Ageism: Why can't younger people vote? Because they don't have valid opinions? Some adults don't have valid opinions. This seems to affect our dramatically in our modern era, as many of our older folks are still around and skewing the generational differences towards conservatism.

Classism: Why do we feel it necessary to have a political class at all? Bush Sr., Mr. Clinton, Bush Jr., Obama, (Ms. Clinton?). To me, it feels weird even asking these people to have differing views. They're all apart of the council on foreign relations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Members_of_the_Council_on_Fore...). Control+F either Clinton or Bush. This in my opinion, is why we won't change any neo-con/neo-lib policies anytime soon. Expect less worker rights, more outsourcing, more free trade, more deficits, and more protection of institutions deemed too big to fail (impossible in classical capitalism but not the crony kind).

Apathy: The US has killed many people in Iraq since 2003. If you crunch one version of account, it works out to 16 people every day, for 20 years. Yet most Americans are more concerned with their own internal matters. This seems like it could be extended to anything being committed outside of the US to other humans, including torture, enslavement, anything. The American people have already shown that if their bellies are full, then it doesn't matter how many people their government kills. How can anyone fix this?

Anyway, this to me seems like the major hurdles we all need to get over...

Because society has a long-standing agreement that a phase of life called "childhood" exists, during which an individual is not fully developed and can't be trusted to make decisions about his or her future. It may be somewhat arbitrarily defined at 18, but I don't see why people who need to be protected against entering into contracts as well as receiving a slew of rights and protections can be expected to have meaningful input into the management of their country. Someone who can't even join the military could vote to send their older fellow countrymen into war. I find the idea that the voting age can be lower than the age of majority very strange, and I have strong doubts that the age of majority should be lowered to 16 - on account of protecting childhood.

> This seems to affect our dramatically in our modern era, as many of our older folks are still around and skewing the generational differences towards conservatism.

Wait, what. You meant to come out against ageism, then you criticize old people for voting "wrong"?

All in all, if you take a step back from you criticisms, there's a common point: Legitimacy. Submitting a ballot every few years is a very weak foundation for a government as sprawling and powerful as most modern and western ones. Fiddling the knobs of who can vote does little more than shift the balance of power inside the political class.

I mean that the very idea of 18 == adulthood is going away. For instance, more and more people over the age of 13 but under the age of 18 are being prosecuted as adults in criminal cases. Zero tolerance policies for kids of all ages are assuming that they are capable of making choices with life altering consequences, but only in negative ways. So for some actions - adult understanding of the world is assumed much younger than the age of 18. On the other hand, we are seeing the infantilization of people older than 18 - drinking age is 21, car rental 25, college policies are becoming more and more like those of high-school, college campus law enforcement is becoming less and less tolerant of "young people behavior" (e.g. parties and festivals). It is a weird set of standards that sends a strange message. Those that conform well are placed in a class that can fully enjoy the rewards of membership eventually, and those that don't or make mistakes are placed in a different class, one with many restrictions.

Basically I'm saying that while the notions of adulthood and childhood aren't bad, the implementation brings them into question.

Here's an example that can't be thus answered. Should a minor pay income taxes, if they have enough income? I think most people would say yes. But then tell me again why they can't vote?

National Youth Rights Association (for Americans): http://www.youthrights.org

Besides, child movie stars.

Some rental companies allow younger drivers to rent, but they charge them a lot more.

On the other hand, when someone who can't even join the military (e.g. folks over 30) could vote to send their younger fellow countrymen into war, no one thinks twice.

(I think 30 is the age at which you are too old to join the military, but someone correct me if I'm wrong.)

Within the branches I know that more interesting/selective active duty branches have lower requirements. For example, active duty Navy is 34 but Navy Seals' cap is 28.

None of this takes away from your point since there are plenty of voters older than 42.

Don't worry too much about kids taking over the country -- voter participation by people younger than 40 is so low that you could drop the voting age to zero and it wouldn't affect the results that much.

Well then let's do that. Seriously. Making assumptions on participation for youths in elections is akin to making assumptions on how women would vote before Women's Suffrage. While you may be correct, it's impossible to say that they're apathetic for such and such reasons when they're not even allowed to vote until the age of 18.

I tend to think it's a bad idea because of how it would change behavior of some adults who interact with children.

As adults, if we want to do more than just voting, we can go door-to-door talking to voters, for example. We can put up posters, or make calls. If another voter isn't convinced, they can just say so; if they don't even want to talk, they can close the door or hang up the phone.

But children are often captive audiences. They are surrounded by adults (adult family members, teachers, etc.) who can and do tell them what to do, and there are consequences if they fight back. Sure, you can lie to Dad and say "sure, I voted for your guy", but what if he catches you lying and actually kicks you out of the house like he said he would? A teacher probably wouldn't outright tell students how to vote. But... they'd certainly have a much bigger incentive to teach them good political thinking, for the teacher's value of "good". There are already church leaders who outright tell their congregations how God wants them to vote. Do we want to point that kind of crap at kids as well?

A lot of adults wouldn't abuse their power, of course. Currently, children can't vote, so they have far less incentive to abuse it in this way.

No, I'm simply pointing out that in this day and age, we have more older people voicing their opinion. This leads to policies that favor this group and disadvantages other groups (youth).

I think Thomas Jefferson had much to say on the tyranny of one generation to the next.

> All in all, if you take a step back from you criticisms, there's a common point: Legitimacy. Submitting a ballot every few years is a very weak foundation for a government as sprawling and powerful as most modern and western ones. Fiddling the knobs of who can vote does little more than shift the balance of power inside the political class.

Agreed. However youth suffrage is an important topic. You say that society needs to protect childhood, but to me, it seems like they're protecting them from their own opinions and values... Like the article mentions.

You're kind of begging the question on the other two -- you've assumed your hypotheses, making it hard to disentangle. For example, you're assuming Americans haven't confronted the fact that war kills lots of people -- I don't know that's clearly the case. You're right on the cliff of using the word "sheeple."

One thing I will question -- are populist governments (which you seem to desire) really a solution to the issues of authoritarianism and repression? A movement that seems to have contempt for as many people as the populist movement does seems like it could easily degenerate into its own tyranny and purging.

