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Comment by lenerdenator | Hacker News Reader

At this point, it's fair to assume that if the US government wanted to surveil you to a nefarious end, they absolutely could, easily, using things you bought to make your life more convenient.

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.

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Sadly ICE and CBP is still getting paid because it was already funded by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. [1]

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 laugh at myself sometimes for things like this: I refuse to provide my phone number to the cashier who promises me loyalty points, then I hand over the same credit card number I use for all my purchases. Boy, I really showed them how much I value my privacy!

How are those two things the same?!

They're both a single long-lived identifier that identifies a single person and their habits?

I always pay in cash. I go out of my way to get cash and travel to more distant stores to spend it.

Same, exactly the same here.

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.

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