Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state
greenwald.substack.com
greenwald.substack.com
>It is always the case that there are benefits available from relinquishing core civil liberties: allowing infringements on free speech may reduce false claims and hateful ideas; allowing searches and seizures without warrants will likely help the police catch more criminals, and do so more quickly; giving up privacy may, in fact, enhance security.
> But the core premise of the West generally, and the U.S. in particular, is that those trade-offs are never worthwhile. Americans still all learn and are taught to admire the iconic (if not apocryphal) 1775 words of Patrick Henry, which came to define the core ethos of the Revolutionary War and American Founding: “Give me liberty or give me death.” It is hard to express in more definitive terms on which side of that liberty-versus-security trade-off the U.S. was intended to fall.
And if you don't get the security you were promised, it's too late to do anything about it.
The key phrase is "a little temporary safety". 250 years ago people understood that the "security" gains were small and fleeting, but the loss of liberty was massive and permanent.
He's saying the local democratic legislature must not give up its "freedom" to pass laws taxing the powerful Penn dynasty which almost owns Pennsylvania.
He wants to reject a deal offered by the Penns: A big lump of money for temporary military security now, in exchange for an agreement that they can never be taxed ever again.
It's not pernicious for any reason because it's absolutely true in general, Franklin was simply using a general piece of wisdom to justify particular government actions.
Yes, using it that way was an improvisation and a bit of a stretch, but the real issue here is why he needed to resort to it - that's a rabbit hole that pretty much goes to the bottom of today's problems which we're handling in a much worse manner than him back then.
The quote is in defense of the government: WITTES: It is a quotation that defends the authority of a legislature to govern in the interests of collective security. It means, in context, not quite the opposite of what it's almost always quoted as saying but much closer to the opposite than to the thing that people think it means.
https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou...
“The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few…”
(/s)
Thanks for educating us!
If our democracy is sufficiently broken, if supermajority voter policy preferences continue to be dismissed by both parties, it might be that we just cannot survive under the old Constitutional order. The Right's open move towards a post-democratic future, and the proceduralist Center's continued failure to fully utilize their popular mandate to fix things that need fixing, implicitly authorizes a Left to develop that is more obsessed with expression of the popular will and with good governance, than it is with a 250 year old bureaucratic structure and "norms". Norms of restraint are a consensual exercise, and cannot persist unilaterally.
The way things are going, the trajectory, make even most 20th century hereditary monarchies look pretty decent. Especially ones that devolve most power to parliamentary bodies.
Autocracies have lots of issues around eg building a sufficiently capable bureaucracy that isn't too corrupt to do things. It can make it harder, not easier. Democracy can lean on democratic legitimacy, constitutional traditions, and a history of allowing power transitions without anyone losing their heads or launching a civil war over it. Those are all really useful things that autocracies have to cope without. It's not like it's easy mode.
Almost every bill for the past 15 years has been filibustered. More than half the Supreme Court is part of an organized partisan conspiracy, and a third has worked specifically fighting election laws to advantage their guy. The DHS stands as a rogue paramilitary that can be deployed when politically convenient as de facto martial law, the DOJ openly persecuting ethnically defined political opponents and daring Congress to do anything about it, when they're not trying to charge Congresspeople with crimes. People are being disappeared into concentration camps. We are unilaterally withdrawing from the military and economic empire that has served us since the 1940's, in the name of ethnic hatreds and Hitlerian brinksmanship. The economy now has more to do with the Fed chair than any pathetic exchange of goods and services we can string together.
This doesn't end well, and it's broken enough already that a return to Biden/Obama/Clinton type leadership couldn't possibly hope to fix it unless they can lock down leadership for the next couple generations; More damage can be done in a month than they can fix in four years. "Just win every election from now until the end of time" isn't a real strategy.
I don't know what comes next, but if we choose to burn the house down today rather than practice good maintenance, the next homeowner cannot succeed by employing good maintenance.
Similarly, if the neighbor burns your house down deliberately because he hates you, and you start the rebuild process without doing anything about your neighbor's existence, you shouldn't be surprised if you end up with more ashes.
> There's no government as effective at instituting necessary changes as a benevolent autocracy
The world is so complex that a single person or group can adapt and develop fast enough. We've seen what happens to planned economies. Their ineffectiveness is not due to malevolence.
Distribution of power not only serves as a protection to autocratic takeover but allows the system to be more flexible. The concentration of power can make some things more efficient but you trade flexibility.
Probably because Franklin most certainly thought himself to be writing on behalf of the people and was making a direct appeal that they assert their right to govern themselves rather than letting powerful private interests do as they wished.
That's not equally relevant everywhere the quote gets used, but it seems pretty relevant here, no?
And for me, it seems somewhat disingenuous to imply that a decision is being made when your premise belies that.
It's not like pre-Revolutionary America was a notably secure place that inevitably see-sawed into a freer but insecure place afterwards.
That is 1) presented without evidence and 2) almost certainly false. It is not always the case.
1. Don't give up liberty, give up security.
2. Give up liberty, give up security.
3. Give up liberty, don't give up security.
4. Don't give up liberty, don't give up security.
Number 4 is completely possible. It's just that people in power don't like it because it means they have less power. They want to pretend that only options 1 and 3 are available and ignore that they are actually offering option 2.
But I will say I don't think you should say "options," but rather "possibilities." "Options" implies that all four are actually available. I don't think you get to assume that 4 is possible without offering evidence.
However, in general, they are not exclusive. This has been demonstrated fairly often. In fact, it is often the case that maximizing liberty leads to more security.
https://www.culturaldiplomacy.org/europeanamericanrelationsh...
https://www.securityanddemocracy.org/post/beyond-the-false-c...
It wasn't a nitpick by the way. I deeply resent American using "the West" like if my own country and culture was somehow fungible in their experience. They are not. We don't have that much in common. That doesn't include a legal tradition, or a conception of what freedom of speech should be, neither does it include values or history.
Edit: Enjoy downvoting me. It doesn't make what I said any less true. If you think the various European countries can be grouped with the US in a coherent whole, you are deeply deluding yourselves. They can't even be lumped together.
Grouping terms like "the west" can be broad enough to include over half of all living humans or so narrow that it applies to a small village.
It is, admittedly, not a particularly useful term, but it's not like americans are reaponsible for it.
> Where have you seen it used outside of Americans
Well, there was this minor thing called "the western roman empire" for a few years, so that might be a starting point.
I am fascinated to learn how a claim that westerners "prefer liberty over security" is somehow erasing your culture though.
I lived in Germany for a while. Germany is definitely a part of "the West", have been the defining border with "the East" in the Cold War. Germans do not share a cultural viewpoint about liberty and security with the USA. So claiming that westerners "prefer liberty over security" while also including Germans (and others) in the definition of "the West" is absolutely erasing their culture.
I got that bit from wikipedia, it amused me.
As for germans, if they do not share such a viewpoint (and now I want evidence either way), the claim about the west is merely wrong, not "cultural erasure".
The original claim was something about liberty and security and no one in this chain seems interested in bringing in any actual specifics about who thinks what where.
I generally prefer the term "Anglosphere" to refer to only the bits of "the West" that share that cultural viewpoint when I'm discussing cultural matters. It's not perfect, but it's useful.
Given the widening gap between the USA and Europe (and Canada) in economic and military matters, I'm not sure how much longer "the West" is going to be useful.
Essentially the major societies before ended up in local maximums because they didn’t have the ruthlessness of capitalism or the economic desperation to adopt technologies that in the short term would unemploy large portions of society and wipe out old power structures.
I think it's accurate to say that all the wealthiest (per capita) economies in history - i.e., the wealthiest economies over the last ten years - are in free societies.
I tend to agree, though it's of course hard to prove. However, I'm talking about the present, not the past.
> There are no human rights for the lowest castes in Hinduism
I said it is "very widespread", not everywhere. Perhaps the confusion is the word Universal: that doesn't mean everyone believes it (false for any belief), but that everyone has the rights, whether or not they know or can exercise them. It's the concept that starts the Declaration of Independence: All are created equal, and all have inalienable rights.
> there were nothing like the modern idea of human rights in Japan or China before they westernized
I am talking about the present, where it's adopted in East Asia (including in China - Taiwan, Hong Kong (though suppressed now), June 4 on the mainland), throughout Latin America, Europe of course, parts of Africa, the Anglo world, etc.
> there are no human rights for polytheists in Islam,
There is no country called 'Islam'; if we go by scripture, nobody has human rights. The idea that all practicioners of Islam have the same beliefs is as true as saying all practicioners of Christianity do - and look at HN.
In Indonesia, the largest majority Muslim country, there are human rights, also in India, with the largest Muslim population (but not the majority). I think Pakistan and some South Asian countries probably have them enshrined.
What's mostly missing is the Middle East, Central Asia, parts of SE Asia, and large parts of Africa - though there are Benin, Botswana, Kenya, and many others iirc.
Quotes are pointless, discussion should be limited to what's happening on the ground. For any given thing that happens, do we think that it, specifically, is helpful or harmful.
It's trivial to reverse that quote: we can, and have, pushed to keep the US population armed with increasingly-advanced personal weapons (in the name of liberty) without actually gaining any protection against authoritarian styles of government use of force or surveillance as a result. While just making civilian-on-civilian violence easier and more lethal.
Does anyone actually have any idea what's actually happening "on the ground?"
> without actually gaining any protection against authoritarian styles of government use of force
There are three weapons for every man, woman, and child in the USA. You may enjoy more of this protection than you realize.
> While just making civilian-on-civilian violence easier and more lethal.
80% of murders happen after an argument. More suicides happen by firearm than murders by a factor of 2:1. States with lower population densities like Alaska have 6x the suicide rate of states with higher densities like New York. There's a reason people aren't given these statistics.
According to https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/05/what-the-..., this is true (if you squint) for 2023 (actually in 2023 murders were 38% of gun deaths, suicides and "others" add up to 62%, so 1.6 to 1), but the ratio varies widely for other years. According to the graph https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/05/what-the-..., murders and suicides were much closer together in 2021 - after that, the number of murders has dropped, while the number of suicides kept increasing.
Americans are not safer then people in other comparable countries. They get shot more often.
In particular, they are much more likely to be shot by cops. And one of the hardest thing a layer can do is to prosecute a cop for it - they are simply untouchable unless stars align just right.
What do you mean by that? You just gave people those statistics and they are widely available if people would want to look them up afaik.
Who should give other people statistics?
No, that's a gross misrepresentation of what he said and meant. Patrick Henry was referring exclusively to political liberty from British colonial rule. There is no sense whatsoever in which he was referring to civil liberties against domestic rule. It didn't have a single thing to do with "security".
> But the core premise of the West generally, and the U.S. in particular, is that those trade-offs are never worthwhile.
Also totally false. This is the core premise of libertarians in the West, who are, and always have been, a minority. It is not, and has never been, the "core premise" of the West or the US. Or else, quite obviously, we wouldn't have the constant tension between these liberties and the need for security. The idea that "those trade-offs are never worthwhile" is not a core American idea. We make those tradeoffs every single day. And continue to argue about them, e.g. over what degree of gun control is proper after each school shooting that happens.
Many in American history have noted that America is a kind of natural fortress protected by ocean moats. What that assumption just did not take into account is how America’s enemies would take action against America with that assumption taken as granted. It has come in the form of endless amounts of infiltration, subversion, corruption, and pollution… as any half-witted strategist and saboteur would have done. America was simply not sophisticated enough to realize that massive threat, because the leaders relied on that assumption that the USA is an impenetrable fort; never considering what happens if your fort is infiltrated through the many different means you open yourself up to being infiltrated.
America, a genuine America or whatever one can scrape together to consider as such, not just one that emulates and imitates like some kind of container cult, is really not long for this world. Another 20 years and Americas simile stops existing in anything but name only, if that, since there’s not even any reason or incentive anymore to keep the name out the branding at that point.
What do we call this place post America? Maybe we just come right out and just call it Oceania.
I know you're making a point by linking it to 1984, but Oceania is a real name for a continent.
The problem America(complimentary) is currently facing is the rebound of America(derogatory). It has elected its own Peron, and is turning into a dysfunctional South American country, driven by exactly the same forces.
When the check and balance got tipped over, all this promised "security" will only surface when it benefits the regime.