So was Carl Sagan, Angelina Jolie, Paul Krugman, Oprah Winfrey, Tom Brokaw, Aaron Ross Sorkin, etc etc.

The CFR is a collection of influential Americans who meet to discuss and influence policy on the gamut of topics. It isn't a place where the Illuminati lizard-people meet to perform occult rituals and determine how to enslave the population of the earth, despite how the interwebs tries to paint that picture.

It's hard to say they have any specific agenda when you actually read some of the (vast amounts) of work they produce. You are welcome to disagree with their policies, but don't act like they're some powerful entity that's ruining the world. It's incredibly naive.

>Expect less worker rights, more outsourcing, more free trade, more deficits

So, on the one hand you criticize others for apathy, but on the other you criticize outsourcing, which moves jobs into the capable hands of the denizens of other, poorer countries, rather than hording them in your own country; free trade, which is hugely beneficial to everyone involved, always, provided everyone actually practices it; and (I assume governmental) deficits. Why are there high deficits, currently? Oh yeah, social safety net. Should we get rid of that?

My point is, these subjects (even TBTF) aren't black and white.

Yes, because it's definitely not military and espionage expenditure or subsidies for corporations.

> My point is, these subjects (even TBTF) aren't black and white.

While I agree with you B&W point, I feel like too big to fail is a failure in management of the economy. To let companies become so big as to effect the entire economy so negatively if they fail is disastrous. The government is propping up/keeping afloat monopolies.

In my opinion, The US is at 0% interest rates, is still in a recession, and can't possibly do anything else in regards to inflationary measures (printing money) without the negative affect on it's position as the world reserve currency.

http://youtu.be/PHe0bXAIuk0?t=13m36s <- Notice how the US is on target for a depression according to many economists.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMHmTyJXcy0&feature=c4-overvi... <- Here's a great talk regarding quantum easing and how unless the government can start more drastic measures, the economy will tank.

I'd like to heard your defense for the status quo, and also how you believe that social safety nets created in the 40's has anything to do with our crises of 2008.

It's hard to say they have any specific agenda when you actually read some of the (vast amounts) of work they produce.

It's not that hard at all. They are very clearly economic neoliberals, moral/social moderates, and foreign-policy hawks. These positions are coherently expressed in all their literature, even if their membership varies in just how ardent/extreme or quiet/moderate they want to be about expressing and imposing their ideology.

Why do we feel it necessary to have a political class at all? More generally, why do we have representative democracy at all? We have the internet. It's now technically possible for everyone to vote on every issue, or even to have everyone collaborate on drafting new laws.

About that... say some of us did set up a usable and scalable direct democracy mechanism on the Internet. Say we get the massive user-base this deserves for some currently existing nation. Imagine for some random piece of psuedolegislation, we got some law passed in said system such that it succeeds with an unprecedented turnout and majority lead. At what point does that stop being just a petition but the actual law. A near impossible feat, but when military turnout reaches a certain percentage, I think at some point we have something going.

More realistically, why not create the software and infrastructure and start pitching this to some cities, counties, maybe even states/provinces to start doing this? It could at least be informative and entertaining.

More practicalaly, the biggest issue I see is in the security of it. How could identity be handled? Integrity? etc, etc. #trust

I say, let's get started anyway. We'll probably want to have some failure under our belt anyway by the time there's a real demand (assuming I'm psychic ;)

I think my point is, it's up to us. We are the people.

The basic idea is that each person has a vote, and all matters should be resolved by a public vote. Since not everybody may have time and resources to vote responsibly in every matter, the vote can be delegated to someone else. It is easy to imagine how every person could delegate his or her vote to different people in different matters.

Going down this road, sometime you have to consider the question of actual motions and matters to vote upon. Who drafts these? Well, it should be the people who suggests questions to vote upon, and the people who decides which questions are most important -- by voting on them.

Then, the people should discuss the matter. Each person can voice their opinion, but also vote on the opinions of others. After a good discussion, with many arguments back and forth, it is time to vote.

But, alas! The matter has already been resolved. The most popular arguments have surfaced to the top, with the corresponding caveats and so on. This discussion is the perfect basis for drafting whatever law or resolving whatever matter was under question.

Now, this all sounds very similar to Reddit, or Hacker News. Basically, this is how the political process would work. Note that not all of what I have discussed here is a part of Aktiv Demokrati or their system. It's more of a summary of my own thoughts on the matter.

To wit, how do I delegate my 2024 vote on whether or not to allow unaglisivation[2] to be legal or not? Political issues are emergent phenomena, and that would seem to be a problem with such a delegation system. It seems like it might be better to just mandate voting, or tie it to some basket of broadly sought after government gated entitlements, such as driver's licenses, etc. so as to make it generally more inconvenient not to vote than to vote[3].

[1]Obviously "incredibly broad" is not going to be very broad in relation to the current US vote delegation system which is pretty much "delegate all of my decisions to X", but if you're talking about creating a brand new system harnessing the power of information systems that didn't exist in the late 1700s, there's not much reason to constrain yourself to comparisons with such an archaic system.

[2]This is a made up term

[3]Though in such a coercive voting system, I think you would have to randomize option placement and offer a "no opinion" option for every issue so as not to unduly skew the results by the people who really do not want to vote, or don't feel well enough informed on a particular issue.

[edit to add footnote [1] and for clarity]

I'm not quite sure I get your point, but I think it stems from a misunderstanding about the delegation. In my mind, this is very fluctuating. Let's say all questions are divided among departments, similar to today. Now, perhaps I I have delegated my vote on all questions of agriculture (which obviously unaglisivation falls under) to you.

This means that you carry my vote, until I either remove my support from you henceforth, or I vote differently in a particular matter. So, I have simply delegated all matters of agriculture to you on auto-pilot, but I can change that whenever I want -- including during a vote (which in this system must take some time, perhaps on the order of weeks, or indeed indefinitely, until a matter is resolved).

The system is inspired a little bit by the great John Byrne story "The Trial of Reed Richards".

Meh. That's as naked politicking as if the Tories suggested double votes for land owners or higher rate tax payers.

Oh, I apologise, I didn't realize you're royal.

