Is surveillance risk chilling your online speech?
Given the expansion of the fed/state/local/corporate surveillance net, do you find yourself expressing yourself less freely on the internet than you did five years ago?
It does sound like the property management company that owned the building might have been trying to get existing tenants to leave so they could renovate the building. And that's probably ultimately a good thing. Obviously it's disruptive for the existing legal tenants; but it sounds like it was a building in disrepair - that's why it was cheap enough for large numbers of illegal immigrants to be living there - and in general I think that tenant protection laws in major American cities are an impediment to building more and better-quality housing units.
Innocent children were marched out of their homes in the middle of the night by masked & unidentified Federal paramilitary troops with automatic weapons, who broke into the building by helicopter.
I will do everything in my power, for the rest of my life, to comprehensively politically disempower anyone who believes this is “ultimately a good thing.”
I think it's very important to show the true American spirit of telling those, who think they are out betters, to just go fuck off.
We're ALL Kings here in the USA.
Calling out bullshit, praising hard work and artistic expression, and enjoying life all need to be balanced.
Sharing things I've learned, the Beauty I've seen, and admitting my mistakes are core to the way I operate these days.
Before they had an easy access to the data but the barrier was their capacity to go through it. Nowadays any middle manager with data access and an OpenAI subscription can potentially get a sentiment and summary of your public (or even private with some saas plans) conversations.
I’m more careful with my words than I ever was.
I don't know if it's a net negative on society, in the end in China people are very apathetic towards all of this, their lives are fine, they can get food delivered in 5 minutes, trains run on time, flying cars, and all that. Bread and circuses, bread and circuses.
(This joke would be funnier if HN allowed unicode Full Block characters)
Even if what they're doing isn't legal, that doesn't stop them from potentially ruining your life in the process, maybe even getting away with it.
From the government, a little, but I think as a non-American in the US I was always a bit careful on that front. Better not to get in any trouble you know.
I think it's unclear whether the Brendan Eich case "worked out" or not, depending on what exactly your stance is with respect to his original political donation, and what you think about the trajectory of his career after he was forced to resign from Mozilla. I certainly know queer activist types who are not happy that he is still in tech, and still the CEO of a browser company.
I'd rather the Chinese have my data over a US company because... what could they do? I live here, not China.
Mass online surveillance has destroyed my dream and passion of participating and contributing to a free personal higher quality internet. To be specific, running my own websites, and participating in public forums.
I feel forever stuck in a never ending dilemma.
It is difficult to get to own a domain and a webserver that is not tied to oneself. Cryptocurrency gives options, but I have no clue how to acquire it without it being tied to me. Buying crypto through credit card is seen as capital investment in my country, and it is on you to prove to the tax agency if it was not the case.
One may ask, what is my threat model? What am I so scared about? To me, it feels like giving up. It is the principle of mass surveillance and tracking being against my values, purpose and passion. I want to share with the world, but I don't want it forcefully tied to my real identity.
I feel okay sharing what I have made with friends and real people that I meet. But I do not feel okay being forced to share to mass automated surveillance. The thought of going through the airport of e.g. America, and immediately, my interests, my way of thinking, what I like, what I don't like, what I know and what I don't know, is being tied to my identity in real time is uncomfortable.
And even assuming that I own the infrastructure without it being tied to me, there is the threat of stylometry. I will be writing a lot of text, and that will be possible to tie directly to me. Using AI to transcribe or change my stylometric fingerprint destroys the way I want to express myself, the words are no longer my own. This worry, of leaking my stylometric fingerprint, is also the reason I barely at all use AI, when I do, I obfuscate how I express myself.
Maybe one day I will care less. It perhaps has a big hint of maladaptive perfectionism. I developed OCD two years ago, with my obsessions being focused on taking risk. That does not change the fact, that it heavily has impacted me and the way I am expressing myself freely on the internet.
Does that count?
'Cnyrfgvar Npgvba' would make a great tshirt, or bumper sticker - but better not print it inside UK boundaries, just to be safe
Looking forward to the day when the government disallows every permutation of every character in criminalized character strings
Q: If Linus Torvalds embeds "Cnyrfgvar Npgvba" as a comment in the next release, would that mean that the UK government must cease using Linux?
Exciting times, mates.
I do wonder if I could automate the expression of uncontroversial opinions in the public sphere though. For example things about movies, music, or sporting events. These are valid interests that I simply don't have. I have at times been regarded with (I think) unfair suspicion for not engaging with social media to a meaningful degree.
OR. You want to say something about US oil and gas companies, or Israel. Those two things will get you scrutinised.
But obviously if you tried to organise protests during lockdowns, that's a different kettle of fish.
But if you start making some big posts about Woodside etc, you can have AFP knocking at your door.
There are things I don't say online anymore, not because I don't think they're correct, but because my opinion could be deemed offensive.
Whenever I say something I think could risk being seen as offensive, I tend to add a lot of footnotes explaining my reasoning for the things I'm saying and why I'm not trying to offend.
I also never share remotely offensive humour to friends over social media or messaging apps anymore, which used to be fun. Lots of people have been arrested for jokes so just not worth it tbh. Even if I don't think it's that offensive the law is too subjective to take the risk.
And for things that might seriously attract the ire of people who consider political violence a positive good, there's always TOR.
The risk of being denied entry to US and my lack of interest in visiting US share a reason. That's the only change vs 5 years ago as far as governments are concerned.
As for corporate I've always assumed no internal communication was private.
uggcf://fnynanir-ehalba.bet/ureovr.ugzy comes to mind.
