Adtech surveillance and government surveillance are often the same

Not at all. The EFF does a lot of good work along those lines also. https://www.eff.org/issues/cell-tracking

> ...shouldn't there also be a push to stop cellular service providers from selling your location data?

Yes

There should be rules stopping the collection of that data

There should be rules against locking down devices people "own" that prevent countermeasures

Private use of this data is as worrying as government use. More so. States are often democratically accountable

I built one of the first location aggregation systems. Maybe the first, hard to be sure. My company had close relationships with all of the US cellular companies and built white label apps for them, mostly under the auspices of family safety (though many users were more concerned about the location of their partners than of their kids).

Around the same time OAuth 1a came out and it seemed like a great ideal to offer a platform that leveraged these relationships to sell location to app developers, subject to consent and with a bunch of features to protect privacy.

In the end, we had one app developer who was even remotely successful and the less privacy-focused aggregators partnered with the next generation of app developers and the product had no future.

Nostalgia is fun.

> In the years since CALEA was passed it has been greatly expanded to include all VoIP and broadband Internet traffic.

the article makes it sound like LE is freely able to tap any VoIP call. how would that work?

i thought the usual setup for a VoIP call is SIP to ring the other party (which is partially secured), followed by ICE/STUN/TURN for the parties to find the most direct route between them, followed by the actual audio stream. do clients just not encrypt the audio stream? do carriers MITM everything downstream of that first SIP hop? (that would be inconsistent with the read-only probing suggested: “hardware taps or switch/router mirror-ports are employed to deliver copies of all of a network's data to dedicated IP probes.”).

Also we need better education about the risks of carrying around an always-on GPS receiver that continually transmits your location to third parties.

Victim-blaming? Maybe. But you can choose to turn your phone off.

I wouldn't say it's characteristically fascist, but your instinct that all this will end poorly is probably right. Ever since the Snowden leaks, we've known that multiple nations built up a digital power disparity that can stockpile exploits and apply them for petty purposes. NSO Group proved that it can be done practically silently, to any phone, with no extra software. Situations like the Canada/India murder probe also recently suggested that supposedly-secure channels can be intercepted anyways. One can only imagine what China or the NSA is fully capable of today.

So far we've avoided catastrophe, but it does feel increasingly like the surveillance and internet control lines have already been drawn. I'd hear out anyone who wants to steelman a nicer interpretation of things, though!

> it isn’t the definition of fascism when corporations collude with governments

(As this question only makes sense to ask if you meant "isn't it" rather than "it isn't", I'm going to make the obvious assumption)

That's the first time I've heard this definition for fascism.

Normally it's defined as authoritarian nationalism, having a centralised autocratic dictatorial leader, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and propaganda to support the belief in some natural social hierarchy to maintain all that.

There was a time I would have agreed abuses like these would end badly, but after seeing the effects of the Snowden and Wikileaks revelations about how nihilistic and evil our institutions can be, I doubt the reaction to these or other surveillance realities will come to much. The main effect of those disclosures was a rise in populism, but even with the loss of the White House for a term, it had no lasting impact and that populist reaction has been effectively quashed.

If you want to effect change, get in earlier when it's still just the crazy fringe talking about it, like 25 years ago, or 25 years from now, and maybe you can steer the course away from the next one.

>I that this is going to end much more badly than people realize.

The state of web surveillance today will seem quaint compared to what's coming. Things like Quest 3 and Apple Vision are going to be just the beginning of it, but once everyone is walking around with AR devices, you will have no option of opting out of the point cloud. These companies will have a realtime graph of where and what everyone in public is doing at all times, even those who've never used any services. It's terrifying.

It's the inverse. In a fascist government I'd expect the administration to effectively control the markets and corporations; however, I think this move is the corporations effectively controlling and attempting to supplant the government. It's the perverted idea of "stakeholder capitalism" taken to it's natural conclusion.

What's been more annoying is that the government directly uses these services on their websites.

for example dmv.ca.gov and irs.gov both use google throughout their site.

Things break down when the government wants identity, or captcha or other things, and lets google be the solution.

> Someone once said: "A democracy with advanced tech is less free than a dictatorship with primitive technology"

Someone was an idiot. They should read about life in ancient Egypt, Inquisition-era Spain, Nazi Germany or the GDR, each of which was less technologically advanced than Switzerland, New Zealand, Denmark, Estonia or Ireland today [1].

[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/freedom-i...