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AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to former CIA Clandestine Service chief Jose Rodriguez speaking to CBS News in 2014. Rodriguez defended the CIAs so-called enhanced interrogation techniques.

JOSE RODRIGUEZ: It was necessary. And let me give you a little history lesson on this. At the time of 9/11, we had general information that an attack was coming. But we didnt know when, where, how. And the reason was, was because the informants, the agents that we had, were on the periphery of the leadership. So we really did not have any inside information. Once we captured Abu Zubaydah and realized that he was the key to letting us know about the incomingthe upcoming second wave of attacks, we decided to go with the enhanced interrogation program. And once that happened, we started to learn about theabout the organization. We got information that added to our base information. We were able to capture and kill the entire al-Qaeda leadership that attacked us on 9/11. We were able to protect the homeland. We were able to save lives.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Jose Rodriguez from 2014 on CBS. I wanted to get Jeremy Scahill to respond, co-founder of The Intercept, host of the weekly podcast Intercepted, author of the books Blackwater: The Rise of the Worlds Most Powerful Mercenary Army and Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield, as well as the Oscar-nominated film Dirty Wars, and a former Democracy Now! producer. Jeremy, your response to both what Rodriguez said and also the possible appointment of Gina Haspel to head the CIA.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, first of all, I mean, Jose Rodriguez is the guy who wrote in his memoir, which was called Hard Measuressounded like it was like a porn movie or somethingthat when they decided to start torturing people around the world, that it was the CIA and the Washington establishment putting on their, quote, big boy pants, is how he referred to it, just to give you a sense of the kind of infantile mentality that some of the people that John Kiriakou was describing had.

And I think that there is substantial evidence to suggest that some of the people involved with this programI dont know directly about Gina Haspel, but othersseemed to really enjoy torturing people, placing them in boxes, exploiting their fears by using psychologists and other mental health professionals to come in and say, What are they actually really afraid of? Whats their deepest, darkest fears? and then exploiting those. So, if someone was afraid of spiders, they would put them inside of a box, that they referred to as a coffin, and then they would put a caterpillar inside of the box and tell the person that it was a tarantula that was in the box with them. They did something called walling, where they would have a rope that was on the other side of a wall, and they would, out of nowhere, just slam a prisoner and yank him on a kind of jerk chain, or like he was a dog on a leash, against the wall. And then you had the kinds of extreme torture that Gina Haspel was involved with. And both Jose Rodriguez and Gina Haspel, in addition to being involved with the outright torture of people, both of them were involved with the destruction of videotapes that were filmed at these black sites that showed, we understand, torture.

And what I think is also important for people to realize right now, Gina Haspel is not considered some extremist in the CIA community. In fact, President Obamas director of central intelligence, John Brennan, was on MSNBC all throughout the day yesterday singing her praises. In fact, at one point, an MSNBC anchor asked John Brennanor said to John Brennan, Now, you demoted her when you were at the CIA. And he goes, No, no, no, no, no. I didnt demote her. In fact, shes wonderful and has all this integrity. And she was tasked with very difficult operations, you know, and persevered and did it with gusto. And, you know, then you have James Clapper, same thing. It was a lovefest on the so-called like opposition media yesterday throughout the day. And MSNBC actually created athey had a graphic up that was describing Gina Haspels track record. And they said that she was involved with sending terror suspects to put them in the hands of foreign governments to be tortured, but they described what she did in Thailand as, quote-unquote, rough interrogation. Now, already its an abomination that anyone refers to this as enhanced interrogation, but, out of nowhere, MSNBC starts referring to torture by the CIA as rough interrogation.

So, we now have someone who is nominated to be the CIA director. It will be interesting to see what happens at that confirmation hearing. One possibility heremy colleague Matthew Cole and I were discussing this yesterdayis that Trump knows that shes going to have a very difficult time being confirmed as CIA director. Now, maybe thats not true. It will take a lot of Democrats. You know, Dianne Feinstein has already come out and sung the praises of Gina Haspel. But Trump is sort of portraying this as shes going to break the glass ceiling and become the first female CIA directorof course, they choose a woman who, as The Onion put it, you know, had to torture many more people than her male colleagues to prove herselfbut that part of the idea might be to force the Democrats to try to stop the appointment of the first female CIA director in an effort to get Senator Tom Cotton, who has been dying to be CIA directorand I think that a lot of neocons want him there, very hawkish on Iran, etc.to sort of pave the way for Tom Cotton to take control of the CIA.

And the final point that Ill make on this micro part of the discussion is that, you know, with the exception of people like John Kiriakou and others who were whistleblowers and who found themselves in the crosshairs of the national security establishment in this country, there really is no such thing as former CIA. And I think its very telling that, across the board, when you hear all these pundits, who were former senior CIA, DNI, FBI, naval intelligence analysts, theyre all on the same pageNed Price, who was the spokesperson for the CIA under Obama, just heaping praise on Gina Haspel all throughout the day. Nothing will fundamentally change in this country with torture, with war crimes, unless we hold those who did the torture accountable.

Gina Haspel does not belong as head of the CIA. She belongs in front of a judge, answering to what she was doing, running a torture operation at a black site in Thailand and destroying evidence. And then, John Brennan, Obamas CIA directorwhile the Senate was investigating the torture that Gina Haspel was a key player in, John Brennans CIA starts spying on the United States Senate. This is the investigators who were investigating the very torture that Gina Haspel was directly involved with. It was Obamas CIA director who was spying on the Senate.

AMY GOODMAN: How?

JEREMY SCAHILL: The Senate investigators were given access to close net computers so that they could review documents. And, of course, the CIA wanted no pages released. What ended up happening is the Senate released a several hundred-page executive summary of a report that wasthat is still not public, that was thousands and thousands of pages. So, Brennan and others at the CIA were concerned about this investigation, and they began monitoring what the Senate investigators were looking into.

