Not sure why this is being downvoted, as there is clear link between the influx of CIA/NSA/FBI/DHS agents in private sector and an increase in turning over of sensitive data to government, at-will. We have laws and constitutional rights for a reason.
Sources that identify persons who worked at government intelligence agencies that now work in private sector, that are verified? That's quite credible, as it can be quickly and independently verified. Brains... use them.
Like... your submissions and comments on HN? Should we also believe you are capable of managing the responsibility of software engineering when you proudly advertise your website in encryption-free HTTP?
> there is clear link between the influx of CIA/NSA/FBI/DHS agents in private sector and an increase in turning over of sensitive data to government, at-will.
Yes, that clear link is called 'growth', there's no tabloid conspiracy required.
Social media companies employ vastly more people today than they did years ago, some of those people would have worked for the government in the past. And because of growth in user counts, and awareness of new policing methods, there's a growth in police and secret police interest in the data.
The laws on the books largely permit this sort of thing (Warranted deep searches, warrantless-geofenced-shallow searches, buying anything that's otherwise sold to third-parties), I'm not sure what other outcome one could expect.
Don't know about FB but it's public knowledge that Google was CIA VC funded but also rumors are, it is an informal revolving door both with IC and whitehouse.
> Not sure why this is being downvoted, as there is clear link between the influx of CIA/NSA/FBI/DHS agents in private sector and an increase in turning over of sensitive data to government, at-will. We have laws and constitutional rights for a reason.
Well corporations have more laws and their rights are more numerous and potent than yours.
Don't forget that the FBI has an office AT Facebook HQ, as mentioned in the writeup of Zuckerberg when he was named Time's person of the year:
"The door opened, and a distinguished-looking gray-haired man burst in — it's the only way to describe his entrance — trailed by a couple of deputies. He was both the oldest person in the room by 20 years and the only one wearing a suit. He was in the building, he explained with the delighted air of a man about to secure ironclad bragging rights forever, and he just had to stop in and introduce himself to Zuckerberg: Robert Mueller, director of the FBI, pleased to meet you."
Yeah.. he just happened to be in the building... and I suspect FB isn't the only tech giant with an "interesting" relationship with law enforcement and intelligence.
> Don't forget that the FBI has an office AT Facebook HQ, as mentioned in the writeup of Zuckerberg when he was named Time's person of the year:
I read the article you linked, and it doesn't say that there was an FBI office at Facebook. It only mentions the FBI in reference to a single event where Mueller is at their HQ and visits.
How are you getting that they have an office there? Or are you suggesting that Mueller was working out of Facebook HQ?
I worked at a mid-size MSP some years back, and their datacenter had a room only the three letter agency folks could access. While it was never explicitly articulated, the belief was that the room was filled with the gear they were using to suck up whatever communications they deemed interesting and worthy of snooping. As far as I know, no warrant, subpoena or other formal request for such was ever issued.
At some point, the Internet becomes a tool for surveillance above all, and only by building from the ground up for privacy, can we hope to use it as a tool for anything other than propaganda, advertising and oppression.
There are allusions in open sources (e.g. the Afghanistan Papers—a series of interviews the government conducted to perform a "WTF went wrong" appraisal of the war in and occupation of Afghanistan, that has since been released to the public) to some agencies having free (as in, unrestricted, not gratis—I expect the arrangement involves money changing hands) access to customer data & activity at several major telcos.
I'd be very surprised if none of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, and Apple have similar arrangements with them, these days. I'd also be surprised if all of them have such arrangements, but I doubt none of them do.
> As far as I know, no warrant, subpoena or other formal request for such was ever issued.
Ok, but otoh, if you aren't involved in handling warrants, why would anyone tell you anything about it? Aren't those things under seal sometimes? Especially for wiretaps?
Journalists regularly use social media to report on any private citizen who can be positively identified. Sometimes they even appear to have privileged access to profiles, posts, and other data. Is it any surprise that intelligence agencies would have an order of magnitude more privilege with any social media that matters?
Don't ever do anything newsworthy while you have a social media profile, unless you are an influencer, because if you are a normal private person, you don't want that kind of publicity.
The big tech companies get hundreds of thousands of data requests a year from the FBI and other agencies. This used to swap the big tech companies by being overloaded with requests.
They’ve all gone through great lengths to make it easier to request and provide data to the agencies. Companies like Microsoft have provided direct taps to the agencies.
I can't speak for all of high tech, but my experience was that we encrypted everything on the phy itself. All data was encrypted via hardware before it left the host and was never decrypted until it reached its endpoint. If the endpoint was one of our devices, it was again decrypted in hardware.
Outside of this, I don't expect Google, fb, etc to ignore court subpoenas. That is not a tech issue, it's a government one (if there is really any issue at all).