I'm still amused by a certain ccp propaganda video my parents consumed that boast about how quickly the cctv networks helped catch a thief who stole a foreign tourist's phone, yet those cameras would also conveniently stop working at a specific day whenever a highschooler went missing in the campus.
All the prerequisite for a similar dystopia is already in place in the US and there is may be one more chance to fix it, although I wouldn't hold my breathe.
I frankly see it as a liberty to be able to use this tech, and it would be tyranny to prevent us from using it.
Wuh? I was a paramedic who probably has responded to nearly 1,000 fentanyl abuse patients.
I've never seen one who is all busy-beavering looking for homes to surreptitiously spy in kids bedrooms.
Symptoms of fentanyl use include: extreme drowsiness, poor responsiveness, nodding off, profound confusion and inability to focus on even simple acts, delayed reactions, poor body control.
The idea of a bunch of fent users sneaking around neighborhoods trying to be pedophiliac perverts seems far more right-wing fearmongering than anything based in reality.
> The idea of a bunch of fent users sneaking around neighborhoods trying to be pedophiliac perverts seems far more right-wing fearmongering than anything based in reality.
This is why I hate the far right and the far left. The far left is like "we should just let the fent users steal all of our stuff because they are humans to! Let them poop freely on the sidewalks!", the far right are like "Those are all illegal immigrants lets deport them to El Salvadore". As a moderate, I hate both sides. It is just too bad that Trump is in power right now so the far left gets a huge electoral boost in local elections.
I think it should come natural to engineers because I see it as similar to failure engineering, but for the legal system. When you engineer a bridge, building, or even a program you build failure modes into them. Not to cause them to fail but to control fails. A simple version is "fail open" vs "fail closed". A bank safe that fails, fails closed. It is locked and you need to drill it open. Same with an encrypted harddrive but no drill... But a locked door in a public building will typically want to fail opened, least you trap people inside during a fire. A more complex example is the root of a conspiracy. When a tall building collapses you tend to want it to fall in on itself so it doesn't take out neighboring skyscrapers...
So Blackstone's Ratio (and Franklin's recounting) is similar. It asks "which mode of failure is better? That innocent man are condemned or that guilty men go free?" This is a question we must all ask ourselves least we back ourselves into a corner. There's no perfect solution. We don't want failure, we should reduce it as much as possible, but if/when it fails, which outcome do you prefer?
I'll link the wiki but the topic is so famous you'll find a million and I'm pretty sure it's taught in every law school in America
If the people on charge of deciding when to use the cameras were morally perfect, we have all the upside and none of the downside.
The problem is we live in a fallen world and that will simply never work.
Nevertheless it is a siren song that causes us to repeatedly make the wrong trade
derp
While I agree with Henry, and intend for _my_ life and social impact to fall there, "where the U.S. was intended to fall" is a misnomer here. That quote was one man's opinion. The U.S. is millions of living beings who, if they have liberty, should get to do whatever they want with it (which in itself is an oxymoron).
1. Postal Service Act of 1792
2. Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986
Anyway, Facebook can read your DMs, Google can read your email, Ring can take photos from your camera.
We can very easily make those things a crime, but we don't seem to want to do it.
Accept that many folks are built differently than you and me and stuff like actual freedom you may be willing to lay your life for may be meaningless fart for others, especially when its not hurting them now. For example US folks voted current admin willingly second time and even after a full year of daily FUBARs the support is still largely there. If even pedophilia won't move some 'patriots' then reading some communication doesn't even register as a topic.
Also, anybody actually concerned about even slightest privacy would never, ever buy such products, not now not a decade earlier. Ie for my family I don't even see any added value of such devices, just stupid fragile something I have no control over, but it sees everything. Why?
If anyone with power picks and chooses who gets justice then there is no justice, those people are corrupt, and they need to be removed from power and charged.
Whatabout whatabout whatabout. Charge, try, and imprison the guilty regardless of how much money they have, which political party they are part of, or how they vote. Anything else is madness.
They put Ghislaine Maxwell in jail then had to wait until her appeal about Epstein's immunity deal made it to the Supreme Court.
Comments like these are a distraction. All we need to do is get to work. If people took action every time they felt like posting these comments, we'd get a lot done.
Well, except that you have debts like mortgages and car loans to pay off. And your kids need to participate in extra-curriculars so they can get into a good school, and those cost money. And theaters are out of fashion now, so you'll need to buy that 80" TV with the surround sound so you can have a theater at home. And your shows are now on 6 different streaming services so that'll cost a little extra each month. And life really is easier with AI, but they all have strengths and weaknesses so you'll probably want to pay for 2, if not 3 of them. And your fast fashion gets threadbare after 20 or 30 washes so you'll need to regularly order 3 or 4 replacement shirts so you can send back the 2 that don't fit quite right.
Anyways back to the gears and whee.... oh look a squirrel!
Which changes? metoo certainly didn't change much, the George Floyd protests also led to nothing, just look at how ICE has been executing US citizens in the last months. In 2025 alone, before Renee Good and Alex Pretti, ICE murdered 32 people with zero accountability [1].
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/...
Shot. Killed. Executing is a ridiculously inaccurate framing bordering on rage baiting. And that is before we get to whether Pretti or Good were committing felonies, when they were willfully obstructing federal agents from doing the job they were assigned.
Even if one assumes that to be true: there might have been a case for an arrest, but not for firing into a moving vehicle that is forbidden even under ICE guidelines, and certainly not for unloading a whole magazine worth of ammunition into an unarmed person.
I stand by my judgement: both cases were extrajudicial killings and clear enough in their intent to be called executions.
Pretti may have had an accidental discharge of his gun, which he took to a confrontation with law enforcement. Sad and foolish way to go out, seemed like a suicide by cop situation to me.
Everything I just wrote is opinion, just like everything you wrote. Who is right? Maybe neither of us, it's complicated/messy.
Considering only the timing of these events, I conclude this ice stuff is poorly concocted psyops meant to enrage people and distract from other news.
Defund the police is a loser latest craze issue engineered by scoundrels, no matter how you package it.
And I think you're misremembering the world before #metoo and George Floyd. Regarding the latter, police used to widely behave like ICE; now it's anathema - at least in cities. None of them help ICE afaik.
The conservatives like to preach hopelessness to their enemies - for obvious reasons, an age-old tactic - saying things like protests accomplish nothing (obviously false), these movements did nothing. The wierd part is, their enemies have picked up that argument and make it themselves. They simply and bizarrely have disarmed themselves, but they had and have the power the entire time.
That is precisely why I didn't mention these.
> Regarding the latter, police used to widely behave like ICE; now it's anathema - at least in cities. None of them help ICE afaik.
They still kill people en masse [1], still overwhelmingly non-White people, and the number only increased over the years. It's good that police and National Guards (at least in Minneapolis) are on the side of the people, but as a system, police in the US is still loving to kill people.
And the GOP had DC tear apart the last visual reminder, the Black Lives Matter road mural [2] under extortionist threats.
> The wierd part is, their enemies have picked up that argument and make it themselves. They simply and bizarrely have disarmed themselves, but they had and have the power the entire time.
Similar to the Epstein Files, what should have happened in response to metoo and George Floyd/BLM was action that went beyond symbolism. Actual prosecution and judgement of people found to be in violation of the law and making sure that the conditions leading to these events will not repeat. But that was not done - movie sets got intimacy coordinators, Washington DC the BLM mural... while Weinstein got at least one conviction overturned on technicialities and Chauvin got moved to a low security prison [3].
Of course particularly the young generations are angry. Absolutely vile and horrible things can happen without any impactful action afterwards. And that's before we even go into the mess that is the Epstein Files, with Maxwell hoping for a pardon of all things after being moved to a minimum security facility already [4]. She does not deserve even one single day in freedom in her life again. Or before we touch the mess that is Jan 6th 2021, with Trump handing out pardons like others hand out candy [5]. Attempt a fucking putsch and get off scot free? WTF is this shit? In many other countries, putschists get hanged in the streets, as a warning sign to others.
To sum it up: there have been no meaningful results and changes from either of these events. And that is why there are so many voices on the progressive left calling for the removal of, amongst others, Chuck Schumer and other high-ranking Democrats in favor of people like Mamdani on one side, and mob justice aka the plumber's brother on the other side. Some still have faith in democracy itself but just demand better representatives and leaders, but others deem executing people like insurance CEOs the only way forward. And personally? I don't condone acts of violence like this, but I understand where they are coming from - a completely shattered trust in the ability of the government to hold bad actors accountable and improve the lives of the wide masses.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2025/03/08/nx-s1-5321872/dc-black-lives-...
[3] https://www.npr.org/2024/08/21/g-s1-18339/ex-officer-convict...
[4] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czd049y2qymo
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardon_of_January_6_United_Sta...
> what should have happened in response to metoo and George Floyd/BLM was action that went beyond symbolism.
There was and is:
Laws have been passed in many places protecting rights. Oppressive systems like bail have been reformed in many places. Progressive prosecutors were elected around the country - some still are in office. Even the other prosecutors have (often) stopped backing law enforcement corruption. In some places, police have been prosecuted and jailed for the first time.
I think people overlook it for a common reason: Many things that were disruptive change then became the norm, so people don't notice them. As they say about innovation: First they laugh at you (ridicule your idea), then they say it's not in the Bible (violates the established orthodoxy), then they say they knew it all along. :)
> And the GOP had DC tear apart the last visual reminder, the Black Lives Matter road mural [2] under extortionist threats.
Maybe the last reminder in DC, which I doubt. I see plenty of BLM signs (and LGTBQ+ pride flags) in cities.
You do have a point in there. The problem IMHO is communication: silent progress just isn't enough with such glaring abuses of power.
> Maybe the last reminder in DC, which I doubt. I see plenty of BLM signs (and LGTBQ+ pride flags) in cities.
That's private persons that float these. The DC mural was a public admission by a government entity that they don't stand for such behavior, and that is what made ripping it out so powerful symbolically. The teardown was a very public symbol of "we shit on anything DEI".
Beyond that, there is no consensus on any of these gobbledygook movements - all these comments up and down these threads make the implicit assumption that we all agree.
Why is everyone suddenly outraged Ring has access to your footage? These cloud-connected cameras...hosted on someone else's servers. It's literally how they work. "But I didn't think they would use the video in a way I didn't personally approve after giving it to them!"
So instead, people are rage-returning Ring cameras and posting their receipts and exchanging them for...Chinese cameras. Which do the same thing, except this time the servers are overseas and completely uncontrolled.
It's hard to have any empathy when the warning label was already on the box for all these products.
This is exactly the sort of thing there should be legislation for. To a somewhat weaker extent than I’d like this is what GDPR and friends covers, the law says that companies must state what data they’re gathering and what purposes they’re gathering it for. If they overreach then they can be fined into oblivion.
In practice this is not as strong as it should be, broadly companies can and do basically go “we’re collecting all your data for whatever purpose we like” and get away with it, but they do at least think carefully about doing so.
There’s no reason we can’t force providers of cloud backed devices to treat your data with respect, rather than thinking of it as residual income they’re leaving on the table if they don’t also sell it to third parties for data mining.
The fault is not with the idea of expecting that you own the data that you made and the equipment that you purchased. The fault here is the regulatory structure that makes you by default not the owner of your data or your things.
When private data sources are being used to drive government enforcement actions (ICE), I think the reality has gone beyond Snowden.
These constructions feel too simplistic to capture anything useful.
My credit card company can see my transactions. My medical provider can read my medical records. People who hire house cleaners let people see inside their house.
It's commonly accepted that when you engage with a company for business purposes, they can see things involved in your business with them.
The problem with the Ring situation isn't that Ring can "see" your video cameras. It's that they were using the information for things outside of the scope of business that was implied when you bought the camera.
People don't care if a Google bot "reads" their e-mail for spam filtering. They don't care if a contractor sees the inside of their house during construction. What they do care about is if the other party tries to use that access for something outside of the scope that was agreed upon.
> It's hard to have any empathy when the warning label was already on the box for all these products.
These snooty takes where we're supposed to look down upon others for having reasonable assumptions about usage of their data are why it's so hard to get the general public to care about privacy. It's unnecessarily condescending for what? To look down upon people or play "told you so" games? If privacy advocates want to get anywhere they need to distance themselves from people who run with this kind of attitude.
There was that google engineer who was reading kids emails to groom them.
