The linked tweet is from a past Congressional sysadmin, so it seems reasonably authoritative - but it's cited in thread that's connected to some other interesting opinions on this:
These responses are over the top. The photo of the congressional office that is circulating shows a wireless Logitech keyboard and mouse, and an unlocked workstation. That tells a pretty damning story about the ambient level of security awareness in congressional offices. Congress has a very serious technology competence problem. Probably a better long term strategy to focus on that.
I agree. The risk from this intrusion is not a whole lot different (and considerably more overt) than from the access that any number of other people have had to this building in the past. (Tour guides, visiting civilians, contractors, cleaners, ...).
Professional attackers were not waiting to follow a Jamiroquai knock-off around during an event whose CCTV footage will be heavily scrutinized.
This may be a good incentive to review policies such as full disk encryption and proximity-card workstation lock/unlock but pulling miles of CAT-6 from this building is not a sensible response: defenses _should_ already account for this sort of threat. If purple team has not already "what if"'ed this particular variant of the evil maid problem then that's a serious issue but clearly weak physical security was already a known feature of the threat model.
What makes you so sure said workstations had any significant value or access worth locking it down like it held the launch codes or something? According to one of the replies in the tweets you linked, pretty much everything would have been open information anyway.
All this talk from random internets about how "terrible" their infosec is strikes me as a bunch of armchair quarterbacking by people who think they know a lot more than they do... so basically your typical tech worker I guess.
I'd rather they not focus on security. I'd rather everything they do with their computers is live streamed all the time really.
Their incompetence isn't any different than the average person in the work force, and they shouldn't be keeping secrets anyway.
I'm sure some replies and downvotes to this will think I am crazy because they have important secrets like terrorism intel etc, and yes I understand that, but continue to disagree. I believe a nation could function just fine without secrets. It would simply be different. We don't a good job with the secrets anyway.
Terrorism intel is the least of my concerns with your proposal.
IMHO, privacy is a key part of negotiation, creativity, and planning. Lack of privacy would make it difficult for them do their jobs well or (more likely) drive them to use unofficial, private channels.
Sometimes a deal or a new idea needs a "safe space" to grow.
I assume you are a programmer (this is HN). Do you think operations at your company would improve if everyone's screen was constantly broadcast to management? Personally, I'd prefer to be judged on my job performance, rather than having some non-engineer decide if I'm doing a good job based on their impression of what's on my screen.
The legislative record and public statements of our congressmen are almost always enough to evaluate their competence.
In terms of physical intrusion, a tremendous amount of security theater was exposed today. Quite astonishing how easily people were able to gain access.
I was really disappointed and disheartened. It showed great weakness.
I recently watched the movie Olympus Has Fallen. We were just wanting a dumb action movie to pass the time. The North Korean terrorists just basically walked in and took the White House. We were like, how stupid is that, no way that could really happen. And here today, we literally saw it happen. People took over one of our nation’s most important buildings with extremely high level people in it without a sweat, without resistance, and basically without repercussions. I remarked today to my family that I bet Russians and North Koreans were watching going, wait, we can just walk in? Of course they couldn’t because they aren’t white “Americans”. And all of this really paints a nasty picture of what happened today. It was a soup of treason, violence, white privilege, disgrace, sadness, and weakness.
I mean, a bomb on the grounds was found and detonated by a bomb squad and people were still allowed to stay on the premises. I really could not believe how they could just take over the place. I even saw a video where police actually just opened the gates for them.
> The North Korean terrorists just basically walked in and took the White House. We were like, no way that could really happen. And here today, we literally saw it happen.
The total strength of government building security in DC is around 2 battaglions.
You think there is nobody who can bring 2000-3000 people to the rifle, and numerically overwhelm them? And it seems that not insubstantial numbers of DC security personnel did simply desert their posts.
Commando paratroopers with heavy weapons, and moreover armour will leave no chances for a regular army unit, let alone civilian police.
I expect the security personnel to be trained and the mob to not be trained.
I expect (given the consequences of allowing them in and prior use of lethal force against demonstrations by Americans in America) the security personnel to be ready, willing, and able to use lethal force to keep armed protestors out, even if the doors were open.
I expect the doors to be strong enough to withstand anything short of an RPG.
I do not expect security personnel to desert their posts in their own capital city.
> I do not expect security personnel to desert their posts in their own capital city.
Surely that was out of concern for their own safety (to retreat can be a valid strategy) and / or not willing to open fire on US civilians in such a symbolic place.
I hadn't heard about that before. In fairness, she did hit several officers with her car, and was actively attempting to run one over when she was shot.
It's still a shame. I do wonder if there's something else they could have done. I don't know anything about how hard it is to stop a car.
I expect the security personnel to be trained and the mob to not be trained.
The latter assumption is a serious mistake. Sure, the mob is not as well trained as professionals, but when you consider the number of vets with some military experience, the fairly large numbers of militia organizations which provide amateur levels of training in both virtual and real contexts, and the high availability of training materials (military manuals etc), it's smart to assume that any given mob will contain some people who know what they're doing and are able to direct others.
But DC has rather strict laws about firearms, so it was rational to rely on a swarming approach and then try to exploit the gains from that tactic. While the attempt to take over the capitol failed insofar as Congress reconvened to finish the process of counting electoral college votes, and many of the participants have been or are about to be arrested, the far right has scored an outstanding propaganda victory (complete with photogenic martyrs) at little real cost. I would say 2021 has got off to a spectacular start for them.
The thing is, you don't want to get shut down before you start. There were in fact a few arrests for firearms possession earlier that morning, before the rally near the White House had convened. Once attention had shifted to the Capitol, I imagine there was much less police surveillance on the surrounding streets (until the National Guard were eventually deployed).
But you make a good point; perhaps the plotters over-relied on shock value and ended up half-assing it, or perhaps there was no more plan other than stirring up disorder and hoping to capitalize on an emergency situation.
I'm pessimistic about the long-term implications; the far right gave up on the idea of a political solution some time ago and the less far right is now about ready to join them.
[An article I read said] There was an additional bomb also found on the Capitol grounds.
Obviously this is a developing situation. And the details don’t actually matter to my point. Clear and present evidence to commit acts of domestic terrorism was available, and people were still allowed to loiter and vandalize as they pleased.
Honestly, it kind of is. Regardless of the legal and administrative elaborations, the psychological impact of whose flag is flying and who has custody of it are at least equally important.
>> Per the capitol police website they have 2,600 officers and a budget of $460 million. It honestly just ... didn't look like they were trying very hard. They managed to arrest what, 14 people? Compare that to the BLM protests on the west coast where unmarked vans of feds were literally rolling up and black bagging people off the street. USCP is charged with protecting Congress, and I think members of congress should be thinking hard about whether the police were complicit in what happened today.
--
> We were just wanting a dumb action movie to pass the time. The North Korean terrorists just basically walked in and took the White House. We were like, how stupid is that, no way that could really happen. And here today, we literally saw it happen.
Technically, you did not see that happen - the people that walked in were not North Korean terrorists. This distinction may be important, or it may not.
> People took over one of our nation’s most important buildings with extremely high level people in it without a sweat, without resistance, and basically without repercussions. I remarked today to my family that I bet Russians and North Koreans were watching going, wait, we can just walk in?
I would bet my money that they're thinking something else entirely, something more along the lines of: Now isn't this an interesting development! What is the range of plausible explanations for this unusual and counter-intuitve series of events, that took place at one of the most strategic locations in America's capital, on a very special day, when large quantities of protesters were known (in advance) to be present, and violence was expected? Is this strange situation purely organic, or might something more interesting be going on?.
Thirty years ago I expect American journalists would be asking similar questions. Unfortunately, the only place you are likely to find such curiosity and diversity of thought in modern America is in conspiracy theory forums - but you know what they imply(!) (over, and over, and over) about them: "If they propose an idea, or explanation for something, it should be considered to be false".
> Of course they couldn’t because they aren’t white “Americans”. And all of this really paints a nasty picture of what happened today. It was a soup of treason, violence, white privilege, disgrace, sadness, and weakness.
Technically, this is just your heuristic prediction of what happened, and what it is. What really happened, what it really is, is unknown (to the general public).
> I really could not believe how they could just take over the place. I even saw a video where police actually just opened the gates for them.
I don't find it hard to believe at all. I don't even find it mildly surprising - but I do find it extremely interesting. So interesting that if any journalists bothered to look into it, I'd be tempted to read such articles to see what they come up with. I wonder if any such articles will be written, or if this remarkable phenomenon will be universally (by all major media outlets) attributed to "white privilege" or some such simplistic, evidence-free answer.
Let's see what CNN has to say about this performance:
In this article, we have observations that security was obviously lax despite it being "...known for weeks that President Donald Trump was promoting a rally he said was aimed at preventing the certification of Joe Biden's win."
What we do not have here, is anyone asking questions about why security was so lax.
FTA:
- Lawmakers say they are perplexed at the lack of preparedness among law enforcement given that it had been known for weeks that President Donald Trump was promoting a rally he said was aimed at preventing the certification of Joe Biden's win. Rep. Mike Quigley, an Illinois Democrat who was locked in the House chamber during an armed standoff between Capitol Police and a rioter, praised the officers who were in the building that put their lives on the line to protect the lawmakers. But Quigley made clear that they were outnumbered and law enforcement was under prepared. "The Capitol Police I was around did an amazing job under difficult circumstances," Quigley told CNN. "My concern wasn't with how valiant the Capitol Police were. It was that an hour before the debate started, I looked at the throngs of people surrounding different sections of the Capitol -- and said, we don't have enough security." Quigley added: "I'm no expert in security, but you can tell we were out-manned in an hour before the debate," referring to Congress' proceedings to certify Biden's win.
In this article we have more observations of unusual anomalies. And again, what we do not have here, is anyone asking questions about why security was so lax.
FTA:
- The chaotic federal response to the Trump rally Wednesday, which was overwhelmed by rioters who stormed the US Capitol, stood in sharp contrast to the heavily-armed presence of thousands of federal authorities during summer protests in Washington, DC, following the police killing of George Floyd.
- The law enforcement response that allowed a typically heavily secured federal landmark to fall under attack, with rioters breaking through windows and into lawmakers' offices and gathering places, came from a hesitant federal bureaucracy after early assurances from DC and Capitol law enforcement agencies. Agencies that had law enforcement that could help Wednesday waited to be asked. "It was a mess. Nobody was communicating. No one knew what we were supposed to be doing there," said one federal law enforcement officer who was dispatched to the Capitol.
- Justice Department officials were in charge of coordinating the federal agencies and US National Guard response ahead of President Donald Trump's rally near the Washington Monument. Some organizers publicly said they planned to conduct a "wild" march to Capitol Hill as the joint session of Congress met to certify President-elect Joe Biden as the next president. But agencies were waiting to be asked by other authorities to help -- even as Trump's election protest unraveled.
- "Law enforcement failed to understand what the likelihood of this threat was," CNN law enforcement analyst Jonathan Wackrow, a former USSS agent, said of the day's events, though "no one should be surprised that this was attempted," given Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani's comments at the rally earlier in the day that this should be a "trial by combat." "There should have been a wall of law enforcement," Wackrow said. Department of Homeland Security spokesman Alexei Woltornist said the agency was running a "virtual situation room" to track communication between agencies, but was "not tracking any active threats." US Customs and Border Protection, a law enforcement agency under the Department of Homeland Security, had dozens of personnel prepared if needed.
- As for the Justice Department, acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen deployed more than 300 agents and officers from the FBI, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the US Marshals Service, to assist the Capitol Police. But the Capitol Police had already lost control. Some of those deployments came almost an hour after the mob put the Capitol into lockdown.
- "By the time the Capitol Police asked for help, the crowd was already inside the building," another federal law enforcement official said.
- After criticism from Washington, DC, municipal officials over the heavy-handed response during the summer Black Lives Matter protests, federal authorities had a visibly lighter presence for the Trump rally.
- Two federal law enforcement officials said Capitol Police assured Justice officials that they were prepared for the rally, particularly since the Capitol grounds are already barricaded in preparation for the Inauguration ceremonies in two weeks.
It's interesting though....it seems like such an obvious question, doesn't it? Shouldn't at least some journalists have this question?
Or, imagine a scenario where this took place at a business owned by anyone in this forum - wouldn't they be asking some questions about wtf happened? Yet when it is the US Capitol, most people have no curiosity.
To me, there are at least two interesting aspects to this. The first is the conspiracy theory aspect (why was security so lax), and then the psychological/neurological aspect (why do so few people who are highly skilled in logic have no curiosity)?
> remarked today to my family that I bet Russians and North Koreans were watching going, wait, we can just walk in?
The US Congress of of great symbolic and relatively little actual importance. If the North Korean military walked in to the Senate and gunned down everyone in it the outcomes would roughly be: US loses ~80 corrupt leaches. US loses ~20 great people. Northern part of the Korean peninsula becomes a glassy wasteland inhabited by cockroaches.
Mobs of grumpy people routinely yell at US politicians, I've seen various protesters screaming politicians into a defensive corner. The BLM protests at the 2020 RNC convention jumps to mind as having scenes that were probably felt just as scary for the politicians involved (the treatment of Rand Paul jumped out at me as unpleasant). US citizens get to scream at their politicians an they frequently exercise that privilege. There isn't an obvious racial element to it.
No, I mean the people in the institution. The spending in Georgia isn't because of ... whoever the candidates are, I don't know their names. It is to decide which party gets another sympathetic vote in decision making.
The institution of Congress is critical. But the specific people in it at any time are important because of how they got there/who supported them on the way in and not because of who they are. They could be replaced and it wouldn't be a big issue, technically speaking. Practically there'd be huge consequences for whoever was stupid enough to disrespect the US Congress.
> They could be replaced and it wouldn't be a big issue, technically speaking
The intent was partisan, to remove representatives of one side to change the result of votes.
> Practically there'd be huge consequences for whoever was stupid enough to disrespect the US Congress
A few people have been arrested. I don't expect many of them to serve prison time. Those who organised this, encouraged it, sold tshirts with "Civil War 6 Jan" on, will not experience any consequences. And don't forget the president can still pardon them.
Selling offensive t-shirts isn't even remotely close to a problem. I too doubt they will experience any consequences.
Hopefully the violent looters and lawbreakers in the protest get prosecuted. But there are recent precedents on this issue; most of the protesters will have been peaceful and shouldn't suffering consequences for exercising basic freedoms.
>Northern part of the Korean peninsula becomes a glassy wasteland inhabited by cockroaches.
If North Korean terrorists were to execute 100 senators, you've already lost. Massacring a bunch of poor pawns in North Korea doesn't solve anything except maybe appeasing some people's ideas of revenge. The DPRK hardly cares today about most of population, but in return they would effectively shutdown the US government and possibly put the entirety of the government into a standstill, possibly freezing tons of regular processes. Before any other bomb is launched, people would be more concerned about making sure they are properly secured - after all if north korean terrorists already executed the Senate, your main fear would be that you're next; and glassing peasants wouldn't prevent that.
In other words, your opponent has just taken your all your Rooks, Knights and Bishops and in response you wipe out their pawns while the opponent's queen is about to checkmate you.
I wouldn't say that's even a fair characterization. Per the capitol police website they have 2,600 officers and a budget of $460 million. It honestly just ... didn't look like they were trying very hard. They managed to arrest what, 14 people? Compare that to the BLM protests on the west coast where unmarked vans of feds were literally rolling up and black bagging people off the street.
USCP is charged with protecting Congress, and I think members of congress should be thinking hard about whether the police were complicit in what happened today.
The standards for response time ought to be rather higher for a large police force that exists primarily to protect a single building complex. And then there's the fact that the Capitol is obviously a much higher-profile target than a random federal courthouse.
>Compare that to the BLM protests on the west coast where unmarked vans of feds were literally rolling up and black bagging people off the street.
Let's not lose perspective.
In the protests outside the Portland federal courthouse building, police held out for weeks while insurrectionists threw bombs [0] and incendiary devices [1], attacked officers with hammers [2] and blinding lasers [3], and tried to breach the courthouse with crowbars and power saws [4]. Nightly arson attempts set fires at, around, and inside the courthouse [5]. The protestors' goal- as stated in their extensive graffiti [6]- was to attack police, breach the courthouse and destroy public property, much as they had done in earlier riots [7]. One stabbed a black conservative journalist in the stomach [8]. Many were arrested carrying illegal guns and ammunition [9].
