The problem here is a lack of data protection laws. It's entirely legal for any private citizen who wants to to purchase huge amounts of mass location data/history for billions of people.
i consider myself fairly knowledgeable about tracking techniques and countermeasures. despite constant effort and techniques that are extreme or impossible for the average individual, i believe my evasions are minimally effective.
it's also increasingly difficult to use the internet or even exist in public at all without some kind of compromise that invalidates most of that work.
Sounds like it is still illegal. They just don't care.
These were positions set up after the Watergate scandal to make it harder for the executive to engage in blatant criminality for long periods without anyone noticing. One ought to read that as a statement of intent to commit lots of obvious crimes.
https://www.rsn.org/001/ice-obtains-access-to-israelimade-sp...
Spoiler: it's obvious to anyone who knows about tech.
I mention the date because this problem has been known by everyone, not just me, for a very long time. But it seems like others are incapable of acting on the knowledge.
> But it seems like others are incapable of acting on the knowledge.
That's wrong. They just don't understand and don't care to understand. They choose not to act, because they don't see a need. Which is true for many things and different groups. You care about turning off your cell phone, how much do you care about climate change or the mass extinction we are responsible for?
I would argue that the equivalent of turning off your cell phone would at the very least be to be a vegetarian. Are you, or are you "incapable of acting on the knowledge"? :-)
https://slate.com/technology/2013/07/nsa-can-reportedly-trac...
+ sorry for tracking your comment edits ;)
You expect SO MUCH diligence from individuals while removing any responsibility for the situation from the companies perpetrating it. I now have to make my choice of phone based on the ability to remove the battery so that I cannot be tracked by my own government? That is insane.
But being able to shut your phone/tracking device off is not a big or crazy ask. And it's not going to wildly alter your life if you do so. You should consider it seriously even if you've been lagging a bit behind, or lacking lived experience, with the state of the world. No better time to adapt to uncomfortable new realities than now.
Why did you leave your phone at home? What are you hiding? Why are you afraid of being tracked by us?
Do you not understand anything about privacy and why it’s important?
Barreling towards a complete lack of privacy is scary and waving it away as "just don't bring your phone" is massively naive. There are many many ways you can be identified and tracked besides your own phone, because there is so much incentive to do it. Even if everyone stopped bringing their phone everywhere out of fear of tracking, they would _still be tracked_
Just some companies which collect unfathomable troves of data but have no incentive to clamp down individuals or manipulate democracies?
I just spilled my rhetorical counter argument...
You are right, the distinction between public or private abuse of power is futile in the end, but this doesnt mean we should put a blind eye on private corporations doing the dystopian ground work, by eg. relativizing all this with a "It could be worse. It could be the government but thank god its only palantir bundling the data, so no f'ing issue here. Calm down smart people!".
To be fair this has been happening at least since 9/11 under both parties.
While I agree with the overall premise, but to best of my awareness (and I worked at an ISP in Russia in '00s) those statements are not entirely accurate.
SORM is Russia's Room 641A, except that it's legislated and all done in the open. It started way before telecom consolidation (which started mid-'00s, when large enterprises with strong government ties started to absorb smaller companies) and initially crept in slowly. At first smaller telcos were able to step around the requirements and just promise to cooperate "if something" (essentially, looking up flow logs and/or running tcpdump after being served a proper warrant).
AFAIK, SORM's first targets were mostly CSAM distributors and people who leaned towards neo-nazi views to various extents. That's how it was legitimized in the eyes of those who knew about it: look, FSB is going against pedophiles and nazis, yay! Don't know about journalists or minorities.
Shit started to hit the fan with mid-2010s rapid acceleration towards authoritarianism, when mandatory censorship and drastic expansion of online surveillance became a law.
And mass/non-targeted phone tracking is a relatively modern development in Russia, mostly post-pandemics.
Sounds similar to ChatControl, right?
Not saying that the EU is turning authoritarian at all, but just that it is a tool that may turn evil in the future.
That's about all in similarities, though. AFAIK, there's a difference in the system architecture: Russian SORM was a push from an existing agency (FSB) who became it's sole operator (and basically took over the country: Putin is KGB/FSB spawn), EU proposal seem to establish a clearinghouse-like system for various law enforcement agencies to access through. There's also a difference in oversight: FSB has none, EU proposes some, though I'm not really knowledgeable on the details.
And - yeah - any tool that allows government to violate citizen rights is inherently dangerous if the government becomes hostile. This is clearly the case in Russia, and I'm not knowledgeable about EU at all so I cannot possibly tell.
If you the reader are working on these technologies, I encourage you take a good look at yourself in the mirror. You are building a surveillance state for the rich to use against yourself, me and everyone else not part of the ruling class.
You are helping cement the class divide.
The last two years it has become more of a signal that "this is something right wing USA would want to supress".
I think the flagging mechanism needs a rethink now it is being abused in this way.
Just be another crop for the police state.
daft_pink•4mo ago
ICE is buying a software tool that analyzes information purchased from commercial data brokers to track people.
vkou•4mo ago
---
[1] Nearly all deportations - overstays are civil, not criminal[2][3] cases.
