Not for Identification

I have my original Social Security card.  I applied for it and got it when I was in High School and was about to get my first real job.  Printed at the bottom is "FOR SOCIAL SECURITY AND TAX PURPOSES -- NOT FOR IDENTIFICATION".  This "Not for Identification" business is often misconstrued.  It is usually taken to mean that your Social Security number is not some kind of ID or identification number.  That's not what is meant.  Because the very same card also says "For Social Security and Tax Purposes".  What is actually meant is that  the card itself is not to be used for identification.  That's because the card itself was not designed to provide positive identification.

And that is a nice bridge.  This post is an update to a previous post about Positive Identification (see http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2016/04/positive-identification.html).  If you reread it you will find it links to previous blogs.  I have been weighing in on privacy issues for some time now.  Although the trend continues the details keep changing.  And there have been several important changes since my last post over two years ago.

I spent some time in the post I linked to on the fingerprint identification system Apple had implemented.  You placed your finger on the correct spot on the phone and it would read your fingerprint.  If it recognized it the phone would unlock.  The phone positively identified you by analyzing your fingerprint.

Apple has since moved on to facial recognition.  Smart phones have had cameras in them for some time.  Even my old fashioned flip-phone now comes equipped with a camera.  My phone doesn't have enough computer power to do facial recognition but newer iPhones do.  They take a picture and supplement it by measuring other characteristics of your face.  If it's a match you have been positively identified and your phone unlocks.

It is important to recognize there are limitations.  First of all, what the phone is doing is matching your current face to one that was identified to the phone during the phone's "setup" procedure.  So the phone knows that, relatively speaking, you are you.  But absolutely speaking it doesn't know who you are.  Also, it is possible to fool the recognition system.  This was true of the older fingerprint system and it continues to be true of the facial recognition system.  But everybody expects that the process will be updated and enhanced as time goes by so that it becomes harder and harder to do this.  Even now, it takes a lot of skill and effort to fool either system. It takes deliberate effort and a considerable amount of knowledge.

But the identification is only relative.  The phone recognizes you as the owner because it has been told that you are the owner.  But it doesn't know who you are.  And the same is true more generally.  The analysis I did pointing out that there is really no way the current system can absolutely tie a specific person to a specific birth certificate is still true.  And using CODIS or some other DNA based system to create an absolute connection continues to get easier and easier from a technical perspective.

CODIS has added 7 additional STRs in 2017 so it is now using using 20.  But nothing has moved from a political perspective. There are still tight restrictions on what gets put into a CODIS database.  There has been no move to CODIS newborns, for instance.  And if smartphone makers are thinking about using DNA for identification I don't know about it.

But there has been big developments on the identification front.  These developments are with respect to relative identification.  But they are so pervasive and extensive that they have rendered the difference between relative and absolute identification moot.

We have known for a long time that tech companies were collecting a lot of data about us.  Google famously saves every search ever made.  Initially this was supposed to be so they could analyze it and optimize their algorithms to give you a more useful answer.  But it soon became apparent that they were not just using it as some sort of anonymous pile of data that helped in search optimization.  They were using it to identify each and every one of us.  They would then develop a profile of each of us which they would sell to advertisers.  The idea was this would allow advertisers to narrowly target their marketing to just the people most likely to be interested in the product.

As an example of how this worked I once searched Amazon for shredders. I didn't need one but my mother, who did not have a computer, needed one.  I soon started to notice that wherever I went on the web an ad for an Amazon shredder would soon follow.   This behavior persisted even after I went back and bought a shredder from Amazon for my mother.  That was modestly entertaining and little or no harm was done to me or anybody else.  So this kind of behavior didn't seem all that bad either to me or pretty much anybody else.  And that's the kind of mental model people had about what was going on.

Okay, so the NSA was sweeping up all this data.  That was the government and they shouldn't be doing that sort of thing.  At least so went the argument by myself and many others.  (There were, of course, lots of people who were okay with this and other intrusive behavior by the government.)  But my point is that if we put this sort of thing on a scale the NSA was generally considered closer to the "bad" end than people like Google.  And a large number of people were of the opinion that it was all fine.

