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Hidden Microphones Part of Government Surveillance Program in the Bay Area

sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com

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Re: Hidden Microphones Part of Government Surveillance Program in the Bay Area

#101

Post by [deleted] »

nostrademons wrote: post #93
jondubois wrote: post #76

Ok, so these facts are true: #1. The government is monitoring us. #2. Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple and many other huge corporations are also monitoring us... And they are sharing our personal data with each other. Why are so many news articles about issue #1 and so few are about issue #2. The government is a negligible threat compared to corporations. It seems like tech companies are manipulating the media to turn…

Big corporations don't generally share data with each other. It's more like the government, Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, and numerous black hat spyware vendors are all monitoring you, and none of them trust anybody else. People inside Google were fucking pissed when the NSA spying practices were revealed, people inside Apple regularly block Google's apps for privacy concerns, people inside Goo…

[deleted]

Re: Hidden Microphones Part of Government Surveillance Program in the Bay Area

#102

Post by bigiain »

dmckeon wrote: post #64
rayiner wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I don't think the 4th amendment has much to say about surveillance. It protects four enumerated property rights: houses, persons, papers, and effects. If you have a property right in something, the government needs a warrant. If you don't, it doesn't. I don't think surveillance is good, but I'm strongly opposed to twisting the interpretation of the Constitution to fight in courts battles that should be fo…

I would put the emphasis on "private" rather than on "property" - if a house I rent contains a person and their papers or effects, they enjoy 4A protection even though I do not own the house, the person, or their papers or effects. A good intro to the US 4th amendment for anyone needing background details is at: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fourth_amendment The key element in the Oakland FBI story seems to be the…

2016: The year the Elevator Pitch died…

(Now I'm wondering who's bugging every conference venue and nearby hotel elevators around Disrupt/TechWeek/SxSW/YC interview/etc venues? I wonder how often bug installers find competitors bugs, and whether they compete or collaborate with each other?)

Re: Hidden Microphones Part of Government Surveillance Program in the Bay Area

#103

Post by [deleted] »

jondubois wrote: post #76

Ok, so these facts are true: #1. The government is monitoring us. #2. Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple and many other huge corporations are also monitoring us... And they are sharing our personal data with each other. Why are so many news articles about issue #1 and so few are about issue #2. The government is a negligible threat compared to corporations. It seems like tech companies are manipulating the media to turn…

[deleted]

Re: Hidden Microphones Part of Government Surveillance Program in the Bay Area

#104

Post by bigiain »

arca_vorago wrote: post #57
rayiner wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I don't think the 4th amendment has much to say about surveillance. It protects four enumerated property rights: houses, persons, papers, and effects. If you have a property right in something, the government needs a warrant. If you don't, it doesn't. I don't think surveillance is good, but I'm strongly opposed to twisting the interpretation of the Constitution to fight in courts battles that should be fo…

I would just like to point out something, not entirely focused at you, but because I see that phrase and similar about "well thats democracy for ya.." America is not a democracy. It is a Constitutional Democratic Republic. Words have meaning, And I would highly suggest that anyone reading this, begin using that phrase when referencing our government. A democracy is mob rule, and with a "mob" so ruled by propaganda an…

Looks around at my local Australian politics... Nice handbasket here, I wonder where we're going?

Re: Hidden Microphones Part of Government Surveillance Program in the Bay Area

#105

Post by jflatow »

jondubois wrote: post #91
awqrre wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#3. Other countries are spying on us and are sharing the data with our government...

Yes, but my point is that this is done in the interest of national/international security (there is no financial incentive for the government). Corporations do their monitoring purely for their own financial gain. The government is like a parent watching a child to make sure that the child doesn't get hurt - The interests of the parent are aligned with those of the child. A corporation is more like a pedophile - The…

The government is not your parent. The government lies to the public constantly, and has an agenda that is largely determined by financial interests.

