That's a legal defense, right? And you use a legal defense in court, correct? And he's refusing to show up in court? How is that the court's fault -- what would you ask the court to do, exonerate him without at trial? How is that a better form of justice? -david On Fri, Jun 25, 2021 at 1:13 PM Karl wrote:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistleblower_Protection_Act

The *Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989*, 5 U.S.C. 2302(b)(8)-(9), Pub.L. 101-12 as amended, is a United States federal law that protects federal whistleblowers https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistleblowers who work for the government and report the possible existence of an activity constituting a violation of law, rules, or regulations, or mismanagement, gross waste of funds, abuse of authority or a substantial and specific danger to public health and safety. A federal agency violates the Whistleblower Protection Act if agency authorities take (or threaten to take) retaliatory personnel action against any employee or applicant because of disclosure of information by that employee or applicant.

Maybe just skipping ahead a few steps before getting pulled into a debate about the US government, do you agree with the concept of representative democracy involving different branches with checks and balances being a philosophically strong foundation for governance? Is your complaint that the US government is an imperfect execution of a fundamentally sound concept, or that the entire idea underpinning our government is irredeemably flawed? I'm not eager to get into a conversation where you end up saying "But democracy sucks, war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength." -david On Fri, Jun 25, 2021 at 3:18 PM Karl wrote:

The problem with whistleblowing is that whatever was going on wrongly, it was almost certainly happening in order to make somebody powerful actually be far more powerful, whether directly or indirectly. There's likely huge incentivisation to pull far more strings to suppress problems. Like the killer who becomes a serial killer because it's all they have left, except it's your head of state.

Here's another quote:

However, according to a report that the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs submitted to accompany S. 743, "the federal whistleblowers have seen their protections diminish in recent years, largely as a result of a series of decisions by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which has exclusive jurisdiction over many cases brought under the Whistleblower Protection Act (WPA). Specifically, the Federal Circuit has accorded a narrow definition to the type of disclosure that qualifies for whistleblower protection. Additionally, the lack of remedies under current law for most whistleblowers in the intelligence community and for whistleblowers who face retaliation in the form of withdrawal of the employee's security clearance leaves unprotected those who are in a position to disclose wrongdoing that directly affects our national security."[8] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistleblower_Protection_Act#cite_note-8

On Fri, Jun 25, 2021 at 4:00 PM Karl wrote:

On Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 6:40 PM David Barrett wrote:

...

Maybe just skipping ahead a few steps before getting pulled into a debate about the US government, do you agree with the concept of representative democracy involving different branches with checks and balances being a philosophically strong foundation for governance? Is your complaint that the US government is an imperfect execution of a fundamentally sound concept, or that the entire idea underpinning our government is irredeemably flawed?

I'm not eager to get into a conversation where you end up saying "But democracy sucks, war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength."

-david

I might be a little too cognitively weak to have a single opinion that works in all scenarios,

But I believe that everything can be made to work in a variety of ways, and we're clearly not there yet, but nor have we turned all of our countries into a giant homogenous hell yet.

Cut to the chase, here's where I am this week, it'll change: - For a democracy with schooling to work, people need to be educated or incentivised to effectively participate in it. It should be the popular video game, rather than kill-zombies, and its weaknesses and properties need to be well-known and accessible so it can be used to resolve them. - For representation to work, representatives need to fully represent their people. This means more of them, and it means regular accessible meetings that get real results, and it means rotating them as soon as people aren't satisfied. This is called spokescouncil in the left. - For a democracy to work at all, people need to have uncensored productive communication. If instead you have everybody staring at advertisements and voting, it's not the communities doing the voting, it's the advertisements. Good choices are made with dialog, not repetition.

This democracy can work. It relies on powerful unsung endangered heros who can influence it when something is wrong. I suspect many people here have tried to be such heros and discovered the dangers.

Something everybody should know about is Citizen's Referendum. In many areas any citizen or group of citizens can pass a new law. It takes footwork, but you can be a huge hero.

