The billionaire class wants a surveillance state. In every one of you still working in tech are helping them.
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.
Are we not allowed to use night vision goggles too?
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.
https://slate.com/technology/2013/07/nsa-can-reportedly-trac...
+ sorry for tracking your comment edits ;)
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?
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.
daft_pink•1h ago
ICE is buying a software tool that analyzes information purchased from commercial data brokers to track people.
vkou•1h ago
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[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•1h ago
FollowingTheDao•1h ago
jackstraw42•57m ago
stackskipton•1h ago
FollowingTheDao•1h ago
stackskipton•58m 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•57m ago
qwe----3•1h ago
tldrthelaw•55m ago
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presiden...
vkou•48m ago
almosthere•40m ago
(and that's forgetting immigration became an 80/20 issue when we found out the number)
drdaeman•6m 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.
pessimizer•58m 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.
malcolmgreaves•1h 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•54m ago
Are you going to link this story? It would be interesting. What was the previous warrant process, and what laws required it?
BinaryIgor•1h ago
daft_pink•43m 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•1h 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.