Real Chilling Effects

> A couple of weeks ago, students asked we keep the discussions, but stop recording the class. They worried about any record of their words that might be viewed as criticism of the current administration, and somehow weaponized against them.

Kudos to the students who were not only aware of this general risk (not just under the current regime, but in many societies), and acted to improve their situation.

Next, they should look at how they're under almost ubiquitous technological surveillance, with little-to-no protections. And now there's emerging "AI" methods to automate harvesting insights from the ubiquitous surveillance fire hoses, and also to automate actions to suppress enemies of the regime. And if you look around, at the pace we're going, it's very easy to believe this will start happening within a year. Maybe they'll decide that one of the best defenses for national security that could happen right now is to cut off the surveillance data wherever possible.

> A couple of weeks ago, students asked we keep the discussions, but stop recording the class. They worried about any record of their words that might be viewed as criticism of the current administration, and somehow weaponized against them.

Words being weaponized is a problem that exists for multiple years now in the US. From the free press [1]:

"To give a sense of proportion, only three professors were fired or forced out of schools over something they said in the post-9/11 panic. The modern era of cancel culture (2014 to present), by contrast, has resulted in almost 200 professor terminations. That exceeds even the standard estimate of 100 professors terminated in the second Red Scare (1947 to 1957)."

[1]: https://www.thefp.com/p/american-colleges-gave-birth-to-canc...

very good itemization of what's happening, thank you for doing this. Unfortunately, one very important bullet point was missing: the world's richest man and arguably most influential in the white house controls a large internet satellite constellation and has acquired tremendous geopolitical power, even before having the president's ear. This is the single biggest threat out there I believe, as he has already had an impact on the Ukrainian front, and world leaders continue to placate him in fear of Starlink service being cut off in their country. I still don't understand how a private american company was allowed to obtain such geopolitical power, but this is by the far the most worrying point that needs to be brought up a lot more

I feel many of us in the IT world have stood along side this descent in real time, because technology has been an enabler (far from being an equaliser). We were mostly mute because of money and traction.

It's worth to keep in mind that it took only about 2 years for this one guy from Austria to remove the final backstops the society had in place before until he was able to become the supreme leader in the 1930's.

2 years.

What has been hard won and fought over can easily be lost very fast and the only way to regain it will be through blood and violence.

Yet to see any of the Free Speech Absolutists come out in defence of actual free speech and against the tyranny of far right lunatics running the federal government, weirdly enough.

> Peter Baker, the New York Times White House correspondent, compared the current moment to his time at Russia at the beginning of the Putin era:

> By the time we left in late 2004, Moscow had been transformed. People who had happily talked with us at the start were now afraid to return our calls. “Now I have this fear all the time,” one told us at the time. There is a similar chill now in Washington. Every day someone who used to feel free to speak publicly against Mr. Trump says they will no longer let journalists quote them by name for fear of repercussions, both Democrats and Republicans

If even half of this is true, I wonder what the future of HN is? THis forum is backed by Ycombinator, a US based "investment" company. Do they have plans to relocate to friendlier climes?

Honestly, step one is for the folks screaming “free speech” and arguing about censorship to see what’s happening, and what real threats to free speech look like. We spent years being told that moderation on private social media was the worst possible thing in the world, and today there’s a real possibility of government prosecutions for protected speech. Even if you don’t like the people being threatened and chilled right now, it will be you eventually.

Might be a strawman, but it seems this kind of person reverses the order of time.

People worrying about free speech before (and now in the UK) are ignored, called hysterical etc ... yet the minute someone is worried about Orange Man it's legitimate worry and you are hypocritical if you feel schadenfreude a bit.

Denialism is a real poison. Sided worryists/denialists are the real problem.

I'm not sure how to call them out without engaging in the same games they play themselves.

There are groups doing great work though, like the FSU in the UK.

I was actually taught Analysis I and II in the former HQs of the Romanian Communist Party's Cadres Faculty (the infamous A250 classroom, for those that attended Computer Science school at Bucharest Politehnica), that was happening towards the end of the '90s - early 2000s, but never in my life back then I would have thought to bring up politics up in class, to the contrary. Which is to say, why are these students afraid of?

The catalog of events near the beginning of the post is very valuable. The false dichotomy that runs through the post ("what if the real threat to free speech was the reactionary despot we made along the way?") is not; it is counterproductive. In the US, neither the left wing nor the right supports freedom of speech. That's how we got into this situation.

It's sad and depressing what's happening.

And even more depressing is how little fight there seems to be, and how spineless many are.

From politicians to big tech and just most people: They sit down quietly, hoping this will just blow over, or that someone else will take the fight so they don't have to.

Don't make it easy! Don't do their job for them! Don't self-censor. Make them show their cards! If not, by the time you're ready to fight, it might be too late to do anything.

> If you spent the last decade being fundamentally wrong about the gravest threats to speech in America, these are clever ways to rewrite history to give the impression that you were right all along.

