Was it ever revealed what the 2015 warning about common commercial service agreements was about?
Off the top of my mind I'd go with privacy policies: maybe their typical vagueness is exploited to the extreme, and rather than pointless legal mumbo-jumbo, they're actually a legal cornerstone of some extensive surveillance program. Hmm...
g-b-r 1 days ago [-]
Ok, unlikely to have been that
AndrewKemendo 2 days ago [-]
I feel bad for guys like Wyden.
The citizens of the U.S. are neither organized enough, sufficiently intelligent and motivated, to keep the various levels of government in check.
As we have seen with the Epstein stuff, even when the evidence is overwhelming and unambiguous there is massive amount of direct support and an accompanying vacuum of response
The only conclusion to be had is: Everyone is ok enough with the state of reality that they will not change it.
Everyone gets the governance they deserve
nozzlegear 2 days ago [-]
> The citizens of the U.S. are neither organized enough, sufficiently intelligent and motivated, to keep the various levels of government in check.
Isn't this basically the job of Wyden and his colleagues in our republic? If your critique is that his colleagues are doing a poor job of it (or worse, they're actively working against it), I'd agree but would add that inherent flaws in both the pre and post- civil- war-system have brought us to such a point. IMO the citizens of today are less to blame than the people who passed laws like the Permanent Apportionment Act in 1929, or who've consistently defunded education systems across the country, etc.
That's not to say that today's citizens are helpless or blameless, of course.
joriJordan 22 hours ago [-]
He can be out of touch too.
Shortly after Trump started to screw up the economy, Wyden stated Trump had ruined an economy that was the envy of the world.[1] The problem is that envy of the world economy was built entirely on decades of deflation of the average persons buying power.
Other world leaders were envious alright. They wanted the secret to how US leaders convinced the public to accept runaway inequality, where it now takes $800k/yr to have the buying power of $200k/yr in 1980.
He’s doing well with the whole investigating Trump angle
but like the rest of the Dems he's signed off on looting workers.
He's literally one of if not my favorite senator right now. Oregon is an extremely based/wonderful state, and so are its brothers in Washington. The politics of the region is wonderful and most who hate them hate them cus they ain't them.
Now, if we could just get its population to stop hating AI and being luddities, they could ride the GenAI wave up forever. Unfortunately, "everyone in seattle hates AI"
mrandish 1 days ago [-]
Ron Wyden, Rand Paul and Justin Amash (until he left office in 2021), are the only members of congress I have respect for simply because they've proven consistently willing to ignore party loyalties and even their own political currency to stand for certain issues they feel strongly about - regardless of which party it helped or hurt.
bartonfink 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
hn_acker 2 days ago [-]
I think classified wrongdoings at national intelligence agencies like the CIA fit right in on Hacker News. In the US, few politicians go as far as Wyden to hold such intelligence agencies accountable. (Semantics note: most employees of government agencies are not politicians.) You can't expect whistleblowers and non-government hackers to do all the work.
Perhaps posting this article was premature, because the classified wrongdoings Wyden concerns himself with today remain unknown. I find Edward Snowden's leaks of classified documents about NSA surveillance relevant to Hacker News, so if you can overlook the boring present, feel free to treat TFA as a brief reminder of an interesting yesteryear:
> Apparently, one of the things that reportedly pushed Snowden to leak was watching then Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, lie to Wyden’s face in a hearing about whether the NSA was collecting data on millions of Americans.
soraminazuki 2 days ago [-]
What a sad place this site has become. No one would've said that a decade ago when the Snowden disclosures were ongoing. Yet here we are now.
Rendered at 15:05:26 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
> The Wyden Siren: Senator's Cryptic CIA Letter Follows A Pattern That's Never Been Wrong
Off the top of my mind I'd go with privacy policies: maybe their typical vagueness is exploited to the extreme, and rather than pointless legal mumbo-jumbo, they're actually a legal cornerstone of some extensive surveillance program. Hmm...
The citizens of the U.S. are neither organized enough, sufficiently intelligent and motivated, to keep the various levels of government in check.
As we have seen with the Epstein stuff, even when the evidence is overwhelming and unambiguous there is massive amount of direct support and an accompanying vacuum of response
The only conclusion to be had is: Everyone is ok enough with the state of reality that they will not change it.
Everyone gets the governance they deserve
Isn't this basically the job of Wyden and his colleagues in our republic? If your critique is that his colleagues are doing a poor job of it (or worse, they're actively working against it), I'd agree but would add that inherent flaws in both the pre and post- civil- war-system have brought us to such a point. IMO the citizens of today are less to blame than the people who passed laws like the Permanent Apportionment Act in 1929, or who've consistently defunded education systems across the country, etc.
That's not to say that today's citizens are helpless or blameless, of course.
Shortly after Trump started to screw up the economy, Wyden stated Trump had ruined an economy that was the envy of the world.[1] The problem is that envy of the world economy was built entirely on decades of deflation of the average persons buying power.
Other world leaders were envious alright. They wanted the secret to how US leaders convinced the public to accept runaway inequality, where it now takes $800k/yr to have the buying power of $200k/yr in 1980.
He’s doing well with the whole investigating Trump angle but like the rest of the Dems he's signed off on looting workers.
[1] https://fortune.com/2025/04/10/ron-wyden-us-economy-envy-lau...
Now, if we could just get its population to stop hating AI and being luddities, they could ride the GenAI wave up forever. Unfortunately, "everyone in seattle hates AI"
Perhaps posting this article was premature, because the classified wrongdoings Wyden concerns himself with today remain unknown. I find Edward Snowden's leaks of classified documents about NSA surveillance relevant to Hacker News, so if you can overlook the boring present, feel free to treat TFA as a brief reminder of an interesting yesteryear:
> Apparently, one of the things that reportedly pushed Snowden to leak was watching then Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, lie to Wyden’s face in a hearing about whether the NSA was collecting data on millions of Americans.