This all boils down to the question of how to reign in the administrative state, and the problem here is that no one really wants to reign it in, they want to control it and point it in the direction they prefer, that is, they want an extra-judicial, extra-legislative source of power to exist, but just not do any of the things they don't like.
But I don't think this is possible, once you have an administrative state, of course it's going to monitor and spy on everyone, it's going to arrest people and not give them fair trials (hello Assange), it's going to try to manipulate democratic processes and it's going to crush any force that it perceives as a threat to its own survival. In short, it will have a mind of its own, with its own goals, and by definition it will not be bound by legislative or judicial restraints.
Organisations creep until they are stopped when left untended. They can stop growing because of money shortage, political decisions, lack of manpower, pressure from stakeholders, etc., but there's a strong tendency in all organisations to grow and expand influence. There's no reason why this should not hold for spying and policing agencies. It's not inevitable, but there certainly is a non-negligible probability.
>There's no reason why this should not hold for spying and policing agencies
Isn't that what democracies call "constitution"? Something that protects citizens' rights again wrong-doing of powerful entities including legislators and the state itself?
Democracy is the best we have for the people. But while the theory is sound, the practical implementation is usually flawed.
The people are "in power" just for that day while they're giving their blessing to their representative. After this, as long as things aren't too abrupt and disadvantage the regular person obviously enough to trigger a violent response, that representative can pretty much represent and defend any other point of view. Usually the one from the otherwise equal but not quite equal, much richer person. And with education being on the bottom of everyone's list, it just gets easier to cover these things up.
For things that concern interests far from home it's even easier. Freedom also means you're free to pump as much one sided information as possible. So as long as one can flood the people with Middle Eastern terrorism, Russian hackers, or Chinese human rights abuses, who's going to care about the home team doing the same even at home?
Superficially democracy is alive and well but it's like religion, most people observe it only in theory and when it matters to them personally. And when it does matter to them, it doesn't matter to enough other people. Which is why most talking points don't have a strong majority, and they're mostly dealt in a compromising way, which makes everyone equally unhappy (except a very few).
Well, to the best of my knowledge, in most countries, the constitutions themselves suggest some actions to the people in the case somebody is not complying with the constitution.
Did we see any of those suggested countermeasures taking place?
The answer is actually because we spent several years with the entire country dedicated tona total war effort in the face of an enemy that was devoted to our total and absolute extinction and subjugation.
Following that rather than returning to a peacetime country and disbanding the associated military structure it was instead repurposed for a cold war in the face of another enemy that had sworn themselves to our complete and absolute destruction and which had the capability to do so. In the face of such constant risk of extinction almost any measure was seen acceptable to counteract the threat.
However after about 60 years the threat disappeared but the massive institutions built up to combat the threat then needed to continue to justify it's existence as careers and lives had been built upon counteracting the Red menance. Unfortunately these institutions did not cease to exist and continued the same tactics that it was profecient in despite the threat to the existence of the nation.
Lol. Mass spying is far from recent. Mail has been spied upon for centuries in the US. Sending agents to spy on political groups too. I'm never sure exactly when this ideal time was, that time before government got evil, but I suspect it never really existed.
I believe it is not about the means and the tooling. Systemic problems need to fix the system, not various outcomes of such problems. Assuming we are talking about democracies, I guess it is up to the people. If the people do not care, then fine. "Nothing to see here, move along". If this is the case, I disagree with "the people", but apparently that is just me... Or few of us.
> ...the problem here is that no one really wants to reign it in...
Why shouldn't it spy on people? If the state is fundamentally on our side, that is a win (fuzzy abstract principles like privacy vs. concrete benefits like stopping specific illegal activity). Ditto if the state is neutral. We have no need to keep secrets from a neutral but fundamentally principled entity. Privacy isn't really important enough to worry about if there are just a few bad actors working individually. It'd be a battle of a luxury (privacy) vs a need (security)
It is only because the state is fundamentally not on our side that people should be trying to reign it in and use concepts like privacy to do so. At some point any information the state has will be used by your political adversaries to attack.
Privacy (from the state) isn't worth anything if the starting point is that the administrative state will be a reliable, proper and responsible bearer of power.
If you can guarantee "good" rulers, then even autocracy isn't so bad—the problem is there will inevitably be bad rulers. Even if I 100% agree with the current administration's policies, I'd be foolish to think there won't be a time when another party (whose polices I 100% disagree with) will be voted into power, and be given access to the same tools to use for what I'd consider nefarious ends.
We must ask, when agreeing to give government a new power, how to protect ourselves against their inevitable abuse of that power. The "national security" excuse circumvents that process.
