NSA asks Congress to let it get on with that warrantless data harvesting, again
theregister.com
theregister.com
Big tech is not allowed to lobby for the government to pass certain laws or restrictions or whatever else.
Big tech is not allowed to voluntarily or in any form shape or a communicate any data with the government unless it is strictly related to government business and employees.
The government may not communicate in any form shape or way any data to big tech unless the conditions from the above paragraph apply.
Government may continue to regulate technology companies, but the data they collect on their users is considered strictly not in the domain of any form of government.
Unless we are talking about court cases with discovery and the defendant being able to defend themselves. If someone uses Facebook to commit a crime Facebook should be liable to reveal data about the messages they sent by court order for a *public* trial.
There are always severe consequences, there are severe consequences if thhe status quo remains as is, there are severe consequences if the status quo changes
We have got banking privacy regulations through the world, we have got religious and government split laws through the world. These both work and are needed
It is due time big tech becomes split from explicit government interference with political aims and goals as shown on the Twitter Papers. This NSA bullshit is also not acceptable
It's the law, it'll be written by a billion lawyers who consider edge cases like this and this little comic will apply.
Overall, you're giving more power to Big Tech and lessening the power of government over Big Tech. They will be able to hide their offenses under the cover of "user's data", which the government is not allowed to see.
Again. This is literally what law is all about. All existing law was created from baselines like these, and this is a very very poor excuse to refuse to regulate a massive and dangerous industry.
Refusing the ability for the government to absorb the data of big tech is not empowering them, it's weakening them.
They're so heavily intertwined that bucketing them into distinct categories that don't talk to each other would be a massive ship to turn around.
We see how big tech is taking on a lot of functions of a state. Big tech companies are a bit like states. They have something like citizenship, taxes, and laws.
Reminds me of some paper about Walmart/Amazon systems getting sophisticated enough to run the country better than the govt - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn
Yeah, government types which disregard democracy tend to have that attribute.
Company towns and scrip were super efficient too!
Not so great for civil rights though.
What taxes, laws, and citizenship is unqiue to tech companies? I assume you mean money to join, rules, and membership. There are business outside of tech that have this
People love to bring up “it’s actually not in the constitution” as if explicitly saying that in anyway detracts from the fact that a foundational principle of the nation /separated/ church from state.
"but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States."
There are also unwritten concepts that are effectively enforced such as prison review boards giving credence to someone that has become a Born Again Christian when considering parole. That is not written anywhere to my knowledge.
But you are right, they can not force someone to be Christian.
You watch too much TV. Most courts do not have you swear "on" anything, you simple raise your hand "Swear or affirm under the pains and penalties of perjury you will tell the truth" some do not even add the "under the pains and penalties of perjury"
if there are any courts in the US still using a Bible they are in the EXTREME minority.
>There are also many government buildings that fund the creation and installation of religious statues and bible verses on plaques in their halls
Pretty sure that is also not true... Governments have allowed the installation of such things but they are often funded by private groups. I would love a citation where the GOVERNMENT paid for out of tax payer money a religious installations is say they last 20 years.. (paid for, not approved)
>>effectively enforced such as prison review boards giving credence to someone that has become a Born Again Christian when considering parole.
Citation...
Parole Boards often require the offender to Admit guilt and ask for forgiveness, this has being interpreted by extreme anti-religious groups as them "requiring people to become born again Christians"
I never said I wanted to listen to your opinions about the modern state of religion in America. I told you a fact, that church and state are separated by law in this nation and it’s encoded into the bill of rights. That you dislike American culture having evolved from a Christian one is your own axe to grind clearly.
* One nation, under Allah, indivisible… (Islam)
* Marriage is a legal institution between one man any many women (Mormon)
* “The office is closed for Yom Kippur next Monday.” (Judaism)
* The right to bodily autonomy begin at birth so there is no moral issue with abortion (Satanic Temple)
Of course the people are descendants of protestants and so our customs would naturally reflect that but so does our government. As a country we were so concerned about escaping state sponsored religion that we didn’t stop to think at all about how codifying norms into law that come from a particular religion end up creating a religious rule in all but name. Like we don’t even pretend to have religious freedom in any meaningful sense — your right to practice the traditions of your faith or have your institutions respected ends where what is acceptable and normal as defined by Christians ends.