If someone can abuse something, you should expect it will be abused and you might not expect the avenue of abuse.
I get what you are trying to say, that its outcomes that are important. But you cant just hand everything over and trust.
> These snooty takes where we're supposed to look down upon others for having reasonable assumptions about usage of their data are why it's so hard to get the general public to care about privacy.
In addition: it’s not just the Ring camera installer whose rights are being violated (to be optimistic), it’s everyone who walks past on the sidewalk.
Privacy is a public good.
And it’s so long gone nobody (in the US or UK at least) can see a way to get it back.
Which Chinese cameras do this? I've only seen some dumb IP cams.
yitechnology.com
https://www.amazon.com/stores/YI/page/DA1FB96F-810D-4062-8CD...
The Chinese or Russian or whatever government is not sending thugs with guns to my doorstep over petty matters and if they did I would likely, depending on the exact details be within my rights to resist them with violence.
You can't say that about the federal/state/local government.
China set up secret police stations in the US. Which doesn't detract from your point, but just in case you didn't know.
No, the right thing to do is to buy an IP camera (most of which are made in China), firewall it, and send the footage to a local NVR. At no point should the camera speak to the open Internet.
It's the same principle with any Internet-of-Shit device -- it's not allowed to communicate over the Internet, period. At that point, any built-in backdoor or anti-feature becomes irrelevant.
>we don't seem to want to
Congress protects only itself and its actual constituents — wealthy corporate persons.
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Citizens United (2012) and the surveillances themselves make this monitoring self-capturing: the only way to prevent it is to convince most people to not install, but most people want the installed benefits.
Even getting your neighbors to re-position their Ring cameras (which they have every right to install) can become very difficult.
After city councils individually ban Flock-like CCTV traffic monitoring within their jurisdictions, their police can (and often do) still access neighboring jurisdictions' to monitor border crossings. You can't escape This System, even without license plates nor cell phones.
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Term Limits now? end Citizens United. release The Files!
[0] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/mike-joh...
Robert Bork (sorry to add my personal commentary but an absolute shit stain of a human being) was nominated for the Supreme Court (which, thankfully, he always not confirmed), and a reporter went to a video rental store and asked for his rental history, which there was no law against. The published article didn't include much, as Bork hadn't rented any particularly salacious material, but there was bipartisan outrage that this had occurred.
Just goes to show how far we've fallen when there was once bipartisan outrage over accessing your Blockbuster rental history, when tech giants now have 10 times as much surveillance on you - your 1 am "shower thoughts" in your search history, all the websites you've visited, all your social media posts, and even social media posts about/including you posted by someone else, everything you've ever commented on a blog forum, your location history, etc.
It's so easy to get rid of a congressman you don't like with term limits. But why do you think, on average, his replacement would be better? The replacement would only be more unknown.
Lesser of two evils sort of thought process...
That could be improved by getting rid of de jure preferential treatment for things like committee memberships. You’d still have informal power from seniority though.
In Germany it's prohibited by law to point your private surveillance camera to public spaces like the boardwalk, no recording of these areas is allowed. I think thats the way it should be. Unfortunately in some areas (e.g. train stations) it is allowed.
Is that what you intend to be arguing for? In any case, there needs to be more nuance in the discussion than a one-liner.
I think the quantity of surveillance matters. When it’s just a few places, then it’s a minor intrusion on liberty. When it’s a lot of places, it’s a major intrusion that will facilitate the (further) rise of authoritarianism.
Well, yeah, I think that was super obvious, no?
> In any case, there needs to be more nuance in the discussion than a one-liner.
Not really. Super public busy places like train stations ought to be surveilled. The benefits far outweigh any cons.
What counts as a "super public busy place" ? The airport? The bus terminal? The local library? All major roads that experience rush hour traffic?
Who is the person who says where the cutoff line is? What if that authority wants to move the line to include everything? Or nothing? Do they even need to provide notice to the public of their actions?
Who should be able to access to all this footage? Public? Government investigative branches only? What about the system administrators?
Does this footage require attestation to prove it's legitimacy in a world where AI can generate footage?
How long should this footage exist for? Do I have to trust not just current admins and their superiors but all the people who may be in those roles in perpetuity? IE do I have to trust people who haven't even been born yet?
Is it allowed to be centralised, so people can easily be tracked from one site to another for every step outside their house? Or should each site have separate data housing with access terms to match so that tracking a person is a significant task?
.. ..
There are a lot of concerns. You may argue that there isn't a lot of nuances because you have a set idea of how it should all go. But others may differ.
There's just....not. It's a pretty well established concept by now. For almost 50 years or so.
> What counts as a "super public busy place" ? The airport? The bus terminal? The local library? All major roads that experience rush hour traffic?
Yes to all of these.
> Who is the person who says where the cutoff line is?
Not a person, but a sound methodology ideally. Kind of like what we've mostly been doing even if it isn't formalized.
> What if that authority wants to move the line to include everything?
Yes, the slippery slope is a problem, agreed. That's why we need to be vigilant in responding to government plans.
> Do they even need to provide notice to the public of their actions?
In a civilized democracy, they should.
> Government investigative branches only?
Yes, pretty much.
> What about the system administrators?
Not if it can be avoided.
> Does this footage require attestation to prove it's legitimacy in a world where AI can generate footage?
No.
> How long should this footage exist for?
3 - 6 months is typically standard.
> Do I have to trust not just current admins and their superiors but all the people who may be in those roles in perpetuity? IE do I have to trust people who haven't even been born yet?
You have to trust the system is accountable.
> Is it allowed to be centralised,
Ideally, no.
> Or should each site have separate data housing with access terms to match so that tracking a person is a significant task?
Bingo.
> There are a lot of concerns. You may argue that there isn't a lot of nuances because you have a set idea of how it should all go. But others may differ.
I'd argue your concerns have already been addressed by current systems that have worked fine for decades.
The issue is that times are changing. "Worked fine for decades" doesn't apply to the Ring Doorbell or Flock. Or that authorities exactly want to have all footage in the one place, from train stations too.
Modern computers allow for scaling of capabilities that are only tolerable at all when limited in number.
IE the capability to track an individual's every movement is tolerable if it is limited in number, has oversight, and only used by appropriate authorities against bad people that everyone can agree are bad.
But being able to track minority groups en masse as modern systems are capable of is clearly an issue.
I see your parameters to the above questions as mostly reasonable although I'd rather not have the cameras everywhere in the first place. But do you think even your reasonable seeming desires are being adhered to?
I don't.
> But do you think your desires are being adhered to?
No, but I think an apathetic population are the problem, and I don't know how to solve it.
It was the thing about "nuances" that bugged me mostly. The nuances determine whether the benefits outweigh the cost.
Appropriately managed isolated systems are fine. Dystopian nightmare is not.
.. and the apathy might doom us all. Thank you for an interesting thread of conversation.
That, and the eagerness for misinformation that fits with preconceptions.
> Thank you for an interesting thread of conversation.
Likewise!
In the case of an attack, I’d wish for a gendarme not a recording that would let me relive the experience.
A gendarme is worse in every way.
So might the cops we already have in such places.
> The security camera will do nothing (but record).
Exactly as intended.
> And having the policeman standing there is about as much a deterrent as a "Smile--You're Being Recorded" sign.
This seems like a weird thing to say. Cops are more of a deterrent than a gendarme.
But there are other ways that we could figure out who to blame after the fact that don't require everything you will ever do to be recorded, forever.
No one said anything about retaining footage forever.
What are your suggestions for help finding an attacker without CCTV footage?
It's inevitably what happens.
I'm going to have to do a hard 'hell no', in that case.
These problems will be solved. Most Americans agree on most things. Don't let the politicians who benefit off of dividing us fool you. An agenda that focuses on reform outside of the usual finger pointing game of partisan politics and promises to enact these reforms without fear or favor will win.
Any such agenda must also be willing to purge itself of any old guard that stands in the way, and treat them as a virus attached to their political movement. There is no benefit from trying to say, make a wedge between a Clinton and a Trump. If you can't get over that you're part of the problem, and this cycle will just continue.
Stop defending an old guard halfway in the grave. Being right doesn't matter in electoral politics, winning does. It is likely the only way to achieve such a broad reform is to be willing to entertain as many incriminations as possible.
Given recent relevations re Epstein this is our best chance to reform corruption in generations. Let's not squander it by defending anyone simply because they fall on one side of a dubious partisan line, or seem "less bad" than another.
The broader the castigation, the more likely to achieve momentum that can actually enact said reforms, given the disadvantages of taking on these vast incumbent interests and a government that is easily susceptible to gridlock driven by a minority.
Citizens United litigated a very specific issue. It was only an issue because Congress had actually passed some meaningful campaign finance reform after many painful years (really decades) of effort. The court essentially kneecapped it overnight on a 5 to 4 basis. Get money out of politics commonly means get dark/pac/corporate money out of politics, not individual donors well within long established FEC limits that these pacs are designed to circumvent.
Again, billionaires live by different rules. This doesn't just apply to taxes, criminal justice, etc it applies to the foundation of our democracy - free and fair elections. What could be more in keeping with the best of American traditions than ensuring our elections are as egalitarian as possible?
Ranked-choice reduces transparency and understanding of the vote-counting process, disenfranchises an alarming percentage of lower-income voters, obstructs risk-limiting audits (which are essential for security), and is non-monotonic (increasing voter support for a candidate can make them lose). Further, ranked-choice doesn't actually fix the spoiler problem and won't eliminate two-party dominance.
Approval voting is cheap and easy to implement, dead simple to explain, count, and audit. Not only does it eliminate the spoiler problem, it is easy to see why it does so: your ability to vote for any candidate is independent of your ability to vote for any other.
Not so dead simple to vote, though. If you're a sincere voter and you prefer Alice to Bob and Bob to Charlie, do you approve of Alice, or both Alice and Bob?
That choice has to be either strategic or very noisy.
There seems to be some unavoidable complexity to voting methods: letting the voter deal with the complexity leads to a method with a very simple algorithm but that's tricky to use. Letting the method itself deal with it leads to more complex algorithms, but makes it easier to vote.
That said, the alternative vote is a bad ranked voting method; with that I do agree. Just beware of the complexity hidden in the system, whether that's Approval or Ranked Pairs.
My position admittedly breaks down when people lie to low-information voters about the fairness of the process - but, in my defence, people will lie about any system that doesn't produce the results they want. I'd prefer they lodge their objections to a better system than first-past-the-post.
if you really want to get into the game theory, here it is. https://www.rangevoting.org/RVstrat6
I know, it sucks. Politics is terrible. But we have some momentum behind RC/IRV so we should use it and stop the single-vote FPTP system that's plagued us for centuries. Anything is better than that. So let's join forces and get behind whatever has momentum even if it's not technically the best.
A ranked choice ballot at least requires you to assign a unique value to every candidate on the ballot: you can honestly rank your second choice without being concerned that doing so undermines your first.
That's highly implementation dependent. Where I live we have ranked-choice ballots for local primary elections, while the local general elections are FPTP. State and Federal elections are all FPTP for primary and general elections.
While I am free to rank up to five candidates when filling out my ballot, I am not required to use all five choices.
I can just ignore all that if I choose and just rank one candidate first and leave the rest of the ballot blank. Or I can rank multiple candidates, but I'm not required to "assign a unique value to every candidate on the ballot."
In fact, if there are more than five candidates for a particular office, I can only rank five of them.
All that said, I'm absolutely in favor of RCV and wish we had it for all elections, not just local primary elections.
I'm sure you're right. Unfortunately, I'm not the person you'd need to convince.
Here's contact information[0] for the relevant folks, and thanks for taking an interest. I'm sure my fellow townspeople will be grateful for your guidance. You have my thanks for stepping up to help us improve our voting systems!
For your reference, here's some background on the how the process came to be[1][2][3][4]
[0] https://www.vote.nyc/page/contact-us
[1] https://ballotpedia.org/New_York_City_Ballot_Question_1,_Ele...
[2] https://apnews.com/article/nyc-ranked-choice-voting-explaine...
[3] https://rankthevotenyc.org/history-of-rcv-in-nyc/
[4] https://rankthevotenyc.org/what-we-learned-from-new-york-cit...
I am just a consumer of such things and have exactly zero say in my town's approach to voting.
I do know that RCV is better than FPTP, even more so if we don't, at least, require a majority, and am glad my town is at least making a start at such things.