So, you know, this isnt just like, Oh, we have Mr. out-of-control Putin asset Donald Trump putting this horrid torturer in power. No, no, no, no, no. The hashtag #resistance, in terms of former intelligence people that are on the liberal networks, they love Gina Haspel. They absolutely love her. And no ones saying word boo about the fact that John Brennan was the one who was heading the CIA when the CIA was spying on the United States Senate committee thats tasked with overseeing the Central Intelligence Agency.

AMY GOODMAN: So, I want to go to something Dexter Filkins wrote in The New Yorker. Actually, it was Raymond Bonner, in [ProPublica], about questions beginning to swirl about the Bush administrations use of black sites and the program of enhancedso-called enhanced interrogation.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Its rough interrogation now, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: [Haspel] began pushing to have the tapes destroyed. She accomplished her mission years later when she rose to a senior position at CIA headquarters and drafted an order to destroy the evidence, which was still locked in a CIA safe at the American embassy in Thailand. Her boss, the head of the agencys counterterrorism center, signed the order to feed the 92 tapes into a giant shredder.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. I mean, you know, and another way of putting that: If you and I were involved with a crime and we did that, its destruction of evidence. And clearly, there was a systematic effort toat first, to defend the torture tactics, and then, later, to say, Well, lets remove any evidence that we did this to terror suspects. And lets remember Guantnamo is still open. Donald Trump has intimated that he wants to put more people there. The vast majority of people that were taken to Guantnamo were cleared for release.

And part of the reason that maybe even some people that were involved with terrorism are not ultimately going to be held accountable is because of people like Gina Haspel. So, if youre an American and you were horrified, shocked, angered by what happened on 9/11, and you want people that were involved with terrorism plots against the United States, including successful ones, to be held accountable, Gina Haspel is one of the people that you should be furious with, because it was the torture that she and her colleagues were running at these black sites that has resulted in some people being able to walk away, and the fact that they were held in this lawless gulag in Guantnamo rather than treated as criminals and given due process and a trial.

AMY GOODMAN: Were going to break and then come back to this discussion with The Intercept's Jeremy Scahill, who will be joined by his colleague Lee Fang, and also longtime CIA officer John Kiriakou, who worked at the time in the CIA with Gina Haspel, who's now being considered to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Stay with us.

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Direct democracy or pure democracy is a form of democracy in which people decide on policy initiatives directly. This differs from the majority of most currently established democracies, which are representative democracies.

In a representative democracy, people vote for representatives who then enact policy initiatives.[1] In direct democracy, people decide on policies without any intermediary. Depending on the particular system in use, direct democracy might entail passing executive decisions, the use of sortition, making laws, directly electing or dismissing officials, and conducting trials. Two leading forms of direct democracy are participatory democracy and deliberative democracy.

Semi-direct democracies in which representatives administer day-to-day governance, but the citizens remain the sovereign, allow for three forms of popular action: referendum (plebiscite), initiative, and recall. The first two formsreferendums and initiativesare examples of direct legislation.[2]

Compulsory referendum subjects the legislation drafted by political elites to a binding popular vote. This is the most common form of direct legislation. Popular referendum empowers citizens to make a petition that calls existing legislation to a vote by the citizens. Institutions specify the timeframe for a valid petition and the number of signatures required, and may require signatures from diverse communities to protect minority interests.[2] This form of direct democracy effectively grants the voting public a veto on laws adopted by the elected legislature, as is done in Switzerland.

Power of initiative allows members of the general public to propose specific statutory measures or constitutional reforms to the government and, as with referendums, the vote may be binding or simply advisory. Initiatives may be direct or indirect: With the direct initiative, a successful proposition is placed directly on the ballot to be subject to vote (as exemplified by California's system).[2] With an indirect initiative, a successful proposition is first presented to the legislature for their consideration; however, if no acceptable action is taken after a designated period of time, the proposition moves to direct popular vote. Such a form of indirect initiative is utilized by Switzerland for constitutional amendments.[2]

Power of recall gives the public the power to remove elected officials from office before the end of their term.[7]

Many residents, especially of smaller cities but even cities like Encinitas, California, with over 60,000 residents, in passing Prop A in 2013, insist on direct resident voting for some decisions. Such measures agree with anarchists, who have long argued against representative democracy. They argue that direct democracy opposes a strong central authority. That is because decision-making power can reside at only one level. A central authority keeps the people themselves from governing themselves.[8]

The earliest known direct democracy is said to be the Athenian democracy in the 5th century BC, although it was not an inclusive democracy: women, foreigners, and slaves were excluded from it. The main bodies in the Athenian democracy were the assembly, composed of male citizens; the boul, composed of 500 citizens; and the law courts, composed of a massive number of jurors chosen by lot, with no judges. There were only about 30,000 male citizens, but several thousand of them were politically active in each year, and many of them quite regularly for years on end. The Athenian democracy was direct not only in the sense that decisions were made by the assembled people, but also in the sense that the people through the assembly, boul, and law courts controlled the entire political process, and a large proportion of citizens were involved constantly in the public business.[9] Modern democracies, being representative, not direct, do not resemble the Athenian system.

Also relevant to the history of direct democracy is the history of Ancient Rome, specifically the Roman Republic, beginning around 509BC.[10] Rome displayed many aspects of democracy, both direct and indirect, from the era of Roman monarchy all the way to the collapse of the Roman Empire. Indeed, the Senate, formed in the first days of the city, lasted through the Kingdom, Republic, and Empire, and even continued after the decline of Western Rome; and its structure and regulations continue to influence legislative bodies worldwide. As to direct democracy, the ancient Roman Republic had a system of citizen lawmaking, or citizen formulation and passage of law, and a citizen veto of legislature-made law. Many historians mark the end of the Republic with the passage of a law named the Lex Titia, 27 November 43 BC, which eliminated many oversight provisions.[10]

Modern-era citizen lawmaking began in the towns of Switzerland in the 13th century. In 1847, the Swiss added the "statute referendum" to their national constitution. They soon discovered that merely having the power to veto Parliament's laws was not enough. In 1891, they added the "constitutional amendment initiative". Swiss politics since 1891 have given the world a valuable experience base with the national-level constitutional amendment initiative.[11] In the past 120 years, more than 240 initiatives have been put to referendums. The populace has been conservative, approving only about 10% of these initiatives; in addition, they have often opted for a version of the initiative rewritten by government. (See Direct democracy in Switzerland below.)

