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Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

greenwald.substack.com

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Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#71

Post by embedding-shape »

jeffbee wrote: post #55
alejohausner wrote: post #38

Glenn Greenwald is back on substack. Yay! For the past few years, he’s mostly done videos on rumble, and he’s fun to watch, but personally I prefer his writing. In case you’ve been under a rock for 10 years, Greenwald was the guy who published Snowden’s revelations. His focus has always been on censorship, surveillance, and hypocrisy in government.

"Yay" Greenwald is (still) playing footsie down at the Nazi bar. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/feb/07/revealed-how-s...

> Revealed: How Substack makes money from hosting Nazi newsletters

If we're gonna judge authors for what platforms they're using, does that mean we're all bad guys here on HN too, since a lot of current misery is because of startups and technology companies who used to receive a lot praise here?

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#72

Post by m348e912 »

I know Ring is getting a bad rap for enabling state level surveillance, but the Ring app offers an option to enable end-to-end encryption between the camera and your phone.

The stored video is encrypted with key generated on your phone. You have to be physically close to the camera in order to share the key and complete the set-up. Once encrypted, the video can't be analyzed by AI or used in a broad surveillance effort.

It's entirely possible that the encryption keys have a backdoor, but I doubt it. Although there is no way to verify.

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#73

Post by harimau777 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #52
oefrha wrote: post #21

It’s pretty amazing when you get the worst of both worlds—total surveillance, yet still rampant crime.

That's the only way it can be in a system with thousands of crimes on the books. People commit minor offenses, and often felonies without knowing it, on a regular basis. If surveillance was consistently used to actually enforce the laws, people would a) notice the surveillance[0] and then actually object to it and b) start objecting to all the ridiculous and poorly drafted laws they didn't even know existed. But they…

On the other hand, those thousands of crimes on the books exist because American society operates under a norm of "if its not explicitly illegal then its fine for people to do it". See for example, the rhetoric around maximizing shareholder value.

If the only way to protect yourself from selfish people is if their actions explicitly illegal, then the logical outcome is to make more and more things explicitly illegal.

IMHO, that's one of the core failures of modern Libertarian/Objectivist influenced thought.

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#74

Post by alejohausner »

jeffbee wrote: post #48
danesparza wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What evidence do you have the Glenn Greenwald wants a strongman? If anything, he has been attacked by numerous 'strong men' (in various governments!) over several years.

Greenwald is a vocal and consistent anti-institutionalist, and this creates the conditions for strongmen to take over. Whether he is aware of having this effect is not relevant.

He criticizes the military-industrial complex. Don’t you think that’s an institution worth dismantling?

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#75

Post by karp773 »

alejohausner wrote: post #38

Glenn Greenwald is back on substack. Yay! For the past few years, he’s mostly done videos on rumble, and he’s fun to watch, but personally I prefer his writing. In case you’ve been under a rock for 10 years, Greenwald was the guy who published Snowden’s revelations. His focus has always been on censorship, surveillance, and hypocrisy in government.

I personally miss Snowden's revelations so much. Such a brave soul! He should keep doing what he does best and never stop. It's sad that we have not heard any new revelations from him for a long time, though. Any ideas why he stopped?

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#76

Post by embedding-shape »

wordsunite wrote: post #32

I know it seems hard, but just stop using Google, Amazon, Meta products. Tell everyone you know to stop using their products. They have all been acquiring and amassing surveillance for years through their products and now they're just double dipping with AI training to sell you more of it. The more you can get people to realize and disconnect the better. I wish more people would use AI to build alternatives with a cl…

> I know it seems hard, but just stop using Google, Amazon, Meta products

It's not just hard for some though, literally their livelihood depends on it. Want to run a restaurant today? You basically must have Facebook, Instagram and Google Maps entry for enough people to discover you, probably more than half of the people we got to our restaurant who we ask, cite Google Maps as the reason they found the place, and without half our income, the restaurant wouldn't have survived.

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#77

Post by iririririr »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #63
wordsunite wrote: post #32

I know it seems hard, but just stop using Google, Amazon, Meta products. Tell everyone you know to stop using their products. They have all been acquiring and amassing surveillance for years through their products and now they're just double dipping with AI training to sell you more of it. The more you can get people to realize and disconnect the better. I wish more people would use AI to build alternatives with a cl…

>I know it seems hard, but just stop using Google, Amazon, Meta products. I noticed your own app's website [0] hosts videos on YouTube [1] and uses Stripe as a payment processor [2], which is hosted on AWS. You also mentioned that your app is vibe coded [3]; the AI labs that facilitated your vibecoding likely built and run their models using Meta's PyTorch or Google's TensorFlow. "Just stop using" makes for a catchy…

Talking about anti-tech-monopolies and using Stripe-paypal is extra ironic.

I can understand aws, youtube, being on google index, and other things as they sometimes are the most cost efficient or vendors don't offer alternatives... but stripe-paypal is more expensive and worse than the less-bad alternatives. jeez.

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#78

Post by sillywabbit »

m348e912 wrote: post #72

I know Ring is getting a bad rap for enabling state level surveillance, but the Ring app offers an option to enable end-to-end encryption between the camera and your phone. The stored video is encrypted with key generated on your phone. You have to be physically close to the camera in order to share the key and complete the set-up. Once encrypted, the video can't be analyzed by AI or used in a broad surveillance effo…

End-to-end encryption only means something if you trust the endpoints.

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#79

Post by embedding-shape »

karp773 wrote: post #75
alejohausner wrote: post #38

Glenn Greenwald is back on substack. Yay! For the past few years, he’s mostly done videos on rumble, and he’s fun to watch, but personally I prefer his writing. In case you’ve been under a rock for 10 years, Greenwald was the guy who published Snowden’s revelations. His focus has always been on censorship, surveillance, and hypocrisy in government.

I personally miss Snowden's revelations so much. Such a brave soul! He should keep doing what he does best and never stop. It's sad that we have not heard any new revelations from him for a long time, though. Any ideas why he stopped?

I'm not sure if it's sarcasm or something, but Snowden essentially lives in exile from his home as the US government would like to punish him for exposing the secrets of the US government spying on everyone. Not sure what new revelations could come from him.

Re: Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest reveal the severity of U.S. surveillance state

#80

Post by wwweston »

alejohausner wrote: post #51

The backlash against the use of Ring cameras began with their tone-deaf superbowl ad. Amazon assumed that customers would buy their surveillance technology. The whole thing reminds me that we have returned to the Gilded Age, when the rich people who run the world strutted about arrogantly, without fear of shame or public disapproval. It’s as if Bezos is telling us “you have no choice. You will buy our product whether…

The bigger problem is that our digital gilded age is founded in an entrenched culture organizing and framing support for it. It’s one that has been carefully created with several tracks of effort going back decades (some even a century).

Counterculture is disorganized and shallow, and funding is not as abundant where understanding of this problem exists.

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