That said, I'd love to make it even better.
As I suggested[1] to your colleague, it would be terrific if your expertise could be used to improve the voting system where I live.
I'd expect that the folks[2] who make such decisions could be convinced to re-frame things in another referendum based upon the recommendations of you and your organization. I know I'd certainly appreciate it!
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47035812
> You can explain to me until you're blue in the face why approval is strictly better even in this situation, but I am emotionally attached to my vote counting for Bernie more than any other candidate, so reason isn't going to work on my lizard brain.
but your actual strategy is to rank hillary in 1st because bernie can't win. or, in the case of my aunt, she preferred warren but voted biden to beat trump. she would have ranked them biden>warren>trump in a ranked election for that very reason. this is called "compromise strategy".
bro, approving both of them is better than being strategically forced to say that you prefer clinton to bernie or biden to warren.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190219005733/https://sites.goo...
you used to live across the street from me on harper street in berkeley by the way.
Even by its nature, ranked choice means that radical ideas need to temper themselves or somehow be extremely popular. Trump never would have won in a ranked choice system.
If you also mean make it so Congress doesn't have a $4T slush fund to buy favors and influence every year, then I'm on board. If you think reducing the paltry sums spent on campaign contributions is going to take the money out of politics, you're bad at math.
Moving past that, yes we are in agreement. In fact you bring up an excellent point, which is that political parties themselves make corrupt use of campaign finance lawlessness to get in the way of their own voters and rig their own primary systems. None of these entities, whether the DNC or a right wing corporate interest group should be able to buy and sell American elections.
Individual campaign contributions are a non issue, also because regular people are capped at relatively low and long established FEC limits these various slush funds/pacs are designed to circumvent. As you said, the math is clear. I'm confident if this issue were ever put straightly to the American people, the result would be overwhelmingly in favor of campaign finance reform. The real issue isn't anyone's ability to do math, but what you hinted at earlier. The political parties themselves enjoy and benefit from this corruption. Therefore they are incentivized to ensure such a vote never takes place.
The current moment offers an opportunity to overpower such entrenched powers that be, if we can collectively move beyond partisan finger pointing that will only alienate those fellow Americans we need to agree with us to make such a broad based reform possible.
Citizens United was a case about a federal agency attempting to suppress the publication of a movie due to breaching "electioneering communications" rules first introduced in 2002. Contrary to the common narrative, it was more a case of the government arguing "speech is money" as a pretext to use its authority to regulate certain expenditures of money in order to control what information could be released into the media ecosystem. The court struck this down under a correct application of consistent first amendment jurisprudence, ruling that speech is always protected by the constitution, and cannot be suppressed under the guise of regulating spending.
The case and the ruling had nothing to do with campaign donations or funding of candidates. Overturning the Citizens United ruling would create a situation in which agencies under the authority of incumbent politicians would be able to control and curate public political discourse in the lead-up to elections. This is likely the exact opposite of what you intend.
> term/age limits for all public offices.
Term limits would have the effect of creating large incentives for office holders to use the prerogatives of office to set themselves up for their future careers after their terms expire. Term-limited politicians would be even more motivated than those in the status quo to hand out favors to potential future employers and business partners.
On top of that, it would be much more difficult for for politicians to establish notoriety and carve out a base of direct public support by building reputation in office. Instead, a steady stream of relative unknowns would require support from sponsors and entrenched party organizations to win office, making back-room players much more powerful than in the status quo. This is, again, likely to result in the exact opposite of what you intend.
> Given recent relevations re Epstein this is our best chance to reform corruption in generations.
Agreed, but that will require voters to abandon their reflexive partisan positions and accept that the institutions themselves are dysfunctional, irrespective of which people happen to be administering it at any given time. In the current cultural climate, that seems unfortunately unlikely.
... that has been virtually useless as it has been rendered ineffective by Republican obstructionism and the unwillingness of the Democrats to counteract it, leading to the current state of Trump being able to do what he wants completely unchecked.
You should always assume bad actors when designing a political system.
And that's why parliamentary republics where you elect parties that form coalitions that chooses a prime minister who still has to deal with opposition and its own party support, every day, are much more resilient to authoritarianisn.
In fact there hasn't been a single parliamentary republic to turn authoritarian since Sri Lanka 50 years ago. Presidential ones? As many as you wish.
It's very stupid to elect single individuals to executive power.
I'd disagree on that. Austria had the FPÖ in government multiple times and each time they caused massive scandals. Some of the German states are on the brink of the AfD not even needing a coalition partner alone - should the elections this year turn out to be as bloody as the polls suggest, it may very well be the case that they go from opposition straight to sole government, with no one holding them back.
Fully agree on the rest though.
I wish more people would use AI to build alternatives with a clear, binding mission not to exploit the data, not to sell or be funded by investors who expect it to, etc. We have the power to build more than ever. We should use it.
Also, most people don't actually need something like Amazon. Not to minimize the level of investment in it, but I don't see Amazon or Google as being quite the same as Bell or Standard Oil. Maybe between Google and Apple there's some kind of duopoly like that?
My impression is people don't value — either because they don't understand or minimize — things that protect privacy and anonymity. This is a standard refrain on these kinds of forums and elsewhere — "your typical person doesn't know or care about [feature X that preserves privacy, choice, and autonomy], they just want something that works and is fun". It's been belittled as unfashionable or paranoid or performative or something, when it's really something that's had short term costs that pale in comparison to the long-term costs.
I'm not saying governments don't need to be on the "right side" but I think people need to see security as involving not just encryption and so forth, but also decentralization, anonymity, demonopolization, and censorship resistance. It needs to be seen as part of the product or service benefits.
A lot of this reminds me of stuff from the 90s, when network security was ignored for awhile for customer convenience's sake. It seems really similar now, only the thing that's been ignored is like user control and privacy or something like that.
I think the thing that's surprising to me, for example, is that it takes a Super Bowl ad for people to realize that maybe there are downsides to letting a monopoly have access to video throughout the neighborhood everywhere.
Perhaps you have a grandfathered account, but times have changed for the worse with Tuta alone.
The only way to get around this is to use encryption. dont send plain text email.
And the upfront cost will be quite high.
Uh huh. No. You use their system to do it, they have your prompt, and the output on hand. Even more so, they have the capability to tamper with it. They are essentially in a position to own the entire instance of the work product. It doesn't matter if they don't yet. It matters that they can. Furthermore you lose out on the learning. You lose out on any innovation. You lose out in the eyes of the law on the privacy of the communique you use to drive the black box.
>In addition, right now AI has little vendor lock in and there are multiple competitive alternatives, so becoming dependent on a single company is not so likely.
Yup. Right. Like we don't know how that ends. <gestures to />50 years of market consolidation in the distance, letting the illusion of choice speak for itself>
Look at Kagi's success and compare it to Google. It doesn't even register.
People need to start paying for things, because if you're not paying for it, you're not in control of it.
Getting away from American tech has become an actual national security issue.
Ideally you would still have private enterprise create alternatives, but it’s easy to imagine that email, social media will simply be built for citizens by their government.
There’s more incentives than pure profit - Government seems capable enough to attract people when it comes to cyber weapons.
Governments aren’t currently making these tools, because until last year, private enterprise was good enough. It still is, minus the dependency on America and its political climate.
Personally - The issue isn’t engineer availability or salary, but committee based decision making.
What brought the popularity of gmail was the huge space provided which at the time felt infinite. I still remember the counter that was showing the size increasing seemingly indefinitely.
I see this as a downside. Native email clients are much faster and a far better UX than a Web inbox. It's also pretty much required if you juggle multiple accounts.
You're looking at America in 2026 and concluding we want to give the state more control over private lives?
Thomas Sowell's Conflict of Visions describes the difference well.
You dropped an adjective: wealthy
The 17th amendment is a little over 100 years old.
People need to stop treating the US constitution as this "mythical" thing rather than the reality of it being a very undemocratic document that is highly resistant to change.
Luckily the house can be expanded with a simple majority IN the house, one way to truly combat this.
There is an entire branch of government whose purpose is to execute the will of Congress.
...with money. They are already paying for things by violating their own privacy and those around them. The irony is that the amount of money required for the service is much less the expected value of the surveillance for the provider. Service payment is an insurance expense, protecting against individual and systematic violation of the 4th Amendment rights. It's insurance (and cheap insurance) because this usually doesn't matter in practice. But sometimes it does, and when it does it REALLY does matter.
<tinfoil_hat>It would be smart for surveillance capital to fund some of these privacy forward providers, steer them to both charge you for a service and violate your privacy, hope for a very public controversy, and eventually discredit the fundamental approach.</tinfoil_hat>
We need to move in the right direction, not get paralysis in the status quo because of high profile edge cases.
No matter what there will always be warrants and wire taps. The goal is to get away from the "free flow" of information.
In most cases there can’t be movement in this direction and to the degree there can be, it isn’t enough.
- regulate the crap out of surveillance capitalism.
- enforce laws on the books
- Break up firms
Tech used to have a leg to stand on in the face of government over reach. Today, tech firms have largely adapted to the incentives that actually make themselves known every quarter.
Customer support, content moderation, compliance are avoided, and lobbying argues that if you dont let tech it easy, your economy wont innovate. Except enshittification is the term to describe how extractive mature tech markets become.
I am all for more subscription models, but this shouldn’t come at the cost of throwing our hands up and ignoring the many changes that can better align the current incentives.
That's one of the big hidden factors driving the ad/surveillance economy: people's purchasing power just isn't what it used to be, while at the same time they're expected to be paying regularly for more things than ever before (home broadband, mobile phone plans, etc).
The problem is centralization is more convenient for consumers. You can easily control your doorbell, your garage door, your security cameras with 1 app, and everything just works.
Open source and decentralized solutions need to be just as convenient and cheaper than centralized ones for consumers to choose them.
Most people don't have much of a disposable income.
So for me "stop using Facebook" sound similar to saying "burn all of your family photos and throw away your ability to talk to many of the people who are important to you."
I don't say this to necessarily mean that you are completely wrong, just to point out that opting out of these companies can be more complicated than it may initially appear.
Local events - check
Local groups - check
Small time music bands/artist/performances/etc - check
Buy nothing groups where I can get rid of something I don't use - check
Groups for mom with kids to get organized for some kids event - check
A library having a read together event for a kids book author - check
I'm happy I don't have to use FB, but my wife uses it all the time, she just avoids newsfeeds and all the click/rage bait parts.
I’m genuinely asking, it wasn’t rethorical - none of that exists in my corner of Europe anymore. Businesses, indie stuff and local stores use instagram, groups are WhatsApp, second hand stuff has its own app.. facebook seems to be just the >60 year old crowd.
Meta as a company is obviously currently relevant, it’s Facebook as a social network still being used what’s surprising to me.
Here they’re almost in the same category as MySpace, something you mention in passing talking about the past.
People have become dependant on the convenience of these tools and become, for lack of a gentler word, lazy. Moreover we have this current sense of entitlement -- that all of these details of modern living should be done for us. Having our social circles organized and maintained for us, having infinite entertainment a button press away, food delivered to our door on a whim, cars to take us anywhere always minutes away.
People survived just fine before these conveniences, it just too a bit more effort. You could collect your friends contact information, keep an address book, call them up from time to time. It's not perfect, but it works and starts to break the silicon valley tech giant dependence.
Personally I find adding friction to these processes has actual value. When you slow down and have to put a bit more effort in, it helps you to evaluate what is important, and what truly matters. You prioritize, you make tradoffs. The process IS the richness in life. We all don't need to be jet setting globetrotters to whom paris might as well be New York or london or munich, while robots manage our social lives. There is no substitute for actively working to build a community where you are. You have to put the effort in, and in a single generation we have lost so much of it. But we can get back there again if we try.
You just aren't looking for obvious alternatives that would still allow you to do all that privately. Keep your family photos offline on your own hardware. Create a contacts list on your phone (ideally de-Appled and de-Googled) and text people on Signal and/or create group chats. Tell people you are leaving Facebook because it is an evil surveillance machine, and that you can be reached on Signal, email (self-hosted) or phone.
I've deleted all of my socials but LinkedIn in 2019 and I haven't missed anything at all.