In response, and after local law enforcement abandoned the courthouse by order of Portland's Mayor Wheeler, federal agents arrested suspects in accordance with the law. They read suspects their rights, treated them fairly, and in most cases- thanks to an extremely permissive District Attorney [10]- released them within 48 hours of arrest.
What happened in Portland (and Seattle, Minneapolis, Chicago, and other American cities) this summer was also undeniably insurrection, and undeniably much more violent. Despite this, police in Portland never shot anyone in the back, much less fatally.
Call today's insurrection what it is, but be consistent.
1) People are calling this an “insurrection” because it’s so directly an attack on country leadership. (Whereas the incidents you’re referencing are predominantly riots and attacks on the police.) There may be hypocrisy here, but I don’t think that word is a part of it
2) I think the major difference in the left’s eyes is that those protests were against police brutality and racism, whereas this is an attack on our democracy and an attempt to overrule a free and fair election. Motives matter
3) Invading the capital building wielding deadly weapons is (pretty objectively) more serious than attacking the outside of a single federal courthouse (not to minimize that of course)
Let's not mince words. Insurrection means violent uprising against the government. Attacks on public servants and public buildings for the purpose of overthrowing the government are insurrection.
The Portland courthouse siege- OP's chosen example- was led by violent white anarchists. Their motive was to topple the government. Portland's Black Lives Matter activists complained many times that their cause and movement had been hijacked [0][1][2].
The people who invaded the capitol today, at least some, probably thought they were protecting democracy. They may have thought they were defending election integrity. They were wrong. That doesn't mean they are evil or amoral. It means they are misinformed and misled. Using them as a foil to downplay other, much more violent unrest is neither helpful nor informative.
I haven't seen photos of armed rioters in the capitol. If you have some, please link them.
> The people who invaded the capitol today, at least some, probably thought they were protecting democracy.
What they thought is irrelevant in a country that believes in the rule of law: they were attacking the highest institution of one branch of government with the express purpose of forcing them to overturn the legal result of the election and install their preferred president. This is an (attempted) insurrection, and there are no two ways around it.
Comparing this to an attack on a courthouse is patently absurd. Especially since the courthouse was not attacked for 'toppling the government' - I can't even imagine where you came up with that - but because it was known that arrested/kidnapped protesters had been held inside the courthouse building. In general, none of the BLM or Antifa protesters are interested in "toppling the government" - they are interested in "toppling" the police and in stopping the white nationalist fascists that police are openly supporting from taking over the country.
>This is an (attempted) insurrection, and there are no two ways around it.
Yes, I called it insurrection earlier. You've replied to my comment out of context of the reply which preceded it, so your strawman of me doesn't make any sense.
>they are interested in "toppling" the police and in stopping the white nationalist fascists that police are openly supporting
I wrote a longer reply to your comment, but then I deleted it. DC metro police are more than 50% black, it's a joke that they would "openly support white supremacists."
Good grief. If you’re using graffiti as the source then compare it to today where signs said their goal was to overthrow the government.
Trying to draw any sort of equivalence is insincere.
And honestly any one who breached or attempted to breach the courthouse or the Capitol (the building or the property) should go to jail for a long time. So in that sense, we agree.
I think that the Lafayette Square episode with the Trump church visit would look mild in comparison. ‘When the looting starts the shooting starts’ was what Trump said then, where is that rhetoric now?
It appears the DC leadership and the Pentagon wanted to avoid a show of force that mimicked what happened during the summer, trying to learn from their mistakes during the protests triggered by Floyd’s death.
> Compare that to the BLM protests on the west coast where unmarked vans of feds were literally rolling up and black bagging people off the street.
Boy, I wonder if the fact that these guys basically just goofed around and took pictures instead of burning down the capitol (like what happened in the Portland courthouse) had any bearing on that.
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. We're trying to avoid the hell we're all sinking into. Comments like this are a sharp push hellward, so please don't.
One was an unarmed woman shot by law enforcement, as police have confirmed [0]. The other 3 died near the riot due to separate medical emergencies [1].
Edit: a large proportion of your most recent, say, 10 comments to HN have been breaking the site guidelines really badly. I don't want to ban you, because you've been a user here for a long time and you've posted many good things. But if you keep doing this, we're not going to have any choice. Having something like this be your first comment in months is extremely dismaying.
They have, for the record. I.e., posts from the morning that were effectively were dead got additional downvotes rapidly after posts in this thread. And I got plenty of HN’s passive aggressive “you’re posting too fast” messages.
Are you a mod? For example, look at this comment[0], which stood at 1 all day long, which is now -3 after last night.
Did I say it was downvotes past 48 hours? Just ones that people had stopped paying attention to because the posts fell off the front page got additional downvotes moments after a new post in this thread.
If you believe someone has done this (downvoting all your old comments on unrelated posts), try emailing the modstaff. It happened to me once and dang quickly fixed it.
> The videos from the Capitol demonstrate just how outmatched the police were
Not sure if I understand the point you're trying to make.
They shouldn't have been outmatched in the first place. The protest was planned and the information was extremely overt. Something went horribly wrong for this to happen.
Any one of those protestors could have brought in a bomb. They weren't exactly going through metal detectors. Given that a pipe bomb was found at the RNC, and a suspicious package of some sort at the DNC, I'm surprised someone didn't try. I wonder how worried security there was about explosive devices and weighing whether to open fire.
Many of them were also carrying guns. No idea who thought it'd be a good idea to just stand down and let them in, but my guess is that making martyrs of them would push us closer to something like the beginning of a civil war.
The police seem to have stood down because they are sympathetic. There's video circulating of the rioters being let through barricades by the officers manning them. I'll say it's plausible they were not prepared to resist the crowd, but the way it looks is like they wanted to participate.
Was there to document and distribute some propaganda, we did not get very close to the militant action, but a few things to report:
- At least one flash-bang (probably) and one tear gas grenade (definitely) were used on the capitol steps.
- Their duty as police is to protect and serve, so shooting would have been a terrible idea. Evacuation is not difficult in an ultra-hard target like the capitol, and a lot of civilians had bags, some of which definitely contained firearms. I also heard some shouts about fetching guns from hotel rooms (we did not stay overnight in the city). A gun battle would have been catastrophic on both sides.
What I’m saying is that they almost certainly would not have been able to “get the bad guys” without being shot themselves, unless the tactic was machine-gun emplacements turning everyone into hamburger, with the side effect of starting a shooting war nationwide.
I think you have a very weird and wrong idea of what "collateral damage" means. Actually, the police should avoid collateral damage at all cost, even if it means not catching the bad guys.
I think he refers to the fact that there's been (supreme)court cases about this that generally rule in the polices favour saying they're under no obligation to protect, etc.
Living in Portland, I can say I'm simply amazed at their restraint! Our own police here will taze, pepperspray, baton, without any law being broken first. It's sort of like Affirmative Action, but for violence.
We still don't know who fired that shot, and there were no reports of shots fired otherwise. Given the scope of what happened, a single lethal shot fired is kind of a miracle. And shocking given how many injuries and deaths we saw from protests earlier in the year which were under far better control, with far more law enforcement involved.
If you poke around a bit on YouTube, there are multiple videos of it happening on there. My guess is that the woman was trying to get into a corridor that the Secret Service was protecting, and they really didn't want anyone in there. Capitol Police seemed unaware of this as a few of them armed with long guns stood on the same side of the door literally right next to the woman who was shot, when she was shot after trying to enter through that broken window.
This article gives some background color on her public social media. [1] It's pretty depressing honestly to think that she was so caught up in conspiracies and it got her killed.
You want cops to be more like stoic stormtroopers? If every cop out there took a selfie with rioters, it would have been easier to manage them by a degree. Imagine hundreds of selfies with cops were posted in right wing social media, how will that not make right wing protestors have a nicer attitude towards the cop in the future?
what's really the downside of letting this happen? Not focused on crowd control? This is also crowd control.
As demonstrated by the mobs actions, they weren't there to protest. They were there to wreck the joint. The cops let their guard down. It's silly to think that being chummy with the crowd would deescalate them when they've been prepping for this for ages.
If they were there to wreck the joint, it would have been wrecked. From what I saw many protestors were stopping the anarchist from causing any real damage.
If this is how cops de-escalate then it’s a massive double standard to how they dealt with protesters over the summer, including the time they tear gassed peaceful protesters to make way for Trump’s photo op right there on DC in June [0]
Outmatched or just letting people in? Mixed messages in this video, some cops standing ground while others just deciding to remove themselves from the post https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZ9oThRuMVs
Riot cops are regularly outnumbered. They are trained to use less-lethals to outmanuever, disperse and kettle crowds like this. They had advance warning and could have dispersed the early crowds. It was just this past summer that Trump had a crowd near the White House dispersed with tear gas to give a speech where he held a Bible upside down.
But when the time came today, there were no tear gas or 40mm rounds, no LRAD. The security simply didn't show up when the expected crowd was percieved to be aligned with the police.
This is a consistent pattern throughout our law enforcement system.
I think it was obvious from everything we've seen, especially in comparison to the recent protests, that the police response was deliberately small. Whether they received orders to allow the protesters in, whether they themselves decided to do it, whether they were denied reinforcements - its obvious that something caused police response to be almost non-existent to an obvious threat.
If there had been a BLM rally instead of a MAGA rally on the steps of the capitol the day the election is certified, they would have been kept well away from the building with riot gear.
> If there had been a BLM rally instead of a MAGA rally on the steps of the capitol the day the election is certified, they would have been kept well away from the building with riot gear.
Living in Portland, I had this same thought. Random one way streets in downtown Portland get a much more violent, immediate, and overwhelming police response on a nightly basis than the Capitol building did when there was an obvious riot forming.
If it had been a BLM rally, the tear-gas would have started before any protester had made it up the steps, the same way it still happens in Portland. What a fucked up country I live in.
Part of me wonders if this was malicious compliance with the demands to downsize police. "You want less police? See what happens?" That doesn't seem beyond belief.
Don’t attribute ignorance which can be safely explained by malice
I think it is much more likely that this downsizing had everything to do with who the protestors were—i.e. their political views and skin color—in each case.
Your point about the difference in police responses seems valid. There was advance warning of potential conflict.
However, your statement that the police are overwhelmingly Trump supporters seems weak and inflammatory and is what I suspect drove downvoting. There are several examples of individual police taking stands against the crowd. Directly linking police performance today to politics is also questionable. When dealing with rowdy crowds it may be best to take things easy and act to calm tensions. A large number of cops ended up behind the crowd surge where the best course of action becomes ambiguous.
I didn't downvote you but you did not provide any proof that police is a) overwhelmingly Trump supporters and b) would shirk their responsibility because of that.
And you posted irrelevant links as if they somehow support your argument.
The FOP endorsed Trump twice and a 2016 Police Magazine poll showed that 84% of officers intended to vote for Trump. There have also been a handful of news stories about current and former police officers getting in trouble for supporting Trump/opposing Democrats in illegal ways...
"Alabama Police Captain Resigns After Saying Biden Voters Deserve a ‘Bullet in Their Skull’"
"Arkansas police chief resigns after threatening to abuse Democrats"
"Ex-Houston Police Officer Charged In Attack Over Bogus Election Fraud Plot"
"Officer suspended for blaring 'Trump 2020' from NYPD vehicle"
Don't take down votes personally I find that for a short time after most of my recent comments on HN I get (automated?) downvotes which are then wiped out a few hours/days later.
The mayor of DC oversees the police force that's responsible for policing off the Capitol grounds, in the rest of DC that's not federal land. They're not the ones who would be asking for reinforcements to help secure the Capitol, they're one of the potential sources of reinforcements for the agency that is responsible for protecting the Capitol.
The mayor's request was basically that the Feds not unilaterally start escalating and militarizing police efforts in her jurisdiction without her involvement. In hindsight, that does seem to have been the correct strategy for her police department, because all the violence seems to have been concentrated within the jurisdiction of a different police department.
Sure, but there's a difference between coming with riot gear and attacking protestors, and posting 10 cops to guard all of congress and then have them walk away when protestors show up leaving the doors wide open.
They could have easily guarded the building itself. Close the doors and post 30 guards at each entrance?
Interestingly, everything I read today said that they did request assistance. A day or two ago. It just took until the events unfolded for anything to happen. A very quick Google search turned up: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/urging-calm-dc-may...
They could have guarded the building, though, even if they don't want the agents to engage outside of the building. Guarding the entrance should be feasible. If it isn't, Congress should not have meetings there.
Based on the reports, some of the rioters were carrying blue lives matter flags. I would say it's pretty obvious there were shared sympathies between the mob and those protecting the Capitol.
Being overrun by attackers is one thing. Ignoring them would be dereliction of duty. But assisting and siding with them? I don't even know what you'd call that anymore.
The main issue is that this isn't what the Capitol police are optimized for. They are meant to handle the run-of-the-mill protesters, and prepare for an active shooter or bomb threat. A mob of people breaking in is very different. Handguns are much less useful when you've got 20 people breaking through the windows. You can't try to arrest one of them without being swarmed by the others, and if you end up firing a shot the crowd will panic and attack you and you simply don't have enough firepower or distance. To defend against a mob, you need many more officers (enough to stand side by side at relevant choke points) equipped with riot gear and tear gas to disperse the crowd. And then a Quick Reaction Force on standby with guns and nonlethal weapons who can reinforce any area where the mob is threatening to break through.
Without the numbers and the right equipment for the situation, the mob was able to break through and then the priority had to become securing the congresspeople until sufficient force could arrive to help clear.
We've all seen the side by side image comparison of the BLM protest response (guys in military get-up standing shoulder to shoulder on the steps) and the Trump "Stop The Steal" protest (a handful of cops). For whatever reason, they didn't think a group of angry protestors who said they were going to do this, would actually do this.
Yeah, and you can bet there will be some very long and very serious investigations over this. Congress is plenty pissed off, and the Capitol Police work for them (I believe they technically are a part of the legislative branch, not the executive). And I think every law enforcement agent in the district should be ashamed of what happened.
I should point out that the photo going around showing the difference between the BLM response and the response to this mob is of the DC national guard, not Capitol Police. The DC national guard was not mobilized when the rioting started yesterday. Apparently it was requested but the DoD had not approved it. You can bet there will be some investigations there, and people involved will try to hide themselves in the bureaucracy and pointing fingers.
My bet is that, in a year or two, we'll see some serious reforms in this area. Probably an expedited procedure for mobilizing the DC National Guard, or Congress will be so angry they will demand an expansion of the Capitol Police force, since that force works directly for them.
My issue (and I'm not even an American) is why wasn't a large police presence there from the start? The Proud Boys, Q groups etc made it very clear this was going to happen. People can claim they weren't being serious, it was all just chest pounding prior to Jan 6 but why weren't they prepared for the most obvious outcome?
One thing that's not security theater is if you try to get into the room where the VP and Congress are you will be shot in the face (neck). Taking a podium or making a mess of some paperwork isn't all that meaningful. I think it shows that the security professionals have it figured out.
We saw the same thing during the Kavanaugh protests. The protestors were able to gain access to several locations in Federal buildings that they weren't supposed to be in. Nothing was changed to improve security, rather stupidly. During both Kavanaugh and the BLM / Antifa protests members of Congress were repeatedly threatened with death and or general physical violence (eg Rand Paul, a pacifist, being surrounded by a hyper violent mob and having to be shielded by half a dozen police officers as the mob tried to attack him and his family), little appears to have been modified to adjust for the atmosphere of increasing partisan violence that is enfulging the US. It's obvious what that's going to inevitably result in unless some appropriate security steps are taken. The partisan violence will get dramatically worse this decade as the sides split further apart. Some people foolishly think Biden is the end of it; Trump was only a symptom of what's happening, which is the beginning of a cultural civil war (the two major political sides in the US have absolutely nothing in common now), and increasingly intense acts of violence will go along with that.
Can you cite bases for these claims and characterizations? Nobody has stormed the Capitol and violently disrupted Congress since the war of 1812, as I understand it. Certainly I've never seen anything like it. I don't agree that the protests described are remotely the same, nor with the characterization of the summer protests as "BLM/Antifa". I saw plenty of massive BLM protests, zero Antifa except occasionally on TV. It's like calling Redmond WA the town of Microsoft / Joe's Diner.
