>The solution is to ensure good people are elected and that good oversight and accountability controls are in place...
The issue is that you can't simultaneously have accountability and secrecy. If nobody knows bad things are happening then nobody can hold anyone accountable.
This is the theory behind the FISA court etc., to provide a body which is responsible for restraining bad actors. But then the court itself is secret and you fall into the same trap: The court hears from the government but not the target or the public or the EFF or anyone with an incentive to argue the contrary position, which encourages it to have a strong bias in favor of the government, and the outcomes are secret so the court itself has no accountability to anyone and becomes a rubber stamp.
> The issue is that you can't simultaneously have accountability and secrecy. If nobody knows bad things are happening then nobody can hold anyone accountable.
That's true. That's what needs to go into the design of accountable systems. In the end you have to trust people in a system that must have secret parts, but that doesn't mean there are not ways to design oversight systems to reduce the risk of regulatory capture and lone wolves, and still expand transparency to much higher levels than currently exist. I would even argue it's possible to do without appreciably compromising operational security.
Organizations like EFF or ACLU are actually a great idea in that regard, IMO.
>Organizations like EFF or ACLU are actually a great idea in that regard, IMO.
I might agree if it weren't for the fact that they're catastrophically under-funded. It would fall apart unless their funding somehow scaled sustainably with the number of cases they had to argue. That is very unlikely to come from public donations if they're doing something the public can't observe. And if the funding is to come from the government then I wonder what you would propose to prevent it from experiencing the same failures that have plagued existing public defenders (i.e. police+prosecutors get more resources and congressional sympathy).
The issue is that you can't simultaneously have accountability and secrecy. If nobody knows bad things are happening then nobody can hold anyone accountable.
This is the theory behind the FISA court etc., to provide a body which is responsible for restraining bad actors. But then the court itself is secret and you fall into the same trap: The court hears from the government but not the target or the public or the EFF or anyone with an incentive to argue the contrary position, which encourages it to have a strong bias in favor of the government, and the outcomes are secret so the court itself has no accountability to anyone and becomes a rubber stamp.