“I'm Not Supposed to Show You This ” – Edward Snowden (2021) | Hacker News Reader

“I'm Not Supposed to Show You This ” – Edward Snowden (2021)

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78 pointsrhabarba37 comments

Scientific progress seems to turn everything into an arms race that becomes more and more tempting, dangerous and risky as things advance. We seem to lack the self restraint necessary to stop ourselves from playing the game, the primary victim of which are always going to be us eventually, in this case as the means of tyranny are democratised.

Pretty much an inevitability once governments become too big. It’s a common literary topic in the early 1900s covering from Orwell, Kafka, Brave New World just to name a few examples.

Or too small, as gilded ages and the like show in practice

In-Q-Tel, folks. Look it up. It funded all this "social media" BS early on for what appears to be precisely this reason.

In-Q-Tel appears to be a not for profit venture capital firm explicitly with the aim of investing in companies that aid the US Intelligence effort. However, I just looked at their investment portfolio via Wikipedia and didn’t see any notable social media startups they invested in. What companies are you thinking of?

In the words of Andy Greenberg, in Sandworm, he says In-Q-Tel is assigned the task of furthering the interests of 3 letter agencies.

> I just looked at their investment portfolio via Wikipedia

Go back two spaces.

In-Q-Tel sold 5,636 shares of Google, worth over $2.2 million, on November 15, 2005.[9] The shares were a result of Google's acquisition of Keyhole, Inc, the CIA-funded satellite mapping software now known as Google Earth.

From In-Q-Tel Wikipedia Page

Thank you - I missed this while skimming.

There's an implicit trust assumption in the upstream data sources provided to such that goes unmentioned…

Snowden for president. Hard to believe that Obama didn't have the balls to pardon him.

The joke is on them. I don't have a cell phone, I don't use Facebook, and I am constantly Linux distro hopping when I work writing code while ssh'ed into private servers behind my private VPN.

That will show em!

Look at all the convenience your giving up, just so you can be red flagged.

Since when is Facebook a convenience? Regarding a cell phone, I don't commute and I don't have even the tiniest bit of need for one. Linux is better than Windows, and it's my opinion everyone ought to use a VPN.

Finally, you have to be a real conspiracy nut case to believe not having an Facebook account or cell phone would get someone `red flagged` by a shadow overlording spying agency.

As a counterexample of your “nut case” hypothesis, in anti money laundering, now, across the globe, a bank not having enough profiling information about you is deemed a red flag, and assigns you more risk - that may rise to the point that they close your accounts or that your assets may be frozen proactively by the bank without a judge, or the police for that matter, to opine in the freeze.

Not many banks use facebook as a datapoint but mobile phone and address? Par for the course. And this is going to increase with fraud and aml converging.

very skeptical of this assumption, maybe

>and I am constantly Linux distro hopping when I work

Oh no, not again that "security" "mitigation"....

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