Google keyword warrants give U.S. government data on search users
forbes.com
forbes.com
But the real problem is that general population has zero to no issue with it. They barely comprehend the scope of what is happening. I am not sure it registers at all. Last time I talked to my wife about it, she said she has nothing to hide and I had to resist the urge to just plop her internet history open to make it a teachable moment. I had this conversation once before. It is not fun and I don't want a repeat.
Those of us that are not so domesticated, we wild ones, we who intimately comprehend history because we understand the nature of violence and power, are dying with anxiety as centralized powers gain more and more power over us every year.
Your wife has no understanding of violence and power, i.e., she is domesticated. That's why she has "nothing to hide."
The funny thing is, people have been aware of this property of human nature for thousands of years, but every generation that lives through hard times is shocked when they are forced to rediscover these principles -- as you seem to be discovering. If you continue to investigate why your wife thinks as she does, you'll come to the points I've made above and the behavior of the compliant masses will make much more sense -- and will leave you with quite a terrible feeling if you truly come to understand how most people will pretty much blindly comply with any prevailing authority that has seized the capacity to commit violence.
I am personally highly domesticated. I accept that without society there are a lot of things I would not be able to do ( engaging with random strangers on HN come to mind -- in a lot of ways, it is pleasure and a privilege to have time to engage in an intellectual discussion ).
But I disagree with your definition that the defining aspect of domestication is surrendering one's capacity to do violence. You may be applying the meaning of the word as that referring to a farm animal, but, if you permit the pun, we are not on animal farm. We live in an odd 1984 dystopia, where we hashtag about room 101, but we are not on animal farm yet. In that sense, we are not domesticated.
You could argue, a lot of us have been lulled by the comforts of the lazy life, but meaning is somewhat different from the one proposed by you.
To your point about violence, I want to note that no one really surrenders it. If US news are any indication, it is, at best, temporarily suspended.
Domesticated: works for a major corporation in a big city. Has no guns, no means of personally protecting himself, lives in close proximity to strangers, and if the food stores went down, he would starve to death within a few weeks.
Undomesticated: made very anxious by every conspiracy theory because he knows the world is dangerous and no one is ultimately his buddy, lives in a bunker in some undisclosed location, has at least a year of food rations, has more guns and ammunition than a small Latin American nation, makes a plan to kill everyone he meets.
The domesticated believe the undomesticated to be insane because they don't think about their own safety and violence as the undomesticated do. How many people look at the doomsday bunker crowd as a bunch of lunatics? They aren't lunatics: they have no trust in the system and they have taken it upon themselves to secure their safety to the best of their ability.
The fact that you blithely say "we live in an odd 1984 dystopia" tells me, no offense, that you aren't aware of what that means. Perhaps intellectually you do, but because you aren't used to protecting yourself, such a statement doesn't rain down anxiety and paranoia upon your emotional register. This is the strange thing about the domesticated condition: it's a type of blindness.
I'd compare the blindness of the domesticated to the difference between an old person at a funeral versus a child at a funeral. What is death to youth? What can youth possibly know of death? On the contrary, what is death to age? Death is profound and moving to those who have enough experience to know what it is, but it is nothing -- absolutely nothing -- to those that have not developed the depth of experience that allows one to register the significance of the grim reminder of our own mortality. The same thing goes for violence and its fruits and our ability to intimately know them.
In any case, good luck out there Winston #room101.
I must admit... I have fallen in love with my own term because it really does seem to describe some of the human diversity I've encountered.
Clarification needed
> Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.
It refers to a general concept of alertness and awareness about your surroundings, and how you can't tell who might be good or evil until they act, so just assume everyone could be malicious until proven otherwise (or, more practically, until you're out of their sphere of influence).
So.. no. It does not alarm me. It helps that I don't fit your model very well.
But your thought process does interest me.
The mad mad has you by the throat, you feel his cold steel press up against your virgin neck. Your last words: "I don't believe in neat model of the universe where you can assign vague tag, label, whatever you want to call it and apply it to every facet of reality."
