Tech companies shouldn't be bullied into doing surveillance
eff.org
eff.org
It does seem like Anthropic is at least the only big AI company that is pursuing some safety discussions around their technology like not using it for surveillance and war for killing people autonomously.
This administration is wielding a power that was meant to serve Americans in the past by forcing companies to conform to an agenda that is anti-democratic/freedom/constitutional.
I'm just not confident they will stand against this administration when the going gets tough but let's see what happens this Friday I guess.
This administration got elected because tech billionaires invested in it. They were right behind them, and I mean literally.
Isn't it possible that this was all deliberately done by tech companies to get access to data and consolidate their position, and secure public funding?
Outside of having a military, several tech companies are probably more powerful than nation states at this point, and I think some of them realize this. As long as a complete slip into barbarism is still not fully on the table, nations need the data that tech companies have more or less entirely captured and established a complete hegemony around at this point. They also rely directly on their products. I guess the EU is starting to wake up to how problematic this is.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance_disclosure...
'By the late 1990s ECHELON was reportedly capable of monitoring up to 90% of all internet traffic. According to the BBC in May 2001, however, "The US Government still refused to admit that Echelon even exists."'
You could also say that this is what the people have wanted for decades.
Remember the PATRIOT Act? Voted in by a vote of 99 to 1 in the senate. (And the 1 who voted against it? Yeah, we got rid of him for a more "law and order" type guy.)
What we're seeing is just the people getting more of what they're demanding. You get the government you deserve. And you deserve to get that government good and hard as often as possible.
And some of the uglier implementations may be repealed, ICE may be "reformed," there may be "hearings" and "committees" and that may give the illusion of "returning to normal" but we will never go back to the reality of power before Trump any more than we can go back to the reality of power before 9/11. Absent revolution and civil war, it's simply impossible.
[0]https://medium.com/@s-blog/a-history-of-disaster-capitalism-...
We're talking about unprecedented levels of corruption and nepotism.
Remember when MAGA went crazy when it was claimed that Nancy Pelosi made 130 million in stocks since 1987[0] - over the course of 30 years of investing.
Or when Hunter Biden worked with some Ukrainian company, for which he was, apparently, qualified - way more qualified then a lot of the current positions in the government.
Now let's compare it to the alleged 1.4 billion Trump made in a few months[1], and this doesn't count how much the family and friends could have made with inside trading.
How can it be refreshing when there's no comparison?
[0]https://abc45.com/news/nation-world/report-shares-nancy-pelo...
[1]https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/01/20/opinion/edito...
This is just not true. If one party sprints leftward and then points at the other party and calls them far right, eventually people notice.
The top issues were illegal immigration, prices, and the fact that the Democrats just couldn't answer the question "what is a woman?" even when being confirmed as supreme court justices.
If you look totally mad and self-destructive, you will eventually lose in America. Unless you're Gavin Newsom, perhaps.
> The top issues were illegal immigration, prices, and the fact that the Democrats just couldn't answer the question "what is a woman?" even when being confirmed as supreme court justices.
You didn't realize the whole subject of "what is a woman" was pretty much a "minor issue", blown out of proportion by MAGA, social networks, and podcasts?
Like, how was that subject more important than January 6? Doesn't it bother you more that a former president (now president) tried to stop a vote count?
It's insane what social media is doing to people.
> If you look totally mad and self-destructive, you will eventually lose in America. Unless you're Gavin Newsom, perhaps.
The fact that you lack the awareness of how mad and self-destructive this administration is, not just internally within the USA, but also the destruction of decades of soft power, is truly mind-blowing to me.
If you think that the demands for rights of a fraction of a minority are "totally mad and self-destructive", but what's happening every week since the administration took over is normal, then I don't think we're operating in the same reality plane.
What they don't realize is the irreparable damage being done to the country and society with this behavior.
When I say that was one of the main issues people voted on, what does it mean to be a minor issue blown out of proportion? Does that mean they didn't really vote on it in a significant way? Or do you mean they did, but you think they shouldn't have?