The idea that it's both sides and civil war is coming is certainly a claim of the militant right wing that seeks violence. Nobody else says it that I know of.
True pacisfism isn't not congruent with his capitalist leanings. Rand Paul is someone who's very ok with the police beating up and killing black people, so it makes sense that they'd be yelling at him
Well, how were they supposed to prevent it? I personally support killing rioters (of both political wings), but that is not palatable anymore. The building is not exactly and armored bunker. If they don't use force, there's quite literally nothing they can do to secure it. The same reason you can almost never win conventional wars in enemy territory anymore (that one might be for the best, but true nonetheless).
You support killing rioters, eh? Care to define rioter? At what point does a worked up crowd of protestors become a riot? What if the police use agitators? What if a couple of protestors start damaging things, but the rest of the crowd remains peaceful? What if the rioters are running away, is it still okay to kill them? What if the rioters are legitimately trying to prevent a fascist regime from taking over? Do motivations count at all? Is it rioting to run from black-blocks? Is it rioting to shout at police lines? Is resisting arrest rioting?
You lost me at "What if the rioters are legitimately trying to prevent a fascist regime from taking over?". I bet many at the Capitol believed they are "legitimately trying to prevent a communist regime from taking over"... what you are basically saying is "violence is ok as long as I personally believe it's ok".
I'd say require the police line to wear body cams, have them on, and then require connecting a shot to a specific act. That would also serve as good Pavlovian training for people who think violence is ok as long as they personally think it's ok. The definition of what act can vary, but what I meant above is limited to this instant, targeted reaction - what I want to see is a specific "protester" throw a rock at police, or force entry, or set something on fire, and instantly gets shot; with camera evidence of both. Of course, I'd also accept arresting (and prosecuting with real punishment, not releasing after a few hours), but I don't believe it matters which one is used in the case of violent riots.
> Of course, I'd also accept arresting [...], but I don't believe it matters which one is used in the case of violent riots.
It matters a lot when you decide that rioting people can simply be shot. Because it means you've given them up as humans. One of our claims to civilization is that we handle violence sufficiently, not proportionally. And certainly not excessively.
> I personally support killing rioters (of both political wings), but that is not palatable anymore.
That's incredibly scary you hold that view: You're suggesting massacring protesters who are only causing property damage. Tear gas, rubber bullets and pepper spray are the way to disperse mobs/protesters/rioters from causing excessive property damage.
Of course if some protesters started shooting people then obviously using lethal force might be required.
Yeah, I should have clarified that other effective means of dispersal/incapacitation are also acceptable. However, I believe Draco of Athens was right about this in particular, so I don't personally think there's a difference.
We spent all summer watching as police subjected peaceful protesters to violent methods of crowd control. Why were there no rubber bullets, tear gas, etc? When BLM marched in DC, there were more armed guards in front of the Lincoln memorial than in front of the Capitol building yesterday. This was absolutely preventable.
First, there was tear gas, and in fact there were rioter(s?) shot by police. Then, you are comparing one protest to hundreds. There were tons of protests in Seattle where a group of a few dozen would go around marauding and looting and police would stand down and watch. Same here I guess.
In the United States we hold the ideal that individuals should be subject to due process before being punished by the state. The idea that people should be executed extrajudicially is incompatible with a core philosophy of the American system and is way out of line with mainstream American values and beliefs.
It's not execution; in many/most states, you are allowed to defend life, health and property with deadly force. It may be getting watered down these days due to unfavorable public opinion, but a law in the books in WA is/was, iirc, that you can use deadly force to prevent a felony.
Why, from the first principles, though? It's a slope and not a switch, but even in the case of "regular" crime, I'm not entirely convinced someone showing willful, unambiguously intentional disregard for basic social contract/others' negative rights, has full claim to the same rights, i.e. full moral value.
In this case we are talking about trying to achieve political means via violence. The kind of people who do that outside of very extreme circumstances definitely renounce their moral value as human beings in my view. It's not that they /should/ be shot as a punishment or something; it's more like dealing with malarial mosquito - the evil is on the level where ends justify the means.
"The kind of people who do that outside of very extreme circumstances definitely renounce their moral value as human beings in my view. "
Your logic could be applied to any number of movements, including the Women's Suffrage movement, the Civil Rights movement, the Revolutionary War, and thousands more.
Excluding the Revolutionary war, it would only characterize a small subset of these movements, often acting explicitly against the wishes of its spiritual leaders. It's not really about values; I am an atheist and I believe that the world would be a better place without religion, but if someone firebombed an empty church out of the same impulse I'd still place them in the same dehumanized category.
Go to the middle east and you'll see what killing rioters looks like. Its not protests anymore, it turns into literal wars that devastate cities and innocent peoples lives.
You mean a courthouse in Portland being burned down during the summer didn’t already shake your faith in the security of our federal buildings?
And I’m not sure if people are aware but the capitol is a public building. Meaning, on a normal day anyone can just go in there. There wouldn’t have been the physical intrusion everyone is catching the vapors over if they hadn’t put up barriers and shut down the whole city in the first place. You know, I’m actually starting to understand that whole argument about how preemptive shows of force by the police can actually escalate a situation...
I have never worked on Capitol Hill but I'm going to go ahead and say this is misinformation. I did work for the DOD, and arguably the DOD does not have access to nearly as sensitive information as the State Department or at times Congress. The most basic procedures for classified information require that it be stored behind locked metal cages, in bank-style vaults, with encrypted hard drives, accessed via SMART cards, and transferred via an armed escort. When I left for Afghanistan there was one person carrying Top Secret information and the case it was carried in was handcuffed to him, not only was he armed but he had an armed escort as well.
The notion or idea that some Congressperson has Classified+ information sitting behind a wood or glass door sounds highly suspicious.
No need for using the term "fake news". Noone posted any news, nor are they fake.
It's not about possible access of classified information, but the now unknown state of the devices and systems.
Physical barriers, like a guarded entry, produce a zone of trust. People are searched for weapons on entries to somewhat guarantee that no weapons are inside. Once the entry is un-guarded, the trust level is 0% and needs to rebuild.
There's a notion being presented that having access to physical offices is somehow tantamount to having access to a SCIF. That is the misinformation/hyperbole/fake news part. If you post on Twitter and your tweet goes viral, it is now news.
Those networks will assuredly have to be rebuilt from the ground up. He's definitely right on a number of things but fueling speculation like this, especially when it's already been acknowledged the SCIFs were not breached, is equally dangerous.
Indeed. I find myself particularly annoyed at this instance of Monday morning quarterbacking about infosec at a public building. People here are talking like somehow these systems would have access to launch codes or something. There is a general unwillingness to give the benefit of the doubt that the people in charge of infosec here may have actually thought through their decisions.
In my disgust, I admit to wishing that these people are someday judged by random internet know-nothings for their own decisions in turn.
What about physical safety of Senators? They let them in an ~hour after the mob ransacked the place. Not enough time to scan for explosives, and they already found two pipe bombs, Molotov cocktails, not to mention some guns in nearby parked truck. This is crazy :o
I imagine they're more restrictive than here, but I don't know the laws in DC. Around here finding some guns in a parked truck would not be noteworthy. Given that some of these people probably came from well outside of DC, I wouldn't be at all surprised they just drove their truck up with whatever was in it already without a thought.
Unfortunately, I also wouldn't be surprised to hear that they intentionally brought them just in case some of their buddies forgot their weapons for the coup attempt. That is, sadly, the country we've made for ourselves.
DC v Heller strongly limited the ability of the district to regulate gun ownership. It doesn't apply to states, which means it almost certainly doesn't apply to your city.
Some of the mob might already have the appropriate clearances for the various computer systems. I’m unsure if house delegates can enter with weapons though.
And the senate floor isn't a particularly important piece of ground to hold (when the Senators are not there at least).
Expending lots of resources and good will smashing what was essentially theatre-- wouldn't have been a good move.
If only we treated more protests like that: Stood back and people show their anger, then move on with our lives -- message heard-- with minimal injury and damage.
[I'm aware that a protester was shot and killed inside the capitol building -- but relative the scope of the event, I think it's still fair to characterize it as that way]
FWIW, the Capitol building is normally substantially open to the public.
I respectfully disagree that the siege of a national symbol, at the heart of a nation, is a harmless act. This was a substantial threat to democracy as we know it. That a Senate in session is forced to seek refuge due to safety concerns is nothing but dangerous and harmful to the very fabric of societ. If just a few of those 'protestors' had had slightly more nefarious intent the outcome could have been very different.
A lot of issues are partisan. What happened yesterday is not. Yesterday both Republicans and Democrats came out and denounced the insurrection in the stronges of terms.
> This was a substantial threat to democracy as we know it.
The US democracy is not threatened by violence against any single building or even most sets of people.
Had they burned the building to the ground and somehow caused the deaths of everyone inside, the US democracy would continue. They did not achieve anything remotely close to that.
There is no basis for calling some angry rioters smashing windows and smoking pot "a substantial threat to democracy". None.
Anything that grinds ongoing Senate election proceedings to a halt by force is a threat to democracy. Regardless of the insurgents political agenda. There are no ifs or buts here. There can still be violence even if nobody gets hurt. Yesterday the violence of a few (temporarily) silenced the voices of all voting Americans.
The protests/riots aren't that bad IMO, this kind of stuff happens. What is bad is the root cause - an elected official fighting tooth and nail to retain power after being voted out, and finding real support among a large fraction of the population.
What the Panthers did in California is not comparable at all. I encourage you to listen to the account of the day in their own words.
They came armed (nominal, as they went armed everywhere) to a peaceful prearranged meeting at the statehouse. The media turned it into a crazy narrative because black men carrying long arms were photographed inside the statehouse.
I can't help but find myself on your side on this one. After years of horrific abuse of protesters by police, and denouncement of such, I get to sit here and watch those same people turn around and denounce non-escalation just because of who the protesters are this time. Like most protests, I feel sure that the majority of the violence was committed by a relative few extremists and a lot of people were content to express their anger with perfectly legitimate shouting and standing around. Had this event been escalated it is likely a lot of those people would be dead or injured, making this whole thing a lot worse.
Sadly, I am becoming quite used to being disappointed in my countrymen.
Group A gets treated unfairly w.r.t how group B is treated.
Clearly the welcome outcome is that group A becomes treated justly, at least as justly as group B.
Yet, some members of group A wouldn't mind that at, if that option were not on the table, group B were treated at least as badly as group A. It's stupid, it's counterproductive, but hey, humans...
When group A sees another instance of group B being treated (again) better than how group A would have been treated in those circumstances, I think it's not surprising how people can get a tad angry and when you're angry, your thoughts wonder a little bit more on the dark side, right?
When some people from abroad kill people in your soil, it's quite understandable that people get angry and talk about bringing pain to people in the countries where these attackers come from.
It's that "right"? Will that create a better world? Clearly if you just found a way for that never happening again, that would be enough right? The sense of "punishment" is so deeply ingrained in our nature; it's not a prerogative of part of the political spectrum.
This whole thing was pretty harmless. The media and people who don't like the president calling it "insurrection" and other such breathless terms are giving it way more credit and import than it deserves.
As far as revolutions go, this one was... understaffed.
That one person was (at least based on what we know currently) shot dead by police. All of the HN comments about how dangerous this is and how the police needed to be more aggressive are effectively calling for more people to have died - because that's the inevitable consequence of what they want. (I've seen people in communities less polite and aggressively moderated than HN, but pulling from more or less the same tech community, outright calling for the police to open fire.)
Normal police are trained in crowd control, and they plenty of non lethal ways to achieve that. Calling for police to be more aggressive is not the same as calling for more people to be killed.
> Stood back and people show their anger, then move on with our lives -- message heard-- with minimal injury and damage.
Disagree on that point. Allowing riots creates a lot of anger on the other side of the political isle. Also, the rioters are often not representative of the majority of protestors and undermine the entire movement (think about the BLM rioters' impact on how the overall movement was perceived). They also often lead to a violation of rights; property destruction, assaults, deaths, etc. Almost nobody - on any side - wants a small number of thugs to run the show.
Agreed, the first half of MLK’s famous “a riot is a language of the unheard” quote states that the conditions existing in America which foment riots “must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots.”
Our collective goal should always be to resolve the conditions that lead to rioting. But when a riot occurs it should be stopped and dispersed as safely and expediently as possible.
It was quite the adventure watching this all on TV from Europe.
One thought that comes to mind is that I'm sure the most heavily armed nation in the world could have gotten rid of these people in no time, but perhaps they didn't because of the symbolism of the location.
Here in Brussels' main court house (a massive imposing building like the Capitol), a guy once just strolled in and shot and killed a judge (correction: a judge and a clerk, in 2010) and then just strolled out.
The minister of justice said they would not improve security because they wanted the place to remain "of the people, for the people" (paraphrased from memory, it doesn't make total sense but you get the jest of it).
I have friends working at the European parliament where at one time was a group of people protesting against the presence of Marine Le Pen, rocks in hands. There were exactly 2 (unarmed) "security guards" present who told my friend they obviously stood no chance if these people decided to charge. On another occasion 100 Kurdish protestors managed to break in to the building. But they just don't want these places to look like Fort Knox.
In the end, a guy in buffalo costume fooling around on the senate floor is better than puddles of blood.
This is a very poor take. There is a marked difference between meeting people half way and openness to alternative view points, and allowing a mob to attack and derail the proceedings of Congress with the express purpose of overturning the legal election results.
This was a shameful display by the police charged with defending the rule of law in the USA, and even more than protesters, the police who plainly allowed this to happen must be investigated and tried. Whether those are the boots on the ground or the higher ups I have no idea, but this can't be left to stand.
Given what we've seen tonight, this could have easily turned into a putsch attempt, and it would have been very hard to stop it once the mob was allowed inside the building. They could have taken senators and congressmen hostage, they could have forced them to overturn the elections in a mock session, they could have killed dissenters - it was only by luck that it turned out they were disorganized and essentially there for a stunt.
> 138 representatives —65% of GOP caucus—and 7 senators voted to discard PA. PA rules were voted in by the GOP but even the guy who got elected by them voted to throw out the ones for the president. They would have stolen that election if they had the numbers.
(The riot was an alternative approach to throwing the election by destroying the electoral college ballots https://twitter.com/SenJeffMerkley/status/134693870593264845... ; it's not clear to me whether that would be a mere paperwork hiccup or whether it could provide a pretext to really invalidate the electoral college somehow)
Each state makes 6-9 copies of the certifications that get sent to Congress. And each house of Congress gets their own stamped/sealed and certified "originals". So I would say there was next to zero chance of the ballots being destroyed having any lasting impact, other than the sheer horror of it occurring, of course.
This is an overreaction because, as the OP mentions, legislatures around the world are often not heavily secured. Protestors forcing themselves into legislative buildings is pretty common worldwide even in stable countries, for example Taiwan and Germany recently, and there are no longterm consequences at all for rule of law.
There was meaningful security in place last night in Washington DC: the legislators were evacuated to a heavily secured facility nearby.
The difference is in this case the “attack” was announced and legislators had spoken to the police in advance and been told that they were prepared.
The other difference is that not even a few months ago, police used massive shows of force against people who were unarmed (other than cameras for the reporters among them) and completely peaceful, in the same area.
Protestors didn’t force themselves into the Reichstag in Germany. There were standing in front of it and were talking selfies.
If you think those three police officers at the Reichstag would have stopped those protestors if they action had wanted to storm the building, you are delusional.
Oh, and not too long before that Greenpeace members actually climbed the Reichstag and unrolled an anti-coal banner. Just that the media didn’t frame this into “an attack on democracy”.
To attack democracy is precisely the goal of this protest, though. The democratic election is complete, the results didn’t go their way, and in the midst of the final certification of results, these people broke into the Capitol to disrupt the process. That seems like an attack on democracy to me. If not that, what was their goal?
Well to be fair, isn't it their apparent belief that the results did go their way, but <.. something conspiratorial..>? So they presumably at least notionally feel that the attack on democracy has already happened, and they are... I don't know, defending it?
They believe what they believe and they also hold the idea that if that belief is threatened by facts, there must ALWAYS be an alternate narrative that allows them to continue to believe what they believe. This is because Trump himself is strong in this means of building an internal fantasy reality and then presenting it to others (irrationally) which then either causes them to believe it or come to understand his ego is the issue here.