My ultimate point in this exchange with you is that violence has a real sobering effect on the mind. It's a great filter of sense and nonsense.
Anecdotally, I had 3 NDEs and as the adage goes in the immortal words of Dr.House nearly dying changes everything for about three weeks. And it sounds about right in retrospect. I returned to normality fast. It sobered me enough to survive, but not enough to redefine my whole world around me in terms of domestication.
I don't want to assume, but I think you are extrapolating to a society from a single encounter. It would seem you over-corrected.
Just to further complicate this discussion, as an atheist, I do not yelp 'sweet entropy'. But it goes back to my original point. Things are complicated and you are making them more complicated by pretending they are simple:P
I don't think anything I've said is particularly strange. If you parse "domesticated" into slave and "undomesticated" into master...then you'd end up with a very traditional worldview in which masters operate on a different level than slaves -- the latter subordinate to the former. The latent thesis in all this is that an intimate understanding of violence is what separates master from slave.
And this is what I consider to be a cipher from his "Thus Spoke Zarathustra:"
“But it is the same with man as with the tree. The more he seeks to rise into the height and light, the more vigorously do his roots struggle earthword, downword, into the dark, the deep - into evil.”
Also "The Golden Bough" by Frazer if you can read between the lines.
"Americans are concerned about how much data is being collected about them, and many feel their information is less secure than it used to be. The majority of Americans say they are at least somewhat concerned about how much data is collected about them by both companies (79%) and the government (64%). Additionally, seven-in-ten Americans say they feel their personal information is less secure than it was five years ago. This compares with just 6% who say they feel their information is more secure, and about one-quarter (24%) who feel it’s about the same."
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/11/15/key-takeawa...
Apart from that, both Apple and Google are doing rather well. I certainly did not see a decrease in sales of various panopticon enabling devices. Far from it. Amazon joined the fray and along with other players convinced people to install wiretaps in their own homes. There is an actual joke about it so I am not sure if it is a question of social proof or cognitive dissonance.
I agree there is an improvement, but I am not as optimistic it since I don't see it affecting profits.
It’s really tough to make this case. You can ask someone whether they’re worried about tracking and likely get a “no,” but if you put a “allow app to track” button they’ll also click “no,” and if you ask how they feel about a concrete specific data collection, they’ll often say they don’t like it.
Also - https://www.privacytools.io/
The problem is that this could obviously be used with keywords that target a wide group of people, e.g. finding everyone who plans to attend a protest. If we continue to allow keyword warrants we should add a law limiting their reach, e.g. by limiting the number of people who can be revealed in the answer to any one such warrant.
And you have no problem with this? Government and police looking into and judging you based on what you read is one step away from policing wrongthink. You can't learn anything deemed dangerous anymore without being arrested. Can't look up how a bomb or sarin gas works without SWAT coming down on you because you're obviously a terrorist.
This government collusion with Google is the same thing. Government and police show up and say "find me a list of people who searched for dangerous knowledge". This is normal now, without even the trepidation depicted in films like Se7en.
But after thinking about it, I think they meant the former and you meant the latter. But to the library, it’s the exact same thing. A library doesn’t (traditionally) track each and every book, so if it’s a popular book, it could have been checked out by any number of people.
I think this is fine, as long as courts work to keep the scope small and laws allow people to do whatever they want without hindering freedom.
I think there’s a continuum from the cops being able to say “we found this here book at a crime scene, who had it checked out?”, which should clearly be allowed, to “the security footage shows a copy of War and Peace with the libraries sticker on it in the crooks hand, who had it checked out”, which should probably be allowed, to “we need to know everybody who checked out The Anarchists Cookbook in the last six months because the crook used an IED thats described in there”, which probably should be allowed.
They track checkouts. But back in the day, we could switch checkout cards in the cover of the book and return them and the library would never know the difference. With modern computers and barcodes, I do believe the individual books are tracked.
