Four fears for authoritarians

The thing is, the extremes of keeping things hidden we see in the government are just a tip of a long tail of many, many people trying to keep things hidden in other, more mundane, institutions. For existential fears, people who could point out these problems stay silent. We accept this as a necessary acts, because of "competition". But aren't wars and such just another result of this thinking, really? (For an interesting take on morality of speaking truth, see also Sam Harris' book Lying.)

Here's a couple of ideas:

1. Can democratic state do without any secret service at all? I don't mean not to have "operational" security. You need to keep secret where you have troops, keys etc. But; maybe it should just release all the secrets after 5 years, about operations they did. Likewise, their operations should be made public, just like courts are. In other words, the default position should be to release, not keep secret. I am on a fence regarding technology plans - would really world be a better place if Russians couldn't make the bomb? The point is, we take position "secret service is needed" for granted; I don't think it is.

2. There should be no blank exceptions to free speech, just like in the above case. It should be right applied to everybody, not just US (or other state) citizens. Private sector shouldn't be an exception - you should have right to publicly criticize your employer. There should be no contracts preventing you from disclosing information about what you don't like, or about what happened to you.

3. I envision a platform that would allow anonymous publishing of unreliable information, which then could be collectively analyzed and the reliability of sources assessed, without revealing them. Kind of inversion of classical journalism, where you have a limited number of people (editors) accessing unreliable information and only publishing if you can reasonably prove it to be true; here you would publish indiscriminately things, that are not true, and only later, via some algorithm that would connect the sources somehow yet retain their anonymity, the correctness of the information would be proved. It should allow to connect very small leaks from many people. This would require a cultural change in how we understand media, but it could be done in incremental way.

I am not completely advocating all of what I just mentioned; I would just like to see some discussion about that. Maybe everything about institutional behavior in the past, older than 5 years, let's say, should just be fair game to publish. This rule would nicely exclude all the technical and operational plans.

In my opinion, all constitutions suck. They are, after all, the proverbial horse designed by committee. But its better than nothing right?

South Africa probably has the most liberal constitution in the world, that makes sense, it was drafted in modern times so takes into account modern problems like fairness and equality of homosexuals or transgender people. But in practise, I would personally doubt the same constitution is enforced to the same standards as say, Iceland (also a country with a modern constitution).

The US, must have the gold standard of constitutions and there are arguments over if the right to bare arms meant semi-automatic weapons or just muskets. Does the 4th amendment just apply to physical property and letters or digital communications too?

There is no perfect constitution, it is impossible. I don't agree with everything in the EU standards of law, but that's the sad thing, it is better than what we have now. The Germans have more protections than I do, for standards of rights our country authored and pushed on the world (with the US of course) in response to things like WW2. Its unacceptable, I would personally rather have dog shit protections than none at all.

I'm not american either, but I'm pretty sure he was referring to the westboro baptist church.