If you listen to him, he's constantly negating what he just said, which comes across as open to interpretation (or completely insane).
No one man or woman is above the law.
Factual information is arrived at by consensus of people. That a certain group of people in this country refuse to accept or participate in the consensus mechanism (or threaten or dismiss that mechanism) then those people are against whatever it is that forms the consensus, such as the constitution, the US Govt., etc.
This is how dictatorships are born and it would do these people well to understand that replacing their made up fears with a dictator is not going to help anyone.
The protestors in front of the German Reichtags clearly wanted to get into the building, but were stopped by the reinforced glass doors and the three police officers, who acted very differently from what I saw until now from the Capitol Police [1].
In the end the three officers in front of the Reichtag were able to act this way, because they knew that reinforcements in the form of 100 riot police were only 200 meters away. Badly positioned to prevent the initial compromise of the perimeter, but still there to handle a protest like this.
Is it common for that to happen while the legislative is meeting to confirm the next head of the executive? Were these protesters in Germany or Taiwan taking selfies with the police there? Were they also there with the expressed intent of convincing their legislature to overturn the results of the election?
Second that. Once was visiting the German parliament and just strolling around the waiting area. Suddenly a (unarmed) guard rushed from a hallway and asked for my ID. He seemed not too amused with me going through these automatically opening glass doors...
As to the infosec problems: legislature is run (even more in the US) by mostly senile, corrupt lawmakers and a staff of technically inept party groupies (or so I guess, clicking random aides linkedin-profiles). I doubt that any nationstate actor needs a raid of their offices to get to their computers (and that's why these people probably get the real national-security stuff on paper...)
Even in Switzerland was a shooting some years ago (a man shot 15 people in the parlament of Zug). Things just can happen fast und just by surprise. For me it was more surprising how long it took to get more police force to the place, I mean, it can happen suddenly are a lot of people there, but it took hours for the police.
The context is wildly different. One deranged man with a gun on a completely normal day can easily surprise security and cause surprising harm.
A well known protest on a specific day, protesting a contentious issue, while all of the legislative branch is gathered together to confirm the results of the election, which the crowd believes was fraudulent, is an entirely different thing.
Not to mention, the crowd was allowed on the steps near the entrance with no opposition, with reports of policemen taking selfies and even opening a door. Had this happened with the shooter in Zug, would the policeman doing so have been investigated? Would his superiors?
I heard a former Chief of Homeland Security of Obama's on the radio and she had an interesting take. She was surprisingly forgiving of the actions of the security staff.
The argument being that they do training exercises all the time, but there is no playbook for what to do if the president incites violence against his own Capitol. Split-second decisions made in a state of confusion and chaos which make sense from a security point of view could have enormous long term political implications. Up to a point, the risk of acting outweighs the potential reward.
I'm on the fence about this type of explanation. Individual police, I can agree were overwhelmed and were not trained or ready for this.
But as organizations (Capital Police, Metro Police, FBI, etc.) this event was broadly known to be happening all over social media well in advance of Wednesday's event. There should have been a response as soon as that crowd made it to the steps of the building.
What concerns me is how this could have played out if that rioting group was even 10% more organized than they were. Or if they were intending to destroy/damage the building beyond windows and doors. Could you imagine if instead of just taking selfies in the senate president's chair, they piled up the desks and lit them on fire?
I hope this event sparks some changes in security protocols, because now any extremist group intending to disrupt government or make a bold statement know exactly how to do it and know they'll get far enough to do some serious damage.
I think you might be missing the subtlety in argument I was relaying.
The security staff know how to deal with extremist groups. But they were not dealing with an extremist group in the traditional sense - where the overwhelming majority of the population are in agreement that their actions are wrong e.g. 9/11, Boston Marathon, Orlando nightclub. They were dealing with a group claiming to act on behalf of the leader of one party in a two party system - in other words, a very significant percentage of the population.
It wasn't failing to act, but confusion about choosing whether or not to act and to what extent. They were not prepared for a scenario where taking action could genuinely be a trigger for wide scale insurrection, violence and even civil war affecting millions - the trolley problem on steroids.
> Or if they were intending to destroy/damage the building beyond windows and doors.
They were - pipebombs and molotov cocktails were recovered. But as uncomfortable as it feels, it might not have been as simple as shooting the bad guys.
> But as organizations (Capital Police, Metro Police, FBI, etc.) this event was broadly known to be happening all over social media well in advance of Wednesday's event.
Exactly my take on this. And why I got so baffled it actually happened. I, a Brazilian living in Sweden with a passing interest in US politics (just due to its repercussions to my life and countries), was aware of the radio chatter that something like this was bubbling. How can security forces of the most powerful country on Earth's history let this roll?
Given that this was an entirely predictable series of events, I think it's pretty damning in itself that there was no playbook to deal with this sort of uprising.
While at the individual level it probably makes sense to err on the side of inaction, at the organizational level this is a massive failure.
People used to call this “deescalation” and considered it the prime example of how to deal with protesters. When protesters are taking selfies with the cops then something is clearing going right.
On the other hand, an unarmed protestor was shot and killed, but almost certainly there will be no riots or sacking of small town centers in response.
The Federal courthouse was under constant siege for weeks in Portland, but that was “mostly peaceful”. This on the other hand was clearly a “mob” according to NYT.
I just want to see people be consistent with how they describe and respond to protesters regardless of the political affiliation of the protest.
Relative to the scale of rioting throughout 2020 this was objectively pretty tame, minus the fatal shooting. At least you can say it wasn’t a targeted assassination unlike other cases last year.
'Objectively pretty tame'? That's a pretty rich. It's only 'tame' because of the police treated these (mostly white) protestors with kid gloves, and because the barricaded doors allowed a safe retreat of the congresspeople. Your portrayal of the shooting of a woman actively trying to smash into the floor of the senate with the senators and VPOTUS inside as equatable to police brutality is laughable. These people were trying (fruitlessly) to stage a violent subversion of democracy and openly threatened the highest elected officials in the nation.
> Your portrayal of the shooting of a woman actively trying to smash into the floor of the senate with the senators and VPOTUS inside as equatable to police brutality is laughable.
Well, another recent example of "police brutality" was shooting a guy holding a knife who was trying to get into a car with kids, after attempting nonlethal takedowns. I think that's quite comparable.
> These people were trying (fruitlessly) to stage a violent subversion of democracy and openly threatened the highest elected officials in the nation.
You're giving them too much credit. They got in. Then what? It was like a carnival, walking off with furniture, posing for pictures, smiling while sitting in important chairs. Lots of screaming, a few broken windows.
In a country where you can buy guns in supermarkets, they didn't fire a single shot. They could have set fire to the place, taken people hostage. It could have been so much worse.
Most of those people probably couldn't subvert or overturn anything more than a paper bag.
Perhaps if the insurgents had faced the same violent police response as BLM protestors the outcome would have been very different. But if the police let you in instead of engaging in violent escalation, why not pose for pictures and have a chat?
That is irrelevant. The intent was to overturn the election. The fact that they were incompetent or not sufficiently dedicated to their cause to be willing to die for it is no excuse for letting it get to where it did.
> In a country where you can buy guns in supermarkets
You can also buy ps5’s in supermarkets. Is the absurd part that you could buy non food related items in a supermarket or that supermarkets have devolved into a one stop shop for everything?
>They got in, then what? they didn't fire a single shot
Then: four people killed
There are lots of ways to do harm without shooting. Many politicians are elder. Somebody could have suffered a heart attack, Biden for example... and then what?.
And some of the rioters were trained professional soldiers. Do they had access to harmful substances?, chemical poisons?, Nobody knows. Do we remember the 2001 Anthrax mail attacks to democrat senators and journalists finally linked to a Fort Detrick employee?.
In fact is even easier, in the middle of a pandemic just collaborating to spread a lethal virus between smiles and selfies would do the job. Videos show people touching three times each inch of the same knob door in a minute for no evident reason.
Those people was armed, organized, directed and manipulated.
They shot one, hosed them all down with tear gas and OC to the point of a police officer needing medical attention for too much OC exposure, and 3 other protestors are dead for unlisted causes.
If that had happened when protestors burned down a police station, destroyed miles of shops, threw molotov cocktails at a federal courthouse or any of the other riots in the past few months, there would be half of our politicians shouting to end all policing.
About as many as were trying to violently break into an in-session senate floor accompanied by an angry, armed mob intent on overthrowing the government.
Sorry, were the protestors who burned down a police station or occupied a block of Seattle unarmed? I'm pretty sure they had rifles, compared to our insurrectionists which had.. flagpoles?
Or is trespassing on federal property worth a death sentence now?
It’s always a tragedy when police have to kill a assailant instead of apprehending them. Particularly when the assailant is unarmed.
There have been countless situations more dangerous to the lives of police or bystanders than this, where the assailant was not killed. But perhaps none with so many “important” people in the same room.
They could have easily arrested her. They shot and killed her instead. She had no weapon and had made no physical contact with any officer. Just shot as she came through the door.
At the same time, there are a half dozen well armed officers on the same side of the door as the protestors who are not being attacked and freely arrive at the scene within seconds of the shooting.
"I just want to see people be consistent with how they describe and respond to protesters regardless of the political affiliation of the protest."
You want people fighting in the streets for social and racial justice in the face of quantifiable repression to be treated the same as people storming the national Capitol to overturn an election result they don't like based on provable lies?
> with the express purpose of overturning the legal election results.
I guess the answer is... calm down? A few hundred (even heavily armed) people do not stand a chance changing the results of the election, or almost anything in the US.
The event was for show. Although, unfortunately, one of them died. But it should remain that way and there is no reason to escalate further. (I guess we already have precedents of how escalation usually lead to innocent deaths).
> A few hundred (even heavily armed) people do not stand a chance changing the results of the election, or almost anything in the US.
This is not the issue here. It is not even that the outgoing president very deliberately provoked the attack, as well as a much wider opposition to the democratic process. The biggest problem is that the president was actively supported, in his provocation, by more than a few US senators, along with elected officials of several states (some of whom are plausible presidential candidates themselves.)
There is little doubt that if any of the extra-legal or simply bogus attempts to overthrow the election had succeeded, these senators, and most likely the republican party as a whole, would have been happy to go along with that act, in what would, in reality, have been a coup d'état.
Even if the supreme court put a stop to it - which is not a certainty - much damage would have been done.
>There is little doubt that if any of the extra-legal or simply bogus attempts to overthrow the election had succeeded, these senators, and most likely the republican party as a whole, would have been happy to go along with that act, in what would, in reality, have been a coup d'état.
You could describe the 2000 election as a successful bogus attempt to overthrow an election. Has America already had a coup d'etat?
In 2000 it was unclear who actually won because the Florida vote count was very close. No one was alleging that one side or the other was cheating, and everyone was in agreement that whoever got the most votes should be president. Also, Al Gore, as the outgoing Vice President, presided over the same certification proceeding that Trump and his followers disrupted yesterday. In January 2001, that proceeding went without a hitch even though the loser of the election was in charge of it.
What would have happened if they had pushed into the room? What would have happened if they had had firearms on them? What if they had been able to grab just a few congressmen at gun point?
Sure, I'm not proposing to escalate and it's wonderful that it is over with no real effects. But the security handling was atrocious, and the results would have been much worse if the mob were only slightly more organized and intent on bloodshed.
I'm not claiming that they would have succeeded to actually install Donald Trump for a second term. But I do believe that they could have forced a mock result to eb proclaimed on the senate floor, creating a much larger problem for the future and giving much more power to their narrative.
Also, note that the quote from me was supposed to reinforce the idea that there were compelling reasons for the police to take their presence as a serious threat. These weren't protesters chanting to save the whales, they were protesters asking for the election to be overturned (even if I agree with you that they had no real chance of achieving this goal).
I admit to being a little shocked at the glibness of this statement. As a non-USian, I see a profound shock among other thoughtful non-USians that it has come to this. Regardless of political affiliation, I believe most honest, ordinary non-USians have held in high regard the robustness of the American democratic system and its resilience to the wholesale corruption that plagues many other countries. The democratic ideal, and America as exemplar, has always been held in lofty regard. However, I’m more certain than ever that this ideal has now been firmly relegated to a historical oddity. A 200 year blip in the record of human governance, with a forthcoming return to mean. Watching this slow motion disaster unfold has mad me very, very sad.
I'm not so much shocked as tired. This is like 9/11 with a four year warning of the planes arriving and being able to watch them on Flightradar, towing a huge sign saying "we're going to crash this baby into the Pentagon". And nobody doing anything about it because that would mean that "both sides" weren't in fact equal.
Pleasantly surprised that the death toll was only four, of which only one was shot; much better than the regular death toll of single mass shooter incidents.
How is it a 9/11? In 9/11 thousands of people died, postcard-symbolic buildings demolished by foreign terrorists. Here... A few hundred people strolled around in the Capitol and 4 people died.
Ah, but how many of those people died of 9/11 or just with 9/11? How many of them had pre-existing conditions? Besides, that's just one day of COVID. Was it worth closing the skies and invading Iraq for a mere three thousand people some of whom would have died anyway?
... no, I probably shouldn't joke about this, however dark, but if there's one thing that last year has made clear is that death tolls barely move the needle politically and that symbols stick in people's heads and effect real change. Even if the symbols aren't tied to underlying reality. The revenge of Baudrillard.
The symbolism of protestors in the capitol was "shocking" upthread. I worry that next month we'll have forgotten about it because something worse will have happened. We've already moved on from the guy who blew up a telephone exchange, and the other occupations of state capitols, and those guys who tried to kidnap a state governor despite being infiltrated by the FBI.
(For the avoidance of doubt, I am with John Donne that anyone's death diminishes us, but avoidable and preventable deaths doubly so, which is why I'm in favour of responsible politics and the politicisation of preventable deaths)
People care about whatever they are told to care about by the media or whatever social media algorithms shove onto their feed.
Whole countries can freak out about the disappearance of one child or a car accident caused by some random intoxicated person and then everybody talks about their names, there are political leaders chiming in etc. Whole countries can come together to donate millions for the treatment of a rare disease of a single child. It's kinda random.
Humans are not calibrated to care about actual stats, just stories. A good story of one person can weigh more than a boring story of millions.
It's all theater, nothing more, whichever party wins... It's circus.
> Regardless of political affiliation, I believe most honest, ordinary non-USians have held in high regard the robustness of the American democratic system and its resilience to the wholesale corruption that plagues many other countries. The democratic ideal, and America as exemplar, has always been held in lofty regard
Where are you from, how old are you? Watching too many Hollywood hero movies?
I think the above attitude is less common outside the US than within. It's usually Americans who view themselves as through the lens of American exceptionalism, the rightful police of the world, just bringing democracy everywhere out of altruism and a care for people everywhere etc.
In Europe, the US is definitely seen in a more ambivalent light with lots of corruption etc.
I live in Europe, and the universal reaction I saw in my circle was shock. People don't think the US is perfect, but the events of yesterday are completely outside the range of what they expect to see in the US.
What exactly? They broke into a building and wandered about a bit. They didn't take any politician hostage, didn't burn down the building, etc. They were like unruly children.
Aren't you shocked to see thousands of cars burned in France over NYE? About seeing the American riots last summer?
It's blown out of proportion. This Trumpist crowd was disorganized. They didn't have a plan, didn't have leaders, didn't have demands or any credible way to win. Life goes on.
They had a plan, albeit an insane one, a leader, albeit an insane one, demands (change the election result), and a credible way to win (abduct or kill senators in order to change the outcome of votes). It's all very "we took six of the seven control rods out of the reactor and nothing happened!"
Fundamental disagree. They didn't even scratch the surface. These buildings, the senators etc are all symbolic. They are expressions of the power relations, not the originators of it. Even if they do say stuff under threat, that would not have a real effect. It would be overturned by the Supreme Court or whatever.
There is no way to make Trump win this way and actually get obedience from the institutions of the country. They would just not recognize Trump, even if somehow senators, under duress, said he won.
It was 0 rods of the 7. Power is not in the buildings. It's in the network of interests of powerful people in the background across the country.
They stormed the Capitol, trying to disrupt the process by which the President is chosen. How many times have you seen this happen before in the US? For me personally, it's zero.
France has famously unstable politics, which is why they are on their fifth Republic. No one was surprised to see something like BLM because the US has long-running problems with racism. But this? This was new.
