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Comment by jpm_sd | Hacker News Reader

People in the sixties: "I better not say that or the government will wiretap my house."

Today: "Hey, wiretap, do you have a recipe for pancakes?"

https://twitter.com/andreacoravos/status/999761670540025856?...

The joke doesn’t really make any sense though. How will they know to wiretap your house because of what you’re saying unless it’s wiretapped already?

That is pretty much the way it works now using parallel construction to make up a reason to make the wiretap official.

Informers

I understood this statement (“whoops, probably on a list now”) to mean that the government is always listening for key words, and using one would assign someone to listen to every word.

Hm two comments and both are saying this is ridiculous when in reality - this is reality.

Guys I think we lost to the tech overlords.

Seems like a false equivalence. First, a corporation is not the same as the government. Second, the government wiretapping your house is a violation of your constitutional rights, whereas you freely choosing to add a smart device into your home is not.

A corporation can give or sell your data to the government.

Although Motel 6 just got in trouble for doing that

https://abcnews.go.com/US/motel-pay-12m-settle-lawsuit-shari...

Interesting case. What surprises me most is that the lawsuit was filed by Washington's Attorney General which is technically also a part of the government. Probably that is because he was elected rather than appointed.

Also state vs federal. Very different.

Something to keep in mind is that the government is not a whole. It's lost of disparate entities all working towards their own interests. This [1] is their AG and his own personal ideological perspective is what you'd expect for the person that filed the lawsuit. And, you'll find this to invariably be the case on government (and private) actions. This is another example of why real diversity, ideological diversity, is absolutely critical. It keeps everybody honest. If their AG was ideologically in support of the consequences of the actions of the Motel, it's much less likely that this case would have been filed.

This reality is something that should never be ignored as it goes all the way to the top. For instance the Supreme Court is the highest voice in our nation on legal matters and they generally only hear cases where the outcome should be complex and difficult to perceive. Yet on most matters you could predict with a pretty good degree of certainty exactly how most the court would vote, on most issues, based on little more than knowledge of their own individual ideologies. This is why I'd never want a 9-0 supreme court (or even a 7-2), even if the majority aligned strongly with my views and values. We're all subject to bias and other issues. And the only really good way to make sure we keep ourselves based and honest is to ensure the presence of dissenting voices.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Ferguson_(politician)

And this is exactly the loophole that the government relies on.

Most of all major US based tech corporations today are part of various secretive government programs including PRISM [1]. Internal NSA slides, never meant to be publicly revealed, state that PRISM facilitates "extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information." Examples offered included surveillance on email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice-over-IP chats (such as Skype), file transfers, and social networking details. Snowden in describing the system stated that, "in general, the reality is this: if an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc. analyst has access to query raw SIGINT [signals intelligence] databases, they can enter and get results for anything they want."

This is really where the constitution is starting to fail us. The government can increasingly circumvent the constitution by simply pressuring, or enticing, monopolizing companies to cooperate with them meaning they need not pass any particular law, which in turns means that the constitution is increasingly powerless to constrain the behavior of the government. As one obvious example, imagine the government wanted to stop videos from being published on some topic. In times past this would have been a huge deal and they would have had to try to pass a law, which would have directly run into the first amendment. Today, all they need to do is pressure, or incentivize, a tiny handful of companies, Google and Facebook in particular, to cooperate and they can censor whatever they like without passing a single law.

I wonder if this is analogous to how the interweaving of church and state felt in times past, before we started to pass laws requiring the separation of church and state. Both entities are able to covertly pursue their own ends with mutual plausible deniability. 'We're not being anti-competitive. We're behaving within the bounds of the law set by the government.' 'We're not censoring anything. Corporations have every right to set their own rules and policies.' Whatever the case I've no doubt that the next great nation that is started from scratch, as the US was, will undoubtedly make some effort to isolate government from business, and business from government.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)

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