Nooooooo! He was my next door neighbor a few years ago, and I knew him as a person before I realized that I knew him as a hero.
His dogs were fiercely protective of his house, which is perfectly understandable. One day I saw a "sewer cleaning" van behind his house, and I have a hard time believing that's what it really was: https://honeypot.net/2025/03/12/rip-mark-klein.html
That certainly is just a Sewer TV inspection van! I have a hand in writing some of the software that is run on these and processes the videos that come out of them. They all have rack mounted PCs and a monitor with a joystick to control the crawler that goes in the pipe.
> That certainly is just a Sewer TV inspection van!
Hee hee, I can hear the NSA now: "Dammit, who parked a sewer inspection van in the middle of our massive surveillance network?!?"
Back on the topic of indiscriminate wide-net surveillance (which I think was also the focus of the AT&T whistleblower), I quote Bruce Schneier on the Snowden leaks:
"I started this talk by naming three different programs that collect Google user data. Those programs work under different technical capabilities, different corporate alliances, and different legal authorities. You should expect the same thing to be true for cell phone data, for internet data, for everything else. When you have the budget of the NSA and you're given the choice, 'Should you do it this way or that way?' The correct answer is: both."
Yes, I think it's absolutely wild that there's a story here about someone spotting a suspicious sewer cleaning van and somebody who had personal experience writing code for that sewer cleaning van chimed in. Seriously, how do you not love this site?
Generally these are done in coordination with a sewer cleaning truck at the next manhole in the pipe. Very common for them to stay on the phone with each other
door bell rings .... five men in dark suits standing outside ... hair on the back of my neck stands on end. I open the door, hands shaking with that burning feeling in my guts "Yea, how can I help you gentlemen" The tallest one, intimidating, gruff, ex marine perhaps, shoves a badge in my face: "N S A, National Sewer Agency" they push me aside and push inside my hosue .. a violation but what do I say?!? They look around ... circling me like a pack of wolves .. then, another pulls a bag from under his arm and produces a plastic jar in a biohazard bag... looks like ice cream and garbage inside, then grufly states "Sir, do you recognize these napkins?" "napkins?" I squeak out ... it hit me.... FUCK! .... the other night .... I was drunk, out of TP, desperate... paper towels staring me in the face - dare I? It was a moment of weakness, desperation and drunkeness rolled into one ... and here I am, staring the consequences in the face.... "Sir, your going to have to come with us" And no one ever heard from me again. Please take heed, only flush TP!
This is fairly close to reality, if you think about it
Medicaid here in Arizona is called "AHCCCS" which is pronounced "access" so imagine the fun homophonic confusion in a conversation about "do you have access?" "well I got access but then I lost it..."
Many conservative Christians have termed homosexuality as "Same-Sex Attraction" or SSA, so they often speak of "suffering from SSA" or being afflicted with it. When I applied to the Social Security Administration for disability, I couldn't help but notice, and their disability program is called "SSDI" which has nothing to do with Reagan's "Star Wars/Strategic Defense Initiative"
Nor do my dealings with the F.A.A. in the past several years have anything to do with a pilot's license or flight clearances; the Family Assistance Administration here doles out funds for food stamps ("SNAP", another good homophone, lets you purchase plenty of alphabet soup for the fam) and other basic needs.
I mean, if a sufficiently capable entity is interested in snooping on an individual like this, mimicking a sewer tv inspection van is a trivial endeavour. You don’t know at all what that van was doing.
Yes we do. It was a sewer inspection van. If it was the NSA, their van wouldn't look so goofy that people took one look at the photo and assumed it had to be an NSA van, which is what happened here. This is a bad movie plot trope: the bad guys can't simultaneously be omniscient and so dumb they're trivially outed like this, just like the real supervillain isn't going to monologue while you free yourself from the chains lowering you into the shark tank.
