> “Facebook can try to sell you products, but Facebook can't put you in jail,” Goitein explained. “Ideological prosecution or suppression isn’t in the monetary interest of these companies.”

This is dangerously naive and less than half true. While Facebook cannot arrest you, it can cause you to be arrested for something that is absolutely not a crime. It can also financially and socially ruin you.

And it is most certainly in their financial and ideological interests to do so in many occasions.

IMHO, the problem with spying on citizens is that it's a double edged sword. We'd be nuts not to gather useful info on serious violations of law to improve national security (FBI) or local safety (local police). But abuse of such inherently secret info is difficult to oversee and harder still to effectively regulate.

On one hand, oversight of spying programs always reveals some details about what nfo was gathered, either as dutiful proof of its proper use to the public, or in court cases as part of the chain of evidence. But doing this inevitably reveals something about what info was gathered and how, thereby weakening the future value of that source as people (or perps) learn to mistrust it and take greater pains to protect their sensitive info.

On the other hand, NOT revealing data that was gathered invites its abuse, especially by orgs with minimal oversight (and scruples). Too often, law enforcement sees oversight of their practices as being equally as inimical as the perpetrators they pursue.

I suspect the only way to sustainably manage this dance of mistrust is to change the role of police so that oversight is built into their culture, where they know someone is always watching their back — both in offering support to help them do a sometimes impossible job, as well as in demanding that they not abuse the special authority their job demands. In terms of their access to sensitive info, this must include enforcable strictures on their special access to info that should NOT be shared with others, like the client-servant privacy privileges demanded of lawyers or doctors.

Without an avenue of recourse, people tune out.

Eliminate choice and you eliminate thought.

Honestly, it has been this way in US politics for a long time. The government is always doing crazy scandalous things, but most people are busy with the day to day and don't know how to act on such information anyway. We are also, as Vidal said, a nation of amnesia. Most people have the attention span of a goldfish. I'm sure most people lack the historical knowledge to contextualize these government actions. They don't know that an antagonistic relationship exists between the people and government. The numerous historical and contemporary betrayals of governments against their peoples isn't in their mind. Plus, most people think they are living in some fantasy world where nothing bad can happen to them.

It's pretty dark. Thanks for coming to my ted talk.

Maybe I can be the first to speak to the actual Wyden–Heinrich letter [1].

I hope I don't sound like a spook when I say: there's been no splash because there's no (public) substance. Having read the 70-page PCLOB report [2], I can summarize it as:

- the CIA has EO 12333 authority to perform bulk surveillance

- they use it to [redacted], including financial transactions

- they have a [redacted] internal process to review its use which potentially has some gaps and vagueness

Sens. Wyden and Heinrich probably have more shocking secret info too. But yeah, I'd expect people to not react to these vague disclosures the same way they did 2013's detailed leaks.

[1] https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/HainesBurns_Wyden...

[2] https://www.cia.gov/static/63f697addbbd30a4d64432ff28bbc6d6/...

Everyone, living and dead, within the Pax Americana sphere is tracked in near real time. Including everyone's economic activity, movements, communications, relationships, interests, and affinities.

These additional disclosures merely confirm additional pieces of overall panopticon are in fact operational.

(I don't know the current state of medical record sharing. Back when I worked in healthcare IT, mid 2000s, we had datafeeds to the CDC and others for public health stuff, deaths, births. No matter; What isn't explicit can largely be inferred from other datasets.)

One darkly humorous aspect is that we're still arguing about stuff like census, gun licenses, voter registration databases, etc. Those tasks could be done with straightforward queries, with almost no errors, no drama necessary.

This article reminded me of how many damn agencies we have spying on us. People regularly talk about the FBI, CIA, and NSA but there are like ten other US intelligence agencies.

The US Intelligence Community contains 17 organizations, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Intelligence_Com... and that's not counting any state or local organizations that Blueleaks showed are doing similar things. Sure Google is making it seem normal to give up our information, but it's also hard to continue being angry when you hear that the DIA and DHS are also spying on us.

> Another factor is that many Americans may now assume that their privacy is already shot.

This is it for me, or the apathetic part of me. After a few revelations you can infer the not yet revealed.

Hey, information wants to be free, right?

It's been going on for decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee

What's going to happen if there is a "big splash". Nothing. Has anyone in intelligence ever been arrested or punished for violating the law? These people are above the law.

On a recent senate committee hearing about authoritarianism the US said Russia is more synchronized in their message of using propaganda and that the US needs to figure out how we can do the same.

In calling out authoritarianism their response is in order to fix it we should be more like them. The US could in the same sentence tell you why it is not okay to start war but it is okay if they do it.

Generally speaking nobody cares.

Given the modern echo chamber, unless people actively spread news/information to those who aren't usually exposed to it, it simply won't ever reach them.

That, of course, is no guarantee. There's tons of people who solely believe the mass media.

The biggest problem is, though, that apparently everyone keeps believing them again and again and again, whenever the topic switches. From one crisis to the next people literally forget that they can not and should not trust both their governments and mass media.

Fascinating, isn't it?

It's very chilly in here.

Too afraid to discuss?

> taking advantage of a loophole in the Fourth Amendment

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

What loophole? Also, any President may rescind any other President's executive orders. It's not like were stuck forever with President Reagan's demented privacy policies. (Don't you just love Republican cognitive dissonance? They want government to be just small enough to fit in a vagina.)

The crises have piled up too high to count. We're on track to lose entire countries to rising sea levels. There's a war in the Baltic states. The pandemic is only just subsiding (again), and only in first world regions. Food insecurity is rising. Even more people are forced to migrate. We already knew the gubmint was spying on us. Just one more thing on the pile.

Efforts to make governments behave are pretty hopeless. Besides, it's not just the US that is spying on everybody. If you want privacy, you need to change your behavior and your tooling, using technology to create privacy.

MDM.. so would advertiser bs fall under any of these?

The most significant aspect of “government” surveillance is that whoever controls the surveillance also controls the government. It was clear that Trump was not in control of the surveillance state: it was working against him. Biden does not seem to have this problem, but he seems deeply compromised, https://www.foxnews.com/media/hunter-biden-scandal-cnn-msnbc..., and, because of his mental condition, it’s clear he’s not the real executive who’s running the country.

The biggest power the media has isn't even to make you believe an active lie. It's the power to bury a story by simply neglecting it, and filling the media space with their own choices.

The media is actively on the side of you living under heavy government surveillance.

Act accordingly.

Hypothetical: If you had a law enforcement agency spying/harassing you, what would you do? If they would make it hard to prove?

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