Sure, I might've just dropped my copy of Harry Potter near a murder as I innocently passed by. And yeah, I might've been looking up the victim's name and address in Google purely out of curiosity right before they got murdered. Neither the Google search nor the book are dispositive but they fit into a broader context which could be used to convict or exonerate me.
Ultimately we need laws or judges to set reasonable limits on powers that could be used for good to make sure they aren't also overused for ill.
This tends to be a problem more and more with ever increasing databases that are convenient to access.
People have intuitions for coincidences that are not appropriate for vast amounts of data.
That if you give police a list of random correlations, they will focus on “those people” that are assumed to be more criminal and usually have less means and ability to fight back.
Since Google is so vast, I can find a page of search hits to support any particular belief I might have, no matter how wild.
It was only a problem when George W Bush wanted to do it. :-p
For instance: In the Netherlands, libraries tend(ed) to destroy your loaned-book information ~ when the books were returned. (They seem to have since picked up some data-mining habits?)
A typical system might work like this. Inside each book there was a pocket attached to the back of the front cover, and in that pocket was a card.
When you checked out the book, your name and library card number and when the book was due were added to the card, below the entries for previous checkouts, and the card was filed somewhere. A card showing the due date was placed in the pocket and you could then leave with the book.
When you returned the book the checkout record card was put back in and the book re-shelved.
Want to know who has checked out a book before? Just walk into the library and look at the checkout card. No need for a warrant, and no need to even ask a librarian for the records.
Eventually the card would fill up and they'd have to start a new one. I don't know if they kept the old ones or not. Since storing them would take space, I'd guess they were probably thrown away (perhaps after recording some stats on how frequently the book was checked out, because those might be useful in the future when deciding on changes to their collection). If they were thrown away, I don't know if they would have taken care to destroy them or just toss them in the garbage.
https://www.propublica.org/article/remember-when-the-patriot...
The Section 215 powers you refer to move jurisdiction of certain matters from one court to another. That's perhaps not great but the main effect of it is giving law enforcement a more secret venue in which to seek warrants.
I always thought that in the west you had a freedom of thought and could pursue whatever direction of research you wished without consequence. After all, without freedom of thought, you can't really have proper freedom of conscience, let alone freedom of speech.
I'm slightly disturbed that apparently it's not quite that simple. Today I'm one of the (un)lucky 10000 I guess. https://xkcd.com/1053/
The point of the post here isn't that Google is providing records (which they have always if the situation has been identified as appropriate by a judge + public safety + ....) but that they are providing a really high level, in no way targeted or restricted request for records
But that's all neither here nor there. We're discussing a court order. No law prevents a court from ordering the disclosure of video rental records, even today with the Video Privacy Protection Act, because the VPPA allows disclosure "to a law enforcement agency pursuant to a warrant issued under the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure". Because that's what courts do. There's really nothing that is protected from court orders in the US, except for a few well-known, very narrow exemptions.
What's frustrating is that that limit is already present in the constitution itself: "upon probable cause... and... *particularly* describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized". "Particularly" isn't syntactic sugar; it is a word with meaning. "Specifically, uniquely or individually"; "In detail; with regard to particulars". Mass/dragnet/geofence warrants aren't constitutional.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/particularly#Adverb
Plenty of federal judges seem to agree,
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/08/new-federal-court-ruli...
"...geofence warrant violates the Fourth Amendment’s probable cause and particularity requirements"*
The old manual system in the UK worked on a system where your library card was a sort of envelope into which the book's card was placed and then it was placed in a tray in chronological order. When you returned the book you got your card back and there was no trace.
The library would only be able to say who had the book at the moment when they were asked not for times in the past.
And these names will be clustered in population centers because people cluster in population centers. And since surnames are generally familial, people with the same names are very likely to live near other people with the same name.
You can use public records searches to find people nearby with the same name as you. You might be surprised at how common it is to have people near you with the same name. There are a few people locally who share a name with me, and who own businesses that probably get a decent amount of internet traffic based on name searches.
