>It is always the case that there are benefits available from relinquishing core civil liberties: allowing infringements on free speech may reduce false claims and hateful ideas; allowing searches and seizures without warrants will likely help the police catch more criminals, and do so more quickly; giving up privacy may, in fact, enhance security.
> But the core premise of the West generally, and the U.S. in particular, is that those trade-offs are never worthwhile. Americans still all learn and are taught to admire the iconic (if not apocryphal) 1775 words of Patrick Henry, which came to define the core ethos of the Revolutionary War and American Founding: “Give me liberty or give me death.” It is hard to express in more definitive terms on which side of that liberty-versus-security trade-off the U.S. was intended to fall.
I think the security/liberty tradeoff is actually often a false promise. You can end up trading away liberty for nothing at all. I don't like buying into this, even to say "liberty is better, we should do that instead" because it implicitly concedes that you would really get the security on the other side of the bargain.
And if you don't get the security you were promised, it's too late to do anything about it.
> "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety" -- Benjamin Franklin
The key phrase is "a little temporary safety". 250 years ago people understood that the "security" gains were small and fleeting, but the loss of liberty was massive and permanent.
If you assume that the security side of the equation is a false promise, then you are not making a decision at all: choosing between liberty with no security, or no liberty plus no security (because it's fake).
And for me, it seems somewhat disingenuous to imply that a decision is being made when your premise belies that.
We concurrently see failures on both the "attempts to preserve liberty" and "attempts to preserve security" front, so let's stop arguing about abstract principles.
Quotes are pointless, discussion should be limited to what's happening on the ground. For any given thing that happens, do we think that it, specifically, is helpful or harmful.
It's trivial to reverse that quote: we can, and have, pushed to keep the US population armed with increasingly-advanced personal weapons (in the name of liberty) without actually gaining any protection against authoritarian styles of government use of force or surveillance as a result. While just making civilian-on-civilian violence easier and more lethal.
> discussion should be limited to what's happening on the ground
Does anyone actually have any idea what's actually happening "on the ground?"
> without actually gaining any protection against authoritarian styles of government use of force
There are three weapons for every man, woman, and child in the USA. You may enjoy more of this protection than you realize.
> While just making civilian-on-civilian violence easier and more lethal.
80% of murders happen after an argument. More suicides happen by firearm than murders by a factor of 2:1. States with lower population densities like Alaska have 6x the suicide rate of states with higher densities like New York. There's a reason people aren't given these statistics.
> It is hard to express in more definitive terms on which side of that liberty-versus-security trade-off the U.S. was intended to fall.
While I agree with Henry, and intend for _my_ life and social impact to fall there, "where the U.S. was intended to fall" is a misnomer here. That quote was one man's opinion. The U.S. is millions of living beings who, if they have liberty, should get to do whatever they want with it (which in itself is an oxymoron).
For those unfamiliar it's worth learning about Blackstone's Ratio. Blackstone was extremely influential to the writers of the US constitution.
I think it should come natural to engineers because I see it as similar to failure engineering, but for the legal system. When you engineer a bridge, building, or even a program you build failure modes into them. Not to cause them to fail but to control fails. A simple version is "fail open" vs "fail closed". A bank safe that fails, fails closed. It is locked and you need to drill it open. Same with an encrypted harddrive but no drill... But a locked door in a public building will typically want to fail opened, least you trap people inside during a fire. A more complex example is the root of a conspiracy. When a tall building collapses you tend to want it to fall in on itself so it doesn't take out neighboring skyscrapers...
So Blackstone's Ratio (and Franklin's recounting) is similar. It asks "which mode of failure is better? That innocent man are condemned or that guilty men go free?" This is a question we must all ask ourselves least we back ourselves into a corner. There's no perfect solution. We don't want failure, we should reduce it as much as possible, but if/when it fails, which outcome do you prefer?
I'll link the wiki but the topic is so famous you'll find a million and I'm pretty sure it's taught in every law school in America
> “Give me liberty or give me death.” It is hard to express in more definitive terms on which side of that liberty-versus-security trade-off the U.S. was intended to fall.
No, that's a gross misrepresentation of what he said and meant. Patrick Henry was referring exclusively to political liberty from British colonial rule. There is no sense whatsoever in which he was referring to civil liberties against domestic rule. It didn't have a single thing to do with "security".
> But the core premise of the West generally, and the U.S. in particular, is that those trade-offs are never worthwhile.
Also totally false. This is the core premise of libertarians in the West, who are, and always have been, a minority. It is not, and has never been, the "core premise" of the West or the US. Or else, quite obviously, we wouldn't have the constant tension between these liberties and the need for security. The idea that "those trade-offs are never worthwhile" is not a core American idea. We make those tradeoffs every single day. And continue to argue about them, e.g. over what degree of gun control is proper after each school shooting that happens.
When the check and balance got tipped over, all this promised "security" will only surface when it benefits the regime.
I'm still amused by a certain ccp propaganda video my parents consumed that boast about how quickly the cctv networks helped catch a thief who stole a foreign tourist's phone, yet those cameras would also conveniently stop working at a specific day whenever a highschooler went missing in the campus.
All the prerequisite for a similar dystopia is already in place in the US and there is may be one more chance to fix it, although I wouldn't hold my breathe.
we could have liberty and privacy and security if the people in charge wanted us to. But they don't and they've convinced enough people that they don't either.
If the police actually did their job, took property crimes seriously and would bother with the suspicious guy high on fent looking into kids bedroom reports seriously, then we really wouldn't have to be setting up our own surveillance to make up for lacking local government services. But here we are, I'm not sure why libertarians think we don't have a right to defend ourselves (using new tech to make up for a lack of policing) when the city won't?
I frankly see it as a liberty to be able to use this tech, and it would be tyranny to prevent us from using it.
I would like it a lot better without the mention to the "West", which, as usual, is a code word for: "I want to pretend my point extend outside the USA but I have absolutely no knowledge of how true that is. I don't intend to do any research because that would demand efforts from me so bear with my casual imperialism". Queue the purely American historical lesson following.
Unfortunately for us all, the assault on liberty even done of the “normies” have started noticing recent, is only the latter stages of this assault on on America that has been going on for arguably 180 years ago.
Many in American history have noted that America is a kind of natural fortress protected by ocean moats. What that assumption just did not take into account is how America’s enemies would take action against America with that assumption taken as granted. It has come in the form of endless amounts of infiltration, subversion, corruption, and pollution… as any half-witted strategist and saboteur would have done. America was simply not sophisticated enough to realize that massive threat, because the leaders relied on that assumption that the USA is an impenetrable fort; never considering what happens if your fort is infiltrated through the many different means you open yourself up to being infiltrated.
America, a genuine America or whatever one can scrape together to consider as such, not just one that emulates and imitates like some kind of container cult, is really not long for this world. Another 20 years and Americas simile stops existing in anything but name only, if that, since there’s not even any reason or incentive anymore to keep the name out the branding at that point.
What do we call this place post America? Maybe we just come right out and just call it Oceania.
The problem is there are two Americas, and always have been. At one point they were clearly separated and had a civil war, but really they exist in overlapping spaces all the time. One is the America of the Declaration of Independence and all the propaganda believed by flag-saluting schoolchildren - some of that is real some of the time. The other is the America that South America is more familiar with, the country responsible for banana republics and endless War on Drugs violence, the America of plantations and exploitation.
The problem America(complimentary) is currently facing is the rebound of America(derogatory). It has elected its own Peron, and is turning into a dysfunctional South American country, driven by exactly the same forces.
We have a branch of government called Congress, here are some things they used to do that made it a crime to read your mail or listen to your phone calls.
1. Postal Service Act of 1792
2. Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986
Anyway, Facebook can read your DMs, Google can read your email, Ring can take photos from your camera.
We can very easily make those things a crime, but we don't seem to want to do it.
Congress protects only itself and its actual constituents — wealthy corporate persons.
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Citizens United (2012) and the surveillances themselves make this monitoring self-capturing: the only way to prevent it is to convince most people to not install, but most people want the installed benefits.
Even getting your neighbors to re-position their Ring cameras (which they have every right to install) can become very difficult.
After city councils individually ban Flock-like CCTV traffic monitoring within their jurisdictions, their police can (and often do) still access neighboring jurisdictions' to monitor border crossings. You can't escape This System, even without license plates nor cell phones.
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Term Limits now? end Citizens United. release The Files!
The Video Rental Protection Act was passed when a video rental employee blackmailed a congressman and there was no law against it. So it's clear how to make congress write new privacy laws.
> Even getting your neighbors to re-position their Ring cameras (which they have every right to install) can become very difficult.
In Germany it's prohibited by law to point your private surveillance camera to public spaces like the boardwalk, no recording of these areas is allowed. I think thats the way it should be. Unfortunately in some areas (e.g. train stations) it is allowed.
How would term limits help? Without term limits, congressmen can be judged by their voting history. With them, we get always new batches of congressmen, while lobbyists stay the same and consolidate their power.
It's so easy to get rid of a congressman you don't like with term limits. But why do you think, on average, his replacement would be better? The replacement would only be more unknown.
Everyone has known Google reads your email since day one. In the early days they would spin it as a good thing: "that's why the spam filtering is great!"
Why is everyone suddenly outraged Ring has access to your footage? These cloud-connected cameras...hosted on someone else's servers. It's literally how they work. "But I didn't think they would use the video in a way I didn't personally approve after giving it to them!"
So instead, people are rage-returning Ring cameras and posting their receipts and exchanging them for...Chinese cameras. Which do the same thing, except this time the servers are overseas and completely uncontrolled.
It's hard to have any empathy when the warning label was already on the box for all these products.
> So instead, people are rage-returning Ring cameras and posting their receipts and exchanging them for...Chinese cameras. Which do the same thing, except this time the servers are overseas and completely uncontrolled.
No, the right thing to do is to buy an IP camera (most of which are made in China), firewall it, and send the footage to a local NVR. At no point should the camera speak to the open Internet.
It's the same principle with any Internet-of-Shit device -- it's not allowed to communicate over the Internet, period. At that point, any built-in backdoor or anti-feature becomes irrelevant.
> Everyone has known Google reads your email since day one.
These constructions feel too simplistic to capture anything useful.
My credit card company can see my transactions. My medical provider can read my medical records. People who hire house cleaners let people see inside their house.
It's commonly accepted that when you engage with a company for business purposes, they can see things involved in your business with them.
The problem with the Ring situation isn't that Ring can "see" your video cameras. It's that they were using the information for things outside of the scope of business that was implied when you bought the camera.
People don't care if a Google bot "reads" their e-mail for spam filtering. They don't care if a contractor sees the inside of their house during construction. What they do care about is if the other party tries to use that access for something outside of the scope that was agreed upon.
> It's hard to have any empathy when the warning label was already on the box for all these products.
These snooty takes where we're supposed to look down upon others for having reasonable assumptions about usage of their data are why it's so hard to get the general public to care about privacy. It's unnecessarily condescending for what? To look down upon people or play "told you so" games? If privacy advocates want to get anywhere they need to distance themselves from people who run with this kind of attitude.
> But I didn't think they would use the video in a way I didn't personally approve after giving it to them!
This is exactly the sort of thing there should be legislation for. To a somewhat weaker extent than I’d like this is what GDPR and friends covers, the law says that companies must state what data they’re gathering and what purposes they’re gathering it for. If they overreach then they can be fined into oblivion.
In practice this is not as strong as it should be, broadly companies can and do basically go “we’re collecting all your data for whatever purpose we like” and get away with it, but they do at least think carefully about doing so.
There’s no reason we can’t force providers of cloud backed devices to treat your data with respect, rather than thinking of it as residual income they’re leaving on the table if they don’t also sell it to third parties for data mining.
We have known all of this for over a decade now, ever since the Snowden leaks revealed some very damning things. The public has unfortunately decided they do no care it seems...
Yes, that is what many people thought because people assume that a state with a reasonable commitment to individual liberty would have safeguards in place to force merchants to not spy on them.
The fault is not with the idea of expecting that you own the data that you made and the equipment that you purchased. The fault here is the regulatory structure that makes you by default not the owner of your data or your things.
>, except this time the servers are overseas and completely uncontrolled.
The Chinese or Russian or whatever government is not sending thugs with guns to my doorstep over petty matters and if they did I would likely, depending on the exact details be within my rights to resist them with violence.
You can't say that about the federal/state/local government.
Get money out of politics (reverse citizens united) and enact term/age limits for all public offices.
These problems will be solved. Most Americans agree on most things. Don't let the politicians who benefit off of dividing us fool you. An agenda that focuses on reform outside of the usual finger pointing game of partisan politics and promises to enact these reforms without fear or favor will win.
Any such agenda must also be willing to purge itself of any old guard that stands in the way, and treat them as a virus attached to their political movement. There is no benefit from trying to say, make a wedge between a Clinton and a Trump. If you can't get over that you're part of the problem, and this cycle will just continue.
Stop defending an old guard halfway in the grave. Being right doesn't matter in electoral politics, winning does. It is likely the only way to achieve such a broad reform is to be willing to entertain as many incriminations as possible.
Given recent relevations re Epstein this is our best chance to reform corruption in generations. Let's not squander it by defending anyone simply because they fall on one side of a dubious partisan line, or seem "less bad" than another.
The broader the castigation, the more likely to achieve momentum that can actually enact said reforms, given the disadvantages of taking on these vast incumbent interests and a government that is easily susceptible to gridlock driven by a minority.
If you also mean make it so Congress doesn't have a $4T slush fund to buy favors and influence every year, then I'm on board. If you think reducing the paltry sums spent on campaign contributions is going to take the money out of politics, you're bad at math.
> Get money out of politics (reverse citizens united) and enact
Citizens United was a case about a federal agency attempting to suppress the publication of a movie due to breaching "electioneering communications" rules first introduced in 2002. Contrary to the common narrative, it was more a case of the government arguing "speech is money" as a pretext to use its authority to regulate certain expenditures of money in order to control what information could be released into the media ecosystem. The court struck this down under a correct application of consistent first amendment jurisprudence, ruling that speech is always protected by the constitution, and cannot be suppressed under the guise of regulating spending.
The case and the ruling had nothing to do with campaign donations or funding of candidates. Overturning the Citizens United ruling would create a situation in which agencies under the authority of incumbent politicians would be able to control and curate public political discourse in the lead-up to elections. This is likely the exact opposite of what you intend.
> term/age limits for all public offices.
Term limits would have the effect of creating large incentives for office holders to use the prerogatives of office to set themselves up for their future careers after their terms expire. Term-limited politicians would be even more motivated than those in the status quo to hand out favors to potential future employers and business partners.
On top of that, it would be much more difficult for for politicians to establish notoriety and carve out a base of direct public support by building reputation in office. Instead, a steady stream of relative unknowns would require support from sponsors and entrenched party organizations to win office, making back-room players much more powerful than in the status quo. This is, again, likely to result in the exact opposite of what you intend.
> Given recent relevations re Epstein this is our best chance to reform corruption in generations.
Agreed, but that will require voters to abandon their reflexive partisan positions and accept that the institutions themselves are dysfunctional, irrespective of which people happen to be administering it at any given time. In the current cultural climate, that seems unfortunately unlikely.
Its a nice outrage wave, but I have very hard time believing this will be a major topic in 2 weeks. People simply don't give a fuck en masse.
Accept that many folks are built differently than you and me and stuff like actual freedom you may be willing to lay your life for may be meaningless fart for others, especially when its not hurting them now. For example US folks voted current admin willingly second time and even after a full year of daily FUBARs the support is still largely there. If even pedophilia won't move some 'patriots' then reading some communication doesn't even register as a topic.
Also, anybody actually concerned about even slightest privacy would never, ever buy such products, not now not a decade earlier. Ie for my family I don't even see any added value of such devices, just stupid fragile something I have no control over, but it sees everything. Why?
These comments appear everywhere, as if people never made changes. Look at the enormous changes prior generations have made. Look at the changes from the conservative/MAGA movement, #metoo, and the George Floyd protests. The claim doesn't stand up to any examination.
