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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

#191

Post by areoform »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #146
shakna wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cambridge Analytica was an experiment run by a marketing team. I wouldn't say marketing will always side on ethics. Propaganda is, and always has been, a subset of marketing aimed at shifting public perception. It would be wild to assume it never happens.

> Cambridge Analytica was an experiment run by a marketing team. I wouldn't say marketing will always side on ethics The argument isn't against ethics. It's about self interest. Amazon bought the Super Bowl ad to sell Nest units. "Unwitting" is correct. There are no lizard people coordinating our march towards dystopia. Just individual people who will–like me–read this article, think we should do more, and then proba…

    There are no lizard people coordinating our march towards dystopia. Just individual people who will–like me–read this article, think we should do more, and then probably do nothing.
There doesn't have to be an explicit conspiracy for a conspiracy to emerge. Conspiracies can be spontaneous, organic emergent behavior. For example, the killing of Ken McElroy; an entire community decided to spontaneously kill someone and then decided to cover up the crime collectively (and - also - spontaneously) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_McElroy

It's very much possible for people to brand the surveillance state as cute; and for consent for a surveillance state to spontaneously emerge / be generated from the attempts of marketers trying to make the Ring dystopia cute.

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

#192

Post by acdha »

alejohausner wrote: post #74
jeffbee wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What’s been dismantled? The major impact of his recent work was helping elect Trump twice and get tech companies to drop anti-disinformation campaigns. The military-industrial complex not only isn’t dismantled, it’s growing!

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

#193

Post by shevy-java »

I mean, this does not come as a surprise. If you look at the US corporations, not just Amazon or Google but Facebook, or more recently Discord - and our all-time favourite chummer, Microsoft - this all screams of strategic mass sniffing and snooping after people. There is 0% chance that this is done solely on a per-corporate level. This is systematic sniffing.

I think the long term solution will have to be to become as independent as possible on these sniffer-corporations and to get real people into office rather than those lobbyists who work for those corporations. This will require a complete re-design of the whole system though. I am not sure we'll see that in our lifetime.

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

#194

Post by voxl »

otterley wrote: post #148
calibas wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're an attorney and you're asking me why the government spying on everyone is a clear violation of the 4th Amendment?

Yes. You’re the one making the assertion (not just that there is a violation but also that the activity is that “the government spying on everyone”); the burden of proof is thus on you. Attorneys challenge each other as a matter of course in every case before a court. This is how the adversarial system works. Perhaps what you meant to say is that “I don’t like the activity that is happening here,” or “I think some of…

I'll bite. We live in a society where the 2nd amendment is a rorschach test for interpreting century old English. Yet, because of how people feel, particularly a couple of activist judges, it has been given the strongest possible interpretation to impart the strongest possible freedoms to the citizenry.

Why have the other amendments not enjoyed this same individual freedom absolutism? Why are we cherry picking which amendments get expanded modern powers "in the spirit of the text"? It's because of how the judges feel.

So before you dismiss someone's opinion because how it might be, let's all be honest with ourselves and realize constitutional law of this nature does not depend on precedent and is largely do to the whims of the supreme court.

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

#195

Post by retrac »

titanomachy wrote: post #132
itsanaccount wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed a big split in viewpoint between people who don't live in the US. Its like those who live in the states have a incentive to act like everything going on is ok, while those outside are increasingly having statements like yours. "How do you not see this power 13 years past Snowden" I've not given up trying to point out how dangerous the US govs powers are in the hands of an ever less capable and more fasci…

I spend significant time in the US, Canada, and Europe, and nobody I talk to seems to think that what's going on is OK. Both Canada and Europe are undertaking major projects to reduce their interdependence with America, and public sentiment on America has changed rapidly since the current administration assumed power. Europeans have always distrusted American tech, and Canadians have started trying to break away as w…

Opinion poll Dec 2025 Canada-wide: "How do you think the Canadian government should approach the following countries?"

https://thehub.ca/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/c9Enf-how-do-yo...

Some is just shock and overreaction I think. But it is an enormous shift.

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

#196

Post by user3939382 »

tootie wrote: post #162
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.

Is he taking a break from being a mouthpiece for Russian propaganda?

Right if you’re not a mouthpiece for the US State Depts horrific foreign policy you’re a Russian propagandist. My family fought in every war going back to the Revolution and I think our policy on Russia is complete shit. AFAIC we started the whole conflict.

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

#197

Post by shevy-java »

oceansky wrote: post #67
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Someone commented on a HN threads on just de-googling and he couldn't even pick up his kids without a gmail or apple account. Just not using it is really unrealistic for the average person at this moment

While that may be true, people need to start somewhere. Otherwise the future will just be even more sniffing done by private entities. Do we want a sneaky Skynet that looks more like 1984?

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

#198

Post by somenameforme »

ambicapter wrote: post #120
embedding-shape wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple isn't on the evil list Yeah, Tim Apple handing over a 24-karat gold plaque to the sitting president is completely normal behavior for CEOs to engage in, and not at all about just making as much money as possible. He had to do that, otherwise Apple as a company would disappear tomorrow. They're just trying to survive.

Unless you're going to demonstrate that handing over a golden plaque implies handing over privacy data to government agencies, I'm going to prefer the former over the latter.

Apple has already been outed as one of the participating companies in PRISM. [1] So that privacy boat has long since sailed. The public legal wrangling is likely just a mutually beneficial facade. PRISM is almost certainly illegal, but nobody can legally challenge it because the data provided from it is never directly used. Law enforcement engage in parallel construction [2] where they obtain the same evidence in a different way. So nobody can prove they were harmed by PRISM, and thus all challenges against it get tossed for lack of standing. It's very dumb.

But in any case the legal battles work as nice PR for Apple (see how much we care about privacy) and also as a great scenario for the government because any battles they win are domains where they can now legally use information directly to the courts and sidestep the parallel construction. That also takes the burden off of Apple PR in giving that information up because it can be framed as the courts and government forcing them, rather than them collaborating in mass data collection.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

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

#200

Post by joebates »

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…

I wonder if this is a technique used by certain leaders of authoritarian regimes to take out people in power they they deem threats. Everyone in the party routinely breaks laws, knowingly or otherwise. The person in charge can decide they don't like someone and start an investigation, knowing they'll eventually find something illegal. Then they can delegitimize and remove them under the guise of "corruption".
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