Some of the issues surrounding the related notion of a direct democracy using the Internet and other communications technologies are dealt with in e-democracy and below under the term electronic direct democracy. More concisely, the concept of open source governance applies principles of the free software movement to the governance of people, allowing the entire populace to participate in government directly, as much or as little as they please.[12]

Athenian democracy developed in the Greek city-state of Athens, comprising the city of Athens and the surrounding territory of Attica, around 500 BC. Athens was one of the very first known democracies. Other Greek cities set up democracies, and even though most followed an Athenian model, none were as powerful, stable, or well-documented as that of Athens. In the direct democracy of Athens, the citizens did not nominate representatives to vote on legislation and executive bills on their behalf (as in the United States) but instead voted as individuals. The public opinion of voters was influenced by the political satire of the comic poets in the theatres.[13]

Solon (594 BC), Cleisthenes (508507 BC), and Ephialtes (462 BC) all contributed to the development of Athenian democracy. Historians differ on which of them was responsible for which institution, and which of them most represented a truly democratic movement. It is most usual to date Athenian democracy from Cleisthenes, since Solon's constitution fell and was replaced by the tyranny of Peisistratus, whereas Ephialtes revised Cleisthenes' constitution relatively peacefully. Hipparchus, the brother of the tyrant Hippias, was killed by Harmodius and Aristogeiton, who were subsequently honored by the Athenians for their alleged restoration of Athenian freedom.

The greatest and longest-lasting democratic leader was Pericles; after his death, Athenian democracy was twice briefly interrupted by oligarchic revolution towards the end of the Peloponnesian War. It was modified somewhat after it was restored under Eucleides; the most detailed accounts are of this 4th-century modification rather than of the Periclean system. It was suppressed by the Macedonians in 322 BC. The Athenian institutions were later revived, but the extent to which they were a real democracy is debatable.[14]

The pure form of direct democracy exists only in the Swiss cantons of Appenzell Innerrhoden and Glarus.[15] The Swiss Confederation is a semi-direct democracy (representative democracy with strong instruments of direct democracy).[15] The nature of direct democracy in Switzerland is fundamentally complemented by its federal governmental structures (in German also called the Subsidiarittsprinzip).

Most western countries have representative systems.[15] Switzerland is a rare example of a country with instruments of direct democracy (at the levels of the municipalities, cantons, and federal state). Citizens have more power than in a representative democracy. On any political level citizens can propose changes to the constitution (popular initiative), or ask for an optional referendum to be held on any law voted by the federal, cantonal parliament and/or municipal legislative body.[16]

The list for mandatory or optional referendums on each political level are generally much longer in Switzerland than in any other country; for example any amendment to the constitution must automatically be voted on by the Swiss electorate and cantons, on cantonal/communal levels often any financial decision of a certain substantial amount decreed by legislative and/or executive bodies as well.[16]

Swiss citizens vote regularly on any kind of issue on every political level, such as financial approvals of a school house or the building of a new street, or the change of the policy regarding sexual work, or on constitutional changes, or on the foreign policy of Switzerland, four times a year.[17] Between January 1995 and June 2005, Swiss citizens voted 31 times, on 103 federal questions besides many more cantonal and municipal questions.[18] During the same period, French citizens participated in only two referendums.[15]

In Switzerland, simple majorities are sufficient at the municipal and cantonal level, but at the federal level double majorities are required on constitutional issues.[11]

A double majority requires approval by a majority of individuals voting, and also by a majority of cantons. Thus, in Switzerland a citizen-proposed amendment to the federal constitution (i.e. popular initiative) cannot be passed at the federal level if a majority of the people approve but a majority of the cantons disapprove.[11] For referendums or propositions in general terms (like the principle of a general revision of the Constitution), a majority of those voting is sufficient (Swiss Constitution, 2005).

In 1890, when the provisions for Swiss national citizen lawmaking were being debated by civil society and government, the Swiss adopted the idea of double majorities from the United States Congress, in which House votes were to represent the people and Senate votes were to represent the states.[11] According to its supporters, this "legitimacy-rich" approach to national citizen lawmaking has been very successful. Kris Kobach claims that Switzerland has had tandem successes both socially and economically which are matched by only a few other nations. Kobach states at the end of his book, "Too often, observers deem Switzerland an oddity among political systems. It is more appropriate to regard it as a pioneer." Finally, the Swiss political system, including its direct democratic devices in a multi-level governance context, becomes increasingly interesting for scholars of European Union integration.[19]

In 1871 after the establishment of the Paris Commune, the Parisians established a decentralized direct system of government with appointed organizers to make sense of the largely spontaneous uprising. While it still refused women the right to vote, they were heavily involved in the consensus before votes took place. Everything from the military to when meetings took place was democratized, and such decentralization and aforementioned democratization led many members of the First Internationale to regard the Paris Commune as a stateless society.

Due to the short lifespan of the Commune, only one citywide election was held and the structures necessary to facilitate future organized elections on large scales was largely nonexistent. However, the influence of direct democratization in the Paris Commune is not to be understated.

In the New England region of the United States, towns in areas such as Vermont decide local affairs through the direct democratic process of the town meeting.[20] This is the oldest form of direct democracy in the United States, and predates the founding of the country by at least a century.

Direct democracy was not what the framers of the United States Constitution envisioned for the nation. They saw a danger in tyranny of the majority. As a result, they advocated a representative democracy in the form of a constitutional republic over a direct democracy. For example, James Madison, in Federalist No. 10, advocates a constitutional republic over direct democracy precisely to protect the individual from the will of the majority. He says,

Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government.