After the patriot act was passed enabling the government to seek this kind of information my local library changed their records policy to not retain information on who checked out books after they were returned (or at least only for a strictly limited time after), as well as a host of other pieces of data-minimization. My library also put up signs explaining how to use the library most privately (e.g. that if you visit and read books on-site no one will ever collect your name or other personal information).
I understand many other libraries did as well and that the ALA promoted such changes.
Access to your library history is a violation of your mental privacy. Imagine you found yourself questioning your sexuality, -- you might check out books on the subject. A few years later a repressive regime could come into power and you might find our that your inquisitiveness a few years back placed you under enhanced scrutiny.
Because the access to search is even more casual the invasion is even more severe. And unlike your local library Google is MUCH less likely to consider your personal freedom a big priority.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/05/nsa-surveillan...
https://slate.com/technology/2015/06/usa-freedom-act-before-...
Wow. So, people like you actually do exist. This is both scary and sad.
*ie not already realising that people like them actually do exist.
It doesn't seem so bad to do it for something super-specific, like the home address of the victim of a crime, in the timeframe that the crime was committed, where you expect to get under 10 individuals. What's more worrying is how broad could this get? Are there any actual legal limits, or does Google just give the Government whatever they ask for?
It seems more and more like some of the tech majors are so big and so dominant over the industry and our lives that it makes less sense to treat them as private companies. In theory, under current legal dogma, Google is a private corporation, and I have no rights at all to data it gathers, so it can hand it over to the Government anytime it feels like it with no knowledge or due process. Even if they claim they only share information for the Right Cases, how do you know, how can you trust them? Do you have any recourse if you think your case was not justified?
Maybe. If this person was, for example, online dating, a member of a popular club, had a YT/TikTok channel, or shared a name with someone who does or is otherwise notable, this could be a big list.
How would you feel being suspected in a murder case because you searched for a d-list celeb who shares a name with the victim?
They were sending warrants to people that searched for particular names, addresses, etc.
Not news. We all know this has been going on for many years. It's fairly standard, in many "capital crime" cases.
Who is the 'we' here?
Many people may have assumed this is happening... But according to the article itself, there's less then a handful of these specific warrants being recorded/unsealed/reported in the news.
Do you have access to sources which Forbes does not where more of these warrants are documented?
From the article:
>Before this latest case, only two keyword warrants had been made public. One revealed in 2020 [...]
File this under “proof of what everyone already knew, but couldn’t verify.”
The request is limited to searches for a couple specific people over a short timeframe. They had legitimate reason for it. There's no issue here.
The title on HN here is Exclusive: Government Secretly Orders Google To Identify Anyone Who Has Searched Name, Address And Telephone N, which implies that this is for all searches that are for any of these sorts of items.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jun/04/microsoft...
Don't get me wrong, it doesn't make them look good, but the problem was the with the source of their results, not them censoring "tank man".
No doubt this is bad, but we know who did the censoring (Microsoft). DDG? I guess we can blame them for using a bad source and for not double checking stuff like this (if that's even possible/viable)?
Anyway, what to use instead? The main alt search engines usually use Bing (DDG, Qwant, Ecosia, Yahoo Search, etc). The only one I'm aware that uses a different source is Startpage (they use Google), but now they're owned by an ad tech company (why not stick with Google in that case?). There's also Brave Search (they have their own index, but also include results from Google and Bing if you want), but it's still in beta and I'm not sure if it's ready yet for prime time.
So... no Bing or Bing-powered search engines. What's left? Yandex? Maybe some Searx instance (which never worked that well for my needs)? Going back to Google?
"We also save searches, but again, not in a personally identifiable way, as we do not store IP addresses or unique User agent strings. We use aggregate, non-personal search data to improve things like misspellings."
Startpage's privacy policy states they do not save search history:
"We don't record your search queries
When you search, your query is automatically stripped of unnecessary metadata including your IP address and other identifying information. We send the anonymized search query to Google and return the search results to you. We don’t log your searches.
To prevent abuse such as robotic high-volume querying, we anonymously determine the frequency of popular search keywords as a part of our anti-abuse measures, while protecting your privacy."
You can trust them if you want, but really can you trust any company now days?
