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Comment by chasil | Hacker News Reader

I have never been to Spain, and I have only slight familiarity with issues in Barcelona and greater Catalonia, but this gives me pause:

"There’s a bitter irony here, too, as GrapheneOS recently pointed out in a tweet. The Spanish region of Catalonia was at the center of the massive Pegasus spyware scandal in 2019.

"Pegasus, a sophisticated surveillance tool sold exclusively to governments, was reportedly used to hack phones belonging to Members of the European Parliament and eavesdrop on their communications. Yet, police in this very region are now scrutinizing savvy Pixel and GrapheneOS users for hardening their devices against unlawful surveillance and other attack vectors."

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All this surveillance tech and law enforcement still don't know who the child abusers on the Epstein list/island were.

Something tells me domestic surveillance is only applied to peasants not the wealthy and powerful.

Oh they know https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjPHq-Ez0nc

Or maybe the democracies at the centre of the Epstein issue have constitutional protections limiting how dragnets get used.

what is five eyes?

Five Eyes is (or was, as its status is undetermined) an intelligence sharing agreement between the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. Each nation has to abide by its own constitution and intelligence gathering limits. For example, the United States generally refrains from sharing intelligence on American citizens with other Five Eyes partners. Canada generally won’t share information on people who only hold Canadian citizenship, etc.

Couldn’t you have googled that?

The poster knows the answer. It was a rhetorical question. Five Eyes is the thing countries with "constitutional protections" use to cheat their way around those protections. The US isn't allowed to spy on US citizens without a warrant but the other countries can do it and then provide the results to the US and vice versa.

And if they're going to be allowed to cheat then why hasn't the cheating done any good?

I personally take issue with this because it can be used by the USA to effectively target data protected under EU's GDPR, because the US has an agreement with Israel to send and share raw, non minimized, sigint without going through legal loopholes to sign proper consents within the US Agencies chain of command as required by the 2023 EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework.

I understand the US' companies and the War in Ukraine made a lot of pressure on EU's lawmakers, but the lawmakers basically nullified the scope of GDPR (military side, in a world where being able to control domestic SIGINT is king), and made EU' domestic companies unable to compete against foreign ones with one single decision (economic side).

It was just irresponsible.

What kind of power and leverage does the EU have in cases like these to say 'NO'?

Judging by recent display of ass licking it does not look like the EU has any say in a matter

Force removal from Mobile App Stores, make EU companies avoid implementing their Pixels or Services or face fines, etc.

2022-2023 for example a lot of companies removed their Analytics and Pixels js, because some EU members agencies (Spain and Italy to be precise) started making pilot cases against domestic companies.

It did work though, EU companies could either take an enourmous cost to properly implement these (ie. by local proxy sending only minimized data) or remove them in favor of EU tracking companies. A lot of similar suits followed with cases against Meta.

By 2023 it was clear the EU would make a political deal with the US so companies restored the defaults, without making the necessary anonymization changes.

Ever heard of the “Patriot” Act? Or was that sarcasm?

>Something tells me domestic surveillance is only applied to peasants not the wealthy and powerful.

Well not only surveillance, but also things like 'law', 'constitution', etc. applies only to the peasants.

Isn't the theory that this is because Clinton was one of them, and he was president at the time?

Even if Trump was one of them, he had no power at that time, so couldn't have done anything to stop (or bury) the surveillance, but Clinton could.

> Something tells me domestic surveillance is only applied to peasants not the wealthy and powerful.

I suspect it's applied to them even more than the rest (ordinary people are not that interesting to surveil), the question actually is what is done with the surveillance afterward.

> Clinton was one of them, and he was president at the time?

The mass surveillance state didn't really get going until George W.

Epstein had better surveillance on his activities than the government.

> Even if Trump was one of them, he had no power at that time, so couldn't have done anything to stop (or bury) the surveillance, but Clinton could.

Who was president at the time Epstein told a reporter he had blackmail material on rich & powerful, later was arrested (and his blackmail material collected from his properties), and finally placed in a facility that had trouble following standard prison procedures while awaiting trial?

>(and his blackmail material collected from his properties)

I'm betting those weren't the only copies of the blackmail material. What are the odds Mossad and other intelligence agencies also have them?

>"Something tells me domestic surveillance is only applied to peasants not the wealthy and powerful."

I think all are surveilled no matter the status. Acting upon it is a different matter of course.

> applied to

> Acting upon it

Same same.

they know, they don't want to tell us, so as to maintain said power structure.

Of course they know....

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