[JumpCrisscross]

> the rich and powerful minority is more organized

They show up. I've worked on privacy legislation at the state and local level. Barely anybody calls or writes in support. That means barely anybody would turn up to a contested primary election over it, or donate to a challenger, or organise the foregoing en masse. Contrast that with bread-and-butter or activist issues, where it's immediately clear there is political capital at the very least on the board.

[citizenpaul]

Or the people elected by other humans could... IDK do their job of representing the people rather than a handful of corporations.

The problem is what I said in other comnents here. This is the fabel of sodom and gomorrah in action. We have no people with any moral compass in charge.

[JumpCrisscross]

> do their job of representing the people rather than a handful of corporations

There is no incentive to represent the civically disengaged. Particularly on niche issues like privacy.

> We have no people with any moral compass in charge

No system works if reliant on wishing up on a star that people were better. We have a lot of problems with our republic's design. None of them can address problems people don't care to involve themselves in respect of.

[citizenpaul]

>no incentive to represent the civically disengaged

THATS LITERALLY THE JOB.

You are literally arguing that if I got a job at a bank and started stealing the deposits it would be ok because I had no incentive not to.

Actually now that I think about it you are also reinforcing my point. Sodom and Gomorrah. You yourself have such poor moral compass that when another person acts maliciously you give them a pass because of course that's what they would do. Because its also what you would do because you also have no moral compass.

The city could not be saved. Not because "god" destroyed it but because the people themselves destroyed it. No good people existed there.

[JumpCrisscross]

> THATS LITERALLY THE JOB

No, it’s not and it never has been. (Civic engagement and persistent watchfulness on liberties is a universal drumbeat across democracies.)

The courts et al are tasked with protecting the minority from the tyranny of the majority, or in this case, the engaged. Making the judiciary coëqual was our founders’ attempt at taming this tendency. But nothing knowledgeable ever written has suggested our republic should run on autopilot.

> when another person acts maliciously you give them a pass

I’m not giving them a pass, I’m saying the system is acting as designed. If people don’t give a shit about privacy but give a LOT of shits about abortion and cost of living, the elected should focus on the latter. This isn’t moral corruption, it’s responding to expressed preference. (Also, Comcast using Wi-fi to aid law enforcement is far from a black-and-white moral issue. It’s a political and legal question with multiple equilibria when it comes to right answers.)

There is being righteous and there is being right. The bulk of advocates for digital privacy enjoy the former and almost take their failure at the latter as further evidence of their righteousness. (It’s a lot easier to wax lyrical about Sodom and Gomorrah than pick up the phone once a month and attend meetings.)

[citizenpaul]

Yeah the job of being and elected official is to ignore the population and seize power/money/influence for yourself....

You really are proving my original point though.

>(It’s a lot easier to wax lyrical about Sodom and Gomorrah than pick up the phone once a month and attend meetings.)

Blame that victim!

[JumpCrisscross]

> the job of being and elected official is to ignore the population and seize power/money/influence for yourself

Non sequitur.

An elected prioritising a hot-button issue bill over one they like but which has no support is listening to their population.

> Blame that victim!

If an accurate description of choices actively made is blame, sure.

[komali2]

The whole point of representative democracy was supposed to be that you elect someone to represent your interests, so you don't need to participate in the day to day mundanity of managing the bureaucracy.

The bar rises. The vote was supposed to be enough. If people call in, well, that's not enough, after all, if you really cared, you'd have written an email, or filled out the correct form in the FTC call for feedback thing, which you knew was happening because you monitor the day to day activities of the FTC, the FDA, and the sixty other agencies that might ask for your opinion on something, without which oh well they'll just do what the lobbyists tell them. Oh, you did fill the form? Well, too bad, our lobbyists tell us that you're a bot. Oh, you're not a bot? Well, if you truly cared, you'd have come to the office of such and such at so and so time. You did? Well, if you truly cared, you'd attend more city council meetings, board of education meetings, representative town halls, senate town halls. You'd have written the senator, the congressperson, the state senator, the state congressperson, the mayor, the governor, the president, the president's dog.

What's becoming clear is that the idea of representative democracy is a good one, but the various implementations throughout history have missed the mark - weirdly, inevitably, all giving way with barely a whimper to highly concentrated forms of power, since the Romans.

We should seek to develop, and teach, solutions that empower each individual to take action. This liberal (as in, liberal democracy) idea that things can only get done if you convince 1000, 10,000, 1,000,000 people to do the exact same specific action, is disempowering, disenfranchising, and leads to concentration of power in the hands of the few who can wield the capital equivalent of 1,000,000 people in the form of lobbying, disinformation campaigns, or whatever other wack shit billionaires and corporations get up to.