It was for show, but the police allowed it to go way too far. Not to mention, where was all the surveillance power of the NSA to provide advance warning?
The disturbing part of what happened yesterday was not that a bunch of assholes formed a mob to disrupt Congress. The disturbing part is that they were obviously allowed to do so.
The NSA is officially not supposed to be spying on the citizens of the USA. That’s the FBI’s job technically... as the USA has no dedicated domestic intelligence agency. There are a number of agencies with limited domestic intelligence roles tasks with specific kinds of intelligence work such as the intelligence branches of the US Treasury, the Department of Energy, and the Coast Guard... but there’s no USA agency equivalent of the United Kingdom’s MI5.
To extend the comparison, the CIA is roughly the USA’a MI6 and the NSA is very roughly equivalent to the GCHQ but not exactly as the NSA are not meant to spy domestically while the GCHQ don’t have that explicit limitation.
They didn't need to spy. They already knew and didn't care. The president held a speech in the morning, addressing his supporters who had traveled from all over the country to come to Washington. He told the crowd to storm the Capitol over the loudspeaker, and that he would lead them in doing so. He didn't. Instead he returned to the White House. But the crowd did what they were told anyway. (People do that a lot these days. They do what they're told.)
Regardless of what it officially is and is not supposed to do, the NSA and not the FBI is the organization that developed programs like PRISM.
The point is that the US federal government has a huge intelligence organization, with a huge amount of resources invested in dragnet data collection and surveillance on anyone and everyone.
The specific 3-letter organization that is technically supposed to be looking at and taking action based on that data isn't that relevant.
No offense, but I don’t think you understand the gravity of what happened. The fact that a mob of people, attempted to overturn the results of an election, is in itself a pretty serious event. That they were unlikely to succeed doesn’t cancel out the fact that they could have easily started a shootout with Congress people inside, that law enforcement seemed so unprepared to deal with a situation that had been telegraphed for so long, that as the article points out this has serious infosec implications, and that the sitting president of the US helped instigate an attempted coup.
It is symbolic, but I have particularly little sympathy for their stunt.
It wasn't a protest of a bill, or a protest for a particular legislative action. It was a protest against the election of the President itself - against all evidence, all facts, and all testimony from just about every official except the President, who egged this on.
I didn't want to see heads rolling, but I was shocked at how delicately they were handled - cops even let them through barricades.
Contrast this with left-wing protesters and their treatment by cops, and you see a much different picture, of people walking or sitting down getting pepper sprayed, or 70-something men getting shoved to the ground in a public square by a team of armored officers.
There are a number of reasons to be angry at this stunt, and a number of conclusions to draw from it. First thing is first, if we had any kind of collective conscience, Trump would be impeached today.
Rioters inflamed by years of Trump's gross lies storm the Capitol, demanding to overturn the results of the election, four die, and your response is, "Calm down"?
One consideration here is that lack of consequences enables escalation - if it turns out that this disruption is not prosecuted and punished, then (as their core reasons for doing so have not changed) they are going to be emboldened and repeat similar acts with more force.
Breaking the loop requires a deterrent, not only verbal "we will not stand for this".
There needs to be some consequences here. Maybe it was just for show, and turned out harmless, whatever. Regardless, the people who participated in this, and those who incited them, should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Otherwise this sort of thing will happen again, and next time it may not be so harmless.
I agree 100%. Of course that is what lots of people have said previously about similar incidents coming from the left but calls for prosecution and stronger police tactics were dismissed in favor of the less-than-peaceful actions because "reasons".
Personally I'm exhausted at trying to "score" the actions of two teams when in fact I really don't want either team to win. It has become an absurd attempt to decide which team is less awful while each side fools itself into thinking it exclusively represents political virtue.
I'm hoping that events don't escalate further and that perhaps there is some opportunity for the emergence of some alternate political parties and more thoughtful political leadership in order to let the existing parties fade into history.
Regardless of your opinion of BLM, there's a huge difference between rioting in the streets, and rioting in the fucking Capitol building while Congress is in session.
The latter seems to wander dangerously close to treason, depending on their goals.
I'm not sure I see the same huge difference you describe. The streets are a shared publicly owned resource just as the Capitol is. People who could be identified acting lawlessly in either situation should be prosecuted to the full extent with an eye towards stopping lawless idiocy.
Just for clarity: People standing peacefully nearby whose worst law-break is a curfew violation? I don't think they should face any consequences, which I realize makes the curfew on its own fairly toothless, but that's already the case now. But when you pick up a rock or bottle and throw it at police, that's AB-DW on police in my book. (Same thing with criminal trespass and malicious destruction of property for the events yesterday.)
Basically, if you're acting like a lawless idiot, I don't care what your shirt says or what sign you're carrying while you do it.
> The streets are a shared publicly owned resource just as the Capitol is.
There's one absolutely huge difference here, and that is that the streets are designated for public access, while the seat of government and the offices of elected representatives are not.
Just because something is publicly owned does not make it legal to access, protest in, or damage. Consider some other publicly-owned properties: nuclear missile sites, courtrooms, the President's bedroom, police evidence rooms.
This is such an obvious distinction I am puzzled why it apparently needs pointing out.
If fewer than 100 people are charged as a result of yesterday's events, I agree that's a grave miscarriage of justice.
I don't care if they're arrested right now (as the violence has ended), but I care greatly that they are eventually charged and that those facts are transparently shared with the public.
Yes, my confusion is that mass arrests happened during BLM protests and after them. In this case during the protests there were no similar actions and that’s what people are pointing out as disproportionate.
In interviews on C-SPAN last night, the DC Attorney General (an elected official by the city) made clear that many of yesterday's actions fall under his jurisdiction, but that (because DC is a federal district directly controlled by the executive branch) he is only able to operate under the guidance of the US Attorney for the District of Columbia, a Trump appointee named Michael Sherwin [0]
I think you place too much emphasis on the symbolism of the capitol building. There was far less damage done to the Capitol (fortunately) than was done in the streets during BLM riots.
And, the police killed an unarmed woman -- no outrage for that?
From what I understand (and I realize that more will come out over time), she was shot while actively trying to breach into a room that she knew she was not authorized to enter and which was secured and defended by armed police.
At some point, an element of “what did they think would or should happen?” has to be considered.
I agree -- and the same thought should occur to someone punching a police officer during an arrest, or grabbing the officer's gun, running away, etc., right?
It seems that usually when those things happen, however, that itself is cause for riots.
Yes with an asterisk. I put punching a police officer or grabbing for their gun into a very different category than running away. In my worldview, the first two, standing alone, subject you to lawful use of force, including deadly force if necessary. The last subjects you to being chased but not to the lawful use of deadly force merely as a result of running away.
The difference is that we could have prevented the wildfire by putting out the small fires in the first place instead of viewing them as legitimate activities.
Can we ditch the "treason" talk? It is just technically inaccurate. I wouldn't even say "insurrection". This was basically a low-grade riot at a symbolically significant location. Everyone should be prosecuted, including perhaps the people responsible for the atrocious police preparation and response. Even if the mob had managed to physically control the building there was no way that would have resulted in any actual change in the proceedings.
I'm not going to defend Trump on this either, but it is a mistake to think that Trump is the source of the discontent. He has taken advantage of the discontent but he isn't the source.
There are actually dozens of arrests and plenty of evidence, self incriminating evidence floating around the social media. It remains to be seen what the outcome of these arrests will be. If they're arrested and let go it would be indeed weird and inviting for more of this in the future.
Luckily the difference in response is absolutely not emblematic of any serious structural issues in American policing, and we can all move on from this with no real reforms.
Were the BLM protests trying to violently overturn the election and install their preferred candidate?
There can be no equivocation between a protest sparked by continued police brutality against citizens; and a protest sparked by massive lies from a leader with fascistic tendencies trying to overturn his democratic loss.
One is a net social good, even if it had deplorable bouts of violence; the other is strictly a social evil.
This is also your perception that the racism isn't whitespread. Step into the shoes of a dark skinned person and we'll see what your perception is then.
Are those 3 people not related in any way to this incident? As far as I can tell the 4 deaths were directly related to the protest. The one person in the US Capitol was shot and was pronounced dead later on. Does it make a difference that not all 4 were shot in the same place?
"Defund the police" doesn't mean eliminating the police, or reducing their ability to respond to in-progress violence.
It means reducing the scope of the police so that they aren't the ones dealing with things like homelessness and mental illness, things that they usually are not trained to deal with.
>Given what we've seen tonight, this could have easily turned into a putsch attempt
No, not really.
The US government isn't a dictatorship, and power is not held by a narrow few people. More importantly, the whole government is structured to prevent someone making themself king.
Let's say that the worst case scenario had happened, and the terrorists had taken members of congress hostage and used the situation to demand that Trump be retained in power indefinitely.
They wouldn't have any leverage beyond the ordinary because in the US, our political officials are easily replaced. In fact, the problem we usually have is that they aren't replaced often enough.
Holding the capital building and the entire congress hostage doesn't mean they have control of the US... it only means they control a building and some hostages.
That's the thing that so many anarchist/white supremacist/revolutionary plots in the US fail to consider... that you can't decapitate the US government and then just take the place of the people you killed, because the rest of the country will just refuse to follow you.
The only way a Germany-style takeover of the government is really possible is with years of slow changes... that has been happening, but hopefully now that it's out in the open we can do something about it.
Say they somehow successfully forced congress to hold their meeting and vote not to certify the elector vote; then, they would force them to hold a vote for the president and 'officially' nominate Donald Trump.
What would happen next? Who would cancel these acts of Congress? What if the Supreme Court (filled with partisan judges) decided to accept the results as well?
IANAL, but i think there's an argument to be made that a congressional vote held under duress (like any other contract) is invalid.
Ultimately, the question of who controls the US government (and its monopoly on the legitimate use of force) falls to "who can order the army to collect taxes from the states". In the absence (or ambiguity) of guidance from the representatives of the states, the decision would come down to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the US armed forces, to decide whose orders he takes and to give the nuclear football to somebody.
HN desiring more authoritarian rule simply because it was the other side. I think the election fraud accusations are completely bogus, but holy shit, do you people listen to yourselves??
Who here is asking for authoritarian rule? Demanding that police protect democratic institutions from fascist mobs is not 'authoritarianism' by any stretch of the imagination.
It is not acceptable for the certification of the legal election to even be delayed as it has by a mob.
I assure you that I would believe the same if pro-Hillary crowds would have amassed in hopes of convincing or forcing Congress to overturn the electors vote in 2016. Especially if police had done little to deter them.
You have to remember we spent most of 2020 being gaslit by the media about “mostly peaceful protests” where people were being assassinated, $2 billion in property damage, a Federal courthouse attacked for weeks, and entire city blocks seized for days by protestors.
After spending the last 4 years hearing that Trump conspired with the Russians to steal his election.
But this suddenly is a mob committing treason and sedition.
The protests were mostly peaceful, which still leaves room for plenty of looting and killing. Don't forget that a lot of the killing was actually performed by policemen and fascist groups/individuals AGAINST the protesters.
The attacked federal courthouse is also a nice contrast - despite weeks of trying, the protesters never made it inside the courthouse. The fascists trying fruiessly to overthrow the election last night however made it inside Congress while it was in session.
The Russia conspiracy theory was a massive red herring, but it also didn't succeed in motivating people to try to overturn the election. Hillary Clinton conceded her election immediately following the result estimates, and Obama immediately started the transition process with Trump's people. There were no lawsuits seeking to disenfranchise 5 million voters for vague reasons.
The democratic quibbling about Trump's legitimacy was just that - quibbling. To compare this to what Trump and his cronies have been doing since the election is laughable.
Turns out that Viking Man is actually a paid actor from Arizona. I don’t think you could make this stuff up if you tried.
First unarmed person shot to death by police in 2021 was Ashli Babbit.
I think you can choose to take a principled stand in support of protestors, or maybe you can call people who shutdown courts or congress and takeover city blocks domestic terrorists, but you don’t get to pick and choose one side or the other depending on whether you agree with the protestors or not.
Yes, but that is just a stroke of luck, it's not something that should be relied on. Just like Trump's attempts to overturn the elections - they are scary as a principle, even though in practice they were so laughably incompetent.
The next fascist president may be less incompetent and achieve far more sinister goals.
While none of his objections had any legal merit, what exactly is scary in principle about using the law as it written to contest the results of an election? The laws are there for a reason and unless a law was broken I fail to see what the issue is?
I am comforted by the fact that our electoral institutions appear to be holding as they were designed to. It proves why separation of power is needed, and why it is critical.
Sadly it has been historically the democrats that want to tear down this separation for political expedience, one of the reasons Trump had sooo much power in the first place is decades and decades of consolidation of power into both the federal government and the presidency
The harm is elevating unfounded claims of a stolen election leading millions of people to believe something was actually stolen from them at a time when partisanship and distrust of people with different political views is already at a boil. It’s reckless and irresponsible.
I think Trump's legal team was completely incompetent
However to believe there was no legit legal claims in an election where the rules where being rewritten on the fly often times with no legislative oversight at all by governor executive fiat is completely delusional
There are reasonable questions about the rules, process and procedures used in the last election.
There was a lot that was done over the last year that eroded trust in this election, the objections on the day of the electoral count being the final perfunctory domino.
Trust in a system has to be earned, and the way that we go about setting the rules for voting, counting valid votes, and reporting the count has been frankly a very chaotic process. It’s no doubt millions of people doubt the outcome.
But this isn’t really anything new. In 2016 50% of Democrats believed that it was somewhat or highly likely that Russians directly altered vote totals to elect Trump.
Harry Reid said there’s “no question” in his mind that Russian hackers covertly altered the 2016 vote count. “I think one reason the elections weren’t what they should have been was because the Russians manipulated the votes. It’s that simple.”
I hope you are being willfully disingenuous with those arguments. Parsing words in just the right way to make a partial point does not count as compelling evidence for your alternate reality.
Not at all. Here’s a good example, from AG of PA Josh Shapiro;
> @RepFredKeller LIE: PA officials violated the law in regards to signature verification on mail-in ballots.
FACT: Our Election Code-which a Republican-controlled state legislature revised in 2019-does not provide for rejecting mail-in ballots based on signature verification.
I don’t see how this is supposed to build trust that the election was run fairly and securely, in fact quite the opposite.
My point is not to debate specific failures. My point is it’s the responsibility of the systems and processes in place in the electoral system to instill trust in the populace that there is no fraud in the voting or the counting.
Instead, people were lied to about how votes would be cast, lied to about how votes would be counted, and the rules were changed arbitrarily in many places up to the final days and even hours of actual voting.
Again, my point is not how much fraud was actually present. But you can have a system people mostly trust even if they don’t like the outcome, or you can do things like not even checking the signature on millions of mail-in ballots.
Signature checking is stupid and pointless. Disenfranchising someone because their signature doesn’t match some record on file is ridiculous. The signature verification itself has many many issues on its own.
The problem is stating without evidence that the signatures are absolutely fraudulent. The claims made by Trump and the GOP over the last decade about voter fraud are to blame.
The president and his cronies have repeatedly claimed in public that they have evidence of massive fraud. They have not even attempted to claim any of these in court, where these claims would have been immediately discovered as outright fabrications.
Also, Trump has sought to buy out election officials with 'gifts', has cajoled and petitioned various others to ask for votes to be thrown out or 'discovered', has tried to convince congressmen and senators to overturn the result of the vote, has cobtemplated invoking marshal law and redoing the election and so on.
In all of this he has been successful in conning a large number of people that the most important democratic institution, the vote, has been stolen from them by the federal government and several states. They were convinced enough that they tried attacking Congress to force it to overturn the results.
If these are not aspects of an attempted coup, I don't know how they should be interpreted.
> While none of his objections had any legal merit, what exactly is scary in principle about using the law as it written to contest the results of an election?
But that's not what happened. What really happened was that Donald Trump and his lawyers repeatedly committed perjury and barratry by deliberately filing cases that were either false or meaningless.
Any petitioner acting in good faith needs their day in court.
There are already penalties in law for people who attempt to abuse the court system for their own benefit and these penalties need to be applied with maximum force to the Trump administration and their legal "professionals".
Exactly the entire force should be dismissed (with no pension) and the senior leadership should be left alone in an office with a bottle of whisky and their side arm
I hate authority as much as the next, but when they keep people out we complain about their brutality, when they let people in we urge them to suicide. No one in their right mind would want such a job, thus we get the people who aren't.
