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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

#421

Post by acdha »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #261
mmaunder wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To anyone on Twitter in like 2016-2019, this is a rather funny sentiment to have about him. I can remember my respect for him dissolve day by day. I didn't even remember until now if he was pro- or anti- Trump, probably neither still. But I simply remember that he slowly turned into the worst caricature of a smug Twitter media guy. Just turned into "hot take" haver and seemed to lose his own plot. If you know you kno…

That’s my impression, too. Not hardcore MAGA so much as falling into the addiction of thinking he was smarter than “the establishment” about everything and taking contrarian stances to show they couldn’t boss him around. Twitter’s algorithm was like a drug for those guys because they’d give a radioactive hot take and get a bazillion notification pings.

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

#422

Post by majormajor »

dhbradshaw wrote: post #218

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 genera…

We concurrently see failures on both the "attempts to preserve liberty" and "attempts to preserve security" front, so let's stop arguing about abstract principles.

Quotes are pointless, discussion should be limited to what's happening on the ground. For any given thing that happens, do we think that it, specifically, is helpful or harmful.

It's trivial to reverse that quote: we can, and have, pushed to keep the US population armed with increasingly-advanced personal weapons (in the name of liberty) without actually gaining any protection against authoritarian styles of government use of force or surveillance as a result. While just making civilian-on-civilian violence easier and more lethal.

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

#423

Post by user3939382 »

wredcoll wrote: post #382
rsync wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would direct you to George Kennan[1] and his 1997 NYT article where he said, among other things: "... expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere o…

Did I miss the news of ukraine joining nato or something? More to the point, this is some hardcore "she was asking for it" victim blaming. You know who started the war? THE COUNTRY THAT LAUNCHED THE INVASION.

You missed the news where our own state dept officials are on leaked calls hand selecting the anti Russian government of Ukraine weeks before their coup or the news where Merkel admitted we negotiated treaties with Russia over Ukraine in bad faith.

The war started with our expansion of NATO, followed by couping Ukraines govt, multiple fake peace treaties, and finally Ukraine murdering thousands of culturally Russian civilians in Eastern Ukraine. I count a war as started when someone starts murdering people w the military not when someone walks over a border. Although your narrative doesn’t work then right?

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

#424

Post by drnick1 »

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…

Who has the keys of the encryption algorithm?

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

#425

Post by Applejinx »

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?

Those guys find it useful when there's some kind of legitimate gripe to use. He needn't take a break, it's very much Western companies doing this. He doesn't even need to put in an ad for whatever doubtless sanctioned Russian services would like to replace these Western tech giants.

Sometimes actual problems can be readily exploited for sinister purposes. Doesn't mean the original problems aren't also sinister, just be damn careful where you intend to flee to :)

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

#426

Post by OutOfHere »

dopidopHN2 wrote: post #405
OutOfHere wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tuta is just horrible, often rejecting account creation altogether. AtomicMail.io is a nice free alternative to Proton.

Thanks for your perspective. I've been using tuta since a year now. Nothing to report

Tuta is pathetic because it asked for my real name, ID verification, and real phone number, altogether defeating the point of anonymity. When I refused to provide identification, it disabled and deleted the new registration. This makes it as bad as Discord.

Perhaps you have a grandfathered account, but times have changed for the worse with Tuta alone.

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

#427

Post by brnt »

drnick1 wrote: post #391
Quothling wrote: post #178

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.

A Pixel is depending on Google.

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

#428

Post by Applejinx »

embedding-shape wrote: post #71
jeffbee wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?

They couldn't possibly make all that money from just Nazis: I'm given to understand they're doing really well these days. I had the impression that Substack became heavily co-opted by anti-Nazis and have done nothing to defend the feelings of the Nazis they're also happy to host. Not sure what the balance is currently, but again: they couldn't possibly be making all that money from just Nazis, and I think that's instructive.

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

#429

Post by jbstack »

random2021 wrote: post #276
jbstack wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In concept what you say is correct but reality is complex. There are very few providers that implement friction free login/password and importantly security. A large number of email providers didn't implement 2FA until very recently. Even those that have terrible apps, ad infested, no app password or oAuth etc. so many governments use MS hosted services. It is akin to Visa/MasterCard duopoly. It is hard to escape but…

I don't see any contradiction here with what I said. If you feel that using Google for email is unavoidable, that can be the part that you keep using. You can still easily ditch a lot of other things. E.g. Pixel phone, Google Docs, Google Drive, AWS. Each of those has plenty of, arguably better, alternatives.

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

#430

Post by ndr42 »

ProllyInfamous wrote: post #273
hermannj314 wrote: post #252

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…

> Even getting your neighbors to re-position their Ring cameras (which they have every right to install) can become very difficult.

In Germany it's prohibited by law to point your private surveillance camera to public spaces like the boardwalk, no recording of these areas is allowed. I think thats the way it should be. Unfortunately in some areas (e.g. train stations) it is allowed.

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