How and why the government is stalking you

But how much data are they collecting that we DON'T know about?

It's all redacted.

Meh.

Layer on top of this what we already know about the close relationship between mobile providers and the government, and it’s a safe bet that if the government wants to know where you and what you’re up to right now, they know.

IOW the headline is just linkbait; the government can stalk you more easily than ever before, but in the text of the article comes the admission that it's not necessarily bothering to do so. Before people throw up slippery-slope arguments and claim these things only go one way, please take a moment and ask yourself how much freedom you realistically enjoy now vs. in previous periods like the Red Scare of the 1950s when the US was in the grip of anti-Communist paranoia. I suggest that we enjoy a great deal more.

The stated goal [OEV] of this technology is to support, “classified blogging activities on foreign-language websites to enable Centcom to counter violent extremist and enemy propaganda outside the US." But Isaac R. Porche, a researcher at the RAND corporation, claims it would not be easy to exclude US audiences when dealing with internet communications.

You could make the exact same argument about Voice of America. A few countries like North Korea still make it illegal to possess radios capable to tuning into to broadcasts from frequencies other than the official propaganda channels. The US has leveraged broadcast and print media to promote its own interests for about as long as those technologies have been around, as do most other governments. I've watched quite a few North Korean propaganda videos on YouTube and somehow I've managed to avoid joining the Kim family personality cult. There's no reason to think that encountering some US government propaganda by accident is going to short-circuit the brains of Americans and turn them in mindless drones - we already have 24 hour sports and shopping and soap opera channels to take care of that.

I'm distinctly underwhelmed.

What's even sadder is that many if not most HN users are contributing to the surveillance apparatus by building web apps and infrastructure, promoting it, and not taking a stand against it.

How many of you Googlers and Facebookers (and the legions of you working for Facebook/Google wannabes) have really thought hard about what you're doing? How many of you care? How many of you honestly want to do something to stop the pissing away of privacy to corporations and the government?

I would venture to guess that it's a vanishingly small percentage. Most just want to make money, and let others worry about the consequences. Or they delude themselves in to thinking they're "changing the world" with some monumental cow-tipping app.

We fully know about that.