6 ms·

We have a branch of government called Congress, here are some things they used to do that made it a crime to read your mail or listen to your phone calls. 1. P

We have a branch of government called Congress, here are some things they used to do that made it a crime to read your mail or listen to your phone calls. 1. Postal Service Act of 1792 2. Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986 Anyway, Facebook can read your DMs, Google can read your email, Ring can take photos from your camera. We can very easily make those things a crime, but we don't seem to want to do it.

dylan604 8mo ago
Don't confuse the public's want with the current situation controlled by the power and money being used to prevent these things from being a crime
kakacik 8mo ago
Its a nice outrage wave, but I have very hard time believing this will be a major topic in 2 weeks. People simply don't give a fuck en masse. Accept that many folks are built differently than you and me and stuff like actual freedom you may be willing to lay your life for may be meaningless fart for others, especially when its not hurting them now. For example US folks voted current admin willingly second time and even after a full year of daily FUBARs the support is still largely there. If even pedophilia won't move some 'patriots' then reading some communication doesn't even register as a topic. Also, anybody actually concerned about even slightest privacy would never, ever buy such products, not now not a decade earlier. Ie for my family I don't even see any added value of such devices, just stupid fragile something I have no control over, but it sees everything. Why?
- tokyobreakfast 8mo ago
  The Epstein stuff is a distraction. The previous admin had 4 years to do literally anything about it and they did nothing.
  - collingreen 8mo ago
    A distraction from what? If anyone with power picks and chooses who gets justice then there is no justice, those people are corrupt, and they need to be removed from power and charged. Whatabout whatabout whatabout. Charge, try, and imprison the guilty regardless of how much money they have, which political party they are part of, or how they vote. Anything else is madness.
    - Henchman21 8mo ago
      Madness is all that remains at this point.
  - wredcoll 8mo ago
    We're talking about trump, try to stay on topic?
  - iugtmkbdfil834 8mo ago
    My personal take is that everything is a distraction, nothing is real ( except conspiracy theories -- naturally ). Also, please subscribe to my totally organic podcast.
  - cjsplat 8mo ago
    What should they have done? They put Ghislaine Maxwell in jail then had to wait until her appeal about Epstein's immunity deal made it to the Supreme Court.
- mmooss 8mo ago
  These comments appear everywhere, as if people never made changes. Look at the enormous changes prior generations have made. Look at the changes from the conservative/MAGA movement, #metoo, and the George Floyd protests. The claim doesn't stand up to any examination. Comments like these are a distraction. All we need to do is get to work. If people took action every time they felt like posting these comments, we'd get a lot done.
  - cheschire 8mo ago
    "There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels ... upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!" Well, except that you have debts like mortgages and car loans to pay off. And your kids need to participate in extra-curriculars so they can get into a good school, and those cost money. And theaters are out of fashion now, so you'll need to buy that 80" TV with the surround sound so you can have a theater at home. And your shows are now on 6 different streaming services so that'll cost a little extra each month. And life really is easier with AI, but they all have strengths and weaknesses so you'll probably want to pay for 2, if not 3 of them. And your fast fashion gets threadbare after 20 or 30 washes so you'll need to regularly order 3 or 4 replacement shirts so you can send back the 2 that don't fit quite right. Anyways back to the gears and whee.... oh look a squirrel!
  - mschuster91 8mo ago
    > Look at the changes from the conservative/MAGA movement, #metoo, and the George Floyd protests. Which changes? metoo certainly didn't change much, the George Floyd protests also led to nothing, just look at how ICE has been executing US citizens in the last months. In 2025 alone, before Renee Good and Alex Pretti, ICE murdered 32 people with zero accountability [1]. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/04/ice-2025-deaths-timeline https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/...