Direct action seems to be the way to empower people to actually get things done, and syndicalist trade unionism seems to be a good way to balance between individual engagement in the serious work of organizing society, while leveraging the good ideas of representative democracy to allow representatives to manage some of the more tedious aspects of day to day communication and organization between various groups.

I freely admit this is utopian thinking, but I sure wish our world would try more experimentation in governance and organization rather than all of us just repeatedly smacking ourselves in the faces with the baseball bat of capitalist liberal democracy and hoping maybe one time we'll come away without a bloody nose or worse.

[JumpCrisscross]

> whole point of representative democracy was supposed to be that you elect someone to represent your interests, so you don't need to participate in the day to day mundanity of managing the bureaucracy

According to whom? Nothing in the Federalist Papers or our country’s founding envisions fire-and-forget politics.

> sure wish our world would try more experimentation in governance

The correct place for this experimentation is small governments. And to my knowledge, this experimentation does happen. It just doesn’t necessarily have the effects its framers imagined. RCV didn’t break the two-party system, for example. And public-sector unions have turned into pests.

[close04]

> There is no incentive to represent the civically disengaged

You're repeatedly misrepresenting or misunderstanding the issue. The tl'dr is that Bezos' civic engagement weighs more than my civic engagement, more than a million of me even. This is one easy way to take the casual and overly general "you're civically disengaged" victim blaming off the table.

Your elected representatives already know your interests, they were a precondition of winning the election. They don't need tens/hundreds of thousands of citizens writing them a letter every time so they are reminded of those interests. This shouldn't turn into a part time job for all citizens.

You casually handwave away the abusers' role with a simple "ah people aren't better" while in the same sentence blaming the abused for not doing enough?

Large corporations have full time lobbyists. They only have to send one "letter". You don't expect every shareholder and employee to be "engaged" just because a company's interest is in fact their interest. Your opinions will be shaped by whether you're more a shareholder or employee, or a "civically disengaged" single parent with 3 jobs.

> We have a lot of problems with our republic's design

The big one being that money is a superpower so the more one has, the more one can take. Or hang behind the predator pack and feed on the leftovers. After all a billionaire's rising tide will lift a millionaire's boat too. Jumping through mental hoops to justify the current situation by victim blaming isn't a prerequisite of this, it's a choice.

[joquarky]

From The Onion, but I'm starting to wonder if this is feasible:

https://theonion.com/american-people-hire-high-powered-lobby...

[JumpCrisscross]

What do you think the EFF, NRA and Sierra Club are?

[JumpCrisscross]

> Bezos' civic engagement weighs more than my civic engagement

Again, I worked on these issues. Bezos and friends never showed up. Nobody showed up. This wasn’t a battle between David and Goliath, it was an empty field to which some generals showed up, looked around and then left.

> money is a superpower so the more one has, the more one can take

To a limit. The last few years have been a barn full of monied candidates being trounced by insurgents.

And again, in any case, not germane to this issue. Most people who would call in on digital privacy don’t bother because they’re lazy or think it’s useless. When they do, e.g. when the EFF mobilises, it’s a quick battle. (The problem being such mobilisation has tended to be reactionary. In part due to the other overlap between digital privacy advocates who will civically engage and libertarians. So we don’t get positive pressure to pass protections, just occasional negative pressure against legal encroachment.)

[close04]

> Again, I worked on these issues.

Working on something means you put in effort, not that it's focused properly or that you even understand the real issues. At best you'll solve your problems without caring or understanding if it solves anyone else's.

> Bezos and friends never showed up.

Case in point. Bezos and friends don't need to "show up" anywhere you'd know. Their interests are implicitly considered and they're transmitted on channels you and I don't have access to. I'm talking about the general issue of asymmetric representation. This is where money matters.

> The last few years have been a barn full of monied candidates being trounced by insurgents.

You are conflating winning a popular election with leading for the people. Such statements in 2025 US are ridiculously disconnected. Almost without exception in recent history the wealthy always increased their wealth faster than the poor, and at their expense. Just over a decade ago the poorest 50% had 0.4% of the US wealth. No wealth means no power, not even personal agency, let alone in national policy. Are you telling me that finally the "insurgents" are fixing this and with their help the bottom half will start gaining the wealth and power from the super rich? Because if you aren't saying this, you aren't saying anything. The powerful will keep pushing and getting what they need, and you'll keep blaming "the lazy" that things don't change.

> Most people who would call in on digital privacy don’t bother because they’re lazy or think it’s useless.

Most people are assaulted with many, many more attacks on their rights and wellbeing. Those are more immediate concerns. Over 50% of US population just barely eeks out more that $10k in wealth. When they're drowning in debt, living from (social security) paycheck to paycheck, worried what else they'll lose next, showing up to fight for digital privacy, or almost anything that's not life and death, is the least of their concerns.

