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Google keyword warrants give U.S. government data on search users

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Re: Google keyword warrants give U.S. government data on search users

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No thanks, I prefer a search engine that doesn't implement Chinese censorship when I'm not in China.

Did you mean to reply to someone else? Because as explained, DDG didn't implement any censorship.

If I use DDG outside of China, and its results are sanitized of anything that offends the CCP, I will hold DDG accountable for that. It doesn't matter if under the hood DDG sources search results from somewhere else, DDG is the one serving me censored results. DDG "implemented" censorship. DDG is accountable.

Re: Google keyword warrants give U.S. government data on search users

#162

As sad as it is to admit it, it is not surprising to me. Worse, given the nature of my job, it is almost a given that some of my searches and queries are a part of an undesirable list somewhere. It is a problem. I am not trying to diminish it. But the real problem is that general population has zero to no issue with it. They barely comprehend the scope of what is happening. I am not sure it registers at all. Last tim…

The general population is highly domesticated. The defining aspect of domestication is the surrender of one's capacity to do violence in exchange for peaceful symbiosis. The domesticated are accustomed to filling rigid roles in society -- a society they believe to be benevolent and infinitely stable. Those of us that are not so domesticated, we wild ones, we who intimately comprehend history because we understand the…

Make no mistake, we are domesticated too. Gallows used to be much busier, running the system's traditional quaint breeding program, except instead of better wool or bigger tubers it was selecting for ingrained compliance and wetware compatibility.

Re: Google keyword warrants give U.S. government data on search users

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The general population is highly domesticated. The defining aspect of domestication is the surrender of one's capacity to do violence in exchange for peaceful symbiosis. The domesticated are accustomed to filling rigid roles in society -- a society they believe to be benevolent and infinitely stable. Those of us that are not so domesticated, we wild ones, we who intimately comprehend history because we understand the…

I think I disagree in several different ways. I am personally highly domesticated. I accept that without society there are a lot of things I would not be able to do ( engaging with random strangers on HN come to mind -- in a lot of ways, it is pleasure and a privilege to have time to engage in an intellectual discussion ). But I disagree with your definition that the defining aspect of domestication is surrendering o…

The pesky big-brained system substrate is much more efficient when it thinks it's free. No individual human has any actual agency.

Re: Google keyword warrants give U.S. government data on search users

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The general population is highly domesticated. The defining aspect of domestication is the surrender of one's capacity to do violence in exchange for peaceful symbiosis. The domesticated are accustomed to filling rigid roles in society -- a society they believe to be benevolent and infinitely stable. Those of us that are not so domesticated, we wild ones, we who intimately comprehend history because we understand the…

I think I disagree in several different ways. I am personally highly domesticated. I accept that without society there are a lot of things I would not be able to do ( engaging with random strangers on HN come to mind -- in a lot of ways, it is pleasure and a privilege to have time to engage in an intellectual discussion ). But I disagree with your definition that the defining aspect of domestication is surrendering o…

My point is: your wife doesn't feel responsible for your personal safety. Here's the difference between a domesticated person who expects someone else to protect them, i.e., do their violence for them, and someone that feels responsible for their own safety.

Domesticated: works for a major corporation in a big city. Has no guns, no means of personally protecting himself, lives in close proximity to strangers, and if the food stores went down, he would starve to death within a few weeks.

Undomesticated: made very anxious by every conspiracy theory because he knows the world is dangerous and no one is ultimately his buddy, lives in a bunker in some undisclosed location, has at least a year of food rations, has more guns and ammunition than a small Latin American nation, makes a plan to kill everyone he meets.

The domesticated believe the undomesticated to be insane because they don't think about their own safety and violence as the undomesticated do. How many people look at the doomsday bunker crowd as a bunch of lunatics? They aren't lunatics: they have no trust in the system and they have taken it upon themselves to secure their safety to the best of their ability.

The fact that you blithely say "we live in an odd 1984 dystopia" tells me, no offense, that you aren't aware of what that means. Perhaps intellectually you do, but because you aren't used to protecting yourself, such a statement doesn't rain down anxiety and paranoia upon your emotional register. This is the strange thing about the domesticated condition: it's a type of blindness.

