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Comment by erentz | Hacker News Reader

At this stage tech companies should be pushing for very strong legislation that makes the US a bastion of data privacy to restore trust. But they are still pushing in the other direction.

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No amount of legislation can stop subpoenas, wiretapping and other extrajudicial means the US has used for data surveillance since the inception of the Patriot Act. With data privacy increasingly becoming a critical matter of national security, strengthening data sovereignty laws and holding corporations accountable was always the way forward.

This is untrue. Subpoenas, wiretapping, and other extrajudicial means can be stopped by legislation that bans them. You can't say in one breath that legislation that enables it (Patriot Act) cannot be undone by more legislation. There are many hurdles required to produce the required legislation, which may not even be broadly supported by the public, but it isn't correct to say "no amount of legislation can stop existing legislation".

A bad legislation is comparatively difficult to revert than a good legislation

That would require to repeal the FISA and the Patriot acts. That won't happen.

More fundamentally, however, the US constitution only protects Americans and American companies. Europeans would be foolish to trust the US with their data given this lack of basic protection and oversight.

> That won't happen.

Never say never.

If they could be stopped by legislation that bans them, they would have been stopped by the legislation that banned them prior to the legislation that authorised them, but we know this is not the case. They were being done on a wide scale long before they were legal.

Extrajudicial means something not legally authorized. The surveillance apparatus in the US for decades has operated outside the confines of legality. By definition, they cannot be stopped by legislation that bans them.

None of them want that. Meta actively hates you. Google doesn’t want data privacy. Neither does Apple, even if they aren’t overtly abusing it for advertising. Why would any of them push for more privacy? Their users largely don’t care (or they wouldn’t use those services in the first place).

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