You decided to label them "lazy". Ever wondered if your work "on these issues" is tainted by this opinion, and that's why ultimately all you can achieve is only for the people who can afford it? Because you can afford it, and the lazy don't deserve it. The correlation is there.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Their interests are implicitly considered and they're transmitted on channels you and I don't have access to. I'm talking about the general issue of asymmetric representation

I’ve worked on other issues that got passed into legislation. In the privacy cases, I was speaking directly to the electeds.

Nobody showed up. They were dead ends unless they could be linked to an issue people care about, e.g. abortion in blue states and Chinese espionage in red ones.

> Most people are assaulted with many, many more attacks on their rights and wellbeing. Those are more immediate concerns

People with strong views on digital privacy tend to be wealthier and better-educated than the average American. Also, the single mother of three working two jobs will show up to town halls and electeds’ field offices when it comes to issues they care about. And it’s impactful.

People do show up and civically engage. Just not on digital privacy.

[throw10920]

> Working on something means you put in effort, not that it's focused properly or that you even understand the real issues

They definitely understand them far more than you, who has zero experience with them and regularly makes fallacious arguments and outright incorrect claims about them.

> Their interests are implicitly considered and they're transmitted on channels you and I don't have access to.

Where, exactly?

> You are conflating winning a popular election with leading for the people.

No, you failed to actually read their comment correctly. Their comment was a refutation of your claim that "money is a superpower so the more one has, the more one can take". They were not claiming that winning an election meant leading for the people, only pointing out the evidence against your claim.

> Because if you aren't saying this, you aren't saying anything.

What does this even mean?

> you'll keep blaming "the lazy" that things don't change

Fact: active participation from voters is a necessary precondition for a democracy to survive.

> showing up to fight for digital privacy, or almost anything that's not life and death, is the least of their concerns

Yes, that's correct, but those same people don't participate on politics at all, with any of the time that they have. The middle class doesn't participate. I've literally never heard a friend or acquaintance of mine say that they've ever contacted a representative (in federal or state government) about a political issue. This factually is an issue of people being lazy and disengaged, because of the fact that people with lots of disposable time and income don't put in the effort.

> You decided to label them "lazy". Ever wondered if your work "on these issues" is tainted by this opinion

No, it's a trivial implication of the nature of democracies. If you don't get that active participation is necessary for democracies to survive, you fundamentally don't understand how democracies work.

This is also an extremely lazy cop-out (which is thematically consistent) where you're dismissing someone's opinion because they have more experience than you in that field...which is insane.

> that's why ultimately all you can achieve is only for the people who can afford it

And, again, this is factually incorrect as to the root of the problem, because the people who can afford to participate in politics (which at the very least includes the middle-class) do not.

> No wealth means no power, not even personal agency, let alone in national policy.

This is also factually incorrect. The eligibility to vote has zero requirements as to income or wealth. Bezos gets the exact same number of votes as I do, despite having orders of magnitude more wealth. And guess how our representatives get elected?

You should really consider listening to someone who has actual experience in the relevant field rather than spewing fallacies and factual inaccuracies.

[transpute]

Any recommendations on possible regulatory responses to the collection, processing and sale of human motion/activity data collected via WiFi and other RF Sensing?

[JumpCrisscross]

> Any recommendations on possible regulatory responses to the collection, processing and sale of human motion/activity data collected via WiFi and other RF Sensing?

Research your state's privacy laws and submit a cool and concise complaint to your regulators, e.g. attorney general, consumer protection bureaus, public utility commissions, et cetera. These offices are understaffed and overworked--there is a good chance they haven't noticed this.

If you want to throw cash at the problem, check if Xfinity is pulling this crap in Illinois. (Or another state with a a BIPA [1].) One could argue that one's radar cross section is biometric [1]. That opens up avenues for financing litigation.

Finally, always, call your electeds. U.S. Congressmen and Senators, yes, but also your state legislators. Put it on their radars. (Most offices will put a staffer on a novel issue if more than a couple people call in about it.) If you want to supercharge this effect, find a local party organisation (e.g. such and such town or county D/R committee or club), go to their meeting and try to get it on the agenda.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biometric_Information_Privacy_...

[thesuitonym]

> They show up. I've worked on privacy legislation at the state and local level. Barely anybody calls or writes in support.

This is by design. A lot of people talk about RTO in regards to business real estate but there's also the aspect of keeping people so busy and exhausted that they don't show up when it matters.

[JumpCrisscross]

> there's also the aspect of keeping people so busy and exhausted that they don't show up when it matters

This would make sense if people didn’t show up for anything. They do. Including very overworked folks.

The unfortunate truth is the people most interested in privacy overlap significantly with the politically nihilistic and lazy. They’ve never called their elected or shown up to a town hall and, moreover, never will, because of course it’s useless.

[throw10920]

This is a wild claim. Do you have any evidence at all for this?