Russia and China probably already know exactly what it is
I think you're trying to hard to dismiss the justification here. There are certainly techniques for monitoring communications that use justifiably classified technologies that were probably developed to monitor communications of adversaries.
Imagine the use of which is helping keep American spies in Iran safe and the knowledge of the technique could help Iran identify those people. That's a perfectly reasonable classification of the technique.
What makes the interpretation of the law secret is that it mentions this hypothetical technology.
Imagine they have the technology to hear speech through walls passively using your WiFi signal. That technology is classified and they have the legal opinion that this doesn't violate the fourth amendment.
Wyden being concerned about whatever this is isn't surprising really but he's always on the extreme end of these interpretations, which I usually agree with, but judges typically don't agree with him.
I think it's probably generous to say the legal justification they are using has just as much chance of being legal as illegal. It would be nice to know what it was though because it can probably be defeated.
> There are certainly techniques for monitoring communications that use justifiably classified technologies
Wyden and others who are privy to what this is have made clear this is NOT about means or methods. This isn't about how the spying is done, it's about whether it's legal for the NSA to ever spy on U.S. citizens by ANY means. Existing law is very clear, it's absolutely not ever okay - no exceptions. It's completely irrelevant whether they're steaming open envelopes to read your junk mail or using a secret orbital mind-reading satellite to read your deepest private thoughts.
Experts like lawyers from the ACLU think it's something like a legal opinion which re-interprets the "absolute, no bulk spying on U.S. citizens ever" rule by claiming "it's not 'spying' if the govt pays a third-party commercial data collection service to give them the data voluntarily." That opens a backdoor for the govt to now back-link metadata and build one composite profile that includes all the private info the federal, state and local govt has ever had on you since birth (tax, employment, DMV, voting, school, govt assistance, Medicare, social security, etc) with everything any bank, credit card, or store knows about you, with every phone call, text, email and cell phone location ping you've had since 2014, with every bit of behavioral data Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc have about you.
To be clear, this is not "with probable cause they could get a warrant from a judge to send a supoena to each of those providers." This is something more like "they already have all that data in one searchable database but without this new secret legal opinion, as soon as it was clear the person was a U.S. citizen they could NOT look at it.
Now they can sit in a chair, and with just your phone number, email address, license plate or a facial ID match from a traffic camera to your driver's license, passport, Facebook profile or TSA airport photo, then instantly search for every single person you've communicated with in the past 3 years and every person they've communicated with and have an AI examine all that data from all those people and have a full 600 page report available in 15 seconds containing 7 million unique pieces of private data from 17,000 people that's instantly searchable - every email, every text, every purchase, every license plate scan, every location ping. No judge, no warrant, (and according to several recent reports), no record it ever happened, who did the search or under what pretext.
Everyone paying attention already knew it's been possible to do this for a decade. And everyone knows the government ALREADY does this for non-U.S. citizens. We just trusted that the government could not do it with U.S. citizens because the constitution and dozens of SCOTUS rulings make it so clearly ILLEGAL. But just like waterboarding and droning teenagers were once so clearly illegal, one secret legal opinion redefined "Spying" just like "Torture" was redefined in the 2000s and "Murder" was redefined in the 2010s - what the 4th Amendment has absolutely forbidden for 250 years instantly became legal to an invasive level Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton couldn't have dreamed in their worst nightmares.
To add a little bit to your comment, the US invented the term "enemy combatant" to evade the Geneva Convention rules about prisoners of war. And it also gave itself the right to designate whoever it wants as an enemy combatant.
You have the law, you have precedent, best not to get on the naughty list.
Inventing the term "enemy combatants" as a label for people who don't wear uniforms isn't the problem. The problem is not even affording them the rights guaranteed to prisoners of war.
> The problem is not even affording them the rights guaranteed to prisoners of war.
I agree. There are really two separate issues.
Circa WWII, the term 'enemy combatants' was created to solve a definitional issue around military 'rules of engagement' (a concept which evolved with the rise of the professional military). There were "enemy soldiers" and "civilians" with separate rules of engagement for each (at least in theory, as the rules weren't always applied uniformly).
As you said, not affording "enemy combatants" any rights after capture is the problem and it's really arisen since the "War on Terror". The only slightly positive sign in all this is the U.S. military is clearly aware U.S. courts won't let them get away with defining a category of human that doesn't have any rights, forcing the military into temporary workarounds like Gitmo. When U.S. courts have been able to establish jurisdiction over enemy combatants, the rulings have not generally gone favorably for the military.
I'm still grateful whenever the U.S. Constitution manages to be inconvenient and annoying to the U.S. government :-). And I hold out some hope we're slowly beginning to claw back some of the unconstitutional excesses of the "War on Terror."
lol “we don’t feel like following the law so we just picked some fresh dog poop and yelled about bad things that were unrelated and then did whatever we want and invented these funny little games with paper thin jokes everyone is going to pretend is valid so we could do whatever we wanted to anyway lol”.
Otherwise you're of course right.
reply