And unarchived. It's very convenient to not have to do things in meetings with minutes where people might later question your decisions. Or report them to the police.
Yes you are right and these people probably are crooks. But in principle I think politicans should be able to have private conversations. These used to happen in literal back rooms but these days everyone is geographically spread out and thats not so possible. Formal decisions should be ratified in official minuted meetings but informal chat should also be possible. Because people need to actually talk to each other in an unguarded way to figure things out sometimes. At the moment the principle seems to be 'anything that a politican types to anyone else should be archived for later perusal' and I'm not sure that thats going to give us better decisions.
> [...] politicans should be able to have private conversations. [...] Because people need to actually talk to each other in an unguarded way to figure things out sometimes.
Which works fine as long as there are no bad actors who may bribe, corrupt, blackmail, etc. Unfortunately that is not the reality we live in and one way[0] of counteracting the bad actors is to enforce transparency with things like "everything must be recorded and archived".
Right but what is the cost of insisting that "everything must be recorded and archived". Are you going to strap recording devices onto everyone in congress? You have to have a mix of safeguards but also practicality, surely?
"Is this politican bad" is not a very good conversation for HN, but "what technology should politicians be using to make them effective" is a good topic for HN, and thats what I'm trying to have a conversation about
And unarchived. It's very convenient to not have to do things in meetings with minutes where people might later question your decisions. Or report them to the police.