I noticed your own app's website [0] hosts videos on YouTube [1] and uses Stripe as a payment processor [2], which is hosted on AWS. You also mentioned that your app is vibe coded [3]; the AI labs that facilitated your vibecoding likely built and run their models using Meta's PyTorch or Google's TensorFlow.
"Just stop using" makes for a catchy manifesto in HackerNews comments, but the reality is a lot more complicated than that.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbCM99cz9W8
Just not using it is really unrealistic for the average person at this moment
For something like icloud vs gmail/gdrive, they're approximately the same, but that doesn't mean "they share just as much [...] as Microsoft and Google. If they never collected data in the first place, they don't have to share with NSA. The most obvious would be for location data, which apple keeps on-device and google did not (although they did switch to on device a few years ago).
Yeah, Tim Apple handing over a 24-karat gold plaque to the sitting president is completely normal behavior for CEOs to engage in, and not at all about just making as much money as possible. He had to do that, otherwise Apple as a company would disappear tomorrow. They're just trying to survive.
But in any case the legal battles work as nice PR for Apple (see how much we care about privacy) and also as a great scenario for the government because any battles they win are domains where they can now legally use information directly to the courts and sidestep the parallel construction. That also takes the burden off of Apple PR in giving that information up because it can be framed as the courts and government forcing them, rather than them collaborating in mass data collection.
Unfortunately, I think reality is much worse than you seem to be under the impression of. Voter suppression and military violence against your own population isn't "narcissism", it's the introduction of authoritarianism. The flagrant narcissism is a symptom of that, not the actual issue.
Instead we have to make judgements based on what limited information we possess and sucking up to trump is a real bad sign for things like caring about privacy/liberty/safety
Hank Green has a really good video about how this is happening here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jOR4wuiPeEQ
Unfortunately, the status quo also means the US (and its tech giants) has real power and control over other countries' technology sector. So, no party in America will make or enforce laws that will change the status quo within the country or overseas.
None of this is legally easy to implement or enforce, and any attempt of doing it is virtually guaranteed to create an unbelievable amount of unintended consequences as people figure out ways to game this new set of rules.
Say for example your local/state/federal agency publishes (or accepts) documents exclusively in ods/odf instead of proprietary formats, that will automatically drive adoption of software and prevent lock-in.
I've heard that both have parts of the spec that are hard to implement if you don't have the software to verify.
How is it a bad thing that both major office software are now documented?
Regulation and liberty mongering are very American. We do it constantly at multiple levels of government.
What kills privacy regulation is this weird strain of political nihilism that seems to strongly intersect with those who care about the issue. I've personally worked on a few bills in my time. The worst, by far, were anything to do with privacy. If you assume you're defeated by forces that be, you're never going to probe that hypothesis.
Don't get me wrong. I appreachiate all the work being done to get Europe out of the claws of US tech companies, but I think having an official EU app store alternative would be a good start.
Install GrapheneOS on a Pixel. Most Android apps just work, and unlike the stock OS, it does not spy on you.
Even if I keep everything safe many govts are using Microsoft cloudfor day2day operations. Recently my employer lost tons of data. Every CV you send to a company or recruitment is kept often unencrypted. Every other country is fingerprinting/face ID upon arrival. Are you sure about their security?
Things that I have dumped into my email are far less consequential compared to those.
The game is lost. Very few people can have privacy.
You most likely can.[0] Of course, banks don't tend to advertise these kinds of authentication devices, probably because people tend to find apps easier, but you absolutely should be able to get one from your bank. It's very much not a Danske Bank specific technology, and it's explicitly there to allow for accessibility for those people without "suitable" phones, e.g. old people.
It's certainly not as convenient to use the online bank with a fob like this vis-à-vis a banking app, and we should absolutely push for banks to not be reliant on Google and Apple for their apps, but it is possible to use the services without being reliant on Google or Apple.
> my healthcare (which is a public service in Denmark) or any of our national digital post services. You can apply to get exempt from the digital post services, and they do have a website solution, but still.
Now admittedly I don't know how this stuff is over there in Denmark, but here in Finland we have access to the digital healthcare services via a website, both for the national patient database and the healthcare region access. Again, not as convenient as the respective apps -- although the app for the national patient database, OmaKanta, is very much in beta stages still, and it's way more convenient to use the website even on the phone -- but it's possible. I would be very surprised if that wasn't also possible over in Denmark.
And authentication can happen via couple means that aren't reliant on the smartphone duopoly, with authentication doable with online banking -- which as established, doesn't even need a phone -- and via a "phone authentication" which IIRC only needs support insofar as it's supported by the SIM card, and then of course authentication can be done with the national ID card and a smartcard reader.
And again, the point isn't that this kind of de-Googling or de-Appleing isn't difficult or inconvenient, or that we shouldn't improve the situation, but that it's absolutely possible to get away without using these vendors. And that we should make sure that these kinds of alternatives remain possible to use.
> Don't get me wrong. I appreachiate all the work being done to get Europe out of the claws of US tech companies, but I think having an official EU app store alternative would be a good start.
Absolutely.
[0]: <https://danskebank.dk/erhverv/find-hjaelp/netbank-erhverv-bu...>
The only way I see a change possibility is for people to think about how to change this collectively. Pushing for open source everywhere would be one partial strategy that could work in certain areas.
Your trillion dollar investment to control the populace ain't worth shit when its on fire and the monkeys are hurling flaming shit at you.
How so?
(Damn, I failed at my attempt to stop posting.)
It is not perfect but you have much more control on which domain you connect to and/or which js you execute.
the really tight one is how to proceed when there is a change of lawful custody or guardianship, because, unfortunately, divorce, and domestic violence happens, and the lag between court order and, notification of custodial reassignment should be close to zero.
I am a parent and the school employees in primary would ask the kid to point finger at their parents and would remember our faces after just a few weeks. If someone had to pick them up because we had an issue we would just call the school.
I however never understood why I couldn't sign a paper so my kids could walk home on their own, especially since they would walk to school on their own already.
All school and class related information is shared exclusively via WhatsApp communities.
I don't know what "VanceAI" is but I am confused ... why would they not want corporate (as in, Fortune 500) users to sign up ?
I can understand aws, youtube, being on google index, and other things as they sometimes are the most cost efficient or vendors don't offer alternatives... but stripe-paypal is more expensive and worse than the less-bad alternatives. jeez.
It is akin to Visa/MasterCard duopoly. It is hard to escape but even if one does it then it resulted only inconvenience. I still don't have my cards in phone - neither will google change path nor will govts force a change.
That's the incorrect premise - for that 50% that you hope to ditch.
Pixel phone is not inherently bad. One can even buy them second hand.
The information lock in from US is impossible to escape for majority of connected world citizens.
In the context of the present debate, Pixel phone is inherently bad because it's a Google product. You're putting money in Google's bank account when you buy one, and you're running your phone the way Google wants you to. The point of the debate is whether it's feasible to move away from such things. In the case of a Pixel phone, it is possible (to some extent, anyway).
I don't care for these 'bottom up' strategies because they don't have clearly defined success conditions and are more wishing than anything else. It also puts the responsibilities on consumers for 'not advocating (or voting) hard enough,' which imho is just another kind of diffusion of responsibility. Everyone ends up feeling bad for not doing enough to solve the problem when the reality is that coordinating social swarms or other sorts of collective action against tech giants with highly integrated command and lobbying structures is almost impossible.
What I meant to convey, from my personal experience, is that it seemed hard to get off of platforms like X, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon Prime, Alexa, Ring, Google Photos, etc. but then I did it and didn’t miss them. These small moves by a lot of people, I believe, can still make a difference. It’s not perfect, but it’s something. Do I still use some services? Of course, I have Gmail and WhatsApp, and use a lot of Apple products. When I can, I choose intentionally what I use since there’s no perfect companies out there, but there are “better” ones (whatever that may be in one’s opinion). I chose cloudflare for hosting and Anthropic for vibe coding. Allowing people to use existing login info versus exposing them to more risk with self managed auth was a choice I made. There are tons of choices we make every day so trying to be more intentional is a good start.
Nobody is perfect, but we can try to improve each day in these choices we make.
It's not just hard for some though, literally their livelihood depends on it. Want to run a restaurant today? You basically must have Facebook, Instagram and Google Maps entry for enough people to discover you, probably more than half of the people we got to our restaurant who we ask, cite Google Maps as the reason they found the place, and without half our income, the restaurant wouldn't have survived.
I mean deGoogle/meta etc is almost impossible
Any neighborhood were local zoning is not a thing and local restaurant can be open. We have a lot of tapas or marisquerías places in Spain that are almost only visited by people from the same neighborhood. I like fish and seafood but don't want the smell of it in my kitchen the next day, whenever I want to eat fish I go to some place selling that and I don't need google maps to find one in my neighborhood.
Also world of mouth is still a thing in many places in this world. Reading HN feels sometimes like a weird parallel universe were people would never open their front door nor meet and to people.
Yes, this is exactly the thing. Our restaurant is in Spain, and what you're saying is very true, which is why Google Maps, Instagram and Facebook tends to be important, as again, half (~guess) the people who arrive found it via Google Maps or Instagram, the rest are people who live nearby.
That's the easy part. What do you do about stuff like face recognition and cameras everywhere? Should you hide your face every time you go out? Should you not speak because there might be a mic around picking up your voice?
This is only going to get worse. We can't trust companies or governments to respect our privacy. We can't trust each other to keep the data recorded by our devices private.
It seems like the fight for privacy is a lost cause. What do we do?
Google and Amazon are harder to complete cut imo. I have replaced Google apart from using YouTube, and I do rely on Amazon for delivery and running personal projects on AWS.
That said for some I can foresee Meta being hard or harder to disconnect from because of their percieved level of personal social needs.
I left facebook and many of my friendships faded away.
Awkward bumping into people conversations would happen such as: "We missed you at my birthday party!", "I didn't know about it, else I would have been there!" "We posted it to facebook..." "I deleted my facebook account 2 years ago."
My personal philosophy was maybe they were not real friends to begin with. After all in the now 5 years since deletion, not one has reached out to ask if I'm even still alive. I've reached out to a couple people, with little to no reply. None the less, it was a hard transition.
For others', that might be an impossible task.
I guess it can be hard initially though. Also, my core group of friends is less than 10, but that’s enough for me. I don’t need to follow what 100 other people are doing in their day to day haha.
No Go, no Flutter, no Android, no GCP nor AWS or anyone that relies on them like Vercel and Netlify, no llama, no React or framework that builds on top of it.
Keeping the list small, there are other items that depend on those companies money and engineering teams.
At best, we can only control our own actions. Even then, it is only possible to minimize (rather than eliminate) the use of their products without putting up barriers between ourselves and society. Consider email: we can use an alternative provider, but chances are that we will be corresponding personally or professionally with people who use Gmail or Outlook. The same goes for phones, only the alternatives available are much more limited. Plus you have some degree of tracking by the telecom networks. (I don't consider Apple or Microsoft much better on these fronts. Ultimately they have their business interests in mind and, failing that, their existence is ultimately at the whim of the state.)
- I want to delete my Amazon account because service has gotten worse and they mistreat their employees. I also want to be able to get groceries, but I don’t have a car and the walking distance grocery store just closed (due to mismanagement). Now I need to spend hours every weekend walking to the farmers market or to the Safeway a considerably distance away.
- I want my prescriptions, but the pharmacy I used to walk to is closing. Now I need to find a pharmacy delivery service that isn’t tied up with Amazon.
- I signed up for One Medical before it was Amazon and it was great. Now it sucks. There aren’t exactly a lot of great alternatives even if I wanted to pay a premium. Wtf do I do?
- I have a Microsoft account I want to delete. If I do that, I will lose access to my Xbox games, and I will lose access to download anything at all on my Xbox 360, which is loaded up with XBLA games I can only use because Microsoft has kept the download part of their store working.
- I’m not on Instagram, but businesses seem to think Instagram has completely replaced the World Wide Web - many restaurants don’t post their hours _anywhere_ but Instagram. I cannot access these details without logging in. A local “speakeasy” coffee shop has a password you have to get from the Instagram story. I just can’t go. Unfortunately the employees are not accommodating. I’ve left a nasty review but that can only go so far. Without a big tech account I can’t even do that.
You are surrounded by people using them.
Therefore, you are subject to the mass surveillance they encode.
And by NOT using them, you mark yourself as dangerous.
