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This kind of defeatist, "They Live", everyone-is-lying all of the time mentality ignores the huge privacy gains the internet has achieved since basically just b

This kind of defeatist, "They Live", everyone-is-lying all of the time mentality ignores the huge privacy gains the internet has achieved since basically just being an open message relay between hubs. And on a purely practical level, law enforcement and prosecutors really struggle to make use of technical data to make cases, even in situations where they have warrants! Consumer encryption is so good that countries around the developed world are actively trying to pass laws to limit its power.

njarboe 3y ago
As Snowden said himself: "Privacy is the right to a free mind," Snowden said. "Without privacy, you can't have anything for yourself. Saying you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say." Mar 28, 2016 It is a huge pain to worry about your privacy all the time and I make many tradeoffs, but I fully support and am glad that others take it very seriously.
FormerBandmate 3y ago
The NSA has no jurisdiction on American soil, so making cases is basically a moot point for PRISM anyway. PRISM will allow the government to extrajudicially kill you if you join a terrorist group (or a group the government considers one), and the fact that it exists and Russian officials have been caught using Windows XP is probably why Ukraine has outperformed expectations so much. The PRISM systems have data on NSA workers’ exes, everyone who’s ever criticized the government, and every gang of shoplifters/carjackers/drug dealers, but most of that data is probably tossed in the garbage. If America ever turned fascist that could be a serious problem (and China’s probably using their equivalent to stop dissidents and criminals), and it’s a massive invasion of privacy, but it doesn’t effect 99.9% of people’s everyday lives.
- titzer 3y ago
  > probably tossed in the garbage. I doubt that. The best we can hope for is that such information is compressed and moved to long-term storage or pointers to it are lost. More likely the only protection it really endures is that it is being obscured by the massive influx of new data; i.e. buried under an endlessly silting riverbed of new data. > and China’s probably using their equivalent to stop dissidents and criminals Check up on China[1]. They've massively stepped up the surveillance to the point where it's actively intervening on people's behavior to make them act "better" and discourage such bad things as....playing loud music on trains. They are barreling towards a dystopia where they can digitally un-person you for wrongdoing and wrongthink. Right now it's just the soft whips of not being to buy a train ticket or fly, but it will absolutely reach into every aspect citizen's lives, from charging different prices to determining where you can live and whether you pay fines or go to jail. China has a long tradition of un-personing politic dissidents, including jailing and killing them. The future looks horrifying. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System#:~:text=The%20Social%20Credit%20System%20(Chinese,the%20People%27s%20Republic%20of%20China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System#:~:text=T....
  - FormerBandmate 3y ago
    Does the NSA have the storage capacity to hold onto everyone in the world’s emails, texts, and all other communications forever? At some point you’d need an entire government AWS, the costs of that alone seem like they’d be higher than their budget by an order of magnitude. I agree about the social credit score, we don’t know the fields they use (unlike FICO) so it probably does include private communications.
    - titzer 3y ago
      I don't know, but the Utah Data Center[1] has been estimated at 3 to 12 exabytes. I know for a fact that at least one $megacorp has worldwide storage larger than that. That seems large enough to comfortably store all human-generated text/audio communications. Who knows how much realtime camera footage they are sucking down; that seems like it would be the biggest amount of data. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
    - legitster 3y ago
      This is kinda where the "big data" conspiracies lose me. I maintain databases for a living, and the thing I constantly going around explaining to people is that giant piles of unstructured data does not actually correlate to intelligence. Even if you theoretically were able to collect the voice recording of every human conversation happening between every human on Earth, actually parsing or using that information proactively is just not feasible. So I think people are being a bit unrealistic about the extent the agencies can even use the massive amounts of data they have.
      - DANmode 3y ago
        It's about the ability to nitpick your entire life back thirty years once you've upset the wrong party leader. It's about later, more so than now.
      - juanani 3y ago
        [dead]
- digging 3y ago
  > 99.9% of people’s everyday lives Although I know it's a made-up statistic, it's worth pointing out that even if that's true, that's a horrific number of people it does affect: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=.1%25+of+the+us+population https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=.1%25+of+the+us+populat...

njarboe 3y ago

As Snowden said himself: "Privacy is the right to a free mind," Snowden said. "Without privacy, you can't have anything for yourself. Saying you don't care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say." Mar 28, 2016 It is a huge pain to worry about your privacy all the time and I make many tradeoffs, but I fully support and am glad that others take it very seriously.

FormerBandmate 3y ago

The NSA has no jurisdiction on American soil, so making cases is basically a moot point for PRISM anyway. PRISM will allow the government to extrajudicially kill you if you join a terrorist group (or a group the government considers one), and the fact that it exists and Russian officials have been caught using Windows XP is probably why Ukraine has outperformed expectations so much. The PRISM systems have data on NSA workers’ exes, everyone who’s ever criticized the government, and every gang of shoplifters/carjackers/drug dealers, but most of that data is probably tossed in the garbage. If America ever turned fascist that could be a serious problem (and China’s probably using their equivalent to stop dissidents and criminals), and it’s a massive invasion of privacy, but it doesn’t effect 99.9% of people’s everyday lives.

titzer 3y ago
> probably tossed in the garbage. I doubt that. The best we can hope for is that such information is compressed and moved to long-term storage or pointers to it are lost. More likely the only protection it really endures is that it is being obscured by the massive influx of new data; i.e. buried under an endlessly silting riverbed of new data. > and China’s probably using their equivalent to stop dissidents and criminals Check up on China[1]. They've massively stepped up the surveillance to the point where it's actively intervening on people's behavior to make them act "better" and discourage such bad things as....playing loud music on trains. They are barreling towards a dystopia where they can digitally un-person you for wrongdoing and wrongthink. Right now it's just the soft whips of not being to buy a train ticket or fly, but it will absolutely reach into every aspect citizen's lives, from charging different prices to determining where you can live and whether you pay fines or go to jail. China has a long tradition of un-personing politic dissidents, including jailing and killing them. The future looks horrifying. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System#:~:text=The%20Social%20Credit%20System%20(Chinese,the%20People%27s%20Republic%20of%20China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System#:~:text=T....
- FormerBandmate 3y ago
  Does the NSA have the storage capacity to hold onto everyone in the world’s emails, texts, and all other communications forever? At some point you’d need an entire government AWS, the costs of that alone seem like they’d be higher than their budget by an order of magnitude. I agree about the social credit score, we don’t know the fields they use (unlike FICO) so it probably does include private communications.
  - titzer 3y ago
    I don't know, but the Utah Data Center[1] has been estimated at 3 to 12 exabytes. I know for a fact that at least one $megacorp has worldwide storage larger than that. That seems large enough to comfortably store all human-generated text/audio communications. Who knows how much realtime camera footage they are sucking down; that seems like it would be the biggest amount of data. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
  - legitster 3y ago
    This is kinda where the "big data" conspiracies lose me. I maintain databases for a living, and the thing I constantly going around explaining to people is that giant piles of unstructured data does not actually correlate to intelligence. Even if you theoretically were able to collect the voice recording of every human conversation happening between every human on Earth, actually parsing or using that information proactively is just not feasible. So I think people are being a bit unrealistic about the extent the agencies can even use the massive amounts of data they have.
    - DANmode 3y ago
      It's about the ability to nitpick your entire life back thirty years once you've upset the wrong party leader. It's about later, more so than now.
    - juanani 3y ago
      [dead]
digging 3y ago
> 99.9% of people’s everyday lives Although I know it's a made-up statistic, it's worth pointing out that even if that's true, that's a horrific number of people it does affect: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=.1%25+of+the+us+population https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=.1%25+of+the+us+populat...