> the bad guys can't simultaneously be omniscient and so dumb they're trivially outed like this
This is a false dichotomy. Federal agencies prove themselves to be fallible (even incompetent) all the time, they just have far more resources available to make up for their mistakes.
Unmarked vans drive around all of the time and nobody bats an eye at them. There is no reason to even bother with a big elaborate company name that anyone could google and do further background checks on
Unmarked vans drive around all the time. They don't typically park out front of a whistleblower's house. There is more scrutiny there than driving down any random street. Therefore, a more sufficient cover would be required.
An unmarked van could park in front of any arbitrary public neighborhood house with street parking for a few hours and nobody would care. As long as people aren’t visible in it.
Multiple days would be suspicious but that would be true of even the “sewer inspection” cover van
An unmarked white van (without windows) parked a house or two down the street hacking your wifi might not be that noticeable. One across the street with a radio dish spinning around and a parabolic mic sticking out the window and a few people entering and exiting it with donuts and coffee multiple times probably would be.
I mean, the real argument here is between "something interesting" and "something boring", and it's message board so "boring" is heavily disfavored. But, yeah, it's a sewer inspection van.
My comment did not express any opinion as to whether this was or was not a surveillance van, and this has no bearing on the proposed alternatives being a false dichotomy.
With GP's clarification, it's still shaped like a false dichotomy but I don't think it's one in spirit. It sounds more like reductio ad absurdum to me, with a sprinkling of hyperbole for effect.
Having said that, reading comments like this, I sometimes think it would actually be great cover. Because you have respected people, like yourself, unequivocally stating that it couldn't possibly be an NSA van.
But, to say it again, I agree that I don't think the NSA would need to do this. My above line of reasoning certainly doesn't hold too much water under serious scrutiny.
A significant multiplier of my certainty here comes from the fact that I was responding to a thread full of people who seemed certain that no sewer inspection van could look like that, which to me says "this van is not inconspicuous", which defeats the whole purpose of having a cover-story van.
You can second-guess that, but I think past this point, we're reenacting the duel between Vizzini and Westley.
> You can second-guess that, but I think past this point, we're reenacting the duel between Vizzini and Westley
So I guess the reveal is that it _is_ a real sewer inspection van, but the NSA has legitimately been inspecting sewers for years to innoculate themselves from suspicion?
I guess they must be down there looking for rodents of unusual size.
That's an odd take. There are numerous examples of people prosaicly defeating the purpose of something that has taken considerable resources to establish.
It's like the spies working in embassies that were easily detectable despite an elaborate cover because they used the car that the previous spy left behind when they went home.
From personal experience with police investigations... they aren't really all that inconspicuous when they come aspying. The van with tints several shades darker than the legal limit that sits outside and the trucks with dash-mount computers and racks of equipment visible through the windshield shadowing your every move aren't exactly hard to see if you're paying attention. When they've got telescopic lenses watching from an adjacent building, you can also see those with the naked eye if you look closely. Hopefully national spy agencies are better at it than small town drug task forces, but...
Perhaps they are optimizing for having plausible deniability/a fully fleshed out backstory in case they are questioned by eg. local cops or a security guard, moreso than inconspicuousness to a random passerby who is unlikely to pose any danger with their idle theorizing
I think NSA has hacked the van (without the van operators realizing) and so it’s both a sewer inspection van and an NSA surveillance van at the same time.
You can either disguise your operation as a goofy sewer inspection van and hope you trick every single person who notices it into second-guessing themselves along the lines of "surely the FBI would be more low-key than that..."
Or you can just be low-key in the first place, end of story. I assume the tech in the modern day (as compared to, like, the 80s when this trope was born) is advanced enough to facilitate this option.
I think I'd rather assume that I couldn't successfully pull off low key 100% of the time while actively monitoring someone from the street in front of their house, so instead I'd make sure that while 99% of the people will see a sewer inspection van and think nothing of it, the 1% who catches a look inside of the van and thinks it's suspicious will easily find a perfectly reasonable explanation for what they think they saw.
