Comment by raesene9
8 years ago
if you want to get it to blow up then (based on past experience of what seems to catch regulator/legislator interest) I'd say that someone tracking the locations of a load of politicians for a while, finding things of interest about places they've visited and then publishing on a news outlet would do the job.
Your approach starts off by making the very politicians that you want to help you extremely pissed off at you.
More effective would be to track a few key politicians, such as those on the committees that would deal with regulating these things, and also a few reporters who have agreed beforehand to participate.
Then the tracking on the politicians is turned over to the politicians, but NOT made public. The reporters write stories about this, illustrating the tracking detail by publishing what it showed about them.
This approach gets the news out to the public, personally shows the key politicians the scope of the issue (and that they are vulnerable too), and lets the public know that the politicians have seen proof of how serious the issue is so that the politicians know that they need to get to work on this because their opponents come the next election will certainly be gearing up to use it as an issue if they do not.
Expose's by investigative Journalists have often made politicians angry, but they have also effected change.
My idea is based on the fact that in my experience people rarely really care about privacy until it personally affects them.
Note for example Feinstein's reactions to domestic spying generally, and then spying on her specifically.
Will it blow up, even if the public is aware?
When Snowden revealed the extent of NSA activities, it caused a momentary uproar but the people moved on pretty quickly after that. As far as I know (and let me know if I am wrong!!), there was no fallout for the government, and business continues as before.
So I am not sure if people will care this time either.
Snowdens' revelations had a massive effect on the tech. sector.
It provided security people with ammunition to push things like encryption of data over "private" network connections, which prevented their misuse by governments (or at least made it harder)
It also pushed tech. companies to publicly take positions on government spying, in general by insisting they wouldn't co-operate.
Cynically, it moved the goalposts, but didn't solve the problem. This is still a positive outcome in the big picture.
Snowden's revelations arguably were a significant factor in EU privacy law, including GDPR. In the U.S., government has been unable to regulate big business for awhile, about privacy or anything else.
We, and the media mainstream, are still discussing Snowden, five years on.
Malta Spitz (German politician) did this to himself in 2010: http://www.dw.com/en/german-politician-reveals-six-months-of...
Good way to loose your job very quickly. I don't think we should have to rely on somebody sacrificing themselves to make a difference.
Not sure anyone would lose their jobs.
1) Be an investigative Journalist
2) Purchase access to these location vendors data
3) Correlate data with known mobile numbers of politicians
4) Find things in data that might be of interest to readers (e.g. "politician x was noted to be in the same place as Lobbyist y on 5 different occasions")
5) Publish Story :)
The more titillating version would be to crawl Backpage or similar successor service for phone numbers of escorts and correlate that with known phone numbers of public figures such as politicians to determine when both were in the same place at the same time. Then publish client lists, with links back to original escort ads for extra sensarionalism.
pay me the cost of a data set plus 6k for a month's labor and i'll do it.
still need an outlet for the story though
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Why not? How do you think change comes about, by complaining about it on a tech forum?
I you are willing to be blacklisted than more power to you. I wouldn't want to force that on someone.
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Not if precautions are taken, and even if someone did, such a patriotic disclosure (if done responsibly a la Snowden) would put that person is very esteemed company.
Yes, but Snowden is currently living in exile, and there's no end to that in sight.
Few have the stomach for that sort of thing...
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