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

greenwald.substack.com

411–420 of 696 posts

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

#411
post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

bring my kids now or i will call the police and you will be charged with abduction.

You must have a complexion on the lighter side if you think calling the police is the best solution to something like this.

thats about as calm as it gets, if my kids were abducted because im not using an app.

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

#412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in the EU we can't use a lot of "society important" smartphone apps without Google Play or the Apple Store. I can get a physical key thing for my national digital ID, but I can't get anything for my bank, my healthcare (which is a public service in Denmark) or any of our national digital post services. You can apply to get exempt from the digital post services, and they do have a website sollution, but still. Do…

> Even in the EU we can't use a lot of "society important" smartphone apps without Google Play or the Apple Store. Install GrapheneOS on a Pixel. Most Android apps just work, and unlike the stock OS, it does not spy on you.

This doesn't help. Your contact number is shared by 50 parents' phone..are you sure of their security measures.

Even if I keep everything safe many govts are using Microsoft cloudfor day2day operations. Recently my employer lost tons of data. Every CV you send to a company or recruitment is kept often unencrypted. Every other country is fingerprinting/face ID upon arrival. Are you sure about their security?

Things that I have dumped into my email are far less consequential compared to those.

The game is lost. Very few people can have privacy.

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

#413

We have a branch of government called Congress, here are some things they used to do that made it a crime to read your mail or listen to your phone calls. 1. Postal Service Act of 1792 2. Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986 Anyway, Facebook can read your DMs, Google can read your email, Ring can take photos from your camera. We can very easily make those things a crime, but we don't seem to want to d…

3. Video Rental Protection Act (1988) >we don't seem to want to Congress protects only itself and its actual constituents — wealthy corporate persons. ---- Citizens United (2012) and the surveillances themselves make this monitoring self-capturing: the only way to prevent it is to convince most people to not install, but most people want the installed benefits. Even getting your neighbors to re-position their Ring ca…

How would term limits help? Without term limits, congressmen can be judged by their voting history. With them, we get always new batches of congressmen, while lobbyists stay the same and consolidate their power.

It's so easy to get rid of a congressman you don't like with term limits. But why do you think, on average, his replacement would be better? The replacement would only be more unknown.

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

#414
post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Not overtly but the subtext is there, but you also miss my point: there is no argument to give. There is no good faith argument with this supreme court. Unless you're the kind of person who is going to defend overturning the precedent of Roe v Wade.

This sort of nihilist/defeatist attitude serves no one.

People have good-faith disputes over whether their activities should be permitted or forbidden, and--like it or not--it's up to our judicial system to interpret the law, especially when it's unclear (which is rather often). The judges hear the arguments and, having heard both sides out fully, has to decide who has the strongest case. It's not an easy job, but in a vague, messy, and imperfect world, someone has to do it.

There are ways to reduce ambiguity, like passing new laws, clarifying existing ones, and even amending the Constitution. That requires we vote and press our representatives to do these things. This has the benefit of making it clear what we want, as opposed to leaving it to the unelected judiciary to try to figure it out and anger half the country who thought they decided wrong.

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

#415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Absolutely. It's often more calculated than that though. The only way (by design) to succeed in the regime is through corruption - you're giving the leader the rope to hang you with if you ever fall out of favor.

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

#416
> This language moves beyond platform-level age gates and toward infrastructure embedded directly into hardware or operating systems.

This is lurching toward what the US military calls the Common Access Card. This is a security token carried by most US military. It's used for everything from logins to building access to meals.[1]

Merely having a Common Access Card doesn't allow access to anything. The system reading it has to recognize the identity. So there are lots of databases of who's allowed to do what.

Is that where we're going?

[1] https://www.cac.mil/common-access-card/

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

#417
post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not overtly but the subtext is there, but you also miss my point: there is no argument to give. There is no good faith argument with this supreme court. Unless you're the kind of person who is going to defend overturning the precedent of Roe v Wade.

This sort of nihilist/defeatist attitude serves no one. People have good-faith disputes over whether their activities should be permitted or forbidden, and--like it or not--it's up to our judicial system to interpret the law, especially when it's unclear (which is rather often). The judges hear the arguments and, having heard both sides out fully, has to decide who has the strongest case. It's not an easy job, but in…

And the entire organizational structure we base ourselves around also collapses routinely throughout history. The supreme court has demonstrated that they are corrupt, the only solutions at this point are radical.

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

#418
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any details about those loopholes? It seems like a potentially big story.

iCloud loophole, push notification loophole, RCS loophole, business messaging loophole. These are just the semi public ones. No one cares.

Those aren’t loopholes and are widely known? I mean, they have an entire E2EE iCloud feature giving customers a choice between security and convenience:

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/108756

RCS has never offered that security guarantee at the protocol level. Google has deployed a proprietary encryption layer on top but refuses to allow other clients access. This was rather famously part of the blue/green message divide which was in the news for years.

Similarly push notifications have had privacy recommendations for ages - that’s why apps like Signal give users the option to choose their level of risk exposure.

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

#419
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He became well known for exposing surveillance but that instinct to portray himself as exposing government hypocrisy lead him to parrot Russian intelligence/Trump campaign attacks on Clinton and Biden long after he should have realized that the right posed a much greater threat to civil liberties and were feeding him information in service of their own campaigns, not transparency. It’s really undercut his earlier wor…

Examining Glenn's work through an ideological lens leads to this kind of rhetoric. It's why he's so good at what he does. He's crossed ideological boundaries constantly in pursuit of the truth of a matter, and in defense of the public.

Uh, that’s how he likes to style himself but that’s more of an ideological stance than you’re complaining about. A true focus on truth and defense of the public would have included questions like “are the Russians totally unbiased in feeding me this information?” or “am I serving the public by refusing to admit I made a mistake and repeated untrue claims which were highly beneficial to the political party who amplified my claims?”

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

#420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that in the US? I’m genuinely asking, it wasn’t rethorical - none of that exists in my corner of Europe anymore. Businesses, indie stuff and local stores use instagram, groups are WhatsApp, second hand stuff has its own app.. facebook seems to be just the >60 year old crowd.

Guess what, Instagram and Whatsapp belong to Facebook (Meta).

No shit. That’s why I literally made the distinction in the first post.

Meta as a company is obviously currently relevant, it’s Facebook as a social network still being used what’s surprising to me.

Here they’re almost in the same category as MySpace, something you mention in passing talking about the past.

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