Ok that's encouraging, I agree we shouldn't give up on what we've got! What I'm not quite following, however, is that you seem to be agreeing that the court system is *so broken* that the rest of the world should stop extraditions to us -- even though the courts are apparently interpreting a complex law that has significant (and slightly majority) support amongst the population: https://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/poll-most-want-edward-snowden-charged... I totally understand disagreeing with that law, or disagreeing with the majority -- and our government is built to manage that difficult push and pull between varied interests. But it feels premature to throw out our entire justice system over something that most people agree with. Extradition is the *start* of the justice process -- a process currently being denied its opportunity. But you seem to be saying it is such a foregone conclusion that our courts are unjust that it is *more* just to just bypass it entirely. I'm trying to figure out if you feel it's foregone because: 1) The law itself is unjust (despite having majority support of the population) 2) The law is just but the courts are not 3) The whole system is unjust because the population is advocating for something unjust This is why I asked if you agreed with the entire concept of democratic rule, as if the majority agrees with something, write a law for that thing, and has an executive branch and court system that enforces that law -- on what basis can you claim justice isn't being served? -david

On Fri, 25 Jun 2021 19:46:48 -0400 Karl wrote:

On Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 7:20 PM David Barrett wrote:

...

...

This democracy can work. It relies on powerful unsung endangered heros who can influence it when something is wrong. I suspect many people here have tried to be such heros and discovered the dangers.

Something everybody should know about is Citizen's Referendum. In many areas any citizen or group of citizens can pass a new law. It takes footwork, but you can be a huge hero.

Ok that's encouraging, I agree we shouldn't give up on what we've got!

circle jerking between two US agents. Hard to look at a more repugnant scene.

Hi David, Our conversations are getting a little long and I have some trouble guiding my hands ... are you able to trim the quotes down some when replying? On Sun, Jun 27, 2021, 8:10 PM David Barrett wrote:

On Fri, Jun 25, 2021 at 4:47 PM Karl wrote:

...

Ok that's encouraging, I agree we shouldn't give up on what we've got!

...

What I'm not quite following, however, is that you seem to be agreeing that the court system is *so broken* that the rest of the world should stop extraditions to us -- even though the courts are apparently interpreting a complex law that has significant (and slightly majority) support amongst the

The problem is that people are spending often their lives in prison associated with politics rather than crime, and many of these people are killing themselves in prison; it's not exactly a therapeutic environment.

No doubt prison sounds awful, and it's unacceptable for anyone to serve extended period behind bars without a trial and conviction -- and I agree, it happens all too often. But so often to *stop all extraditions*?

Did anyone propose that? Regardless, people hiding are in danger. If somebody is actively endangering people in an area that doesn't have a way to protect them, extradition makes sense. Otherwise it's just vengeance. That said, I do like the idea of foreign nations pressuring the US to

improve the efficiency of its justice system by basically "setting conditions" on extradition -- or even enabling the US justice system to proceed while the suspect is held in foreign custody. This way if the US system isn't moving fast enough, they can just release them.

population:

...

...

https://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/poll-most-want-edward-snowden-charged...

Eventually the advertisements win. They have more air time. I'm noting this is a minority of poll results: the article states it is one single poll.

Can you share any other data suggesting the opposite? Is it possible that people genuinely feel that leaking national secrets should be a crime, and think it not because "the advertisements win", but because they actually think for themselves as much as you do, but came to a different conclusion than you?

This is possible, but I'm pretty surprised at it. What kinds of people think this? What's your economic background? I started middle class but when I became poor I learned how much our government is harming the people around me. It's still our duty to defend whistleblowing and fight surveillance, or we

...

will trend to becoming a legalised empire where the same dictator is always voted in. Computers can already predict individual people's votes with strong confidence. We aren't in a democracy until protecting voters in such an environment is resolved.

I 100% agree with the importance of defending democracy. But can you help me understand how you feel surveillance undermines democracy?

People break the laws and enslave people by monitoring and influencing them. Laws don't prevent behavior, just deter it. The worst case is when your head of state does that and stays a dictator. Our democracy is run by spy agencies and marketing programs now instead of common people, because common people can't surveil and influence a crowd, or influence the people who do, when doing basic activities. At best I think you might be suggesting that with data we can predict

voting patterns, and then feed that into hypertargeted gerrymandering algorithms to create districts that protect incumbents. And I absolutely agree that needs to stop. But I think the algorithms are already pretty accurate with the data they've got -- more surveillance doesn't really change anything, gerrymandering is already a potent threat.

