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New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking

aclu.org

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Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking

#41

Post by freeAgent »

hunglee2 wrote: post #2

I used to be skeptical of the skeptics, thought they were paranoid to worry about 'big tech' snooping and tracking our lives. Turns out it is not big tech but 'big govt' that I should've been worried about. We are in danger of turning into a surveillance state

I think it's becoming increasingly apparent that there's not much difference between "Big Tech" and "Big Government." As this article makes clear, they have a symbiotic relationship with each other. Big Tech makes money from Big Government, which uses Big Tech to get around restrictions on what it's allowed to do on its own.

Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking

#42

Post by vorpalhex »

ok_dad wrote: post #40
photochemsyn wrote: post #29

Note that this is just records of some of the federal agencies, not all of them, according to the linked ACLU report: > "Although the litigation is ongoing, we are now making public the records that CBP, ICE, the U.S. Secret Service, the U.S. Coast Guard, and several offices within DHS Headquarters have provided us to date." The NSA is still vacuuming up all the metadata and a good fraction of the content from the ma…

Funny thing is, they started the surveillance in late-2001 to suck all the records up. Where did they get the computers and storage devices to do that all at once? They must have been installing equipment for months or years, especially since I am pretty sure they even built a new data center on Fort Mead for it around that time. Now, this is 2001, when building a datacenter didn't just involve spinning up 1000 AWS E…

I legit don't believe they can store all that data. Youtube alone creates too much data for them to process and handle.

They must be storing either a subset or only partial metadata.

Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking

#44

Post by tremon »

photochemsyn wrote: post #29

Note that this is just records of some of the federal agencies, not all of them, according to the linked ACLU report: > "Although the litigation is ongoing, we are now making public the records that CBP, ICE, the U.S. Secret Service, the U.S. Coast Guard, and several offices within DHS Headquarters have provided us to date." The NSA is still vacuuming up all the metadata and a good fraction of the content from the ma…

It's not quite China yet

What do you mean with this, specifically? Do you mean that China has a more comprehensive data collection apparatus, that the Chinese government has easier access to commercially collected data, or maybe that they exert their control more overtly than the US?

Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking

#45

Post by conception »

sva_ wrote: post #9

I wonder why are we so complacent with these kind of things? Is it really just the fact that we got our bellies full, and live in climate-controlled homes? Or has there been some degeneration of the human body brought upon us with all kinds of new artificial materials we use, that might affect our bodies in ways we can't yet comprehend; or is it a psychological thing based on the results of technological achievements…

>we got our bellies full, and live in climate-controlled homes

I think it's this plus we have no time and the time we have is preyed upon. So, you're fed and more or less comfy, but you're also stressed and tired about that next paycheck. And if you don't get that next paycheck, then you will no longer be fed and more or less comfy.

Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking

#46

Post by rglover »

sva_ wrote: post #9

I wonder why are we so complacent with these kind of things? Is it really just the fact that we got our bellies full, and live in climate-controlled homes? Or has there been some degeneration of the human body brought upon us with all kinds of new artificial materials we use, that might affect our bodies in ways we can't yet comprehend; or is it a psychological thing based on the results of technological achievements…

> So what is different? Why do we repeatedly allow this to happen?

It's not so much an "allow" as it is a "what's the alternative?" The problem at this point is so deeply rooted (in the form of life-long politicians and bureaucrats), the only solution is a full-blown reset. Unfortunately, there's no way to do that without violent revolution. Considering the scale and diversity of thought in the U.S., doing that effectively with the least amount of damage is next to impossible (too many loose cannons with mental issues). It also requires violence, which, if you take a non-aggression stance on problem solving (my own POV) then it's a stalemate.

At this point, the only "fix" seems to be atrophy and circumvention. Atrophy in the sense that you just let it all run its course and meet its eventual demise (anticipating pain and suffering as the system collapses) and circumvention in the sense that you look for ways to excuse yourself from it.

Earlier revolutions happened as part of much smaller civilizations (exactly why the American Revolution was possible—far less variables and far more homogenous thinking among the dissenting class). In a country of 300M+ people, any "revolution" is likely to dissolve into chaos no matter how well-organized or how principled its ideology.

Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking

#47

Post by jandrewrogers »

sva_ wrote: post #9

I wonder why are we so complacent with these kind of things? Is it really just the fact that we got our bellies full, and live in climate-controlled homes? Or has there been some degeneration of the human body brought upon us with all kinds of new artificial materials we use, that might affect our bodies in ways we can't yet comprehend; or is it a psychological thing based on the results of technological achievements…

People have no intuition for what is technically possible or its implications in cases like this, including most people in tech. So they fallback to mentally modeling these cases in terms of things they are familiar with, without any sense of the inadequacies of the model. You can tell people these facts all day but they don't grok it, really, and it would be hard work to try to grok it, which few people have either time or inclination for. They may feel uneasy about it in some abstract sense but as far as they are concerned it doesn't affect them in a material way.

Humans make decisions based things they can imagine and effectively reason about. Humans struggle to incorporate elementary probability theory into their reasoning; anything that requires complex systems thinking, which these kinds of topics do, is only going to be practically accessible to a small percentage of the population.

Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking

#49

Post by candiddevmike »

photochemsyn wrote: post #29

Note that this is just records of some of the federal agencies, not all of them, according to the linked ACLU report: > "Although the litigation is ongoing, we are now making public the records that CBP, ICE, the U.S. Secret Service, the U.S. Coast Guard, and several offices within DHS Headquarters have provided us to date." The NSA is still vacuuming up all the metadata and a good fraction of the content from the ma…

And yet, even with all of this surveillance, we still have mass shootings every five days.
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