Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

greenwald.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 696 posts

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

#211

Post by iamnothere »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #97
harimau777 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> 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. Except that that isn't the only way to protect yourself from selfish people and the assumption that it is is the source of a significant proportion of the dumb laws. There is a narrow class of things that have to be prohibited by law because the…

I will add this: the number of ways in which humans can harm one another is immeasurable, and every law comes with an associated cost. At the bare minimum the cost is enforcement plus the harm imposed by occasional false accusations and convictions. But bad laws can also dampen legitimate economic activity, making social problems worse.

As a society plunges into dysfunction due to economic stress, the number of people harming one another increases. If the society responds using more laws, and fails to correct the source of the dysfunction, it will eventually collapse under the weight of those laws as enforcement becomes uneven and politically driven. (This is the failure mode of legalist and bureaucratic states.) Alternatively, if the society responds with a more arbitrary case-by-case system of punishment, it will collapse into mob rule or dictatorship, so lack of structured law isn’t a solution either.

The only real solution is to fix the root problems facing the society. Antitrust helps with this because it can “unstick” parasitic incumbents who are preventing the market from dynamically responding to real economic conditions.

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

#212

Post by otterley »

voxl wrote: post #194
otterley wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not dismissing the opinion; I'm asking for it to be supported by law and facts. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47024599

I also disagree with your characterization of 2nd Amendment jurisprudence, but I'm not going into that rathole!

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

#213

Post by calibas »

otterley wrote: post #206
calibas wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be playing dumb here. You realize us "normal people" believe the Bill of Rights is to protect us from the government, and the 4th means the government doesn't get to spy on everybody indiscriminately? And yes, they are spying on everybody. They have access to things like cellphone metadata, which to a normal human being is a very clear violation of privacy. It's also my firm belief that our legal system h…

I'm not going to argue over principles, as that's not law, and I largely agree with them. However: > They have access to things like cellphone metadata, which to a normal human being is a very clear violation of privacy. In the U.S., when you study 4th Amendment law in Criminal Procedure, you learn there is a "third party doctrine" that says that if you voluntarily provide a third party with information--even informa…

Yep, that's the exact "loophole" I mentioned in my original comment!

The government can now partner with private businesses to effectively bypass the Fourth Amendment.

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

#214

Post by otterley »

calibas wrote: post #213
otterley wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not going to argue over principles, as that's not law, and I largely agree with them. However: > They have access to things like cellphone metadata, which to a normal human being is a very clear violation of privacy. In the U.S., when you study 4th Amendment law in Criminal Procedure, you learn there is a "third party doctrine" that says that if you voluntarily provide a third party with information--even informa…

Yep, that's the exact "loophole" I mentioned in my original comment! The government can now partner with private businesses to effectively bypass the Fourth Amendment.

Yes, that is true. But that is not a violation, which was in the first clause of your original claim. It's an end-run.

If it were a violation, Courts could enjoin it. But since it's not a violation, there's nothing to enjoin.

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

#215

Post by anonymous908213 »

otterley wrote: post #206
calibas wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be playing dumb here. You realize us "normal people" believe the Bill of Rights is to protect us from the government, and the 4th means the government doesn't get to spy on everybody indiscriminately? And yes, they are spying on everybody. They have access to things like cellphone metadata, which to a normal human being is a very clear violation of privacy. It's also my firm belief that our legal system h…

I'm not going to argue over principles, as that's not law, and I largely agree with them. However: > They have access to things like cellphone metadata, which to a normal human being is a very clear violation of privacy. In the U.S., when you study 4th Amendment law in Criminal Procedure, you learn there is a "third party doctrine" that says that if you voluntarily provide a third party with information--even informa…

> I'm not going to argue over principles, as that's not law,

> The Supreme Court declined to extend the third-party doctrine to tracking one's location via cell-phone metadata in Carpenter v. U.S., 585 U.S. 296 (2018), so it's not absolute.

In other words, principles are law -- in the US, whatever the principles of 9 judges at a given time, because they are the final arbiter of what anything written down by Congress means. "Third-party doctrine" is not law as written by Congress, it is something the Supreme Court made up out of thin air according to their principles. And these principles are not binding; a later panel of judges is free to throw out the rulings of older judges if they decide their principles differ, as famously happened to Roe v. Wade among other cases.

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

#216

Post by neoCrimeLabs »

Insanity wrote: post #184
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…

Meta is the easiest to cut of those. I don’t use anything from them as I don’t engage on social media, nor use their VR and AR stuff etc. Google and Amazon are harder to complete cut imo. I have replaced Google apart from using YouTube, and I do rely on Amazon for delivery and running personal projects on AWS.

Agreed.

That said for some I can foresee Meta being hard or harder to disconnect from because of their percieved level of personal social needs.

I left facebook and many of my friendships faded away.

Awkward bumping into people conversations would happen such as: "We missed you at my birthday party!", "I didn't know about it, else I would have been there!" "We posted it to facebook..." "I deleted my facebook account 2 years ago."

My personal philosophy was maybe they were not real friends to begin with. After all in the now 5 years since deletion, not one has reached out to ask if I'm even still alive. I've reached out to a couple people, with little to no reply. None the less, it was a hard transition.

For others', that might be an impossible task.

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

#217

Post by jbstack »

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…

It doesn't have to be a binary choice between "don't use it ever" and "continue using it as much as you are now". If people stopped using these services 50% of the time, it would have a huge impact.

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

#218

Post by dhbradshaw »

I really like this passage:

>It is always the case that there are benefits available from relinquishing core civil liberties: allowing infringements on free speech may reduce false claims and hateful ideas; allowing searches and seizures without warrants will likely help the police catch more criminals, and do so more quickly; giving up privacy may, in fact, enhance security.

> But the core premise of the West generally, and the U.S. in particular, is that those trade-offs are never worthwhile. Americans still all learn and are taught to admire the iconic (if not apocryphal) 1775 words of Patrick Henry, which came to define the core ethos of the Revolutionary War and American Founding: “Give me liberty or give me death.” It is hard to express in more definitive terms on which side of that liberty-versus-security trade-off the U.S. was intended to fall.

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

#219

Post by WillPostForFood »

ambicapter wrote: post #121
kspacewalk2 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His focus has also involved generous amounts of simping for Russian fascists, excusing their colonialist wars, etc. Not an anti-imperialist, just anti-US.

link?

https://voxukraine.org/en/messing-with-the-truth-disinformat...

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

#220

Post by trinsic2 »

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

Yea I noticed many of these sevices won't allow an email address not hosted with a provider that wasn't Google,Microsoft, or apple where they can collect other details. I think i tried to sign up for VanceAI, it would only accept gmail or discord connected account as a sign in.
Post reply on HN