This is a calculated move to normalize such technology. Yes, it will cause controversy in the short term, and these companies knew this was a possibility—but as a result the image in people's minds won't be the gestapo rounding up grannies; it'll kids finding puppies. To call this "unwitting" is simply naive (not surprising for Greenwald).
And yet there are countless examples that show the exact opposite.
This made it through one of the largest marketing budgets in the world…
The justification was marketers at large corporations don’t mess up and that’s both ridiculous and provably false.
Completely off topic, and for future reference, it's "err" not "air".
Completely fine mistake, stupid homophones and all. Just thought you'd like to know.
Also, these things happen to me all the time if I use voice dictation. I don't trust it because of edge cases like this.
The people creating ads are just organizationally isolated in most cases.
Sometimes it was for no other reason than a bunch of people in house felt they needed to justify their existence, but regardless that’s how it was 90% of the time.
So it is unsurprising to me that a creative team might have been given brand guidelines and a goal, like "hey we want to sell this, we want people happy with this" (much more concretely, obviously) and that could lead to this sort of ad, and I think that's probably more plausible than the team going "we're going to psyop everyone into surveillance statehood".
Some companies put up “press kits” on their site for public use but it’s usually logos and just basic info/stats .
They'll avoid negative perception because this is their job, the message is still arbitrary.
Then this guy [1] walks into the room and says no, be bold, who could possibly object to my life's work, and he gets his way because he's signing the cheque.
On what planet would the ask be marketing copy versus straight access?
In a Super Bowl spot? Why? Nobody was taking out Super Bowl spots for their PRISM participation.
Propaganda is, and always has been, a subset of marketing aimed at shifting public perception. It would be wild to assume it never happens.
The argument isn't against ethics. It's about self interest. Amazon bought the Super Bowl ad to sell Nest units.
"Unwitting" is correct. There are no lizard people coordinating our march towards dystopia. Just individual people who will–like me–read this article, think we should do more, and then probably do nothing.
(If you want a realistic conspiracy, Amazon may have greenlit the spot with an eye towards an audience of one or two in D.C.)
There are no lizard people coordinating our march towards dystopia. Just individual people who will–like me–read this article, think we should do more, and then probably do nothing.
It's very much possible for people to brand the surveillance state as cute; and for consent for a surveillance state to spontaneously emerge / be generated from the attempts of marketers trying to make the Ring dystopia cute.
Both serve the same goals, in a different manner. Both require the same choices by marketing - active and with conscience aforethought.
I see everyone talking about how to stop using products. I even thought about legislation that could help. But that's just it, none of that is possible. You can't even employ a "torches and pitchforks" approach. For any of this to be possible, people would have to coordinate. The means by which people communicate and coordinate are under the influence and control of the very entities that the people are trying to bring under control.
The only way to win this war is by means of economic warfare. And I don't mean "vote with your wallet". If I could spell out what I mean here, then the previous paragraph would have been invalid.
We still have the power to panic the billionaires, and they have the power to get what they want. If what they want is temporarily in sync with what society needs, then so much the better.
Even if you want to inform people the old fashioned way, or organize in person, a few might, but you need majority of voters, how can you reach them when they only want to be reached by mediums controlled by the white house?
> We still have the power to panic the billionaires
Yeah, and making them lose a few billions of dollars isn't it. Even criminal punishment is useless, they'll get pardons, and if not they can just flee to any country that would protect them for their money. there are ways to make them scared for real though.
> Only by shutting down the ports, the rail, the trucks and the delivery services
This is the right track for sure, but the problem is scale, you need coordination to do that. But more than that, you need lots of people agreeing to do without nice things like a good and stable economy, mass layoffs, and dire consequences that aren't worth mentioning here. Matter of fact, the one group of people in the world that could have the most impact are all gathered here on HN :)
For the extreme measures that need to be taken by the people to actually be taken, the people need to understand that those measures are neccesary, and actually be informed of the strategies behind those measures and have some awareness of some of the tactics available to implement those strategies.
The problem is, there is no one even considering any unconventional means. Anyone with power to act is waiting for elections and campaigns. Why can't people just read history and learn from it? Why do we need tragedies to keep teaching us the same lessons again and again. The people in charge are not idiots. they also know elections are ahead. They're actively ignoring courts and making clear and public threats of subverting elections. Why do people have to wait until that actually happens to plan ahead of time?
Americans are still in a catatonic state of "that could never happen here where I live", despite things that could never happen in America continuing to happen every day. The answer is the same as my original post: communications and media are controlled where they matter now.
The general strike is a sad, obvious myth solely to delude us tax-cattle that we will have power, one day, for a day. Something something workers something bosses something something struggle. Bullshit for peasant workers.
"general strike" needs to be thrown in the same box as "communism" and "democracy" and "representation".
This occurred sometime after his actions(CEO giving a talk and was interrupted by a protester): https://www.youtube.com/shorts/SK-5AALSBFA
There were rumors that the reason Elon was bringing his child around every single moment he was in public was because of speculation that the child could assist in being cover for him(again thats speculation though people did get a laugh out of it). It started around the Luigi murder.
We are only in this situation because the economic war was lost. You want the world to fight Amazon and Google while they're in the middle of counting their spoils?
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/feb/07/revealed-how-s...
If we're gonna judge authors for what platforms they're using, does that mean we're all bad guys here on HN too, since a lot of current misery is because of startups and technology companies who used to receive a lot praise here?
The elitism and groupthink here is fucking wild.
>That's why I hang out here on HN with my fellow crazies who can separate ideas, thoughts and knowledge from the person.
Is unironically what you think and posted in earnest? Thats WILD.
That's exactly the point! We're both thinking very different, yet neither of us have explicitly (only implicitly) tried to insult each other. What place on the internet does that better than HN?
Stating that the west, and the US, has actively used Ukraine as a puppet in the geopolitical game is a fact.
It's also a fact that US troops and NATO forces have increasingly surrounded Russia since the 90s.
Mind you, I think that the NATO argument is bogus.
What happened in Ukraine was not a matter of Russian security, but Putin's own ambitions and paranoia against democratic waves in Belarus and Kazakhstan.
Is this talking point still being paid for? I haven't seen it in a while, but I guess I don't keep track that closely.
What are the other russian provided talking points these days?
"... expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking ..."
Is it your position that he was paid for, or in some way disingenuously held, this view ?
I don't have strong opinions on this topic but I note with interest that there seem to be contrary viewpoints that aren't not puppets/trolls.
More to the point, this is some hardcore "she was asking for it" victim blaming.
You know who started the war? THE COUNTRY THAT LAUNCHED THE INVASION.
The war started with our expansion of NATO, followed by couping Ukraines govt, multiple fake peace treaties, and finally Ukraine murdering thousands of culturally Russian civilians in Eastern Ukraine. I count a war as started when someone starts murdering people w the military not when someone walks over a border. Although your narrative doesn’t work then right?
> I count a war as started when someone starts murdering people w the military
So saddam hussein started the second iraq-america war?
Don't answer that.
Also tell me more about your evidence of united states soldiers landing in ukraine and killing/capturing the existing government to replace it, that sounds like a really big scandal we should be talking about!
(Also, gee, I wonder why a government would be "anti-russian" during the past 50 years. Hmmm, nope, nothing comes to mind. Must be racism or something)
We have the phone recordings of our government picking the new government BEFORE the coup. What part of that don’t you understand?
So saddam hussein started the second iraq-america war? Don't answer that.
Whatever your counterpoint is here it’s so weak I don’t even know what it is. Using the military to kill civilians in Eastern Ukraine was definitely the start of the war, you can save the attempt at cleverness.
I mean, you just made this up out of whole cloth. It's fiction, no it's worse than that, it's a deliberate lie, a fraud, a sham. And not a particularly believeable one either.
Saying we should constrain the sovereignty of Eastern European nations to not hurt the feelings of their most dangerous rival is just bullshit. Russia's goals are simply neoimperialist and they obviously had no intention of waiting for Ukraine to join NATO or the EU before invading. They certainly had no similar provocation to snatch territory from Moldova and Georgia.
I am simply pushing back on the notion that anyone who disagrees with my parent was paid to do so.
I don't believe that Kennans position (in 1997) was disingenuous or dishonest.
Strengthening a defensive alliance is not “starting” something, that’s just the usual narcissistic gaslighting used by people with nefarious intent.
Sometimes actual problems can be readily exploited for sinister purposes. Doesn't mean the original problems aren't also sinister, just be damn careful where you intend to flee to :)
If you know you know I guess, but even then, broken clocks and all that. There was a point where he was such a cool guy to me, and I grew up a little in a good way seeing him turn into whatever he did.
It may just be Twitter's fault at the end of the day too!
Glenn is, essentially, hypocritcal because he ignores things that go against his predetermined narrative.
Does he post true things sometimes? Sure, but is it really worth filtering through the rest?
He's being crticized for repeating lies and refusing to post truths.
-Active Petitions and Campaigns to Limit Surveillance: End the Surveillance State (Action Network): Petitions call on Congress to permanently end the PATRIOT Act, stop warrantless surveillance, and oppose the expansion of surveillance technology.
-Ban Facial Recognition (Amnesty International & ACLU): Amnesty International is running the "Ban the Scan" campaign, while the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) targets the use of face surveillance, arguing it poses risks to civil liberties and disproportionately impacts marginalized communities.
-Stop Surveillance Data Brokers (Mozilla): Mozilla Foundation is targeting major websites to stop sharing data with surveillance technology firms that track user movement and interactions.
-Protect User Data from Subpoenas (EFF): The Electronic Frontier Foundation is pressuring tech companies to resist lawless DHS subpoenas for user data.
-Oppose Localized Surveillance (ACLU/Action Network): Local petitions aim to limit technologies like Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPRs) that create massive databases of personal movement.
-Federal Legislative Reform: Advocates are pushing for the "The Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act," which aims to restrict intelligence agencies from purchasing data from brokers without a warrant.
Attorneys challenge each other as a matter of course in every case before a court. This is how the adversarial system works.
Perhaps what you meant to say is that “I don’t like the activity that is happening here,” or “I think some of this might be unconstitutional.” When someone makes a naked blanket assertion about the law, it’s usually a sign that that person doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
And yes, they are spying on everybody. They have access to things like cellphone metadata, which to a normal human being is a very clear violation of privacy.
It's also my firm belief that our legal system has been undermining these basic concepts for decades now. It benefits the federal government to make this all very vague, as if modern technology suddenly means you have no expectation of privacy anymore. They've also mixed in some of that wonderfully authoritarian "for purposes of national security".
There's actual lawyers saying these same things, if you'd like someone to properly debate with.
However:
> They have access to things like cellphone metadata, which to a normal human being is a very clear violation of privacy.
In the U.S., when you study 4th Amendment law in Criminal Procedure, you learn there is a "third party doctrine" that says that if you voluntarily provide a third party with information--even information you consider private-it's the third party's property and you can no longer object to it being sought by the Government. There's a good overview of this on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
The Supreme Court declined to extend the third-party doctrine to tracking one's location via cell-phone metadata in Carpenter v. U.S., 585 U.S. 296 (2018), so it's not absolute.
The government can now partner with private businesses to effectively bypass the Fourth Amendment.
If it were a violation, Courts could enjoin it. But since it's not a violation, there's nothing to enjoin.
It's almost like HN isn't a court and the OP was expressing their opinion that this should be illegal. . . Not relying on specific semantics for the current state of affairs?
HN is a forum of written communications. Clarity and accuracy are essential skills for participating effectively in such places, and are the responsibility of the author.
Are you trying to argue that people shouldn’t be taken at their word? Or that we shouldn’t challenge people who make unqualified legal assertions? I’m not sure what your point is.
We all know that the actual interpretation is up to 5 republicans on the supreme court and whatever they feel on a given day will increase their side's power/ideology.
No one is going to be making arguments about that because there's no point, you can't logic someone out of a position that they didn't use logic to get to in the first place.
So again, when someone on a forum says "this is wrong and something should be done about it" replying that it might technically be legal at this moment in time is incredibly useless. It's completely missing the point.
If that had been what was said, we wouldn’t even be here.
You have the roles and responsibilities exactly backwards.
The difference is significant for that reason alone. The other reason is that if you’re looking to recruit supporters you will get more of them if you get your ducks in a row. Disorganized ducks impair credibility and create friction.
