Posted by hn_acker 1 day ago
> The Wyden Siren: Senator's Cryptic CIA Letter Follows A Pattern That's Never Been Wrong
Off the top of my mind I'd go with privacy policies: maybe their typical vagueness is exploited to the extreme, and rather than pointless legal mumbo-jumbo, they're actually a legal cornerstone of some extensive surveillance program. Hmm...
The citizens of the U.S. are neither organized enough, sufficiently intelligent and motivated, to keep the various levels of government in check.
As we have seen with the Epstein stuff, even when the evidence is overwhelming and unambiguous there is massive amount of direct support and an accompanying vacuum of response
The only conclusion to be had is: Everyone is ok enough with the state of reality that they will not change it.
Everyone gets the governance they deserve
Isn't this basically the job of Wyden and his colleagues in our republic? If your critique is that his colleagues are doing a poor job of it (or worse, they're actively working against it), I'd agree but would add that inherent flaws in both the pre and post- civil- war-system have brought us to such a point. IMO the citizens of today are less to blame than the people who passed laws like the Permanent Apportionment Act in 1929, or who've consistently defunded education systems across the country, etc.
That's not to say that today's citizens are helpless or blameless, of course.
Shortly after Trump started to screw up the economy, Wyden stated Trump had ruined an economy that was the envy of the world.[1] The problem is that envy of the world economy was built entirely on decades of deflation of the average persons buying power.
Other world leaders were envious alright. They wanted the secret to how US leaders convinced the public to accept runaway inequality, where it now takes $800k/yr to have the buying power of $200k/yr in 1980.
He’s doing well with the whole investigating Trump angle but like the rest of the Dems he's signed off on looting workers.
[1] https://fortune.com/2025/04/10/ron-wyden-us-economy-envy-lau...
Now, if we could just get its population to stop hating AI and being luddities, they could ride the GenAI wave up forever. Unfortunately, "everyone in seattle hates AI"
Perhaps posting this article was premature, because the classified wrongdoings Wyden concerns himself with today remain unknown. I find Edward Snowden's leaks of classified documents about NSA surveillance relevant to Hacker News, so if you can overlook the boring present, feel free to treat TFA as a brief reminder of an interesting yesteryear:
> Apparently, one of the things that reportedly pushed Snowden to leak was watching then Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, lie to Wyden’s face in a hearing about whether the NSA was collecting data on millions of Americans.