> allowing disenfranchised people to vote

16 year olds aren't exactly disenfranchised, and to the extend they are, they're not more disenfranchised than higher rate tax payers who pay a disproportionate amount of the taxes that everybody benefits from, but are actually in a minority of voters.

For the record, my point is illustrating the arbitrariness of being "disenfranchised", not arguing for extra votes for the rich.

In the UK and US they are very exactly disenfranchised.

they're not more disenfranchised than higher rate tax payers who pay a disproportionate amount of the taxes

They are disenfranchised, and higher rate tax payers are not. Anyway, enough niggling over what words mean.

There is a actual problem here which is that old people are disproportionately overrepresented, and this is why for example none of the "we're all in it together" cuts are going to affect pensioners. How do we solve that specific problem? One way is to get more 18+ young people to vote. Another way would be to allow 16+ to vote and ensure that they are taken from school to the voting booth. It has been shown[1] that you're more likely to vote in elections if you vote the first time.

[1] http://www.ippr.org/press-releases/111/11175/young-voters-sh...

Now, as life spans are getting longer, that means naturally that there will be more and more older people. It's simply fairer that we should try to increase the pool of younger people voting, and also increase the retirement age, in order to make sure we don't continue to have a huge pool of non-working old people block-voting for their own benefits.

Of course there are limits (you can't have 8 y.o. children voting) but that doesn't mean we don't work where possible to make the system fairer and get more people to vote (ie. more, and livelier and more direct democracy).

I don't see the "fairness" issue here. What I do see is that you have clear policy preferences, judge a certain class of people would likely vote contrary to that preference, and therefore want to get more voters who you assume will be more likely to share your policy preferences rather than the policy preferences you attribute to "non-working old people".

IOW, rather than selling your ideas, you just want to stack the deck.

There's a difference between situations where an such an accusation is a potential accusation which may or may not reflect the actual motivation (which, yes, is true for pretty much any change in voter eligibility) and situations where the change in voter eligibility has the sole stated motivation of using a new voter group to offset the specific presumed policy preferences of an identified existing group (such as where the justification is "...in order to make sure we don't continue to have a huge pool of non-working old people block-voting for their own benefits"), in which case its not an "accusation", its the overtly proclaimed motivation for the change.

You subject millions of young people to an authoritarian (in fact, sometimes downright totalitarian) regime and disenfranchisement on a daily basis and nobody cares because it's part of the plan. But build one little settlement in Occupied Palestinian Territory, and suddenly, everyone loses their minds!

And frankly, no, I'm not going to apologize for that comparison, because at least people are out there pointing out that Palestinian Arabs deserve freedom, self-determination, and human rights. In fact, to be even more of a blatant asshole about it, the oppression of Western youth may be a lesser oppression than a serious military occupation, but there's a hell of a lot more of them. Shut up and multiply ;-)!

/trollface.jpg

That's not really a reply (except insofar as a non-sequitur is a "reply"), that's a completely different and unrelated argument for youth voting from the one offered previously about the desirability of offsetting a presumed voting preference of retirees.

And the response ot that is that you yourself have argued that a line must be drawn somewhere on how young people can vote, saying, "Of course there are limits (you can't have 8 y.o. children voting)",, and you haven't yet provided an argument for why the current line (18 years old) is the wrong place to draw the line, or proposed any criteria for deciding where to draw the line, just presented a lot of hyperventilating about "oppression" and a bizarre analogy to the military occupation of Palestine.

As such, you haven't yet presented even a coherent position to discuss.

YHBT. YHL. HAND.

Of course they are. They don't have the vote, but are still subject to all laws and taxes in full.

It was chosen in full knowledge of the downside of direct democracy, which is mob rule.

I don't understand how someone can watch the online witch hunts on, say, Reddit, and think "I wish that had the force of law."

What about African Americans in the 1700's? Again, on average less educated and "mature" as one might say due to being a disenfranchised population.

The funniest thing about your vote, is that in 2 years from 16, they somehow magically become mature enough...

The reverse is true of black people and adult women: the more learn about the brains of these adults, the less proof we find for any differences in potential brain function.

This is why we treat the decisions of children more lightly than we do the decision of adults. This is a good thing, societally; otherwise millions of children could routinely be imprisoned for assault and battery due to common schoolyard shenanigans.

* The article's entire coverage of Manning revolves around a single incident involving the detention of 15 Iraqis. But that's not all Manning did, despite the wording of the article. Manning fell afoul of the law by haphazardly collecting and releasing to a stranger on the Internet far more documents than any person could possibly have reviewed, many of which had no public interest implications.

* The article cites the case of Jeremy Hammond, convicted for hacking and dumping Stratfor. Ludlow famously supports Hammond's actions. But Hammond didn't leak secrets he knew were in the public interest. He picked an organization whose politics he disagreed with, attacked them, and helped circulate the credit card numbers of its subscribers to the Internet. The clear message being sent by Hammond's inclusion in the article is that he is of a kind with Manning, Snowden, and Swartz. The only thing his case has in common with the others is that they they share some of the same political motivations.

* The article does the same thing with John Kiriakou, asserting as axiomatic the idea that Kiriakou was motivated by the public interest. But Kiriakou didn't become a "whistleblower" until that label became convenient to his defense, after it became apparent that his conversations with journalists, which related to a book he was selling, had outed an agent who had been in deep cover for over 20 years.

I'm left with a disquieting conclusions about the way proponents of Ludlow think: so long as the accused share your politics, it's more important for society to empathize with their motivations than with their decisions and actions. That's what people who blow up abortion clinics think.

I'm also a little worried about the phenomenon of generating public support for any mass leak by working with the media to promote those leaked documents that are most interesting/entertaining/important, while working to thwart any effort to evaluate the impact of the leak as a whole. Call it "Greenwaldism", which feeds a careful drip of calculated outrage and then harnesses it to attack anyone who points out any accompanying documents that might have caused harm by their disclosure.

But I don't think the author is trying to "thwart any effort to evaluate the impact of the leak as a whole". Maybe you're more familiar with the author's hidden agenda than I am, but this particular article just looks like an attempt to glorify Manning and Snowden's motivations without saying anything, whether positive or negative, about the consequences of their actions. It just isn't within the scope of the paper.