> Like, how was that subject more important than January 6? Doesn't it bother you more that a former president (now president) tried to stop a vote count?
I've never seen any particular fallout or actual problem that came out of January 6 other than people saying how bad it was. Certainly not based on any footage I saw. Equally I'm not that bothered by the Democrats removing their democractically elected candidate and replacing him at the last minute with a party leadership-ordained one. But you should probably be if you're that worried about Jan 6, as that was far more consequential.
> The fact that you lack the awareness of how mad and self-destructive this administration is, not just internally within the USA, but also the destruction of decades of soft power, is truly mind-blowing to me.
It might be worth re-reading my post. It was talking about the election, and not what's happened post election. Seeing all of Republican behaviour across all time with no context as to when things happened isn't going to bear much fruit, I think.
But people already rose up. That's why tech companies are adding surveillance everywhere.
People want more surveillance. Have you talked to a rape victim or murder victim before? It would be extremely tone deaf to lecture them about how we should have less surveillance.
They are surveillance companies. That's part of the problem.
Ads are just information too. Where you search good content or bad content, the results (videos and ads) align with that easily. If you really want to unites how it’s really easy to go read something written by someone sorry experienced. In case you work in or around adtech it’s your call but ignorance isn’t really a reason.
Your secondary point speaks to m, meta data, which can be as good as identifiable data.
If someone removes your name from your bank statement it will still tell a lot about you.
If we think it can’t be tied to, the grocery store loyalty program which can also share your individually purchased item data will now share what groups of items you buy and potentially for what purpose.
Then there’s the clickstream of what your browser visits. Let’s remove the name from that, but that data is available too.
Your cell phone location data can’t be attributed to you, but generated maybe it can overlap and then everything wider in it.
All is this kind of data has been commercialized by tech and conveniently available for other privacy invading purposes as well.
That has all changed today, except for Anthropic. You think Apple is going to stand up to an unlawful DoJ demand these days? Hell no. Tim Cook has lit Apple's reputation on fire. I've been a super dedicated Apple user for 25 years, but I'm heading for the exits now. All that trust has been burned.
Stay strong Anthoproc, you are seemingly the only really large SV company with any principles and backbone. I won't forget what happens here, either way it goes.
(Dropping safety pledge)
The best thing the company could do if they want to stick to principles is not be based in the US.
I think they pretty clearly demonstrated good faith and where it ends up is a tactical choice I'm not in a great position to judge.
Almost certainly not on the table. If Hegseth did this he’d crash the market. That’s a red line he will only cross out of stupidity.
We've been saying this about many policies of this administration, only to be sorely disappointed.
I'm not saying it's off the table completely, particularly with Hegseth, who is an insecure idiot. But the choices once it's enacted are (a) Trump ordering Hegseth to stop fucking around or (b) a market crash handing Democrats full control of Congress.
So you're saying it's highly likely then?
https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/law/truman-orders-se...
Do not underestimate Hegseth's stupidity. He's completely unqualified for the job he has and is way out of his depth. Ditto for many others in this administration.
Hey, so what you are saying is that unless we use the AI that we control, to take control of the mass surveillance and autonomous drone strike systems, you will force us to take control of these systems?
I mean, did H just Open Clawed the entire US military?
"Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has threatened Anthropic, saying officials could invoke powers that would allow the government to force the artificial intelligence firm to share its novel technology in the name of national security if it does not agree by Friday to terms favorable to the military"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/24/pentago...
Hell, there's a significant sharing of people between them and SpaceX, meaning the company's full of people with security clearances working on defense contracts.
Anthropic also seems to have dropped their safety pledge in a matter that I'm sure is completely unrelated.
Sure, but Claude seems to be considered better and the US military does not want something second class.
If those tools are open source, fix them. If they're not open source, don't use them. Problem solved.
It's not hard to write an installation script.
Some of the previously *nix friendly ones (ie Siemens NX) have even moved to only being available for Windows.
They are on the side of making money. And the bigger they are, the more pressure. The big tech companies are now so big that they can’t afford to leave any money in the table if they want to keep their growth rates.
