It's complicated. Most career politicians like all those things you hate because it lets them outsource the state's dirty work. The state made constitutional commitments it can't quite keep and has worked around them. On the other hand, those workarounds are themselves becoming threats to the state in ways that have made some politicians willing to rebalance power. On the other hand, I do not want to name specific names of people to vote for, because few Congresspeople are actually hacking at the root of power. Remember when Obama was a Marxist and then turned out to just be another neoliberal?

To explain why, we must keep in mind that all states are in a perpetual crisis of legibility. They have more force than anyone knows what to do with, while having no idea of what happens in their territory or whom to use that force on. To make matters worse, most democratic states - and nearly all states in the Anglosphere - have been constitutionally handcuffed to restrict their investigatory powers. This is an existential threat to the state, and so the state will take any chance it can get to impose legibility upon the people by force, lest the state be replaced with something worse.

I've worded the above like some kind of conspiracy theory, so let's remember exactly who we're talking about: the "I'm-just-doing-my-job" types. If your job is to investigate crime, then the 4th Amendment is an annoying hurdle you have to think about constantly. But it's not a high hurdle to jump over because most criminals are profoundly stupid. Drug kingpins are more of a problem, however. Organized crime is the criminal equivalent of an MLM, so you can pick off a bunch of idiots at the exterior, but not people running the organization. This is where law enforcement gets creative, weaponizing things like tax law and - yes, civil forfeiture - to cut at the root.

The pattern of how democratic states deal with limitations on their power that prove inconvenient is simple: they cheat. Or at least, they cheat the spirit of the law, if not the letter. For example, if your job is to investigate foreign threats to the country, you're not fighting criminals. You're fighting the Borg[0] - an existential threat that learns from and adapts to everything you do, even the successes. For the CIA/NSA, having to get a warrant is like running a marathon while having both hands tied around your back and wearing a pair of cement shoes.

Data brokers are the perfect workaround. They built the perfect panopticon and used social engineering to get people to consent to it. The CIA and NSA buys shittons of their data and mines it to find threats to the state because it's significantly easier and less complicated than getting specific warrants to collect specific data.

Those abusive copyright laws that keep shit out of the public domain? Those were payments made to Hollywood in exchange for positive propaganda. Here, we're working around the 1st Amendment, not the 4th. The US government can't legally compel Hollywood to make propaganda, nor can they prohibit Hollywood from making movies that denigrate US actions. But they can still pay Hollywood to make propaganda[1], they'll downplay the critical movies to save face, and even if they don't, it'll make America look like they're aware of and fixing problems they have no interest in fixing. So when the US government treats a storage platform for stolen songs as an existential threat, it is specifically because they are fulfilling their end of a deal with Hollywood.

But there's a catch. Those constitutional restrictions were put in there for a reason. If the CIA can buy data from data brokers, than so can China's MSS. American lawmakers are so irrationally afraid of TikTok because China figured out how to use the CIA's own weapons against it. The government's defense of the TikTok ban is page after page of redactions. They can't publicly say they know TikTok is a Chinese intelligence asset without telling the judge enough information to blow the cover of every CIA agent in China, but the black highlighter[2] itself is an admission.

Same with the anticompetitive actions. The late 90s saw the US government bring the hammer down hard on the tech industry[3], and then suddenly stop. Why? Simple - the tech oligopoly became useful to American interests and so was given a pass, to the chagrin of America's other sweetheart, Hollywood. Politicians only realized how much power had been actually ceded to big tech by accident. Social media made the mistake of ceding power to Donald Trump, who used it to run for president legitimately, lost a re-election campaign, and then attempted a feeble self-coup. Twitter and every other tech company rightfully shut him down, but this exposed how much power they really had been given in the political process. And then Elon Musk bought Twitter in a vain attempt to restore Donald Trump's influence[4], ensuring that the concern over Big Tech would be bipartisan.

I still can't point you to a politician to vote for, but I can at least point you to an ideology and a person who talks about it: the New Brandeis movement[5] and Cory Doctorow specifically. Louis Rossmann is also a good option if Cory is too left-wing for your taste. Lina Khan is a huge figure in neo-Brandeis and she runs the FTC now, which is why the FTC has been trying to do its job again[6]. I single out antitrust here as it is the enabler of all the other abuses I've detailed above. You need economic centralization in order to get perfectly funded propaganda machines or privatized spying and censorship.

[0] I hope Star Trek is still culturally relevant enough for this reference to land correctly.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IM2VIKfaY0Y

[2] https://www.theonion.com/cia-realizes-its-been-using-black-h...

[3] Examples include the antitrust actions against Microsoft, the copyright actions against Napster and Grokster, and various legislative attempts to either force computer manufacturers to include copy protection hardware or force online services to have upload filters for copyright.

[4] This is an after-the-fact justification; at the time Musk was high off Tesla's stock price and bought Twitter basically in the same way one buys a bunch of shit they don't need off Amazon at 3 in the morning.

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Brandeis_movement

[6] And let us hope to $DEITY that she succeeds, lest we find ourselves living in South Korea.