_Why_ would you ever want blanket surveillance? Persia tried this. It produces oppression. So I would 100% agree with you that we need to stop gerrymandering. But

the growth of surveillance (which is it's own serious problem) feels like a largely sidenote to that conversation. I would love to talk more about how we stop gerrymandering, expand access to voting, and especially enact the National Popular Vote https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/.

What is gerrymandering? I totally understand disagreeing with that law, or disagreeing with the

...

...

majority -- and our government is built to manage that difficult push and pull between varied interests. But it feels premature to throw out our entire justice system over something that most people agree with.

I'm of the camp that punishment-oriented justice increases crime until you have a possibly-violent rebellion to change whatever is stuck with the enforcement of the laws. In a community with honest dialogue crime reduces due to people learning and addressing its relevant reasons.

I think that's a great vision. But if you agree with democracy (which it sounds like you do), then I hope you agree that's not necessarily the system we have right now -- and the way to fix it is gradually, slowly through voting, while defending the system we have *even though it's not ideally what we'd want*.

Our country was founded on revolution, but right now the issue is that voting does little when a political AI can make a third of a country trust a fake news meme. In this community, the people have a more heightened awareness of how

...

political targets are targeted, manipulated, tortured, and destroyed by the powers they threaten. We need the information Snowden leaked to protect ourselves from real violent criminals. It's that the system is corrupt more than that it is inherently unjust.

Can you elaborate on how anything Snowden leaked actually protects you or I from "real violent criminals"? My understanding is the

only real world effect was to cause a spread of zero-day attacks, and

reduce the visibility

Zero-days are not known only by a government. They are known by criminals all over the world, and used to control and spy on systems at a massive scale. Once you _actually hear_ about these attacks, instead of them happening covertly, people _actually fix_ the errors, which seriously protects everyone. I'm too old and worn out to hunt up old documents on my misbehaving mobile phone, but snowden revealed a whole slew of helpful things. It's also notable that many people suffer at the hands of government employees. We need avenues to protect ourselves from the government, too. of our CIA/NSA into adversary thinking. But

What is visibility into adversary thinking? I'll admit I haven't followed it very closely.

Here's a story: I was surprised when I read some of the court documents of that military whistleblower, Manning. The military said they followed standard forensic procedure and powered off the system to image the drive. While I was reading that, I was actually using an operating system boot image of my own creation that used memory remanence to automatically decrypt the harddrive without needing to prompt the user for a key. Memory remanence had been known for years at that time, but the military procedure was to wipe the ram of a system before imaging it. That ram has all the passwords in it, the browser history, things typed into forms, because software is made insecurely. And my military's standard forensic procedure was to wipe it. Where were these people learning their forensics from? Who was teaching them? What were the motivations of these people? Situations like that are important, because they help people like me and you think about what is really going on in the country, and how to protect what is right and needed. A lot of people think the military are harmful, and many have experiences backing it up. If communities were forthrightly included in decision making processes, then people would appreciate formal bodies more, because they were forthrightly directing what the formal bodies did. There are many mediation processes that can reliably find decisions appreciated by all parties. But not very many well-funded mediation organisations. This is why I asked if you agreed with the entire concept of democratic

...

...

rule, as if the majority agrees with something, write a law for that thing, and has an executive branch and court system that enforces that law -- on what basis can you claim justice isn't being served?

I'm personally for consensus rather than majority, far safer, notably in situations like this.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by that? Are you saying the government should only do what has unanimous consent from 300MM+ voters? You genuinely think that's a good method, and aren't just stating it for dramatic flair?

Yup. Mediation works, shows and ads just fill you with stories of conflict. - efficient, effective communication between all people - working with people's needs and reasons, rather than their preferred choices. There is always a choice that everyone appreciates, if they learn enough about what is going on, and have opportunity for what is important to them to be valued. I'll pick the courts here for what's unjust. Cases like this usually use

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secret evidence, which is not democratic.

