What’s the fix? What’s a simple rule change that would, at the very least, take these data out of law enforcement’s hands outside the most-necessary situations?
Or the other guy's community network idea but it would have to also publish the realtime activities and whereabouts of all politicians who voted against making this illegal.
Much like the law that stopped video rental companies from telling what their customers were renting, that passed after some politicians had their video rental histories leaked.
They’re above the rules for a political cycle because we’re shifting to a system of spoils. That doesn’t change that everything they’re doing right now is legal. (Outside ICE. They’re a warren of criminality right now.)
That this culture shift would need time to trickle down into positive bans on surveillance performed by the government (eg Flock), or requiring audit trails for government use of commercial data that still gets collected, shows how far we're behind.
(I use the word "port" to indicate that we need to avoid letting lobbyists stuff it full of loopholes and regulatory capture the way everything else is. Heck I think we could do worse than copying the text verbatim and letting the courts sort it out)
This means that I, as the owner of my data, can refuse to provide it for some use cases, request its deletion, etc. It’s my data after all.
It's about the amount of data. It's about what it can be used for from military adjacent organizations under a fascist regime. Whether you think the us is headed toward fascism or not, what if it did? That's the point.
One is a clear and present danger. The other is a hypothetical danger. Both deserve being addressed. But if only one is going to get political capital, it should be the first.
(I've worked on technology privacy issues. My takeaway is the public is broadly fine with the tradeoff. Folks in tech are not. But folks in tech with strong views on privacy are politically useless due to a combination of self-defeating laziness and nihilism.)
You cannot change the rules to fix this. You can only change your personal habits. I wish it wasn't like this, but none of those agencies can be held accountable by design.
This. The lesson of the past decades is: if some organization has the data, eventually it becomes too attractive not to (ab)use it. Even Apple, which sold itself as a privacy-first company is slowly adding more and more ads. Squeezing out more profits is just too attractive with the pile of data that they are sitting on. Similarly, bad governments will require access to the data if they can.
Employees inside companies should push back collection of data as much as possible (the GDPR helps a lot in Europe). If you do not have the data, you cannot use it in a user hostile-way in the future and governments cannot request data that you do not have. If you have to store data, go for end-to-end encryption.
Citizens should try to escape the Apple/Google duopoly (e.g. by installing GrapheneOS), block trackers, and only install the necessary apps (no app = no easy tracking). For apps that you do need, revoke as many sandbox privileges as possible.
Sure Flock, we buy your safety pitch. We just don’t trust you.
This is the worst of all worlds. Actual criminal investigations get thwarted or the reporting requirement gets diluted to the point of being useless (“someone looked for something today!”). And a burden of vigilance shifted onto the public.
Funding the police is the burden of vigilance already on tax-payers. We’re already approach the worst of worlds. Your perspective just points to human organizations being unsustainable, not this concept in particular.
What would be made public? If it isn’t verbose, it’s useless for accountability. If it’s too verbose, it’s a privacy issue per se and burden to legitimate investigations.
Though. Now that I think about it. Maybe a delayed notice requirement for anyone whose records are queried. That’s personally hitting in a way a public record is not.
As the founding fathers intended.
We don't have public consensus on major questions, in my opinion, to make this a fruitful endeavour.
One thing we need is a political movement to push for Constitutional amendments. My five are, in decreasing order of priority, (1) multi-member Congressional districts, (2) striking the pardon power, (3) abolishing the electoral college and creating a referendum requirement for major legislation, (4) changing the first sentence of Article II to "the President shall execute the laws of the United States," and (5) permitting the Congress to charter independent agencies for up to 20 years.