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Comment by fhood | Hacker News Reader

Good way to loose your job very quickly. I don't think we should have to rely on somebody sacrificing themselves to make a difference.

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Not sure anyone would lose their jobs.

1) Be an investigative Journalist

2) Purchase access to these location vendors data

3) Correlate data with known mobile numbers of politicians

4) Find things in data that might be of interest to readers (e.g. "politician x was noted to be in the same place as Lobbyist y on 5 different occasions")

5) Publish Story :)

The more titillating version would be to crawl Backpage or similar successor service for phone numbers of escorts and correlate that with known phone numbers of public figures such as politicians to determine when both were in the same place at the same time. Then publish client lists, with links back to original escort ads for extra sensarionalism.

pay me the cost of a data set plus 6k for a month's labor and i'll do it.

still need an outlet for the story though

The Intercept would probably be interested in publishing something like this

yeah, but we'd need to make it first. like i said, i'd do it myself if i didn't have to maintain my moneymaking elsewhere.

Why not? How do you think change comes about, by complaining about it on a tech forum?

I you are willing to be blacklisted than more power to you. I wouldn't want to force that on someone.

I agree, wouldn't want to force that on someone either. However I am sure there are plenty of people willing to sacrifice for the "greater good" (such as myself - I have quit a job before citing ethical reasons). People have different risk tolerances, and also current life situations - understandable. Just don't think the expectation should be set that change will come around from anything less than drastic action.

Not if precautions are taken, and even if someone did, such a patriotic disclosure (if done responsibly a la Snowden) would put that person is very esteemed company.

Yes, but Snowden is currently living in exile, and there's no end to that in sight.

Few have the stomach for that sort of thing...

That's more because he released government secrets, not corporate. If the gov wasn't after him I'm pretty sure quite a few big companies would try to hire him.

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