Every organization needs mechanisms to root out corruption, not just hope and prayers. Transparency, accountability, rule of law are just the start. You need to design checks and balances, internal policing mechanisms, accounting for every dollar, processes to eliminate conflicts of interest, self-dealing, cronyism, etc.
Sadly, it seems that these institutions are prone to a kind of rot that means you can't just set them up once and forget. You need constant vigilance against these institutions corrupting themselves. Vigilance requires attention, not just from officials, but from journalists, media, the public. We're all so damn distracted that things are now rotting faster than ever.
It also doesn’t help that newsrooms have been totally gutted by the loss of advertising revenues. This is particularly acute at the local level, where traditionally you had local newspaper staff at meetings for local councils, but these have largely disappeared in a lot of places.
I've wondered if the future posed in the last story in I, Robot gives a taste of an alternative. I've felt like Asimov tried to explore similar ideas. Four "supercomputers" are so advanced and powerful that countries which don't utilize them would become left in the dust. The technology is so advanced it enforces a new paradigm - play by the new rules or die out. Is there some (non-disastrous) technological (or cultural?) development that will upend all traditional power structures in a similar way?
The robots in Asimov's story are basically uncorruptable. The closest modern example I can think of is encryption + bitcoin. But governments while they can't break encryption can go after exchanges and enact harsh legal penalties thereby extending traditional power structures.
Would a neuralink+pocket AI get you out of any situation, even a government coming after you? Would personal faster-than-light ships allow everyone to escape to their own worlds?
The fact that these examples are so fanciful shows how entrenched power is I'd say. But maybe some single advancement will provide a new modality, or a continual buildup of decentralized tech like torrents, crypto, blockchain, encryption, and cheap computing power.
And as far as cultural changes, maybe that was one purpose of ancient gods. To posit a supernatural power that can destroy any man-made power. But religion also seems to entrench worldly power on the flip-side.
Do you think it would be fair to say that countries that operate in this way are no longer democracies?
I have my own thoughts on the matter but I'm curious based on this assessment of yours what other people think about the implications of the situation.
I think it would be fair to say that any Democracy past a certain size (and that size is probably not going to be much bigger than a medium sized city) is going to have parts of it that will not be exposed to public scrutiny and operate independently of the public will.
I'm pretty sure the majority of Danes would be against helping the U.S spy on other EU nations. But it was done because the country was not asked. There are of course other things that the government wants to do that they are prevented from by popular sentiment.
Both Autocracy and Democracy are present in any system, their distribution just changes due to circumstances.
Any state which enforces private land tenure in a non-reciprocated manner will tend towards autocracy over time. A distinguishing feature of high functioning republics is the ability to organize reliable public assessments of direct taxes on landed property within their borders. Under corrupt governments the assessments are never kept up to date and the nobility is given arbitrary and excessive privileges and exemptions to shift direct contributions to the least advantaged members of society. Maybe 50% of local governments and 20% of regional states in the U.S. are high functioning. The federal government was able to organize assessments in 1798, 1813-1816, and 1861 but is generally not high functioning.
> Do you think it would be fair to say that countries that operate in this way are no longer democracies?
Such an agency operating outside of the visibility of those voting is by definition not democratic. But that doesn't mean the rest of the democracy isn't there.
Just because the rest of the democracy is there doesn't mean the country is actually a democracy though, if the machinery of democracy exists but can't control and regulate the totality of the state.
IMHO, people prefer "trust, but check" over "blind trust". You can cast a referendum, if you are unsure. Hitler was elected in a democratic way, so it's possible that your democratic ally can turn into a totalitarian enemy at a next election.
Also, it is easier to check for Russian spies in a government from outside, than from inside. For example, soviet agent in Germany government, called "D-104" in memories of Yurii Drozdov, is still not found. I suspect Schröder, which works for Russian Gasprom now, but he may leave a replacement agent, to work after him. (Merkel?)
> countries that operate in this way are no longer democracies?
Such countries do not extend democratic values to ~other countries~. In fact, they may actively erode democracy in other countries.
If the power structure of a country no longer extends democratic values to other countries, the power structure ~may~ no longer understand democratic principles and have deep problems within its own nation as a result.
I think any moderately sized nation state quickly develops an inner state with autocratic tendencies. Democracy combined with a healthy press and strong protections on free speech are a strong check on the domestic powers of this inner state, but are much less effective in curbing the autocratic inner state overseas.
The nation state hasn't ceased to be democratic, but its internal autocratic state is running amuck overseas.