[2] If they were criminal cases, every accused would be constitutionally entitled to a trial by jury.
[3] Anyone using the term 'illegal' to refer to those people is speaking out of both sides of their mouth. They want to make them sound like criminals, while denying them the constitutional protections that all accused criminals are entitled to.
etchalon•4mo ago
stackskipton•4mo ago
FollowingTheDao•4mo ago
stackskipton•4mo ago
I talk about this issue with people time and time again including my wife. I then watch her pretty much turn over location to every app because she just clicks top button to make prompt go away. I finally got into her iPhone and number of apps that had widespread location access was so frustrating.
pessimizer•4mo ago
qwe----3•4mo ago
tldrthelaw•4mo ago
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presiden...
vkou•4mo ago
almosthere•4mo ago
(and that's forgetting immigration became an 80/20 issue when we found out the number)
drdaeman•4mo ago
It possibly would be very different if federal administration would openly recognize the potential issues and put at least a sliver of effort in showing how it deals with those. I can understand their statement that the scale of the problem requires action of comparable scale - that is logical. However, careless actions become incredibly dangerous at scale, and I have yet to see a sliver of understanding of this, for all I'm seeing so far is arrogant stubborn self-confidence that is very hard to distinguish from malicious intent. And I'm putting a lot of effort here with my suspension of disbelief for the sake of civilized discussion.
Those hotheads are supposed to be a conservative government. They don't act like one at all.
vkou•4mo ago
You're acting like some prior President cracked his knuckles one day, and signed an EO to import 15 million people in, and justifying the unconstitutional insanity of the past 8 months based on that falsehood.
You're drawing a false equivalence fallacy, and covering blatantly illegal and unconstitutional actions. A 52% consensus isn't enough to achieve those, either. You need 66% consensus in Congress, and 3/4s of States.
If the issue is as existential as you think it is, it's on you to build the consensus necessary to achieve that. If you can't, tough luck.
queenkjuul•4mo ago
15M people over the course of decades, and you can't possibly prove they contribute meaningfully to homelessness (besides, possibly, many of them being homeless themselves).
pessimizer•4mo ago
If the dossiers are available on the market, and the price is right, and they're allowed to for some reason even though they wouldn't be allowed to collect that information themselves, they should just buy them for every citizen just in case.
vkou•4mo ago
gruez•4mo ago
Are there any reputable law scholars that supports this argument? Otherwise this feels suspiciously close to sovereign citizens argument about how they don't need drivers licenses because they're "traveling" or whatever.
>[3] Anyone using the term 'illegal' to refer to those people is speaking out of both sides of their mouth. They want to make them sound like criminals, while denying them the constitutional protections that all accused criminals are entitled to.
What about "illegally" parked cars? Those are also civil infractions.
vkou•4mo ago
Yes, literally everyone, because that's how the law is written.
Note https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/2436 - this would reclassify it from a civil to a criminal offense, but did not pass into law.
Also note that entry into the US after having been removed from it is, by law, a criminal offense.
----
> What about "illegally" parked cars? Those are also civil infractions.
You should note that nobody calls the people who put them there 'illegal drivers'. (We also don't apply that moniker to people speeding, failing to signal on a lane change, or being responsible for many other moving violations. We do apply it to people driving drunk or without a license - which are criminal offenses.)
gruez•4mo ago
I stand corrected, thanks.
>You should note that nobody calls the people who put them there 'illegal drivers'. (We also don't apply that moniker to people speeding, failing to signal on a lane change, or being responsible for many other moving violations. We do apply it to people driving drunk or without a license - which are criminal offenses.)
Nobody calls them "illegal" drivers because there's a more specific term, specifically "driver who parked illegally" or "speeder". The latter already incorporates an implication if illegality, and the former is basically the same as "illegal driver" but with slightly different phrasing. The equivalent for immigrants would be "person who immigrated illegally", but that's basically the same as "illegal immigrant". I suppose you can try to use the latter term as an attempt to destigmatize the term, but that feels like the whole "autism vs people with autism" thing from a few years ago all over again.
malcolmgreaves•4mo ago
The bigger story is that the Republicans have illegally dismantled safeguards against the centralization and collection of data. And they’ve stopped any sort of warrant process for collecting and analyzing this data.
Buying commercial data with a warrant or a process around it to ensure it is lawfully used is one thing. Disregarding the law and constitution to do whatever you like is a wholly different matter.
And don’t forget the end game. This is about silencing political opponents. It’s not for a lawful use. It’s purely so the Republicans can keep their man in power in perpetuity.
The end game alone makes this vastly different than what’s been done before.
pessimizer•4mo ago
Are you going to link this story? It would be interesting. What was the previous warrant process, and what laws required it?
BinaryIgor•4mo ago
daft_pink•4mo ago
I wrote this TLDR, because I wondered what I would have to do to prevent tracking (turn off bluetooth etc), but it's just a commercial data broker.
pessimizer•4mo ago
And both will continue to be allowed to do this, obviously. Something something private business free speech child protection that doesn't apply to ICE because I'm against ICE right now.