[...]

[A] pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will be felt by a majority, and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party. Hence it is, that democracies have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.[21]

John Witherspoon, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, said: "Pure democracy cannot subsist long nor be carried far into the departments of state it is very subject to caprice and the madness of popular rage." Alexander Hamilton said, "That a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure, deformity."[22]

Despite the framers' intentions in the beginning of the republic, ballot measures and their corresponding referendums have been widely used at the state and sub-state level. There is much state and federal case law, from the early 1900s to the 1990s, that protects the people's right to each of these direct democracy governance components (Magleby, 1984, and Zimmerman, 1999). The first United States Supreme Court ruling in favor of the citizen lawmaking was in Pacific States Telephone and Telegraph Company v. Oregon, 223 U.S. 118 in 1912 (Zimmerman, December 1999). President Theodore Roosevelt, in his "Charter of Democracy" speech to the 1912 Ohio constitutional convention, stated: "I believe in the Initiative and Referendum, which should be used not to destroy representative government, but to correct it whenever it becomes misrepresentative."[23]

In various states, referendums through which the people rule include:

A total of 24 American states had constitutionally-defined, citizen-initiated direct democracy governance components as of 1999 (Zimmerman, December 1999).

The Rojava cantons are governed through a combination of district and civil councils. District councils consist of 300 members as well as two elected co-presidents- one man and one woman. District councils decide and carry out administrative and economic duties such as garbage collection, land distribution and cooperative enterprises.[24] Civil councils exist to promote social and political rights in the community.

Democratic theorists have identified a trilemma due to the presence of three desirable characteristics of an ideal system of direct democracy, which are challenging to deliver all at once. These three characteristics are participation widespread participation in the decision making process by the people affected; deliberation a rational discussion where all major points of view are weighted according to evidence; and equality all members of the population on whose behalf decisions are taken have an equal chance of having their views taken into account. Empirical evidence from dozens of studies suggests deliberation leads to better decision making.[8][25][26] The most popularly disputed form of direct popular participation is the referendum on constitutional matters.[27]

For the system to respect the principle of political equality, either everyone needs to be involved or there needs to be a representative random sample of people chosen to take part in the discussion. In the definition used by scholars such as James Fishkin, deliberative democracy is a form of direct democracy which satisfies the requirement for deliberation and equality but does not make provision to involve everyone who wants to be included in the discussion. Participatory democracy, by Fishkin's definition, allows inclusive participation and deliberation, but at a cost of sacrificing equality, because if widespread participation is allowed, sufficient resources rarely will be available to compensate people who sacrifice their time to participate in the deliberation. Therefore, participants tend to be those with a strong interest in the issue to be decided and often will not therefore be representative of the overall population.[28] Fishkin instead argues that random sampling should be used to select a small, but still representative, number of people from the general public.[7][8]

Fishkin concedes it is possible to imagine a system that transcends the trilemma, but it would require very radical reforms if such a system were to be integrated into mainstream politics.

Electronic direct democracy (EDD), also known as direct digital democracy (DDD),[29] is a form of direct democracy which utilizes telecommunications to facilitate public participation. Electronic direct democracy is sometimes referred to by other names, such as open-source governance and collaborative governance.[30]

EDD requires electronic voting or some way to register votes on issues electronically. As in any direct democracy, in an EDD, citizens would have the right to vote on legislation, author new legislation, and recall representatives (if any representatives are preserved).

Technology for supporting ED. has been researched and developed at the Florida Institute of Technology,[31] where the technology is used with student organizations. Numerous other software development projects are underway,[32] along with many supporting and related projects.[33] Several of these projects are now collaborating on a cross-platform architecture, under the umbrella of the Metagovernment project.[34]

EDD as a system is not fully implemented in a political government anywhere in the world, although several initiatives are currently forming. Ross Perot was a prominent advocate of EDD when he advocated "electronic town halls" during his 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns in the United States. Switzerland, already partially governed by direct democracy, is making progress towards such a system.[35] Senator Online, an Australian political party running for the Senate in the 2007 federal elections, proposed to institute an EDD system so that Australians can decide which way the senators vote on each and every bill.[36] In 2016 Senator Online ran candidates in the Australian Federal Elections under the AEC registered Party Name - Online Direct Democracy Party. ODDP The Party remains active in politics via Australian public Social Media forums ODDP Facebook ODDP Twitter.

A similar initiative was formed in 2002 in Sweden where the party Aktivdemokrati, running for the Swedish parliament, offers its members the power to decide the actions of the party over all or some areas of decision, or alternatively to use a proxy with immediate recall for one or several areas. Since early 2011, EDD parties are working together on the Participedia wiki E2D

The first mainstream direct democracy party to be registered with any country's electoral commission [checked against each country's register] is the UK's People's Administration Direct Democracy party.[37] The People's Administration have developed and published the complete architecture for a legitimate reform to EDD [including the required Parliamentary reform process].[38] Established by musicians and political activists, the People's Administration advocates using the web and telephone to enable the majority electorate to create, propose, and vote upon all policy implementation. The People's Administration's blueprint has been published in various forms since 1998 and the People's Administration is the first direct democracy party registered in a vote-able format anywhere in the worldmaking transition possible through evolution via election with legitimate majority support, instead of potentially through revolution via violence.