I think it's probably most accurate to say that there are democracies of different sizes. Your country is a more of democracy as more people have equal agency over their government. This obviously has never happened to a complete extent, and it's still an open question whether that should happen. But a discrete separation between "democracies" and "not democracies" will run into these sorts of problems in any case.
The word democracy derives from the Greek words for ‘People’ - ‘Demos’ and ‘Power’ - ‘-cracy’. So, literally: ‘people power’ or ‘power of/to or government of the people by the people’. Originally, very roughly speaking, it was an alternative form of government to being ruled by tyrants. If you are seriously disparaging one of the many forms in which human beings have tried to implement some form of democracy, arguably all of which have some flaws, and not just shilling for some authoritarian interest or other (or your own, possibly benighted, or imagined self-interest?), then you need to be more specific. (P.S. Churchill had some useful thoughts on the matter :)
The Greek concept of democracy looked nothing like the modern republic. A Greek democracy did not elect legislators: that function belonged to the people assembled as a whole. Nor did it elect ordinary magistrates, who were instead selected by random lot from lists of willing volunteers in a process now called "sortition." The rationale behind sortition relied on the notion that the ordinary business of government was mundane and required no special competence or knowledge aside from the ordinary citizen's share of justice and patriotism. The ancient Greek democracy elected only ambassadors and generals, people in whom authority needed to be concentrated and yet who also had to be competent rather than simply willing.
There was an ancient form of government in between tyranny and democracy: oligarchy. In an oligarchy, a few people were selected to make decisions for the rest. There were in different cities various methods of selecting the oligarchs, but popular election was certainly among them. The downside to regularly scheduled, popular elections, in contrast to the random chance of democratic sortition, was that the expectation of elections generated political parties or factions to attempt to influence or control the outcome of the popular election and thus control the oligarchy. This was, of course, impossible in a democracy, since no election was held: sortition makes partisan politics pointless.
In short, the reason that the word "democracy" is never found in the American Constitution is that America was never intended to be a democracy in the ancient sense, the only sense in which the Founders understood the term. The modern "democracy" of an elected legislature and elected magistrates is, in fact, what the Greeks would have termed an oligarchy.
As you suggest, ancient Athenian democracy bore little resemblance to modern forms of representative democracy and no doubt appears very limited/odd to modern sensibilities. What you wrote doesn’t make what I stated about the derivation of the word any less true though: https://www.etymonline.com/word/democracy
All forms of democracy so far have been hefty compromises in one way or another and so will all be in the future, short of some sort of technological marvel I suppose. Different countries, constitutions etc. rebalance the mechanisms in one way or another, as more or less direct/representative forms of democracy inevitably have consequent drawbacks... Parliamentary democracies, republican democracies etc./all the various voting mechanisms etc., all are compromises designed to try and strike some sort of balance or confer some practical advantage. You can argue that some are antiquated, some unfit for purpose, but most IMHO. are better than the alternative. The fundamental problem with oligarchies/tyrannies/polyarchy/plutarchies/‘pick-your-archy’ is surely that you might (and almost inevitably eventually will) get a bad apple/apples. ‘Absolute power corrupts absolutely’ etc. As I understand it, the U.S. is a kind of republic (a ‘federal presidential constitutional republic’ according to Wikipedia :) and Madison/Jefferson/the founding ‘dudes’ tried to strike some, as they viewed it, balance between representative democracy and an appointed/elected executive, as you’re no doubt aware… You can argue it was/is deeply flawed and that their efforts to avoid partisan politics/entrenched political parties have failed/there are many problems with lobbying groups/corruption etc., but I would suggest that there exists at least some opportunity to debate and consequently change representatives/legislate a hopefully better way of doing things? It beats the alternative/being arbitrarily ruled by a bonkers king/some tinpot dictator/absolute/hereditary monarch! Perhaps the democratic process ought to always be a work-in-progress, a compromise that we tweak and balance with other mechanisms to eg. protect minority rights or to provide long-term stability and short-term effective and efficient decision-making through discussion rather than dictat? I would suggest that there are decisions best taken at a very direct/local level and others that are best dealt with globally/even on a more technocratic basis… The voters ideally should be educated enough to be able to thoroughly understand the process and enabled and enfranchised wherever possible to engage with it fully…
“Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…”
- from a speech in the Commons by Winston Churchill (a man with many imperfections! :)
https://richardlangworth.com/worst-form-of-government
But I don't think this is possible, once you have an administrative state, of course it's going to monitor and spy on everyone, it's going to arrest people and not give them fair trials (hello Assange), it's going to try to manipulate democratic processes and it's going to crush any force that it perceives as a threat to its own survival. In short, it will have a mind of its own, with its own goals, and by definition it will not be bound by legislative or judicial restraints.