Comments like these are a distraction. All we need to do is get to work. If people took action every time they felt like posting these comments, we'd get a lot done.
I am almost sure that those two acts refer to human beings reading and listening, not to algorithms. Or at least a decent corporate lawyer will convincingly turn things that way.
... that has been virtually useless as it has been rendered ineffective by Republican obstructionism and the unwillingness of the Democrats to counteract it, leading to the current state of Trump being able to do what he wants completely unchecked.
That's a flaw of the constitution and it's revisions.
You should always assume bad actors when designing a political system.
And that's why parliamentary republics where you elect parties that form coalitions that chooses a prime minister who still has to deal with opposition and its own party support, every day, are much more resilient to authoritarianisn.
In fact there hasn't been a single parliamentary republic to turn authoritarian since Sri Lanka 50 years ago. Presidential ones? As many as you wish.
It's very stupid to elect single individuals to executive power.
I know it seems hard, but just stop using Google, Amazon, Meta products. Tell everyone you know to stop using their products. They have all been acquiring and amassing surveillance for years through their products and now they're just double dipping with AI training to sell you more of it. The more you can get people to realize and disconnect the better.
I wish more people would use AI to build alternatives with a clear, binding mission not to exploit the data, not to sell or be funded by investors who expect it to, etc. We have the power to build more than ever. We should use it.
>I know it seems hard, but just stop using Google, Amazon, Meta products.
I noticed your own app's website [0] hosts videos on YouTube [1] and uses Stripe as a payment processor [2], which is hosted on AWS. You also mentioned that your app is vibe coded [3]; the AI labs that facilitated your vibecoding likely built and run their models using Meta's PyTorch or Google's TensorFlow.
"Just stop using" makes for a catchy manifesto in HackerNews comments, but the reality is a lot more complicated than that.
It doesn't have to be a binary choice between "don't use it ever" and "continue using it as much as you are now". If people stopped using these services 50% of the time, it would have a huge impact.
The comments are fair. My post was quick and lacked details as I was frustrated in the ever increasing enshitification of the web.
What I meant to convey, from my personal experience, is that it seemed hard to get off of platforms like X, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon Prime, Alexa, Ring, Google Photos, etc. but then I did it and didn’t miss them. These small moves by a lot of people, I believe, can still make a difference. It’s not perfect, but it’s something. Do I still use some services? Of course, I have Gmail and WhatsApp, and use a lot of Apple products. When I can, I choose intentionally what I use since there’s no perfect companies out there, but there are “better” ones (whatever that may be in one’s opinion). I chose cloudflare for hosting and Anthropic for vibe coding. Allowing people to use existing login info versus exposing them to more risk with self managed auth was a choice I made. There are tons of choices we make every day so trying to be more intentional is a good start.
Nobody is perfect, but we can try to improve each day in these choices we make.
Talking about anti-tech-monopolies and using Stripe-paypal is extra ironic.
I can understand aws, youtube, being on google index, and other things as they sometimes are the most cost efficient or vendors don't offer alternatives... but stripe-paypal is more expensive and worse than the less-bad alternatives. jeez.
> I know it seems hard, but just stop using Google, Amazon, Meta products
It's not just hard for some though, literally their livelihood depends on it. Want to run a restaurant today? You basically must have Facebook, Instagram and Google Maps entry for enough people to discover you, probably more than half of the people we got to our restaurant who we ask, cite Google Maps as the reason they found the place, and without half our income, the restaurant wouldn't have survived.
That is going to work as the same as telling people to stop buying gas from Standard Oil or stop using Bell Telephone. Without government intervention you cannot break up their control.
I agree that government restrictions usually help if they're implemented well, but part of the issue is the government is benefiting from this kind of thing.
Also, most people don't actually need something like Amazon. Not to minimize the level of investment in it, but I don't see Amazon or Google as being quite the same as Bell or Standard Oil. Maybe between Google and Apple there's some kind of duopoly like that?
My impression is people don't value — either because they don't understand or minimize — things that protect privacy and anonymity. This is a standard refrain on these kinds of forums and elsewhere — "your typical person doesn't know or care about [feature X that preserves privacy, choice, and autonomy], they just want something that works and is fun". It's been belittled as unfashionable or paranoid or performative or something, when it's really something that's had short term costs that pale in comparison to the long-term costs.
I'm not saying governments don't need to be on the "right side" but I think people need to see security as involving not just encryption and so forth, but also decentralization, anonymity, demonopolization, and censorship resistance. It needs to be seen as part of the product or service benefits.
A lot of this reminds me of stuff from the 90s, when network security was ignored for awhile for customer convenience's sake. It seems really similar now, only the thing that's been ignored is like user control and privacy or something like that.
I think the thing that's surprising to me, for example, is that it takes a Super Bowl ad for people to realize that maybe there are downsides to letting a monopoly have access to video throughout the neighborhood everywhere.
I see what you're saying but I don't think that's the answer for everything, because people also pay for conveniences, like a Ring subscription so that Amazon stores footage in their cloud for you.
The problem is centralization is more convenient for consumers. You can easily control your doorbell, your garage door, your security cameras with 1 app, and everything just works.
Open source and decentralized solutions need to be just as convenient and cheaper than centralized ones for consumers to choose them.
Alternatively, basic stuff like e-mail and payment processing should be provided by the state. After all, the state provides a road network, which is similarly essential and rather more expensive.
DuckDuckGo is free to use, and is proof that you can have privacy respecting search. They make their money like Google used to by selling rankings, not by having users log in so that they can be followed across all their devices.
...with money. They are already paying for things by violating their own privacy and those around them. The irony is that the amount of money required for the service is much less the expected value of the surveillance for the provider. Service payment is an insurance expense, protecting against individual and systematic violation of the 4th Amendment rights. It's insurance (and cheap insurance) because this usually doesn't matter in practice. But sometimes it does, and when it does it REALLY does matter.
<tinfoil_hat>It would be smart for surveillance capital to fund some of these privacy forward providers, steer them to both charge you for a service and violate your privacy, hope for a very public controversy, and eventually discredit the fundamental approach.</tinfoil_hat>
And the problem with that is, all the money has been siphoned off by the people at the top.
That's one of the big hidden factors driving the ad/surveillance economy: people's purchasing power just isn't what it used to be, while at the same time they're expected to be paying regularly for more things than ever before (home broadband, mobile phone plans, etc).
- regulate the crap out of surveillance capitalism.
- enforce laws on the books
- Break up firms
Tech used to have a leg to stand on in the face of government over reach. Today, tech firms have largely adapted to the incentives that actually make themselves known every quarter.
Customer support, content moderation, compliance are avoided, and lobbying argues that if you dont let tech it easy, your economy wont innovate. Except enshittification is the term to describe how extractive mature tech markets become.
I am all for more subscription models, but this shouldn’t come at the cost of throwing our hands up and ignoring the many changes that can better align the current incentives.
I'm not sure its necessarily that simple. For example, because of the job market for software engineers I have moved to new cities multiple times during my adult life. As a result, my social network is highly fragmented and without Facebook it would be incredibly difficult for me to manage.
So for me "stop using Facebook" sound similar to saying "burn all of your family photos and throw away your ability to talk to many of the people who are important to you."
I don't say this to necessarily mean that you are completely wrong, just to point out that opting out of these companies can be more complicated than it may initially appear.
> So for me "stop using Facebook" sound similar to saying "burn all of your family photos and throw away your ability to talk to many of the people who are important to you."
You just aren't looking for obvious alternatives that would still allow you to do all that privately. Keep your family photos offline on your own hardware. Create a contacts list on your phone (ideally de-Appled and de-Googled) and text people on Signal and/or create group chats. Tell people you are leaving Facebook because it is an evil surveillance machine, and that you can be reached on Signal, email (self-hosted) or phone.
People before Facebook found themselves in exactly the same situation as you and managed to survive.
People have become dependant on the convenience of these tools and become, for lack of a gentler word, lazy. Moreover we have this current sense of entitlement -- that all of these details of modern living should be done for us. Having our social circles organized and maintained for us, having infinite entertainment a button press away, food delivered to our door on a whim, cars to take us anywhere always minutes away.
People survived just fine before these conveniences, it just too a bit more effort. You could collect your friends contact information, keep an address book, call them up from time to time. It's not perfect, but it works and starts to break the silicon valley tech giant dependence.
Personally I find adding friction to these processes has actual value. When you slow down and have to put a bit more effort in, it helps you to evaluate what is important, and what truly matters. You prioritize, you make tradoffs. The process IS the richness in life. We all don't need to be jet setting globetrotters to whom paris might as well be New York or london or munich, while robots manage our social lives. There is no substitute for actively working to build a community where you are. You have to put the effort in, and in a single generation we have lost so much of it. But we can get back there again if we try.
In the main example cited by the article: how? It involves the use of surveilance systems by other people,These people may be unaware, disinterested, or even enthusiastic participants in this data collection. The same goes with data being collected by Google when the customer did not have an active subscription.
At best, we can only control our own actions. Even then, it is only possible to minimize (rather than eliminate) the use of their products without putting up barriers between ourselves and society. Consider email: we can use an alternative provider, but chances are that we will be corresponding personally or professionally with people who use Gmail or Outlook. The same goes for phones, only the alternatives available are much more limited. Plus you have some degree of tracking by the telecom networks. (I don't consider Apple or Microsoft much better on these fronts. Ultimately they have their business interests in mind and, failing that, their existence is ultimately at the whim of the state.)
Meta is the easiest to cut of those. I don’t use anything from them as I don’t engage on social media, nor use their VR and AR stuff etc.
Google and Amazon are harder to complete cut imo. I have replaced Google apart from using YouTube, and I do rely on Amazon for delivery and running personal projects on AWS.
That said for some I can foresee Meta being hard or harder to disconnect from because of their percieved level of personal social needs.
I left facebook and many of my friendships faded away.
Awkward bumping into people conversations would happen such as: "We missed you at my birthday party!", "I didn't know about it, else I would have been there!" "We posted it to facebook..." "I deleted my facebook account 2 years ago."
My personal philosophy was maybe they were not real friends to begin with. After all in the now 5 years since deletion, not one has reached out to ask if I'm even still alive. I've reached out to a couple people, with little to no reply. None the less, it was a hard transition.
That's the easy part. What do you do about stuff like face recognition and cameras everywhere? Should you hide your face every time you go out? Should you not speak because there might be a mic around picking up your voice?
This is only going to get worse. We can't trust companies or governments to respect our privacy. We can't trust each other to keep the data recorded by our devices private.
It seems like the fight for privacy is a lost cause. What do we do?
"trust"? Lot's of ambitious people are selling extra refined new additions to surveillance right now! "business is good" for example the 90s PDF architect Leonard Rosenthol recently put up ads promoting a brand of Ring cameras that have extra features. Of course he is making money on it. Someone on LinkedIn said "what is this?" and the reply was "adding ownership attributes to Ring camera footage is a step towards publication rights for the owner" .. almost too strange to believe but yes, this is the actual move.
None of that helps, that's the point. How can you stop a ring camera from recording you as you're just taking a walk outside? How can you stop people's phones from tracking other people's phones, APs and BT? How can you stop ISPs from selling your real time location info, including to the cops?
No Go, no Flutter, no Android, no GCP nor AWS or anyone that relies on them like Vercel and Netlify, no llama, no React or framework that builds on top of it.
Keeping the list small, there are other items that depend on those companies money and engineering teams.
It doesn’t just seem hard, it is hard. I’m working on it, but here’s a few examples:
- I want to delete my Amazon account because service has gotten worse and they mistreat their employees. I also want to be able to get groceries, but I don’t have a car and the walking distance grocery store just closed (due to mismanagement). Now I need to spend hours every weekend walking to the farmers market or to the Safeway a considerably distance away.
- I want my prescriptions, but the pharmacy I used to walk to is closing. Now I need to find a pharmacy delivery service that isn’t tied up with Amazon.
- I signed up for One Medical before it was Amazon and it was great. Now it sucks. There aren’t exactly a lot of great alternatives even if I wanted to pay a premium. Wtf do I do?
- I have a Microsoft account I want to delete. If I do that, I will lose access to my Xbox games, and I will lose access to download anything at all on my Xbox 360, which is loaded up with XBLA games I can only use because Microsoft has kept the download part of their store working.
- I’m not on Instagram, but businesses seem to think Instagram has completely replaced the World Wide Web - many restaurants don’t post their hours _anywhere_ but Instagram. I cannot access these details without logging in. A local “speakeasy” coffee shop has a password you have to get from the Instagram story. I just can’t go. Unfortunately the employees are not accommodating. I’ve left a nasty review but that can only go so far. Without a big tech account I can’t even do that.
Using AI to do anything isn't going to liberate one. It's just going to shift the dependence from one company to another. Your new feudal lord will be the people running the Santa Claus machine you're running. Don't keep trying to tell people AI is the solution. The real solution is self-hosting. And that cannot be AI'd half as easily.
The suggestion is not to depend on AI for privacy, but to use it to build products like signal which guarantee privacy. Using AI to build a product doesn't mean sharing the data from that product. In addition, right now AI has little vendor lock in and there are multiple competitive alternatives, so becoming dependent on a single company is not so likely.
No no you see... when Google or Amazon or Meta et al are doing it it's a-okay. But let's ban Huawei or DJI on 'National Security' grounds because they MIGHT be doing this too!
Surveillance is not black or white. In this world you’d have to be a cave man to not get surveyed, you just have to pick your battles. Not using any other the big 5-10’s product or s like saying don’t buy from Walmart or something. It’s stupid
> But the graphic Amazon used seems to have unwittingly depicted how invasive this technology can be
This is a calculated move to normalize such technology. Yes, it will cause controversy in the short term, and these companies knew this was a possibility—but as a result the image in people's minds won't be the gestapo rounding up grannies; it'll kids finding puppies. To call this "unwitting" is simply naive (not surprising for Greenwald).
That’s why I’m hoping the news picks this up more - especially about the intended integration with flock/ICE. That might be the issue that brings awareness mainstream beyond the tech-aware circles
Of course, they would. If the administration asked Bezos, and he gets a benefit out of it. He will task his marketing team to come up with something which tries to frame it in a positive light. Knowing that even if a few people make a stink this will blow over eventually and when it rolls out, he can always say it is just about puppies and neighborhood security. Nobody cares.
And yet this went up. I understand it’s easy to just say “marketing teams don’t understand anything,“ but I have worked with many and they are incredibly sensitive to negative feelings/reactions. They get it wrong but they tend to air on the side of caution which means the vast majority of the time they avoid situations like this incredibly intentionally.
So, what's currently going on to fight back against all this? Here's what I found. Does signing a petition actually doing something? It's hard to tell but if you are inclined, at least take a look at some current efforts.
-Active Petitions and Campaigns to Limit Surveillance:
End the Surveillance State (Action Network): Petitions call on Congress to permanently end the PATRIOT Act, stop warrantless surveillance, and oppose the expansion of surveillance technology.
-Ban Facial Recognition (Amnesty International & ACLU): Amnesty International is running the "Ban the Scan" campaign, while the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) targets the use of face surveillance, arguing it poses risks to civil liberties and disproportionately impacts marginalized communities.
-Stop Surveillance Data Brokers (Mozilla): Mozilla Foundation is targeting major websites to stop sharing data with surveillance technology firms that track user movement and interactions.
-Protect User Data from Subpoenas (EFF): The Electronic Frontier Foundation is pressuring tech companies to resist lawless DHS subpoenas for user data.
-Oppose Localized Surveillance (ACLU/Action Network): Local petitions aim to limit technologies like Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPRs) that create massive databases of personal movement.
-Federal Legislative Reform: Advocates are pushing for the "The Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act," which aims to restrict intelligence agencies from purchasing data from brokers without a warrant.
I don't think people grasp the gravity of the situation.
I see everyone talking about how to stop using products. I even thought about legislation that could help. But that's just it, none of that is possible. You can't even employ a "torches and pitchforks" approach. For any of this to be possible, people would have to coordinate. The means by which people communicate and coordinate are under the influence and control of the very entities that the people are trying to bring under control.