Flux (political party) is a political movement which aims to replace the world's elected legislatures with a new electronic system known as issue-based direct democracy (IBDD). Flux originated in and is most active in Australia, but it is also active internationally, with a group existing in Brazil.[39]

Mi-Vote MiVote is another political entity developed in Australia by Adam Jacoby. The online website hosts regular votes on matters of Australian legislative interest utilising block chain technology supplied by technological offshoot - Horizon State Horizon State

At a global level, a major initiative is being pushed forward by Democracy Earth Foundation DEF with their implementation of The Social Smart Contract Whitepaper V1, built on Ethereum Blockchain and being distributed under the title of Sovereign Sovereign Code This is an Open Source Initiative aiming to bring Direct Liquid Democracy to every community, through direct community participation in Block chain Processing, Data Allowance and Attention. Like all BC based technologies they will create "Tokens" which contribute toward a continual drip that underwrites a Universal Basic Income of voting rights for users. Democracy Earth Foundation is 501 (c) 3 non-profit registered with offices in San Francisco Paris New York and establishing Ambassadors worldwide.

Anarchists have advocated forms of direct democracy as an alternative to the centralized state and capitalism; however, others (such as individualist anarchists) have criticized direct democracy and democracy in general for ignoring the rights of the minority, and instead have advocated a form of consensus decision-making. Libertarian Marxists, however, fully support direct democracy in the form of the proletarian republic and see majority rule and citizen participation as virtues. The Young Communist League USA in particular refers to representative democracy as "bourgeois democracy", implying that they see direct democracy as "true democracy".[40]

Democratic schools modeled on Summerhill School resolve conflicts and make school policy decisions through full school meetings in which the votes of students and staff are weighted equally.[41]

Some notable contemporary movements working for direct democracy via direct democratic praxis include:[42]

Continued here:
Direct democracy - Wikipedia

Our Mission

Finding out what happened in the United States in 2016 and the impact it had is important. But that is not enough. The U.S. intelligence community assessed in January 2017 that Moscow will apply lessons learned from its Putin-ordered campaign aimed at the U.S. presidential election to future influence efforts worldwide, including against U.S. allies and their election processes. Russias efforts are also ongoing across Europe and we also need to prepare for other state actors to replicate Putins tactics. Moreover, Putin does not distinguish between political parties, but rather seeks to sow and exploit divisions. When our democratic institutions are weakened, every party and democratic nation is at risk.

Meeting this challenge to our democracy demands that Republicans and Democrats in the United States unite with our democratic allies around the world to better understand Russias multifaceted aggression in order to defend ourselves and our democratic partners, and deter such activity in the future.

The Alliance for Securing Democracy, a bipartisan, transatlantic initiative housed at The German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF), will develop comprehensive strategies to defend against, deter, and raise the costs on Russian and other state actors efforts to undermine democracy and democratic institutions. The Alliance will work to publicly document and expose Vladimir Putins ongoing efforts to subvert democracy in the United States and Europe.

Read our Full Mission Statement

In the Federalist Papers No. 68, Alexander Hamilton wrote of protecting Americas electoral process from foreign meddling. The Hamilton 68 dashboard, a project with the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, seeks to expose the effects of online influence networks and inform the public of themes and content being promoted to Americans by foreign powers.

In Artikel 38(1) des Grundgesetzes fr die Bundesrepublik Deutschland heit es: Die Abgeordneten des Deutschen Bundestages werden in allgemeiner, unmittelbarer, freier, gleicher und geheimer Wahl gewhlt. Sie sind Vertreter des ganzen Volkes, an Auftrge und Weisungen nicht gebunden und nur ihrem Gewissen unterworfen."Artikel 38" ist ein Projekt der Alliance for Securing Democracy des German Marshall Fund of the United States. Die Seite soll russische Einflussnetzwerke in sozialen Medien aufdecken und die deutsche ffentlichkeit darber informieren, mit welchen Themen und Inhalten Russland sie zu beeinflussen sucht.

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Alliance for Securing Democracy | The German Marshall Fund ...

"On the Blockchain, no one knows you're a fridge"

So far, all contracts we listed were owned and executed by other accounts probably held by humans. But there is no discrimination against robots or humans in the Ethereum ecosystem and contracts can create arbitrary actions like any other account would. Contracts can own tokens, participate in crowdsales, and even be voting members of other contracts.

In this section we are going to build a decentralized and democratic organization that exists solely on the blockchain, but that can do anything that a simple account would be able to. The organization has a central manager that decides who are the members and the voting rules, but as we'll see, this can also be changed.

The way this particular democracy works is that it has an Owner which works like an administrator, CEO or a President. The Owner can add (or remove) voting members to the organization. Any member can make a proposal, which is in the form of an ethereum transaction to either send ether or execute some contract, and other members can vote in support or against the proposal. Once a predetermined amount of time and a certain number of members has voted, the proposal can be executed: the contract counts the votes and if there are enough votes it will execute the given transaction.

Open the wallet (if you are only testing, go to the menu develop > network > testnet), go to the Contracts tab and then press deploy contract, and on the solidity code box, paste the code above. On the contract picker, choose Congress and you'll see the setup variables.

You can change these parameters later. As a start, you can choose 5 minutes for debate time and leave the remaining parameters at 0. A little lower on the page, you'll see an estimate of the cost for deploying your contract in ether. You can try lowering the price if you want to save, but that might mean having to wait longer for your contract to be created. Click Deploy, type your password and wait.

In a few seconds you'll be taken to the dashboard, scroll down and you'll be able to see your transaction being created. In under a minute you'll see the transaction successful and a new unique icon will have been created. Click the contract's name to see it (you can get to it at any time on the Contracts tab).

If you want to share your DAO with others, then they need both the contract address and the interface file, a small text string that works as an instruction manual of the contract. Click copy address to get the former and show interface to reveal the latter.

On the other computer, go into the Contracts tab and then click on watch contract. Add the correct address and interface and press OK.

On the "Read from contract" you can see all the functions you can execute for free on the contract, as they are just reading information from the blockchain. Here you can see, for instance, the current "owner" of the contract (that should be the account that uploaded the contract).

On the "Write to contract" you have a list of all the functions that will attempt to do some computation that saves data to the blockchain, and therefore will cost ether. Select "New Proposal" and it will show all the options for that function.