tokyobreakfast 8mo ago
Everyone has known Google reads your email since day one. In the early days they would spin it as a good thing: "that's why the spam filtering is great!" Why is everyone suddenly outraged Ring has access to your footage? These cloud-connected cameras...hosted on someone else's servers. It's literally how they work. "But I didn't think they would use the video in a way I didn't personally approve after giving it to them!" So instead, people are rage-returning Ring cameras and posting their receipts and exchanging them for...Chinese cameras. Which do the same thing, except this time the servers are overseas and completely uncontrolled. It's hard to have any empathy when the warning label was already on the box for all these products.
- jon-wood 8mo ago
  > But I didn't think they would use the video in a way I didn't personally approve after giving it to them! This is exactly the sort of thing there should be legislation for. To a somewhat weaker extent than I’d like this is what GDPR and friends covers, the law says that companies must state what data they’re gathering and what purposes they’re gathering it for. If they overreach then they can be fined into oblivion. In practice this is not as strong as it should be, broadly companies can and do basically go “we’re collecting all your data for whatever purpose we like” and get away with it, but they do at least think carefully about doing so. There’s no reason we can’t force providers of cloud backed devices to treat your data with respect, rather than thinking of it as residual income they’re leaving on the table if they don’t also sell it to third parties for data mining.
  - mvanbaak 8mo ago
    'then they can be fined into oblivion' with capital CAN. Give me an example where this actually happened. (not just a statement that it will be done, but an actual example of a company going under because of the fine)
- idiotsecant 8mo ago
  Yes, that is what many people thought because people assume that a state with a reasonable commitment to individual liberty would have safeguards in place to force merchants to not spy on them. The fault is not with the idea of expecting that you own the data that you made and the equipment that you purchased. The fault here is the regulatory structure that makes you by default not the owner of your data or your things.
ProllyInfamous 8mo ago
3. Video Rental Protection Act (1988) >we don't seem to want to Congress protects only itself and its actual constituents — wealthy corporate persons. ---- Citizens United (2012) and the surveillances themselves make this monitoring self-capturing: the only way to prevent it is to convince most people to not install, but most people want the installed benefits. Even getting your neighbors to re-position their Ring cameras (which they have every right to install) can become very difficult. After city councils individually ban Flock-like CCTV traffic monitoring within their jurisdictions, their police can (and often do) still access neighboring jurisdictions' to monitor border crossings. You can't escape This System, even without license plates nor cell phones. ---- Term Limits now? end Citizens United. release The Files!
- pocksuppet 8mo ago
  The Video Rental Protection Act was passed when a video rental employee blackmailed a congressman and there was no law against it. So it's clear how to make congress write new privacy laws.
  - ipython 8mo ago
    Psst anyone at Covenant Eyes[0] want to sign up for the obvious assignment here?? [0] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/mike-johnson-son-monitor-porn-intake-covenant-eyes-1234870634/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/mike-joh...
  - hn_throwaway_99 8mo ago
    That doesn't appear to be accurate, at least from the Wikipedia article. Robert Bork (sorry to add my personal commentary but an absolute shit stain of a human being) was nominated for the Supreme Court (which, thankfully, he always not confirmed), and a reporter went to a video rental store and asked for his rental history, which there was no law against. The published article didn't include much, as Bork hadn't rented any particularly salacious material, but there was bipartisan outrage that this had occurred. Just goes to show how far we've fallen when there was once bipartisan outrage over accessing your Blockbuster rental history, when tech giants now have 10 times as much surveillance on you - your 1 am "shower thoughts" in your search history, all the websites you've visited, all your social media posts, and even social media posts about/including you posted by someone else, everything you've ever commented on a blog forum, your location history, etc.