What should they have done differently? It’s comply with the order or dissolve the company.
If you clear your Google history (as you should), can they still respond to an order like this with your name? What if you did the search from Brave or Safari, where you were not logged into Google?
Also what if you are logged into Google, but your Google search history was always switched off?
>What if you did the search from Brave or Safari, where you were not logged into Google?
Relevant quote from the article:
>In Wisconsin, the government was hopeful Google could also provide “CookieIDs” belonging to any users who made the searches. These CookieIDs “are identifiers that are used to group together all searches conducted from a given machine, for a certain time period. Such information allows investigators to ascertain, even when the user is not logged into a Google account, whether the same individual may have conducted multiple pertinent searches,” the government wrote.
As for the argument that they can still find it: The laws usually allow for the company to decline on the grounds that complying would be an "undue burden." In other words, if their usual method is to run some program they wrote to handle the common case, and this time they'd have to write a new program, they might claim that's an undue burden.
Might. If they feel like it.
I'm pretty sure the relevant distinction is between "Data that expires after a specific period of time" and "Information retained until you remove it" in their privacy policies.
I don't see why using Brave or whatever would influence the contents of their server logs.
They could, but might say "nah, too much trouble."
They can still trace you via your IP Address. Ironically, Incognito is not really an incognito
Assuming they still have the data (didn’t delete it, just “cleared” it), then yes.
Heck, it’s even a running stand-up joke. “Ask your wife if you can look up something on her phone. Google “How to kill your husband” and hand it back to her. Congrats, you’re safe for another month!
I turned to my partner and joked "You better not be huffing any chloroform in the near future."
That's the light side of it, but the scary side of it, and why these sort of "fishing expeditions" are so dangerous, is that statistically it's probably the case that if you're keywords are pretty specific (googling a person's name or address in a very time limited window), that 90-95% of the time if someone popped up they were doing something suspicious - but that means 5-10% of the time you'd get a false positive. Given revelations of people who have been released fro death row for rather flimsy evidence, I don't have confidence that the authorities would do much besides try to find someone guilty once they got a hit.
Every now and then I want to Google something a bit dubious, but decide against it, just in case. I mean, I've no intention of murdering anyone or anything like that, I'm just just a curious soul.
Not so fast there buddy. Best check what autocompletes for "how to dispose of a b..." and "best place to b...".
Sure, google's search results suck nowadays, but she could always just go to the library.
Personally I use Brave Search for 99% of my searches. They are definitely privacy based, unlike some other alternatives.
https://wiki.openrightsgroup.org/wiki/Guardian_and_Snowden_r...
Many large media outlets have basically buried this fact rather quickly after the initial coverage of the revelations, and now we can have stories about how "the keyword warrant" being "one of the more contentious". Sure, it's contentious, since _more_ government bodies get easier access to some of the information, but its infraction of people's privacy is nothing compared to the vast public spying.
One should also mention the mechanism of "National Security Letters", in which the executive branch of the US federal (only?) government can compel non-govenrment entities, in secret, to provide them with whatever information they deem necessary for national security purposes:
It's amazing we've become so tethered to our phones that it's just implicitly obvious that your phone's location is the same as your location. Authoritarian governments rejoice! People will voluntarily pay and cling to their tracking devices, no need to track them personally.
An open ended search might be on terms related to bomb making, where curiosity might get someone labeled a potential terrorist. Here a specific person went missing and they were looking for people who searched on that specific person. It's still a net, but it's not that wide and its focused on something that already happened. They even put date ranges on the search.
I see the problem though. It's probably just a matter of time before the specificity is loosened a lot, and that would be bad.
This screams of government being acutely overstrained as it is but no reason to give them a hand with such deed.
You should also search for this person too. They requested data and data should be served.
The notification should say:
Google has searched your data in response to a legal request from XYZ court. Google searched for the keyword "John Smith" in your Google search history. No matches were found, so no further action was taken. For more information, click HERE.