The only way to win this war is by means of economic warfare. And I don't mean "vote with your wallet". If I could spell out what I mean here, then the previous paragraph would have been invalid.
> The only way to win this war is by means of economic warfare.
We are only in this situation because the economic war was lost. You want the world to fight Amazon and Google while they're in the middle of counting their spoils?
It is not yet illegal or dangerous to call for a general strike. Only by shutting down the ports, the rail, the trucks and the delivery services will people create enough economic disruption that the billionaires will call their political toadies to heel and get them to start fixing this shit.
We still have the power to panic the billionaires, and they have the power to get what they want. If what they want is temporarily in sync with what society needs, then so much the better.
There were rumors that the reason Elon was bringing his child around every single moment he was in public was because of speculation that the child could assist in being cover for him(again thats speculation though people did get a laugh out of it). It started around the Luigi murder.
How do you convince people to participate in a general strike when the tiktok, facebook (and as a result threads, instagram), and twitter are controlled by the whitehouse and are actively taking down such posts?
Even if you want to inform people the old fashioned way, or organize in person, a few might, but you need majority of voters, how can you reach them when they only want to be reached by mediums controlled by the white house?
> We still have the power to panic the billionaires
Yeah, and making them lose a few billions of dollars isn't it. Even criminal punishment is useless, they'll get pardons, and if not they can just flee to any country that would protect them for their money. there are ways to make them scared for real though.
> Only by shutting down the ports, the rail, the trucks and the delivery services
This is the right track for sure, but the problem is scale, you need coordination to do that. But more than that, you need lots of people agreeing to do without nice things like a good and stable economy, mass layoffs, and dire consequences that aren't worth mentioning here. Matter of fact, the one group of people in the world that could have the most impact are all gathered here on HN :)
For the extreme measures that need to be taken by the people to actually be taken, the people need to understand that those measures are neccesary, and actually be informed of the strategies behind those measures and have some awareness of some of the tactics available to implement those strategies.
The problem is, there is no one even considering any unconventional means. Anyone with power to act is waiting for elections and campaigns. Why can't people just read history and learn from it? Why do we need tragedies to keep teaching us the same lessons again and again. The people in charge are not idiots. they also know elections are ahead. They're actively ignoring courts and making clear and public threats of subverting elections. Why do people have to wait until that actually happens to plan ahead of time?
Americans are still in a catatonic state of "that could never happen here where I live", despite things that could never happen in America continuing to happen every day. The answer is the same as my original post: communications and media are controlled where they matter now.
The general strike is a sad, obvious myth solely to delude us tax-cattle that we will have power, one day, for a day. Something something workers something bosses something something struggle. Bullshit for peasant workers.
"general strike" needs to be thrown in the same box as "communism" and "democracy" and "representation".
Glenn Greenwald is back on substack. Yay! For the past few years, he’s mostly done videos on rumble, and he’s fun to watch, but personally I prefer his writing. In case you’ve been under a rock for 10 years, Greenwald was the guy who published Snowden’s revelations. His focus has always been on censorship, surveillance, and hypocrisy in government.
Laura Poitras' documentary Citizenfour is an excellent introduction to the amazing work that Glenn does and has done, and how he's been personally targeted - although I don't recall whether the doc includes Glenn's partner being harassed by US authorities.
He's great for privacy, surveillance and a centrist liberal critique of both parties, but his obsession with Israel is annoying and distracting from the other non- partisan contrarian attitude that I like him for.
Heh, “obsession”, as if Israel has been doing absolutely nothing of interest for the past two years. Not to mention its blatant involvement in the domestic US political scene via AIPAC and friends.
He became well known for exposing surveillance but that instinct to portray himself as exposing government hypocrisy lead him to parrot Russian intelligence/Trump campaign attacks on Clinton and Biden long after he should have realized that the right posed a much greater threat to civil liberties and were feeding him information in service of their own campaigns, not transparency. It’s really undercut his earlier work.
Examining Glenn's work through an ideological lens leads to this kind of rhetoric. It's why he's so good at what he does. He's crossed ideological boundaries constantly in pursuit of the truth of a matter, and in defense of the public.
This is the same "useful idiot" trap that Julian Assange fell into. It's a challenge to incorporate the lessons of people like these without falling into the opposite trap, that of cynical apathy.
Those guys find it useful when there's some kind of legitimate gripe to use. He needn't take a break, it's very much Western companies doing this. He doesn't even need to put in an ad for whatever doubtless sanctioned Russian services would like to replace these Western tech giants.
Sometimes actual problems can be readily exploited for sinister purposes. Doesn't mean the original problems aren't also sinister, just be damn careful where you intend to flee to :)
Right if you’re not a mouthpiece for the US State Depts horrific foreign policy you’re a Russian propagandist. My family fought in every war going back to the Revolution and I think our policy on Russia is complete shit. AFAIC we started the whole conflict.
His focus has also involved generous amounts of simping for Russian fascists, excusing their colonialist wars, etc. Not an anti-imperialist, just anti-US.
Rumble is indeed a free for all, with lots of angry kooks. But it’s also a place where reasonable dissenting voices have found a way to get their ideas heard. It’s a mixed bag.
> Revealed: How Substack makes money from hosting Nazi newsletters
If we're gonna judge authors for what platforms they're using, does that mean we're all bad guys here on HN too, since a lot of current misery is because of startups and technology companies who used to receive a lot praise here?
I personally miss Snowden's revelations so much. Such a brave soul! He should keep doing what he does best and never stop. It's sad that we have not heard any new revelations from him for a long time, though. Any ideas why he stopped?
I'm not sure if it's sarcasm or something, but Snowden essentially lives in exile from his home as the US government would like to punish him for exposing the secrets of the US government spying on everyone. Not sure what new revelations could come from him.
The Pinkerton National Detective Agency, founded in 1850, operated largely outside the constraints of the Fourth Amendment for much of the 19th century because they were private agents, not government actors. Congress passed the Anti-Pinkerton Act in 1893, which prohibited the federal government from hiring Pinkerton employees or similar organizations.
As an attorney I’d like to understand why you think there is a “clear” Constitutional violation going on here. What activity, specifically, are you referring to, and what precedent supports your claim?
As a trial attorney for more than 40 years, I'd say these are examples of egregious illegal surveillance of American citizens by the current government:
1. A retired US citizen emailed a DHS attorney urging mercy for an asylum seeker he had read about. Five hours later he received an email from Google advising him the federal government had served Google with a subpoena demanding information about him. Then they followed up by knocking on his door.
The federal government's concerted effort to intimidate citizens should concern every American.
A memo from a Department of Homeland Security official reviewed by CNN and sent to agents dispatched to Minneapolis last month asked them to “capture all images, license plates, identifications and general information” on “agitators, protesters, etc. so we can capture it all in one consolidated form.” And the official reportedly provided such a form, called “intel collection.”
3. Moreover, ICE officers have traveled to the homes of protesters. Not to arrest them, because they have done nothing illegal. Rather, ICE was trying to intimidate them by letting them know ICE knows who they are and where they live. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/us/minneapolis-ice-agents
Seems to me like someone's security camera footage, even if held by a 3rd party, would pretty clearly fall under "papers and effects" same as my crap sitting in a rented storage unit does.
It's only because we've had a century of legal contrivance that it doesn't IMO.
If corporations and government are acting together, this is fascism (according to Mussolini). It seems that is already the case. It's just we call it 'democracy'. Perhaps 'crypto-fascism' is the right term.
"Inverted totalitarianism" is the term you're looking for, although with Trumpism we're flipping to just straightforward totalitarianism. "Crypto-fascism" is applicable to Surveillance Valley's fake strain of "libertarianism", which is more accurately described as corporate authoritarianism.
That's the only way it can be in a system with thousands of crimes on the books.
People commit minor offenses, and often felonies without knowing it, on a regular basis. If surveillance was consistently used to actually enforce the laws, people would a) notice the surveillance[0] and then actually object to it and b) start objecting to all the ridiculous and poorly drafted laws they didn't even know existed.
But they don't want the majority of people objecting to things. They want a system that provides a thousand pretexts to punish anyone who does something they don't like, even something they're supposed to have a right to do, by charging them with any of the laws that everybody violates all the time and having the surveillance apparatus in place so they can do it to anyone as long as it's not done to everyone. That doesn't work if the laws are enforced consistently and the majority thereby starts insisting that they be reasonable.
I wonder if this is a technique used by certain leaders of authoritarian regimes to take out people in power they they deem threats. Everyone in the party routinely breaks laws, knowingly or otherwise. The person in charge can decide they don't like someone and start an investigation, knowing they'll eventually find something illegal. Then they can delegitimize and remove them under the guise of "corruption".
On the other hand, those thousands of crimes on the books exist because American society operates under a norm of "if its not explicitly illegal then its fine for people to do it". See for example, the rhetoric around maximizing shareholder value.
If the only way to protect yourself from selfish people is if their actions explicitly illegal, then the logical outcome is to make more and more things explicitly illegal.
IMHO, that's one of the core failures of modern Libertarian/Objectivist influenced thought.
And the people in power not facing the consequences of their crimes even if they come to broad light. In fact the people in charge of the surveillance is the same that hide those crimes, or convince population that there is nothing to see there.
The surveillance protects the regime, which mostly involves the US Federal government. Street crime, unless it’s organized by Cartels, is not a political threat.
You can see the counter example during the 40s-70s when the FBI targeted the mafia and local political corruption to take out the remaining organized crime strongholds .
Today organized crime doesn’t have much political influence. A sort of truce. So there’s no longer incentive for the feds to pursue street crime. Street crime yields no longer funnel into influence.
In fact, most political corruption today is coming from entitlements , which further bolsters political control.
It's simple - if a camera sends pictures and images to a cloud (other prople's computers) you must expect that thay process and store the data (and it's often in their ToC anyway). It's sad that many non-technical people don't realize that.
Ring camera spyware, Amazons....excuse me Department of Defence/War..whatever the name, they have contracts with Amazon, which had the Super Bowl ad reveiling a new feature called "search party"...which it uses AI face/pattern recognition under the guise "search for missing dogs" to scan all its cameras videos for the "missing dog"...
.Now this scans all Ring cameras, inside houses, outside houses, wherever theres a Ring camera....but its really to find people, dissenters, "criminals" in the eyes of the satanic surveillance system.
The minds involved always play on the emotions of people to bring this about, such as a child who lost their dog or an "illegal" immigrant who commited a crime...they spread the propaganda, stir up emotions, then get the results...more gullible Americans accepting more surveillance and spying on their neighbors like the psychos did with fake "covid" hysteria.
Part of their propaganda the so called missing lady Nancy Guthrie...how convenient, right around the time of Amazons search party, Google Nest has the psyop. With a sherrif saying the videos were not saved, she didnt have a Google Nest subscription..lol, see where thats going?
This type of centralization breeds authoritarianism. See also the Iran protests. There’s too many single points of failure in technology. These systems become sources of oppression inevitably.
How do we build a resilient system that doesn’t rely on single platforms?
> Flock Safety, a police surveillance tech company
Interesting - few months ago this was private, illegally tracking people and cars company. I’m amazed how well US progresses!
For anyone who doesn't know yet, there are a wide variety of ONVIF supporting cameras that you can setup with a local NVR running Frigate. You can block internet access to the cameras, so they can't create outbound connections, and only inbound connections to the video streams are allowed.
Tailscale has a free tier that's a good option to remotely access your network and cameras.
> This language moves beyond platform-level age gates and toward infrastructure embedded directly into hardware or operating systems.
This is lurching toward what the US military calls the Common Access Card. This is a security token carried by most US military. It's used for everything from logins to building access to meals.[1]
Merely having a Common Access Card doesn't allow access to anything. The system reading it has to recognize the identity. So there are lots of databases of who's allowed to do what.
> while Flock is unrelated to Search Party, public backlash made it impossible, at least for now, for Amazon to send Ring’s user data to a police surveillance firm
Not the same, but ring is a common target for police warrants already
There’s more posts that get to the front page complaining about Apple’s frosted glass than the surveillance state being built by every other tech company
Other? No other company makes you register with the company before you can install apps on your own phone. No other company makes you send your location to it if you want to access GPS on your own phone.
> "All of this is particularly remarkable, and particularly disconcerting, since we are barely more than a decade removed from the disclosures about mass domestic surveillance enabled by the courageous whistleblower Edward Snowden..."
With respect to Greenwald, I don't think it's remarkable at all.
I have learned, through experience, that sometimes when people want to do things they should not, or against which there is opposition, there is enormous power in simply doing it. If you ignore people enough, you can do anything.
Preventing this requires systems with accountability.
And as HN commenters frequently note, accountability for government, tech, or corporate leaders in general seems culturally missing in the US.
Despite Snowden, nothing here is remarkable. This has grown because it _can_ grow.
It is remarkable that it took an ad from the same company that makes the product to make (some) people come to the realization of the surveillance they are subjected to and uninstall their cameras. The public is truly clueless despite all the messaging from the EFF and other organizations.
It is also interesting that US seems to be getting the surveillance state without any of the benefits such as low crime rate. In my view it is a valid choice for the country of having more crime Vs more surveillance, but in the US such a choice is not offered.
It’s baffling and makes you wonder about the strategic mission of the surveillance state. Surely they must be achieving some objectives – since they are heavily resourced, and capable. If not crime prevention, it must be political influence.
There’s a ton of evidence of foreign state intervention since WW2. And there are hints at domestic intervention since the 1960s . The likely focus is domestic political intervention, since it takes time for whistleblowers and stories to see the light of day.
Great writeup. Glenn mentions that he stopped using Gemini. While I still use Gemini for technical research and occasional coding/design work via Antigravity, for all day to day queries and prompts I have switched to using Proton's Lumo that is really quite good: use of a strong Mistral model and web search is 100% private, and while chat history is preserved for a while it is stored and processed like Proton Mail.
More good reading that I found helpful are the books: Privacy is Power and Surveillance Capitalism.
As a trial attorney for more than 40 years, I'd say these are examples of egregious illegal surveillance of American citizens by the current government:
1. A retired US citizen emailed a DHS attorney urging mercy for an asylum seeker he had read about. Five hours later he received an email from Google advising him the federal government had served Google with a subpoena demanding information about him. Then they followed up by knocking on his door.
The federal government's concerted effort to intimidate citizens should concern every American.
A memo from a Department of Homeland Security official reviewed by CNN and sent to agents dispatched to Minneapolis last month asked them to “capture all images, license plates, identifications and general information” on “agitators, protesters, etc. so we can capture it all in one consolidated form.” And the official reportedly provided such a form, called “intel collection.”
3. Moreover, ICE officers have traveled to the homes of protesters. Not to arrest them, because they have done nothing illegal. Rather, ICE was trying to intimidate them by letting them know ICE knows who they are and where they live. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/us/minneapolis-ice-agents
As a side and probably fully off topic note (although...), I asked ChatGPT an innocent code question while not giving my code. It basically answered with the variable name I had written in my own code (da.ma.st) (a variable inside an object inside an object : data.main.stance). I still have to understand how and why it happened (I am not using anything else than ChatGPT in my browser and I absolutely never provided this chunk of code to the AI).
I further noticed that while I had a chatgpt window open, my dev site window was becoming laggy after many refreshes as if something was deliberately trying to scan it every time it got refreshed. I suspect the AI to scan other open tabs and simply reading through everything it can encounter. It is actually the only explanation up to date (but I unfortunately don't have much time to try to validate this speculative opinion: I will surely give other shots in order to narrow my suspicions).
I tend to think that this kind of data extraction frenziness may be a big problem in the future. Read it as : "let's collect everything, just tell everyone we are not collecting it, and then we'll see what we can get from it." Imagine such data being used in the future versions of governments if things get wild.
if you really want users to see an outward sign of your respect for privacy, start building cameras with lens covers, and microphones with mute switches, and a "flag" of some sort that clearly demonstrates the position of the privacy hardware.
I don't want to say I give up, but after seeing how powerful modern facial recognition softwares are, mostly by Israelis, and what I mean is: if you're walking randomly in an Uzbekistan's mall with a moustache and sunglasses this information is instantly known by lots of actors with 99.9%+ accuracy, I kinda give up.
