I really did not need to read this right now...
Hidden Microphones Part of Government Surveillance Program in the Bay Area
181–190 of 293 posts
Re: Hidden Microphones Part of Government Surveillance Program in the Bay Area
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? One wants you to look at ads more relevant to you than random placement. The other wants you to stay in line, not question your leaders, accept the oligarchy, and if you don't, your life will be made a living hell until you are rendered neutral. Yeah go government.
The government doesn't need to coerce the average person to stay in line. The government is the instrument through which the average person forces the fringe elements to stay in line. The average person, thus, has a lot more to fear from corporations than from the government.
The average person has way more to fear from government. Ever known a company that started a world war? or genocided people ? concentration camps etc etc etc.
Governments have killed way more people than corporations and statistics prove it, thus the average person has a lot more to fear from government.
Re: Hidden Microphones Part of Government Surveillance Program in the Bay Area
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google has vastly more information on everyone in America. Orders of magnitude. (and by extension maybe foreign intelligence agencies) The government is just playing catch-up! I rather our slightly dysfunctional government have more information about me than an ad company that's the play toy of tech-utopian billionaires
Why? One wants you to look at ads more relevant to you than random placement. The other wants you to stay in line, not question your leaders, accept the oligarchy, and if you don't, your life will be made a living hell until you are rendered neutral. Yeah go government.
Google wants to manipulate you into buying things and hading them over more information. If you know even a little about marketing/sales you know how powerful these forces are especially when targeted at a whole nation. On an individual level we never feel like the CocaCola ad makes us buy more coke, but it does.
"your life will be made a living hell until you are rendered neutral" ... sorry, but that just doesn't match up with reality. Maybe your fantasy of the future?
Re: Hidden Microphones Part of Government Surveillance Program in the Bay Area
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps you are mistaking the ideal government from the actual government. Governments are repeat offenders, and they lie to the public constantly. Its no secret - look it up. Yet they are so powerful, that it happens anyway. Its also no secret that the people who control the government have interests in retaining power and accumulating wealth. Politicians don't even deny that they can be bought, money is free speech…
I'm not describing the ideal, I'm describing the reality. Digression: my mom loves Hillary Clinton. She's an immigrant, consumes very little American media, but she is a staunch Clinton supporter. Clinton recites all the buzzwords she likes: children, education, security. She views politically radical ideas with deep suspicion and views nonconformity as a character flaw. I look at the government we have, and can't he…
What Clinton tells her is not what Clinton actually does. Campaign promises are exactly that. The government lies to your mom to get her support and 'keep her in line'.
Re: Hidden Microphones Part of Government Surveillance Program in the Bay Area
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
Cell phone is not designed to listen to you all the time. But yes, it is designed for you to be contact-able all the time, so the premise of somebody knowing your (rough) location is there.
Re: Hidden Microphones Part of Government Surveillance Program in the Bay Area
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google has vastly more information on everyone in America. Orders of magnitude. (and by extension maybe foreign intelligence agencies) The government is just playing catch-up! I rather our slightly dysfunctional government have more information about me than an ad company that's the play toy of tech-utopian billionaires
I don't use Google, and prefer they not keep tabs on me all the time...but I think governments have a much...much worse track record on suppressing people than corporations. Google can be wiped from the earth by merely a new invention or a shift in the market to a better product...or financial fraud. Pretty hard to up root an entire legal structure and apparatus that grows every single year and has the ability to jai…
I don't use google either! But I've gotta say, every year it gets more and more frustrating as people ask me to use their google spreadsheets and chat with them on google hangouts etc. etc.
Google might not have an account of mine, but I'm 100% sure they know who I am, what I'm interested in and what I'd be interested in in the future! Thanks to cookies, their ads and snippets of JavaScript on every webpage, my friends uploading contacts lists with my name in them etc. etc. they must have a profile built for me.
With the current state of things it actually doesn't really bother me (other than it's monopolistic market distorting effects, but whatever), but you brought up the possibility of them falling part! A very interesting scenario. Google is playing nice and placating people while they make boatloads of cash. When Firefox and IE natively implement adblock or some technounicorn clobbers them they'll get a lot less nice! And we checked enough End User Agreements to let them
With the government we have some recourse
Re: Hidden Microphones Part of Government Surveillance Program in the Bay Area
#187Hmm I wonder how this would work considering its all things openly available to be recorded. Follow a federal agent home from work and film them and their house. Film their children going to school and post pictures locations and times online, also taking photos of other relatives, friends etc and where they live and their phone numbers and post it all online. Have your friends join in and keep posting every detail a…
Stalking.
Re: Hidden Microphones Part of Government Surveillance Program in the Bay Area
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a much deeper problem - there are so many laws, and so little public knowledge of many of them, that it's pretty close to being true that anyone the government wants to coerce into doing something against their own interest can probably be threatened with being charged with something (with at least reasonable chance of success in convicting). When the best unpaid legal advice you can find says "Don't talk to…
When "every single person is a criminal", That is tyranny ^
Tyranny? This is America!
Re: Hidden Microphones Part of Government Surveillance Program in the Bay Area
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
The government doesn't need to coerce the average person to stay in line. The government is the instrument through which the average person forces the fringe elements to stay in line. The average person, thus, has a lot more to fear from corporations than from the government.
The average person has way more to fear from government. Ever known a company that started a world war? or genocided people ? concentration camps etc etc etc. Governments have killed way more people than corporations and statistics prove it, thus the average person has a lot more to fear from government.
You may want to learn more about the East India Company. If you don't think that an company can start a war then their history may surprise you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company
Re: Hidden Microphones Part of Government Surveillance Program in the Bay Area
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
Total surveillance is sold under guise of preventing terrorism, but the main effect is simple: it allows the status quo to become entrenched and permanent. You are rendered economically exploitable and politically neutered. There is a reason the state and intelligencies, from the Pinkertons to the FBI, have had a historical obsession with extensive spying on political movements and economic assembly. Both have real p…
"Entrenched and permanent" is a bit exaggerated, as the governments of pervasive-surveillance East Germany and the Soviet Union discovered.
The Stasi and KGB couldn't dream of the technology and telecommunications networks that enable today's surveillance society.