I would love to read some well-reasoned and evidence-based analyses of the concrete consequences of Manning's and Snowden's leaks. But does every op-ed need to be so comprehensive and perfectly balanced? People who are concerned about the deadly consequences of recent leaks should write their own articles, I'd read them too. Even better if somebody posts a (nicely animated, responsive, HTML5, node.js-backed, CSS-only, etc.) infographic of excess deaths attributed to each leak. HN would love that! If the leakers are getting more public support than they deserve, it's only because their opponents have been unable (or unwilling) to publicize themselves effectively so far.

That seems a bit hyperbolic. Blowing up an abortion clinic is a clear, obvious, and directly destructive and violent act. Leaking information may not always be done altruistically, but political motivations or not it's definitely more complex than that.

And while I can see your point, I think you have focused on, relatively speaking, the mundane issues of leaking information rather than the quite significant revelations that have resulted. These things which point to very serious and concerning issues. Not that I want to say the ends always justify the means, but regardless of the means you're going to have to deal with and acknowledge the ends. I can think of nothing less productive in the wake of these revelations than to attempt redirect the focus conversation back to the morality of the leaking itself or the intentions of the leakers. The conversation about what to do about what we now know seems to be magnitudes more important.

It is harder for me to be sympathetic towards Manning. The best-known "revelations" (at least, about misconduct) from those dumps were already known in detail before the disclosure; Reuters published an article that did a scene by scene recap of the video now known as "Collateral Murder", for instance.

>Swartz argued that it was sometimes necessary to break the rules that required obedience to the system in order to avoid systemic evil.

That paragraph would have been a perfect place in which to touch on the Church Committee and its origins. Does the author even know about it?

Honestly, most people with social power and influence don't seem to care about the revelations because they don't. They have nothing on the line -- their rights will never be threatened, nor will government programs like the endless War on Terror ever affect them (in ways that they will understand; "blowback" is evidently too intricate of a concept for most). Could that be because they're white men? Perish the thought

The judge's husband has an email address released in the Stratfor disclosure and works with Stratfor clients, but the judge refuses to recuse herself (while threatening Hammond that he faces a life sentence).

Unmitigated gall.

He created a whole site like Stripe's Capture the Flag back in 2003: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HackThisSite

This part of his history is also sad:

Hammond attended the University of Illinois at Chicago on a full scholarship. In the spring of 2004, during his freshman year, he pointed out a security flaw on the computer science department’s website to department administrators, offering to fix it. For pointing out the flaw, Hammond was called before the department chair and ultimately banned from returning for his sophomore year.

He was absolutely convinced that hacking was going to be the way that we protest in the future. He likened it to doing a sit-in of a restaurant, protesting outside of a business, or chaining yourself to a tree.

Everything he did was focused on this goal. Helping people learn to hack was going to be a required part of a functioning society. He led by example and some people followed.

I can't help but wonder if he is the first of his kind: a political prisoner of the Internet age.

I am not sure I agree with this: it seems to me that a quick ruling could be made on recusal and that it would arise quite rarely. But I'm not familiar with the system, and the lawyers I have heard from are. I suppose if judges are nearly always making good choices about when to recuse themselves the system should work fairly well.

This does depend on where you are, different jurisdictions will draw the line in very different places. E.g. England has particularly strict rules on bias and the appearance of bias in judges: in a famous recent case, Augusto Pinochet successfully got a ruling that he could be extradited to Spain overturned, because one of the judges on the five judge panel (Lord Hoffmann) was a director of a charitable trust linked to a body (Amnesty International) that had submitted an amicus brief in the case.[1]

(Not that it did Pinochet much good, since a differently constituted court later came to the same conclusion as the original one).

[1] http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/ld19989...

If you're effectively saying that any individual has free reign to do whatever they desire with trade secrets, sensitive diplomatic information, and whatnot because of a moral injury they may feel the system is giving them, then you've effectively destroyed any form of organized human activity that involves trust or secrets.

Here's why: people get morally offended at all kinds of bullshit. It's totally dependent on the individual as to what pushes their buttons.

So yes, good people in bad systems do really bad things. Lots of Nazis were working boring jobs as part of the system that exterminated millions of people. But as a society we generally do not hold these people accountable for such actions. After WWII most of those folks kept right on working boring jobs, this time rebuilding the country instead of operating concentration camps.

Whether or not those people are supposed to feel guilt or revulsion at their own actions is a moral question -- a question between each of them and their own standard of what the universe expects of them. Confusing personal decisions with public ones is a good way to muddle your thinking.

That's a straw man argument.

There are lots of innocuous things that could destroy our civilization if everyone chose to do it all the time. If everyone had their A/C turned up to MAX on a hot summer day, the entire continent will suffer a blackout and all industry will grind to a halt. If everyone exercised their right to travel on public roads at the same time, there will be a massive traffic jam everywhere. What saves the day is the mundane fact that not everyone exercises all of their rights all the time. Just like the bandwidth of your internet connection, rights are routinely oversold with the expectation that not everyone will use them at the same time. Otherwise everyone will have ridiculously low bandwidth caps.

Most people who support Snowden believe that some people sometimes have a right, or even a duty, to divulge secrets. Organized human activity as we know it will, of course, grind to a halt if everyone in fact divulged everyone else's secrets all the time. But the mundane fact of the matter is that most people will keep secrets. Common sense, not strict laws against divulging secrets, keeps human civilization alive.

So what? Perhaps if they had held themselves more accountable when they were enabling the regime then some of the horrific acts committed by the Nazis could have been stopped! Sure, as a society we don't hold them criminally responsible, but we hold them morally responsible to some extent. And we absolutely should. Just being one cog in a giant evil machine is not a good thing, the existence of millions of such cogs enables incredible evils to occur.

There is no absolute here. You can't say as an absolute "if it offends your morality then whistleblow" and neither can you say "always trust the chain of command". Neither leads to a good outcome. But people damn well need to take a look at all the small things they do and evaluate if they contribute to something they cannot morally defend. And where it's massive abuses of the people by the government, hell yes, blow that whistle hard.

Instead what we have is a proliferation of secrecy that leads to systemic and individual corruption.

