Widespread FBI abuse of foreign spy law sets off "alarm bells," tech group says
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
IMO, this is the most infuriating aspect about the censorship push of the past few years. They've already been suppressing freedom of speech using people's livelihoods as a covert form of blackmail... But that wasn't enough and so they had to break the pretense and engage is overt censorship.
Literally everyone who works for a corporation engages in regular self-censorship. This implies that they believe that they may be reprimanded for speaking their thoughts. As someone who has actually spoken their thoughts, I can tell you that it's more than just a belief! The consequences are real.
The executives responsible stepped over the line and should be tried and jailed.
Speak for yourself! I work in the private sector and I can’t think of any way my speech is circumscribed by that - unless of course I tried to discuss politics in the workplace, which is simply frowned upon because it’s cringe.
Higher power / natural law
v
Irrevocable natural rights of individuals
v
Revocable rights given to the state for the common good
…
We can revoke the government’s mandate to rule us at any time. I understand people may have forgotten, or don’t know or have the background to understand, or maybe even don’t care. But that doesn’t change anything about the natural order or founding principles.
The system we are currently headed towards:
State
v
Subjects
This is monarchy / totalitarianism, and while it may be done for all the right reasons, it’s stepping backwards in terms of what’s good for the world, the progress of civilization, and is a failure to learn the profound lessons of the enlightenment that unleashed the greatest period of technology innovation and unrivaled economic expansion in history.
Authoritarianism is looming in the US and elsewhere; I worry about the efforts to "burn down the corruption" being replanted with a new authoritarian replacement.
But these changes don’t usually happen until we have atrociously difficult or insanely outrageous behavior from the government, or conditions that are incredibly poor. People don’t make these kinds of changes easily and will argue for the status quo until the very, very last opportunity generally. At that point it is an inevitability…
Still, worthy point.
There is still hope for reform.
If folks don’t know already they should realize that section 702 was only passed after it became public that this surveillance was already happening with questionable legal authority.
Maybe some us based tech giants could do something about it or just not go and fuck over any non US based service
I guess Big Brother trumps petty partisanship concerns.
NYT had an article a few months ago (I submitted it here) attacking Republicans for turning against the FBI and saying this would put an end to sedition 702. Guess that was them panicking over nothing.
Your only options to vote for if you dislike mass surveillance are hard left progressives (Bernie Sanders, Ron Wyden) or libertarians (though the ones who run with the republicans are unreliable on this issue).
If your implication is that Trump is somehow truly against the spooks, just remember how eager he was to deploy federal marshals to cities like Portland and Seattle to round up protestors. Look to his past comments about the spooks. Before he was on their shit-list, he would make comments like this: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-insists-...
I don't know if either of the protests accomplished anything, as populist causes.
It's still a 50/50 what Floyd actually died from, since there were multiple contributing medical factors. Billions in economic damages from the looting/shut downs during the protests in these cities, something like 20+ were killed during the riots. The police are still funded.
Despite his rhetoric, in hindsight, Trump was politically savvy enough not to take the bait and send in the army to restore order. Which Miley was Chomping at the Bit to refuse. Trump would be in a prison cell today at best.
The J6 protest, turned into riot and delegitimized Trumps legitimate claims of election irregularities. No meaningful signature check has been done to this day.
Trump is currently beating Biden in polls, so he might be back.
Or did he/one of his loyalists just /say/ that? I'm genuinely curious because I thought all legal defenses were allowed to read the discovery.
Get your gpg infrastructure in place, comrades. Find those old motherboards and dubious laptops and airgap them.
The final line will come down to whether or not we can do math of our own choice on machines of our disposition.