Regardless of what the real story is on this van, lookup the Bernie S. case if you want an easy case with proof of government surveillance incompetence. Under cover Secret Service agents were photographed surveilling a 2600 meeting in a mall court, then got embarrassed when the 2600 guys posted flyers with their photographs around. Most criminals are dumb which is a good thing as I like the bad guys getting caught, but unfortunately the smart ones graduate to become politicians.
haha well dont assume
spies are some godmode infallable people. spies also are humans and can have varying degrees of freedom to express their stupidity in their work..
in our country some spies got caught drivin around with wifi pineapple in plain sight circling govt and ngo sites.
in my mind thats next level dumb stuff, but maybe they arent really hackers and think its not conspicuous, or even the opposite, they know exactly what it is but think 'oh normal people wont stop to think about this, they dont recognise such equipment'.
if you werent there, didnt know the guys in the van etc. etc. - its all just guesswork.
even public record of a sewer inspection right then and there at that time (which i kinda doubt exists) wouldnt confirm or deny what that van was really doing there.
that being said, i would _assume_ its a sewer inspection van. but thats an assumption, not a known fact.
Reminds me of the joke where students prove by induction that the teacher is not actually planning a surprise test, and are surprised when there's a test the next day
I mean, why not both? If I was a shadowy agency I would start an actual legit sewer inspection company that does real sewer inspections. And then just collect and share a little extra data as needed. Nobody would be the wiser!
Now I'm starting to wonder if that guy habitually leaves the door open because he got sick of people winking at him with a wry smile every time he had to go to a job.
Sometime there’s vehicle from at least three businesses and two government agencies gathered round an inconspicuous looking civil infrastructure element, and I have to wonder who spying on who. And how much that’s costing.
You're thinking like a normal person. You need to think like an institution that has the entire weight of government behind them and who nobody wants to be on the wrong side of.
They either find someone who has suitable vans they can threaten with prosecution. That person then agrees to be an "informant" because that's better than losing your life to the feds and then their handler asks to borrow a van. They like this because no money needs to get spent specifically on it so it doesn't tend to get scrutinized. If they're going full above the table they register a business with the state complete with valid HVAC license or whatever and then rent a van from some company the FBI owns/runs that rents white vans and have some decals printed up. (For those inclined to do further reading, the OSINT hobbyists have done a lot to expose this workflow as it relates to aircraft so probably start there.)
Same. I can totally buy the joystick and the robot as I've seen this done in my area, but the rack mounted PCs and the headphones makes it seem awfully like he's telling Tom Cruise which wire to cut.
That's almost definitely just a sewer inspection van; I found videos that company has of "multi-sensor pipeline inspections" with the same van, open, with the same equipment visible, and a bunch of people following a bunch of equipment down into a manhole.
As an aside, if you are purchasing an older home make sure you pay for a sewer line inspection. I had no idea this was a thing until a few years later when I had to replace mine and it cost ~$25,000.
I also have an older home and we had to repair our sewer line. It was clay pipe which had broken in a few spots and had major root intrusion. Thankfully there's some newer technology that makes it significantly cheaper in the right circumstances -- instead of digging up your street connection and laying in new pipe they can blow an epoxy-soaked liner into your existing pipe, then run a curing light through it. It ended up being less than 40% of the cost of replacement and works just as well.
We had ours done when we moved in a couple years ago and it was a cool snakey camera thing; they only got us out to the service line; past that would have been a lot more elaborate. Also: that video feed? Pretty gross.
As an aside: I think a lot of people here would be surprised at the amount of technology (and surveillance) that goes into setting speed limits and placing stop signs in residential areas.
A lot of people might also be surprised how frequently traffic engineers will OK unnecessary and less safe four way stops in order to get the annoying citizen pestering them to just leave them alone.
The neighborhood that I have to drive through to get from where I live to where I work hates that their precious little neighborhood is used as a commuter route by a lot of people, so they stuck stop signs EVERY. SINGLE. BLOCK.
