[autoexec]

Not in this case. The president has full authority over the NSA which is part of the DoD. With Guantanamo Bay, he needed to find states willing to take in the prisoners and he needed congress. As commander-in-chief Obama could have ended the domestic spying program with a single order.

He used a couple of secret memos to expand the spying program without needing anything from anyone. https://www.propublica.org/article/new-snowden-documents-rev...

[sneak]

That assumes that the president actually has full practical authority over the NSA and IC.

I don't know if that is true other than on paper.

These organizations consume the private details of the lives of every federal judge, every member of the legislature, every prosecutor, every staffer, and their entire families, all of their mistresses, drug dealers, fixers, and bag men.

I think this would put them in a position of significant leverage over anyone who is ever elected president.

[autoexec]

> I think this would put them in a position of significant leverage over anyone who is ever elected president.

Worse than that, it gives them the ability to identify and eliminate threats to their power before they can even get to the point where they could build a viable campaign for the presidency!

That kind of power, along with access to information on any petty rival, or even just the nudes of the random but sexy person they met in passing the other day, is temptation enough to corrupt anyone. Even if we could assume it hasn't been abused to that extent so far (and we've already learned about many many abuses) there's nothing stopping it from happening in the future.

One my earliest concerns with the NSA collecting all of this data is that with the president at the top of the chain of command I expected every president would abuse this power for themselves. That Bush Jr would use it to target his personal enemies, that Obama would do the same, and I think it's safe to say that Trump wouldn't have been able to show restraint if he had any access to it, but we saw how Trump had to press people in foreign countries to dig up dirt on his enemies.

While I've seen some claims that Trump's access was more limited than it was for other presidents (due to his unstable behavior) I suspect no president has been given access to the massive amounts of data being collected and stored by the NSA, even though (officially) nothing could stop a sitting president from ordering it.

While it could just be true that no president has ever tried, it might also be true that in practice those presidents had less authority over the NSA than the NSA had over them and so the NSA could simply tell them "no".

[sneak]

Your last paragraph seems the much more likely explanation. It seems Trump almost certainly would have used this authority against his domestic enemies if it were actually within his practical command.

[autoexec]

I think so too, which is disturbing in its own way. I don't want president abusing that information, but if the president is powerless and considering the NSA has already shown that it is able to outright lie to congress without consequence what hope do any of us have to change anything? Seems like they've got all the power and no one is able to keep them in check

[novok]

Something you learn about large organizations if you work in one for a while is it can often be hard to make the organization do things it doesn't want to do, even if you're the top honcho of the organization.

[ncmncm]

Trump appears to have had such control over the Secret Service, such that Pence knew better than to get in their car.

[hammock]

This whole thread makes me wonder if a politician couldn’t use smart contracts staked with some substantial portion of their net worth, to credibly back their promises. If the break the promise, they lose the money

[autoexec]

The money would just come from donors, and while giving donors their money back if a candidate fails to do what you want them to seems fair enough, it could easily just become bribery with extra steps and we've legalized bribery too much as it is.

[thfuran]

Political campaigns spend money. They can't just give it all back to donors later.

[autoexec]

Even that spending can often go to help themselves and their friends. For example, Debbie Wasserman Schultz got a "job" on the Clinton campaign as payment for taking the fall for the whole "Screw democratic voters, the DNC will pick their chosen candidate in backroom deals before the primary election" scandal.

Trump too made sure to enrich himself on campaign funds:

"On the day of his inauguration, Trump filed paperwork for his reelection, allowing himself to continue raising money from supporters while he served. As other people filled his campaign coffers, Trump sat back and watched, never donating to the reelection effort. Instead, he did the opposite, taking money out of his campaign by charging for things like rent, food, lodging and legal expenses. In doing so, the president managed to shift $2.7 million from his supporters to his businesses between his first day in office in 2017 and Election Day in 2020, according to an analysis of Federal Election Commission filings." (https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2020/12/10/trump-m...)

They can also take money to offset the cost of the contract violation. "I'll give 40,000 in dark money to break the 24,000 contract you have that says you would make poisoning baby food illegal."

Somehow I doubt injecting more money into politics is going to be the solution to our problems.