Let's go probe the boundaries of transparency. What, exactly, will stop working well? If anything, it is likely to be a tiny and perhaps negligible fraction of what is now secret. That is, we may find the cost of radical transparency, especially in government, is much lower than the cost of a metastatic security state.

He makes no attempt to explain just what "evil" Manning was fighting by passing along essentially random classified diplomatic traffic, or why Snowden might have felt morally justified in leaking secrets about U.S. spying on strategic competitors. This was not the Pentagon Papers.

Not the author of the piece. People in general, i.e. the HN community

Welcome to the hyper-individualistic, hyper-critical, post-communitarian world, where neither tradition nor any existing social institution is taken for granted. Everything is now open to critical scrutiny, and nothing that fails such scrutiny will receive anyone's respect. Gone are the days when "institutions", "common procedures" and "cooperative managerial work", for example, were universally agreed to be valuable things in themselves. Now they need to prove their own worth, or else. Because if they have no intrinsic moral worth, you can't blame others for eroding them.

I don't know whether there really is such a thing as Generation W, but if Snowden and Swartz are its holotypes, then I have rather high hopes for it. Not because I expect a whole lot of whistleblowing in the foreseeable future, nor because I think they're particularly interested in politics (they probably aren't), but because they're probably the first generation to ascribe absolutely no intrinsic moral worth to the "System" in "Systemic Evil".

The System, whether it's a corrupt industry, a corrupt three-letter agency, or your country, has finally lost the romantic halo ascribed to it by traditional assumptions. It has revealed itself to be just another social convention with some (in fact, lots of) instrumental value but zero intrinsic value. The baby boomers, of course, also had their moment of subversiveness in the form of the civil rights movement. But the U.S. in the 60s and 70s was affluent and egalitarian enough to leave them with lifetime jobs, nice suburban homes, and enough money to watch Fox News on their four-foot TVs for the remainder of their retirement. Those perks are now gone, and with it the last traces of the System's romantic halo. All that is left is a rotting social infrastructure with questionable instrumental value at best.

So perhaps for the first time in human history, a large number of people are now mentally prepared to judge the "System" solely on its instrumental value. Instead of asking whether or not their actions will help preserve the System, people can now honestly ask whether certain portions of the System are worth preserving in the first place. Gen W is like the theoretical physicist in that famous story who, when asked how his research contributes to national defense, replies that his research makes the nation worth defending. Only sometimes, it might not be worth defending. Or perhaps even worth destroying.

It is no surprise that the Obama administration has a reputation for prosecuting more whistleblowers than (nearly?) every other administration before it. Previous administrations had no need for massive prosecutions, the population behaved itself. But the population won't behave anymore. The only psychological bias that kept them at bay has dissolved away, and I suspect that it's gone for good.

And like a lot of people who have warm fuzzy feelings about Snowden, I think that this quiet but irreversible change in humanity's sociopolitical lookout will turn out to be a Very Good Thing (tm) in the long term. Another superstition trampled under the relentless feet of reason.

Society vacillates between rejecting institutions and embracing them, for a basic reason: you really don't want to go too far in any direction.

On one hand, you obviously don't want to become slaves to the status quo. Injustice exists, and it must be fought. On one hand, there is intrinsic value in having issues be settled. At a point, a final disposition is better than the "right" disposition. It is difficult for society to function productively without broadly shared values, purposes, and coordinating institutions.

The idea of a "hyper-individualistic" "post-communitarian" world is absolutely at odds with the direction of social change to date. Our societies become ever more interdependent, a phenomenon that has accelerated greatly since the industrial revolution and the resulting trend towards specialization and division of labor. Which is really the more "hyper-individualistic" world? The world circa 1750 where everyone was a farmer and grew their own food and sewed their own clothes and generally did 95% of the activities necessary to sustain their lives, or the world circa 2013 where everyone does a hyper-specialized job and depends on the labor of thousands of other people doing hyper-specialized jobs to maintain their lifestyle? Shared values, shared purpose, and common institutions are far more important today than they were a couple of hundred years ago.

1) The ability to store/process data on the scale to monitor an entire population.

2) The US government's assertion that it has the right to do this. It's not new under the sun, but it's new in the US.

What are you referring to, exactly? I thought the scandal was the dubious distinctions being made to specifically avoid "monitoring an entire population", and the lack of oversight to prove it.

We're not anarchists. Well, ok, most of us will claim to be anarchists of some sort. But what's really going on is that we almost all, to a man, feel hugely betrayed by society's institutions.

That doesn't mean we hate institutions and all want to move to the desert and become survivalist maniacs. It means we want institutions that actually do their job of making society run well.

Whether it will be better is an open question. I don't think the baby boomers did a great job with their renovation.

We criticize the baby boomers for being distracted by TV, but I think gen Y is going to prove themselves even more easily distracted, especially considering how shitty their outlook is if they have a whole-scope outlook on the world they live in. It sucks, it has very limited avenues for improvement, and all angles point towards further problems. Why worry when you can distract yourself with trite banality?

Every kid who tweets about her 9th-grade teacher's inappropriate joke is a whistleblower in the making. 0.001% of them might go on to work for a three-letter agency, and 0.001% of those who do might eventually leak something incriminating. Then some men in black will go through her school records and find that she's had a long-standing "problem with authority". Who knows? Even Snowden, until 2009, believed that whistleblowers should be shot in the balls [1].

Subtle, deeply ingrained assumptions like "the Government says so, so it must be true" or "white men are more trustworthy than blacks" only show up in large-scale aggregate data. It might be so un-obvious that a whole generation of sociologists could make a living studying the tip of the mysterious iceberg. But that's how societies change all the time, it will have tangible political consequences in the long term, and that's all I'm hoping for.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/06/exclusive-in-2009...

I'm sure you're wonderful to be around at parties!

In fact, a fairly good definition of "civilization" would be "a bloc of people who have organized themselves so as to overpower natural forces and configure their lives in accordance with their own preferences/values/criteria".

TL;DR: I don't go around claiming hurricanes are "optimal", so neither are market crashes.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/03/the-mark...

It's funny that he can't see he's arguing against himself. Snownden would've never done this if it wasn't the NSA that was breaching everyone's trust. Manning also wouldn't have leaked those documents, if he didn't think war crimes were being committed.