TLDR: Your rights are routinely violated in a "slippery slope" manner, but the methods and incidents cannot be rectified by the courts because it's hiding under a veneer of parallel construction. It's not like law enforcement is going to come out and say "We're violating your rights." Snowden revelations are a prominent example; Clearview's facial recognition database is another: "Clearview AI used nearly 1m times by US police"
You should know that this type of argument is likely to hurt your own position when delivered to a moderate middle. You're basically telling people to ignore what they see and hear around them, and to believe that not only is the end coming - it has already come and we are living in a dystopia.
The reality I see when I go outside is that me and my neighbors and my community is doing fine. Is there problems? Sure there are, as there always was and always will be. But no my friend, we are not at the bottom of a slippery slope.
From what I see there's way more problematic extra-judicial action that has zero to do with big tech - cops just shooting people in the streets over minor infractions... that's where I spend my activist hours.
The thing you claim to be an activist for happens hardly ever, comparing the number of engagements citizens have with police.
The violation of your rights described on the slippery slope here is happening to everyone all the time.
You aren't concerned because it has not impacted you in a way that you perceive. It has impacted you, but you fail to draw the connection.
Government and police agencies breaking the law and ignoring the constitution is bad for America. The fact they hide this and other techniques is further evidence.
I couldn't agree more. The techno dystopia talk seems more like techie ego to me. Closed source software, benign privacy intrusions, etc. are not the problems of the century and most people don't care not because they are ignorant but because these issues are smaller than we think.
These things are straightforwardly related though. It is very common among people who organized or were very active in summer 2020 anti-police violence protests to have caught charges in the last few years for completely unrelated things. Often very "routine" type harassment, fraud, low level drug stuff that would normally not ever be investigated without getting busted or reported.
Of course that's all benign coincidence I'm sure I'm just being paranoid. And of course your neighbors and community are doing fine, I'm sure mine are just more criminal. Nothing to worry about keep working on your thing.
> It is very common among people who organized or were very active in summer 2020 anti-police violence protests
> ..., fraud, low level drug stuff...
fraud has a specific victim, someone who was defrauded. plenty of folks are out there fighting against drug laws. you're not going to find a lot of folks helping you defend fraudsters.
> I'm sure mine are just more criminal
i don't think any of that makes your friends, or those protests, sound better.
From what I've heard on Darknet Diaries "wire fraud" and "mail fraud" seem to come up a lot in charges. "mail fraud" can be as little as putting something you're not allowed to mail into the mailbox or using a bogus return address. Pretending to not be yourself online can be "wire fraud" or accessing a computer or website you're not authorized to access (even if the website has trash security).
In the "real world" if you walk past a convenience store that looks open, its automatic front doors slide open, lights are on etc, and you go in and look around... do you think you're committing some sort of "fraud" because the owner says it's actually closed and you forgot to scrutinize the posted hours? I don't think most people would agree.
And that's what I would call "trash security" and the owner's own damn fault if they're upset that people walked in and looked around.
I don't think anyone has ever been convicted of wire fraud for looking around the store front, as in your analogy. Please cite a case if I'm wrong. I'm sympathetic to this cause.
But in the digital world and the real world there's a door called 'Employees Only' that goes to the back. In many stores in the real world, it's not even clearly labeled, people just have enough sense to not go back there or it's considered trespassing and unwelcome.
> And that's what I would call "trash security" and the owner's own damn fault if they're upset that people walked in and looked around.
When this happens in the real world we (as in most of society) think "Doesn't this guy have any common sense?". "Oh wow, this guy is the reason we have to put DO NOT DRINK on the bleach bottle - apparently if there's no sign then people will just do it"
> . It is very common among people who organized or were very active in summer 2020 anti-police violence protests to have caught charges in the last few years for completely unrelated things.
I participated in these protests, as did many of my friends and community. Nothing happened to them such as you describe.
Wondering what makes you think your belief, experience, or recounting of either (truthful or otherwise) would be credible enough to be worth enunciating.
I could just as easily say I had a bunch of friends who were targeted. I could tell you I spent time at a black site held by feds who wouldn't identify themselves or their agency. So obviously anecdotes here in this context carry no value.
What is more believable and trustworthy is the investigative reporting that clearly states that what giraffe_lady et al. have been saying is closer to the truth than your tiny (and statistically probably white and/or middle-to-upper class, considering you have an account here -- obviously not a threat to the status quo and so quite low on the list of targets for state-sanctioned kidnapping) bubble's experience, faithfully represented or otherwise.
I guess what I'm saying is basically what ends up being the appropriate response to the problem always on this site: you don't know the extent of what you don't know, so more than a little humility is warranted here, particularly in the face of real reporting by real journalists.