I make sure to come to a complete fucking stop at every one of those signs. Partially because I hate the feeling of rolling through stop signs, but partially out of spite lol.
how far is that sewer line run, 6 miles? they usually just bore it out and put a PVC sleeve inside. This is done with the cast iron sewer lines, because if they're not properly taken care of, they will rust into nothing and then you just have a suggestion of a hole through the dirt to the sewer line.
my lines are 4" PVC, if we somehow clog those, someone call me an ambulance.
The old shitty clay lines are what you find in most rentals in SoCal. Then one day none of your toilets flushes and the landlord says you flush too many wipes down the toilet. You argue and they make you pay for a plumber who's like "yea they all do that DONT USE WIPES!!!!!One!!!" And then finally after getting to know every other plumber in town, one offers to run a camera for free and shows you that the main line is fucking falling apart and that's why it keeps plugging up.
TBH sewer main inspections should be required any time someone wants to rent a house out.
I don't think it's very plausible. The subtext of the photo is "that looks comically unlike what you'd inspect from a sewer inspection van". Well, I can tell you pretty much for sure: thats' what the inside of a sewer inspection van from that company looks like.
It took just a couple minutes (less than 5) to go look this up and find the video, for what it's worth.
Maybe it's an NSA wet team! Wet, because they do sewer inspection work. :)
I think if they're buying a fake sewer inspection van they're probably smart enough to find one that doesn't look to people on the Internet like it's a prop out of the movie Enemy of the State.
I hope the owner of the company doesn't read this. They probably like their designs! :)
I just went to Google maps to the address written on the van's passenger door and lo and behold, Google did drive down the alley behind and while this is a larger vehicle and not just a van, that's their look (they also have black versions if you look around): https://www.google.com/maps/@33.7851188,-118.211276,3a,67.3y...
I found a video with an identical National Plant Services sewer inspection van, inspecting a large-diameter sewer line: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVXceJ3Yxnw
(The photo shows van TV-230 while the video shows van TV-217, so they are different instances of the van.)
That is a van built by Ares (I might have the spelling slightly wrong).
Funny enough I once bought a used one, stripped the sewer inspection equipment out, kept the Oman diesel generator and made it into an actual surveillance van.
The inspection robots that came with it were cool. I sold them and the other equipment I pulled out for a good chunk of cash.
The money shot! I did not realize sewer cleaning required so much onsite IT. Are those rack units running computational fluid dynamics models to figure out how to unclog elaborate networks of pipes?
I wanted to point out that when visiting those sites from Germany (nationalplant.com and the specializedmaintenance.com website) it shows the same unavailable geoblocked message. I wouldn't have recognized it but after opening both links in new tabs on my phone I thought I forgot to open one of the links in this thread and I double-checked it.
Are those fake companies both hosted on wordfence or something? What are the odds, huh?
I am willing to believe it was innocuous. The guy already spilled the beans and has been blackballed from government access. Does he require clandestine surveillance any more? Easy enough to get “national security” reasons why all of his devices need to be tapped. More intimidating to have visible GMen watching him for life.
For some reason this reminded me of Ernest Hemingway. In the later parts of his life, he began to believe he was being followed and tracked by the FBI, and these delusions eventually gave way to various other issues. Or perhaps it could be the other way around, but there is a catch here.
In either case this led to him being somewhat brutally treated with electroconvulsive therapy, repeatedly, to little effect beyond damaging his mind. A quote from on that was, "What is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure, but we lost the patient." He would kill himself not long thereafter.
The interesting thing is that the FBI was following and tracking him, and simply stayed silent as this all played out.
That very well could be what it was. If it had been anything other than:
1. Spotless.
2. Parked right behind Klein's (and by extension, my) house.
3. Skittish, such that they closed the door right after I took the picture and drove off less than a minute later without pulling any gear up out of a manhole or something.
then that's probably what I'd chalk it up to. I am absolutely not 100% convinced it was, say, an undercover NSA van.