Have you heard any information about any of the thousands of legislators, Capitol employees, media members or any of the other legitimate occupants of the Capitol building being hurt, killed, or even being in unwilling contact with the insurrectionists? If not, than the Capitol Police did their primary job effectively, which probably hurt their ability to do their other job (maintaining a secure perimeter around the building).
The GP is way off base suggesting both the dismissal and suicide of the entire police force responsible.
There is a massive difference between police keeping people out of a public building and police actively attacking even quasi-peaceful protesters like we've seen a lot of times during the BLM protests. I, for one, don't have a real problem with police launching tear gas at BLM protesters trying to enter the Portland courthouse. I do have a problem with police shooting rubber bullets and throwing tear gas at protesters on the streets chanting.
I'm really getting tired of the what-about-ism here. They should ALL be prosecuted. Any violent protestors. Anyone that does property damage.
Anyone protesting in a non-violent way should be allowed to do so.
What we are seeing instead is peaceful, non-violent BLM protesters and journalists are shot and teargassed. Violent protestors are allowed to get away without prosecution. And Trump insurrectionists are allowed to walk into the most important federal building in the country, and then walk out.
This is insane. As a country, we no longer know wrong from right, or up from down, or true from false. That is the definition of a major mental pathology.
This is way out of proportion, and you're suggesting this without even waiting for a formal investigation, which is almost hypocritical.
The whole point is that we should re-establish the supremacy of the rule of law. What happened last night was an assault on this. Enacting your suggestion would be the same.
How is this different than the very large and often violent protests that have been taking place around the country in major cities, often in front of legislative areas, yet law enforcement has by and large allowed the property damage and violence to proceed without intervention, precisrly because they do not want to escalate tensions? None of it is good, but we should be consistent in requesting law enforcement to draw down every such violent mob, not just the partisan favorite.
The problem is that law enforcement is incompetent. They are provocative against the peaceful and ineffective against the violent. Pretty much the worst of both worlds.
I think there's an argument to be made that the response at the Capitol was what you want from a police force. The Capitol Police have a dual role as bodyguards (for legislators, their staff, other employees of the legislative branch, and the journalists and media covering them) and as security guards (for the buildings of the Capitol complex). Given that as far as I can tell none of the people who were there to do the business of operating the US government were injured, and that almost all were successfully evacuated, it seems they did that first (and more important) job excessively well.
The second job is more difficult to do effectively (with the potential that some of the protesters were armed, any armed response could have escalated into an actual battle), and was almost certainly compromised by the absence of the personnel needed to evacuate and secure the legitimate occupants of the complex (I don't see any numbers at a quick glance, but almost certainly thousands of people on what was a normal workday until 2:30PM).
Not to mention the inexplicable absence of last summer's no-badge secret police in guarding this protest, and an unwillingness of the executive branch to provide requested national guard allocations to support the Capitol Police.
Right, if invading the nation's capital building for a few hours is considered insurrection, then much more so is taking over the part of Portland around the mayor's office, along with property destruction and violence towards other citizens. If we want to get technical, the latter is most definitely the sort of insurrection that would allow lawful military intervention by the president.
I did not say that the police should have quashed the protest or attacked it violently.
That does not mean that they should have ever allowed protesters to attack the Capitol building while Congress was in session.
It's also important that the BLM protests were not about wanting to overturn the results of the election and install their preferred candidates. The cause that is at least proclaimed by a protest movement matters, it is not just a detail when considering a valid response to it. And even so, any police officers who fought BLM protesters to keep them from attacking democratic institutions, especially those in session, were fully justified.
> but perhaps they didn't because of the symbolism of the location.
I think there were a number of things going on, but one of the not to be discounted is that individual police officers probably had a lot of sympathy for the protestors. There are pictures of police officers taking selfies with protestors etc. They saw each other as sharing similar politics and backgrounds. Very different from the individual police officers attitudes toward Black Lives Matter protests.
Note I am not saying it was some kind of conspiracy with orders from abovve, I am saying individual police sympathies in aggregate led to much increased tolerance.
In many cases in the USA the cops are quite happy to create puddles of blood, for better or worse (and it's usually worse).
Note I am also not saying they "should" have created puddles of blood here.
I completely agree with this take. 85% of police officers voted for Tump in 2016.
Just from personal experience, I've noticed a growing animosity from police pushing back on the reform movements happening across the country. I've heard officers refusing to be involved in psychiatric calls due to changes in use of force laws which could hold them personally accountable. Instead of working to find a legal solution, their attitude seems to be one of revenge and their actions a punitive measure on the electorate and government which chose to enact those laws.
There is a culture of us vs. them that is being focused towards politicians and reformists. I hope it's not a pervasive one.
It does beg the question; if your the leader of a political faction, who is currently faced off against another faction which has spent the last something years courting the prime authority figures in the region, what's the next tactical step after that faction starts starting shit and those authority figures who are tasked with stopping said shit refuse to act? Is the only solution to quickly bootstrap your own brand of authority figures and hope yours is bigger than theirs?
Very few police officers actually live in the area they work in. Most live far outside the city in the suburbs or more red areas. Either due to cost of living or politics. This often contributes to the "us vs them" divide because the people policing neighborhoods are often from different areas, ethnicity, incomes and political leanings.
Even in places like Chicago where there is a residency requirement, most officers tend to live in "cop and firemen" neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city. This has some predictable consequences: https://blockclubchicago.org/2018/12/20/police-heavy-wards-g...
> That's likely a national statistic. Remember, these are police in DC, a very liberal area.
Still cops. I personally know two DC area cops who are quite red. Remember, police organizations have been pushing the idea that anyone who protests police brutality is anti-cop and the right wing have more or less 100% stood by them or encouraged them.
It says that 84% of responding email-registered readers of POLICE MAGAZINE indicated that that they would vote for Trump. That's not the same as what you said at all.
This magazine "emailed 59,238 readers". There are more than 10x that many full-time police officers in the US. Can one conclude that the responding fraction of this tiny-circulation magazine's readership is statistically representative of all police officers in the country?
It's not surprising that police don't side with Democrats who vilify them for defending themselves, and refuse to respond to psychiatric calls that might make them a target. Consider the killing of Walter Wallace, one of the "psychiatric incidents" you're talking about:
> Several 9-1-1 calls were made by Wallace's sister, brother, and neighbor, telling dispatchers that Wallace was assaulting his parents
> The two officers arrived in the area to respond to a domestic dispute. When they arrived, Wallace walked out of his house carrying a knife. The two officers backed away while telling him to drop the knife, and as Wallace walked in their direction, each officer fired several rounds at Wallace, hitting him in the shoulder and chest. He later died from his wounds in the hospital. Wallace's family stated that Wallace was having a mental health crisis.
> Protests and demonstrations against police brutality and institutional racism in response to Wallace's killing took place across Philadelphia throughout late October.
> The then-presidential nominee Joe Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris published a joint statement saying, "Our hearts are broken for the family of Walter Wallace Jr... We cannot accept that in this country a mental health crisis ends in death."[34]
Edit: And it really says something about our ability to discuss facts on Hacker News when quotes from Wikipedia and a body cam video are downvoted to invisibility.
> It's not surprising that police don't side with Democrats who vilify them for defending themselves
I honestly don't disagree with this. However, I think it's possible to believe that police are abdicating their duty instead of handling it like proper authority figures while simultaneously believing that the harsh rhetoric of some reformists isn't helping the situation.
This cuts both ways since, as your comment indicates, we always blame "Democrats" or "Republicans" instead of identifying actual problematic behavior. "Democrats" are no more to blame for this than "Republicans" with their "thin blue line" which quite obviously pits the police against some underworld of crime (or, at this point, the "radical left") instead of presenting the reality that police work for and with the community.
> Consider the killing of Walter Wallace, one of the "psychiatric incidents" you're talking about
Cases like this are a very real concern amongst police, EMS and fire in many jurisdictions. I don't think it should be swept under the rug. On the other hand, police, in particular, have vast amounts of leeway and are often not held accountable (certainly not criminally) in many cases that go the opposite direction of the one you describe. This is evident to everyone reading this, I'm sure.
There are no easy solutions but I'm tired of police departments acting entitled. Refusing to perform your job and acting like the legislature + the reform minded public is your enemy does not help anyone. Responsibility lies in police chiefs, police unions/brotherhoods, and the executive and legislative bodies of our local governments to work together.
A knife wielded as a weapon within 20ft of you is very definitely a lethal threat. I don't know the circumstances of this particular situation very well, but if I shot someone coming at me with a knife and an intent to harm I'd be well justified in doing so.
You aren’t a cop. I’m 100% in agreement that if a citizen gets attacked by a knife wielder, the use of lethal force in defense is fine. However cops are professional peace keepers. They have training, equipment and numbers on their side. You can watch videos of European cops dealing with a knife threat, it’s really not hard.
Here in Germany, people wielding knives get killed from time to time as well. Pepper spray tends to get used first, and I do not remember any case where a dozen rounds were fired[1] (German police fire on the order of 50 rounds total per year, cf https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffengebrauch_der_Polizei_in_... ).
Never having been in a knife fight, I'm not going to speculate or second guess people who put their lives on the line. What's your expertise in this area?
No expertise, but just offhand one could use beanbags, rubber bullets, tear gas, pepper spray, tranquilizers, etc - Is there a good reason that these are not options? Why jump straight to shooting someone multiple times? Maybe I’m just not understanding something.
I don't know how effective any of those are at stopping someone who intends to hurt you, but Tasers, which were specifically discussed because the officers weren't carrying any and some people thought they might have helped, apparently are only between 50% to 75% effective.[1] That's a big risk when someone is only a few steps away.
That is only with the shooty prongs. Get right in there and a taser works 100% of the time. Hit 'em in the spine and the legs drop out. The problem is cops are too concerned about their own safety. They are cowards, and when they get scared they shoot.
Public and local priorities determine budgets. Departmental budgets and priorities determine what equipment is purchased and equipped, and the degree to which their usage is trained. Training and official departmental policy determine the degree to which de-escalation is a priority, and whether the officers are obligated to follow an escalation policy in which tools they employ, or if they're permitted a toolkit approach.
> Note I am not saying it was some kind of conspiracy with orders from above.
There is no conspiracy necessary. A single officer can simply allocate too few officers to guard the place. And in fact that is what happened and is the reason the national guards weren’t there prepared and stopped it before it happened. No conspiracy, just a chain of sympathetic command.
That just isn’t true. The “Autonomous Zones” lasted for weeks. Left wing protestors and rioters got away with literal murder, violence, looting.
How many people did the protestors at the capital harm? How much property was actually damaged? There are hundreds or more small businesses that were looted or burned to the ground during the left wing protests. How many small businesses or individuals were harmed by the Capitol protestors? There was a unarmed protestor that was shot and killed by a Capitol cop. Where is the outrage over an unarmed woman getting shot? Perhaps because she is a white Trump supporter she doesn’t matter as much as a black felon suspect getting shot by cops?
The hypocrisy is vivid but not surprising.
Left wing riots that destroy and loot small businesses that have nothing to do with the grievances being protested: “peaceful protest” supported by AOC and other Democrat politicians.
Trump protestors occupying the halls of the very institution they are protesting? Somehow they are seditious and horrible.
If these Capitol protesters were leftists protesting a Trump victory, the media and most people here would be singing a different tune.
And what’s frustrating to many people is how even a discussion of election fraud gets flagged and buried. Especially in a place like Hacker News. Has anyone actually looked at the statistical anomolies from the election? We’ve talked about voter machine integrity years ago on HN, but those concerns disappeared all the sudden. Concerns about electronic voting seem to evaporate when it benefits a candidate of ideological choice.
It’s weird. It’s like the entire HN community has no technical curiosity about any part of the clearly “interesting” election. It really feels conspiratorial how all facets of the tech industry have identically but independently have worked to defeat a political candidate.
So yes, I get the protests. When we’re being gaslit on “fair and secure” elections, but with our own eyes we see the appearance of exactly the opposite. People are going to get mad. One case in point: In Atlanta, during the presidential election night. All the media reported that counting was suspended for a “water pipe break” at State Farm Arena. A pipe break that never happened. Not a single work order. No repair. No maintenance record. Not a photo. Nothing. Zero evidence. Then all of the critical battlegrounds coincidentally stop counting votes at the same times? Florida didn’t stop. Neither did Texas. Or New York State. But the critical battlegrounds? Every one of them stopped the counts. Observers being kicked out. Observers being told to go home yet the counting continued. Trucks arriving in the middle of the night with extra votes..
This isn’t made up. This is all real. Was is fraud? Perhaps not. But are the coincidences that all happen to favor Biden compelling? Definitely.
And yet even discussing these weird anomalies that all favor Biden can get you in Facebook jail, suspended from Twitter, kicked off of YouTube.. downvoted on Hacker News. Even debating or questioning the Coronavirus orthodoxy can get you censored.
The world is fucked up and tech companies are a big part of the problem. I don’t think I have ever been more ashamed to be in this industry.
Try to zoom out a bit and maybe back a few years and marvel that a guy with big hair and a permanent scowl has gotten you to believe that storming the US Capitol is a lesser offense than robbing a Foot Locker.
If you have a problem with BLM riots then you should have a problem with these riots. You can't call someone a "protester" if they have gone past a police blockade and are attempting to enter the chamber against the direct orders of Capitol Police. They were rioters.
I have a problem with BLM _riots_ but not anything about the protests themselves. I have a small problem with the MAGA protests, in that they're being led astray, but they absolutely have the right to protest and air their grievances if they're peaceful.
You are the one being gaslighted or trying to fool others. Every challenge to the vote was thrown out because there was no evidence presented. If there are the thousands of millions of zillions of cases of fraud and evidence of any of it why hasn't that been presented? It's because it doesn't exist. You can spout whatever lies you like in the media - social, mainstream or lamestream. But you can't lie to a judge without consequences, so no lawyer will help you lie.
As for Georgia, more than zero evidence:
https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-did-fabricated-water-mai... so stop repeating that ridiculous talking point like it's a fact. If someone else sees your posts they might believe the same false things you do because you're authoritative.
There isn't a conspiracy to elect Biden. He's not that interesting.
>Yes, these rioters would have been dealt with quite quickly, and violently, had they not been white right-wingers.
You must not have been paying much attention to events outside your bubble recently. Many Antifa and BLM-aligned groups have spent much of the last year rioting, looting and committing arson. Throughout, they have been protected and excused by the mainstream US media and the intellectual Left, and the relatively small number of individuals that have been arrested during these events have mostly been released immediately - often to commit further violent crimes the same day.
I find that hard to square with your assertion that the protesters yesterday received preferential treatment due to their race and political leanings. As far as I can tell, the only difference in yesterday's events was that the Trump supporters didn't feel the need to burn the Capitol down.
I've attended some of the protests from this summer, some of the larger ones with 40K people. No property damage, no arrests, no one hurt or arrested.
Contrast to the ones that did turn into riots with property damage, looting or people getting hurt, which were perpetrated by a small group of protesters that stuck around after they were told to disperse / broke curfew, it seems similar to what happened in the capitol.
I think a big difference is that the rioting this summer affected insured private property and unfortunately did get people hurt in an effort to bring attention to systemic problems that parts of our country have. The event yesterday was a specific attack at a democratic process our country has in an effort to overturn an election that, at this point, has not had any evidence in court shown to cause doubts of it's legitimacy.
Intent matters. If the riots from this summer tried to assault city halls or state capitols that were in session I have a very good feeling they would have been met with more prejudice.
> Learning living along with the radicals is a good alternative to having a war with them.
This is what most regimes and "leaders" don't understand. They think that if they were put/elected there by some people then those are the only ones they have to serve. They do not acknowledge that they should serve the country. As such the disenfranchised start to think that if the power isn't on their side, the complete opposite must be. They drift towards an extreme, whatever that may be since both left and right extremes are very closer to each other - they justify the same things for different reasons.
Once enough are disenfranchised the power balance shifts. But the next to come in power will do the same, this time with the "moral" justification that the others deserve to be punished, swinging the pendulum further to the opposite side. If you repeat this cycle a few times you get to the pendulum's breaking point.
A president with a terrible character to begin with will just fast track the pendulum in one swing. They will add fuel to the fire and watch it burn not only out of pleasure or frustration, but also ineptitude.