Edit: downvote all you want. dealing with google is like talking to the police, whatever you say/do will be used against you. in googles case for advertising/influencing you or by the government using the google gold mine. you can spare yourself by using a different search engine.
The context is often left out in that interview snippet, because he goes on to say "... but if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines including Google do retain this information for some time, and it’s important, for example that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities."
Actions online leave a data trail. The US government has broad subpoena power to acquire that data trail. DDG is a smaller aggregation house, so it's less likely to be hit first, but I wouldn't assume that they don't retain routing info, IP addresses, etc. that could (with some difficulty) be collected and aggregated to narrow the search space for a person.
Doesn’t make what he said untrue. Just funnier.
So no, the old argument of "if you don't want it known, don't do it" is fallacious and dangerous.
(If the problem with the original isn't obvious to you, try specific cases like "If you don't want people to know you're gay, maybe you shouldn't be being gay.".)
Correct, but not a universal, constant, perpetual one like life and liberty. It is situational and context-specific; for example, it is not assumed you have a right to privacy regarding what you shout in the public square.
The still open question is the scope (perpetuity and breadth) of that right regarding things like the information you query on a publicly-accessible third-party search service... Does it look more like the privacy around what you do in your own bedroom or around what you do in the public square. And we have precedent that pokes at this topic... One's banking affairs, for example, are relatively private, but the state has a vested interest (taxation and investigation of a crime) in acquiring that information in special circumstances, and banks can and will divulge their copy of that information upon due legal request from the state.
I think it's hard to build a case that you have the same right to privacy as a bedroom right regarding information that you have queried in a third-party's database over a public network. It certainly seems like the jury is still out on the topic (and has been for two or three decades now, at least).
For example say a disgruntled ex-lover posts private medical information on someone else and this gets indexed by Google. Obviously this is a breach of privacy. I would extend that to any private information, and the person should have the ability to remove that private information.
I think it has also been made more and more clear that platforms should not perpetually and forever host information about individuals against their wishes. People change, and this should be reflected in the public square. In the old days, your shouts only existed in the memory of those that were there. Now they are as fresh as the day they were posted.
The UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 12 states: "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks."
The key is "protection of the law" and this is why I think that privacy should be regulated by government which extends its authority into "private" companies. Clearly that function is needed. However, I am constantly hearing the opposite case being made, that government should use its power to dig up information on law-abiding citizens as they could be doing something illegal.
They're all the same, serving you ads based on your search terms.
If you don't collect data, you can't share it in a warrant.
the catch is that they didn't log by default but they had to log specific users due to a warrant.
the same will happen any service hosted by legal businesses.
that is a usable quantum bump up in privacy. requiring the authorities to specifically be investigating you, rather than you just being caught in a dragnet looking for someone to investigate.
There isn't a single search engine anywhere that isn't collecting some data. Not even DDG.
> When you search at DuckDuckGo, we don't know who you are and there is no way to tie your searches together.
> When you access DuckDuckGo (or any Web site), your Web browser automatically sends information about your computer, e.g. your User agent and IP address.
> Because this information could be used to link you to your searches, we do not log (store) it at all.
They obviously have the search term your searching! They don't need to track you, they send the ads back with the search results!
Google isn't doing that. They have pretty complete portraits of your life (and dare I say) psychology that only comes from having such an incredible wealth of information about you and your position in the network graph.
Security through obscurity is bad long-term, comprehensive strategy because it's unstable and not indefatigable... Not because it doesn't work in the short run and in one-off cases.
Except for the cases where you want the exact opposite, because the noise makes it more difficult to find a single person. If there's only 5 people using, say, TOR Browser - you become easy to track.
Not saying this is the case here, just that different situations require different operational security considerations.
Moving important email to protonmail. I only use firefox and duckduckgo browsers. Pretty much exclusively using duckduckgo for search. I've installed a PiHole on my home network. I've switched to an iPhone... although I considering some custom android ROM now. Using Apple Maps.
I wish there was a YouTube alternative that was up to par.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/secure-email-provider-protonma...
Protonmail literally gave up the personal info of some French activists who were later arrested...
