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by potato3732842 223 days ago
The point is that just because the good guys got the bad guys in the end doesn't make it right or that it's good precedent.

I remember during the Fanny-whatever-her-name-was thing that went through the courts prior to Trump's election they pulled up cell location records from 10yr ago as if they were nothing special whatsoever and introduced them as evidince. Sure, all of that was done according to laws and process, but having decades old location records exist at all to be subject to government inquiry is probably something that's bad on its face and we should not be doing even if it lets us nab a few people who did wrong.
1 comments
dialup_sounds 223 days ago
I don't know what you mean by "good guys got the bad guys in the end": the subject of the indictment is currently the President of the United States and the charges were dropped as a result.
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potato3732842 223 days ago
My initial comment was a reference to the TV series "24" which came out in the early 2000s and was pretty transparently .gov propaganda to get people on board with or at least more open to the fact that the CIA was denying people their rights and torturing them and this was officially sanctioned.

By "good guys got the bad guys" what I am referring to is that the arctic frost stuff resulted in federal prosecutions. First off, you can't really use conviction as a bellwether for whether serious wrong was actually done. Federal prosecution is intentionally ruinous for anyone without huge, huge resources and even if you beat the flagship charge the laws are such that if they want you they'll still get you and they're only really constrained by political optics. Martha is probably the best example of this. And second, even if the prosecution is being done in pursuit of people who have legitimately done wrong (note I did not say "violated the law" because the laws are so broad), I'm not sure that prosecuting sitting politicians is a door that ought to be opened because due to the ruinous nature of of having the feds after you it basically hands a ton of power to the executive to harass politicians to get what they want.

This ties us back to 24 and the CIA because they were theoretically torturing people to "save american lives" and "prevent terrorism" which, while noble goals, are still not justification for going from "torture is never acceptable" to "torture is acceptable sometimes".

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dialup_sounds 223 days ago
If I follow you correctly, you're saying that we should not investigate or prosecute crimes committed by politicians¹ because the CIA did something on a TV show? That's an interesting point of view.

I am skeptical that doing so would result in greater concentration of executive power constrained only by political optics—given that that's what we're seeing now—and it is hard to envision a scenario of executive harassment of the legislature more obvious than what we've already seen² happen.

¹ to be clear, we're talking about things which actually happened in real life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot

² Senate Chamber, January 6 2021 https://share.google/kJois0ZmHS7j6XMAU

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