Warning: a bit of meta ahead.

I upvoted this as I was reading the first paragraph, even though I had a sneaking suspicion it was just a recap of secrecy state news. I did this probably because I'm a sucker for things that I feel strongly about emotionally.

But as I continued reading, I'm thinking Good grief! Here's some other person rightly upset about where we are but clueless about how we got here or what to do about it. What have I gotten into?

Then I come to this:

"All this somehow got me thinking of the doctrine of "democracy promotion", which was developed under George W. Bush and maintained more or less by Barack Obama"

What? America has publicly and openly supported democracy -- sometimes at the pointy-end of a gun -- for decades. Then several other errors stood out.

I'm sure that W.W., whoever he might be, means well, but we've kind of reached the point here where there are a hell of a lot of people getting the general message that things are fucked up and carrying a ton of baggage with them when trying to figure out how. So break out the pet theories: evil bankers, corporations controlling the government, one party or the other out to set up a kingship, GW Bush policies continues to destroy the country -- whatever emotional baggage they're dragging around, they're bringing it to this discussion.

This is a really bad thing because it trivializes the entire issue. Ezra Klein the other day was talking about FISC judges mostly being Republican, as if the problem here were not that we have the FISA court in the first place, but that the wrong people are on it!

(I find a bit of self-referential critques to all of this; it seems the charges being leveled are those the authors would be most guilty of themselves given the chance, but I digress)

This guy wants to go on a riff about how the select few -- our betters -- are making these incredible decisions about the disaster we've created.

Let's be clear about this: the government keeping detailed records of all the communication and movement of each citizen is not okay, even if 90% of the country voted for it. It's not okay because a democracy cannot survive in a perpetual state of war, and once we are at war with the population itself, it's never going to end well. Police counter-intelligence is one thing. There are probably 10K people in the US that need secret files and should be watched because they are dangerous. Fishing expeditions against huge databases of facts from years ago regarding any random citizen are out of the question. It's not that it's bad or makes me angry. It's that it doesn't work. The system is unsustainable over the long-term.

So kudos to the author for being outraged and making a point about the system broken. I encourage whoever it is to stick around and learn to articulate the good parts of the system as well as the shitty parts. Learn the difference between what a lot of the rhetoric folks read, like about the judges being unaccountable, and what the reality actually is. Otherwise it's just more mindless ranting. (About something many of us are legitimately upset about) Because it confuses the issue as much as illuminates it, this is not helpful.

I'm going to start being much more careful with upvotes for security state articles on HN. Love 'em, but they need to bring more quality to the table to be here.