And yet, that's exactly what I thought it was from the moment I saw the gear racks and monitors inside.
Here's the thing, there's never going to be convincing evidence for you to decide that it wasn't what your hunch said it was. That's the nature of suspicion.
You could Google "national plant services van" on image search and find similar vans, and that the company is owned by is the Carylon Corporation, with revenue of $300m/year -- but that couldn't convince you that a government agency (it wouldn't be the NSA unless they're violating the law) didn't borrow it or copy it.
You could read that their services include "Digital CCTV inspection. Laser profiling. Sonar pipeline inspection." but that couldn't convince you that the monitor+joystick and other equipment is needed for sewer inspection, because you already believe it is for surveillance. (The irony being that the kind of mass surveillance Mark Klein exposed, or Snowden exposed, means there's absolutely no need to park a truck outside someone's house. You can track who they're communicating with already, and you can subvert their own devices to listen in, instead of parking a van out front for their neighbors to notice.)
You could look at who has the contract to inspect sewers in your town -- it's public record. But you could still choose to believe that the federal government did the same check, and went out and got an identical truck so as to be less suspicious (although in this thread half the people are saying "that's too clean/fancy/technological to be a sewer inspection van!" so if they did it would have backfired.)
Was he under surveillance? Who knows. Does this truck prove anything either way? No. Everybody is going to leave this thread with whatever hunch they came in with.
We have a manhole outside our house and it was inspected like this. I work with GIS for electric and gas companies. I used to keep small ear protectors in the Burley so me and the kids could go up and ask "diggermen" about holes in the road.
Xcel used directional drilling for a plastic gas main down our street and then did sewer intrusion inspections after. A neighbor had their sewer line pierced. It's a hazard because it isn't detectible until the sewer line blocks and then the blade thingy the plumber uses can sever the plastic gas service lateral in the sewer line.
There is a gas overflow valve (like a ball bearing that too much flow can push in to block the pipe) back at the service tee fitting on the main. If that doesn't work then you could have a gas explosion in the sewer or house. It happens and it is bad. Clients give presentations on these projects at conferences (e.g. use GIS to combine the sewer and gas topology to identify where the crossings are.)
That truck isn't for inspecting your sewer, it's for inspecting every junction on that sewer line, 8 hours per day, every day. They will have a map and linear reference showing where every other underground utility (fiber/gas/electricity) intersects it and be recording and cross referencing it in case it needs to be produced in court at a later date.
People are conflating do-you-need-a-$30k-sewer-line "plumber inspection" with this service. This kind of inspection is more like the "assuming tort liability" role that the companies like sitewise serve. Even with the robot done and packed, the operator in the truck was working for a bit, making copies of the videos and tagging them and stuff. If your gas main piercing a sewer causes explosions the settlements can be in the tens of millions.
BigUtility uses trenchless directional drilling to poke a drill horizontally down the street and then laterally to each house saving millions of dollars in open trench costs. The gotcha is that they can't see where they are digging and thus can burn, electrocute, explode or kill taxpayers. The inspections help with sewer maintenance / cleaning but the big money/concern is on the liability for cross bored gas lines.
The robot (the one I saw outside my house) was over $10k and kitting out the whole truck with a crane and the monitors and reels was $90k. They hosed the robot down completely with high pressure water from the truck once it came back out and checked it over for damage. That and the fact that the van guys typically don't go in the sewer is why the van is clean. It's an "expensive equipment" van, not a plumbers van. For comparison the fiber optic inspection a plumber might use is more like $2k and you can rent them.
Depending on the job they can inflate a balloon at the next manhole upstream or even pump/route the sewer through a temp pipe on the street surface (looks like a big fire hose) from the previous manhole to the one after where the van is. That needs 3 crews plus flaggers for traffic. They use a radio to coordinate with the other crews.