Plural marriage isn't widely practiced or supported for pragmatic reasons.
Holidays are religious artifacts, yet not all of them, and there is no forced participation anymore. (Except in so far as government services are unavailable.)
Abortion rights have and are evolving. As the old, more religious folks die off it should swing the other way soon.
1. A fundamentalist Protestant Christian ethos, derived from the Puritans;
2. A cosmopolitan and secular ethos, derived from British and Western European mercantilism;
3. Literally everything else, including the last 240 years of immigration and infusion by every non-Christian group under the sun.
Whenever people say that America is "Christian," I wonder if they mean it in that syncretic sense, or in an attempt to erase or obscure it.
It was not a Poem.
never mind, then. the big thing that moral imperatives have in common with the checks and balances necessary for society to be healthy is that none of these things ever require any effort.
I want to blame politicization and very clear 'us vs them' sentiment, but I am no longer certain that is the entire reason for current craziness. I am not sure non-tech people understand what is at stake.
To me it is an episode of Dark Mirror 'The entire history of you'. And they do not get it why it is a very bad idea to make a new normal.
The historical conventional wisdom around the US's political parties is that Democrats fall in love (meaning that they abstain from voting over minor political differences), while Republicans fall in line (meaning that they hold their nose and vote for whoever the party ticket is). That's changed a little bit over the the last decade, but not appreciably so.
American politics today are about thesis/antithesis, where the thesis is whatever the latest liberal agenda is and the antithesis is everyone who normally disagrees with each other, but is united in a common disagreement with the Democratic Party.
In this environment, there's only one political thesis (not antithesis) that has more than a very small percentage of the vote.
https://www.texastribune.org/2022/10/30/johnson-amendment-el... https://www.newsnationnow.com/religion/churches-politics-pul...
In the West we fight pretty hard to keep the Church and State separated, but this isn't a natural state of being. The Divine Right of Kings, the Pharoahs were gods, Sharia law, the Japanese Emperor is the direct descendant of Amaterasu, the Spanish Inquisition, etc etc etc. History is rife with Church and State being two sides of the same coin. In fact in recent years certain government leaders have been pretty effective at intertwining the US government with Christianity, despite the separation of Church and State being enshrined in the First Amendment; prayer in schools, the repeal of Roe v Wade, etc.
The link between big government and big tech (and big ag, big auto...) ought to be fought with similar gusto as we attempt to protect the separation we've won between church and state.
Freedom of religion came at a time when long-distance communication traveled very slow, in a country with oceans for borders. In a typical (old world) situation religious consolidation makes sense for a state, religion is the only thing that significantly threatens state power besides other states. This was even more true 300 years ago. Today’s tech companies aren’t a challenger to state power; people mostly hate Mark Z. & Jeff B., rather tech is the very fabric that the state is made of.
> That's what he's saying. He's not saying that Big Government and Big Tech are separated, he's saying that Big Government and Big Tech ought to be separated.
I think this desire comes from a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of power. It's beyond wishful thinking.
Religion really needs government to be threatening, while tech can be threatening on its own.
https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...
https://gizmodo.com/larry-ellisons-oracle-started-as-a-cia-p...
Personally I would struggle to resist reading Biden’s/Trump’s emails, whereabouts and digital footprint for a day, it would be pretty interesting to say the least.
Yep and social media got unfettered access to real thoughts and patterns of almost entire internet population for a while. I would be stunned if they were not able to distill a way to determine when a given message works best ( not just what message works best for a given task ).
Marketing always had people divided into various groups they could sell to. Adtech, made into real science.
<< People often overestimate how good they are at defending themselves from propaganda because they are only counting the propaganda that is not targeted at them and not the propaganda that does work (propaganda doesn't mean bad either).
Being aware helps, but you are right. I found myself nodding, when upon reflection it was clear I was being manipulated based on later facts.
This is called microtargeting[0].
> Being aware helps, but you are right. I found myself nodding, when upon reflection it was clear I was being manipulated based on later facts.
Well I can't stress enough that this isn't always a bad thing. Propaganda can even be beneficial. It can help people band together for important things (e.g. informing people about climate change). But we also should be aware that we are often manipulated. I think it is fine when it is for the good (hard to define though, which is problematic) but not okay for bad purposes. Paved with good intentions after all.
