Technically the full quote from Wyden is: "when it is eventually declassified, the American people will be stunned that it took so long and that Congress has been debating this authority with insufficient information."
It's a small thing, but I find the click-bait editorializing from techdirt a bit off-putting.
24 years of the Patriot Act, and counting...
Altman is like Musk: he showed his true colors long before the current politically-inflected drama.
Musk was over-promising about self-driving, so much and for so long it became pretty clear he was a shameless liar. There are also so many reports of Altman lying (e.g. that's apparently why he got fired) and engaging in Machiavellian manipulations that you can be pretty sure he's a shameless liar too.
So if you want them to die faster, use their services.
I was already paying for Claude Max before the War Department fiasco, so there’s not much more I can do to hurt OAI apart from complain about it online, although I did persuade several people on various group chats I’m on to switch.
Considering how many lines Anthropic has crossed, it all feels like forced outrage to me. I feel ethically justified supporting none of these companies, it's reminiscent of the forced duopoly between iOS and Android.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/12/karp-palantir-anthropic-clau...
- The story would become about "leaking" classified information
- He would likely lose his access to this stuff in the future
Originally applied only to the largest communications companies, this now has effectively unlimited scope.
The only safeguard (which took years to add legislatively) was that the FBI had to clear it; but now the FBI is refusing even to record such requests, to avoid any record of abuse (and the person responsible is dubious).
Surveillance seems necessary, but in the wrong hands, it's systemically deadly: it grants overwhelming advantage, and destroys arms-length trust, driving transactions of any size into networks prone to self-dealing and corruption.
Once in a while, I’d get into a conversation with a friend or a stranger I met at some random function, and they’d ask how to stay private online and protect their data. I used to go in depth about how to do it, with excitement. Now I just say: be normal, fit in with the crowd, freeze your credit.
Plausible deniability is harder than just total protection.
https://chuniversiteit.nl/papers/browser-extension-fingerpri...
You know this, but "normal" patterns are less remarkable.
I like Ron Wyden but he should just employ his Congressional privilege here and read it out.
So as he gets older, the cost/benefit changes, but I believe that's why he hasn't, is that his calculus involves him being the only one this reliable on screaming about what's going on behind closed doors.
https://www.pointoforder.com/2013/08/06/congressional-releas...
Another aspect is that we need to lower the bar for declassification in general. The reality of classified information is that it is almost universally boring and time limited in its value. Also, so many people have access to it that it leaks out slowly anyway. Just look at how much of the US military and contractors have or have had secret and higher clearances. [1] When multiple percentage points of Americans (and other governments) have access currently or have had access in the past to supposedly 'top secret' information then hiding it from the rest of the population just sounds silly. It is time to start re-asserting the public's requirement to be informed even if that has some potential risks or even actual harms associated with it.
[1] https://news.clearancejobs.com/2022/08/16/how-many-people-ha...
It feels a little like keeping the filibuster around: maybe technically it’s within their power to change the norm, but once unilaterally spilling secrets becomes The Done Thing, it’s hard to imagine it wouldn’t spin out into a free-for-all.
For all the mud that gets slung around, I think congresspeople really don’t get there without some kind of patriotic instinct, some kind of interest in the United States’ ongoing functioning. And I certainly can’t imagine they’d keep getting access to new secrets after pulling something like that, one way or the other…
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_of_Eight_(intelligence)
Worth noting his full quote is that people will be “stunned that it took so long” for the info to come out. Which is not quite the same thing as being stunned in general.
Why do they have any power? Wyden was elected by his constituency. The "congressional leadership" can go pound sand. To the extent they have any power here it should immediately be completely neutered and then removed.
Yes, there are serious problems with the way Congress is organized, but there's probably a reason that practically every parliamentary body on the planet has similar problems.
So, move the show off the floor, never has it been easier to reach the population as an individual. Are the citizens that enraptured by "the floor" as it is? It seems to me, that if you were serious, this would be no problem at all.
> there are serious problems with the way Congress is organized
None of that is dictated by the constitution. You can change the way committees work overnight if you want. Some would argue that this happened in the 1970s and 1990s when party politics fully invaded what used to be assignments of seniority and experience.
> but there's probably a reason
Corruption. It's worth a lot of money to certain people. You can either design that out of the system or reduce the total power of that system relative to the population.