pear01 8mo ago
Get money out of politics (reverse citizens united) and enact term/age limits for all public offices. These problems will be solved. Most Americans agree on most things. Don't let the politicians who benefit off of dividing us fool you. An agenda that focuses on reform outside of the usual finger pointing game of partisan politics and promises to enact these reforms without fear or favor will win. Any such agenda must also be willing to purge itself of any old guard that stands in the way, and treat them as a virus attached to their political movement. There is no benefit from trying to say, make a wedge between a Clinton and a Trump. If you can't get over that you're part of the problem, and this cycle will just continue. Stop defending an old guard halfway in the grave. Being right doesn't matter in electoral politics, winning does. It is likely the only way to achieve such a broad reform is to be willing to entertain as many incriminations as possible. Given recent relevations re Epstein this is our best chance to reform corruption in generations. Let's not squander it by defending anyone simply because they fall on one side of a dubious partisan line, or seem "less bad" than another. The broader the castigation, the more likely to achieve momentum that can actually enact said reforms, given the disadvantages of taking on these vast incumbent interests and a government that is easily susceptible to gridlock driven by a minority.
- whattheheckheck 8mo ago
  Does the next coalition have any money?
  - pear01 8mo ago
    What point are you attempting to make? Or are you one of a minority of people that refuses to see the difference between (say among other things) the unrealized gains of someone like a Musk vs someone's working class parents saving up for retirement? Citizens United litigated a very specific issue. It was only an issue because Congress had actually passed some meaningful campaign finance reform after many painful years (really decades) of effort. The court essentially kneecapped it overnight on a 5 to 4 basis. Get money out of politics commonly means get dark/pac/corporate money out of politics, not individual donors well within long established FEC limits that these pacs are designed to circumvent. Again, billionaires live by different rules. This doesn't just apply to taxes, criminal justice, etc it applies to the foundation of our democracy - free and fair elections. What could be more in keeping with the best of American traditions than ensuring our elections are as egalitarian as possible?
mschuster91 8mo ago
> We have a branch of government called Congress ... that has been virtually useless as it has been rendered ineffective by Republican obstructionism and the unwillingness of the Democrats to counteract it, leading to the current state of Trump being able to do what he wants completely unchecked.
- epolanski 8mo ago
  That's a flaw of the constitution and it's revisions. You should always assume bad actors when designing a political system. And that's why parliamentary republics where you elect parties that form coalitions that chooses a prime minister who still has to deal with opposition and its own party support, every day, are much more resilient to authoritarianisn. In fact there hasn't been a single parliamentary republic to turn authoritarian since Sri Lanka 50 years ago. Presidential ones? As many as you wish. It's very stupid to elect single individuals to executive power.
  - mschuster91 8mo ago
    > In fact there hasn't been a single parliamentary republic to turn authoritarian since Sri Lanka 50 years ago. I'd disagree on that. Austria had the FPÖ in government multiple times and each time they caused massive scandals. Some of the German states are on the brink of the AfD not even needing a coalition partner alone - should the elections this year turn out to be as bloody as the polls suggest, it may very well be the case that they go from opposition straight to sole government, with no one holding them back. Fully agree on the rest though.
SergeAx 8mo ago
I am almost sure that those two acts refer to human beings reading and listening, not to algorithms. Or at least a decent corporate lawyer will convincingly turn things that way.

