The FBI tried to ambush my source

Do these ever work?

The people you are blowing the whistle to are the same ones doing the shady illegal stuff.

Your belief that we have powerful checks on government power is clear you support a much larger and more intrusive government than I ever would, I see the government today as an unchecked dystopia novel, you think it is perfectly fine and balanced, that is more scary to me than government power. That we as a society have lost the very notion of what freedom actually is, that we has a society have come to accept the gilded cage as "freedom"

Beyond that, It comes down to the question of constitution interpretation as well. You believe the 4th amendment is silent here, you believe the FBI is operating under authorization of the 4th amendment because a law was violated, a law that seems to be protecting people that are violating the 4th amendment wholesale (the nsa), and ironic twist if I ever saw one.

You believe this because our Supreme Court has been derelict in the duty at uploading the plain and true meaning of the US Constitution for decades, you like many look to the Supreme Court for the meaning of the constitution, you have outsourced your thinking to this body, these people for whom we in society have placed on pedestal, and ironically in practice have given a title of nobility, something forbidden in the constitution.

“You seem to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so. They have, with others, the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps.... Their power [is] the more dangerous as they are in office for life, and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves.”

― Thomas Jefferson

Uh... yes? If a law was violated, that's probable cause. It's sort of a definitional thing. What legal regime do you desire that manages to pre-decide on which laws are OK to violate before the collection of evidence occurs?

This sounds like an argument against the whole idea of law enforcement, I guess? You don't think that police should have the power to seize evidence or arrest people at all? (Because before they do that, we need to decide whether the laws they're trying to enforce are acceptable to the target of the investigation, right?) I mean, that's a position. Libertarians and anarchists occasionally say stuff like that. But it's absolutely not the legal framework we live under, and I doubt you'll find much support for it among the broader electorate.

If you don't like the laws we have, then the remedy available to you is to elect a government to change the laws. You don't get to demand that we enforce them differently for the laws you don't like.

To the extent those are relevant, they magnify the problems now (with or without more districts), rather than mitigating them.

> It would be a lot harder for two parties to completely control an 8000 member congress or gerrymander that many districts.

More districts make gerrymandering easier, not harder. As does more information.

Sure, there'd be more independents (absolute count), and at least one more often, in an 8000 member House, but proportionate to the total, there'd probably be fewer, on average, than there have been with the 435 member House.

This is a specious appeal to an abstract concept, that in this case justifies autocratic power. The entire run-amok surveillance industrial complex exists precisely due to such selective enforcement. If the FBI were actually interested in achieving justice, they would be going after the highly organized traitors systematically undermining our freedoms rather than small isolated cases of individuals committing a crime while trying to expose those larger crimes. Instead we see this exact "different enforcement", but with the opposite prioritization.

And yes, the people deciding en masse to elect different representatives would be one way to fix the problem. But there are many such ways, and general normative condemnation is the way to maintain and build support for any/all of them rather than getting focused on a specific approach which may or may not work.