Then the 2016 election happened.  And over time we have learned a lot more about what tech companies in general and Facebook in particular have been up to.  And more and more people have become very angry.  There is something in the business called an EULA, an End User License Agreement.  We have all had to deal with them.  They are long documents full of impenetrable legalese that even expert lawyers can often not make sense out of.  In the backs of our minds we are all pretty sure that there is stuff in them that we would not like if we understood what it was and what it meant.  But you can't get around EULAs.  Everybody uses them so you can't just go to the next company.

And they are all bad to one extent or another so it is impossible from a practical point of view to go with the company that has the least onerous EULA.  They are what is called a "coercive contract".  At least one party (us) is effectively powerless in the negotiation.  So we don't read them.  We just click the "Agree" button and move on.  We have all made a deal with the devil.  If we are going to have access to these compelling tools and gadgets we are going to have to put up with a certain amount of stuff we would rather not have to.  But if we sign up for Facebook, for instance, we expect the bad behavior to be confined to the relationship between us and Facebook.  And we did after all "Agree" to Facebook's EULA.

But we have found out that it is far worse than we thought.  We expect Facebook to use what it has learned about us to try to get us to sign up for more Facebook stuff.  And we expect Facebook to sell profile information to advertisers so that Amazon can pester me with ads for shredders.  But we expect it to stop at that.  But it turns out it didn't.

Facebook has a program that allows companies to build and run applications within the Facebook environment.  Those applications can harvest information.  And the information is not limited to what we tell the application.  A popular type of application is a cute quiz.  "How much do you really know about Star Wars?", or about pop stars, or fashion, or cars, or whatever.  Certainly these quizzes can be constructed to collect information that advertisers would find valuable and, therefore, pay money for.  That sort of thing seems fair.  But these cute applications (they are designed to be cute so that they will be popular so that lots of people will install them) are not limited to harvesting the data you provide while answering the quiz.  It turns out that they get access to all the information Facebook has on you.

That's bad.  I'm pretty sure it's legal because they would be idiots to not put the necessary language into their EULA.  But this "they get all the that Facebook has on you" degree of badness is just the first and least bad level of badness.  It turns out they also get access to what Facebook knows about your friends.  That's the second level of badness.  And this behavior is probably legal because of the Facebook EULA.  There is probably some language in there saying this sort of thing is legal.  But it turns out there is a third level of badness.

Remember the bit about how I was getting those Amazon shredder ads everywhere.  I did my search not in Google or Facebook but on Amazon's web site.  So only Amazon knows I did the search.  What's going on is that advertisers and the companies they do business with like Amazon and Facebook share data in networks.  Amazon shared the information that I had done a search on shredders to its network partners and they placed "Amazon shredder" ads on web sites that I later visited.

It turns out that Facebook does the same thing.  They are part of these information sharing networks so they have access to what's happening on sites that are far away from anything Facebook owns or operates.  So Facebook has a profile on people like me who have NEVER had a Facebook account.  And people like me have never signed an EULA with Facebook or any of the application providers Facebook hosts on their platform.

We have slowly found this out as revelations have trickled out as people have looked at how the 2016 election actually played out.  Facebook has a "commercial" interface so that people who want to make a buck can build and run an application to run on the Facebook platform.  But they also have an "educational" interface so that people doing research can also have access to the Facebook platform and Facebook data.  This latter interface is given wider latitude due to it's presumably non-commercial and beneficial intent.

A Cambridge University Don (professor - Cambridge is in the United Kingdom) took advantage, and as we now know, allowed a company called Cambridge Analytica to harvest vast amounts of data about Americans from Facebook.  First it was data on 50 million people.  Then it was data on 87 million people.  The actual number is and probably will never be known.  And we know they sucked a vast amount of data out of Facebook.  And we know we don't know where it all ended up.  Facebook at one point asked for it all back.  Fat chance.