dylan604 8mo ago

Don't confuse the public's want with the current situation controlled by the power and money being used to prevent these things from being a crime

kakacik 8mo ago

Its a nice outrage wave, but I have very hard time believing this will be a major topic in 2 weeks. People simply don't give a fuck en masse. Accept that many folks are built differently than you and me and stuff like actual freedom you may be willing to lay your life for may be meaningless fart for others, especially when its not hurting them now. For example US folks voted current admin willingly second time and even after a full year of daily FUBARs the support is still largely there. If even pedophilia won't move some 'patriots' then reading some communication doesn't even register as a topic. Also, anybody actually concerned about even slightest privacy would never, ever buy such products, not now not a decade earlier. Ie for my family I don't even see any added value of such devices, just stupid fragile something I have no control over, but it sees everything. Why?

tokyobreakfast 8mo ago
The Epstein stuff is a distraction. The previous admin had 4 years to do literally anything about it and they did nothing.
- collingreen 8mo ago
  A distraction from what? If anyone with power picks and chooses who gets justice then there is no justice, those people are corrupt, and they need to be removed from power and charged. Whatabout whatabout whatabout. Charge, try, and imprison the guilty regardless of how much money they have, which political party they are part of, or how they vote. Anything else is madness.
  - Henchman21 8mo ago
    Madness is all that remains at this point.
- wredcoll 8mo ago
  We're talking about trump, try to stay on topic?
- iugtmkbdfil834 8mo ago
  My personal take is that everything is a distraction, nothing is real ( except conspiracy theories -- naturally ). Also, please subscribe to my totally organic podcast.
- cjsplat 8mo ago
  What should they have done? They put Ghislaine Maxwell in jail then had to wait until her appeal about Epstein's immunity deal made it to the Supreme Court.
mmooss 8mo ago
These comments appear everywhere, as if people never made changes. Look at the enormous changes prior generations have made. Look at the changes from the conservative/MAGA movement, #metoo, and the George Floyd protests. The claim doesn't stand up to any examination. Comments like these are a distraction. All we need to do is get to work. If people took action every time they felt like posting these comments, we'd get a lot done.
- cheschire 8mo ago
  "There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels ... upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!" Well, except that you have debts like mortgages and car loans to pay off. And your kids need to participate in extra-curriculars so they can get into a good school, and those cost money. And theaters are out of fashion now, so you'll need to buy that 80" TV with the surround sound so you can have a theater at home. And your shows are now on 6 different streaming services so that'll cost a little extra each month. And life really is easier with AI, but they all have strengths and weaknesses so you'll probably want to pay for 2, if not 3 of them. And your fast fashion gets threadbare after 20 or 30 washes so you'll need to regularly order 3 or 4 replacement shirts so you can send back the 2 that don't fit quite right. Anyways back to the gears and whee.... oh look a squirrel!
- mschuster91 8mo ago
  > Look at the changes from the conservative/MAGA movement, #metoo, and the George Floyd protests. Which changes? metoo certainly didn't change much, the George Floyd protests also led to nothing, just look at how ICE has been executing US citizens in the last months. In 2025 alone, before Renee Good and Alex Pretti, ICE murdered 32 people with zero accountability [1]. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/04/ice-2025-deaths-timeline https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/...

tokyobreakfast 8mo ago

Everyone has known Google reads your email since day one. In the early days they would spin it as a good thing: "that's why the spam filtering is great!" Why is everyone suddenly outraged Ring has access to your footage? These cloud-connected cameras...hosted on someone else's servers. It's literally how they work. "But I didn't think they would use the video in a way I didn't personally approve after giving it to them!" So instead, people are rage-returning Ring cameras and posting their receipts and exchanging them for...Chinese cameras. Which do the same thing, except this time the servers are overseas and completely uncontrolled. It's hard to have any empathy when the warning label was already on the box for all these products.

jon-wood 8mo ago
> But I didn't think they would use the video in a way I didn't personally approve after giving it to them! This is exactly the sort of thing there should be legislation for. To a somewhat weaker extent than I’d like this is what GDPR and friends covers, the law says that companies must state what data they’re gathering and what purposes they’re gathering it for. If they overreach then they can be fined into oblivion. In practice this is not as strong as it should be, broadly companies can and do basically go “we’re collecting all your data for whatever purpose we like” and get away with it, but they do at least think carefully about doing so. There’s no reason we can’t force providers of cloud backed devices to treat your data with respect, rather than thinking of it as residual income they’re leaving on the table if they don’t also sell it to third parties for data mining.
- mvanbaak 8mo ago
  'then they can be fined into oblivion' with capital CAN. Give me an example where this actually happened. (not just a statement that it will be done, but an actual example of a company going under because of the fine)
idiotsecant 8mo ago
Yes, that is what many people thought because people assume that a state with a reasonable commitment to individual liberty would have safeguards in place to force merchants to not spy on them. The fault is not with the idea of expecting that you own the data that you made and the equipment that you purchased. The fault here is the regulatory structure that makes you by default not the owner of your data or your things.

ProllyInfamous 8mo ago

3. Video Rental Protection Act (1988) >we don't seem to want to Congress protects only itself and its actual constituents — wealthy corporate persons. ---- Citizens United (2012) and the surveillances themselves make this monitoring self-capturing: the only way to prevent it is to convince most people to not install, but most people want the installed benefits. Even getting your neighbors to re-position their Ring cameras (which they have every right to install) can become very difficult. After city councils individually ban Flock-like CCTV traffic monitoring within their jurisdictions, their police can (and often do) still access neighboring jurisdictions' to monitor border crossings. You can't escape This System, even without license plates nor cell phones. ---- Term Limits now? end Citizens United. release The Files!