> Learning living along with the radicals is a good alternative to having a war with them.
I think the original deal of public education was to establish a realistic way to do this. IMO the over focus on the shared benefit of raising income/GDP as the benefit has compromised the long term sustainability of the system.
Re: those protest turnout photos... how does one relieve themselves when in the middle of the sea of people? In Times Square on New Years, you just don’t drink water and do whatever you can to hold it in. If you leave you’ve lost your spot and you’re stuck at the outskirts where the portapotties are. I assume there are no mobile bathrooms during protests... Im guessing people are always in motion as people migrate to new locations?
It sounds like the crowd was much larger than anyone expected, and the organizers didn’t think to provide bathrooms. Probably the same folks who organized the press conference at the four seasons.
As a kid, I walked right into the front doors of the US Capitol, down the hall, and into one of my representatives offices. (Without adult supervision too!) They were quite friendly.
The building has security, of course, but it’s not like some kind of off-limits private building.
That being said, I have never been more embarrassed and scared for politics in this country than I have been today. These people really had no clue about the kind of damage they did today. It is looking like misinformation is the biggest plague of the Information Age.
It's not, but one, congress was in session, and two, they knew there was going to be a big group of agitated protestors outside. Compare how tight security was when there was a BLM protest there.
Oh yes, clearly today was not a normal day that people should be walking in the front door. And it should have been treated more seriously than it apparently was. I’m just saying that the place isn’t a fortress by default.
> One thought that comes to mind is that I'm sure the most heavily armed nation in the world could have gotten rid of these people in no time, but perhaps they didn't because of the symbolism of the location.
Oh no, the police let them through, there's clips showing they literally opened the gates, pictures of them taking selfies, etc. It's the "blue lives matter" subculture within those groups, where the police think they're on their side and the protestors think the police is on their side. The policemen involved should be fired and charged with dereliction of duty and conspiracy or something like that. Of course, there should have been a lot more (riot) police active as well, since it was known in advance it was going to be a bad protest.
I hope it's investigated thuroughly. That said, I don't think that being apparently "nice" to protestors is necessarily a convincing proof that you are somehoe "letting it happen". If you are outnumbered and the situation isn't directly threatening, then it may be better to keep the situation from becoming threatening while you call for reinforcemens. Then the problem was that they were outnumbered to begin with, which could shift blame upwards. It's going to be obvious from investigating communications, whether reinforcements were called in, how quickly they were sent.
Sickening when you consider the sacrifice of PC Keith Palmer who "un armed" stopped a knife wielding attacker attempting to breach the Houses of parliament.
I mean, if we're talking about symbolism, you might be right for "a guy in a buffalo costume", but the confederate flag was flown inside the capitol.
For many people, the damage that causes to government feeling "theirs" is much, much higher than a violent incident, even more so if we compare it to the way recent protests have been handled.
A dead woman on the floor with blood pooling out of her head sends a weaker message in this respect than an appropriately-decorated piece of cloth being raised? I suspect you may be a little too shaken by recent events to be thinking clearly. Thoughts and prayers, my friend.
What we have seen conclusive proof of tonight is that police are happy to work with or at least to allow fascist mobs to storm the government, while they are willing to maim and kill leftist protesters against police brutality at the slightest signs of provocation.
The fact that a woman was shot by police in last night's protest is a tragedy, as all human life is precious. But a democracy can't bow down to mob rule for fear of violence. The protesters should have never even been allowed to get near the Capitol building while Congress was in session, and in that case perhaps this loss of life could have also been avoided.
Police brutality and the police culture of violence before other solutions is also something that has been discussed in leftist circles the entire year. It is a culture that must be changed, which will surely be a monumental task, if it even is attempted. Still, the alternative is not simply allowing mobs to attack federal institutions with impunity.
It's all the worse that the right is trying to paint her death as police brutality.
We need to be clear, she was shot while trying to force her way through a barricaded door when law enforcement was trying to safely get elected officials and other innocent people out of harm's way, and she was only shot after multiple warnings.
I fully agree that the terrorists shouldn't have been allowed into the building, but it happened, and given that, if this isn't a textbook example of a situation where law enforcement was justified in using lethal force, I'm not sure what is.
In case you have forgotten, last year saw literal insurrectionist leftist communes that took over parts of cities, and were left unsuppressed for weeks. This is definitely quite an escalation, but to me, a European looking from the outside in, it looks anything but unilateral.
How are protesters against police brutality 'insurrectionists'? Were they trying to stop an election from being certified? Were they trying to even overthrow elected officials?
Not to mention, the largest difference is that during the BLM protests you saw daily police brutality against the protesters from day one, with tear gas, rubber bullets, etc. You did NOT see police taking selfies on the steps of the buildings they were supposed to keep the protesters out of.
But you also saw police officers in demonstrations of solidarity (either photo-ops or sincere).
I think if you compare a single event with a large number of different events, you’ll find examples where one is worse by some measure and others where one is better. I don’t really want to comment on the recent events or the validity of the argument (or it’s spirit), but I think it probably isn’t reasonable to compare a single event with the aggregate of many different events.
Are you referring to the Red House? You believe that a fenced in house that was sometimes called an 'autonomous zone' (as far as I can tell, most often by people outside - the mayor of Portland for example apologized for calling it such) was closer to an insurrection than people seeking to overturn the legal results of the election entering the Capitol building while congress was in session?
Even if the people defending the Red House did call it an autonomous zone, their only real demands were to protect the livelihood of one family. They did not seek to expand, they did not try to gain political power from it,they did nothing that I would actually view as a significant attempt to challenge the authority of the state beyond a very specific case.
Even there, I understand the name "Autonomous Zone" was only used by the people occupying the area between June 8 and June 13 - afterwards they decided to call it an "Organized Protest" instead. They also never challenged the authority of the state itself (except for police), and all of their demands were social, not political. They eventually peacefully dismantled most/all of the area anyway.
I fail to see how this can be presented as comparable in gravity with people attacking the Capitol building with the intent of overturning the result of the federal election.
The fact remains that BLM related protests in 2020 were handled much more harshly than this. If this were a BLM protest, not only would the protestors have been all arrested and/or killed, but the media would be treating it like a national emergency.
And it's not just the fact that the police allowed it to happen or that the military was not asked to intervene until way too late.
It's also the alarmingly not-alarmed media response. What happened to "thugs" or "rioters" or "enemy combatants"?
Are we watching the same news channels? They were called "terrorists" on several cable news channels, and (fairly) "insurrectionists" on just about every news channel. I also heard "thugs" more than once. I heard the event as a whole called a "sacrilege".
So does the American flag for a lot of people, that's why we need a military, right? Did you know this woman was a veteran, by the way? She swore an oath to protect that flag, not the confederate flag. Try reconciling this in your mind, maybe you'll understand what's happened better.
I'm not justifying it, just giving context for why folks are alarmed, especially for people from other countries who don't necessarily have context for obscure US symbols.
And yes, the American flag is problematic in its own way.
He said "how about this symbolism!" and talked about a piece of cloth. I'm now asking what an unarmed woman with blood pooling out of her head symbolizes. If it helps you answer the question at all, she was also a US military veteran with four tours of service.
Symbols usually become symbols due to them being glaring examples of an injustice. George Floyd became a symbol, for example, due to the obvious unreasonableness of him being killed violently on the street when an officer responded to the use of a counterfeit bill. People don't consider that a reasonable reaction.
If you had asked any American a week ago about what they think is a reasonable reaction for an officer faced with people trying to surpass a barricade, that has been set up for security reasons inside a government building to protect the people inside, after said building has been trespassed by a crowd breaking through the windows, I don't think "shooting" would have been unexpected.As some people pointed out half jokingly, "you can't even try that in GTA".
I don't see the relevance of mentioning that woman's connection to the military either, other than emphasising that she should have known better.
In opposition, I think the flag that symbolises the right of people to own slaves, being flown without consequence in the meeting place of congress while the officers stand around and take selfies with the mob, sends a clear message to the descendants of slaves about how much can they expect to be protected and represented by that democracy. Even more so in a climate where they have been violently repressed for protesting inequality.
Today's "Confederate flag" is literally a rebel battle flag from a horrifying civil war.
The fact that said civil war was instigated by the rebels specifically to protect the institution of slavery is just bonus.
It is a very powerful symbol. Anyone who claims it's about Southern heritage is being deliberately ignorant. It's blatantly oppositional, self-serving, and violent.
It's unfortunate that you're being downvoted, you make an excellent point.
George Floyd was murdered by police during a routine arrest.
Ashli Babbitt was executed by police for trespassing during a protest.
Both of these (and many others) are powerfully symbolic: of an overbearing and largely unaccountable police state, in which its enforcers use violence as a first resort.
George Floyd was a common criminal coming down from a large fentanyl dose (nevertheless RIP), Ashli Babbitt was a military veteran acting in an expressly conscientious manner alongside a large gathering of other like-minded political activists. Surely these are both tragic losses, and yet the common criminal received immeasurably greater sympathies here and elsewhere. What's going on? Were BLM grievances not rooted in an equitable respect for the sanctity of life and an earnest desire for peaceful coexistence? Perhaps this explains the months of undirected destruction that followed across the country in the middle of what was represented as a dire pandemic? Maybe these people are hypocrites, useful idiots, bigots, and losers?
From what I remember the common criminal was not resisting the arrest and got slowly suffocated by a police officer using a technique that is not sanctionned for neutralizing suspects.
The military veteran - gathering with like minded people who thought they were sent there to make a coup and storm the capitole and one of them was carrying colsons so who knows what else they planned to do - try to get further in the capitole, with the support of a mob behind her singing threats, to wreak havoc.
How you think your attempt to fabricate an alternative reality on HN is going to fly is beyond me.
> Were BLM grievances not rooted in an equitable respect for the sanctity of life and an earnest desire for peaceful coexistence?
GF was slowly put to death. Ashli Babbit broke through a doorglass after breaking into the capitole with people who had previously brought the flag down and claimed to overturn a democratic election. I don't see this act as a sign of wanting a peaceful coexistence.
Yeah, this is a tragedy and a failure of the VA as well.
I’m sure there is a program (or several) to help our vets adjust to civilian life but it needs to be updated to help build community so they aren’t as likely to get sucked into Qanon or similar cults like she did.
Separately, we need to continue to raise our expectations of police ability to de-escalate situations. This is one of many, many unarmed civilians killed by police in recent years. Normally they aren’t storming the capitol, but it should still be possible for police / secret service to de-escalate a situation like this. It won’t happen until our DAs and various state attorneys start charging cops that kill.
It’s not a schtick. This woman was apparently sucked into Qanon, a cult that targets soldiers & veterans and apparently went from someone who spent more than a decade respecting a strict chain of command in the air force to breaking into the nation’s capitol.
While climbing through a window that had the glass smashed out she was shot. Shooting an intruder is like the most protected type of self defense there is, so it’s to be expected when breaking into any building, no? So what happened to make her think this wouldn’t get her killed?
That doesn’t make it any less of a tragedy, even more so. Someone that served honorably shouldn’t be left alone to get sucked into all of this.
That said, in the video I can’t hear anyone issue a verbal command such as “Get back or we’ll shoot!” or anything like that. There should have been de-escalation at this point IMO. There were other ways to deal with this aside from shooting her.
(This is a problem with probably every law enforcement agency in the country, a very recent public example is the Breonna Taylor case where police chose one of the most dangerous possible ways to serve a warrant and created a deadly situation where there was none before)
> That said, in the video I can’t hear anyone issue a verbal command such as “Get back or we’ll shoot!” or anything like that.
Reminder that the rules of engagement for the US army are way more rigorous than those of the police forces and engagements are scrutinized more thoroughly. There should have been warnings until there was no other way to keep the protesters out of the perimeter.
Now that I think about that woman's profile: could it be that this veteran, because of her training, was expecting to hear warnings, didn't and so thought it was safe to keep moving forward ? We'll never know. I have seen the scene and there are other elements I can't explain. We'll never know the whole truth.
It's so sad that people who served their country for years get swallowed in this.
It's absurd to intimate the grievances people have surrounding the 2020 election are cult conspiracies. I have enough reasons to dislike Trump, and I'll tell you this election was an absolute disaster. It's obvious to any neutral party.
This is utterly non-responsive. I was noting it's wrong to interpret these people's actions as QAnon directives. Perhaps they merely have a brain and therefore have low confidence in the legitimacy of 2020 election results in contested states.
In some ways it brought back old memories of storming of Stasi HQ in Eastern Berlin[0]. I couldn't find references to that effect, but I recall there was talk back then that among the first ones to breach the Stasi were people from the western intelligence agencies, who had a pretty good idea of where to go and what to grab.
There are many alternatives that are not "total anarchy" or "puddles of blood" or "fort knox". Obviously America tends to prefer the fort knox strategy[0], but there are other choices like staging police nearby[1].
There is no way to attribute this to anything but malice. The police response was so wildly different from the response to any other protest we have seen in the past 10 years that it is laughable to even entertain the idea that it was a case of stupidity.
You know, it's not the first time the Capitol building has been stormed by the protestors. Before this, there was a BLM protest and they managed to hold the building just fine.
They were being reinforced by mysterious federal forces then… which was bad, so we got rid of them. Last time’s problem was solved so hard it produced this time’s problem.
The other issue is that reinforcements in DC are controlled by the President, who of course wanted this to happen so he could watch it on TV, so he didn’t mobilize any of them.
I think so, too. Openness is more important. But I have to say that the physical security before the Capitol building was laughable. There is a video of three policemen trying to hold a makeshift barricade against more than 50 protesters. Obviously, they failed.
The bottom line is that the police appeared to be totally understaffed even though the protests had been announced for weeks and were entirely predictable.
Openness is extremely important, but the rule of law is still more important.
What we have seen last night was an attempt at mob rule, and it was almost obviously allowed by the police force whose duty it is to safeguard the security of the nation's most powerful institutions.
This doesn't mean that the Capitol building should be turned into a fort. But there is a vast distance between being open in general on one hand, and allowing a crowd of people whose stated intent is to overthrow the legally confirmed the results of the presidential election to amass on the steps of Congress and to breach the building while the legislative is in session confirming those results at the federal level.
The charitable take is that it was human error. Bad planning.
The conspiratorial one is that it was deliberate. The question in that case is on what level (leadership, or on the ground). I hope investigations will show this. Who raised the issue of too little staff? Who denied reinforcements? Was there a massive number of officers calling in sick that morning? Etc etc.
I have stated this in other comments, but I feel it is extremely important. There is no rational way to attribute this to simple human error, given the overwhelming evidence of how protests on much more irrelevant topics, moments and locations are normally treated by US police.
There can be no reasonable doubt that this was allowed to play out, with the few policemen stationed there being openly friendly with the crowd by some reports. The level where the decision to allow the protest to attack Congress was taken is of course up to the courts to investigate, but I feel it is disingenuous to claim that this isn't the most reasonable conclusion by far.
Just want to point out that police are friendly with protesters all the time and often take pictures with them even when they are anti police protests.
> One thought that comes to mind is that I'm sure the most heavily armed nation in the world could have gotten rid of these people in no time, but perhaps they didn't because of the symbolism of the location.
> In the end, a guy in buffalo costume fooling around on the senate floor is better than puddles of blood.
This statement is no longer true.
My left leaning twitter feed has many references about how the police removed wheelchair bound protestors some years ago and references to lost eyes during BLM walks/riots and Jane Fonda's arrest on the steps of the Capitole and pictures of police officers in body armour waiting on the steps of the Capitole for BLM marches.
Gunshots were fired in the Capitole, POTUS's message to deescalate started with election results denial, protestors brought down the flag and replaced it with a Trump flag.
It's much more concerning than the buffalo guy fooling around. Reframing the chain of events to that single moment is missing the bigger picture.
- Members of the Senate
- Members of the House of Representatives
- The Vice President
were in the building during an important legislative event.
We can look back at this and say it a mostly harmless event, but what if one of the protesters was a deranged person or enemy agent with a deadly weapon or decided to start a fire or explosion in the capital? Even in state courthouses they won't allow you in before going through a metal detector. And this was before 9/11. And Americans are well aware of having to take off their shoes before entering their airport gate.