And that's just Cambridge Analytica.  There is certainly no technical reason dozens or hundreds of others could not have done the same thing.  And we know that Cambridge Analytica was able to harvest data on users who signed up for one of the applications they put together.  They all signed Cambridge's EULA.  But we also know that this group numbers less than a million.  We get to 50 and later 87 million because they were able to collect data on "friends" then "friends of friends" and so on.  All these people at least signed the Facebook EULA.  But were they also able to collect data on people like me, people who have never signed up for Facebook?  The answer is unclear.

So it turns out that Facebook knows a lot about each of its users.  The NSA would probably like to know as much about people as Facebook knows.  So Facebook can positively identify its users.  The positive identification is relative.  They can't tie a specific user to a specific birth certificate.  But they know so much about that person it doesn't matter.  They can more positively identify a person that a bureaucrat at the bureau that issues driver's licenses, or voter registration cards, or passports.  They can do a better job of positively identifying a person that the government can.

And Facebook has taken all the heat.  But the same is true of Google.  Remember they have all that search history (and lots more).  It is probably also true to a lesser extent of Apple and Microsoft and a number of other companies.  (So far the spotlight has shown brightly on Facebook and left the others in the shadows.)  We now have a completely new method of personal identification, one that I did not imagine as recently as two years ago.  You can now be positively identified by your online profile.

Most of us now live on our smartphones.  (Again, I am an exception.)  Back in the stone age of personal computers Intel was going to put a serial number in their 80486 chip.  The privacy advocates of the day talked them out of it and treated this as a big victory for privacy, the ability to use computers and remain anonymous.  But while they won this tiny skirmish they lost the war.  There are hundreds of numbers on smartphones that can easily be accessed that provide a unique identification for a specific device.

Microsoft even pioneered a process for creating a GUID, a Globally Unique IDentification.  The process guaranteed that it would never generate the same number twice.  Microsoft uses GUIDs all over the place in their software.  If you can get access, and it is easy to do, to any of these GUIDs you can uniquely identify a device like a PC (I do have and use those) or a tablet running a Microsoft application or a smartphone running a Microsoft application.  And creating GUIDs is not that hard to do.  So you can't avoid the problem by avoiding Microsoft.

You might just as well try to have a presence on the Internet without ever "Agree"ing to an EULA.  Other vendors have figured out how to generate their equivalent of a GUID.  Then there are all those numbers that behave like a serial number.  Every network interface has a MAC address.  It is effectively a serial number.  Lots of software uses a "License key" or an "Activation key".  They are both effectively serial numbers.  IP addresses often behave like a serial number.  The list goes on and on.

Companies like Facebook can harvest GIUDs and MAC Addresses and license/activation keys and tie a specific profile to a specific device or small list of devices and build up a positive identification.  And they can and have done it better than the government.

I am pro-privacy.  But I am also realistic.  I have argued in a number of posts that when it comes to privacy the horse left the barn long ago and that there is no effective way to get the horse back.in the barn.  And even if you did the horse is likely to escape no matter how much effort you put into horse-proofing the barn.

I think we need to accept the fact that privacy is not possible any more.  That means we need laws, regulations, and social norms to constrain how we and our institutions and our businesses behave in a world where the technology exists that permits the powerful to peer pretty much anywhere they want.  There is technology like encryption that can close some of the doors that let the powerful or just the technologically sophisticated in.  This sort of thing is helpful and should be encouraged.  But it doesn't protect us from those who have access to the inside like Facebook and whoever they license or enable.

This means that we must outlaw behavior that is technologically possible and often easy to do.  We must also demand a high level of tolerance when it comes to what people are permitted to do.  No matter who you are there are some behaviors other people engage in that you don't like, in some cases you don't like it a lot.  As a society we must find ways to constrain the actions you are allowed to take in response to the behaviors you dislike.  If you violate those constraints you need to be punished.