This isn't an issue with ProtonMail in particular; any email provider has to follow local laws, and Swiss law is generally a pretty good framework if you have to choose.
If this was the case, you would have given the full context in your earlier comment. There is a significant difference between tracking by default and tracking only when issued a court order.
Is there? Either your data is on their server or it isn't. As if they can't give data created before a court order to a government after a court order...
In one case, you track everything.
In the other case, you don't track everything. But you have the ability to turn on logging when required (like, for example, with a warrant).
>As if they can't give data created before a court order
This is surprisingly simple. You just don't track the data until you have to because of a warrant. Then you say "Sorry, I don't have data before your warrant arrived because we do not track it".
They literally claim they're "unable" to give data to 3rd parties.
Another claim is that they have secure features for activists and journalists.
The trust is broken...
>For the record, I have no issue with Protonmail
And I called that out because it was obviously untrue based on the rest of your comment. Now you say
>The trust is broken...
Which sort of proves my whole point to begin with.
This would depend on the warrant.
>If you turn on logging, does it turn on logging for all? (Seems likely yes)
No, the warrant must have a specific (non-drag-net) scope. Broadly scoped warrants are fought to reduce the scope to something specific (reduced time-frame, reduced users, etc.). This is common, even with Google/FB. I'm not sure why you assume yes.
>Therefore one warrant can put all other privacy-desiring users at risk...
No, not really.
Google does exactly what you're upset about ON TOP of a plethora of more insidious things.
If you're trying to make a claim that one is equal to the other you're failing miserably.
Complaining about being downvoted is shunned upon on HN and is unlikely to cause people to stop downvoting. It brings nothing interesting to discussion and actually reduces density of interesting things.
My style tends to be terse/short and perhaps I don't always make my point well.
Don't be disheartened by a few downvotes in the short period while a comment is still editable. You may get many more upvotes as time goes on. Or not, but don't take it personally either way.
There are also people like me that upvote interesting comments even if we disagree with them (especially if they are unfairly negative). Meta-commentary on votes tends makes them much less interesting.
It reminds me to be wary of my own biases. Because from where I stand they are all two sides of the same coin.
On the other hand, courts in China do whatever the CCP tells them. These are not equivalent.
I think it's possible to get justice in the US court system if you have money. This isn't really "rule of law" as one might commonly think of it though.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/innocen...
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/lawyer-who-sued-chevron-sen...
Cops can search your car if they have a reason to believe you've committed a crime, but if they just start rifling through every car in a public lot someone is getting sued.
I'm not sure what to make of this statement.
To become a judge at the federal level is a deeply political process. Judges are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Nominated judges are usually the same political party as the president but must also be acceptable to at least a majority of senators, and there is often some bargaining to make this work. Every SCOTUS nomination in recent history has had senators question nominees on their political opinions. Federal courts frequently break along ideological lines such that the balance of liberals to conservatives on a court is important to parties and voters. Some state courts mirror this, with the governor nominating and a legislature confirming. How could this process be described as apolitical?
This is different from an apolitical process where a neutral body like a bureaucracy or bar association selects judges based on merit. The US is distinct from many European countries in this regard.
The GP is literally always correct in relativistic terms. If that makes people in the West feel more comfortable with the government, I guess I could say good for them? :)
A bigger court elected by the people could help solve that problem. Not lifetime appointments with zero accountability. The Supremes are just another fascist and anti democratic institution, like the electoral college or the party apparatuses.
(sorry, new account BTW, lost the last password)
I have worked in China, China is a totalitarian communist State. There are no tenuous connections between the CCP and Chinese companies, companies ARE the CCP.
For example if you go around China you will see children with a red badge around the neck. This badge represents that the kid is a good student and the kid is forced to wear it.
In China the best students automatically enter the CCP, there is a spy apparatus that controls them once people travel abroad from friends and relatives. If they do something abroad against the CCP they take retaliation against their families.
If you want to create a company in China, you must enter the CCP. How tenuous is that?