Not making the distinction between the two is only helpful for the purpose of blowing off steam and the only outcome is outrage fatigue.
Which is why it's a misnomer to call the legal system a justice system in criminal cases. Lol.
> The Supreme Court declined to extend the third-party doctrine to tracking one's location via cell-phone metadata in Carpenter v. U.S., 585 U.S. 296 (2018), so it's not absolute.
In other words, principles are law -- in the US, whatever the principles of 9 judges at a given time, because they are the final arbiter of what anything written down by Congress means. "Third-party doctrine" is not law as written by Congress, it is something the Supreme Court made up out of thin air according to their principles. And these principles are not binding; a later panel of judges is free to throw out the rulings of older judges if they decide their principles differ, as famously happened to Roe v. Wade among other cases.
Very well said. While the legal system's details are important for a few avenues of effecting change, they're often used to bog down conversions into "what is" territory rather than staying focused on "what ought". And "what ought", based on the ideals laid out in our country's founding documents, is very different from "what is" in the modern day.
Why have the other amendments not enjoyed this same individual freedom absolutism? Why are we cherry picking which amendments get expanded modern powers "in the spirit of the text"? It's because of how the judges feel.
So before you dismiss someone's opinion because how it might be, let's all be honest with ourselves and realize constitutional law of this nature does not depend on precedent and is largely do to the whims of the supreme court.
I also disagree with your characterization of 2nd Amendment jurisprudence, but I'm not going into that rathole!
People have good-faith disputes over whether their activities should be permitted or forbidden, and--like it or not--it's up to our judicial system to interpret the law, especially when it's unclear (which is rather often). The judges hear the arguments and, having heard both sides out fully, has to decide who has the strongest case. It's not an easy job, but in a vague, messy, and imperfect world, someone has to do it.
There are ways to reduce ambiguity, like passing new laws, clarifying existing ones, and even amending the Constitution. That requires we vote and press our representatives to do these things. This has the benefit of making it clear what we want, as opposed to leaving it to the unelected judiciary to try to figure it out and anger half the country who thought they decided wrong.
1. A retired US citizen emailed a DHS attorney urging mercy for an asylum seeker he had read about. Five hours later he received an email from Google advising him the federal government had served Google with a subpoena demanding information about him. Then they followed up by knocking on his door. The federal government's concerted effort to intimidate citizens should concern every American.
2. NYT: https://archive.ph/W5FwO ICE’s New Surveillance State Isn’t Tracking Only Immigrants
A memo from a Department of Homeland Security official reviewed by CNN and sent to agents dispatched to Minneapolis last month asked them to “capture all images, license plates, identifications and general information” on “agitators, protesters, etc. so we can capture it all in one consolidated form.” And the official reportedly provided such a form, called “intel collection.”
3. Moreover, ICE officers have traveled to the homes of protesters. Not to arrest them, because they have done nothing illegal. Rather, ICE was trying to intimidate them by letting them know ICE knows who they are and where they live. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/us/minneapolis-ice-agents
I found crim pro to be a very distressing and depressing course.
Also, that last link to The NY Times article is broken.
[1] To suggest that the Government doesn’t know what’s legal and what isn’t stretches credulity. They know; and they’re going to ride as close to that line as possible when motivated by their bosses.
I'm not going to engaged with someone on HN debating legal principles regarding something so straight forward. And, as I said, this is off the top of my head. It's basic constitutional law which I haven't found necessary to research. After that sentence I googled McCarthyism and found that SCOTUS ruled in multiple cases that Senator McCarthy and his supporters violated the First Amendment rights of the citizens they accused of communism. I haven't read the opinions, but I am confident they ( and many others ) support the very basic principles I speak of.
The government cannot collect and put the names of peaceful anti-government protestors into a government database; or show up at their homes when they violated no law; or the government issuing a subpoena to google for personal data about a man who wrote a one sentence letter to a DOJ prosecutor asking for leniency for the defendant in a case he read about.
These are all actions taken by the government in response to citizens expressing viewpoints the government did not like. You will never find more classic First Amendment fact patterns.
> The government cannot ... show up at [people's] homes when they violated no law
This happens all the time. It depends on the purpose. Is it purely to harass someone, or is it to perform an investigation or for some other legitimate purpose? It's not prima facie unlawful.
You might find this poster to be instructive. It is very difficult under current law to prevail in a harassment case. https://ij.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Infographic_First-...
Having said that, my posts had nothing to do with the 'realities' of winning in court regarding the activities outlined. Rather my point is the activities are clearly unconstitutional by any conventional analysis by any qualified US attorney. Whether or not you could develop the requisite proofs is another matter entirely. But it is clear that the current administration is following the Orban playbook ( and of some South American authoritarian regimes ).
This is not 'business as usual' in any way, shape or form.
A US Citizen ( a retired lawyer if I recall ) read an article about a prosecution by the DOJ and the citizen emailed the prosecutor ( after getting his email from the judicial database ) and sent a short plea urging mercy for the asylum seeker. Five hours later he received an email from Google advising him the federal government had served Google with a subpoena demanding information about him. Then they followed up by knocking on his door.
There can be zero doubt that the subpoena upon Google violated due process. Being an administrative subpoena, there was no judge involved but due process ( eg probable cause ) is still required and - absent some wildly unimaginable set of unknown facts - there was clearly no probable cause here.
This administration is clearly in the process of gathering names of US citizens who hold beliefs Trump does not like. The larger question is what is Trump's intention in collecting such names? Based upon his actions in the past year, Americans shouldn't hold their breath hoping they are wholesome.
I assume that when you say "develop the requisite proofs," you mean "prevail in court." In Constitutional law, these are inseparable and an outcome of Marbury v. Madison. The Court says what the law is. If the Court's opinion is that the Government's behavior is permitted by the Constitution, then it follows that the behavior is Constitutional; and because our law relies on precedent, that interpretation is rather sticky. It does so happen that from time to time, we overturn precedent--and I hope we do, because we have some pretty bad law out there--but until then, we rely on it to predict the outcome of future cases.
> There can be zero doubt that the subpoena upon Google violated due process. Being an administrative subpoena, there was no judge involved but due process ( eg probable cause ) is still required and - absent some wildly unimaginable set of unknown facts - there was clearly no probable cause here.
Yeah, I agree. The problem is, without some sort of injury, there's likely no standing, and so the case will probably never see the light of day.
I neither make nor imply any such suggestion.
>>they’re going to ride as close to that line as possible
This administration has already overtly failed to comply with valid Federal Court Orders.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/us/minneapolis-ice-agents...
It's only because we've had a century of legal contrivance that it doesn't IMO.
https://jasher.substack.com/p/crime-is-likely-down-an-enormo...
If you’re not, yes it is, unfortunately same can’t be said about the U.S., where my not very large social circle have experienced robbery at gun point at a gas station, street mugging, home break-in with everything stolen, smashed car window, all within the past decade. I was more fortunate but still got my bike stolen.
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2025/11/19/gallup-crime-p...
There's always the question of where exactly you're referring to and what kind of crime you're referring to. But I assumed that's what the parent post was referring to.
There are some neighborhoods with more murders in a month than some whole states see in a couple years.
We know exactly where the majority of crime is in the US, you are correct, down to the neighborhood.
Now… let’s say you were to call the national guard in to safeguard those areas, how do you think that would go over by those cities governors and reaction media? I guess the answer depends on the year.
That is not Donald Trump's / Stephen Miller's objective in Minnesota, nor is it the outcome.
"If there's crime, let's send in the army!" Of course you'd suggest that, you're twelve.
Someone uses a scenario as reductio ad absurdum, you can yell “THEYRE ONLY 12” and claim it was an endorsed suggestion.
I mean it, you’re doing great. Keep digging.
So, are you using your brain and demanding other systemic changes like free mental-health care and housing? or are you just being a tool and wanting more police violence?
People commit minor offenses, and often felonies without knowing it, on a regular basis. If surveillance was consistently used to actually enforce the laws, people would a) notice the surveillance[0] and then actually object to it and b) start objecting to all the ridiculous and poorly drafted laws they didn't even know existed.
But they don't want the majority of people objecting to things. They want a system that provides a thousand pretexts to punish anyone who does something they don't like, even something they're supposed to have a right to do, by charging them with any of the laws that everybody violates all the time and having the surveillance apparatus in place so they can do it to anyone as long as it's not done to everyone. That doesn't work if the laws are enforced consistently and the majority thereby starts insisting that they be reasonable.
If the only way to protect yourself from selfish people is if their actions explicitly illegal, then the logical outcome is to make more and more things explicitly illegal.
IMHO, that's one of the core failures of modern Libertarian/Objectivist influenced thought.
Except that that isn't the only way to protect yourself from selfish people and the assumption that it is is the source of a significant proportion of the dumb laws.
There is a narrow class of things that have to be prohibited by law because there is otherwise no way to prevent selfish people from doing them, like dumping industrial waste into the rivers. What these look like is causing harm to someone you're not otherwise transacting with so that they can't prevent the harm by refusing to do business with you. And then you need functional antitrust laws to ensure competitive markets.
The majority of dumb laws are laws trying to work around the fact that we don't have functional antitrust laws, or indeed have the opposite and have laws propping up incumbents and limiting competition, and therefore have many concentrated markets where companies can screw customers and workers because they have inadequate alternatives. Trying to patch that with prohibitions never works because in a concentrated market there are an unlimited number of ways the incumbents can screw you and you can't explicitly prohibit every one of them; the only thing that works is to reintroduce real competition.
As a society plunges into dysfunction due to economic stress, the number of people harming one another increases. If the society responds using more laws, and fails to correct the source of the dysfunction, it will eventually collapse under the weight of those laws as enforcement becomes uneven and politically driven. (This is the failure mode of legalist and bureaucratic states.) Alternatively, if the society responds with a more arbitrary case-by-case system of punishment, it will collapse into mob rule or dictatorship, so lack of structured law isn’t a solution either.
The only real solution is to fix the root problems facing the society. Antitrust helps with this because it can “unstick” parasitic incumbents who are preventing the market from dynamically responding to real economic conditions.
Don't forget compliance costs. Those are some of the largest costs and they're largely hidden because they don't go into the government budget. You pass a law to prevent a million dollars in total harm and then a hundred thousand companies each spend $100 to comply with it, what did you get and what did you pay?
Compliance costs also have a specific type of cost because of their asymmetry. It's like adding a fixed amount of weight to a boat. If you add 1000 pounds of regulatory costs to a 200,000 ton container ship, it doesn't even notice. If you add the same amount of weight to a kayak, it sinks. But if you keep adding costs until you sink all the small boats, and then sink all the medium boats, you're not just failing to solve all the problems caused by market consolidation, you're actively making them worse.
However, I don't see that happening anytime soon so the numerous laws are the best option we have.
It's not. You're asking for contract law.
You can see the counter example during the 40s-70s when the FBI targeted the mafia and local political corruption to take out the remaining organized crime strongholds .
Today organized crime doesn’t have much political influence. A sort of truce. So there’s no longer incentive for the feds to pursue street crime. Street crime yields no longer funnel into influence.
In fact, most political corruption today is coming from entitlements , which further bolsters political control.
1. A retired US citizen emailed a DHS attorney urging mercy for an asylum seeker he had read about. Five hours later he received an email from Google advising him the federal government had served Google with a subpoena demanding information about him. Then they followed up by knocking on his door. The federal government's concerted effort to intimidate citizens should concern every American.
2. NYT: https://archive.ph/W5FwO ICE’s New Surveillance State Isn’t Tracking Only Immigrants
A memo from a Department of Homeland Security official reviewed by CNN and sent to agents dispatched to Minneapolis last month asked them to “capture all images, license plates, identifications and general information” on “agitators, protesters, etc. so we can capture it all in one consolidated form.” And the official reportedly provided such a form, called “intel collection.”
3. Moreover, ICE officers have traveled to the homes of protesters. Not to arrest them, because they have done nothing illegal. Rather, ICE was trying to intimidate them by letting them know ICE knows who they are and where they live. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/us/minneapolis-ice-agents
Now he's complaining that Nest had video footage without a subscription as if the user wouldn't know this. Nest still processes video for motion detection alerts for people without a subscription. It just deletes the video after processing unless you have a subscription to pay for the storage. Even though I am not a user myself, I'd be surprised if this isn't clear to the people who use the product. I am not at all surprised that Greenwald doesn't understand it though.