It's not *transparent*. But if that's what voters decided, how can you claim it's not democratic? Also, are you *genuinely* in

Voters decided to keep evidence secret at trials? I never checked off any law like that on any ballot. support of total transparency of evidence logged into the public record for

all to see forever -- including, say, child pornography?

That's a silly thing to mention, but yes. We need to know what is true, very badly. It's also clearly helpful if pedophiles can get arousal from old court evidence rather than incentivising criminal production of new material. Here's the kinds of evidence that is typically kept secret. Which of these

do you feel should be shown publicly, and why? https://www.wicourts.gov/services/attorney/docs/conf_flyer.pdf

That's a lot of stuff, and my phone isn't letting me copy-paste it to see it while I type. It might be simplest to let the jury decide what to keep confidential. It would be helpful to let people publicise evidence if it could help protect them: - a victim of whom the accused is acquitted could be aided by having the right to choose arbitary evidence to publicise - an individual sentenced to extended prison time could be aided by having the right to choose arbitrary evidence to publicise I suspect what you are *actually* trying to say is that "yes, I agree that

not *everything* should be public. But I would like more to be public." Which is a reasonable position to take. Is that what you are actually trying to say?

? Let's not convict whistleblowers using secret government evidence. We need to protect people our democracy from corruption more than anyone ever needs to exert vengeance. Regarding public and private, I would like the right to live a fully public life. This protects people from harm because what happens to them becomes known. Others would like secret lives. I believe the operation of a government should be fully transparent and public. The people with classified information should be academic researchers and such, not formal powerholders.

On Sun, 27 Jun 2021 20:56:32 -0400 Karl wrote:

Our country was founded on revolution,

That's hilariously wrong karl. Your US cesspool was 'founded' by a coup d'etat carried by SLAVE OWNERS. The only thing the US non-revolution changed was criminal control from english non-human turds to US non-human turds. You and barret do not know the A of the ABC of the history of the cesspool where you live. Or are completely dishonest. Guess which one is the correct explanation.

On Sun, 27 Jun 2021 21:56:01 -0400 Karl wrote:

On Sun, Jun 27, 2021, 9:39 PM Punk-BatSoup-Stasi 2.0 wrote:

...

On Sun, 27 Jun 2021 20:56:32 -0400 Karl wrote:

...

Our country was founded on revolution,

That's hilariously wrong karl.

Your US cesspool was 'founded' by a coup d'etat carried by SLAVE OWNERS. The only thing the US non-revolution changed was criminal control from english non-human turds to US non-human turds.

You and barret do not know the A of the ABC of the history of the cesspool where you live. Or are completely dishonest. Guess which one is the correct explanation.

It's notable that we killed the locals,

yes, you did that too.

and then waged a war on our homeland,

...furthermore the coup d'etat' against england was bankrolled by the french monarchy. I bet your nazi govt schools didn't teach you that. bottom line here is that only the worst kind of dishonest turd can pretend that there's any 'legitimacy' to your government or your 'country' karl.

and then had a civil war. We might have problematic culture.

'culture'

We still have it in our constitution to protect the ability to rise up if something has gotten very wrong.

yet another piece of infinitely dishonest nonsense yes. Your US cuntsitution still has all the slavery 'clauses' as well. Makes for hilarious reading. Now, are you mentioning this (fake) "ability to rise up if something has gotten very wrong" because you think it's real or because you admit it shows how infinitely corrupt your 'country' is?

On Fri, 25 Jun 2021 15:40:22 -0700 David Barrett wrote:

Maybe just skipping ahead a few steps before getting pulled into a debate about the US government, do you agree with the concept of representative democracy involving different branches with checks and balances being a philosophically strong foundation for governance?

anybody with half a brain and a minimum of intellectual honesty knows and admit that 'representative democracy' is a criminal joke and that 'checks and balances' is infinitely idiocy and propaganda. you have to be infinitely stupid or dishonest to pretend that GOVERNMENT is going to CHECK ITSELF.

checks and balances

you can divide the MAFIA in as many 'branches' as you want. You still get the MAFIA, a criminal organization that only works for its own criminal interests.

I'm not eager to get into a conversation where you end up saying "But democracy sucks, war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength."

then get lost, asshole.