Re: Hidden Microphones Part of Government Surveillance Program in the Bay Area

#106

Post by bigiain »

smsm42 wrote: post #29
mtgx wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're going to conduct criminal activity, do it in the privacy of your own home. Meanwhile: http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/the-fbi-can-neither-confirm-n... Soon they'll say "if you're going to do or say 'bad stuff', just do it in your own head". And then we'll have technologies that can read and "hear" what our brains think all around us.

Well, if you voluntarily put in your home device designed to listen to you around the clock, and send the data out, you can't complain it listens to you and sends the data out, can you?

That's pretty much exactly what Snowden is telling us we do when we choose to carry a cell phone...

Re: Hidden Microphones Part of Government Surveillance Program in the Bay Area

#107

Post by Gibbon1 »

mike_hock wrote: post #4

> If you're going to conduct criminal activity, do it in the privacy of your own home. > That was the original intention of the 4th amendment. Wat. The intention of the 4th amendment was to enable criminal activity, but confine it to private property? Not to protect citizens' privacy from government snooping without probable cause? The intent was to prevent the executive branch from indiscriminately "searching" (and…

I've come to the opinion that warrants are simply there to provide an audit trail. The executive branch needs to provide a record of what it's up to to the Judicial branch.

If you think in terms of that, current attempts by the executive branch to spy on people without warrants is extremely alarming. You have to ask, why exactly do they have a problem with informing the Judicial branch what they are doing?

Re: Hidden Microphones Part of Government Surveillance Program in the Bay Area

#109

Post by bigiain »

cornchips wrote: post #39
jamesdwilson wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whoever made this site should be dumped off the bridge in the background.. What exactly did you mean by that? CBSLOCAL.com editor? should be murdered? why?

Hahaha. Can't take a joke? You PC, bro? I was referring to abuse of popup ads and the enormity of the data; over 4000 requests spreading across over 30 mb after a 1:49 video is finished... Obviously, nobody would dump anyone off a bridge for such a thing; but their duties should be... :-)

How do you reckon "Can't take a joke, bro?" is going to play out in court, when the FBI can selectively produce voice-printed recordings of your "conspiracy to commit murder" comments (and claim the rest of the conversation was "unavailable due to technical errors")?

And if you don't think the FBI is likely to pull shit like that, how's this sound:

"The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000."

and: "the cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death."

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudenc...

Re: Hidden Microphones Part of Government Surveillance Program in the Bay Area

#110

Post by nostrademons »

jondubois wrote: post #100
nostrademons wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big corporations don't generally share data with each other. It's more like the government, Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, and numerous black hat spyware vendors are all monitoring you, and none of them trust anybody else. People inside Google were fucking pissed when the NSA spying practices were revealed, people inside Apple regularly block Google's apps for privacy concerns, people inside Goo…

I don't think everybody is out to get everybody else in a homogeneous manner. There is obviously a higher degree of collaboration between similar entities. I think it's pretty obvious that we have the government on one side and corporations on the other. We need to make sure that a healthy equilibrium stays in place between the two. Right now I just feel that corporations are winning.

That's not actually true, at all. The tightest bonds of collaboration are usually within a team, and the next tightest are between a product team and its users. It's not unusual for a department to take its users' side against the rest of the same corporation, like for example when Google Search levied an SEO penalty against Google Chrome, or how Google PageSpeed marks many Google sites as slow.

It's also not unusual for organizations to collaborate on one aspect and compete on another. On one hand, Google is in fairly tight with the Obama administration, with the HealthCare.gov rescue & USDS being largely led by ex-Google and ex-Twitter engineers on temporary leave. On the other, all the tech companies banded together to encrypt everything when they found out the NSA was snooping on their wire links.

I used to believe as you did, dividing big entities up into "government" and "corporations", but then personal experience in a big corporation and a lot of friends in government showed me that this is not at all how the world operates. Ultimately it's a lot more chaotic, and the default state in most relationships is "frenemy".

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