This at first seems like a new and unnatural way for people to behave.  But a thousand or so years ago we all lived in small villages.  It was then easy to look into a doorway as doorways frequently had no doors.  But social morays constrained people from looking into doorways or acknowledging that certain behaviors were taking place in some public place.  This was all enforced by shunning and other social actions.  Society is now a global enterprise encompassing billions of people, millions of companies, and thousands of governments.  Social norms alone are not going to work for us now.

At first blush it might sound like I am advancing a Libertarian agenda.  And that is half right.  Libertarians believe that legal prohibitions on behavior should be kept to a minimum.  That's the part where my position coincides with the libertarian point of view.  Where I differ is that there also needs to be legal prohibitions that outlaw violating the new norms.  The government must step in, sometimes in a heavy handed way, to stop people, organizations, and institutions from doing things they want to do, namely going after people they disagree with and prohibiting behavior they don't like.

Facebook is a rich and powerful corporation with many fans.  It will take a very powerful institution to be able to force them to change their behavior.  They won't do it on their own.  The only institution capable of doing that is a large powerful government doing intrusive things.  And that kind of government is one Libertarians vehemently oppose.

We are a very divided society right now.  And at its most fundamental level what divides us is our vision of how things are and how things should be.  Until we come to a common vision the sort of things I am talking about are impossible.  Even if a common vision were possible the issues I am talking about will be very hard to resolve.  The most likely result of this current division is gridlock with no progress in any direction.

Maybe that is for the best.  It gives all of us time to think about these issues and decide what we think about them and where we stand.  But if recent events tells us anything they tell us that instead of thinking about these hard problems we will chase the next shiny object and the one after that.  Then we will wonder how we got into another fine mess.

Liberal Democracy

This is a subject that I have been planning on getting around to for some time.  In the notes I had assembled on the subject I listed "Democracy 101" and "Government 101" as possible titles.  The post was always supposed to feature a discussion of the phrase "liberal democracy".  In the end I decided that this phrase is central to the discussion.  So I went with it for the title.

I also labeled this post as a "culture" post rather than the more obvious label of "politics".  I decided to do that because of the importance of the subject to our culture as a whole.  It is too important to be pigeon holed as merely politics.

And the immediate event that caused me to transform this subject from a potential to an actual blog post was the recent widespread coverage of Sinclair Communications.  Sinclair owns close to 200 local TV stations and would like to own more.  They are working on a plan to acquire the chain of TV stations owned by a company that grew out of the Chicago Tribune newspaper.  Newspapers have long been considered a dying business so lots of owners have been busily diversifying.  That's what the owners of the "Trib" did.  They bought a bunch of TV stations.  Sinclair wants to buy them.  If the acquisition goes through Sinclair would end up owning over 200 TV stations whose combined reach would extend to cover 80% of the population of the US.

That level of ownership concentration sounds bad.  But that's not what Sinclair got in trouble for.  The people who control Sinclair are, like many wealthy people today, very conservative.  They've got it and they want to keep it.  They are adamantly opposed to anything that might possibly threaten their position.  And in the case of Sinclair their ownership of so many TV stations puts them in a position to actively do something about it.

A lot of people get their news from their local TV station.  The news is supposed to be sacrosanct.  There is an unwritten (or, in the modern era, unenforced) rule that says management does not interfere with news content.  Sinclair has instead been influencing what local news on their stations has to say about some issues.  They have long since moved beyond just making hiring and firing decisions, a power that gives them considerable control over news content.  They also have been sending edicts out for years now saying "this must appear on the air".

Some stations have been burying these segments in low viewership parts of their schedule.  Other stations have been happy to air them in prime time.  But all of them have been forced to respond in some way.  A few stations have managed to avoid airing a few segments.  But for the most part the segments got aired.  The segments Sinclair was sending out were always presented as if the local staff decided they should be aired.  This was not the case.  But the segments were obviously not locally produced.  That, at least, gave the local staff a fig leaf of cover.

Having gotten away with everything so far Sinclair decided it was time to up their game.  They sent out a script and instructed one or more of the local news staff to read it on the air as if it represented that person's own opinion.  The local news staff was forced to go along with this charade.  Like all the other material Sinclair provided the latest statement had a decided conservative slant.  In general all of the pieces were designed to support and enhance the ability of Sinclair's owners to maintain and expand their power and wealth.