With the line blocked for inspection the robot typically just has a film of that nasty sewer grease on it.
They told me the door stays open even in winter because the crane operator / tether wrangler guy is right by an open sewer which is a fall and methane hazard.
The job isn't quick - there might be 300 feet / 100m of line to the robot near the next manhole. Unless they were just looking at one service main, if they were able to leave they must have been winding up already.
The more important question is: is there a sewer manhole where they parked?
If we can surveil people with drones from miles away, what technology are the FBI using that requires guys physically in a van outside a house? If you were going to park outside, why would you use a method that usually blocks the street?
I dug up a pic. If you look carefully you can see two tethers, one for the 4 wheel metal sled that moves it and a thicker one for the camera and lights on the "head" part. The crew used the controls to move the head around until it was looking at my kids and they could see themselves on the second screen (one screen faced out the door.) The kids thought it was cool: https://i.imgur.com/2ltz8bj.png
Story about a fatal explosion caused by horizontal directional drilling piercing a gas main:
I can't find any conference papers but the industry term to google is "crossbore" and this blog post has some pictures of gas service laterals piercing sewers:
I would think that anyone working in a sewer inspection van would keep the door open because it is highly likely that sewer inspection vans smell like, well, sewer.
If the van is loaded with equipment, or even if it isn’t, theft and robbery are common in most of the US. You can’t leave a van door open and not be extremely vigilant.
One thing for certain: that is absolutely NOT a sewer inspection van. Seriously, you ever worked trades? It is way too clean on the interior and not fitted for working dirty jobs, to say nothing of the visible surveillance workstation.
While I can honestly believe both (it was a surveillance van vs it was a sewer maintenance company), do you think that the intimidation and surveillance of Snowden or Assange won’t last until the end of their lives?
This is crazy.. you guys are focused on vans and mini stories when all his sacrifice and that of thousand if not more americans was snuffed.
`Congress intervened by passing the FISA Amendments Act which, in part, granted “retroactive immunity” to the telecommunications carriers for their involvement in the NSA spying programs. This massive grant of immunity for past violations of multiple state and federal laws protecting communications privacy was unprecedented.`
Be the change you want to see. I mentioned the vans and his dogs because Mark wasn't some random picture on the Internet, but the nice guy a couple houses down who talked about the volunteer work he did for harbor seals[0]. He was a real person we liked a lot and I thought others might enjoy hearing about his noisy, overprotective golden retrievers.
But yes, he was also a personal hero to me before I met him in real life, and we should absolutely still be talking about the things he uncovered and what happened to them afterward. Please do tell those stories, too.
He risked everything, and in the end, the system closed ranks to protect itself. Retroactive immunity was basically a way of saying - "Yep, it was illegal, but it doesn't matter."
You have to remember that half, possibly more than half, of the country is more than okay with what the NSA was doing and is doing.
It's not at all surprising that Congress would indemnify people for, more or less, doing what Congress authorized them to do. If we don't like it, we could consider, maybe not voting the same people into that Congress. Over. And over. And over. And over. And over. And over.
A full 24 Senators and 63 Representatives have held their seats for over 36 years. That's not what you'd expect of a citizenship that was actually upset about being spied upon by their government.
It's obviously not a problem of electing the wrong people. There are enough checks and balances in the system to ensure that there is no change forthcoming.
The system is, indeed, set up to minimize revolutionary churn. The tilt that we're seeing right now towards fascism and white nationalism has been some 40 years in the making. It takes a lot of organization to tilt the whole thing.
This is a feature, not a bug. The system is architected, when something is controversial, default to no motion.
> You have to remember that half, possibly more than half, of the country is more than okay with what the NSA was doing and is doing.
I doubt this. I'd also be interested to see if those people actually know, on any real level, what the NSA was actually doing.
> If we don't like it, we could consider, maybe not voting the same people into that Congress. Over. And over. And over. And over. And over. And over.
