Comment by d5lt5

18 hours ago

It's interesting how you think of US tech currently being in a process of becoming a tool of state surveillance and oppression that Russia and China have, while the following exists:

* PRISM (est. 2007) spied on US citizens with the help from AT&T, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and etc.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM

* SpyFiles (various years, ~2011) US/EU surveillance software: https://wikileaks.org/spyfiles/

* Facebook (est. 2004):

  - Helped Cambridge Analytica (~2013) to interfere with the elections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal

  - Bought Onavo (~2013) to spy on competition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo

  - Manufactured consent to enable genocides in Ethiopia, Myanmar, and Gaza.

* Palantir (est. 2003): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir

* Microsoft GSP (~2003) to enable US government to find zero-days (now with Mythos): https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/securityengineering/gsp

It's one thing to spy on your population/users, it's another to spy on your clients.

You can go all authoritarian fascist if that's what floats your boat, but at least don't backstab people who buy shit from you.

Can't you be repressive and professional?!

  • 3 entries in the list above did exactly that more than a decade ago. My point is that the US tech is not in a process, they were at the frontier long before everyone else.