FBI Searched Data of Millions of Americans Without Warrants | Hacker News Reader

FBI Searched Data of Millions of Americans Without Warrants

bloomberg.com

88 pointsgrupthink15 comments

Interesting a story like this pops up and no one seems to care but a guy buys Twitter and there are 5000 heated comments. I can't tell if it's just because we're so beaten down by the unstoppable and never ending betrayals by government, a completely screwed up sense of priorities, or both.

> a completely screwed up sense of priorities

This one, although I wouldn't choose quite that phrasing. Most people don't seem to care too much, so we're condoning the behavior via democratic process. I wouldn't be surprised if a significant chunk of people support it in the name of stopping the terrorists. I don't agree with that, but such is democracy. Especially in a system where we effectively vote on a whole world view by electing representatives, instead of voting on laws ourselves. Joe Schmoe might be anti-surveillance state but even more pro-gun, so if his options are anti-surveillance and anti-gun or pro both, he picks the pro-gun one even though his views don't entirely align.

> wouldn't be surprised if a significant chunk of people support it in the name of stopping the terrorists

Most people don't care. The vocal minority who do care have a habit of jumping the shark. That lets perfect be the enemy of the good and in the end no policy gets printed.

> Joe Schmoe might be anti-surveillance state but even more pro-gun, so if his options are anti-surveillance and anti-gun or pro both, he picks the pro-gun one even though his views don't entirely align.

The fact of the matter is that the duopoly of US politics are both pro-surveillance aside from a select few. It simply doesn't matter because there's nothing you can do about it.

Maybe folks are afraid to comment? Chilling effects are effective.

Did you miss the 800+ comment thread about civilization collapsing?

I would say we're beaten down by our governments. We're already coming up to 10 years since the Snowden revelations and the Wikileaks stuff, so it isn't as if this is new info.

I think at this point a lot of people who genuinely cared have just switched to doing their best to cover themselves since clearly the masses are perfectly fine living in a panopticon.

As is often the case, the media has a large part to play here too. Every time Elon posts a meme you can expect multiple articles written about it, along with paragraphs of indignant rage in the comments section. People just can't help but react to whatever dumb thing is placed in front of them, it seems

It's basically a throwback to the era of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI keeping files on everyone of interest, although now it's being done hand in hand with the NSA's mass collection system. Which is still splitting all fiber optic traffic at the major domestic nodes and piping it off for collection, isn't it? As revealed well before Snowden actually:

https://privacysos.org/technologies_of_controlnaurus/

The question more people should be asking: How can this kind of vacuum-style, society wide surveillance exist alongside promises of democratic governance, and parallel to constitutional guarantees that the government will stay out of our business unless we are suspected to have committed a crime?

Every time I look at this stuff, I can't help thinking that our political leaders in Congress and the bureaucrats at the FBI must be really envious of the kind of power states like Saudi Arabia and China have over their domestic populations, and would create such a system here if they could.

> The exact number of U.S. residents who potentially had their information reviewed isn’t known because there’s no precise way to measure the data, according to the report.

How convenient.

For the FBI or bloomberg?

For the FBI.

https://archive.ph/2s3Yg

If the data exists, it's going to be used...

I'm shocked, shocked i tell you. In a democracy ? In the democracy ?

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