I'd compare the blindness of the domesticated to the difference between an old person at a funeral versus a child at a funeral. What is death to youth? What can youth possibly know of death? On the contrary, what is death to age? Death is profound and moving to those who have enough experience to know what it is, but it is nothing -- absolutely nothing -- to those that have not developed the depth of experience that allows one to register the significance of the grim reminder of our own mortality. The same thing goes for violence and its fruits and our ability to intimately know them.

In any case, good luck out there Winston #room101.

Re: Google keyword warrants give U.S. government data on search users

#165
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The general population is highly domesticated. The defining aspect of domestication is the surrender of one's capacity to do violence in exchange for peaceful symbiosis. The domesticated are accustomed to filling rigid roles in society -- a society they believe to be benevolent and infinitely stable. Those of us that are not so domesticated, we wild ones, we who intimately comprehend history because we understand the…

Make no mistake, we are domesticated too. Gallows used to be much busier, running the system's traditional quaint breeding program, except instead of better wool or bigger tubers it was selecting for ingrained compliance and wetware compatibility.

Amusingly said. I agree that the most docile tend to have the greatest fitness in society, but I don't think it is all a matter of genes. I once had a near death experience and it really woke me up. I think anyone that has been close to death realizes that most people never think twice about their mortality till the very end...and this creates two very different types of psychological species: those who carry the weight of their mortality and those who fly around like little birds who think they will never die...tweet tweet...I will live for ever. The former we may call the "undomesticated" and the latter we may call the "domesticated." At least this is how I've come to understand things.

Re: Google keyword warrants give U.S. government data on search users

#166
Using a VPN provider in a country outside US jurisdiction would be recommended. Sure, they can also request the data from there with enough political pressure, but it is about putting up barriers.

This screams of government being acutely overstrained as it is but no reason to give them a hand with such deed.

You should also search for this person too. They requested data and data should be served.

Re: Google keyword warrants give U.S. government data on search users

#167

On one hand I totally believe that our privacy needs to be protected companies that facilitate government surveillance should be boycotted. On the other hand, the fact that no one can find Brian Laundrie indicates to be that generally government is incompetent and can’t mask all these things together to do anything really useful.

If he's in the belly of some crocodile, he's probably not using electronic devices.

If the crocodile looked him up on Google, we basically already got it.

Re: Google keyword warrants give U.S. government data on search users

#168
post #80

> so-called geofence warrants, where investigators ask Google to provide information on anyone within the location of a crime scene at a given time. It's amazing we've become so tethered to our phones that it's just implicitly obvious that your phone's location is the same as your location. Authoritarian governments rejoice! People will voluntarily pay and cling to their tracking devices, no need to track them person…

[deleted]

Re: Google keyword warrants give U.S. government data on search users

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the library warranty thing depends. If the government wants to find out who checked out the Communist Manifesto so they can jail them for thought crime - that's bad. If the police want to know who checked out this specific copy of Harry Potter because they found it at the scene of a murder, that's good. Sure, I might've just dropped my copy of Harry Potter near a murder as I innocently passed by. And yeah, I…

There's an in between situation where someone is looking for correlations with a crime, but they are simply searching so much data, that they inevitably get a huge number of very close, but invalid matches. This tends to be a problem more and more with ever increasing databases that are convenient to access. People have intuitions for coincidences that are not appropriate for vast amounts of data.

Things like this make me think of the movie Gattaca. Mild Spoilers After the murder, they just go around vacuuming up any and all organic material to test for DNA. They get a hit from someone who “isn’t supposed to be there” and immediately focus the entire investigation on that person. It fits the very real pattern of using science to just confirm the human biases held by the people using it. If police can sweep up and search through a mountain of data, it is going to be the Muslim immigrant hit they focus on over the white middle manager. It will be the person struggling off and on with homelessness that gets arrested because they matched a pattern and didn’t have an alibi, over the suburban mom.

That if you give police a list of random correlations, they will focus on “those people” that are assumed to be more criminal and usually have less means and ability to fight back.

Re: Google keyword warrants give U.S. government data on search users

#170
This is one of those slippery slopes, but I dont think the uses here have gone down that slope yet.

An open ended search might be on terms related to bomb making, where curiosity might get someone labeled a potential terrorist. Here a specific person went missing and they were looking for people who searched on that specific person. It's still a net, but it's not that wide and its focused on something that already happened. They even put date ranges on the search.

I see the problem though. It's probably just a matter of time before the specificity is loosened a lot, and that would be bad.

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