How do we build a resilient system that doesn’t rely on single platforms?
by making sure that compatibility is enshrined into law, so that competition occurs, rather than walled gardens.
It has to start at the top - gov't has to mandate it.
We need resilience that's hard to regulate or undo.
What does a non-government solution look like to you that can't be undone by the People?
If government regulation is the tool which can bring the amount of torque needed to loosen the screws on competition, then government is the tool you have to use.
Regulation is also being developed around the world to figure out how to address the challenges being thrown up. The DSA and GDPR are being studied and better policy will result.
Government has connotations in America, that end up derailing any conversation about it.
Usually at some point, it gets pointed out that Tech is booming in America, while it’s moribund in Europe, and do you really want to be Europe? This shifts the conversation to what kind of money you want to make.
Compatibility isn't the problem. CCTV is pretty much an open standard. Folks are choosing Ring and Nest over open systems.
Compatibility in terms of the Ring/Nest ecosystem would be the separation out as separate product categories, and prohibition against anti-competitive bundling of these four aspects: hardware device, backend storage service, client app (mobile/weapp) that interacts with both, and any background "application"" functionality (image recognition, sharing with neighbors/police, etc).
If Google or Amazon released a product in each of these categories that's probably fine, as long as each were only built with documentation publicly available to every other developer. The point is if Amazon storage + Amazon social features were still wildly popular-by-default leading to this type of commercial, people could easily switch to alternatives that respected privacy.
This is lurching toward what the US military calls the Common Access Card. This is a security token carried by most US military. It's used for everything from logins to building access to meals.[1]
Merely having a Common Access Card doesn't allow access to anything. The system reading it has to recognize the identity. So there are lots of databases of who's allowed to do what.
Is that where we're going?
I don't use google maps, I use Waze I don't use messenger, I use whatsapp I don't upload my pictures, contacts (sync is enabled by default)
Anyways. What are the options? It will be another free cloud hosted service.
These corporations have nothing in mind but profits and would sell your sould if it meant a tick up in their bottom line.
With respect to Greenwald, I don't think it's remarkable at all.
I have learned, through experience, that sometimes when people want to do things they should not, or against which there is opposition, there is enormous power in simply doing it. If you ignore people enough, you can do anything.
Preventing this requires systems with accountability.
And as HN commenters frequently note, accountability for government, tech, or corporate leaders in general seems culturally missing in the US.
Despite Snowden, nothing here is remarkable. This has grown because it _can_ grow.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/guthrie-doorbell-video-delayed...
Tailscale has a free tier that's a good option to remotely access your network and cameras.
There’s a ton of evidence of foreign state intervention since WW2. And there are hints at domestic intervention since the 1960s . The likely focus is domestic political intervention, since it takes time for whistleblowers and stories to see the light of day.
No one cares.
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/108756
RCS has never offered that security guarantee at the protocol level. Google has deployed a proprietary encryption layer on top but refuses to allow other clients access. This was rather famously part of the blue/green message divide which was in the news for years.
Similarly push notifications have had privacy recommendations for ages - that’s why apps like Signal give users the option to choose their level of risk exposure.
Each one allows for access, at times warrant less, at any moment.
It’s bizarre that you think this is “Ok”. Insane you are defending it. Combined it makes a hard hard take that they are security oriented.
Beyond that Apple has cooperated with data turnover at the personal request of President Trump multiple times. So pull your head out of the sand.
Apple not only gives keys they often provide access with no legal requirement at all. They also DO NOT e2ee all sources they claim to depending on what regions the messages pass through to devices they end up at. There are also massive cooperation and caching going on of messaging and push notifications which access is provided to several governments. Aka as the Wyden leaks
Not the same, but ring is a common target for police warrants already
The data is only accessible to us for 3 hours but why would we expect them to shred the drives at the 3 hour mark so it's not accessible to them?
I don't own a smart speaker. It's actually annoying because there are so few options for a music system now. I've previously owned a Sonos but honestly it's just not a polished product. Anyway, my issue with smart speakers is I don't want a cloud-connected always-on microphones in my house. Sorry but no. You simply never know when law enforcement will use such a thing via a warrant nobody can tell you about (ie FISA). It could be targeted to you, individually but there are far worse alternatives.
It could be a blanket warrant against, say, people posting negatively against ICE online. Or microphones couldd be used to identify such people based on what it hears. You just have no control.
And once again, Google handed over PII voluntarily to the government recently [1]. Companies don't need to comply with administrative subpoenas. It takes a court order signed by a judge to enforce.
All of this is just another reason why China was correct to keep US tech companies out, basically. But here's where it's going to get much worse for the US and those same companies: when the EU decides enough is enough and creates their own versins that are subject to EU jurisdiction.
[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/10/google-sent-personal-and-f...
More good reading that I found helpful are the books: Privacy is Power and Surveillance Capitalism.
The keys then become:
1) Implementing policies discouraging them from doing so at the societal level
and
2) Implementing force behind those policies at the personal and societal level
DHS isn't getting paid right now because Kristi "Dog Shooter" Noem managed to screw up so badly that even Congressional Republicans under Trump don't want to own her agency's behavior and carved DHS out of the normal funding bill. There's still a chance for #1 to be achieved. #2 remains to be seen at the societal level, but you can start working on that yourself for the personal level.
But the other holes in the bucket doesn't mean you have to help. From a real opsec point of view a single tiny hole is the same as no wall at all. But from a day to day view less is less. It does at least reduce the spam.
And there is also, say you plug hole A and you can't do anything about hole B.
Some day something may develop that changes hole B (maybe a new law, maybe it's a service that you can stop using, maybe one org stops cooperating with another, whatever).
If hole A has already been wide open for years then closing hole B may not change much. But if hole A has been closed for years when the opportunity to close hole B comes along, then maybe closing hole B actually does something.
I choose to see it as something is better than nothing and it's worth it to apply pressure and be sand in the gears.
It's got to be better for everyone that there is at least some sand in the gears than if there were no sand in the gears.
So while some parts of DHS aren't funded, and it does give Democrats bargaining power, it could still end up in a situation like the October 2025 shutdown where they don't get meaningful change.
TSA employees won't get paid which could impact air travel. Probably not as bad as when FAA employees weren't getting paid but if it's bad enough the pressure for Democrats to cave again will be high.
[1] https://www.cato.org/blog/one-big-beautiful-bill-made-ice-sh...
I further noticed that while I had a chatgpt window open, my dev site window was becoming laggy after many refreshes as if something was deliberately trying to scan it every time it got refreshed. I suspect the AI to scan other open tabs and simply reading through everything it can encounter. It is actually the only explanation up to date (but I unfortunately don't have much time to try to validate this speculative opinion: I will surely give other shots in order to narrow my suspicions).
I tend to think that this kind of data extraction frenziness may be a big problem in the future. Read it as : "let's collect everything, just tell everyone we are not collecting it, and then we'll see what we can get from it." Imagine such data being used in the future versions of governments if things get wild.
I think the long term solution will have to be to become as independent as possible on these sniffer-corporations and to get real people into office rather than those lobbyists who work for those corporations. This will require a complete re-design of the whole system though. I am not sure we'll see that in our lifetime.
I'm confident Google etc will be compelled (if they haven't already been) to share their dossiers with the US and allies so that there is a file on each individual's psychology, weaknesses, and a how-to manual for gaslighting that person with the goal to silence them or coerce them into acting a certain way.
And by then, the Stasi would look like cute amateurs in comparison.
Those raising these concerns have been dismissed as paranoid for decades, even post-Snowden. And yet, surprising no-one, here we are.
Its like those who live in the states have a incentive to act like everything going on is ok, while those outside are increasingly having statements like yours. "How do you not see this power 13 years past Snowden"
I've not given up trying to point out how dangerous the US govs powers are in the hands of an ever less capable and more fascist government, ie posting here on HN, but the odds to convince people are low.
Both Canada and Europe are undertaking major projects to reduce their interdependence with America, and public sentiment on America has changed rapidly since the current administration assumed power. Europeans have always distrusted American tech, and Canadians have started trying to break away as well.
The Americans I spend time with are also unhappy with the direction things are going, but most of them still use Google Chrome and buy everything on Amazon. They seem to be less willing to accept a little bit of inconvience to take a moral stand.
https://thehub.ca/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/c9Enf-how-do-yo...
Some is just shock and overreaction I think. But it is an enormous shift.
1984 is here and we are allowing it bit by bit by normalizing at every small step stuff that would've been madness ten years before.
East Germany spent millions to spy on people.
Now people spend millions so the state can spy on them.
Madness.
Will another Progressive Era bring about more equality, or are the billionaires too entrenched?
Counterculture is disorganized and shallow, and funding is not as abundant where understanding of this problem exists.
It’s like the “don’t tread on me” militia crowd voting by like a 90% margin for a regime that is now enacting every single one of the things they’ve been afraid of for 50 years: masked cops, opaque detention centers, assaulting (and murdering) people for legally exercising second amendment rights, mass surveillance, social credit systems, and so on.
Or, I guess, like Lenin creating a totalitarian state to enslave the workers to liberate the workers? Or the French Revolution replacing the monarchy with the terror? Many examples in history I suppose.
If anything, he has been attacked by numerous 'strong men' (in various governments!) over several years.
He's either insanely clueless, a propagandist who is being dishonest about his goals, or an accelerationist who thinks making things worse will make them better after (magic happens here).
The magic never happens. Any political program that boils down to (1) break everything, (2) magic, (3) things are better, really goes (1) break everything, (2) either things stay broken and you end up a failed state or someone worse takes over.
I'd really appreciate it if you backed up this claim. If anything, I've seen him be sharply critical of the current administration in the US. I'm unfamiliar with his coverage of Putin.
Home of the Brave.
Insurrections do not look like that.
- The goal was interrupting the peaceful transfer of presidential power, a foundational element of U.S. constitutional governance.
- Force was used to disrupt lawful governmental authority.
- Part of a larger conspiracy to use alternate slates of electors to dispute the election and send it back to state legistatures (see Eastman memo and resulting lawsuits).
- Force was used to disrupt lawful governmental authority.
In the end, it wasn't anything history books will recognize as an insurrection. Because it wasn't an insurrection. That word means something, and this wasn't it. Was it bad? A bad thing? Yes, it was a bad thing I'd say. Not an insurrection though. Whatever those people did, it wasn't going to change anything. The powers that be could have had every last one of them killed with a snap of their fingers. They didn't because that would have been an overreaction to a bunch of methbillies trashing the place.
They did not.
Its another copy of their MAC data storage scenario due to a "rogue engineer"
The stored video is encrypted with key generated on your phone. You have to be physically close to the camera in order to share the key and complete the set-up. Once encrypted, the video can't be analyzed by AI or used in a broad surveillance effort.
It's entirely possible that the encryption keys have a backdoor, but I doubt it. Although there is no way to verify.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/media/securing-your-origin-for-...
even Amazon Web Services:
Benefits of using HTTPS connections:
HTTPS provides end-to-end encryptionSo… exactly not the part I care about?
Cool, it’s encrypted on transit to me… now what about at rest with them? Is it encrypted and they absolutely can not view or hand that footage to police/gov? No.
Technically yes, e2e encryption means video hosted on their servers is only viewable by devices with decryption keys. So if the police/gov brought a subpoena to request the video, Ring could only offer them the encrypted video. They would have to take possession of your phone and gain access in order to decrypt and view the video.
In this case the "ends" in the e2e encryption is the camera and your phone.
- You can call your service e2e encrypted even if every client has the same key bundled into the binary, and rotate it from time to time when it's reversed.
- You can call your service e2e encrypted even if you have a server that stores and pushes client keys. That is how you could access your message history on multiple devices.
- You can call your service e2e encrypted and just retrieve or push client keys at will whenever you get a government request.
But I think your third point is valid, there is nothing stopping Ring from telling the app to share a user's keys and then give them to whoever is asking.
They are acknowledging that the end to end TRANSIT is encrypted. They are not encrypting from themselves at rest.
They are encrypting at rest, that's my whole point and what everyone in this thread seems to be missing. When you turn on e2e, the video is not viewable anywhere but your phone. That's why you can no longer view your videos on ring.com and a myriad of ring features will no longer work.
https://ring.com/gb/en/support/articles/7e3lk/using-video-en...