1984 is here and we are allowing it bit by bit by normalizing at every small step stuff that would've been madness ten years before.
I mean, this does not come as a surprise. If you look at the US corporations, not just Amazon or Google but Facebook, or more recently Discord - and our all-time favourite chummer, Microsoft - this all screams of strategic mass sniffing and snooping after people. There is 0% chance that this is done solely on a per-corporate level. This is systematic sniffing.
I think the long term solution will have to be to become as independent as possible on these sniffer-corporations and to get real people into office rather than those lobbyists who work for those corporations. This will require a complete re-design of the whole system though. I am not sure we'll see that in our lifetime.
This probably even has ramifications beyond US residents.
I'm confident Google etc will be compelled (if they haven't already been) to share their dossiers with the US and allies so that there is a file on each individual's psychology, weaknesses, and a how-to manual for gaslighting that person with the goal to silence them or coerce them into acting a certain way.
And by then, the Stasi would look like cute amateurs in comparison.
Those raising these concerns have been dismissed as paranoid for decades, even post-Snowden. And yet, surprising no-one, here we are.
I've noticed a big split in viewpoint between people who don't live in the US.
Its like those who live in the states have a incentive to act like everything going on is ok, while those outside are increasingly having statements like yours. "How do you not see this power 13 years past Snowden"
I've not given up trying to point out how dangerous the US govs powers are in the hands of an ever less capable and more fascist government, ie posting here on HN, but the odds to convince people are low.
I spend significant time in the US, Canada, and Europe, and nobody I talk to seems to think that what's going on is OK.
Both Canada and Europe are undertaking major projects to reduce their interdependence with America, and public sentiment on America has changed rapidly since the current administration assumed power. Europeans have always distrusted American tech, and Canadians have started trying to break away as well.
The Americans I spend time with are also unhappy with the direction things are going, but most of them still use Google Chrome and buy everything on Amazon. They seem to be less willing to accept a little bit of inconvience to take a moral stand.
Dropped Alexa years ago. They sure can do the same thing, and listen into every house "to find a missing child". Or some other BS. Or let all Alexas say "This is a national emergency. Do not leave the house. This is ..."
East Germany spent millions to spy on people.
Now people spend millions so the state can spy on them.
The backlash against the use of Ring cameras began with their tone-deaf superbowl ad. Amazon assumed that customers would buy their surveillance technology. The whole thing reminds me that we have returned to the Gilded Age, when the rich people who run the world strutted about arrogantly, without fear of shame or public disapproval. It’s as if Bezos is telling us “you have no choice. You will buy our product whether you like it or not.”
Will another Progressive Era bring about more equality, or are the billionaires too entrenched?
The bigger problem is that our digital gilded age is founded in an entrenched culture organizing and framing support for it. It’s one that has been carefully created with several tracks of effort going back decades (some even a century).
Counterculture is disorganized and shallow, and funding is not as abundant where understanding of this problem exists.
Greenwald demonstrating his technological illiteracy once again. This time, he doesn't say that PRISM is mass surveillance, though he writes about it right next to where he talks about mass surveillance and has never admitted his mistake.
Now he's complaining that Nest had video footage without a subscription as if the user wouldn't know this. Nest still processes video for motion detection alerts for people without a subscription. It just deletes the video after processing unless you have a subscription to pay for the storage. Even though I am not a user myself, I'd be surprised if this isn't clear to the people who use the product. I am not at all surprised that Greenwald doesn't understand it though.
"...While the “discovery” of footage from this home camera by Google engineers is obviously of great value to the Guthrie family and law enforcement agents searching for Guthrie, it raises obvious yet serious questions about why Google, contrary to common understanding, was storing the video footage of unsubscribed users. A former NSA data researcher and CEO of a cybersecurity firm, Patrick Johnson, told CBS: “There's kind of this old saying that data is never deleted, it's just renamed.”..."
Its another copy of their MAC data storage scenario due to a "rogue engineer"
I can say from direct experience Apple is not any better and at times much worse as they actively lie about their security measures by obscuring loopholes left open for direct government access as well as they cooperate with little to no push back.
The surveillance industry has gotten out of hand. It is also true that there is ample reason to ignore and avoid anything coming out of the OA's author, who has a strong history of Russian-aligned propaganda efforts. Please don't cite him or amplify him further. Propaganda and disinfo ops worldwide are just as big of a problem as accelerating, unchecked, abused surveillance.
Is he pro Jan 6 because he's anti-establishment or he's pro Trump? Seems like he's the former and doesn't know when to stop being anti-establishment and that puts him weird places.
Jan 6 wasn't an insurrection. Nobody was armed except one guy with a pistol and the dude with a spear. It was a bunch of obese methbillies trashing the place.
- Jan 6, the day the votes are certified by Congress.
- The goal was interrupting the peaceful transfer of presidential power, a foundational element of U.S. constitutional governance.
- Force was used to disrupt lawful governmental authority.
- Part of a larger conspiracy to use alternate slates of electors to dispute the election and send it back to state legistatures (see Eastman memo and resulting lawsuits).
At this point, it's fair to assume that if the US government wanted to surveil you to a nefarious end, they absolutely could, easily, using things you bought to make your life more convenient.
The keys then become:
1) Implementing policies discouraging them from doing so at the societal level
and
2) Implementing force behind those policies at the personal and societal level
DHS isn't getting paid right now because Kristi "Dog Shooter" Noem managed to screw up so badly that even Congressional Republicans under Trump don't want to own her agency's behavior and carved DHS out of the normal funding bill. There's still a chance for #1 to be achieved. #2 remains to be seen at the societal level, but you can start working on that yourself for the personal level.
Sadly ICE and CBP is still getting paid because it was already funded by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. [1]
So while some parts of DHS aren't funded, and it does give Democrats bargaining power, it could still end up in a situation like the October 2025 shutdown where they don't get meaningful change.
TSA employees won't get paid which could impact air travel. Probably not as bad as when FAA employees weren't getting paid but if it's bad enough the pressure for Democrats to cave again will be high.
I laugh at myself sometimes for things like this: I refuse to provide my phone number to the cashier who promises me loyalty points, then I hand over the same credit card number I use for all my purchases. Boy, I really showed them how much I value my privacy!
But the other holes in the bucket doesn't mean you have to help. From a real opsec point of view a single tiny hole is the same as no wall at all. But from a day to day view less is less. It does at least reduce the spam.
And there is also, say you plug hole A and you can't do anything about hole B.
Some day something may develop that changes hole B (maybe a new law, maybe it's a service that you can stop using, maybe one org stops cooperating with another, whatever).
If hole A has already been wide open for years then closing hole B may not change much. But if hole A has been closed for years when the opportunity to close hole B comes along, then maybe closing hole B actually does something.
I choose to see it as something is better than nothing and it's worth it to apply pressure and be sand in the gears.
It's got to be better for everyone that there is at least some sand in the gears than if there were no sand in the gears.
Once again we see tech companies capitulating to the US government who is actually doing the things we accuse China is theoretically doing in the future.
I don't own a smart speaker. It's actually annoying because there are so few options for a music system now. I've previously owned a Sonos but honestly it's just not a polished product. Anyway, my issue with smart speakers is I don't want a cloud-connected always-on microphones in my house. Sorry but no. You simply never know when law enforcement will use such a thing via a warrant nobody can tell you about (ie FISA). It could be targeted to you, individually but there are far worse alternatives.
It could be a blanket warrant against, say, people posting negatively against ICE online. Or microphones couldd be used to identify such people based on what it hears. You just have no control.
And once again, Google handed over PII voluntarily to the government recently [1]. Companies don't need to comply with administrative subpoenas. It takes a court order signed by a judge to enforce.
All of this is just another reason why China was correct to keep US tech companies out, basically. But here's where it's going to get much worse for the US and those same companies: when the EU decides enough is enough and creates their own versins that are subject to EU jurisdiction.
I bought some tower speakers made in the early 2000s and they sound awesome. Huge heavy things, but it's not like I've ever had to move them since I bought them. I power them with an inexpensive NAD amplifier that supports streaming and bluetooth sources.
He’s not wrong but screw Glenn Greenwald. I assume his solution will be to back the current or next strongman, because strongman rule will save us?
It’s like the “don’t tread on me” militia crowd voting by like a 90% margin for a regime that is now enacting every single one of the things they’ve been afraid of for 50 years: masked cops, opaque detention centers, assaulting (and murdering) people for legally exercising second amendment rights, mass surveillance, social credit systems, and so on.
Or, I guess, like Lenin creating a totalitarian state to enslave the workers to liberate the workers? Or the French Revolution replacing the monarchy with the terror? Many examples in history I suppose.
I don’t see where you’re coming from. Greenwald is constantly pointing out abuses of power and hypocrisy in government. Have you actually read what he writes? He is in no way a fan of totalitarian strongmen.
Greenwald defends totalitarian strongmen abroad by his reflexive and universal opposition to American power. His stance on Ukraine, for example, is as extremely pro-Putin as any writing can get without saying "I love Vlad and I will kiss him".
Greenwald is a vocal and consistent anti-institutionalist, and this creates the conditions for strongmen to take over. Whether he is aware of having this effect is not relevant.
Greenwald supports both Putin and Trump, for starters.
He's either insanely clueless, a propagandist who is being dishonest about his goals, or an accelerationist who thinks making things worse will make them better after (magic happens here).
The magic never happens. Any political program that boils down to (1) break everything, (2) magic, (3) things are better, really goes (1) break everything, (2) either things stay broken and you end up a failed state or someone worse takes over.
Who would have thought that after changing no laws to ban the behavior, firing nobody, and re-upping the post-9/11 laws consistently, that the process would continue? I, for one, am shocked... that anyone might be shocked about this.
It would be foolish to believe this isn’t happening basically everywhere. The reason this is news right now is because Amazon got cocky enough to buy an ad spot on the most watched TV event in the US showing the extent of their surveillance network.
I know Ring is getting a bad rap for enabling state level surveillance, but the Ring app offers an option to enable end-to-end encryption between the camera and your phone.
The stored video is encrypted with key generated on your phone. You have to be physically close to the camera in order to share the key and complete the set-up. Once encrypted, the video can't be analyzed by AI or used in a broad surveillance effort.
It's entirely possible that the encryption keys have a backdoor, but I doubt it. Although there is no way to verify.
When national interests require that, it can get a firmware update which sends a copy of data to comrades in U.S. Ministerium für Staatssicherheit even before that e2e encrypted copy reaches your phone.
>enable end-to-end encryption between the camera and your phone.
So… exactly not the part I care about?
Cool, it’s encrypted on transit to me… now what about at rest with them? Is it encrypted and they absolutely can not view or hand that footage to police/gov? No.
> Cool, it’s encrypted on transit to me… now what about at rest with them? Is it encrypted and they absolutely can not view or hand that footage to police/gov? No.
Technically yes, e2e encryption means video hosted on their servers is only viewable by devices with decryption keys. So if the police/gov brought a subpoena to request the video, Ring could only offer them the encrypted video. They would have to take possession of your phone and gain access in order to decrypt and view the video.
In this case the "ends" in the e2e encryption is the camera and your phone.
I really like this passage:
>It is always the case that there are benefits available from relinquishing core civil liberties: allowing infringements on free speech may reduce false claims and hateful ideas; allowing searches and seizures without warrants will likely help the police catch more criminals, and do so more quickly; giving up privacy may, in fact, enhance security.
> But the core premise of the West generally, and the U.S. in particular, is that those trade-offs are never worthwhile. Americans still all learn and are taught to admire the iconic (if not apocryphal) 1775 words of Patrick Henry, which came to define the core ethos of the Revolutionary War and American Founding: “Give me liberty or give me death.” It is hard to express in more definitive terms on which side of that liberty-versus-security trade-off the U.S. was intended to fall.
I think the security/liberty tradeoff is actually often a false promise. You can end up trading away liberty for nothing at all. I don't like buying into this, even to say "liberty is better, we should do that instead" because it implicitly concedes that you would really get the security on the other side of the bargain.
And if you don't get the security you were promised, it's too late to do anything about it.
> "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety" -- Benjamin Franklin
The key phrase is "a little temporary safety". 250 years ago people understood that the "security" gains were small and fleeting, but the loss of liberty was massive and permanent.
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When you've given up all liberty, there's nothing left to stop the security being used against you.
If you assume that the security side of the equation is a false promise, then you are not making a decision at all: choosing between liberty with no security, or no liberty plus no security (because it's fake).
And for me, it seems somewhat disingenuous to imply that a decision is being made when your premise belies that.
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We concurrently see failures on both the "attempts to preserve liberty" and "attempts to preserve security" front, so let's stop arguing about abstract principles.
Quotes are pointless, discussion should be limited to what's happening on the ground. For any given thing that happens, do we think that it, specifically, is helpful or harmful.
It's trivial to reverse that quote: we can, and have, pushed to keep the US population armed with increasingly-advanced personal weapons (in the name of liberty) without actually gaining any protection against authoritarian styles of government use of force or surveillance as a result. While just making civilian-on-civilian violence easier and more lethal.
> discussion should be limited to what's happening on the ground
Does anyone actually have any idea what's actually happening "on the ground?"
> without actually gaining any protection against authoritarian styles of government use of force
There are three weapons for every man, woman, and child in the USA. You may enjoy more of this protection than you realize.
> While just making civilian-on-civilian violence easier and more lethal.
80% of murders happen after an argument. More suicides happen by firearm than murders by a factor of 2:1. States with lower population densities like Alaska have 6x the suicide rate of states with higher densities like New York. There's a reason people aren't given these statistics.
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> It is hard to express in more definitive terms on which side of that liberty-versus-security trade-off the U.S. was intended to fall.
While I agree with Henry, and intend for _my_ life and social impact to fall there, "where the U.S. was intended to fall" is a misnomer here. That quote was one man's opinion. The U.S. is millions of living beings who, if they have liberty, should get to do whatever they want with it (which in itself is an oxymoron).
For those unfamiliar it's worth learning about Blackstone's Ratio. Blackstone was extremely influential to the writers of the US constitution.
I think it should come natural to engineers because I see it as similar to failure engineering, but for the legal system. When you engineer a bridge, building, or even a program you build failure modes into them. Not to cause them to fail but to control fails. A simple version is "fail open" vs "fail closed". A bank safe that fails, fails closed. It is locked and you need to drill it open. Same with an encrypted harddrive but no drill... But a locked door in a public building will typically want to fail opened, least you trap people inside during a fire. A more complex example is the root of a conspiracy. When a tall building collapses you tend to want it to fall in on itself so it doesn't take out neighboring skyscrapers...
So Blackstone's Ratio (and Franklin's recounting) is similar. It asks "which mode of failure is better? That innocent man are condemned or that guilty men go free?" This is a question we must all ask ourselves least we back ourselves into a corner. There's no perfect solution. We don't want failure, we should reduce it as much as possible, but if/when it fails, which outcome do you prefer?
I'll link the wiki but the topic is so famous you'll find a million and I'm pretty sure it's taught in every law school in America
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio
> “Give me liberty or give me death.” It is hard to express in more definitive terms on which side of that liberty-versus-security trade-off the U.S. was intended to fall.
No, that's a gross misrepresentation of what he said and meant. Patrick Henry was referring exclusively to political liberty from British colonial rule. There is no sense whatsoever in which he was referring to civil liberties against domestic rule. It didn't have a single thing to do with "security".
> But the core premise of the West generally, and the U.S. in particular, is that those trade-offs are never worthwhile.
Also totally false. This is the core premise of libertarians in the West, who are, and always have been, a minority. It is not, and has never been, the "core premise" of the West or the US. Or else, quite obviously, we wouldn't have the constant tension between these liberties and the need for security. The idea that "those trade-offs are never worthwhile" is not a core American idea. We make those tradeoffs every single day. And continue to argue about them, e.g. over what degree of gun control is proper after each school shooting that happens.
I think part of the problem is a temptation to believe that we can have out cake and eat it too.
If the people on charge of deciding when to use the cameras were morally perfect, we have all the upside and none of the downside.
