Google Security Team Member on NSA: "Fuck These Guys"

All of those but possibly Boston are essentially mentally ill people who went nuts - domestic attacks. The NSA is usually tasked with dealing with foreign threats. So your complaint is, by and large, mistaken. Your complaint is better directed at local police and mental health facilities.

It's almost certain that the TLAs generally tries to keep within the law as they see it, and push the boundaries as far as they can - this is the trend of the executive branch. I would expect them to have batteries of lawyers hired to find out exactly what is permissible, and then to do all of it.

It'a also entirely disingenuous to say that the TLAs have no purpose. To riff off of @leashless from Twitter - they are a reaction - an immune response - to some entities which do and did some very bad things covertly, and are now being an autoimmune disease on the host state. The truth is, 9/11 gave a rather large blank check to the industrial/ security/intelligence companies and agencies in the US, and most people were not in the mood to worry about civil liberties too much at the time. "Never again" was the refrain, and that sort of perspective removes all ability to do a cost-benefit analysis. So they expanded with that attitude and that check... then, like beauracracies do, they entrenched and began to expand power and capabilities. This is not new behavior in any bureaucracy. This sort of eventuality was, as I recall, predicted quite loudly after the Patriot Act was passed.

> Granting that, why bring Italy up them?

Because I live here and it's a very good example of proportional systems not being strictly better than what we have in the US.

> swap coalition partners and form a new majority coalition if a minor partner wants too much.

Easier said than done in many cases.

>our vote actually has meaning; our votes actually change the elected officials, etc. We still can run a socialist candidate (c.f. Kshama Sawant 2013 in Seattle) and they aren't shut down via police action or other hardcore discrimination.

See, my theory, call me a tinfoil hatter if you will, is that we are on the brink of losing our votes. 1) Collect extensive data on any and all citizens. Any especially politically active citizens will receive extra scrutiny. Ones that are further up in local, state and federal politics will receive even more. This information will be used secretly to ensure that, besides a few outliers who are either allowed to be subversive for the sake of maintaining a smokescreen, all politicians can be controlled. Russell Tice, a prominent NSA whistleblower has alluded to exactly this process occurring under the NSA of today, as it did under J Edgar. He ominously refers to a young man who now resides in a nice white house as one of these who received extra attention. (To me, that explains a whole great deal. And think about it - one of my google searches released to the press would destroy any political career I had, and would be quite enough to turn me into someones puppet, or force me out of politics all together.)

2) With the political market cornered, to an extent, step two begins. Militarise the police. Use infiltration and subversion to delegitimise, split and turn public opinion against activists, whilst also using techniques to track and monitor the most influential ones. Again, there is evidence that the NYPD and other departments have undertaken actions like this. There is a wealth of technology to aid them - tracing FB profiles, using false cell towers, facial recognition tech combined with surveillance cameras, etc. This will have a chilling effect, as mentioned above - acitivists movements are accused of vandalism, of violence, suspect motives, etc, and are also brutally put down. Public sympathy fades, and the support for and involvement in protesting and other forms of activism begin to wither.

Congratulations, you have the makings of a great authoritarian state!

Note that nothing I referred to above is beyond the realms of possibility - in fact, please point to anything I said and I will try to dig up some solid evidence for it.

Quite simply, we are going past the point of no return. It will become progressively more difficult to have an impact on the political apparatus. At some point, it will come down to one thing: a fight.a very bloody fight. it happens every few centuries when an existing political and social order becomes stagnant, and the citizenry are pushed out of fear, hunger or anger to act. When we the people have nothing to lose, that is when things will change. It may not happen tomorrow, or next year, or next decade, maybe not even this century, but it will happen.

Who said I abandoned voting? I said it doesn't work in this case. I research and vote every election. But I know for the more important offices at the state and national level, the system is broken. The two party system and big money means I don't get any say in selecting who runs, the corrupt system does.

I took the meaning of the OP to be generically 'those who pay to influence politicians', not strictly the lobbyists themselves. So although you are technically correct that there is a distinction, the spirit of the original one-line comment was that individual voters don't have the power that organized interests do. I gave a practical example in which the interests of individuals are overshadowed by leverage that an employer has over those individuals. It's a case in which a vague threat of 'hey, you want a job don't you?' turns into aggregating money into the hands of a few people who lobby (in the generic sense) politicians to support things that may be against the interests of the employees. Such is the game they play.

As to your last statement, largely it is the shareholders and executives who are the beneficiaries of the lobbying they do. You can argue that the employees are beneficiaries in the sense that they have a job, but that misses the point: the benefits of lobbying fall asymmetrically. Again, it's a leverage thing. They leverage the desire of the little guy to have a job and raise his family and in turn reap huge rewards for the shareholders. So although you can say everyone benefits and gets what they want, the result is really a distortion of power and influence.