I'm not sure you can do much until you get down to the bedrock problems here.
My "ethical" list has several dozen politicians, but it is definitely short. And their names don't seem to last very long into each career...
This is not the same thing as saying people will be stunned by how long it took to discuss/investigate the matter, which is what Wyden actually said…
>On December 20, 2005, Judge James Robertson resigned his position with the court, apparently in protest of the secret surveillance,[11] and later, in the wake of the Snowden leaks of 2013, criticized the court-sanctioned expansion of the scope of government surveillance and its being allowed to craft a secret body of law.[12] The government's apparent circumvention of the court started prior to the increase in court-ordered modifications to warrant requests. In 2011, the Obama administration secretly won permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to reverse restrictions on the National Security Agency's use of intercepted phone calls and e-mails, permitting the agency to search deliberately for Americans' communications in its massive databases.
I can't name another indisputably ethical congressman. I dread the day he leaves office.
Under "Oversight", they point out that the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board concluded that that the government's Section 702 program operates within legal constraints, as recently as 2014! Wow! </sarc>
Thank you for your service, Ron.
Also: Hello from Roseburg.
He is one of the few that is actually looking into Epstein bank accounts movements.
It was definitely swimming upstream in the post-9/11 days. I was hopeful for a while with Trump that we'd see more of a mainstream resurgence, but it's not looking like it to me anymore.
Anyway, I can only imagine what he's alluding to here...
Source: am Oregonian.
ON edit: Oops, sorry, 702 is up for renewal. Still not clear he could win a cloture vote, though.
"I don't need to care about privacy because I have nothing to hide" is trivially disproved:
Humans arrive at conclusions about other humans based on information. Sometimes these conclusions are incorrect because humans aren't perfect at reasoning and this happens more often with some kinds of information.
Therefore, it's perfectly rational to hide/not-disclose/obscure some information to lessen the chance that others take action based on faulty conclusions.
My word of caution is if you do have access to these systems or a shared password, tread very carefully.
Like I'm having a hard time concocting a reveal that would be "Stunning"
"NSA wiretapped all major phone carriers, recorded every voice conversation and text message of every citizen"
Meh, not that stunning. at least not in a "violation of rights" kinda way. Maybe in a "wow they had the technical acumen to even handle all that data" kind of way
"NSA has secret database with all medical records", "NSA has logs of every credit card transaction", "NSA can compel anyone anywhere to spy and reveal all data on anyone for any reason"
Would any of these reveals actually be "stunning", frankly I've assumed the worst for so long that the response will be more like "wow, that all they're doing?"
like opening a diaper on a kid with IBS, you expect it to be so bad when it's a normal turd you're suddenly really happy about shit.
"In fact, when it is eventually declassified, the American people will be stunned that it took so long and that Congress has been debating this authority with insufficient information"
You are correct that the American populace has normalized this already. The fact that this is done without congressional oversight is indeed stunning. Or at least it would have been a decade or two ago.
Everyone knew the NSA spied on everyone, yet Snowden leaks were truly stunning, because no one had evidence of the sheer scale of what the NSA (and collaborators) were engaged in. Wyden Siren was already firing off about that many years beforehand, before we knew the actual truth, so considering his record, I'm also skeptical it'll be "truly shocking" for the average HN tech-nerd, but for the general public, to have evidence of what the government does? Probably will be "stunning", but the one who lives will see.
When we un-tether the possibile from tech-specific delineations, you'll find things get more and more alarming.
Whatever it is Wyden is sounding the alarm about, you can be certain the sole protection we have - the sole guiding principle and bulwark against abuse - is the agency's culture given the rampant "incidental" collection and the public claims that putting the equivalent of a removable sticky-note over the names of U.S. citizens from their personal data is sufficient to satisfy the 4th Amendment as the NSA searches through our persinal data in bulk.
And what is culture if not the people we have to promote the practices?
Boy am I glad we have an administration that lets agencies largely lead themselves and doesn't engage in efforts to replace a large part of various agency's workforce - specifically those who care about the agency's culture!
Most Americans have this kind of thing tuned out, that have bigger issues in their lives.
Or backdooring most major microprocessors (tpm).
Etc?
