Unless the court shrinks down to three seats (or four, if the Circuits cooperate) Alito and Thomas alone can’t dictate the way the Court treats the issue.
I don’t see why anyone is downvoting this, it’s trivial to see the history of votes on 4th amendment cases. Terry v Ohio is a great example.
We are assuming they are the only 2 doing (and as far as I know, none of the other judges have been implicated) but that's like finding two drunk guys passed out on a bench on a college campus and assuming that binge drinking isn't rampant in college.
Could I - as an individual - do such surveillance[1]? Won’t three letter agency knock on my door? Is there a difference between digital surveillance and physical surveillance?
[1] obviously at smaller scale, but imagine same level of creepiness.
you're a marketing company. you're gathering data for data mining that you will sell to other brokers. lots of small or niche marketing firms out there.
could you do it as one (1) person? might be hard. but you and a few coworkers / employees is perfectly reasonable.
chances are you won't sell directly to the government but to an aggregator, but it's not crazy to think that a small org could potentially sell to the gub'mnt if the data is juicy enough. would have to be very niche stuff though, like maps of labor / union folks, or data tracking Islamic prayer app use, etc.
keep in mind that being a government vendor means you have to jump through certain hoops, and those can be onerous, but again, not theoretically impossible.
A purchase works as follows: I like ice cream. I give you 5$. You give me an ice cream. I enjoy ice cream.
This is: government likes private health data. Hospital gives Palantir 5$, and your health data, repeat for 1 million patients. Palantir gives the health data to government, employs the nephew of the head of the healthcare regulator. Your unemployment gets denied because the doctor said you could work.
Buying means exchanging money for goods and services. This is exchanging money AND goods AND services for nothing. It's highly illegal for private companies, if you try it you'll get sued by the tax office the second they see it and find all company accounts blocked "just in case", but of course if you are the government, directly or indirectly, it's just fine and peachy.
And you might think "this makes no sense". But you'd be advised to check out who appoints the head of the hospital first. It does make sense. (In fact just about the only break on this behavior in most EU countries is that the Vatican still has control over the board of a very surprising number of hospitals. Needless to say, the EU governments really hate that, but there tend to be deals around this. For example, in Belgium the hospitals get 50% less per resident. These sorts of deals were made, but they now mean that if the government wants the Vatican out of the board ... they have to increase spending on that hospital, often by a lot. I'd call them "Vatican hospitals" but one thing government and the Vatican really agree on is that they do not want patients to know the underlying financial arrangements around hospitals, and in many cases it's quite difficult to find who controls a hospital even though it's technically public information)
Ice cream was sellers when they were selling it, but not the data, data belongs to someone else, who didn't explicitly allow selling it
Legally this should be treated as signing under duress and invalidated.
If someone's life or well-being depends on it, and undergoing services in not a choice, terms and conditions should not be legally allowed to be unilaterally dictated by one party.
There are multiple layers of corruption at work here. (They also cap the number of doctors, and clinics, etc).
This doesn't seem surprising on its face given that a hospital is, not unreasonably, a heavily regulated entity.
The supply of medical care, from operating rooms to doctors themselves, is heavily controlled by the state. There are billions, perhaps trillions of dollars that would flow into reducing the cost and increasing the availability of high quality medical care in the US if this were not so.
The demand is through the roof and will continue to rise. But the right to supply is only handed out to cronies.
The closer economic unit would probably be a bank itself, and to my understanding you do effectively need the government’s permission to open one of those.
Zoning, construction permits, occupancy permits, patio permits, food licenses, liquor licenses, health inspections, dumpster permits, etc
Liquor licenses notwithstanding.
There is no default-deny for getting a business license or opening a restaurant in a commercially zoned area, anyone can do it. Licensing and permission aren’t quite the same thing.
If you want to actually contribute to this very difficult topic, please refrain from welding disparate labels together in the introductory materials.
And I do realize the only reason the Vatican management is better is because the Vatican is ALSO corrupt ... but with different masters. The improvement is coming from the conflict between these groups. I do get the impression the Vatican is actually the more moral of the two parties, meaning compared to the government, but not by a huge margin.
>Needless to say, the EU governments really hate that
> if the government wants the Vatican out of the board ... they have to increase spending on that hospital, often by a lot. I'd call them "Vatican hospitals"
> one thing government and the Vatican really agree on is that they do not want patients to know the underlying financial arrangements around hospitals
> in many cases it's quite difficult to find who controls a hospital even though it's technically public information)
I am responding to these somewhat "breathless" statements that imply more than they delineate. My rebuttal is that these words frame a kind of inquiry that is common among conspiracy-attracted commentors.
The subject deserves more rigor and less insinuation IMO.
Thus, a company performing data collection and sharing it with the government may trigger nerd rage whereas company performing data collection and using the data to help profile ad targets triggers nerd advocacy, i.e., attempts to defend the practice of data collection with "justifications" that have no limit in their level of absurdity
For the surveillance target (cf. the surveilling company), what is significant about data collection is not how the data is used, it is how the data _could_ be used, which is to say, what is significant about data collection is (a) the fact that data is collected at all, not (b) what may or may not happen after the data is collected
Moreover, despite equivocal statements of reassurance in unenforceable "privacy policies" and the like, (b) is often practically impossible for those outside the company and its partners to determine anyway
Hypothetical: Trillion-dollar public company A whose core "business" is data collection and surveillance-supported advertising services takes a nosedive due to unforseen circumstances that affect its ability to sell ad services. Meanwhile, billion-dollar public company B whose core business is data collection and surveillance services for goverments sees their business on the rise. Company A decides to acquire or compete with company B
There is nothing that limits company A's use of the data it has collected for whatever purpose the company and Wall Street deems profitable
As such, the significant issue for the surveillance target is (a) not (b)
Focusing on the fact that company B assists governments whilst company A assists advertisers is a red herring
Once the data is collected, it's too late
I talked with cousins about it 8 years ago and I got laughed at as a conspiracy nut for saying that our personal data will be used against us if we allow it. People either don’t understand or don’t care because they’ve grown comfortable with it.
Suing your government generates results. Suing a company usually results in it shedding it's shell corporation and taking it's assets where you can't get them.
Selling user data needs to be a federal criminal offense. You need to go to jail for doing this. You need 15+ years in prison for doing this or enabling this in bulk. Let's start talking asset forfeiture next.
It's been like that for a while; I don't think either side of America's political aisle has the heart to extricate themselves of such a privilege.
PBS's _spying on the homefront_ piece from 2007 already described this very kind of omniscient private database.
The government itself isn't constitutionally allowed to build or run anything of the kind, but it can commission friends in the private sector to do one and query it with little to no oversight
I am definitely not uploading my face and ID on Discord or any site
They went from warrant, to FISA, to just write a request about a name, to more or less describe a vague group of ppl on whom you want the data
You should watch this show. It's available online and pretty informative.
If things weren't bad enough in 2007, things that have changed since then are most notably the cloud act that was created, Ring that started to "backup" your home CCTV in the cloud, then also Ring that enabled so called "Search Parties" and made a superball ad about it
In Capitalist Russia, you are on surveillance by bought off government;
In Soviet America, government bought off by surveillence on you!