Why should we be the ones to trust the government, when the government has zero trust in us, and therefore wants to spy on everyone, when it really should be the other way around. Privacy for citizens, total transparency for the government.

There is something verifying and controlling what the watchers do (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellige...). The problem is, that system hasn't been effective at stopping the abuses some of us would like stopped.

Yes. It is oversight by the public at large.

On the one hand, spying on everyone is definitely not a power the State should have in a non-militarized situation.

On the other hand, the world simply isn't working right if I personally am not on a few watchlists for the stuff I've read and written on the Internet.

As for your second point, of course there have been much more disruptive changes in the past. But I wasn't talking about the scale of disruption, only about the cultural backgrounds that underlie social change. Nowadays, there are much fewer common backgrounds (religious, ideological or cultural) to bind people together than ever before. Most people who are affected by your political action will not share your faith, your ancestry, or even your language. They won't even identify you as a compatriot, and you don't care for their traditions and emotional attachments, either. How do you act under such circumstances? I find this question both thrilling and worrying.

Interesting thoughts. I would look a lot more into the changes in the 1960s, though. Personally I see a lot in common.

First they rejected religious authority, then they rejected a lot of the "accepted wisdom" about preordained social roles for women and visible minorities, then they began to reject the rest of traditional moral teachings regarding marriage, homosexuality, the value of a tight-knit rural community, etc.

Now I think the authority-rejecting spree has reached the state as well. The state has been secularized, but it continues to reserve for itself many of the powers that medieval monarchs claimed to have been granted by God -- and more. A ripe target indeed.

Unlike racism and sexism, I'm pretty sure the state will survive the scrutiny in some form or another. We can't afford anarchy. The question is, what will it look like when it re-emerges on the other side of the century?

Life happens on the boundaries between chaos and stasis (what rayiner says in another comment in different words). It's not a coincidence that life depends on liquid water, the boundary between chaotic water vapor and static ice. It's not a coincidence that either too low or too high a mutation rate would break evolution.

This same holds true for all other life-like complex systems such as human culture and society.

Hope I'm not referencing Godwin's law so soon in the discussion, but this quote makes me think about the deference most of the German intellectuals had for "Der Staat", starting with Hegel. There are countless examples, but a quick search brought me to this (which is actually a book written from an "individualist" POV, as far as I can tell):

> Oppenheimer's view of the state is profoundly opposed to the then dominant characterisation propounded by G. W. F. Hegel of the state as an admirable achievement of modern civilisation.[1] Proponents of this view tend to accept the social contract view that the State came about as every larger groups of people agreed to subordinate their private interests for the common good. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_State_%28book%29)

As an outsider, I always regarded the Anglo-Saxon system (meaning the United States and Britain) as an antidote to the views expressed by Continental Europe, seems things have changed.

There is a lot more to take away from the history of Germany than "respect for the state allowed the Nazis to rise."

For hundreds of years, "Germany" was composed of bickering territories that were kept divided by the continual intervention of the major European powers. Unification and the rise of the German state brought tremendous prosperity and economic progress to Germans. Modern Germany still draws tremendous benefit from that unification.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5964665

Sadly, much of it has been forgotten.

This is wrong on a number of levels; the US wasn't designed from the ground up -- at the ground level, and the whole way up to the level of the States, it was a pretty direct carry over from the pre-revolutionary structure under British colonial rule, with the "colonies" renamed "states". And, while it certainly was inspired by a particular strain of philosophy, this was neither scientific (empirical political/social science, wasn't even a thing) nor is it even remotely unique for revolutionary regimes to create regimes based on currently-popular trends in political philosophy in opposition to the contemporary dominant models, its also not uncommon for them to fall apart rather quickly, as the US revolutionary regime under the Articles of Confederation did, and be replaced by one that (while it may retain some of its revolutionary flavor) hews a lot closer to the previously dominant models (as the US system under the Constitution -- which borrowed heavily from the system in Britain and those in many of the colonies-that-became-states -- did.)

On one hand, I believe the British Empire was built on "a respect for institutions and deference to common procedures". That's just the way it's done, after all.

On the other, I suspect the United States is becoming a civilized country.

What gets me about this quote is complete lack of introspection as to who exactly lacks respect for institutions and deference to common procedures. Snowden revealed a lack of respect for institutions in those very institutions. The hypocrisy is thick.

But we all know this. And we all know that this is spin. And it's this lack of self-respect the institutions have for themselves and their own actions that fosters questioning the moral stance, value, and intrinsic worth of the "System" by those brought up on messages of double-standards, question authority, and buck the status quo. The emperor has no clothes, and comes right out and says it.

Us engineer/programmer types know that the last thing you want to do is a total rewrite of a working system, because its precise setup often contains domain knowledge that we don't have. "I don't know what this piece does, but it's ugly and seems problematic" does not necessarily imply "this piece should be removed or changed using my current level of expertise".

The analogy is not perfect, because civilizations are not really intelligently designed, so they can often contain crud that's just crud, but the same goes for you own body. Do you have the domain knowledge to determine that the appendix does nothing, the little finger is noncritical, and the liver is critical? Do Snowden or Swartz have the domain knowledge of the workings of civilization to make a decision like that for everybody?

It's that kind of naive wholesale re-architecting that dropped the ball on the Congo, Zimbabwe, etc, and caused a hundred million to die by communism.

As much as I think Swartz was right to challenge the rent seekers in science publication, and Snowden was right to undermine the NSA, I think there's really something to be said for being careful with this stuff.

Sure there's a lot of apparent problems in our current civilization, but please consider that we might occupy a relatively optimized position in a sea of dysfunctional possible societies, and that the exact mechanics of that may be nontrivial and beyond the understanding of you or me or any of these other "Generation W" troublemakers (of which I am one). The stakes are high enough that we really ought to be careful.

>Another superstition trampled under the relentless feet of reason.

This doesn't seem like rational thought, it seems like endorsement of destructive mob behavior backed by quasi-religious ideals.

Would you recognize naive problematic restructuring when you saw it, or are you just using this sentiment as another soldier in the war against some fixed enemy?