Now companies are dominated by MBAs and nepotism. Most join tech for a quick cash out. Having values is seen as a loss, because if you can get a billion, why not? You're invincible if you're rich and none of these downsides apply to you. Screw everyone else. They could just be a billionaire themselves if they don't like it.
As a result, zoomers today meme about people like the unabomber making a good point.
I don't blame them.
As a nerd I think my spirit was broken by the absolute apathy of the normies. It was easy to ignore up until the early 2000s. It's become unbearable after social media and the iPhone reached the masses. It's not nerd stuff anymore. They influence every design now. They shape every decision. They are actively exploited at every turn. They are profiled, surveilled, controlled. It's gotten to the point even we nerds can't escape this fate no matter how much we want to. We try to tell them about it and we're made out to be tinfoil hat nutjobs. It's happening and they don't care.
It feels so hopeless and it's honestly very radicalizing. It breeds sociopathy. In the end I can't find the will to blame the billionaires either. I think I'd do the same if I could. Make billions and then just create a small paradise for me and all the people I care about. A subset of society where the principles I hold dear actually apply. Society is too fucked up and nobody cares, so I'll just create my own fiefdom.
Ask Italy how that ends.
My country is heading down this path as we speak. President literally gave a speech where he asked something like "who will ensure the survival of the millions of useless people created by technology?" They're obviously going to make us pay for it. The actual billionaires will simply leave before they get taxed, of course. Whoever stays gets to foot the bill.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
PRISM started in 2007, during the Iraq war.
Companies such as?
And then to appeal to Anthropic is just offensively, willfully ignorant.
I hope you have more evidence for this than just that press release. As far as I'm concerned that was nothing more than a stunt because while Tim Cook "fought" against the FBI, intelligence agencies and private cybersecurity companies already had the capability to break into ~all smartphones.
That single instance created an unreasonable amount of belief that iPhones are unbreakable, which is good news if you're the FBI and you want criminals to put way more trust into their iPhones than they should.
The same Apple actively aids Chinese government's suppression of civil liberties [1]. To think that there's any ideological conviction (and moral high ground) behind their [apparent] pro-privacy stance is painfully naive.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/11/apple-limits-i...
Apple defined ICE as a "protected class" in blocking anti-ICE apps (boingboing.net)
Anecdote, but I knew a couple senior folks at Apple during the San Bernardino encryption dispute [1]. My understanding is Cupertino was surprised—going all the way to the top—how much backlash they got for what they felt was the natural reaction. (Not to unlock.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93FBI_encryption_d...
https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/08/06/internal-memo-at-...
https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...
These companies use safety and intellectual property as excuses to achieve centralization. But if you think about it for more than a second, they're basically saying "intelligence for me but not for thee."
I don't want to live in a world where a handful of entities control all of the intelligence, and I don't think you do either. The best future we can hope for is one where everyone can run an open-source AGI on their own gaming PC. And by run I mean local matmuls, not API calls to a remote server.
That said, Anthropic finances PACs[1] that push legislation like the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA)[2] that would make Anthropic the gatekeepers and censors of all user-generated content on the internet, in order to save the children. That same legislation would force you to scan your face and ID to access or create user-generated content online, again, to save the children. Anthropic would get paid to train on, and censor, all user-generated content that's shared online into perpetuity. If passed, it would also mark the death of free anonymous speech on the internet.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/12/anthropic-gives-20-million-t...
[2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/12/congresss-crusade-age-...
So not only will we pretend PRISM didn't happen but somehow they even fought it?
I don't know if it can be verified whether end-to-end encryption like Whatsapp and co claim to offer is actually safe. I suspect it isn't, but, I don't know enough.
I doubt it. The largest tech companies of the time were Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, Oracle and IBM. It would be nice if you were more specific.
News articles are extremely available and things were so early that they did all fight like hell as a new industry.
The internet itself was the new unknown tech to politicians and their lobbyists just like ai is now.
Little is actually new except it’s maybe be to you just like the current crop of politicians the tech of the day that might impact power or connection between people.
IBM, for instance, was part of military-industrial complex before the term was coined. That's why I am quite skeptical of the claim.