In the news business it is fine to have an opinion.  But there is supposed to be a separation between news, fact based information, and commentary, opinion which may or may not be solidly grounded in fact.  In a newspaper there is the "news hole" and the "opinion page".  Broadcast news operations are supposed to maintain a similar separation.  There are two problems with the Sinclair material.  First, it has been presented as news when it is actually opinion.  Secondly, they disguised the source of the information.  If Sinclair had said "the following represents the opinion of the management of Sinclair Communications" everything would have been fine.  But they didn't.

This Sinclair behavior was well known within the news business.  In theory competitive pressures should have caused Sinclair's competitors to make a big deal of the story.  They didn't even though claiming "we are the truly independent people you can relay on and they are a bunch of lying corporate toadies" should have been good for business.  It is important to remember that the news business is a business.  And it is owned almost completely by wealthy and powerful individuals and corporations.  Calling out Sinclair's shortcomings might have caused one's own shortcomings to come under scrutiny.  And that scrutiny might have turned up embarrassing information.  For this or other reasons Sinclair's competitors kept mum.  So the public in general and Sinclair viewers in particular stayed blissfully ignorant.

That is until a few days ago.  Sinclair might have gotten away with this latest stunt.  Initially it drew no coverage.  But then a web site called "Mashable" put out a short video featuring video of anchor after anchor on station after station robotically repeating exactly the same words.  They mashed up the video so that we could see many anchors on many stations simultaneously saying exactly the same thing.  The video went viral and the whole sorry business could no longer be ignored.

Or could it?  My local paper, the Seattle Times, at first didn't cover it at all.  Then they did a story not about Sinclair but about Trump's tweet about Sinclair (and a bit about the pending acquisition).  Finally the story blew up to the point that it couldn't be ignored.  So they did a long in depth piece about the whole thing.  That was yesterday.  Today, the follow up consisted entirely of some nice letters to the editor.  I expect the story to be gone by tomorrow and never reappear.  Okay, that was way too long an introduction.  But I feel better.

The form of government in this country is called a "liberal democracy".  Both words are important.  People generally understand "democracy" to be "by the people, of the people, and for the people", in the words of Abraham Lincoln.  But what's this whole "liberal" thing about?

The first thing to understand is that an authoritarian form of government is the natural state of things.  To cite just one example, classical China was of the opinion that the best form of government was one headed by a "philosopher king".  A king is an authoritarian figure.  That was taken as a given.  What one hoped for was that he was also a philosopher.  The Chinese saw that term quite differently than we do today.  They did not think of an academic pontificating from an ivory tower in a completely impractical way about things that seemed completely disconnected from the real world.  To the Chinese a philosopher was a well educated and intelligent person who was thoughtful and careful and was very familiar with the way the real world worked and how actual people behaved.

If you ignore the formal title a philosopher king is what most people in most places and at most times have hoped for in a leader.  They expect a king, an authoritarian head of government who has absolute or near absolute power.  But they hope he also has the same attributes the Chinese looked for:  intelligent, well educated, thoughtful, practical, and careful.  Such a person would be well versed in the issues of the day.  He would come to a decision about what the right way to proceed was and then he would have the power and authority to "make it so".  The whole point of a liberal democracy was to not have a king, philosopher or otherwise.  But why?

The problem with kings is that while a good king can do a lot of good a bad king can do even more bad.  The big problem with kings in particular and authoritarian systems in general is the succession problem.  Who takes over from the old guy?  Ideally you want to replace a good guy with another good guy.  But all too often the guy you were replacing was a bad guy and he ended up getting replaced by another bad guy.

And there was another problem.  Succession fights could get really messy.  A lot of people could get killed.  A lot of raping and pillaging could happen and that would be bad for everybody.  Say you had a good guy.  In the standard authoritarian scheme he sticks around until he dies.  But late in life he could have all kind of medical problems that turned him from a good guy to a bad guy.  Or he could get dementia or some other mental condition that again turned him from a good guy to a bad guy but left him physically healthy and, therefore, long lived.  And say you eventually replaced him with another good guy but there was a nasty fight over the succession.  A country could go a long time between stretches of "good guy" rule.