pocksuppet 8mo ago
The Video Rental Protection Act was passed when a video rental employee blackmailed a congressman and there was no law against it. So it's clear how to make congress write new privacy laws.
- ipython 8mo ago
  Psst anyone at Covenant Eyes[0] want to sign up for the obvious assignment here?? [0] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/mike-johnson-son-monitor-porn-intake-covenant-eyes-1234870634/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/mike-joh...
- hn_throwaway_99 8mo ago
  That doesn't appear to be accurate, at least from the Wikipedia article. Robert Bork (sorry to add my personal commentary but an absolute shit stain of a human being) was nominated for the Supreme Court (which, thankfully, he always not confirmed), and a reporter went to a video rental store and asked for his rental history, which there was no law against. The published article didn't include much, as Bork hadn't rented any particularly salacious material, but there was bipartisan outrage that this had occurred. Just goes to show how far we've fallen when there was once bipartisan outrage over accessing your Blockbuster rental history, when tech giants now have 10 times as much surveillance on you - your 1 am "shower thoughts" in your search history, all the websites you've visited, all your social media posts, and even social media posts about/including you posted by someone else, everything you've ever commented on a blog forum, your location history, etc.

pear01 8mo ago

Get money out of politics (reverse citizens united) and enact term/age limits for all public offices. These problems will be solved. Most Americans agree on most things. Don't let the politicians who benefit off of dividing us fool you. An agenda that focuses on reform outside of the usual finger pointing game of partisan politics and promises to enact these reforms without fear or favor will win. Any such agenda must also be willing to purge itself of any old guard that stands in the way, and treat them as a virus attached to their political movement. There is no benefit from trying to say, make a wedge between a Clinton and a Trump. If you can't get over that you're part of the problem, and this cycle will just continue. Stop defending an old guard halfway in the grave. Being right doesn't matter in electoral politics, winning does. It is likely the only way to achieve such a broad reform is to be willing to entertain as many incriminations as possible. Given recent relevations re Epstein this is our best chance to reform corruption in generations. Let's not squander it by defending anyone simply because they fall on one side of a dubious partisan line, or seem "less bad" than another. The broader the castigation, the more likely to achieve momentum that can actually enact said reforms, given the disadvantages of taking on these vast incumbent interests and a government that is easily susceptible to gridlock driven by a minority.

whattheheckheck 8mo ago
Does the next coalition have any money?
- pear01 8mo ago
  What point are you attempting to make? Or are you one of a minority of people that refuses to see the difference between (say among other things) the unrealized gains of someone like a Musk vs someone's working class parents saving up for retirement? Citizens United litigated a very specific issue. It was only an issue because Congress had actually passed some meaningful campaign finance reform after many painful years (really decades) of effort. The court essentially kneecapped it overnight on a 5 to 4 basis. Get money out of politics commonly means get dark/pac/corporate money out of politics, not individual donors well within long established FEC limits that these pacs are designed to circumvent. Again, billionaires live by different rules. This doesn't just apply to taxes, criminal justice, etc it applies to the foundation of our democracy - free and fair elections. What could be more in keeping with the best of American traditions than ensuring our elections are as egalitarian as possible?

mschuster91 8mo ago

> We have a branch of government called Congress ... that has been virtually useless as it has been rendered ineffective by Republican obstructionism and the unwillingness of the Democrats to counteract it, leading to the current state of Trump being able to do what he wants completely unchecked.

epolanski 8mo ago
That's a flaw of the constitution and it's revisions. You should always assume bad actors when designing a political system. And that's why parliamentary republics where you elect parties that form coalitions that chooses a prime minister who still has to deal with opposition and its own party support, every day, are much more resilient to authoritarianisn. In fact there hasn't been a single parliamentary republic to turn authoritarian since Sri Lanka 50 years ago. Presidential ones? As many as you wish. It's very stupid to elect single individuals to executive power.
- mschuster91 8mo ago
  > In fact there hasn't been a single parliamentary republic to turn authoritarian since Sri Lanka 50 years ago. I'd disagree on that. Austria had the FPÖ in government multiple times and each time they caused massive scandals. Some of the German states are on the brink of the AfD not even needing a coalition partner alone - should the elections this year turn out to be as bloody as the polls suggest, it may very well be the case that they go from opposition straight to sole government, with no one holding them back. Fully agree on the rest though.

SergeAx 8mo ago

I am almost sure that those two acts refer to human beings reading and listening, not to algorithms. Or at least a decent corporate lawyer will convincingly turn things that way.