I am aware that similar accusations are leveled against Intel ME and AMD's Platform Security Processor.
https://www.csoonline.com/article/562761/researchers-say-now...
https://www.franksworld.com/2025/09/18/the-intel-backdoor-no...
You’re far more cynical than the typical citizen, who Ryder is addressing.
Claim: We’ll Be “Stunned” By What the NSA Is Doing Under Section 702
Actual quote: I strongly believe that this matter can and should be declassified and that Congress needs to debate it openly before Section 702 is reauthorized. In fact, when it is eventually declassified, the American people will be stunned that it took so long and that Congress has been debating this authority with insufficient information.
He said people will be stunned that it took so long to be declassified; not that people will be stunned by what it is.
Given how fast and lose I've seen the DODGE folks play with the data they have, absolutely not. I still shudder over the fact that my OPM data was hacked years ago
"Saying you don't need privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don't need freedom of speech because you have nothing to say." - Edward Snowden
The meaning is to highlight the incredible silliness of the “nothing to hide” skawkers who sound like so many Soviet propagandists.
Thinking comparisons of two similar things are always for the purpose of saying that they are the same thing is ridiculous, don’t you think? It might sound like clever reasoning to people of a mediocre intellectual capacity but it is not logically coherent.
Surveillance suppresses expression through chilling effects.
How does that even help? The concern is that you're deterred from e.g. admitting that you're a lesbian under your own name because your religious grandparents wouldn't approve, or advocating for school choice because your boss is married to a public school teacher, or criticizing the government.
Knowing that they're going to see it doesn't stop them from cutting you out of their will or putting you on toilet duty or playing "show me the man and I will show you the crime".
And even this assumes that the government can and will protect the data from the various bad actors who want it, something they have absolutely failed to do on multiple occasions.
And governments are always doing something wrong...
(I am from the EU, lived in US and China and am rich because of both, would not live in either ever again)
After we 'fixed' the issue a few times, they BOTH showed up to our office.
Both Named Leslie, born on same day, a few small towns apart, same last name and home phone since they had been married. Back then, SSN were handed out by region sequentially, so one had the last two digits 12 and the other 21.
They were born in different years. Their SSNs were not close. For one of them the name was her maiden name. For the other, a married name. They went to different colleges and had different credentials. They did live in the same town.
When my aunt died, all the credit companies and collections companies tried one of two recovery tactics. Some tried to make her brother pay the debts as her surviving spouse. The others tried to assert that the debts were incurred by his wife and that the mismatch of other data in their own databases was evidence of fraud.
I'll bet that pair has stories to tell.
We always double-check dosages for medications before taking them.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1605484/
Every time one of them goes to a particular medical facility, he has to explicitly decline having them merge their charts.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/taylor-lautner-taylor-dome-wife...
That is, if you frame your argument such that you believe people don’t understand the trade off it allows you to not engage with the fact they just disagree with your conclusion.
The establishment likes to pat the establishment on the back but ordinary people seem to know what's up. In my minimal experience, anyway.
(One thing to keep in mind... grand juries really are a cross-section of the population, whereas lawyers get to select jurors after talking to them, so there is some selection bias on ordinary juries that grand juries don't have.)
The jury was me, (white) nine other white people, and two brown people. Me and the brown people thought the cop was obviously lying, and was therefore not guilty. The nine other people thought he was guilty.
Like the cop was obviously fucking lying.
After three days of deliberation we declared a hung jury.
I was speaking with the prosecutor afterwards and he mentioned they were going for the felony version of the crime instead of the misdemeanor (he was obviously guilty of the misdemeanor, the felony depended on the element the cop was lying about) because the dude was a bad dude and they needed to get him.
I looked him up when I got home. (I didn't look him up during the trial, they expressly forbid you from doing that) He had done something bad and went to prison for four years. He did his time and got out. They were still trying to throw the book at him for bullshit.
I looked him up recently. He was never convicted of anything ever again, but died in jail two years after we declared a hung jury. Prosecutor got what he wanted in the end, I suppose.
Why is complying with that rule more sensible than believing the cop because he's a cop?
You see, there are good people and bad people. Giving the good people more tools is always good, because they're good people. If you're a good person, you need not worry either. Bad things don't happen to good people.
Cops are good guys, criminals are bad guys. The government fighting criminals is good. If you get caught up in it - well, that's fine right? Because you're a good guy, too. So that's good for you. And, if something bad DOES happen to you... well then you were never a good guy. Obviously, because bad things happen to bad people.