The long term effect of this experience was succession rules.  Lots of countries in lots of places and in lots of historical eras went with some kind of blood line thing.  The eldest son of the old king would succeed him to become new king.  The idea was to make the succession as smooth as possible.  The odds that the son of a good guy will also be a good guy were better than average.  So there is that to be said for that particular system.  But what if there is no son?.  Or what if the son is an infant?

Nobody ever came up with a really good succession rule.  Modern corporations are authoritarian.  The usual succession rule for them is "promote the pest qualified person from the ranks of senior management".  But authoritarians are jealous of their power.  So they often surround themselves with yes-men.  Yes-men are by their nature second rate.  And in public companies the ultimate arbiter is the board of directors operating on behalf of shareholders.  Oh no!  Liberal democracy.  So while some kind of "best man for the job" rule is possible in principle it often doesn't work that well in actuality.

The idea behind the liberal democratic form of government came out of a European movement called The Enlightenment.  Steven Pinker just published an excellent book called "Enlightenment Now" that goes into a lot of detail about what The Enlightenment was about and what the key ideas that drove the movement were.

The Enlightenment is associated with the liberal movement.  But it is important to understand that the liberal movement was a reaction to the status quo, the way things are, have always ben, and naturally should be.  The thing that drove the liberal movement and produced The Enlightenment was the simple idea that "there has to be a better way".  Liberalism and The Enlightenment started out as an "anti" movement.  It was only after they convinced themselves that certain ideas were superior to the old way of doing thins that they became "for" anything in particular.

Liberalism and The Enlightenment marched in lock step with science.  The old ways of  finding truth were revelation and authority.  God would reveal to us what was right and true.  And the down-to-earth version of God was an authority of one kind or another.  It might be someone with a lot of military or political power.  It might be an oracle speaking for God.  Or it might be a revered ancient.  Again, these sources of truth work better than some completely random process.  But people started asking themselves a key question:  "is there some method that works better for finding truth?"  Listening to some random dude was not the answer but was that the only alternative?

Eventually they found their answer not in a religious belief or a person but in a process.  We now call that process "scientific investigation".  Don't listen to some random dude.  But do listen to the dude who has scientifically investigated the question or issue.  Galileo looked through a telescope and saw amazing things.  And the cool thing about Galileo's approach was that anyone could look through a telescope and see the same thing.  You didn't have to depend on Galileo.  You could confirm it for yourself.  And this whole idea of confirmable observations leading to new ideas and theories that, in turn, could be buttressed by additional observations revolutionized everything.  And this approach quickly ran up an amazing track record.  New ideas that were produced by this process actually worked.

The Enlightenment took this approach to culture and government.  It was apparent that a good king was amazing.  But even good kings screwed up a lot and bad kings and messy successions made for a lot of bad, and often really bad.  So the first thing members of the enlightenment did was try to figure out how to fix the succession problem.  They failed. They also figured out that nobody gets it right all the time.  So maybe vesting all power in one person was a bad idea.  Experience with various forms of councils and ministries, shared authority and responsibility, often led to a better outcome.

So the idea of replacing monarchies with democracies came out of The Enlightenment and liberal thinking.  And it is important to understand that in this context "liberal" means no more than "not bound by past ways".  "Liberal" now means something else.  But that is because The Enlightenment is now a historical movement.  As such liberalism is now tied to a set of ideas that were developed then and are still around.  Similarly the concept of conservatism has also evolved.  It is no longer just "they way things are and have been".  It is now associated with ideas that may or may not represent how things are now.  Instead, they can be more clearly seen as "in opposition to the standard list of 'liberal' ideas".