They didn't make a decision "for everybody", they just made a decision that happened to affect a lot of people. It is part of the romanticism that surrounds the modern state to assume that every action with implications for a Government must be a decision for everybody. No it isn't. The NSA isn't "everybody". The Obama administration isn't "everybody". The fate of human civilization does not depend, and has never depended, on the actions of one Swartz and one Snowden.

The good thing about changes that take place over generations, like what I was trying to describe above, is that they take a long time. We're talking about 30-50 years here, if not longer. The boomers won't be dead until the 2050s, and it will probably take just as long for someone who grew up worshiping Swartz and Snowden to occupy the White House. As Max Planck said, progress happens one funeral at a time. Guess what, modern medical technology has made funerals rarer than ever before.

One Swartz and one Snowden won't change the world. I'm not even sure whether the kind of behavior they exemplify should be encouraged at all. But the thing is, those leaks weren't one-man attempts to re-architect the USA. Rather, they are symptoms of a wider political and psychological change that has been going on for a couple of decades already, and will likely accelerate whether we like it or not. This is not about some violent revolution, it's about social progress, and progress takes a long time.

Patches are coming. The pull requests won't be as polite as they used to be. Not a single line of code will be taken for granted, not even those written by the BDFL himself. But none of this needs to involve a complete rewrite. Just a series of incremental improvements.

This is a good point.

The same applies to many other things in history; communism wasn't some kid who thought up a new ideology in his basement and pushed it on everyone else; it took the endorsement of the intellectual elite and a broad movement to make it happen. Still it went badly for billions of people.

Your implication is that this stuff is happening whether we like it or not, and that that somehow invalidates criticism of the naivety of it all. But then you side with it. If it is an inevitable march of history, surely it is as reasonable to criticize it as it is to endorse it, or as futile to endorse as it is to criticize?

The thing is that these broad movements are made up of people like Snowden and Swartz and so on who make things happen because they believe in it, and we do have some control over that. For example, if the international intellectual community had been less naively infatuated with democracy and independence movements, perhaps they would not have pushed so hard on Rhodesia and the Belgian Congo, Zimbabwe and the DRC would be first-world countries instead of hellholes.

If you make the inevitable march of progress cool, it will happen faster, whether it's a good thing or not. If we make reasoned caution and sanity cool, we might get a better outcome for the future of humanity.

Conservatives tend to err on the side of caution, aware that many things work well for reasons we're not aware of, so you should respect institutions because they've got experience and longetivity on their side, and the consequences of changing/dismantling them may be far worse than you'd imagine. Humility is good, and don't mess with what works.

Liberals tend to err on the side of improvement, with a belief that we can understand things, and then intelligently change them to make the world a better place. Obviously, this can produce much more positive change, and make the world a far better place... but can also lead to the kind of societal breakdown that conservatives fear.

But don't try mapping this to political parties... they're organizations with agendas, not so philosophical.

I have a different view. Mostly unsubstantiated.

Every system becomes calcified. Every system will be exploited (broken) by insiders. That the rich get richer is math, not morality. Ditto power.

There is no perfect system, no ideal.

Periodically, mostly due to social upheaval, mostly due to technological change, the status quo is disrupted. I call this "shaking the ant farm".

Then there is a period of uncertainty. Until a new consensus is reached. New structures erected.

In USA's culture (and political history), the last major renegotiation was The New Deal. It's duration was extended by the Cold War and the US's massive investment in response to Sputnik.

We've been coasting on those investments ever since.

I don't know when the ant farm will be shook up again.

(My world views are heavily influenced by my understanding of Peter Drucker, Kevin Phillips, and Robert Wright.)

This would imply that the world never actually gets better at all, which I think is clearly refuted by reality. Anyone given the choice to live in 1913 or 2013 would clearly choose the latter -- even if they might ask for 1968 over either!

Just because social perfection has yet to spring from the singular pen of one philosopher in a cafe somewhere doesn't mean that convergent improvements don't happen.

Enlightenment-driven social democracy works better than other systems we've tried. Maybe it's even a local optimum we can't improve on through mere hill-climbing. What I do know is, if we just sit there saying, "There's no ideal to reach towards, shit just happens, what the hell?", we'll never accomplish anything.

We know what we like, so that is an ideal: make a system we like better than the previous systems.

It is certainly not very nice to suspect that there may be great powers watching and manipulating the world, but real harm and manipulation also exist, and that's why we (historically) have security agencies.

Now if they are not doing their job, or if the capabilities and funding they have far outweigh their accomplishments, then yes, we should curtail them. Or if they have become completely internally corrupt, and are providing no safety at all, then yes, perhaps they should be disbanded.

But we would still need an alternative which we do trust (collectively, if not individually) to provide the same services, or people will just be exploited worse by malignant players who don't have even the pretence of moral behaviour.

My line of thinking here might seem to be a conservative one of "don't rock the boat" - but I'm not necessarily proposing inaction/the status-quo; open source does a pretty good job of promoting trust in software where previously there was a large information disparity between developer and customer, for example, and I think that concept could (potentially) apply here too.

Peter Ludlow, who wrote the NYT piece, is a real Professor of Philosophy. If you're interested in philosophical treatments of cyber rights, hacktivism, and online communities, read his books!

Very well elucidated rant by the way :-)

It is natural for ALL systems, whether a political organization, company, terrorist organization, and even biological entities, to fight change and keep the system in tact. We are now at a point where we can critically assess our social organizations from a humanistic perspective and ask if they are really adding value or not.

It is very, very exciting. Also scary.

Spreading awareness of how institutional behavior can lead to evil actions is extremely important. We have learned a lot about power, evil, oppression, etc since the structure of the modern democratic state was created. We can and need to do much better.

I have a feeling that many of those who should read it will be unduly distracted by the gender issues around Manning.

But. It's worth the fight. Sending her the article and I might even stop in for dinner and start the conversation fresh tonight.

Similarly, people set up governments for societies but they also have a culture, and an idea of what is "beyond the pale". An insular culture can slowly become disconnected from the rest of the people, even in government which gets feedback through voting and other limited means. Thus, individuals possessing a "moral sense" who are hired to work in the government may in fact engage in whistleblowing. Governments recognize this and many offer limited protections to this activity. Of course, if they are too far gone in how much they disconnect from the people's preferences, then they might seek to screen heavily when hiring new people, to make sure they don't have this "liability". And thus make themselves even more insular.