Before interacting with the contract, you'll need to add new members so they can vote. On the "Select function" picker, choose "Add Member". Add the address of the person you want to make a member(to remove a member, pick the function "Remove Member"). On "execute from" make sure that you have the same account that is set as the owner as this is an action only the main administrator can execute. Press execute and wait a few seconds for the next block to go through with your change.

There's no list of members, but you can check if anyone is a member by putting their address on the Members function on the Read from contract column.

Also, if you want the contract to have any money of its own, you need to deposit some ether (or other token) into it, otherwise you'll have a pretty toothless organization. Press Transfer Ether & Tokens on the top right corner.

Now let's add the first proposal to the contract. On the function picker, select New Proposal.

For "beneficiary" add the address of someone you want to send ether to, and put how much you want to send in the box marked "Wei Amount." Wei is the smallest unit of ether, equal to 10^-18 ether, and must always be given as an integer. For example, if you want to send 1 ether, enter 1000000000000000000 (that's 18 zeroes). Finally, add some text describing the reason you want to do this. Leave "Transaction bytecode" blank for now. Click execute and type your password. After a few seconds the numProposals will increase to 1 and the first proposal, number 0, will appear on the left column. As you add more proposals, you can see any of them by simply putting the proposal number on the "proposals" field and you can read all about it.

Voting on a proposal is also very simple. Choose "Vote" on the function picker. Type the proposal Number in the first box and check the "Yes" box if you agree with it (or leave it blank to vote against it). Click "execute" to send your vote.

When the voting time has passed, you can select"executeProposal". If the proposal was simply sending ether, then you can also leave the "transactionBytecode" field blank. After pressing "execute" but before typing your password, pay attention to the screen that appears.

If there is a warning on the "estimated fee consumption" field, then this means that for some reason the function called will not execute and will be abruptly terminated. It can mean many things, but in the context of this contract this warning will show up whenever you try to execute a contract before its deadline has passed, or if the user is trying to send a different bytecode data than the original proposal had. For security reasons if any of these things happens, the contract execution is abruptly terminated and the user that attempted the illegal transaction will lose all the ethers he sent to pay transaction fees.

If the transaction was executed, then after a few seconds you should be able to see the result: executed will turn to true and the correct amount of ether should be subtracted from this contract's balance and into the recipient address.

You can use this democracy to execute any transaction on ethereum, as long as you can figure out the bytecode that that transaction generates. Luckily for us, you can use the wallet to do precisely that!

In this example, we'll use a token to show that this contract can hold more than ether and can do transactions in any other ethereum-based asset. First, create a token that belongs to one of your normal accounts. On the contract page, click Transfer Ether & Tokens to transfer some of them to your new congress contract (for simplicity, don't send more than half your coins to your DAO). After that, we are going to simulate the action you want to execute. So if you want to propose that the DAO send 500mg of a gold token to a person as a payment, then follow the steps that you'd do to execute that transaction from an account you own and press "send" but when the confirmation screens pops up, don't type your password.

Instead, click "SHOW RAW DATA" link and copy the code displayed on the "RAW DATA" field and save it to a text file or notepad. Cancel the transaction. You'll also need the address of the contract you'll be calling for that operation, in this case the token contract. You can find it on the Contracts tab: save that somewhere too.

Now go back to the congress contract and create a new proposal with these parameters:

In a few seconds you should be able to see the details on the proposal. You'll notice that the transaction bytecode won't be shown there and instead there's only a "transaction hash". Unlike the other fields, Bytecode can be extremely lengthy and therefore expensive to store on the blockchain, so instead of archiving it, the person executing the call later will provide the bytecode.

But that, of course, creates a security hole: how can a proposal be voted without the actual code being there? And what prevents a user from executing a different code after the proposal has been voted on? That's where transaction hash comes in. Scroll a bit on the "read from contract" function list and you'll see a proposal checker function, where anyone can put all the function parameters and check if they match the one being voted on. This also guarantees that proposals don't get executed unless the hash of the bytecode matches exactly the one on the provided code.

Anyone can actually check the proposal very easily by following the same steps to get the correct bytecode and then adding the proposal number and other parameters to the function called Check proposal code on the bottom of Read from contract.

The rest of the voting process remains the same: all members can vote and after the deadline, someone can execute the proposal. The only difference is that this time you'll have to provide the same bytecode you've submitted before. Pay attention to any warnings on the confirmation window: if it says it won't execute your code, check to see if the deadline has already passed, if there are enough votes and if your transaction bytecode checks out.

Here are some drawbacks of this current DAO that we leave as an exercise to the reader:

In the previous section we created a contract that works like an invitation-only club, where members are invited or banned by the whim of the president. But this has a few drawbacks: what if someone wants to change his main address? What if some members have more weight than others? What if you actually want to trade or sell memberships or shares on an open market? What if you wanted your organization to have work as a constant decision machine by shareholders?

We are going to modify a bit our contract to connect it to a specific token, which will work as the holding shares of the contract. First we need to create this token: go to the token tutorial and create a simple token with initial supply of 100, decimals of 0 and a percentage sign (%) as a symbol. If you want to be able to trade in fractions of a percent, then increase the supply by 100x or 1000x and then add the corresponding amount of zeros as the decimals. Deploy this contract and save its address on a text file.

Now to the shareholder code:

The code is deployed almost exactly like the previous code, but you need to also put a shares token address which is the address of the token that will work as a share with voting rights.

Notice these lines of codes: first we describe the token contract to our new contract. Since it only uses the balanceOf function, we only need to add that single line.

Then we define a variable of the type token, meaning that it will inherit all the functions we described earlier. Finally we point the token variable to an address on the blockchain, so it can use that and request live information. This is the simplest way to make one contract understand the other in ethereum.

This association presents a challenge that the previous congress didn't have: since anyone with tokens can vote and the balances can change very quickly, the actual score of the proposal can't be counted when the shareholder votes, otherwise someone would be able to vote multiple times by simply sending his share to different addresses. So in this contract only the vote position is recorded and then the real score is tallied up on the execute proposal phase.