The problem is we live in a fallen world and that will simply never work.
Nevertheless it is a siren song that causes us to repeatedly make the wrong trade
>giving up privacy may, in fact, enhance security
When the check and balance got tipped over, all this promised "security" will only surface when it benefits the regime.
I'm still amused by a certain ccp propaganda video my parents consumed that boast about how quickly the cctv networks helped catch a thief who stole a foreign tourist's phone, yet those cameras would also conveniently stop working at a specific day whenever a highschooler went missing in the campus.
All the prerequisite for a similar dystopia is already in place in the US and there is may be one more chance to fix it, although I wouldn't hold my breathe.
we could have liberty and privacy and security if the people in charge wanted us to. But they don't and they've convinced enough people that they don't either.
It's not liberty if you can only have it if the people in charge want you to.
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If the police actually did their job, took property crimes seriously and would bother with the suspicious guy high on fent looking into kids bedroom reports seriously, then we really wouldn't have to be setting up our own surveillance to make up for lacking local government services. But here we are, I'm not sure why libertarians think we don't have a right to defend ourselves (using new tech to make up for a lack of policing) when the city won't?
I frankly see it as a liberty to be able to use this tech, and it would be tyranny to prevent us from using it.
I would like it a lot better without the mention to the "West", which, as usual, is a code word for: "I want to pretend my point extend outside the USA but I have absolutely no knowledge of how true that is. I don't intend to do any research because that would demand efforts from me so bear with my casual imperialism". Queue the purely American historical lesson following.
If we're nitpicking, is it queue or cue?
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Greek philosophy did not happen in the USA and actually predates it quite a bit.
Universal human rights is a very widespread belief and concept, extending to all continents and many, many cultures. It's not hard to understand why.
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Unfortunately for us all, the assault on liberty even done of the “normies” have started noticing recent, is only the latter stages of this assault on on America that has been going on for arguably 180 years ago.
Many in American history have noted that America is a kind of natural fortress protected by ocean moats. What that assumption just did not take into account is how America’s enemies would take action against America with that assumption taken as granted. It has come in the form of endless amounts of infiltration, subversion, corruption, and pollution… as any half-witted strategist and saboteur would have done. America was simply not sophisticated enough to realize that massive threat, because the leaders relied on that assumption that the USA is an impenetrable fort; never considering what happens if your fort is infiltrated through the many different means you open yourself up to being infiltrated.
America, a genuine America or whatever one can scrape together to consider as such, not just one that emulates and imitates like some kind of container cult, is really not long for this world. Another 20 years and Americas simile stops existing in anything but name only, if that, since there’s not even any reason or incentive anymore to keep the name out the branding at that point.
What do we call this place post America? Maybe we just come right out and just call it Oceania.
The problem is there are two Americas, and always have been. At one point they were clearly separated and had a civil war, but really they exist in overlapping spaces all the time. One is the America of the Declaration of Independence and all the propaganda believed by flag-saluting schoolchildren - some of that is real some of the time. The other is the America that South America is more familiar with, the country responsible for banana republics and endless War on Drugs violence, the America of plantations and exploitation.
The problem America(complimentary) is currently facing is the rebound of America(derogatory). It has elected its own Peron, and is turning into a dysfunctional South American country, driven by exactly the same forces.
Sorry, name's taken.
I know you're making a point by linking it to 1984, but Oceania is a real name for a continent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oceania
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We have a branch of government called Congress, here are some things they used to do that made it a crime to read your mail or listen to your phone calls.
1. Postal Service Act of 1792
2. Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986
Anyway, Facebook can read your DMs, Google can read your email, Ring can take photos from your camera.
We can very easily make those things a crime, but we don't seem to want to do it.
3. Video Rental Protection Act (1988)
>we don't seem to want to
Congress protects only itself and its actual constituents — wealthy corporate persons.
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Citizens United (2012) and the surveillances themselves make this monitoring self-capturing: the only way to prevent it is to convince most people to not install, but most people want the installed benefits.
Even getting your neighbors to re-position their Ring cameras (which they have every right to install) can become very difficult.
After city councils individually ban Flock-like CCTV traffic monitoring within their jurisdictions, their police can (and often do) still access neighboring jurisdictions' to monitor border crossings. You can't escape This System, even without license plates nor cell phones.
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Term Limits now? end Citizens United. release The Files!
The Video Rental Protection Act was passed when a video rental employee blackmailed a congressman and there was no law against it. So it's clear how to make congress write new privacy laws.
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> Even getting your neighbors to re-position their Ring cameras (which they have every right to install) can become very difficult.
In Germany it's prohibited by law to point your private surveillance camera to public spaces like the boardwalk, no recording of these areas is allowed. I think thats the way it should be. Unfortunately in some areas (e.g. train stations) it is allowed.
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How would term limits help? Without term limits, congressmen can be judged by their voting history. With them, we get always new batches of congressmen, while lobbyists stay the same and consolidate their power.
It's so easy to get rid of a congressman you don't like with term limits. But why do you think, on average, his replacement would be better? The replacement would only be more unknown.
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Everyone has known Google reads your email since day one. In the early days they would spin it as a good thing: "that's why the spam filtering is great!"
Why is everyone suddenly outraged Ring has access to your footage? These cloud-connected cameras...hosted on someone else's servers. It's literally how they work. "But I didn't think they would use the video in a way I didn't personally approve after giving it to them!"
So instead, people are rage-returning Ring cameras and posting their receipts and exchanging them for...Chinese cameras. Which do the same thing, except this time the servers are overseas and completely uncontrolled.
It's hard to have any empathy when the warning label was already on the box for all these products.
> So instead, people are rage-returning Ring cameras and posting their receipts and exchanging them for...Chinese cameras. Which do the same thing, except this time the servers are overseas and completely uncontrolled.
No, the right thing to do is to buy an IP camera (most of which are made in China), firewall it, and send the footage to a local NVR. At no point should the camera speak to the open Internet.
It's the same principle with any Internet-of-Shit device -- it's not allowed to communicate over the Internet, period. At that point, any built-in backdoor or anti-feature becomes irrelevant.
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> Everyone has known Google reads your email since day one.
These constructions feel too simplistic to capture anything useful.
My credit card company can see my transactions. My medical provider can read my medical records. People who hire house cleaners let people see inside their house.
It's commonly accepted that when you engage with a company for business purposes, they can see things involved in your business with them.
The problem with the Ring situation isn't that Ring can "see" your video cameras. It's that they were using the information for things outside of the scope of business that was implied when you bought the camera.
People don't care if a Google bot "reads" their e-mail for spam filtering. They don't care if a contractor sees the inside of their house during construction. What they do care about is if the other party tries to use that access for something outside of the scope that was agreed upon.
> It's hard to have any empathy when the warning label was already on the box for all these products.
These snooty takes where we're supposed to look down upon others for having reasonable assumptions about usage of their data are why it's so hard to get the general public to care about privacy. It's unnecessarily condescending for what? To look down upon people or play "told you so" games? If privacy advocates want to get anywhere they need to distance themselves from people who run with this kind of attitude.
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> But I didn't think they would use the video in a way I didn't personally approve after giving it to them!
This is exactly the sort of thing there should be legislation for. To a somewhat weaker extent than I’d like this is what GDPR and friends covers, the law says that companies must state what data they’re gathering and what purposes they’re gathering it for. If they overreach then they can be fined into oblivion.
In practice this is not as strong as it should be, broadly companies can and do basically go “we’re collecting all your data for whatever purpose we like” and get away with it, but they do at least think carefully about doing so.
There’s no reason we can’t force providers of cloud backed devices to treat your data with respect, rather than thinking of it as residual income they’re leaving on the table if they don’t also sell it to third parties for data mining.
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>Chinese cameras. Which do the same thing, except this time the servers are overseas and completely uncontrolled.
Which Chinese cameras do this? I've only seen some dumb IP cams.
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We have known all of this for over a decade now, ever since the Snowden leaks revealed some very damning things. The public has unfortunately decided they do no care it seems...
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Yes, that is what many people thought because people assume that a state with a reasonable commitment to individual liberty would have safeguards in place to force merchants to not spy on them.
The fault is not with the idea of expecting that you own the data that you made and the equipment that you purchased. The fault here is the regulatory structure that makes you by default not the owner of your data or your things.
People are waking up too late, so don't support them, rather ridicule them and tell them their newfound awareness is futile?
>, except this time the servers are overseas and completely uncontrolled.
The Chinese or Russian or whatever government is not sending thugs with guns to my doorstep over petty matters and if they did I would likely, depending on the exact details be within my rights to resist them with violence.
You can't say that about the federal/state/local government.
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Don't confuse the public's want with the current situation controlled by the power and money being used to prevent these things from being a crime
Get money out of politics (reverse citizens united) and enact term/age limits for all public offices.
These problems will be solved. Most Americans agree on most things. Don't let the politicians who benefit off of dividing us fool you. An agenda that focuses on reform outside of the usual finger pointing game of partisan politics and promises to enact these reforms without fear or favor will win.
Any such agenda must also be willing to purge itself of any old guard that stands in the way, and treat them as a virus attached to their political movement. There is no benefit from trying to say, make a wedge between a Clinton and a Trump. If you can't get over that you're part of the problem, and this cycle will just continue.
Stop defending an old guard halfway in the grave. Being right doesn't matter in electoral politics, winning does. It is likely the only way to achieve such a broad reform is to be willing to entertain as many incriminations as possible.
Given recent relevations re Epstein this is our best chance to reform corruption in generations. Let's not squander it by defending anyone simply because they fall on one side of a dubious partisan line, or seem "less bad" than another.
The broader the castigation, the more likely to achieve momentum that can actually enact said reforms, given the disadvantages of taking on these vast incumbent interests and a government that is easily susceptible to gridlock driven by a minority.
And we can get there with ranked-choice voting. We really need to press hard until we get it.
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> Get money out of politics
If you also mean make it so Congress doesn't have a $4T slush fund to buy favors and influence every year, then I'm on board. If you think reducing the paltry sums spent on campaign contributions is going to take the money out of politics, you're bad at math.
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> Get money out of politics (reverse citizens united) and enact
Citizens United was a case about a federal agency attempting to suppress the publication of a movie due to breaching "electioneering communications" rules first introduced in 2002. Contrary to the common narrative, it was more a case of the government arguing "speech is money" as a pretext to use its authority to regulate certain expenditures of money in order to control what information could be released into the media ecosystem. The court struck this down under a correct application of consistent first amendment jurisprudence, ruling that speech is always protected by the constitution, and cannot be suppressed under the guise of regulating spending.
The case and the ruling had nothing to do with campaign donations or funding of candidates. Overturning the Citizens United ruling would create a situation in which agencies under the authority of incumbent politicians would be able to control and curate public political discourse in the lead-up to elections. This is likely the exact opposite of what you intend.
> term/age limits for all public offices.
Term limits would have the effect of creating large incentives for office holders to use the prerogatives of office to set themselves up for their future careers after their terms expire. Term-limited politicians would be even more motivated than those in the status quo to hand out favors to potential future employers and business partners.
On top of that, it would be much more difficult for for politicians to establish notoriety and carve out a base of direct public support by building reputation in office. Instead, a steady stream of relative unknowns would require support from sponsors and entrenched party organizations to win office, making back-room players much more powerful than in the status quo. This is, again, likely to result in the exact opposite of what you intend.
> Given recent relevations re Epstein this is our best chance to reform corruption in generations.
Agreed, but that will require voters to abandon their reflexive partisan positions and accept that the institutions themselves are dysfunctional, irrespective of which people happen to be administering it at any given time. In the current cultural climate, that seems unfortunately unlikely.
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Does the next coalition have any money?
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Its a nice outrage wave, but I have very hard time believing this will be a major topic in 2 weeks. People simply don't give a fuck en masse.
Accept that many folks are built differently than you and me and stuff like actual freedom you may be willing to lay your life for may be meaningless fart for others, especially when its not hurting them now. For example US folks voted current admin willingly second time and even after a full year of daily FUBARs the support is still largely there. If even pedophilia won't move some 'patriots' then reading some communication doesn't even register as a topic.
Also, anybody actually concerned about even slightest privacy would never, ever buy such products, not now not a decade earlier. Ie for my family I don't even see any added value of such devices, just stupid fragile something I have no control over, but it sees everything. Why?
These comments appear everywhere, as if people never made changes. Look at the enormous changes prior generations have made. Look at the changes from the conservative/MAGA movement, #metoo, and the George Floyd protests. The claim doesn't stand up to any examination.
Comments like these are a distraction. All we need to do is get to work. If people took action every time they felt like posting these comments, we'd get a lot done.
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The Epstein stuff is a distraction. The previous admin had 4 years to do literally anything about it and they did nothing.
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I am almost sure that those two acts refer to human beings reading and listening, not to algorithms. Or at least a decent corporate lawyer will convincingly turn things that way.
> We have a branch of government called Congress
... that has been virtually useless as it has been rendered ineffective by Republican obstructionism and the unwillingness of the Democrats to counteract it, leading to the current state of Trump being able to do what he wants completely unchecked.
That's a flaw of the constitution and it's revisions.
You should always assume bad actors when designing a political system.
And that's why parliamentary republics where you elect parties that form coalitions that chooses a prime minister who still has to deal with opposition and its own party support, every day, are much more resilient to authoritarianisn.
In fact there hasn't been a single parliamentary republic to turn authoritarian since Sri Lanka 50 years ago. Presidential ones? As many as you wish.
It's very stupid to elect single individuals to executive power.
I know it seems hard, but just stop using Google, Amazon, Meta products. Tell everyone you know to stop using their products. They have all been acquiring and amassing surveillance for years through their products and now they're just double dipping with AI training to sell you more of it. The more you can get people to realize and disconnect the better.
I wish more people would use AI to build alternatives with a clear, binding mission not to exploit the data, not to sell or be funded by investors who expect it to, etc. We have the power to build more than ever. We should use it.
>I know it seems hard, but just stop using Google, Amazon, Meta products.
I noticed your own app's website [0] hosts videos on YouTube [1] and uses Stripe as a payment processor [2], which is hosted on AWS. You also mentioned that your app is vibe coded [3]; the AI labs that facilitated your vibecoding likely built and run their models using Meta's PyTorch or Google's TensorFlow.
"Just stop using" makes for a catchy manifesto in HackerNews comments, but the reality is a lot more complicated than that.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45644698
Someone commented on a HN threads on just de-googling and he couldn't even pick up his kids without a gmail or apple account.
Just not using it is really unrealistic for the average person at this moment
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It doesn't have to be a binary choice between "don't use it ever" and "continue using it as much as you are now". If people stopped using these services 50% of the time, it would have a huge impact.
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But you can still reduce your exposure. Giving in to hopelessness seems suboptimal.
The comments are fair. My post was quick and lacked details as I was frustrated in the ever increasing enshitification of the web.
What I meant to convey, from my personal experience, is that it seemed hard to get off of platforms like X, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon Prime, Alexa, Ring, Google Photos, etc. but then I did it and didn’t miss them. These small moves by a lot of people, I believe, can still make a difference. It’s not perfect, but it’s something. Do I still use some services? Of course, I have Gmail and WhatsApp, and use a lot of Apple products. When I can, I choose intentionally what I use since there’s no perfect companies out there, but there are “better” ones (whatever that may be in one’s opinion). I chose cloudflare for hosting and Anthropic for vibe coding. Allowing people to use existing login info versus exposing them to more risk with self managed auth was a choice I made. There are tons of choices we make every day so trying to be more intentional is a good start.
Nobody is perfect, but we can try to improve each day in these choices we make.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
I don't think using AWS has quite the same privacy implications to using Amazon's own SaaS services.
his app has also Google, Apple logins and for first time I have seen, login with meta button.
https://app.wordsunite.us/
It’s hard that’s why he is still using it
Talking about anti-tech-monopolies and using Stripe-paypal is extra ironic.
I can understand aws, youtube, being on google index, and other things as they sometimes are the most cost efficient or vendors don't offer alternatives... but stripe-paypal is more expensive and worse than the less-bad alternatives. jeez.