We see this in so many things. Well, rich people MUST be hardworking and moral, right? Because good things have happened to them, so they must be good. Well, the janitor must be lazy or stupid right? Because their job is bad, so they must be bad. Well, the cops raiding my house must be good thing right? Because I'm good!
If there's one thing I have learned from life, it's that life is not fair. Children starve, innocents get murdered, the evil can thrive, and happiness isn't doled out to who deserves it. It's never about who deserved what or what is right. It's about systems, structure, and incentives.
If you have to make a caricature of his arguments to so much as address them, what does that say about the strength of your own argument?
Being a judge is an actual job that requires training and experience.
Ofcourse it makes court cases a lot more boring if you are dealing with someone who knows what they are doing.
Usually just make a quip about having curtains then move onto discussing just how moist the turkey is this year
Some prominent examples:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-22832263
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DSVJmOajGDe/
https://thestandard.nz/if-you-have-nothing-to-hide-you-have-...
Not that exact phrase, it is too elaborate. Most people grunt "eh, don't care" and "it's free, right?"
The average person really is that apathetic.
Yes, I've heard that exact wording from cops.
From normal people, the more common way of saying it is along the lines of "well I don't really care if the cops see anything on my computer".
(The Nazis subsequently compiled a list, post-occupation, but that's not what you asserted.)
The distinction is important in this context, since the purpose of collecting and keeping the data wasn't specifically to have a list of Jews handy.
This is relevant to data collected by companies and governments today.
Consider a list of children with their parent names and the parents' preferred pronouns. You don't have a list of gays, but you have a list from which gays can be readily identified with high accuracy.
How does that make the distinction important? The lesson to draw is "you shouldn't keep a list of Jews, whether you think you're doing it for good reasons or not". The list is a list regardless of whether you think calling it a list is fair in some abstract sense.
> You don't have a list of gays, but you have a list from which gays can be readily identified with high accuracy.
Well, you're almost right. Except of course that you do have a list of gays. That's why Grindr having Chinese ownership was seen as a national security risk.
If you go to your kindergarten and tell them to stop keeping a list of gays they will look at you weird and most likely dismiss you as a nutjob. Because they don't have a list of gays, they just have a list of kids with their parents' names and pronouns.
That's why I think it's important to keep the distinction rather than conflate the two like you want to.
But the situation in 1940 was very different: religion permeated every fabric of society. Mind you the government simply took over the job of record keeping from the churches, temples and synagogues.
I am sure Jews today still keep lists about who is a Jew and so does every other religious denomination because such mundane information matters to them.
If I'm doing something wrong, the onus is on the government to prove this within the rules established to prevent such abuse (and on the people, their elected representatives, and the judiciary to ensure these rules are sufficient to accommodate the interests of all parties involved).
Re the current US government I'd be more worried about their cruelty as illustrated by ICE, DOGE etc.
One of the interesting things the Epstein drama has kicked up is legal or not, the powerful get up to some wild things at parties. And in their business dealings just based on the background number of scandals. If there is an organised group of people allowed to look there is just endless blackmail material which is going to get used, just like LOVEINT.
The people who say "I'm not doing anything wrong, so I have nothing to hide" simply don't understand that it's not their call.
This is how I view privacy as well. You never know who will be in power and who will access that information in the future with ill intent.
This line of thinking kept me away from the Mpls ICE protests. All of the people that protested had their face, phone, and license plate recorded and documented.
I’m not even afraid of being persecuted by the current administration, it’s the possibility of a much worse administration in the future that gave me pause.
I know I'm already on some GOP list somewhere, but I figured I'd do whatever I could do to protect myself and my family from the local MAGAs in my area.
Unfortunately, your (entirely understandable) position is exactly what will enable such an administration to come to power.
What you are doing in 2026 is what you would have done in 1936.
The right way to reply to that is: not everything that's legal must be public.
You probably don't want the rest of the world to see you poop, or pick your nose, or listen to every word you say. Almost everyone has things they'd be embarrassed to disclose to other people. And this can be weaponized against you should any rival gain access to it.
They may have dodged, ducked, dodged the rules while they DOGE'd their way through the government, but not sure if they used RAM trucks while they did it