Relationships between govt and tech industry for sure have existed, at that time the relevant and participatory parties may not have been present, or present in the way or on the sides being assumed if compared to today.
It’s actually a pretty interesting read.
"Ok, if you don't do what I tell you then you HAVE to connect the autonomous AI engine that only you understand and control, I repeat you HAVE to connect your golem to my control systems."
Like a bank robber threatening to hand the gun to the teller if they don't put the money in the bag.
Like SecDev H "open claw"-ing the entire US military.
Either way, it's ALL business.
But then they can't make their billions selling our data.
You might as well suggest Mobil not sell gasoline or oil.
I've recently rewatched Steve Blanks's "Secret History of Silicon Valley" talk [1]. Until 80's most SV startups seem to be financed directly by the military. This changes only after the rise of private VC. But for strategic technologies like internet, search, communication, social media and finally AI, they still have to have control over them. "User Data" everyone talks about is not limited with consumer behavior. The real money is on how we think and act as citizens of this world. The whole world wouldn't give all their data to an app named Uncle Sam or CCP. But we are happy to give the same information to Facebook, Google, ChatGPT or TikTok. They are free and they don't want our money.
The separation was never completely clear, but there was a time when the separation was much more marked.
The reason was simply that programming culture at that time was more "chaotic", "anti-authoritarian", "open-source"/"free software" (in the erstwhile understanding of this being just a part of a bigger movement, not in the verbal sense), "radical privacy" (cypherpunk), "hacking" (including the legally dubious aspects) etc.
These values were quite opposite to those of the military-industrial or surveillance-industrial complex, so there was a lot of friction between the cultures of the tech companies at that time and these complexes, which made it not particularly attractive for these sides to partner - if only because of the frictions between the sides that were to overcome.
Anthropic opened themselves to this disaster by making that first contract with the military.
I don’t want them to lose this battle but it’s also one they brought upon themselves by stepping into that arena.
This is quite the same discussion like players shouldn't cheat, yet it's not the fault of the game but the player that is behaving wrong.
So search the responsibilities on the acting side.
What would you do if you were a government in-charge of keeping a country full of independent thinkers safe from themselves?
Maybe the part that makes me most sad is that for those of us who have been doing this for, well, our entire lives, it’s just not the outcome any of us envisioned but it’s the outcome that (almost) all of us have been party to even if in some small way.
The courts have lost their goddamn minds.
Also, the third-party doctrine hasn't been good enough for certainly the last thirty and maybe the last hundred years. But, authoritarians aren't easily separated from their tools of oppression, so I expect to not see that cluster of regulations updated to be actually protective within my lifetime.
I think the median American favors security over freedom right now. The reality of cable news and now social media is that an unsolved crime is a national anxiety. When we’re whipped into a collective panic like that, it seems outright ridiculous that the cops not be allowed to access anything that could help.
If you're just venting with friends, or trying to build cred as a moral philosopher, then yes, obviously there should be such a law.
Vs. if you're talking about cause and effect, in the real world... its kinda like how foxes never pass laws against foxes moonlighting as henhouse guards. Or somehow Officer Fox, Prosecutor Fox, and Judge Fox don't seem keen on enforcing that law.
I am curious about how far a project like Confer can go, but I wouldn't be surprised if it couldn't be profitable (because it is designed to not do surveillance).
I would personally add "bullied, coerced and/or gaslighted into doing surveillance".
I don't understand why the US government is doing this though. Wouldn't it be much easier to do use some of the already passed laws on foreign intelligence to open a surveillance data pipeline? You know, like PRISM.
I mean, this is inconsistent with the previous M.O., and highly unusual.
I also feel very conflicted to suddenly have to "defend Anthropic", a company that has been systematically doing evil things (destabilizing markets, promoting misleading media campaings, etc). I don't want to defend those guys.
Can I just dislike both the US military and Anthropic at the same time, and say there are no good guys here?
Hegseth gives Anthropic until Friday to back down on AI safeguards
SaaS
FTFY
They're going to spy on you regardless.