> I know it seems hard, but just stop using Google, Amazon, Meta products
It's not just hard for some though, literally their livelihood depends on it. Want to run a restaurant today? You basically must have Facebook, Instagram and Google Maps entry for enough people to discover you, probably more than half of the people we got to our restaurant who we ask, cite Google Maps as the reason they found the place, and without half our income, the restaurant wouldn't have survived.
It really depends where the restaurant is located.
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That is going to work as the same as telling people to stop buying gas from Standard Oil or stop using Bell Telephone. Without government intervention you cannot break up their control.
I agree that government restrictions usually help if they're implemented well, but part of the issue is the government is benefiting from this kind of thing.
Also, most people don't actually need something like Amazon. Not to minimize the level of investment in it, but I don't see Amazon or Google as being quite the same as Bell or Standard Oil. Maybe between Google and Apple there's some kind of duopoly like that?
My impression is people don't value — either because they don't understand or minimize — things that protect privacy and anonymity. This is a standard refrain on these kinds of forums and elsewhere — "your typical person doesn't know or care about [feature X that preserves privacy, choice, and autonomy], they just want something that works and is fun". It's been belittled as unfashionable or paranoid or performative or something, when it's really something that's had short term costs that pale in comparison to the long-term costs.
I'm not saying governments don't need to be on the "right side" but I think people need to see security as involving not just encryption and so forth, but also decentralization, anonymity, demonopolization, and censorship resistance. It needs to be seen as part of the product or service benefits.
A lot of this reminds me of stuff from the 90s, when network security was ignored for awhile for customer convenience's sake. It seems really similar now, only the thing that's been ignored is like user control and privacy or something like that.
I think the thing that's surprising to me, for example, is that it takes a Super Bowl ad for people to realize that maybe there are downsides to letting a monopoly have access to video throughout the neighborhood everywhere.
You can start by creating a email at tuta or proton. It does not have to be 100% overnight
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Its an intractable problem because people now have a general expectation that everything is "free".
Look at Kagi's success and compare it to Google. It doesn't even register.
People need to start paying for things, because if you're not paying for it, you're not in control of it.
I see what you're saying but I don't think that's the answer for everything, because people also pay for conveniences, like a Ring subscription so that Amazon stores footage in their cloud for you.
The problem is centralization is more convenient for consumers. You can easily control your doorbell, your garage door, your security cameras with 1 app, and everything just works.
Open source and decentralized solutions need to be just as convenient and cheaper than centralized ones for consumers to choose them.
Alternatively, basic stuff like e-mail and payment processing should be provided by the state. After all, the state provides a road network, which is similarly essential and rather more expensive.
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People pay for things and are still spied on.
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It's easy to say we should all start paying for things.
Most people don't have much of a disposable income.
DuckDuckGo is free to use, and is proof that you can have privacy respecting search. They make their money like Google used to by selling rankings, not by having users log in so that they can be followed across all their devices.
>People need to start paying for things
...with money. They are already paying for things by violating their own privacy and those around them. The irony is that the amount of money required for the service is much less the expected value of the surveillance for the provider. Service payment is an insurance expense, protecting against individual and systematic violation of the 4th Amendment rights. It's insurance (and cheap insurance) because this usually doesn't matter in practice. But sometimes it does, and when it does it REALLY does matter.
<tinfoil_hat>It would be smart for surveillance capital to fund some of these privacy forward providers, steer them to both charge you for a service and violate your privacy, hope for a very public controversy, and eventually discredit the fundamental approach.</tinfoil_hat>
And the problem with that is, all the money has been siphoned off by the people at the top.
That's one of the big hidden factors driving the ad/surveillance economy: people's purchasing power just isn't what it used to be, while at the same time they're expected to be paying regularly for more things than ever before (home broadband, mobile phone plans, etc).
We could
- regulate the crap out of surveillance capitalism.
- enforce laws on the books
- Break up firms
Tech used to have a leg to stand on in the face of government over reach. Today, tech firms have largely adapted to the incentives that actually make themselves known every quarter.
Customer support, content moderation, compliance are avoided, and lobbying argues that if you dont let tech it easy, your economy wont innovate. Except enshittification is the term to describe how extractive mature tech markets become.
I am all for more subscription models, but this shouldn’t come at the cost of throwing our hands up and ignoring the many changes that can better align the current incentives.
I'm not sure its necessarily that simple. For example, because of the job market for software engineers I have moved to new cities multiple times during my adult life. As a result, my social network is highly fragmented and without Facebook it would be incredibly difficult for me to manage.
So for me "stop using Facebook" sound similar to saying "burn all of your family photos and throw away your ability to talk to many of the people who are important to you."
I don't say this to necessarily mean that you are completely wrong, just to point out that opting out of these companies can be more complicated than it may initially appear.
> So for me "stop using Facebook" sound similar to saying "burn all of your family photos and throw away your ability to talk to many of the people who are important to you."
You just aren't looking for obvious alternatives that would still allow you to do all that privately. Keep your family photos offline on your own hardware. Create a contacts list on your phone (ideally de-Appled and de-Googled) and text people on Signal and/or create group chats. Tell people you are leaving Facebook because it is an evil surveillance machine, and that you can be reached on Signal, email (self-hosted) or phone.
Where are you that Facebook (the network, not meta as a company) is still minimally relevant ? I haven’t logged in in about a decade.
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People before Facebook found themselves in exactly the same situation as you and managed to survive.
People have become dependant on the convenience of these tools and become, for lack of a gentler word, lazy. Moreover we have this current sense of entitlement -- that all of these details of modern living should be done for us. Having our social circles organized and maintained for us, having infinite entertainment a button press away, food delivered to our door on a whim, cars to take us anywhere always minutes away.
People survived just fine before these conveniences, it just too a bit more effort. You could collect your friends contact information, keep an address book, call them up from time to time. It's not perfect, but it works and starts to break the silicon valley tech giant dependence.
Personally I find adding friction to these processes has actual value. When you slow down and have to put a bit more effort in, it helps you to evaluate what is important, and what truly matters. You prioritize, you make tradoffs. The process IS the richness in life. We all don't need to be jet setting globetrotters to whom paris might as well be New York or london or munich, while robots manage our social lives. There is no substitute for actively working to build a community where you are. You have to put the effort in, and in a single generation we have lost so much of it. But we can get back there again if we try.
Nonsense, those aren't real relationships if you don't have numbers to each other and the relationships die with you deleting an account.
I've deleted all of my socials but LinkedIn in 2019 and I haven't missed anything at all.
In the main example cited by the article: how? It involves the use of surveilance systems by other people,These people may be unaware, disinterested, or even enthusiastic participants in this data collection. The same goes with data being collected by Google when the customer did not have an active subscription.
At best, we can only control our own actions. Even then, it is only possible to minimize (rather than eliminate) the use of their products without putting up barriers between ourselves and society. Consider email: we can use an alternative provider, but chances are that we will be corresponding personally or professionally with people who use Gmail or Outlook. The same goes for phones, only the alternatives available are much more limited. Plus you have some degree of tracking by the telecom networks. (I don't consider Apple or Microsoft much better on these fronts. Ultimately they have their business interests in mind and, failing that, their existence is ultimately at the whim of the state.)
Meta is the easiest to cut of those. I don’t use anything from them as I don’t engage on social media, nor use their VR and AR stuff etc.
Google and Amazon are harder to complete cut imo. I have replaced Google apart from using YouTube, and I do rely on Amazon for delivery and running personal projects on AWS.
Agreed.
That said for some I can foresee Meta being hard or harder to disconnect from because of their percieved level of personal social needs.
I left facebook and many of my friendships faded away.
Awkward bumping into people conversations would happen such as: "We missed you at my birthday party!", "I didn't know about it, else I would have been there!" "We posted it to facebook..." "I deleted my facebook account 2 years ago."
My personal philosophy was maybe they were not real friends to begin with. After all in the now 5 years since deletion, not one has reached out to ask if I'm even still alive. I've reached out to a couple people, with little to no reply. None the less, it was a hard transition.
For others', that might be an impossible task.
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> stop using Google, Amazon, Meta products
That's the easy part. What do you do about stuff like face recognition and cameras everywhere? Should you hide your face every time you go out? Should you not speak because there might be a mic around picking up your voice?
This is only going to get worse. We can't trust companies or governments to respect our privacy. We can't trust each other to keep the data recorded by our devices private.
It seems like the fight for privacy is a lost cause. What do we do?
"trust"? Lot's of ambitious people are selling extra refined new additions to surveillance right now! "business is good" for example the 90s PDF architect Leonard Rosenthol recently put up ads promoting a brand of Ring cameras that have extra features. Of course he is making money on it. Someone on LinkedIn said "what is this?" and the reply was "adding ownership attributes to Ring camera footage is a step towards publication rights for the owner" .. almost too strange to believe but yes, this is the actual move.
None of that helps, that's the point. How can you stop a ring camera from recording you as you're just taking a walk outside? How can you stop people's phones from tracking other people's phones, APs and BT? How can you stop ISPs from selling your real time location info, including to the cops?
Do you have any evidence that this actually works as a strategy?
Alone from that list, it means.
No Go, no Flutter, no Android, no GCP nor AWS or anyone that relies on them like Vercel and Netlify, no llama, no React or framework that builds on top of it.
Keeping the list small, there are other items that depend on those companies money and engineering teams.
It doesn’t just seem hard, it is hard. I’m working on it, but here’s a few examples:
- I want to delete my Amazon account because service has gotten worse and they mistreat their employees. I also want to be able to get groceries, but I don’t have a car and the walking distance grocery store just closed (due to mismanagement). Now I need to spend hours every weekend walking to the farmers market or to the Safeway a considerably distance away.
- I want my prescriptions, but the pharmacy I used to walk to is closing. Now I need to find a pharmacy delivery service that isn’t tied up with Amazon.
- I signed up for One Medical before it was Amazon and it was great. Now it sucks. There aren’t exactly a lot of great alternatives even if I wanted to pay a premium. Wtf do I do?
- I have a Microsoft account I want to delete. If I do that, I will lose access to my Xbox games, and I will lose access to download anything at all on my Xbox 360, which is loaded up with XBLA games I can only use because Microsoft has kept the download part of their store working.
- I’m not on Instagram, but businesses seem to think Instagram has completely replaced the World Wide Web - many restaurants don’t post their hours _anywhere_ but Instagram. I cannot access these details without logging in. A local “speakeasy” coffee shop has a password you have to get from the Instagram story. I just can’t go. Unfortunately the employees are not accommodating. I’ve left a nasty review but that can only go so far. Without a big tech account I can’t even do that.
Using AI to do anything isn't going to liberate one. It's just going to shift the dependence from one company to another. Your new feudal lord will be the people running the Santa Claus machine you're running. Don't keep trying to tell people AI is the solution. The real solution is self-hosting. And that cannot be AI'd half as easily.
The suggestion is not to depend on AI for privacy, but to use it to build products like signal which guarantee privacy. Using AI to build a product doesn't mean sharing the data from that product. In addition, right now AI has little vendor lock in and there are multiple competitive alternatives, so becoming dependent on a single company is not so likely.
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You can self host AI but speed and quality aren’t going to be as good as what companies can offer.
And the upfront cost will be quite high.
As if these tech giants are an aberration? Any company filling their niche will be under the same pressures.
No no you see... when Google or Amazon or Meta et al are doing it it's a-okay. But let's ban Huawei or DJI on 'National Security' grounds because they MIGHT be doing this too!
Surveillance is not black or white. In this world you’d have to be a cave man to not get surveyed, you just have to pick your battles. Not using any other the big 5-10’s product or s like saying don’t buy from Walmart or something. It’s stupid
Other people are using them.
You are surrounded by people using them.
Therefore, you are subject to the mass surveillance they encode.
And by NOT using them, you mark yourself as dangerous.
Meta was easy - nothing of value is lost. Google and Amazon are a bit harder.
They are everywhere
> But the graphic Amazon used seems to have unwittingly depicted how invasive this technology can be
This is a calculated move to normalize such technology. Yes, it will cause controversy in the short term, and these companies knew this was a possibility—but as a result the image in people's minds won't be the gestapo rounding up grannies; it'll kids finding puppies. To call this "unwitting" is simply naive (not surprising for Greenwald).
That’s why I’m hoping the news picks this up more - especially about the intended integration with flock/ICE. That might be the issue that brings awareness mainstream beyond the tech-aware circles
No marketing team would willingly do this and it's insane to think otherwise.
Cambridge Analytica was an experiment run by a marketing team. I wouldn't say marketing will always side on ethics.
Propaganda is, and always has been, a subset of marketing aimed at shifting public perception. It would be wild to assume it never happens.
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Insane is a bit hyperbolic. The history of marketing is full of grand mistakes that seem absurd in hindsight.
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Of course, they would. If the administration asked Bezos, and he gets a benefit out of it. He will task his marketing team to come up with something which tries to frame it in a positive light. Knowing that even if a few people make a stink this will blow over eventually and when it rolls out, he can always say it is just about puppies and neighborhood security. Nobody cares.
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And yet this went up. I understand it’s easy to just say “marketing teams don’t understand anything,“ but I have worked with many and they are incredibly sensitive to negative feelings/reactions. They get it wrong but they tend to air on the side of caution which means the vast majority of the time they avoid situations like this incredibly intentionally.
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So, what's currently going on to fight back against all this? Here's what I found. Does signing a petition actually doing something? It's hard to tell but if you are inclined, at least take a look at some current efforts.
-Active Petitions and Campaigns to Limit Surveillance: End the Surveillance State (Action Network): Petitions call on Congress to permanently end the PATRIOT Act, stop warrantless surveillance, and oppose the expansion of surveillance technology.
-Ban Facial Recognition (Amnesty International & ACLU): Amnesty International is running the "Ban the Scan" campaign, while the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) targets the use of face surveillance, arguing it poses risks to civil liberties and disproportionately impacts marginalized communities.
-Stop Surveillance Data Brokers (Mozilla): Mozilla Foundation is targeting major websites to stop sharing data with surveillance technology firms that track user movement and interactions.
-Protect User Data from Subpoenas (EFF): The Electronic Frontier Foundation is pressuring tech companies to resist lawless DHS subpoenas for user data.
-Oppose Localized Surveillance (ACLU/Action Network): Local petitions aim to limit technologies like Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPRs) that create massive databases of personal movement.
-Federal Legislative Reform: Advocates are pushing for the "The Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act," which aims to restrict intelligence agencies from purchasing data from brokers without a warrant.
I don't think people grasp the gravity of the situation.
I see everyone talking about how to stop using products. I even thought about legislation that could help. But that's just it, none of that is possible. You can't even employ a "torches and pitchforks" approach. For any of this to be possible, people would have to coordinate. The means by which people communicate and coordinate are under the influence and control of the very entities that the people are trying to bring under control.
The only way to win this war is by means of economic warfare. And I don't mean "vote with your wallet". If I could spell out what I mean here, then the previous paragraph would have been invalid.
No, the only way to win this war is to reform your system of governance, decentralisation and democratisation. Power to the people.
The people are part of the problem. They're largely fine with all this.
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How can you do that if you can't coordinate and communicate with others to that end?
Once upon a time, a bunch of people in Boston threw the East India Company's tea into the ocean. We might try something like that again.
> The only way to win this war is by means of economic warfare.
We are only in this situation because the economic war was lost. You want the world to fight Amazon and Google while they're in the middle of counting their spoils?
That's not what I meant.
It is not yet illegal or dangerous to call for a general strike. Only by shutting down the ports, the rail, the trucks and the delivery services will people create enough economic disruption that the billionaires will call their political toadies to heel and get them to start fixing this shit.
We still have the power to panic the billionaires, and they have the power to get what they want. If what they want is temporarily in sync with what society needs, then so much the better.
Luigi Mangione really put a scare in the billionaires for a moment at least.
This occurred sometime after his actions(CEO giving a talk and was interrupted by a protester): https://www.youtube.com/shorts/SK-5AALSBFA
There were rumors that the reason Elon was bringing his child around every single moment he was in public was because of speculation that the child could assist in being cover for him(again thats speculation though people did get a laugh out of it). It started around the Luigi murder.