Another way to count the weighted votes would be to create a single signed integer to keep score of the votes and check if it was positive or negative at the end, but you'd have to convert the unsigned integer voteWeight into a signed integer using int score = int(voteWeight);

Using this DAO is exactly like before: members create new proposals, vote on them, wait until the deadline passes and then anyone can count the votes and execute it.

On this contract the address set as owner has some special powers: they can add or ban members at will, change the margin needed for a win, alter the time required for debate and the quorum necessary for the vote to pass. But this can be solved by using yet another power the owner has: to change ownership.

The owner could change the ownership to no one by pointing the new owner as 0x00000.... This would guarantee that the rules will never change, but it's an irreversible action. The owner can also change the ownership to the contract itself: just click on "copy address" and add it on the "new owner" field. This would make that all the powers of the owner could be executed by creating proposals.

If you want, you can also set one contract as the owner of the other: suppose you wanted a corporate structure where you wanted a President for life that had the power to appoint board members, which could then issue more shares and finally these shares voted on how to spend a budget. You could create an Association contract, that used a mintable token owned by a congress finally owned by a single account.

But what if you wanted different rules for voting? Maybe to change voting rules you'd need a 80% consensus, or maybe the members are different. In that case, you can create another identical DAO or use some other source code and plug that one as the owner of the first.

Voting on all expenses and actions of a contract takes time and requires users to be constantly active, informed and attentive. Another interesting approach is to elect an appointed account that will have control over a contract and then be able to take swift decisions over it.

We are going to implement a version of what's usually called Liquid Democracy, which is a more flexible delegative democracy. In this kind of democracy, any voter can be a potential delegate: instead of voting the candidate you want, you just say which voter you trust to handle this decision for you. Your voting weight is delegated to them and they can in turn delegate it to another voter they trust and so on. The end result should be that the most voted account is one that has trust connections to the largest amount of voters.

First, you need a token. If you have followed the Shareholder association tutorial above, you can use the same token as you had previously, otherwise just deploy a new token and distribute it among some accounts. Copy the token address.

Deploy the democracy contract, and put the token address on the Voting weight token, put 75 as the Percent loss in each round and transferOwnership(address) (without any spaces or extra characters!) as the forbidden function.

Now deploy the Liquid democracy and go to its page. First have any of the shareholders vote on who they would trust to make decisions on behalf of this contract. You can vote on yourself if you want to be the final decision maker, or on the zero address, if you'd rather have no one representing you on that role.

After enough people have cast their votes, you can execute the function Calculate Votes so it will calculate everyone's voting weight. This function needs to be run multiple times, so the first run it will just set everyone's weight as their balance in the selected token, in the next round that voting weight will go to the person you voted appointed, in the next it will go to the person voted by the person you chose and so on. To prevent infinite loops of vote delegations, each time a vote is forwarded it loses a bit of power, set by at contract launch at percentLossInEachRound. So if the loss is set at 75%, it means that the person you vote gets 100% of your weight, but if they delegate the vote to someone else only 75% of their weight is forwarded. That person can delegate to someone else but they'll get only 56% of your voting weight and so on. If the ratio is anything lower than 100% there will be a finite moment where recalculating voting delegation won't change the result anymore, but if it's a 100% it means that voting weights will simply circulate around any potential loops.

If there has been more than one hour and a half since this round of calling Calculate votes has started, all weights will reset and will be recalculated based on the original token balance, so if you have recently received more tokens you should execute this function again.

What is all that vote delegation good for? For one, you can use it instead of the token weight on an Association. First of all, get the code for a shareholder association but replace the first lines where it describes the token:

Into this:

When you are writing your contract you can describe multiple other contracts used by your main contract. Some might be functions and variables that are already defined on the target contract, like voteWeight and numberOfDelegationRounds. But notice that balanceOf is a new function, that doesn't exist neither on the Liquid Democracy or the Association contract, we are defining it now, as a function that will return the voteWeight if at least three rounds of delegations have been calculated.

Use the Liquid democracy as the Token Address instead of the original token and proceed to deploy the shareholder association as usual. Just like before, users can create new proposals on what to do or cast votes on these issues, but now, instead of using the token balance as the voting power we are using a delegative process. So if you are a token holder, instead of having to keep yourself constantly informed by all the issues, you can just select someone you trust and appoint them, and then they can choose someone they trust: the result is that your representative, instead of being limited to a given arbitrary geographical proximity, will be someone in your social proximity.

Also it means that you can switch your vote at any moment: if your representative has voted against your interests in some issue you can, before the proposal votes are tallied up, switch your appointee, or just choose to represent yourself on the issue and cast the vote yourself.

Delegative democracies are a great way to choose representatives, but voting on individual proposals might be too slow for some important or simpler decisions: that's why most democratic governments have an executive branch, where an appointed person has the right to represent the state.

After four rounds of delegations, the address with more weight will be set as the Appointee. If there are many delegated votes, then a few more rounds of Calculate Votes might be necessary to settle in the final appointed address.

The Appointee is the only address that can call the Execute function, which will be able to execute (almost) any function representing the democracy as a whole. If there is any ether or token stored in the Liquid democracy contract, the Appointee will be allowed to move it anywhere.

If you have followed our example and created a Shareholder association using this liquid democracy as a token, then you should be able to use the executive branch in an interesting manner: go to the main Association address and execute a Transfer Ownership function to the liquid democracy.

Once that transfer is complete, switch the function to Change Voting Rules. This allows you to change some essential voting rules, like the minimum quorum needed for a vote to pass or the time a new proposal needs to stay on the floor. Try changing these settings and click execute: when the confirmation window pops up it will tell you that the transaction Can't be executed. This happens, of course, because only the address set as Owner can change these settings and the contract will reject this transaction attempt. So instead of typing your password copy the code on the data field and save it to a text file. Click cancel, scroll to the top and click copy address and also save that to a text file.