Who am I kidding? They don't want the boot off their face, they want it on their foot.
https://theintercept.com/2023/01/05/mccarthy-speaker-republi...
US intelligence agencies are political entities masquerading as law enforcement, and their motivations are largely internal, rather than controlled by the executive (as we saw during the Trump years.)
In the end, the amount of power in the world is finite, and natural power-strivers participate in exercises in game theory over it.
This law doesn't allow them to do that. It allows the NSA to collect stored communications between people who are not US citizens who live outside the US without a warrant. Biden and Trump are both US citizens living in the US, so they fail both criteria. The scandal in 2019 was that the FBI could search for mentions of Americans in these foreigners' communications.
Last I heard, literally zero folks went to jail (or even lost their jobs).
They claimed they had.
Of course, they claimed that they weren’t doing it before concrete details leaked which made that impossible to get away with anymore.
But they’d probably like to stop risking embarrassment if they got caught again.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iEh-l_G1Gcs NSA director lies to congress
I see this as a consequence of monopolization of the sector, it's made it significantly easier to turn these few corporations into de facto wings of their organization.
The conspiratorially minded wonder if they had a hand in forming the monopolies in the first place.
> Mark Klein is a former AT&T technician and whistleblower who revealed details of the company's cooperation with the United States National Security Agency in installing network hardware at a site known as Room 641A to monitor, capture and process American telecommunications.
The CIA also has In-Q-Tel to fund tech companies and develop surveillance tech. I believe Facebook got some seed money off them early on but their Wikipedia article doesn't list them.
Neither of these are tied together in an obvious way, though. Like, the government doesn't directly create monopolies to obfuscate surveillance; in the world where we had hundreds of viable tech platforms and maximum ownership caps, we'd still have surveillance. Because the government is itself a monopoly. But they prefer working with monopolies because they're easier to regulate and comply with the law more. And monopolies also improve the economy, the failure of which is the number one killer of politicians.
The NSA does whatever it wants if it has the technical ability. That should be factored in by now.
Whilst true, they want to be seen as angelic since they're following some laws. Can't be inferring people's pattern of life based of smartphone metadata without been seen as 'the good guys'!
They didnt, congress authorised then reauthorised the programme and are going to reauthorise it again.
4th amendment... pish that tired old document needs to go, nothing stands in the way of "national security" not even that pesky constitution.
We need to do better than accept this.
There are people who want a revolution or civil war. What happens after, assuming they win? They form another government, why won't the same situations they don't like occur again?
Oh because we should have laws about this and enforcement. We have that now and if there isn't a law, like against stock trading, you can vote for that but people don't.
The same situation with occur again the only difference being a economic and human disaster of a war.
b) Political Accountability. Actually have people removed from office that support such approaches.
c) Have actual felony penalties on such violations by the NSA and anyone assisting in coverups with no statute of limitations (or statute starts after declassification).
d) Blanket civil and criminal immunity for whistleblowers related to above violations. Plus financial bounty.
e) Automate the declassification process. (Add checks extra here.)
f) Introduce an Independent Counter-Surveillance and Privacy Agency. (Similar agencies exist in other countries.) It should have the ability to oversee the de-classification process, act as a check and balance on the N.S.A; its sole mandate to protect the privacy and data of inhabitants of the U.S.A. and U.S. nationals.
N.B. The necessity of such an agency becomes even more paramount for the U.S. now that individuals' social network data lie abroad and contemporary issues go beyond the jurisdiction of the FBI.
The statute we're talking about here, 702, is what enables the IC to compel American communications providers to cough up data (about ostensibly foreign targets).
Even that is no guarantee as your packets can be routed into Canada and back if they need to be made foreign.
They should either abolish it or change the law to put real penalties in place for abusing the system. Puting all of this machinery in place and then not providing a means to hold powerful people accountable for their actions when they abuse it is just asking for trouble.
https://www.justice.gov/storage/120919-examination.pdf
The above report is nice, but is anyone going to pay the price for the crimes committed here other than the victims?
Whereas, this mass surveillance is more like putting cameras on some public sewer tunnels to see what passes through the pipes. And then 99.999% of the time not checking the recording before it gets wiped.
Unless you meant the metadata of who you called. But that's not the police collecting that data, but the phone company doing it voluntarily for billing purposes. If the company didn't keep those records, the police couldn't (legally) compel them to without a warrant.