How do you convince people to participate in a general strike when the tiktok, facebook (and as a result threads, instagram), and twitter are controlled by the whitehouse and are actively taking down such posts?
Even if you want to inform people the old fashioned way, or organize in person, a few might, but you need majority of voters, how can you reach them when they only want to be reached by mediums controlled by the white house?
> We still have the power to panic the billionaires
Yeah, and making them lose a few billions of dollars isn't it. Even criminal punishment is useless, they'll get pardons, and if not they can just flee to any country that would protect them for their money. there are ways to make them scared for real though.
> Only by shutting down the ports, the rail, the trucks and the delivery services
This is the right track for sure, but the problem is scale, you need coordination to do that. But more than that, you need lots of people agreeing to do without nice things like a good and stable economy, mass layoffs, and dire consequences that aren't worth mentioning here. Matter of fact, the one group of people in the world that could have the most impact are all gathered here on HN :)
For the extreme measures that need to be taken by the people to actually be taken, the people need to understand that those measures are neccesary, and actually be informed of the strategies behind those measures and have some awareness of some of the tactics available to implement those strategies.
The problem is, there is no one even considering any unconventional means. Anyone with power to act is waiting for elections and campaigns. Why can't people just read history and learn from it? Why do we need tragedies to keep teaching us the same lessons again and again. The people in charge are not idiots. they also know elections are ahead. They're actively ignoring courts and making clear and public threats of subverting elections. Why do people have to wait until that actually happens to plan ahead of time?
Americans are still in a catatonic state of "that could never happen here where I live", despite things that could never happen in America continuing to happen every day. The answer is the same as my original post: communications and media are controlled where they matter now.
What would be asked for, exactly?
Ha! The "general strike".
The general strike is a sad, obvious myth solely to delude us tax-cattle that we will have power, one day, for a day. Something something workers something bosses something something struggle. Bullshit for peasant workers.
"general strike" needs to be thrown in the same box as "communism" and "democracy" and "representation".
Glenn Greenwald is back on substack. Yay! For the past few years, he’s mostly done videos on rumble, and he’s fun to watch, but personally I prefer his writing. In case you’ve been under a rock for 10 years, Greenwald was the guy who published Snowden’s revelations. His focus has always been on censorship, surveillance, and hypocrisy in government.
Laura Poitras' documentary Citizenfour is an excellent introduction to the amazing work that Glenn does and has done, and how he's been personally targeted - although I don't recall whether the doc includes Glenn's partner being harassed by US authorities.
He's great for privacy, surveillance and a centrist liberal critique of both parties, but his obsession with Israel is annoying and distracting from the other non- partisan contrarian attitude that I like him for.
Heh, “obsession”, as if Israel has been doing absolutely nothing of interest for the past two years. Not to mention its blatant involvement in the domestic US political scene via AIPAC and friends.
He became well known for exposing surveillance but that instinct to portray himself as exposing government hypocrisy lead him to parrot Russian intelligence/Trump campaign attacks on Clinton and Biden long after he should have realized that the right posed a much greater threat to civil liberties and were feeding him information in service of their own campaigns, not transparency. It’s really undercut his earlier work.
Examining Glenn's work through an ideological lens leads to this kind of rhetoric. It's why he's so good at what he does. He's crossed ideological boundaries constantly in pursuit of the truth of a matter, and in defense of the public.
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This is the same "useful idiot" trap that Julian Assange fell into. It's a challenge to incorporate the lessons of people like these without falling into the opposite trap, that of cynical apathy.
Is he taking a break from being a mouthpiece for Russian propaganda?
Can you make an example?
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Those guys find it useful when there's some kind of legitimate gripe to use. He needn't take a break, it's very much Western companies doing this. He doesn't even need to put in an ad for whatever doubtless sanctioned Russian services would like to replace these Western tech giants.
Sometimes actual problems can be readily exploited for sinister purposes. Doesn't mean the original problems aren't also sinister, just be damn careful where you intend to flee to :)
Right if you’re not a mouthpiece for the US State Depts horrific foreign policy you’re a Russian propagandist. My family fought in every war going back to the Revolution and I think our policy on Russia is complete shit. AFAIC we started the whole conflict.
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His focus has also involved generous amounts of simping for Russian fascists, excusing their colonialist wars, etc. Not an anti-imperialist, just anti-US.
link?
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"Yay" Greenwald is (still) playing footsie down at the Nazi bar.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/feb/07/revealed-how-s...
Rumble is indeed a free for all, with lots of angry kooks. But it’s also a place where reasonable dissenting voices have found a way to get their ideas heard. It’s a mixed bag.
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> Revealed: How Substack makes money from hosting Nazi newsletters
If we're gonna judge authors for what platforms they're using, does that mean we're all bad guys here on HN too, since a lot of current misery is because of startups and technology companies who used to receive a lot praise here?
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You mean Snowden had to force his material on him, he reluctantly published it, got hooked on the fame and promptly jumped the shark
I personally miss Snowden's revelations so much. Such a brave soul! He should keep doing what he does best and never stop. It's sad that we have not heard any new revelations from him for a long time, though. Any ideas why he stopped?
I'm not sure if it's sarcasm or something, but Snowden essentially lives in exile from his home as the US government would like to punish him for exposing the secrets of the US government spying on everyone. Not sure what new revelations could come from him.
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It's a clear violation of the 4th Amendment, but the government acts like they've found a "loophole" because it's private businesses doing the spying.
The Pinkerton National Detective Agency, founded in 1850, operated largely outside the constraints of the Fourth Amendment for much of the 19th century because they were private agents, not government actors. Congress passed the Anti-Pinkerton Act in 1893, which prohibited the federal government from hiring Pinkerton employees or similar organizations.
As an attorney I’d like to understand why you think there is a “clear” Constitutional violation going on here. What activity, specifically, are you referring to, and what precedent supports your claim?
You're an attorney and you're asking me why the government spying on everyone is a clear violation of the 4th Amendment?
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As a trial attorney for more than 40 years, I'd say these are examples of egregious illegal surveillance of American citizens by the current government:
1. A retired US citizen emailed a DHS attorney urging mercy for an asylum seeker he had read about. Five hours later he received an email from Google advising him the federal government had served Google with a subpoena demanding information about him. Then they followed up by knocking on his door. The federal government's concerted effort to intimidate citizens should concern every American.
https://archive.ph/b9ON8
2. NYT: https://archive.ph/W5FwO ICE’s New Surveillance State Isn’t Tracking Only Immigrants
A memo from a Department of Homeland Security official reviewed by CNN and sent to agents dispatched to Minneapolis last month asked them to “capture all images, license plates, identifications and general information” on “agitators, protesters, etc. so we can capture it all in one consolidated form.” And the official reportedly provided such a form, called “intel collection.”
3. Moreover, ICE officers have traveled to the homes of protesters. Not to arrest them, because they have done nothing illegal. Rather, ICE was trying to intimidate them by letting them know ICE knows who they are and where they live. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/us/minneapolis-ice-agents
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Seems to me like someone's security camera footage, even if held by a 3rd party, would pretty clearly fall under "papers and effects" same as my crap sitting in a rented storage unit does.
It's only because we've had a century of legal contrivance that it doesn't IMO.
If corporations and government are acting together, this is fascism (according to Mussolini). It seems that is already the case. It's just we call it 'democracy'. Perhaps 'crypto-fascism' is the right term.
"Inverted totalitarianism" is the term you're looking for, although with Trumpism we're flipping to just straightforward totalitarianism. "Crypto-fascism" is applicable to Surveillance Valley's fake strain of "libertarianism", which is more accurately described as corporate authoritarianism.
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It’s pretty amazing when you get the worst of both worlds—total surveillance, yet still rampant crime.
That's the only way it can be in a system with thousands of crimes on the books.
People commit minor offenses, and often felonies without knowing it, on a regular basis. If surveillance was consistently used to actually enforce the laws, people would a) notice the surveillance[0] and then actually object to it and b) start objecting to all the ridiculous and poorly drafted laws they didn't even know existed.
But they don't want the majority of people objecting to things. They want a system that provides a thousand pretexts to punish anyone who does something they don't like, even something they're supposed to have a right to do, by charging them with any of the laws that everybody violates all the time and having the surveillance apparatus in place so they can do it to anyone as long as it's not done to everyone. That doesn't work if the laws are enforced consistently and the majority thereby starts insisting that they be reasonable.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1zhe85spsw
I wonder if this is a technique used by certain leaders of authoritarian regimes to take out people in power they they deem threats. Everyone in the party routinely breaks laws, knowingly or otherwise. The person in charge can decide they don't like someone and start an investigation, knowing they'll eventually find something illegal. Then they can delegitimize and remove them under the guise of "corruption".
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On the other hand, those thousands of crimes on the books exist because American society operates under a norm of "if its not explicitly illegal then its fine for people to do it". See for example, the rhetoric around maximizing shareholder value.
If the only way to protect yourself from selfish people is if their actions explicitly illegal, then the logical outcome is to make more and more things explicitly illegal.
IMHO, that's one of the core failures of modern Libertarian/Objectivist influenced thought.
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And the people in power not facing the consequences of their crimes even if they come to broad light. In fact the people in charge of the surveillance is the same that hide those crimes, or convince population that there is nothing to see there.
The rampant crime is largely made up.
Compared to other major western countries, the US has a serious problem with violent crime in particular.
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What are you basing this claim on?
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Really? Rampant white collar crime is made up?
Who’s making up the homicide and other violent crime statistics and for what purpose?
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The surveillance protects the regime, which mostly involves the US Federal government. Street crime, unless it’s organized by Cartels, is not a political threat.
You can see the counter example during the 40s-70s when the FBI targeted the mafia and local political corruption to take out the remaining organized crime strongholds .
Today organized crime doesn’t have much political influence. A sort of truce. So there’s no longer incentive for the feds to pursue street crime. Street crime yields no longer funnel into influence.
In fact, most political corruption today is coming from entitlements , which further bolsters political control.
...because the point of surveillance was never to solve crime.
It's simple - if a camera sends pictures and images to a cloud (other prople's computers) you must expect that thay process and store the data (and it's often in their ToC anyway). It's sad that many non-technical people don't realize that.
Related: Apparently even non-subscribing Nest cameras send video to Google, where it’s stored for an undetermined length of time.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/guthrie-doorbell-video-delayed...
Ring camera spyware, Amazons....excuse me Department of Defence/War..whatever the name, they have contracts with Amazon, which had the Super Bowl ad reveiling a new feature called "search party"...which it uses AI face/pattern recognition under the guise "search for missing dogs" to scan all its cameras videos for the "missing dog"... .Now this scans all Ring cameras, inside houses, outside houses, wherever theres a Ring camera....but its really to find people, dissenters, "criminals" in the eyes of the satanic surveillance system. The minds involved always play on the emotions of people to bring this about, such as a child who lost their dog or an "illegal" immigrant who commited a crime...they spread the propaganda, stir up emotions, then get the results...more gullible Americans accepting more surveillance and spying on their neighbors like the psychos did with fake "covid" hysteria. Part of their propaganda the so called missing lady Nancy Guthrie...how convenient, right around the time of Amazons search party, Google Nest has the psyop. With a sherrif saying the videos were not saved, she didnt have a Google Nest subscription..lol, see where thats going?
This type of centralization breeds authoritarianism. See also the Iran protests. There’s too many single points of failure in technology. These systems become sources of oppression inevitably.
How do we build a resilient system that doesn’t rely on single platforms?
> How do we build a resilient system that doesn’t rely on single platforms?
by making sure that compatibility is enshrined into law, so that competition occurs, rather than walled gardens.
It has to start at the top - gov't has to mandate it.
Anything that relies on gov't can be undone by gov't. Or weaponized by gov't.
We need resilience that's hard to regulate or undo.
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> by making sure that compatibility is enshrined into law, so that competition occurs, rather than walled gardens
Compatibility isn't the problem. CCTV is pretty much an open standard. Folks are choosing Ring and Nest over open systems.
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Functioning antitrust is really all it takes. The last significant US antitrust action was on AT&T in 1982.
> Flock Safety, a police surveillance tech company Interesting - few months ago this was private, illegally tracking people and cars company. I’m amazed how well US progresses!
For anyone who doesn't know yet, there are a wide variety of ONVIF supporting cameras that you can setup with a local NVR running Frigate. You can block internet access to the cameras, so they can't create outbound connections, and only inbound connections to the video streams are allowed.
Tailscale has a free tier that's a good option to remotely access your network and cameras.
> This language moves beyond platform-level age gates and toward infrastructure embedded directly into hardware or operating systems.
This is lurching toward what the US military calls the Common Access Card. This is a security token carried by most US military. It's used for everything from logins to building access to meals.[1]
Merely having a Common Access Card doesn't allow access to anything. The system reading it has to recognize the identity. So there are lots of databases of who's allowed to do what.
Is that where we're going?
[1] https://www.cac.mil/common-access-card/
https://archive.ph/20260214004458/https://greenwald.substack...
It looks like an endless captcha.
Browser / DNS issue. Wireless fine here on WiFi and mobile.
> while Flock is unrelated to Search Party, public backlash made it impossible, at least for now, for Amazon to send Ring’s user data to a police surveillance firm
Not the same, but ring is a common target for police warrants already
I don't understand the issue with the nest cam video.
The data is only accessible to us for 3 hours but why would we expect them to shred the drives at the 3 hour mark so it's not accessible to them?
There’s more posts that get to the front page complaining about Apple’s frosted glass than the surveillance state being built by every other tech company
Other? No other company makes you register with the company before you can install apps on your own phone. No other company makes you send your location to it if you want to access GPS on your own phone.
> "All of this is particularly remarkable, and particularly disconcerting, since we are barely more than a decade removed from the disclosures about mass domestic surveillance enabled by the courageous whistleblower Edward Snowden..."
With respect to Greenwald, I don't think it's remarkable at all.
I have learned, through experience, that sometimes when people want to do things they should not, or against which there is opposition, there is enormous power in simply doing it. If you ignore people enough, you can do anything.
Preventing this requires systems with accountability.
And as HN commenters frequently note, accountability for government, tech, or corporate leaders in general seems culturally missing in the US.
Despite Snowden, nothing here is remarkable. This has grown because it _can_ grow.
USA society has devolved into a game. The only object is to win. Nothing else matters.
It is remarkable that it took an ad from the same company that makes the product to make (some) people come to the realization of the surveillance they are subjected to and uninstall their cameras. The public is truly clueless despite all the messaging from the EFF and other organizations.
It is also interesting that US seems to be getting the surveillance state without any of the benefits such as low crime rate. In my view it is a valid choice for the country of having more crime Vs more surveillance, but in the US such a choice is not offered.
It’s baffling and makes you wonder about the strategic mission of the surveillance state. Surely they must be achieving some objectives – since they are heavily resourced, and capable. If not crime prevention, it must be political influence.
There’s a ton of evidence of foreign state intervention since WW2. And there are hints at domestic intervention since the 1960s . The likely focus is domestic political intervention, since it takes time for whistleblowers and stories to see the light of day.
Land of the free.
Home of the Brave.
Great writeup. Glenn mentions that he stopped using Gemini. While I still use Gemini for technical research and occasional coding/design work via Antigravity, for all day to day queries and prompts I have switched to using Proton's Lumo that is really quite good: use of a strong Mistral model and web search is 100% private, and while chat history is preserved for a while it is stored and processed like Proton Mail.
More good reading that I found helpful are the books: Privacy is Power and Surveillance Capitalism.
I wasn’t aware of the 100% private web search, I’ll have to look. How well does this work?
Try it for free. I pay $10 a month for unlimited use.
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They must love dogs really deeply to go to such length to rediscover them.