Funnily enough the author here is attempting revisionist history himself by claiming that his side's prior misdeeds were justified all along because of the overreaction of the opposing extreme once they came into power. Instead, i would argue that opposing extremists (the left author who appears to be a denialist for leftist problems, and also trumpers on the opposite extreme) are symbiotic, actually propping eachother up in the long term and indeed, contributing to the problem.

I think he anticipated this argument which is why he wrote this block of text like a "No really, we were justified censoring and discriminating against people all those years, look what happened see!" as if he wasn't part of the cause. Sorry, not buying such a weak argument.

Trump et al wouldn't be able to make such weak free speech arguments work either if their opposition hadn't been using their power for a decade to censor everyone they disagree with in a historic purity spiral. Free speech matters. Neither authoritarian left or authoritarian right are good stewards of it. This is not news. But the left handed trump this point on a silver platter.

I think it’s important to look at the issue as a systemic one, not just about the current administration.

For decades, we have delegates all this legal authority to the president with few real checks on the offices power.

Eventually a Trump/Musk would happen.

There are allegations that the Perkins and Coie firm abused their access to a SCIF in order to make unauthorised queries targeting Trump campaign members during the run up to the 2016 election.

The full text of the executive order is available here: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/addr... and mentions removing access to a SCIF:

> The Office of Management and Budget shall identify all Government goods, property, material, and services, including Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities, provided for the benefit of Perkins Coie. The heads of all agencies providing such material or services shall, to the extent permitted by law, expeditiously cease such provision.

It has also been publicly documented from court transcripts that contractors were making unauthorised queries but I don't believe it has ever been released who the contractors were or who they were targeting. Hopefully, if this is the reason for removing SCIF access the current government is able to make these documents public without redaction. Though, the whole thing could just be a conspiracy theory generated by people piecing together bits of random information.

I think they are screaming too late. For more than 10 years was known enough that the US government was mass collecting information about everything they could on internet, the Snowden’s revelations was just a milestone on the current state of that back then, and as nothing happened, it continued.

Now we have over that AIs and probably a government openly willing to use that against you, but that was always a possibility all this time. The future is open, the records are forever. And what we did all this time? Just put in photos, videos and text what can be used against us under some future policy, and shared it with them.

There is a point where we deserve the consequences. And yes, even of this very message.

I have one question about one:

> Public employees are illegally

> purged if they are viewed as

> disloyal to the new regime.

My understanding of how the U.S. government works is that the President functions as the CEO of all federal employees.

Is this all about Schedule F executive order which was rescinded by President Joe Biden on January 22, 2021?

I want to have an intellectually honest discussion about this:

- Why are these firings considered illegal? What is the legal argument?

- Why do we believe the President cannot hire or fire federal workers at will? What legal precedent or framework governs this?

If our system is designed in a way that allows the above and we dont like it, shouldn’t we work to fix it? After all, Congress—specifically the House—is the only branch with the power to write laws.

So if you don’t agree with Executive Order XYZ, let’s propose a law to address and fix it.

Would love to hear thoughtful perspectives on this.

> The judges who provide the last, best hope of constraining the President and the richest man in the world face a historic wave of threats.

The role of the judges is not to contain the President. It's exactly this idea where each department think that it's their role to stop the President which has lost them their job. You cannot operate a government successfully where large parts of it are actively trying to sabotage you.

What President Trump is trying to achieve is to take politics out of the permanent unelected state. Additionally, at the same time he is trying to find cost savings, because US debt is out of control [1]. The UK [2] and many other Countries are in the same boat. US spending on national debt is about $1 trillion a year [3], and it raises about $4.4 billion a year in revenue [4]. This is okay, as long as the US maintains growth [5]. Encase it wasn't obvious by now, we are scheduled for a massive economic downturn, and it is extremely prudent to reduce spending so that the US can still afford interest payments.

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UK_Debt_as_percentage_of_...

[3] https://www.pgpf.org/article/what-is-the-national-debt-costi...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#/...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States

Every old forum and facebook group full of right ringers talking about fishing or whatever has been feeling for close to a decade exactly what the author is feeling now.

I'd say I'm hopeful that things will change now that the shoe is on both feet but I don't have that much faith.

Edit: Since apparently this needs to be explained to some people, nobody is feeling like they can't talk about random boring advertiser friendly interests. People are feeling like they can't talk freely about the kinds of political and social issues that tend to get talked about when you get a bunch of people of a particular bent in one place.

I remember when I had a pretty serious health problem, went from doctor to doctor and none of them helped and some even made it worse.

I complained about it quite bitterly for about a decade, even after I had resolved it on my own without their help.

This post reminds me of that time of my life. He's not wrong and yet he may look back on this time like I have on my life and think heh, is that really what I spent my time doing? The life I could've been living instead. The life I can be living right now, today and tomorrow :)