Also uggcf://fnynanir-ehalba.bet/2026-07-04--lpbzovangbe-prafbefuvc.cat
Look at NPSM-7 [1], which basically says anyone who doesn't like capitalism or Christianity is likely a terrorist. Look at that Texas judge who threw a guy in prison for 30 years simply for moving a box of political contraband [2]. Look at the state department's recent report that labels everything from the DSA to the Black Lives Matter movement as secret agents of Cuba [3].
It's pretty clear that this administration is bent on throwing its political opponents in prison, whether they be actual politicians, protestors, or just bloggers.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSPM-7 2: https://freedom.press/issues/texas-man-sentenced-to-30-years... 3: https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Cuba-Report...
The guy in that case was sentenced for attempting to hide evidence that might show that his wife was associated with an activist group that had vandalized an ICE facility and shot a cop who came to investigate. It's possible that this is in fact an overreach of existing laws defining what counts as attempts to conceal or destroy evidence in court cases, but the legal justification for the prosecution was grounded in evidence and court procedure law for a legitimate prosecution (it is good to legally prosecute people who vandalize government facilities and then shoot cops who come to investigate; unless you genuinely support completely overthrowing the local government and replacing it with a different one through violence), not based on the political content of the pamphlets.
> Look at the state department's recent report that labels everything from the DSA to the Black Lives Matter movement as secret agents of Cuba [3].
Is it incorrect that secret agents of Cuba have attempted to increase the influence of American leftist movements like the DSA and Black Lives Matter? That seems plausible to me; and it doesn't contradict the proposition that there's also substantial organic domestic support for these movements by people who are generally unaware of or unconcerned with Cuban intelligence involement; or that it is and should be legal to voice support for domestic political movements in general even if some foreign intelligence agency thinks it's in its interest to also support the same movement.
Are you referring to anything in particular?
This is a deep topic which I’ve not given its due attention. But I have wondered about my likes and saves and chats on platforms such as Reddit.
This title of a webpage about says it all, “Read our full archive of Graham Platner’s deleted Reddit comments”.
Whatever you think about the former Maine US Senate Candidate, this type of published outrage goes hand-in-hand with his sibling “surveillance”.
Imagine if every email provider had an option to "publicize" next to the ability to star an email or email thread.
It's the private, anti-free speech stuff that would be interesting to see up close. And I'm just talking about email communications.
"It's not what you say, but who you say it to" - that notion hasn't yet become normative as pre-crime and post-crime justice blend.
"Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour" in the tradecraft of oppression, that idea must be reversed.
Freedom-of-speech should not be taken for granted, likewise freedom-of-association. Use it or lose it.
But a modern platform consolidation, zero tolerance practices and shitty spaghetti code written by a cheapest contractor - does.
Remember good old days of "forums"? Apart from some of the outliers on both ends (both cesspools and invite only elitists) a majority of the forums had this concept of warnings. So a user may have been rude or broke a rule or just got unlucky, he get a warning. Then maybe additional warnings. Or next there is "TEMPORARY" ban (absolutely alien concept nowadays), for a few days, then a few months, then a year. And it was actually possible to come back after a year long ban and see that the admins honored their own rules and did indeed unban you. I know a friend who was a frequent posted on a city automotive forum who served two year-long bans and he still posts there, soon it will be 3 decades or so :) . And the list of issuers, bans, dates and ban reason was usually public for all.
So all of that culture of being nice and polite is gone now. There are no warnings anymore (well, HN is tiny little exception, even then warnings are informal here, no automation like it was done in the previous century). Bans are instant and permanent, there are no temporary bans anywhere anymore, except for some deliberately gloating bans, like "you are banned until 2126, haha". And in case a discussion platform is owned by a corpo providing other services, they will ban user everywhere too. And mods are often using some crappy code to autoban users based on some primitive pattern matching. Write an ambiguously interpreted comment and poof, off you go. Some platforms even officially allow report abuse, like FB where a bot owner can take down any post, regardless of its content.
Ironically, the lack of niceness culture and extra harsh extra fast punishments didn't lead to the better talking spaces. Instead people are now using hundreds of throwaway twink accounts and now they don't moderate themselves. Why would they, the punishment to a rabid foaming at the mouth crazy user registered 1 day ago and to a old timer registered 15 years ago and who said some less radical comment in a latest political discourse or doubted some newest fad or whatever, maybe he was simply genuinely mistaken as happens to all - well, the punishment is the same. So why bother? Why write 4 paragraphs of reasoning to explain why entity A is bad in some specific way and the reasons for that, when user can just fire off a one liner hate message and get the same results? And so on.
As a weirdo who never uses twink accounts I'm in a minority and by old habits I still post as if I'm on some oldschool sane forums, but I do often stop and rewrite parts, to avoid being automodded into oblivion. And I certainly don't post on FB or Instagram or YT or other platforms anymore. The collateral damage over there would be catastrophic.
No, because five years ago was probably the high point of online speech restriction. A time where people were banned from platforms like Twitter and Facebook for expressing political opinions or stating scientific facts
If anything, you're more free to "express yourself" now.
now that trump is president and X is a thing, i do feel much more free to express myself without worries
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSPM-7
Quote from the NSPM-7: > There are common recurrent motivations and indicia uniting this pattern of violent and terroristic activities under the umbrella of self-described “anti-fascism.” These movements portray foundational American principles (e.g., support for law enforcement and border control) as “fascist” to justify and encourage acts of violent revolution. This “anti-fascist” lie has become the organizing rallying cry used by domestic terrorists to wage a violent assault against democratic institutions, constitutional rights, and fundamental American liberties. Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality. As described in the Order of September 22, 2025 (Designating Antifa as a Domestic Terrorist Organization)
Yeah, Tom Paine used to fucking rhapsodize about border control.
They actually wrote that?
Jeebus.
It's a good thing I love Baseball, McDonald's and God, yessiree.