At the end of the day, SECRECY is the source of many of the problems. Secret laws and secret courts like FISA which sometimes complain that they are being lied to by the executive branch -- but only during fortuitous court case does it even come to light. Or this: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/10/the-secr... ... nothing changed in the last two years. I am a liberal and I really liked Obama, but I despise his administration's stance on secrecy, and foreign policy, because it sets a terrible precedent.

Compare: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandOp...

There was quite a good article recently about how quotes turn into misquotes and eventually proverbs: http://www.chronicle.com/article/Who-Really-Said-That-/14155...

There are basically three kinds of Wrongly Attributed Statements. WAS I is an adaptation or composite of a statement or statements from someone or several people, who may or may not be famous. WAS II is a statement that was uttered, as is, by someone, often not famous, that has come to be widely attributed to someone else, invariably more famous. WAS III was never uttered by anyone, at least not that we know of.

So this was a WAS I. :)

Edit: Actually, this article is better than quite good. It's the best one I've seen on the topic and quite fun and one could even call it definitive.

Edit 2: Ok, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6445595.

Like Todd in Breaking Bad, who is in fact a neo-nazi.

Snowden at al are given as recent, specific examples of people who claim that their "moral compass" requires them to take action. It is entirely possible to disagree with them (and you clearly do) but its much more difficult to argue that dissent based on moral conviction should never be permitted under any circumstances.

Then again, maybe you're just trolling and I've wasted my time.

That being said: The author is setting up a straw man (with an opening analogy to the Nazis to boot!). Nobody thinks Chelsea Manning would have been wrong to continue to fight against or expose a variety of military abuses. Or for Snowden to write his Congressman about NSA abuses. Or for Swartz to campaign for changes to government funded research publication.

People like David Brooks are not succumbing to the banality of evil when calling out Snowden or Manning for behaving recklessly. They're arguing that the flaws in our system are not so pernicious as to justify, say, Manning's indiscriminate data dump or Snowden's theft.

I'm pretty sure that there's plenty of people inside the system who think that they would have been wrong to do that.

But more importantly, does anyone honestly believe that they would have actually achieved anything by doing this? They've both gone as public as they can with the revalations, but I don't see either the military or congress actively trying to address the issues that these leaks have highlighted. Do you have any reason to believe they would have taken them more seriously if the information had been raised to them secretly?

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110922/03520616050/senato...

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120611/16214719280/wyden-...

Snowden/Manning also found themselves in a position to use more leverage, and in those cases it's a separate moral question about whether they chose wisely to take that opportunity or not. (FWIW, I've never seen anyone giving them carte blanche to do whatever they would like with the info they accessed -- that's a straw man).

You can't just bypass that discussion by saying "they're allowed to vote, that should be enough for anyone".

No, it's not a separate moral question. It's the crux of the discussion. The entire spectrum of possible actions was open to them. "Do nothing" vs. "Do something" isn't a very interesting distinction: "Something" might have been to quit their respective jobs as soon as possible, or post snarky comments about the evils of the U.S. government under a pseudonym on reddit, or flee to Hong Kong, or blow up a building where they worked...

Nobody elected Ed Snowden or Chelsea Manning. In fact, the people we did elect put trust in Snowden and Manning to preserve certain secrets. Both proceeded to release not just secrets that exposed malfeasance, but the sorts of things (NSA overseas operations, diplomatic cables) that, by and large, our (inevitably imperfect) democracy has decided are peachy keen. Criticizing that indiscretion isn't giving in to "the system", it's acknowledging that "the system" is one we have built together, and there are certain aspects of its operation that are not subject to the whims or passions of people who had previously sworn to uphold it.

The press is a hugely important part of democracy, because it's their job (in theory, anyway) to keep the populace informed of what their government is actually doing in their names, vs. what they claim to be doing.

If the government is lying about what they're doing (and doing things that are contrary to principals they're pretending to uphold), whistleblowers are necessary.

I agree that if you live in a democracy, you're going to sometimes disagree with policies the majority things are fine. If I think legal abortion is evil but politicians who explicitly support it are elected, I should not "exert more leverage" by threatening to detonate a dirty bomb if the laws are not changed in 72 hours.

Whistleblowing is different -- it's the act of revealing information that was intentionally hidden from the public. Certainly, it may be breaking laws (and the laws may in general be justified!); that doesn't mean the whistleblower's decision is automatically wrong, or that they're cheating the normal democratic process. On the contrary, in most examples they're exposing others who are cheating (by hiding pertinent information from voters, thus affecting their votes).

Your (inevitably imperfect) democracy has also decided the facts of malfeasance to be peachy keen, so that's hardly a justification.

Moscow probably knows most of it, this isn't information/news for them.

I'd like to see all the men that were killed hurt by WikiLeaks data dumps. I mean cables were fucking benign, nothing people already didn't know or heavily suspected.

People go to Moscow because there seems to be no other way to blow the whistle any more, not without ending up like Pfc Manning. Snowden said that right from the start; missing that part is either ignorance or disinformation.

Well, tough crap. If the gov had not threatened him, he would have returned to american soil or gone to a friendlier nation.

Now thanks to this complete and utter SNAFU it's as good as the government handling all the information to Russia.

Assuming that they threatened him with prison time (I believe he was already out of the country), is the government not allowed to try and convict people based on the established law of the land if those people are following their personal moral compass? Is "I felt it was the right thing to do" an absolute defense against prosecution?

I am also curious as to how the government is responsible for Snowden fleeing to Moscow. Is Snowden responsible for his own actions or not?

When it punished Bradley Manning the way it did.

The government doesn't need to make a direct threat, the existing cases are enough to do that.

"is the government not allowed to try and convict people based on the established law of the land"

Of course it is. But there are several cases where the government chose not to.

"I am also curious as to how the government is responsible for Snowden fleeing to Moscow"

If the only place Snowden feels safe is Moscow (because the risk of extradition there is much lower than somewhere else), that's where he is going to go! And if he has something that may be interesting to the Russian government, well, isn't it just lucky...

Snowden was subject to civilian law, so far as I am aware, so he would not be able to draw on Manning as an example.

"Safe", in your world, appears to mean "free from the long arm of the law."