They so reliably do the opposite of what people want and yet continue to win. You don't find this at all odd and you put it down to lack of consideration on the part of the electorate.
> That's not what you'd expect of a citizenship that was actually upset about being spied upon by their government.
The joys of being old enough to remember the Church Committee, The House Select Committee on Assassinations, The JFK Records Review Board. PEOPLE ARE CLEARLY NOT OKAY WITH THIS. Yet those who carry water for the deep state are unimpeded by this. Please see this, or at least, don't repeat simple falsehoods about the electorate.
It's like coming across a drowning man and laughing in his face about his predicament.
They aren't. Fewer than 3/4 of eligible voters voted in 2020. In general, somewhere around 10% to a third of eligible voters actually vote in primaries, which are the elections that actually have the most impact on office holding.
Nobody needs to fake election results when Americans just don't show up to vote. It's a disquietingly under-informed and apathetic electorate.
> It's a disquietingly under-informed and apathetic electorate.
The United States has elevated voter suppression to an art form. Last minute polling relocations, inadequate polling locations, unreasonable ID requirements, unreasonable registration requirements, “accidental” voter roll purges. It’s not easy to vote here. And it’s especially hard if you are in a group the incumbents don’t like.
While these things happen, they are not the bulk of the explanation for the lack of voters showing up.
The bulk of it is that voters don't show up. We had the most turnout for any Presidential election in 2020, when people were literally quarantining to escape a plague... Turnout was around 66%. Evidence suggests that (at least in modern times) the way to get Americans to vote is to so constrain them that they can't do anything else with their time on election day.
> Evidence suggests that (at least in modern times) the way to get Americans to vote is to so constrain them that they can't do anything else with their time on election day.
In 2020 voting by mail was widely expanded because of the pandemic. In 2024 it was rolled back. It was easier to vote in 2020 than it was in 2024.
I wouldn’t describe voting in 2020 as constrained. More like enabled. It’s the closest we’ve ever been to a voting holiday.
Oh, agreed---the voting wasn't constrained. The people were. You had to make the people so bored that they bothered to fill out the damn ballot and put a stamp on it.
Americans get distracted. That's the big secret. We're such a generally satisfied, busy, and entertained group of humans that we literally can't be arsed to go pull the one lever that is most politically powerful every time we get a chance to pull it. Some people are actively marginalized. Most of us just don't bother to read the one-pager on the county website and then show up in the fourteen-ish hours set aside to do the thing (let alone try to, say, actively study the candidates or the on-ballot issues).
I literally had a young man confide in me day of election in 2016 that he was voting for Trump because he liked him on the TV show. That's your American voter, when they show up at all.
> I literally had a young man confide in me day of election in 2016 that he was voting for Trump because he liked him on the TV show. That's your American voter, when they show up at all.
I don’t find extrapolating a single anecdote to the entire population a compelling argument.
One shouldn't, but it does fit a pattern for American voters; I more intended it as an exemplar of known behavior. Ronald Reagan was elected Governor of California on the back of his popularity as an actor, popularity which more-or-less carried him to the Presidency (he didn't have an outstanding record as California governor, unless you count "Passing the most restrictive gun control in history to curb the Black Panthers" as outstanding). Simple name recognition can be a shortcut to the Presidency in the US; Americans don't have a tradition of demanding demonstration of a long career of civil service of their Presidents (with the record, to my knowledge, being the most recent one's first election with "zero previous demonstration").
I'd love to give you some hard data on this in modern times, but AFAICT no polls are even asking questions as simple and obvious as "When did you first hear of Donald Trump?" or "Do you trust an actor more than a politician?"
Trump in 2016 was able to use his lack of political history as a selling point; with no history of service in office, he'd had no scandals in office. Clinton's long political career worked against her in public perception.
I personally believe that there's some benefit to political expertise and demonstrated history of good choices and good leadership; the American electorate doesn't seem to value these things when they reject a career politician for someone with no track record in the highest elected office... And then reelect him in similar circumstances.