Now go to the Liquid democracy page and choose execute. On target put the address of the association contract, leave ether amount at 0 and paste the code you copied previously into the bytecode data field. Make sure you are executing it from the account set as the appointee and click execute.

Once the transaction has been picked up, the Liquid democracy will pass the order to the association and the new voting rules might apply. The appointee has the absolute power to do anything that the Liquid democracy contract can execute. You can use the same technique to create a Mintable Token owned by the delegative democracy, and then allow the appointee to mint tokens or freeze accounts.

To prevent abuses of powers, you can set one Forbidden function that the Appointee cannot ever do. If you followed our example the forbidden function is the transferOwnership(address), to prevent the appointee from transferring the ownership of the association to themselves (in politics, when a president uses his executive power to transfer to themselves something that used to belongs to the presidency, it's a coup or embezzling).

Sometimes time can also be used as a great security mechanism. The following code is based on the congress DAO but with a different twist. Instead of every action requiring the approval of an X number of members, instead any transactions can be initiated by a single member, but they all will require a minimum amount of delay before they can be executed, which varies according to the support that transaction has. The more approvals a proposal has, the sooner it can be executed. A member can vote against a transaction, which will mean that it will cancel one of the other approved signatures.

This means that if you don't have urgency, one or two signatures might be all you need to execute any transaction. But if a single key is compromised, other keys can delay that transaction for months or year or even stop it from being executed.

A transaction that has been approved by all keys can be executed after ten minutes (this amount is configurable), and the amount of time it requires doubles every time for every 5% of members who don't vote (and quadruples if they actively vote against). If it's a simple ether transaction, the transaction is executed as soon as a vote of support puts it under the required time, but a more complex transaction will require it to be manually executed with the correct bytecode. These are the default values, but this can be set differently when creating the contract:

Number of members approving transaction: Approximate time delay

Once the minimum amount of time has passed, anyone can execute the transaction (See "Congress" for a more complete walktrough). This is intentional, as it allows someone to schedule a transaction or hire someone else to execute it.

Deploy that code as you have done before on these tutorials. On the deployment parameters, leaving the minimum time blank will default to 30 minutes, if you want faster lock times, then put 1 minute. After uploading, execute the functions "Add Members" to add new members of your group, they can be either other people you know or accounts on different computers or stored offline.

The account set as "owner" is very powerful as it can add or remove members at will. Therefore, after you added the main members, we recommend that you set the "owner" to another account, by executing the function Transfer Membership. Set that to the multisig itself if you want to have all additions or removals of members to be voted, just like any other transaction. Another alternative is to set that to another trusted multisig wallet, or maybe to 0x000 if you want the number of members to be fixed forever. Remember, the funds on this contract are only as safe as the the "owner" account.

As with any of the above DAO's, this contract can hold ether, any ethereum based tokens and execute any contract. To do that, check how to execute complex proposals on the congress DAO.

For simplicity's sake, a vote against a proposal simply counts as one less vote of support. If you want, you can play around with the idea that negative votes have more weight, but this means that a minority of members could have an effective veto power on any proposed transaction!

How else could you improve this contract?

You have reached the end of this tutorial, but it's just the beginning of a great adventure. Look back and see how much you accomplished: you created a living, talking robot, your own cryptocurrency, raised funds through a trustless crowdfunding and used it to kickstart your own personal democratic organization.

The tokens you still control could be sold on a decentralized exchange or traded for goods and services to fund further development of the first contract and grow the organization.

Your DAO could own its own name on the name registrar, and then change where it's redirecting in order to update itself if the token holders approved.

The organization could hold not only ethers, but any other kind of coin created on ethereum, including assets whose values are tied to the bitcoin or dollar.

The DAO could be programmed to allow a proposal with multiple transactions, some scheduled to the future.It could also own shares of other DAOs, meaning it could vote on larger organization or be a part of a federation of DAOs.

The Token Contract could be reprogrammed to hold ether or to hold other tokens and distribute it to the token holders. This would link the value of the token to the value of other assets, so paying dividends could be accomplished by simply moving funds to the token address.

This all means that this tiny society you created could grow, get funding from third parties, pay recurrent salaries, own any kind of crypto-assets and even use crowdsales to fund its activities. All with full transparency, complete accountability and complete immunity from any human interference. While the network lives the contracts will execute exactly the code they were created to execute, without any exception, forever.

So what will your contract be? Will it be a country, a company, a non-profit group? What will your code do?

That's up to you.

See the rest here:
Create a Democracy contract in Ethereum

November 10, 2010, Beth B, Leave a comment

Democracy is a form of government where the power lies with the people (being governed). The term comes from the Greek word demos meaning people and kratos meaning power. The underlying principle behind democracy is freedom and equality for all its constituents. Democracy acknowledges the decision of the majority, and in a democracy, all constituents have an equal vote, regardless of stature.

The principle of democracy is usually classified in two, direct democracy and representative democracy. It is said that there is no true direct (or pure) democracy wherein power is shared by every citizen. Most democratic countries have a representative democracy, wherein officials are elected into positions of power by the people.

When officials are elected into public office, they are expected to be accountable to the populace who elected them. The people are free to express their thoughts on how the governance is, without fear of recrimination or prosecution, and the elected officials can be reelected or removed by mandate of the people after a prescribed period of time through an election.

Although the power in a democracy is held by the people, democracy is not a rule of individuals but a rule of laws. These laws serve to protect the citizens, limit the power of the government, protect hum rights, and maintain social order. Ideally, every citizen is protected by it, and at the same time no citizen is above it.

Currently, almost half of the worlds nations are governed using the principles of democracy, but this does not make them all fully democratic nations. Some countries that are examples of democracy are: United Kingdom, United States of America, France, Australia, and the Philippines.

Related

See original here:
What is Democracy? - A Knowledge Archive