As a trial attorney for more than 40 years, I'd say these are examples of egregious illegal surveillance of American citizens by the current government:
1. A retired US citizen emailed a DHS attorney urging mercy for an asylum seeker he had read about. Five hours later he received an email from Google advising him the federal government had served Google with a subpoena demanding information about him. Then they followed up by knocking on his door. The federal government's concerted effort to intimidate citizens should concern every American.
https://archive.ph/b9ON8
2. NYT: https://archive.ph/W5FwO ICE’s New Surveillance State Isn’t Tracking Only Immigrants
A memo from a Department of Homeland Security official reviewed by CNN and sent to agents dispatched to Minneapolis last month asked them to “capture all images, license plates, identifications and general information” on “agitators, protesters, etc. so we can capture it all in one consolidated form.” And the official reportedly provided such a form, called “intel collection.”
3. Moreover, ICE officers have traveled to the homes of protesters. Not to arrest them, because they have done nothing illegal. Rather, ICE was trying to intimidate them by letting them know ICE knows who they are and where they live. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/us/minneapolis-ice-agents
As a side and probably fully off topic note (although...), I asked ChatGPT an innocent code question while not giving my code. It basically answered with the variable name I had written in my own code (da.ma.st) (a variable inside an object inside an object : data.main.stance). I still have to understand how and why it happened (I am not using anything else than ChatGPT in my browser and I absolutely never provided this chunk of code to the AI).
I further noticed that while I had a chatgpt window open, my dev site window was becoming laggy after many refreshes as if something was deliberately trying to scan it every time it got refreshed. I suspect the AI to scan other open tabs and simply reading through everything it can encounter. It is actually the only explanation up to date (but I unfortunately don't have much time to try to validate this speculative opinion: I will surely give other shots in order to narrow my suspicions).
I tend to think that this kind of data extraction frenziness may be a big problem in the future. Read it as : "let's collect everything, just tell everyone we are not collecting it, and then we'll see what we can get from it." Imagine such data being used in the future versions of governments if things get wild.
if you really want users to see an outward sign of your respect for privacy, start building cameras with lens covers, and microphones with mute switches, and a "flag" of some sort that clearly demonstrates the position of the privacy hardware.
These comments: Citations needed
it took a while, but Bentham finally got his Panopticon.
I don't want to say I give up, but after seeing how powerful modern facial recognition softwares are, mostly by Israelis, and what I mean is: if you're walking randomly in an Uzbekistan's mall with a moustache and sunglasses this information is instantly known by lots of actors with 99.9%+ accuracy, I kinda give up.
1984 is here and we are allowing it bit by bit by normalizing at every small step stuff that would've been madness ten years before.
Much ado about nothing, this link has been going around the Fediverse: https://www.resistandunsubscribe.com/
Big Brother… It's a cliché, but I think it's a fitting expression. Is it true that individuals themselves are the only means of self-defense?
I mean, this does not come as a surprise. If you look at the US corporations, not just Amazon or Google but Facebook, or more recently Discord - and our all-time favourite chummer, Microsoft - this all screams of strategic mass sniffing and snooping after people. There is 0% chance that this is done solely on a per-corporate level. This is systematic sniffing.
I think the long term solution will have to be to become as independent as possible on these sniffer-corporations and to get real people into office rather than those lobbyists who work for those corporations. This will require a complete re-design of the whole system though. I am not sure we'll see that in our lifetime.
Maybe if congress gave a rats ass about consumer protections and privacy we wouldn't be in this spot. But money talks and shit walks.
This probably even has ramifications beyond US residents.
I'm confident Google etc will be compelled (if they haven't already been) to share their dossiers with the US and allies so that there is a file on each individual's psychology, weaknesses, and a how-to manual for gaslighting that person with the goal to silence them or coerce them into acting a certain way.
And by then, the Stasi would look like cute amateurs in comparison.
Those raising these concerns have been dismissed as paranoid for decades, even post-Snowden. And yet, surprising no-one, here we are.
I've noticed a big split in viewpoint between people who don't live in the US.
Its like those who live in the states have a incentive to act like everything going on is ok, while those outside are increasingly having statements like yours. "How do you not see this power 13 years past Snowden"
I've not given up trying to point out how dangerous the US govs powers are in the hands of an ever less capable and more fascist government, ie posting here on HN, but the odds to convince people are low.
I spend significant time in the US, Canada, and Europe, and nobody I talk to seems to think that what's going on is OK.
Both Canada and Europe are undertaking major projects to reduce their interdependence with America, and public sentiment on America has changed rapidly since the current administration assumed power. Europeans have always distrusted American tech, and Canadians have started trying to break away as well.
The Americans I spend time with are also unhappy with the direction things are going, but most of them still use Google Chrome and buy everything on Amazon. They seem to be less willing to accept a little bit of inconvience to take a moral stand.
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Just give them fake information when signing up. They want your money more than accurate information.
you think they can't de-anonymize you extremely easily from all the other data they have?
I know they can. They can also breach all that under a false identity so I have nothing to worry about.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260215130824/https://greenwald...
Anyone have an archive link?
why do you need it? The article is available in full via the link.
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47023400>
Dropped Alexa years ago. They sure can do the same thing, and listen into every house "to find a missing child". Or some other BS. Or let all Alexas say "This is a national emergency. Do not leave the house. This is ..."
East Germany spent millions to spy on people.
Now people spend millions so the state can spy on them.
Madness.
It's pretty disappointing that there are engineers enabling all of this.
Agreed. "Be the change you want to see". In this case, both as a user and a professional.
The backlash against the use of Ring cameras began with their tone-deaf superbowl ad. Amazon assumed that customers would buy their surveillance technology. The whole thing reminds me that we have returned to the Gilded Age, when the rich people who run the world strutted about arrogantly, without fear of shame or public disapproval. It’s as if Bezos is telling us “you have no choice. You will buy our product whether you like it or not.”
Will another Progressive Era bring about more equality, or are the billionaires too entrenched?
The bigger problem is that our digital gilded age is founded in an entrenched culture organizing and framing support for it. It’s one that has been carefully created with several tracks of effort going back decades (some even a century).
Counterculture is disorganized and shallow, and funding is not as abundant where understanding of this problem exists.
Greenwald demonstrating his technological illiteracy once again. This time, he doesn't say that PRISM is mass surveillance, though he writes about it right next to where he talks about mass surveillance and has never admitted his mistake.
Now he's complaining that Nest had video footage without a subscription as if the user wouldn't know this. Nest still processes video for motion detection alerts for people without a subscription. It just deletes the video after processing unless you have a subscription to pay for the storage. Even though I am not a user myself, I'd be surprised if this isn't clear to the people who use the product. I am not at all surprised that Greenwald doesn't understand it though.
"...While the “discovery” of footage from this home camera by Google engineers is obviously of great value to the Guthrie family and law enforcement agents searching for Guthrie, it raises obvious yet serious questions about why Google, contrary to common understanding, was storing the video footage of unsubscribed users. A former NSA data researcher and CEO of a cybersecurity firm, Patrick Johnson, told CBS: “There's kind of this old saying that data is never deleted, it's just renamed.”..."
Its another copy of their MAC data storage scenario due to a "rogue engineer"
I don't respect Glenn Greenwald after he decided to become a Kremlin spokesperson.
Regular where I live:
I don't use google maps, I use Waze I don't use messenger, I use whatsapp I don't upload my pictures, contacts (sync is enabled by default)
Anyways. What are the options? It will be another free cloud hosted service.
Isn't Waze owned, operated and share infrastructure with Google Maps?
It has hard sarcasm my part: Waze is google, whatsapp is meta, and phones are uploading all your data by default
I can say from direct experience Apple is not any better and at times much worse as they actively lie about their security measures by obscuring loopholes left open for direct government access as well as they cooperate with little to no push back.
Do you have any details about those loopholes? It seems like a potentially big story.
iCloud loophole, push notification loophole, RCS loophole, business messaging loophole. These are just the semi public ones.
No one cares.
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The surveillance industry has gotten out of hand. It is also true that there is ample reason to ignore and avoid anything coming out of the OA's author, who has a strong history of Russian-aligned propaganda efforts. Please don't cite him or amplify him further. Propaganda and disinfo ops worldwide are just as big of a problem as accelerating, unchecked, abused surveillance.
Reminder: Glen Greenwald doesn’t think Jan 6 was an insurrection and now aligns with people like Tim Pool and Alex Jones.
Is he pro Jan 6 because he's anti-establishment or he's pro Trump? Seems like he's the former and doesn't know when to stop being anti-establishment and that puts him weird places.
Do people still believe Jan 6 was an insurrection? Didn't the police invite protesters in?
> Didn't the police invite protesters in?
They did not.
Jan 6 wasn't an insurrection. Nobody was armed except one guy with a pistol and the dude with a spear. It was a bunch of obese methbillies trashing the place.
Insurrections do not look like that.
- Jan 6, the day the votes are certified by Congress.
- The goal was interrupting the peaceful transfer of presidential power, a foundational element of U.S. constitutional governance.
- Force was used to disrupt lawful governmental authority.
- Part of a larger conspiracy to use alternate slates of electors to dispute the election and send it back to state legistatures (see Eastman memo and resulting lawsuits).
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At this point, it's fair to assume that if the US government wanted to surveil you to a nefarious end, they absolutely could, easily, using things you bought to make your life more convenient.
The keys then become:
1) Implementing policies discouraging them from doing so at the societal level
and
2) Implementing force behind those policies at the personal and societal level
DHS isn't getting paid right now because Kristi "Dog Shooter" Noem managed to screw up so badly that even Congressional Republicans under Trump don't want to own her agency's behavior and carved DHS out of the normal funding bill. There's still a chance for #1 to be achieved. #2 remains to be seen at the societal level, but you can start working on that yourself for the personal level.
Sadly ICE and CBP is still getting paid because it was already funded by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. [1]
So while some parts of DHS aren't funded, and it does give Democrats bargaining power, it could still end up in a situation like the October 2025 shutdown where they don't get meaningful change.
TSA employees won't get paid which could impact air travel. Probably not as bad as when FAA employees weren't getting paid but if it's bad enough the pressure for Democrats to cave again will be high.
[1] https://www.cato.org/blog/one-big-beautiful-bill-made-ice-sh...
I laugh at myself sometimes for things like this: I refuse to provide my phone number to the cashier who promises me loyalty points, then I hand over the same credit card number I use for all my purchases. Boy, I really showed them how much I value my privacy!
Same, exactly the same here.
But the other holes in the bucket doesn't mean you have to help. From a real opsec point of view a single tiny hole is the same as no wall at all. But from a day to day view less is less. It does at least reduce the spam.
And there is also, say you plug hole A and you can't do anything about hole B.
Some day something may develop that changes hole B (maybe a new law, maybe it's a service that you can stop using, maybe one org stops cooperating with another, whatever).
If hole A has already been wide open for years then closing hole B may not change much. But if hole A has been closed for years when the opportunity to close hole B comes along, then maybe closing hole B actually does something.
I choose to see it as something is better than nothing and it's worth it to apply pressure and be sand in the gears.
It's got to be better for everyone that there is at least some sand in the gears than if there were no sand in the gears.
I always pay in cash. I go out of my way to get cash and travel to more distant stores to spend it.
How are those two things the same?!
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Once again we see tech companies capitulating to the US government who is actually doing the things we accuse China is theoretically doing in the future.
I don't own a smart speaker. It's actually annoying because there are so few options for a music system now. I've previously owned a Sonos but honestly it's just not a polished product. Anyway, my issue with smart speakers is I don't want a cloud-connected always-on microphones in my house. Sorry but no. You simply never know when law enforcement will use such a thing via a warrant nobody can tell you about (ie FISA). It could be targeted to you, individually but there are far worse alternatives.
It could be a blanket warrant against, say, people posting negatively against ICE online. Or microphones couldd be used to identify such people based on what it hears. You just have no control.
And once again, Google handed over PII voluntarily to the government recently [1]. Companies don't need to comply with administrative subpoenas. It takes a court order signed by a judge to enforce.
All of this is just another reason why China was correct to keep US tech companies out, basically. But here's where it's going to get much worse for the US and those same companies: when the EU decides enough is enough and creates their own versins that are subject to EU jurisdiction.
[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/10/google-sent-personal-and-f...
I bought some tower speakers made in the early 2000s and they sound awesome. Huge heavy things, but it's not like I've ever had to move them since I bought them. I power them with an inexpensive NAD amplifier that supports streaming and bluetooth sources.
He’s not wrong but screw Glenn Greenwald. I assume his solution will be to back the current or next strongman, because strongman rule will save us?
It’s like the “don’t tread on me” militia crowd voting by like a 90% margin for a regime that is now enacting every single one of the things they’ve been afraid of for 50 years: masked cops, opaque detention centers, assaulting (and murdering) people for legally exercising second amendment rights, mass surveillance, social credit systems, and so on.
Or, I guess, like Lenin creating a totalitarian state to enslave the workers to liberate the workers? Or the French Revolution replacing the monarchy with the terror? Many examples in history I suppose.
I don’t see where you’re coming from. Greenwald is constantly pointing out abuses of power and hypocrisy in government. Have you actually read what he writes? He is in no way a fan of totalitarian strongmen.
Greenwald defends totalitarian strongmen abroad by his reflexive and universal opposition to American power. His stance on Ukraine, for example, is as extremely pro-Putin as any writing can get without saying "I love Vlad and I will kiss him".
What evidence do you have the Glenn Greenwald wants a strongman?
If anything, he has been attacked by numerous 'strong men' (in various governments!) over several years.
Greenwald is a vocal and consistent anti-institutionalist, and this creates the conditions for strongmen to take over. Whether he is aware of having this effect is not relevant.
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Greenwald supports both Putin and Trump, for starters.
He's either insanely clueless, a propagandist who is being dishonest about his goals, or an accelerationist who thinks making things worse will make them better after (magic happens here).
The magic never happens. Any political program that boils down to (1) break everything, (2) magic, (3) things are better, really goes (1) break everything, (2) either things stay broken and you end up a failed state or someone worse takes over.
Who would have thought that after changing no laws to ban the behavior, firing nobody, and re-upping the post-9/11 laws consistently, that the process would continue? I, for one, am shocked... that anyone might be shocked about this.
Don't worry, I'm sure that trusting these systems to a group of ghouls from the Epstein files won't have any negative consequences.
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It would be foolish to believe this isn’t happening basically everywhere. The reason this is news right now is because Amazon got cocky enough to buy an ad spot on the most watched TV event in the US showing the extent of their surveillance network.
here in my town in Spain I still see no cams, just phones and you cannot publish without consent when filmed in a public venue.
1. Because it is referring to the Super Bowl which was last week
2. Because everyone knows China is a surveillance state. It’s also entirely done by the state.
3. As above, the US’ surveillance is masked under private companies. This is far different from everywhere else.
4. Whataboutism (although I generally hate this newspeak term).
I know Ring is getting a bad rap for enabling state level surveillance, but the Ring app offers an option to enable end-to-end encryption between the camera and your phone.
The stored video is encrypted with key generated on your phone. You have to be physically close to the camera in order to share the key and complete the set-up. Once encrypted, the video can't be analyzed by AI or used in a broad surveillance effort.
It's entirely possible that the encryption keys have a backdoor, but I doubt it. Although there is no way to verify.
End-to-end encryption only means something if you trust the endpoints.
They often also tend to call HTTPS end-to-end encryption
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/media/securing-your-origin-for-...
even Amazon Web Services:
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When national interests require that, it can get a firmware update which sends a copy of data to comrades in U.S. Ministerium für Staatssicherheit even before that e2e encrypted copy reaches your phone.
Who has the keys of the encryption algorithm?
>enable end-to-end encryption between the camera and your phone.
So… exactly not the part I care about?
Cool, it’s encrypted on transit to me… now what about at rest with them? Is it encrypted and they absolutely can not view or hand that footage to police/gov? No.
> Cool, it’s encrypted on transit to me… now what about at rest with them? Is it encrypted and they absolutely can not view or hand that footage to police/gov? No.
Technically yes, e2e encryption means video hosted on their servers is only viewable by devices with decryption keys. So if the police/gov brought a subpoena to request the video, Ring could only offer them the encrypted video. They would have to take possession of your phone and gain access in order to decrypt and view the video.
In this case the "ends" in the e2e encryption is the camera and your phone.
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