Imagine the possibilities of this, combined with McCarthy's wet dream palantir.
I'm not saying that a Trump presidency isn't a great way to convince people to get a Signal account, but it strikes me that NSA spying and everything else that's gone on over the past decade should have been enough.
(I'm not trying to make partisan points; I'm only saying that there is a large cohort that feels that way. Obviously, many in the U.S. voted for Trump.)
These illegal capabilities have been spreading regardless of party or political promises.
That said, only one of these two people is asking for names of every government employee who has attended a climate science meeting in the past 5 years. The implications are truly chilling.
I'm not surprised to see Trump mount such a challenge, because he is likely ill accustomed to tolerating independent fiefdoms within an organization he nominally heads. But he's far from the first president to try it on, and I very much doubt he'll find more success than his predecessors - indeed the latest on this particular story seems to be that DOE has told him to go to hell, and if that sounds like hyperbole then it's no more so than a lot of the headlines I've just seen.
Presidents have done and can legally do all these things. Trump could do each one of these things. The only hope we have is that he chooses not to out of a sense of not wanting to destroy the country, or out of some sense of morality and sense of what is right and wrong. Each one is a disgusting, horrifying abuse of power. So is demanding a list of federal employees who meet some political criteria with the explicit intention of an ideological purge (even worse, he's purging all people who believe in or are curious about science from a science agency). Next will he ask for a list of federal employees who have had an abortion? A list of those who have voted Democrat? A list of those who have posted an Internet comment critical of him? The next time he asks for a list, will we hear about it?
In response to that, I cannot imagine what I might possibly be able to contribute.
The fact that he's doing horribly immoral things and the defense is -30 days into his presidency already "it's legal therefore it's okay" is a very, very bad sign for the future of his administration, because as I've shown abiding by actions which are 'legal' means almost nothing when it comes to federal executive power. That moral sense which we are depending on which prevents a president from abusing their power is, by the evidence we've seen, not present in him.
How do you mean this to be taken if not to say that what he's done is as bad as all the other things you named? - that is, as a claim of moral equivalence.
I disagree. Trump is the President-elect; she has no position in government. Also, depending on the definition of "many", I don't think it was true that 'many' thought that way. People widely called her corrupt and other things, but generally she didn't propose fascist policies, I don't recall seeing her called fascist, and I followed the election closely. If 'many' = 'some', we can find 'many people' who think anything.
I guess I just dislike relativistic statements, painting all sides as equal.
The specter of Trump has been there the entire time. The danger of mass data collection isn't merely the current President, it's that we have an election every four years.
Go start encrypting everything now. Better late than never. But all the things you sent unencrypted during Obama's presidency, that you didn't stop them from keeping, now Trump will have all of it.
I agree with this 100%. Suddenly people care about mass deportation, for example, but where were they when Obama was deporting a record 2.5 million people? They are terrified of Trump's "deportation force", not realizing apparently that many such deportation forces (e.g. ICE) already exist.
Some things that the left should have cared about under Obama:
* initiating new undeclared wars
* expanding the surveillance state
* eliminating habeas corpus with the 2012 NDAA
* killing two American citizens extra-judicially
* fracking
* selling arms to radicals and brutal foreign regimes
* the Honduran coup
* CIA black sites / torture (forced rectal 'feeding' to the point of rectal prolapse, for example)
* prosecuting whistleblowers
* raiding legal dispensaries / grow ops and wholesale continuing the ludicrous war on drugs
* pro-corporate policies like the TPP, ACA, and the bailouts
* running up the national debt another 10 trillion or so
* contracting out development of astroturfing software from HBGary / Operation Earnest Voice
I could go on. The real left barely exists anymore in America.
Sure, that's easy to miss in the entire "supported by snowden" marketing, but we've had actually a debate about that on HN before.
They're just being realistical about it. If a nation-state is targeting you, relying on a particular app, no matter how secure, isn't enough and they don't want to make false promises.
Now, they use Signal.
I'm not sure if that's more secure. In fact, I'd argue Signal is less secure.
Moxie himself has argued before that the intention of Signal is not to be more secure than these options, but to be a solution that everyone can use that's more secure than Telegram/The old WhatsApp protocol without Axolotl/etc.
Where do they state that?
His dreams really can come true:
http://mediamatters.org/video/2016/06/13/fox-s-gingrich-call...