Are you asking, what purpose was there in bringing the hammer of the American Justice Department and down onto a random grey hat hacker? The same as always: enforce rigid authoritarianism and blind bureaucratic SOP.
Remember kids, clicking the "next page" button on court document websites is legal, doing it with javascript is a felony, off to jail with you, join the rapists and murderers!
Nah history in information security repeats daily. How many unsecured mongodb databases exposed to the internet and unsecured S3 buckets did we see? Credentials have been committed to github so often that Github chose to build an automated alert system on their own dime that you don't even have to sign up for. How many times have lastpass and Experian been breached? How often do we STILL see sql injection attacks, a problem that has been actually solved for decades?
Well, the word used was "authoritarianism", and I believe this is commonly used to refer to a political system, not to individual acts. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
The US breaks their own laws and international laws when going after individuals who embarrasses the US government, including deploying the military if it suits them.
It is a bit like when telecom companies sent bribes to terrorists in order to gain telecom contracts. It not that they intend to do bad things, but occasionally they have to break the law when law stands in the way.
You believe the usa is a democracy? Despite high barriers to voting and the fact that in three federal executive elections in recent history the State gave power to the candidate that lost the popular vote?
Despite the fact that the State allows for bans on women's healthcare despite the majority of population supporting guaranteed access to women's healthcare?
Despite the fact that the State has criminalized marijuana despite the fact that the majority of the population wants it decriminalized?
The USA is not as authoritarian as some places. Obviously that is true. It's a pretty good place to live, comparatively. But don't aid the State in grasping more power. What a terrible end to the American experiment, I predict: PATRIOT act type laws passing again and again while the people allow themselves to be distracted by culture war. History repeats itself except this time the intelligentsia aren't participating voluntarily for self gain, it seems many of them (here) are letting fascism just get away with it because, I dunno, maybe they see themselves on the side of the arbitrarily decided "big tech" actor in the culture war?
Who knows. To me it just seems a repeated pattern of fascist-tilted ideologies coopting contradictory pro worker and nationalist rhetoric and responding to all criticism by retorting that there's no alternatives but ${somePlaceNobodyWantsToLive} so we better just accept things as they are.
Are they though? Bernie Sanders wasn't even allowed to debate as a popular presidential candidate because he didn't have a corporate sponsor or Super PAC funding.
If voters are only choosing amongst candidates put forth by the establishment, and the establishment relies on funding and support from special interests, then democratically elected is somewhat different than democratically selected, isn't it?
I wasn't referring to the executive branch of the US government, in fact that branch has been chosen by state appointed electors and not individual citizens since its beginning.
First, I only wrote "if you think...", so I did not attribute any opinion onto the OP.
Second, however, there is good reason to believe that OP might hold that opinion, since OP wrote about how the purpose of some actions of the American state, via the American Justice Department, were to "enforce rigid authoritarianism". Whose rigid authoritarianism could that refer to in this context, other than an alleged US-American one?
You are correct that I think the USA government is an authoritarian one, insomuch as it is very reactionary or at least conservative, and engages in incredible acts of authoritarianism and imperialism.
I don't think it's anything like authoritarian regimes, wherein a single individual (DPRK) or party (PRC) maintains absolute power. However, it is authoritarian in its representation of its single interest: billionaires and corporations (which famously have personhood in the usa and are explicitly granted political power via legislation).
I wish you wouldn't take a bad faith interpretation of my position by strawmanning me as if I'm claiming the usa is like the DPRK. I'm not alone in my viewpoints, and considering the rise of leftism in the usa, at the very least you would be well served to pay attention to what we're saying if nothing else so you aren't blindsided by a sudden wave of anti-establishment blowback. Read Cory Doctorow's "Radicalized" for some fun fiction on the dangers of laughing away criticism of the problems in the usa as just silly disaffected leftists who aren't "realistic."
In any case I doubt what I'm claiming, if you take it in good faith, is really all that controversial.
Do you want to live in a country where you could be churned through viciously unfair court systems for potential years because you used JavaScript to access APIs that you didn't know were intended to be accessed only by humans through web browsers? Because that's happened to people in the usa.
Do you want to live in a country where you could go to jail for fixing your own tractor, or iphone? That's what the American government is leaning towards.
Do you want to live in a country where human rights aren't guaranteed if the State can pick a demographic trait about you that renders you inhuman in certain situations? The USA is doing that right now to women and their bodily autonomy, and transgender people for same.
Do you want to be a target when you travel because your government armed revolutionaries and then radicalized them against The West by pillaging their country for natural resources? This America has done uncountable times.
So why deny reality? Don't you want the usa to be a better place? You don't have to be a communist to think so. You can simply want the things I mentioned to go away. There's no reason America can't just be a milquetoast capitalist state with whisps of socialism in their healthcare and transportation industry like plenty of nations across the world. Why assume that's a slippery slope to whatever scary thing you think I believe?