(description: a person dressed in black paramilitary gear with modified US flag insignia, possibly with a sidearm, clutching a handful of large zip ties, jumping over a rail in what appears to be the senate or house gallery)
Rittenhouse was in the open, chased and later surrounded by hostile protesters who variously threw things at him, hit him, and attempted to take his rifle. The NYT reported that there had been gunfire as Rittenhouse retreated, and he may have thought it was aimed at him.
The Policeman was with a number of other cops. They had ample room and time to retreat. There was a closed and barricaded door between him and the woman he shot. He fired the first shot.
They both have a case for self-defense, but the Cop's case is going to be a harder sell.
> There was a closed and barricaded door between him and the woman he shot. He fired the first shot.
She was in the middle of climbing through the top of the barricade, which is what got her shot.
DC is also a stand your ground territory, there is no duty to retreat even in civil matters. I think it would be very easy to convince at least a single juror that "a riot attempting to break into your place of work" would instill a reasonable fear of bodily harm. Doubly so when your place of work is the center of the nation's legislative branch. Quadruply so when the rioters are known to be armed.
Even if the officer didn't have reason to fear for his own life, shooting someone because you have a reasonable fear that they will cause bodily harm to someone else is legal. These people were armed and attempting to break into a session of congress. Fear that they might attempt to shoot a legislator would not be an unreasonable concern.
Rittenhouse had no reason to be there in the first place, while the capitol police will have some kind of policing plan and rules of engagement.
Both should be sorted out in court. So many of the protests this year and previously were about situations in which the police shooter never even stood trial. We shouldn't have to second-guess this in the court of public opinion, but we can't trust the prosecutors to prosecute unjustified shootings.
What is your definition of trespassing?
As a non american i would think that trepassing is beeing on someone elses property without permission, not beeing with a violent mob storming a gouvernemnt building with the (at minimum) intent to destroy stuff and breaking the democratic process.
And Rittenhouse was clearly looking for trouble, i don't think a black perosn could Go fully armed to a KKK rally and claim self defense if started shooting people after beeing harassed there.
Whether I agree or disagree is secondary, I am just so glad to see some logically consistent thought!
There have been a lot of violent protests in the last 12 months, this being just the latest example. It’s nothing if not a great litmus test for anyone speaking or writing about protestors or policing protests.
As far as I can tell, there were police officers on the other side of the door (where Babbitt was). Police officer shouldn't have shot her. His life was not in danger.
I'm against the storming of Capitol, but this type of shooting should not be allowed.
Agreed, police officers should rarely be shooting anyone. And certainly not those who are merely trespassing.
There are plenty of options for stopping a person going into a place, that don't involve executing or seriously wounding them. It should be a grave concern for every citizen that the police generally have so few qualms about firing their guns at people.
The police should have attempted to deescalate this situation with a minimum of violence - not the maximum.
I guess you think the police should just let those 'mere trespassers' get close enough to the representatives to pose for a photo? Maybe hold the camera?
For some reason I have seen a vide of the shooting and it looks like the person shooting is in a suite? Is it normal that police officers wear a suite?
They reported that it was a plain clothes police officer. My guess is that some of the Capitol police wear plain clothes. They are usually not in public.
I think in this case it's not only about your life beeing in danger, try this at any milittary base and the chances of getting shot are also quite high i guess.
Yes, but the difference is here that the police obviously let the protestors inside the building. Once that happened, the police and protestors were mixed and there was no real power struggle. Police looks like they were keeping an eye, but no one was fighting. This guy who shot turned a situation that could have been handled with a baton into a deadly situation. He could have created a worse situation, imagine if a protestor had a gun behind this woman and a gunfight erupted.
While i completely agree that this was all unnecessary and a complete fuckup (Trump not calling the national guard, police clearly had a shitty tactic)
But i don't think you can hold this "let them in" up high.
They didn't invite them in, they let them in because of fear of beeing overrun/escalation.
If a mob is in front of your house and threatens to burn it down if you won't let them in, there is no claim you invited them in If you do out of fear.
They should have blasted them of the stairs with watercannons, but idk what the plan was.
I mostly agree with you. Police should have blasted them off the stairs and/or held the cordon at the top of the steps. It would be easier to do and should be easily planned for. If someone died there while trying to break through it would be much more understandable than this.
> a guy in buffalo costume fooling around on the senate floor
Although this qanon leader made it seem ridiculous, the capitol was attacked by an armed mob, who used teargas and flash grenades to prevent the certification of the next President. A bomb was found and four people died.
Somehow, this is not that bad? How are these people merely funny protesters and not insurgents or even terrorists? The funny guy broke laws that can land him at least 20 years in jail.
Its weird seeing the lackluster police response after the secretive kidnappings, overwhelming force and use of chemical weapons against blm protesters.
It's a lot more complicated than that. There is very real and powerful anti-democratic fervor over here. Hundreds of members of the House of Representatives are involved in it, and several members of the Senate also. One member was actually heard outside on a loudspeaker yesterday invoking Hitler, by name, as a virtuous figure. There is white-supremacist anti-government infiltration of the police involved, including the Capitol Police. These same white-supremacist anti-democracy people have even stormed a military base in recent years, and they were NOT met with lethal force in that instance either, so it's not just because the Capitol represents a symbol of democracy. It's a complicated dynamic over here, but that doesn't make it any less chilling.
I live in Florida, and just a few minutes ago on the way to work this morning I passed a white commercial truck with a large commercial logo on the side. The logo reads "Confederate Electric, Inc." laid over a waving Confederate flag (which is a flag of treason and white supremacy.) Anti-government fervor is right in your face, and taken as a very normal and matter-of-fact way of life here now. Florida's Senator Rick Scott last night voted against allowing Pennsylvania the right to participate in representative democracy in voting for the new president. It's a very serious and very sad thing what's going on in America.
I'm pretty sure security would have been a bit higher even in Brussels if armed nazis with a history of breaking into legislative chambers declared they would "march on the court house".
And I have a lot of family members still stateside who think things will get better with Kamela… whereas i left almost 5 years ago… good luck my fellow Americans… because its only going to get worse…
They basically let them in, it wasn’t a breach. It may as well have been orchestrated to derail the session because now all the objection debates are happening at 1AM o.O
If you watch that video the rioters are already behind that barricade. The video pans round at the end and you can see a flood of people crossing the barricade just to the side of them as well. The police were clearly unprepared and way too lenient but it also makes no sense for them to defend a piece of fence that's already compromised.
there's a large security perimeter that's already been breached, and the video shows one chokepoint of the perimeter that hasn't yet been breached.
The officers at that checkpoint know what the situation is: They aren't going to do any good in an open space surrounded by a mob of thousands. They are moving back to a more defensible position (presumably where they can buy time to evacuate the Congress floors). They are calmly walking because breaking into a jog could incite the mob further.
Without reviewing the video, again (I watched it several times, but not in the last few minutes), I do recall officers repositioning a fence section in a way that allows the mob through, but on reflection that could be a shrewd psychological tactic: if the crowd can walk past the fence piece without grabbing and moving it, they (or at least the front line in close contact with officers) may be less likely to grab it to move and, having hold of it, decide to use it as battering weapon against the outnumbered officers.
> They are calmly walking because breaking into a jog could incite the mob further.
Right, and while some are turning they back on the main crowd, its mixed, and that is necessary because, again, there are already groups of rioters in their rear.
While it looks bad at first glance, I think it is quite likely the least-bad response by that group of officers to a situation that is well and truly FUBAR.
This is also basically what happened right at the beginning when the rioters very violently broke through the first fence badly injuring at least one cop. As soon as it was obvious the mob was overwhelming things and the police had rescued their colleagues they fell back at a run to the next line. Pretty standard defensive tactics from time immemorial. That there were only three officers and a fence that was easy for the rioters to lift and batter the police with is concerning.
A SCIF was compromised? How was there not armed guards there to ensure this sort of thing didn't happen. Many military bases are authorized to use deadly force to maintain physical security. I'd imagine a SCIF would demand the same security.
Yet Jethro and his Gadsten flag can just roll up into a SCIF?
This is what happens when you let extremists roam around with impunity for 9 months. Even if they were previously far-left, every action has a reaction of the same magnitude.
The sooner media and social media companies are held accountable for polarizing people on either end, the better for this country.
Incredible that you've found a way to blame Black Lives Matter protesters — who were not present and whose protests were overwhelmingly peaceful[1] — for the actions of a right wing mob. You've completely ignored the difference between the actual goals of the "far-left extremists" and those of these Trump supporters. You've completely ignored the difference in harm done by a protest turning violent and damaging a business and a group storming the US Capitol to overturn the results of a democratic election in the most powerful nation on Earth. The details matter and to simply throw up your hands and kvetch about vague "extremism" deflects responsibility from the individuals and ideologies which promote attacks on democracy.
This kind of cowardly equivocation in the face of fascism is exactly how the events of yesterday were allowed to happen. Your attitude — sadly held by too many Americans — is pathetic and it will not solve the problem of right wing extremism.
maybe now americans will realize how it feels when someone decides your elected president is "illegitimate" and think twice before supporting such actions in other countries. if this happened in Iran or Belarus the media would cheer it.
another interesting thing is the media censoring of Trump (blocked by social media, news like reuters are always making sure to note that what Trump says is false (e.g. "falsely claimed the election was stolen"). this is exactly what would happen in "third-world countries" but now it happens in America and no one cares about it. sure, it's only Trump being censored now, but it's not a big stretch to start censoring regular people too. it's not a democracy if you can't talk freely.
This is a terrible take. Reminding readers that something is a lie is not censorship. And just as democracy couldn't survive real censorship, it also couldn't survive leaders being allowed to lie with impunity. Where we are now is proof of that. I will agree though, Trump has brought the US government down to the level of a third-world country these last four years.
There probably is, and it probably wasn't. There's a big difference between an office of someone who regularly meets with visitors and a room that is likely limited to a handful of people under controlled circumstances. It's likely there's a whole secured area of the building dedicated to operations (telecomm, engineering, etc).
The photos I saw of an unlocked computer were clearly an entirely different desk than the one shown in the photos that have been identified as being Pelosi's own office. It appears the unlocked computer was most likely for one of her staffers in a different room that may have been part of the Speaker's suite.
It's slightly surprising there's not an emergency evacuation procedure for people who work in the building that involves locking all devices that remain in the building via a hot-key or hot-corner. Come to think of it, I wonder if a screen lock command is something that could be pushed from a Windows domain controller...and if so, why wasn't that used?
Relying on humans locking their PC in event of a terrorist attack isn't a IT-Security concept.
Security consists of a threat model and many layers of security measures. Many many outer layers have failed here. I wouldn't blame an individual nor a department here. It's one of those events that probably wasn't in the scope. Additionally, roles/security clearance levels etc. still work regardless of the account beeing open to anyone.
Things like Smartcards, Yubikeys, auto-lockscreen could have failed the same way. Maybe a GPO failed, or a windows update broke the auto-lock.... that's why all these many layers exist.
Windows 10 can be setup to auto-lock if a bluetooth phone goes out of range, and there's a little eco system of third party companies that make keyfobs that do the same basic thing.
Even if it's not a common feature, it's not like I'd be surprised to learn these computers are imaged with some custom software, one of which could be a lock on command (or loss of connectivity to home).
I have no idea how important these machines were, of course.
A government computer should be set to lock as soon as the CAC is removed, and staffers shouldn’t be leaving their CAC in the machine even if they’re fleeing, or else they’ll be locked out of the building. So something obviously went wrong there.
While there may still be one, government data is now rapidly moving to private instances of AWS/Azure. And with standard encryption and backups even getting hands on sensitive hardware won’t be as catastrophic as loose sheets of paper on desks and by printers.
There are several instances of Trump going against his intelligence community, specifically in regards to Russia, to weaken America's cyber-defense. There are legitimate reasons to be concerned that he was being blackmailed by a foreign government to weaken America's institutions, and sow chaos and division.
I don't think there's a good answer because any answer to your question hinges on a political decision. From a practical point of view, "holding him accountable" requires a group of politically-minded people to agree that he has committed a crime for which he needs to be held accountable.
Let's say, for the sake of the argument, that there is indeed a law that he has broken. If the people with the power to punish him for it decide not to do it, then whether he actually committed a crime or not is a moot point. We will only know whether he will be held accountable once he is being held accountable.
Not an answer, exactly, but there is talk of invoking the 25th amendment (possible I suppose, considering Pence and Trump are at odds currently). As of now, none of Trump's cabinet nor Pence have suggested intent to do so. I would wager it will take another event of this nature and/or a big hit to Trump's approval ratings which are very static and unchanged by scandal mostly.
There's also the option of impeachment and removal. This is significantly less likely as it requires a majority of senators and Trump only has two weeks left.
It's unlikely he will be held accountable for encouraging domestic terrorism against democratic and republican lawmakers alike. Especially if he wins up pardoning himself.
Edit:
CNN just reported a source claiming some of Trump's cabinet are in early talks about invoking the 25th amendment. Still very unlikely to happen however.
The best thing we can do is not let history forget what happened today, and what will happen with we let someone like Donald Trump have free reign over the political institutions without proper checks and balances. More than ever, the Democrats need to limit their own powers to prevent a similar occurrence in 4 or 8 more years.
So, try getting into a missile silo. That's paid for with tax dollars as well. Maybe we should allow anyone in there.
Why not the allow people to walk into the oval office?
You're comparing a public service building where normal everyday democratic governmental duties occur - a building specifically of the people - with what is supposed to be a highly secure military installation in which the sole mission of that installation is to launch missiles and cause death & destruction.
Never mind, you're right, the Capitol is also a building where mass death & destruction is launched from.
For the first few decades, any citizen could. You could literally go to the white house or congress and get an audience with the president or congressman. Of course you'd also pretty much have to be anglo-saxon protestant for that privilege. After all, the idea was that these people were your employees. But that was when the country was much smaller.
> Why not the allow people to walk into the oval office?
They do. Call up your congressman and get set up a schedule.
Have you not seen that John Oliver episode about the nukes?
Basically anyone could get in there if they want, but they probs don't want to because knocking over a wrench could easily set the whole place on fire in a conflagration of missile fuel
I would firstly remind you that John Oliver is an entertainer.
I served in the Marines with people from Marine Corps Security Forces. If you go anywhere near a nuclear silo there is a Security Forces Quick Response Force platoon that has already been tracking you and is on their way to intercept you. If you somehow overwhelm a Security Forces platoon you will now need to face the onslaught of the rest of the Security Forces Regiment, all of which are classified as part of Special Operations capabilities within the Marine Corps.
This sounds facetious but I'll answer you in earnest.
Keep in mind I come from the Marines and our base ideologies are wildly different from the rest of the services.
I've served with people in line companies (what you refer to as "normal operations") that definitely take issue with the fact that Special Operations, and Special Operations Command, receive more funding and by proxy better gear and training.
Special Operations as a broad term generally ends up referring to a level of training and gear. I served with former Force Recon Marines who had more extensive training in Close Quarters Battle (CQB), foreign weapons, field trauma and medical, linguists, etc... in addition to better selection of weapons, lighter/better gear, etc... Note that these members still serve the actual Marine Corps. Each branch maintains it's own "special operations capabilities" and if memory serves me correctly these are mandates by Congress.
I only have one friend that actually serves in Special Operations Command as a Marine. The difference with him is a broader set of training. For instance you won't go to some in-house training if they need a comms specialist, they will send you to college. They have personal trainers, dieticians, and different height/weight/grooming standards than the rest of the services. Their gear selection is essentially whatever they prefer. These people work for Special Operations Command and are only loosely responsible to the branches they joined under.
Even the average Marine line company is trained regularly in guerilla operations. They organize without formations or with very loose ones, they're cross-trained heavily with other MOS', and they're taught to thrive in very minimalist and harsh environments for which they train year round as part of the 24 hour response programs.
Special Operations capabilities and SOCOM are just sharper versions of the same spear in my view. Unfortunately, that's not really what SOCOM was supposed to be about, but nonetheless that's part of their job. SOCOM also does anti-terrorism operations across the globe from small incidents or recon you might never hear about to interdiction operations of high value targets or rescues.
I wonder how people will feel about the federal and state governments working with cell phone service providers to generate a list of "attendees." Seems like the conviction rate would be pretty high.
https://twitter.com/JoeUchill/status/1346983998627532800
https://twitter.com/maradydd/status/1346975210017234945
https://twitter.com/MiekeEoyang/status/1347000537208803328