> It's depressing
We're in the second term of President Trump with a Congress that has carried a sub-30% approval rate for decades. I'm not going to be able to offer many optimistic observations about America's Federal elected offices... Or the people who elect them. It is entirely possible the American Experiment ends in this generation with the conclusion that Americans had a good thing going until they lost the tools to successfully self-govern.
I would welcome counter-evidence that didn't fail the conspiracy theory test.
> Fewer than 3/4 of eligible voters voted in 2020.
This is not completely true[0]. I'd also give the advice that you shouldn't take a "nationwide" average to mean much of anything. The wikipedia article shows wide variation across the states which is true for almost any statistic you can think of.
> actually vote in primaries
Bernie voters might give you a hint as to why. I guess this is the problem Mayor Pete's "shadow" app was meant to solve. It honestly seems like parties don't genuinely like people voting in primaries. The person who's "turn" it is might lose.
> elections that actually have the most impact
Unfortunately we're talking about the legislature here because they write the laws in question and are the proper party to wage your grievances against. Have you ever looked into how competitive those primaries actually are? Anyways this is why I vote for Greens and Libertarians. Then they might stand a chance of cracking 5% and getting recognized fully by the Federal Election Commission.
> Americans just don't show up to vote.
All evidence to the contrary. What they don't do is vote in senate elections. There districts with as low as 25% voter turn out. Which means you only need 12% of the eligible population to turn out for you to secure your seat. So you're right. No need to cheat. Just be arbitrary and capricious to the point that busy and worried people no longer feel that using their time in the voting booth can actually change something.
> It's a disquietingly under-informed and apathetic electorate.
As always, back to where this conversation starts, who should bear the responsibility for this? I don't think blaming the electorate itself brings you anywhere other than helping to chase people further away from an important civil institution.
Yea, but I'm not a signatory to the constitution, the /states/ are. Which is why the document immediately tells you it is to "form a more perfect union." The union isn't between you and I nor does it grant either of us law enforcement powers.
Then _immediately_ after you get Section 1: "All legislative powers herin granted shall be vested in a congress of the United States." Which, by the way, prior to the 17th amendment, the Senate was selected directly by the states. Then again immediately after that you get a set of limitations as to who can be admitted to this congress. You'll also note that as citizens we have absolutely no voice in the operation of this congress, the selection of it's bills, nor in the voting on them.
No, in a representative /republican/ democracy, it's the representatives that are first and foremost responsible. The most I can do is offer my input on who those people should be every 2 years, so I certainly bear some, but it's inane to suggest that the current outcome is the fault of the electorate. In particular when billions of dollars are spent every year on campaigns and advertising.
Your idea is austere and unhelpful to a broken and corrupted system. I'd like to develop a notion of jurisprudence that helps the people out of their predicament, not points the finger blamefully at them.
You are right that Congress are the immediate legislative agents, but the Congressional responsibility is back-stopped by the people, because ultimately (with the exception of impeachment and removal from office, which is asking the legislature to police itself) only the people can decide to stop supporting them. And you're right about the 17th Amendment, but that's in the past; modern American voters have more power to choose their representatives than they have in most of American history, and they do not exercise it.
I don't know who else's fault it can be but the electorate when they saw how the current President operates and re-elected him. To say nothing of re-electing the same Congress over and over despite that body having a sub-30% approval rating.
... and if the people don't hold the responsibility, what would you recommend the people do? I'm not sure what "a notion of jurisprudence" means in this context: are you suggesting replacing he power-at-a-distance of an unpopular legislature with rule by nine unelectedlife-appointed officials and their underlings?
His dogs were fiercely protective of his house, which is perfectly understandable. One day I saw a "sewer cleaning" van behind his house, and I have a hard time believing that's what it really was: https://honeypot.net/2025/03/12/rip-mark-klein.html