So, a store can't record that you bought something from them.

The US Congress sells out all citizens, via lobbyists. Populist rage comes a rigged economy, where they are losing money.

Rigged pharma. Unethical medical billing. Out of control healthcare costs. 2008 mortgage crisis. High Frequency trading firms front running trades. Panama Papers. Libor. And a million more.

Citizens won't have it any more. Fixing congress (so they don't sell us out), and congress CAN would WOULD fix this.

People in HN need to start understanding, that while most of us can work from home, earn a living, be fairly happy (especially if you're living with someone).

You simply cannot even begin to asses the financial and psychological damage of every single waiter, or coffee shop barrista, dance artist, theatre actor, or god forbid business owner who might have spent decades building a business that is now bankrupt, sitting at home, with nothing to do, no one to speak to, doing what? Its well known in psychology that spending too much time alone basically makes you go crazy.

Look at the numbers on domestic abuse, drug abuse, mental health issues.

Have a little empathy. There are legitimate viewpoints about whether these lockdowns are worth it, and especially for how long. This isn't disinformation. It's just people who are different from you.

> the only way to get 'badged' is to use the mobile app and take a picture of govt ID (driver license, passport, etc).

Some people have argued, based on this, that Parler was set up by the NSA to get data on people.

Hoovering up data from social media is certainly the sort of thing the NSA would do.

This is what I would expect a technocratic forum like HN to suggest. America's most poverty stricken regions have had public education for nearly a century with almost no meaningful improvement in prospects. Tell me how rural poverty in West Viriginia is reduced by giving people humanities degrees. Better educated voters? Who cares, the poor have no representation of merit anyway; their choices are to vote for one party who ignores them or the other that ignores them.

What do you make of this study by professors from Princeton and Northwestern that finds that "economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence"?

Source: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

What do you make of Jimmy Carter saying in 2014 that "America doesn't have a functioning democracy right now"?

Source: https://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/nsa-affaere-jimmy-car... Translated from German: https://archive.is/Lhlq2

It might be unpleasant to acknowledge, but there is increasingly overwhelming evidence to suggest that the major American political parties are indeed "outside and beyond the reach of 'normal' citizens".

In 2017, the DNC argued in federal court that, as a private corporation, it was entitled to select whichever candidate it preferred for the general election regardless of the preferences of "normal citizens" who voted in the party's primary election. This was in a hearing for a lawsuit filed by Sanders supporters who weren't happy about the DNC working with the Clinton campaign and against the Sanders campaign, as revealed by WikiLeaks.

Source: https://ivn.us/posts/dnc-to-court-we-are-a-private-corporati... and, for convenience, https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/independent-voter-network-ivn...

Growing up in a blue household, social group, and state, I'm less familiar with the history of the anti-democratic machinations of the RNC, but my understanding of the Trump phenomenon was that, at least early on, many Republican voters were attracted to the idea of a political outsider who they hoped wouldn't sell them out like they felt RNC-affiliated Republicans had been doing.

Some contemporary sources seem to back up that interpretation: https://archive.fo/2Vidx (Wall Street Journal) and https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/...

The best educated voter -- any voter in fact -- can also run for office and transform the party.

I dislike the rhetoric you're using that implies the parties are outside and beyond the reach of "normal" citizens. Of course they are institutions with substantial inertia and aims of their own. But as the elections of people as diverse as Cori Bush and Madison Cawthorne and Marjorie Taylor Greene show, it is certainly still possible to make your way from citizen to elected official.

> why shouldn't we have international laws that deter this kind of behavior?

Well in that case why not outlaw spying too, while we are at it?

The point is, nations have spied on each other forever, and these cyber methods are just another form of spying.

When companies get hacked they always make it sound like it is a law enforcement problem, as opposed to their lax security policies. No, these companies need to be held accountable; don't let them divert attention away by saying it is a law-and-order type issue.

I know we should always assume good faith.

From all the vulnerabilities they know, they chose to publish one that's known and only concerns outdated software. Maybe I'm too skeptical but when the NSA starts leaking fixes for zero day exploits, I'll take them more seriously.

Hypothetical: An anonymous source releases CCTV footage that appears to show a public figure urinating on a homeless person. Do you really believe that we'll all ignore that footage because the signature doesn't belong to a major news organisation?