But the assumptions should always be that one day someone like that could take power and gain access to that data.

ModernMech a day ago | parent | next [-]

The way to prevent authoritarians from abusing power is to not elect them, and to throw them in jail when they violate the law. They're not hard to spot; people warned about the current guy for a decade before he took over.

What's happening right now is not because the government had a database lying around and an unspecified authoritarian picked it up.

What's happening is that after a specific authoritarian staged a coup against the government, he was nevertheless allowed to continue his anti-democratic efforts. Trump should have a 27 year sentence like his Brazilian compatriot Bolsonaro, who in monkey-see-monkey-do fashion, similarly affected a coup against his government. Had we actually prosecuted those crimes the way Brazil did, we could still be talking about how to prevent theoretical authoritarian governments from abusing their power. But now we have a specific instance, and in this case, all the anti-authoritarian measures in the world mean jack if the government just allows actual insurrectionists to run for president, which is barred by the Constitution for a good reason. In that case they're just asking for it.

▲

slg a day ago | parent | next [-]

>The way to prevent authoritarians from abusing power is to not elect them, and to throw them in jail when they violate the law.

This was the true motivation for my comment. It's futile trying to design your laws to withstand the dangers of a future authoritarian regime taking power when that authoritarian regime can just as easily change or ignore those laws once they take control. Our government is experiencing a rubber hose attack, the strength of our encryption doesn't matter.

▲

ModernMech a day ago | parent [-]

Yup, the fight against American authoritarianism happened between 2015 and 2025. It's now over, authoritarianism won. All that's left now is for it to burn itself out as people bear the consequences they refused for a decade to entertain were possible.

We spent 10 years warning about him, pointing out his specific authoritarian tendencies, January 6 was predicted years before it happened, but when people said "he's not going to leave" they were met with mockery.

Who tf cares about databases when their plan was to just use their power to throw out entire states worth of votes? The entire J6 plot was that Pence was to reject the certification of the vote so that states could send "alternative electors" who voted for Trump, which would have disenfranchised millions of people at once. What is the law supposed to do against such anti-democratic "might makes right" depravity? At that point, the players have abandoned the game entirely, they're playing by different rules, your laws are meaningless.

Edit: to the dead comment below me:

> If you actually believed you were living under a dangerous, authoritarian government you wouldn't be posting about it on the internet. You'd be scared shitless trying to delete any trace of this connected to yourself.

Bro, I'm already labelled part of a terrorist organization by this government for my political beliefs. There's nothing I can say here or elsewhere that would change that, so at this point my fate is locked in because I'm not going to change what I believe.

There's not point in hiding anything, now is not a time for hiding, it's a time for speaking your mind. These people are authoritarians, but they are not all powerful. Yet. They have no consolidated power. Yet. They 100% want to, but that's not going to be possible as long as people continue to speak out. Read Timothy Snyder's, On Authoritarianism. He describes what you suggest is the rational response as "obeying in advance", which is the primary way in which the authoritarians seize power -- it's freely given by people who are too afraid to push back.

	▲	decremental a day ago \| parent [-]
		[dead]

▲

pjc50 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The problem is that people really want authoritarianism, to use against their enemies.

▲

potato3732842 a day ago | parent [-]

>The problem is that people really want authoritarianism, to use against their enemies.

Look no further than a typical HN comment thread on a niche public policy issue.

They are rife with people scheming up all sorts of ways to thread the needle of public policy so that government enforcement action far in excess of what the public would support can be brought to bear on whoever is on the wrong side of whatever the issue being discussed is.

	▲	ModernMech a day ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, if you go into my comment history from just this week there's a guy who told me "We won the last election. We can and will, with sadness but determination power, turn the power of the state against you and make you leave us the hell alone." That's the mindset of an authoritarian. No needle threading here though, just use "the power of the state to" get our way (no sadness detected).

▲

ndsipa_pomu a day ago | parent | prev [-]

It still amazes me that there was no penalty for storing classified paperwork in his bathroom. I always thought that governments treated security very seriously, but apparently not.

	▲	amanaplanacanal 21 hours ago \| parent [-]
		He got lucky that the sitting attorney general was loathe to appear that he was politically motivated, so was very slow to appoint a special prosecutor. He then got extremely lucky that his hand picked judge was assigned to the case, and slow walked it until he got reelected and took control of the very department that was investigating him. This on top of the fact that the "law and order" party apparently is only for law and order if it's being used against people they don't like. Evidently most people aren't self aware enough to question their own beliefs, who knew?

▲

rsynnott a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I mean I think, while that possibly always _should_ have been the assumption, 20 years ago the assumption would have been very much that someone like that could _not_ take power, and that the worst the US had to fear was the likes of Dick Cheney (admittedly still pretty bad). The idea that the US might just transform into a weird batshit autocracy is really _pretty new_; it wasn't taken all _that_ seriously even in Trump's first term, because, well, the courts will just slap him down, right?

	▲	amanaplanacanal 21 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I don't think most people realize just how slow the court system is. It's horribly underfunded. They generally come to good decisions, but it takes a really long time, and a lot of damage can happen in the mean time.