The Secretive Surveillance Wizards Helping ICE Wiretap Facebook and Google Users
forbes.com
forbes.com
[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.
There's an old saying: you can't believe everything you read online.
Well corporations have more laws and their rights are more numerous and potent than yours.
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.
"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.
https://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28...
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?
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.
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?
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.
Like a dark twist on the open-source saying: "Free as in weapons-free, not free as in beer."
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.
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.
Just wondering how do you feel about this?
I was a network engineer and one of the reasons I left was seeing the reality of packet inspection and what that could mean.
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.
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).
You feel fine about all this because it does not affect you. Yet.
And the person who you are responding to is encrypting everything, which google, facebook ,et all are not doing.
And as far as active collection, how does that compare to people happily and eagerly sharing every aspect of their lives on FB?
> It is here, right now.
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.
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.
I participated in these protests, as did many of my friends and community. Nothing happened to them such as you describe.
So no, I don't believe you.
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.
Anecdote is sufficient to dismiss that.
>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.
> ..., 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.
Also notice where I didn't say they were convicted? Specifically in the fraud charge they were not.
What does having "trash security" have anything to do with it?
In the real world do you look at a convenience stores and think "wow this store has such trash security, I can just take some things"?
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
<< If people are carrying their phones and have Gmail accounts, he said, law enforcement “can get really lucky.
Very aggravating given how much a necessity a phone has become in US.
helping the government break the laws of the government to keep me safe from bad things happening to the government.