What makes it worth saying is that I was actually trying to give helpful feedback to those in your position. Here's the first paragraph again:
>You should know that this type of argument is likely to hurt your own position when delivered to a moderate middle. You're basically telling people to ignore what they see and hear around them, and to believe that not only is the end coming - it has already come and we are living in a dystopia.
And based on how much traction your movement is getting, a lot of people either agree with me or don't think it's enough of a problem to actually do anything about it.
You're welcome to continue being frustrated and shouting in the ether that we're just ignorant and don't know any better despite our personal experiences. Or maybe you can revisit the core pillars of your rhetoric and find more convincing arguments to advance your movement.
And btw, I'm not white and the people with my skin color were enslaved to build railroads and placed in internment camps during WWII. So I think I have a pretty good grasp as to what's at stake.
That's a long way to argue against anecdote in favor of evidence, but the fact is that as you can see from this whole thread... people are short on evidence. People are offering anecdotes, conspiracy theories, and the old "isn't it obvious" line.
Opposite, I'm saying people who participated in those protests are being targeted by police. Virtually everyone does some illegal things, if they really want you they can get you for something. Police surveillance and police violence are done by the same police.
That's of course complete nonsense. Everyone is absolutely not doing illegal things you can go to jail for. Your examples included harassment and fraud like that is something normal people engage in. You're defending criminals and at the same time unwittingly saying that only criminals participated in the protests. Says a lot about you and your friends.
I'd love some examples of these "extra judicial" convictions, and as I said I'm tired of the "yet" argument. I've been hearing this my whole life, as though the government never monitored pre-internet communications.
And as far as active collection, how does that compare to people happily and eagerly sharing every aspect of their lives on FB?
Yes. It is a different world than ours obviously, but it warned of a myriad of horrors, most of which have already been exceeded in my view. That's my genuine viewpoint.
For example, one of the most chilling aspects was the telescreen to me. The horror of telescreens was that someone could maybe be watching, even in your own home. Quote: "There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment". Now this has been exceeded by technological mass surveillance - basically we ARE being watched nonstop. A panopticon effect is replaced by a robot sitting and staring 24/7. Everything I say is stored forever; further, machine learning can effectively filter through all of our civilisation's data and, even far in the future when attitudes change, red flag anything I say which is deemed unacceptable. Pegasus malware can turn my smartphone into a listening and viewing device at any time. I can barely even use cash in my country anymore, so this is extending to all purchases. This is BEYOND what Orwell could envision. It is shocking that people have somehow come to accept and normalise this feeling of being watched.
I could go on and refer to hundreds of similar aspects.
I have read 1984 twice. Once in 1999 and once in 2021.
The effect of the telescreen was so different from what I remember in 1999. It seemed trite in 2021.
Many aspects of 1984 would be an improvement over what we have now. I also imagine that however bad we think surveillance is now it is much more than what we believe it to be. It would hardly be shocking if voice activation is storing keywords from nearly all in person conversations.
The lack of the several minute rage, and complete lack of ministry of love and truth being named as such does not change the fact that all you need to do is look hard enough, and the level of duplicity in saying one thing but doing another, and disguising it through legalistic doublespeak is rampant.
For someone who was around before all of this connectivity became possible, the speed with which the primitives to realize so many of these authorial worst case scenarios possible are being converged upon by a society already explicitly aware of what to look out for is frankly horrifying.
> The lack of the several minute rage, and complete lack of ministry of love and truth being named as such does not change the fact that all you need to do is look hard enough, and the level of duplicity in saying one thing but doing another, and disguising it through legalistic doublespeak is rampant.
That's all of human history, not some new development, and hardly the core of 1984. There is no state control of speech and thought, no enforced caste system, no eternal war, no thought police.
This sort of histrionic posting is why "literally 1984" has become a meme mocking the people who say it.
If the government presents a company with a warrant to wiretap an account, as happens in these cases, they should sleep well at night. Due process is followed, and we as society have decided that warrants are a reasonable trade-off between privacy and successful criminal prosecution.
I don't get this. How does one believe Android is compromised and yet, the hardware is not.
I'm not aware of Google intentionally placing backdoors in Android. However, I am very much aware of hardware makers compromising shipping products, be it the ASIC itself or FW being loaded by ODMs/system integrators.
oh, gawd, why have i never put 2+2 together like that? to be fair, i have not once ever made an online purchase with that kind of challenge, so i just have no real world experience. so i never thought about it, but not only are they able to confirm you are making the purchase, but depending on what the app is doing, they could get your exact location at the time of the authorization. man, my tinfoil hat is getting thicker
[1]https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11562433/Facebook-r...
[2]https://defiantamerica.com/after-learning-that-twitter-emplo...
Not sure why this is being downvoted, as there is clear link between the influx of CIA/NSA/FBI/DHS agents in private sector and an increase in turning over of sensitive data to government, at-will. We have laws and constitutional rights for a reason.