The US might not be authoritarian overall but the people who wind up in positions of power in the various institutions that run it sure seem to have a much greater authoritarian bent than the populace in general so when they can get away with it (like when prosecuting a hacker or arresting a bootleg cigarette seller) they try to go all out. The kinds of people who routinely complain about these excesses often turn right around and complain that specific kinds of criminals they don't like aren't getting treated badly enough and it drives me up the wall.
Would you please stop using HN primarily for ideological battle? Regardless of ideology, that's not allowed here, because it destroys what the site is supposed to be for.
Here's a quick test I just derived to assess how authoritarian the country you currently live in really is: you go to a main square in your country's capital on a busy day and start declaring in a loud voice that, in your opinion, the country's current leader has no idea what they're doing, that all her/his political ideas are idiotic, and that the people of the country would be better off with almost anybody else in his/her position.
Keep doing this for a little while.
The level of authoritarianism of your country can then be measured by the reaction of government officials.
I find this incredibly one dimensional. Apply your rule to a country where government officials are smart enough to leave in the release valve of a little bit of protest and you'd let them get away with basically anything.
Certainly one way authoritarianism manifests itself is through blatant restrictions on freedom of speech.
America, being a nation of highly evolved authoritarianism, has found better ways. Nobody on earth does better marketing than the USA. Nobody. And what else can we call marketing when a government does it other than propaganda? Get someone leaking that the government was doing illegal spying? No worries, he's a Russian agent! Got some upstart kneeling on a football field to protest police brutality? Champagne socialist, race baiter, disrespectful of the American flag, boom, done, we can keep doing police brutality. And bonus, we now have a new angle to culture war: pro and anti cop. Tie being pro cop to owning a pickup truck and just like that you've got people making it their entire identity. Easy! Didn't have to arrest a single person (other than a couple hundred peaceful protestors of course).
No need to arrest the person shouting that the president is an idiot, or a fascist, or whatever. That doesn't matter because the American electoral system is rigidly locked into two parties that serve the true electorate regardless of which is in power: billionaires and corporations. Shout all you want! It doesn't matter all that much.
But should you challenge the true electorate, that's an entirely different story. Why is stealing from the cash register come with a quick trip to jail, yet the largest form of theft in the usa is wage theft, the punishment for which is at worse a fine? And that's if you can hire a lawyer to do the hard work for you: unlike when you steal from the cash register, the State is unlikely to send an attorney general to launch an investigation on your behalf.
Authoritarianism can manifest itself in many ways when you're smart about it. Try to repair a John Deere tractor on your own, lemme know how it goes. Try to grow what you want on your farm, lemme know how it goes. Try to get a medical procedure, well the State might let you, unless you're a woman or transgender.
Grow your own marijuana and then smoke it, lemme know how that works out.
You may be allowed to protest the president, but stand in front of a courthouse with a sign that says "Google jury nullification," let me know how it goes.
Stand in front of a police station with a sign that says "Black Lives Matter," tell me how it goes.
Stand in front of a Whole Foods with a sign about pissbottles, let me know how far the cops force you to move on threat of arrest.
I triple dog dare you to walk into an American police station and request to make a complaint against an officer. I quadruple dare you to change your mind and try to leave if they ask for ID during the process.
Ever driven in South Texas? Lemme know what happens when you try it and refuse to stop at the random border patrol points that aren't on a border, despite being constitutionally "guaranteed" to not need to randomly show proof of citizenship to jackboots asking.
So you can shout about the president. Big deal. You can do that in many places. The power of the authoritarianism isn't vested in that office in the usa. The president is an agent of those interests. The tricky thing about the usa, and the reason it's not a fully fascist state, is those interests are just diverse enough to be unable to collude fully. I think it's on that path though.
Do you think the only measure of authoritarianism is number of prisoners per capita?
At any rate, I was reading that countries like China have alternatives to prison called “administrative detention”. Maybe we should just change the name of our prisons so we can goose the stats?
The US (at least the Republican party & some supporters) possesses other authoritarian traits as well, such as using excessive force to quell protests, pushing a narrative which alienates outgroups (Mexicans, Muslims...), or widespread surveillance.
Obviously it's not as bad as China or Russia, but it's not exactly a bastion of hands-off governance either.
Indeed, it's a matter of degree. I wouldn't call it autoritarian relative to the world, but it's lagging behind Western Europe and a bunch of other countries.
No I think we meet all other reasonable measures also. The experience of freedom in the US is the freedom to make increasingly virtual and arbitrary consumer choices. That’s pretty much it. It’s not the experience of freedom of speech in practice, not free time, not freedom from usurious debt, not the freedom of rising prosperity, not freedom from opaque government interference and meddling.
When people use the word “authoritarian” they are just signaling that they believe the narratives that our media speaks with one voice about those bad, bad other countries.