People that have not lived there just can't understand what totalitarian means, there is no rule of Law and not free press. The "dictator for life" Xi Jinping can kill anyone in China with no consequences, and he regularly kills competitors or threats to his power.
Having said that, people in charge in the US or the financial elite would love the world becoming their own totalitarian regime, just like China but on the entire world. They lobby for that every day.
Those guys really love power, because they have power, they want more, they want it all like the song says.
It is really nothing new. Just like the Romans wanted to conquer Cartage to own the entire world. Philip II of Spain wanted the same thing conquering Britain, later it was Napoleon, and then Hitler and Stalin.
Now it is the US who would love to conquer China and Russia if they could. Also China would love to expand by force if they could.
The only reason they don't is because nuclear weapons.
The price of liberty for normal people is eternal vigilance.
It should not be controversial to say that the CCP is more heavy-handed when it comes to government reach into private lives. That doesn't exonerate the US by any stretch; our government does a ton of shady shit, much of it arguably unconstitutional or extrajudicial, from warrantless wiretaps to drone executions of US citizens. But these make the news, which indicates 1) at least there is a relatively free press and 2) they are unusual enough as to be noteworthy, as opposed to commonplace and not discussed.
China doesn't share the same values as the West. The individual is deemphasized for the collective good, as defined by the current CCP elite of any decade. That doesn't mean their political system is inferior or superior -- our fragile "democracy" is threatening to devolve into civil war and take down the whole country, if not world with it -- but it IS a very different government on a different part of an authoritarianism <--> libertarianism continuum. It's not useful to equate them in this context just because the West does shady surveillance on its own citizens too.
Does what is reported by the media equate to the sum total of US malfeasance? I sometimes wonder if there is an Overton's Window for the public's appetite for corruption and exposure of systemic exploitation.
> China doesn't share the same values as the West. The individual is deemphasized for the collective good, as defined by the current CCP elite of any decade.
Could the 2 power structures have different approaches to how the individual is de-emphasised for collective good? Perhaps the US has a more diffused and opaque strategy of achieving the same end? I say this because Americans signal opportunity and the virtues of social agency to one another at all levels of society - but each time I travel there it seems like a social nightmare where few are actually contented once you get past the small talk.
I'm not so sure that is true. If anything the US agencies seem to be quite a bit more technologically advanced, and I'd bet they sit on more undisclosed zero days than the CCP.
You're definitely correct in the difference in ideological values, and this difference might make up for the technological gap between the surveillance capabilities of the two governments, but I honestly would say it's still a 50-50 to me which one comes out on "top".
China's recent attempts to curb the influences of their Big Tech and online gaming sectors come to mind, vs the fuck-all we've done with ours over the past couple decades. Soon Facebook is going to become a supranational organization that can drive new laws just by enraging enough people through algorithmic manipulation... our watchdogs are whimpering puppies against that kind of power. Our government is way weaker in terms of its ability to regulate business or personal behavior.
And for the common person, sure, our government might know everything we're doing (they all do, these days), but by and large it does not really care. The data it collects is often so disorganized even its own agencies don't know how to share it with each other, much less use it to systematically oppress -- for now. Our discourse and dissent is THRIVING, free speech is alive and well, and we have so much freedom we've self-organized into alternate reality bubbles, absent state guidance and with a deliberate disregard of expert opinion. China doesn't allow its society to fracture like that. Ours has no choice but to allow it to happen, and our elites encourage that sort of fragmentation because it makes for easier power-mongering at the top when the commoners are divided against each other.
The Chinese are oppressed by a heavy-handed, paternal government. Americans are oppressed by a government so weak that capital, charisma, and convenience govern our society, not our supposed laws or values. Other developed countries, democratic or not, tend to fall in between those extremes, from the UK & Australia closer to us (weaker gov) to the Canada & EU (stronger govs) to the Nordic and Asian democracies (stronger yet), yet China's is way way way stronger than all of those.
On the other hand, the fact that no one can find Brian Laundrie indicates to be that generally government is incompetent and can’t mask all these things together to do anything really useful.