This can be quickly be demonstrated by the way we talk about economic systems.  Economic systems are now often lumped into just one of two systems: "capitalist" or "socialist".  But historically speaking, at the dawn of The Enlightenment "the way things are and have always been" would be closer to socialism.  Then government had a close connection to markets and the economy.  And capitalism, the dependence on markets rather than government action, arose out of Enlightenment (i.e. liberal) thinking.  But capitalism is now associated with conservatives and socialism with liberals.  A complete role reversal has taken place.

There are a lot of problems with democracy.  One hopes for "the wisdom of the crowds" and one is often disappointed.  It often seems like an "enlightened despot", the modern equivalent of the Chinese "philosophe king" would be a definite improvement.  And at first blush that's right.  Liberal democracies are hamstrung by process and can't react quickly and effectively to problems.  In theory a benevolent despot could.

The succession problem usually takes a while to become apparent.  And we always assume our benevolent despot of choice will be in the "good king" mold.  Certainly the Italians in the '20s thought that's what they were getting when they put Mussolini in power.  And in fact he worked out well for the Italians for a while.  The same is true for Hitler in Germany in the '30s.  He got the economy out of the ditch and made most Germans feel better about themselves.  It was only after a while that the bad outweighed the good.

So there is always a strong undercurrent pulling us toward an authoritarian system here in the US and elsewhere.  The only time and place you find liberal democracy having true popular support is in places where they have been subject to terrible authoritarian governance for a prolonged period of time and then have, one way or another, found a path to democracy.  This usually doesn't last long as the democrats start screwing up to a greater or lesser extent and people start forgetting how bad the past really was.

It turns out that continuing to have a liberal democratic political system requires buy in from powerful people.  Our founding fathers strongly believed in liberal democracy.  This was especially true of George Washington.  He was very popular when he was elected President.  He saw clearly that he could easily have become King George the First of America.  But he carefully chose another course.  The congress squabbled incessantly, as democratic bodies do.  But he patiently waited them out and established a reputation for restraint and deference.

None other than Richard Nixon, one of my least favorite Presidents, continued that tradition.  When he was convinced he was shortly going to find his Impeachment by the House ratified by the Senate he resigned instead of trying to fight it.  At some level he believed in liberal democratic values.  Many powerful people, some famous and some not, have relinquished power in an orderly manner as required to maintain our form of government.  Our system critically depends on this kind of behavior.

Hitler was democratically elected in Germany but he chose to take a different route.  He had wide public support when he did.  The public had become fed up with democracy.  In that case the problem was not with democracy but with the draconian economic provisions imposed on Germany by Democratic Britain and Democratic France.  We have seen the same scenario play out in Russia.  The problems there were entirely home grown but they were also real.  Putin leveraged them to a position where Russia is no longer a democracy.  And there are dozens of examples of the Hitler/Putin model playing out.

Generally speaking, the response in the US is "it can't happen here".  But it can if people in power abandon liberal democratic values for those that advance their own personal interests.  In short, they behave like the Sinclair Communications people.

The bulwark against this is supposed to be the general public.  What's good for Sinclair Communications is bad for the general public.  But for this to work the general public must recognize what's going on and respond accordingly.  At this pint I am pessimistic about the chances of that happening.  People are supposed to have learned about liberal democracy in civics classes in school.  But civics classes are mostly a thing of the past.  And I am skeptical that even when they were a part of the curriculum  most students ever bought into the idea that this sort of things was important.  Instead I see most people as being pretty apathetic on the subject.  They are not much interesting in voting rights and access to the ballot, for instance.

Contrast that with how deeply they are invested in the fate of local sports teams.  There they pour money, interest, and enthusiasm in in almost limitless quantities.  ESPN is a much bigger cash cow than CNN because it has much higher ratings than CNN.

I am not optimistic that our current form of government will endure much longer.  But we have been through a period like this before.  We had the "Gilded Age".  This was the era of the millionaire robber-baron, people like Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, etc.  That age spawned Teddy Roosevelt and the "progressive era" complete with trust busting and other efforts to reign in the power and wealth of the super-rich.  But history only gives us a template.  It does not force us to follow it.