Over 30y I've learned that surveillance overreach by Govs never stops or even slows down. Only reporting by the press does.
I'm hoping that a historically overt, abusive administration will kick news orgs out of their default complacency - and that they'll take surveillance seriously again. For a time.
That said, I am sympathetic that mental bandwidth is a real issue ATM.
nicholasjarnold · 4h ago
"Flood the zone" => The specific strategy put forth and now enacted by the current US admin in order to overwhelm the media's ability to cover issues and therefore by extension the ability for the public at large to keep themselves informed. It's a fundamental attack on one of the pillars of democracy. Mental bandwidth saturation is a feature here, not a bug.
Additionally, the gradual removal of personal privacy, and the normalization of it, is another attack on a democratic pillar.
It really does seem like structural cracks are widening rapidly. I too hope that our current realities cause a sort of 'wake up' to occur in the minds of those whom are too busy, deep in "my team" politics or otherwise not concerned about what's going on right now.
davidw · 3h ago
The media does plenty of shooting itself in their own feet though. There was tons of coverage of Jake Tapper's book taking time away from everything that is happening right now.
willcipriano · 2h ago
The book about how the media covered up the president's decline?
abridges6532 · 12m ago
Tapper was like #1 in the coverup lmao
zzrrt · 48m ago
I’ve been wondering lately why they told us about “flood the zone” and published Project 2025. Is it because they don’t have regular communication with every person who is willing and able to employ these strategies, so they just communicate them in the open?
No comments yet
gosub100 · 2h ago
It's never limited to a single administration.
toss1 · 2h ago
That is trivially true, but stop both-sides-ing it with false equivalency.
At this point, the major party in power is doing all they can to undermine democracy and strip-mine the country for their own benefit and that of their few multi-billionaire sponsors.
The other party is attempting to herd a broad coalition of people to maintain democracy.
Yes, it is imperfect, and the country has fallen often far short of perfection through it's entire history.
That is no reason to set the perfect as the enemy of the good. Simply declaring "every form of government is (or all parties are) awful" is a cop-out, and the logical conclusion of that is a complete power vacuum which leads only to the population being ruled by rival gangs & fiefdoms.
ivewonyoung · 1h ago
Is my reading of your comment accurate? If not please let us know.
"The party not in power also has been doing similar things(in regards to the article) if not worse over the past couple of decades but lets completely ignore that, not criticize them at all, don't even bring it up and blame only the current admin because...<party currently in power is baddd>"
beej71 · 1h ago
I'm not the parent, but that seems like a pretty bad misread.
But to answer, you worry more about the guy waving a knife in your face than other people who have knives and may have waved them in your face in the past.
I'm curious what the worse one is. The Clipper Chip? Seems like a light pleasantry compared to what's happening now.
gosub100 · 1h ago
I'll happily stop both-sides-ing it when people stop emphasizing "the current administration" when it's not relevant to the topic. Your guy lost, learn from your mistakes and carry on. Or criticize both presidents equally. If you criticized Biden in his tenure it was still Trump's fault. Believe me, I tried. It's Logical nonsense.
exceptione · 1h ago
> I'll happily stop both-sides-ing it when
No, you unconditionally need to stop both-siding. When you want to bring a broader issue in the spotlight, do bring the broader issue in the spot light. But when you feel you are inclined to throw in a bothsidism, which is a negative sum contribution to discourse, then the chance that you actually have an insight on the broader issue is quite small.
> Your guy lost, learn from your mistakes and carry on
As a bystander I can say on behalf of the ones that have been "othered" by means of political marketing, there is no guy. The pressing issue at play is the rule of law, separation of powers, due process, fair elections, and basic respect for human rights. If anyone feels they should continue to shout while waiving the merchandise of their favorite team, if anyone thinks this is the right moment to continue behaving like a spoiled hooligan, then they lose the aforementioned basic prerequisites of democracy, and with that, the democratic constitutional state.
gosub100 · 1h ago
You have no right to incorporate your hatred for our leader into every nook and cranny of conversation. It only shows your bitterness and lack of understanding of the election process. Trump is no worse than any Democrat or any other party leader.
beej71 · 1h ago
Disregarding the rest of the content, the poster has every right to do that!
exceptione · 1h ago
Why would I hate Trump? He is a minor player. His role is to play the chaos actor, to divert attention. Just useful. For the people with real, material influence he is delivering.
The spell is broken if the press can stop wasting our mental bandwidth on the day to day distractions, and start to open themself to the big picture. And yes, doing a postmortem of how they got there is going to be an exercise in self-confrontation across the whole political spectrum.
kurikuri · 54m ago
> Your guy lost, learn from your mistakes and carry on. Or criticize both presidents equally.
So, your solution here is for people who think the current administration is particularly bad to either not complain or accept any whataboutisms you have?
Your ‘both administrations’ quip is a vacuous justification for the current administration’s actions. If this is the basis for your justification, then, regardless of the truth of your claim, you’d be inconsistent to then praise this specific administration for anything positive. Thus, outside of nihilist generalizations about the overall structure of the US, you can’t meaningfully contribute to this conversation. Without giving a positive justification for the administrations behavior, your contributions are ‘logical nonsense.’
I’d rather simply complain about the doublespeakers in office at the moment and say it is wrong to do so, and there is no ‘logical nonsense’ in that.
xeonmc · 3h ago
Humanity needs a lesson that would be remembered in their bones.
diggan · 2h ago
One would think the Snowden Leaks was that moment, that was the moment I'll never forget personally. Basically most of what we thought were crazy conspiracy theories was confirmed by multiple independent journalist organizations to be true.
glial · 3h ago
For a generation
nancyminusone · 3h ago
That's strontium-90, but can we really say we've learned the associated lesson?
gxs · 3h ago
If WWI with a followup WWII reminder hasn't done it, not sure what will
ramesh31 · 2h ago
>If WWI with a followup WWII reminder hasn't done it, not sure what will
It did it; for two generations. The GI's and the Silents were the most civic minded generations we ever had. But those were our grandparents (or great grandparents) now, and living memory has finally faded. Here's hoping it doesn't take another Passchendaele or Hiroshima to reignite it.
potato3732842 · 2h ago
>It did it; for two generations. The GI's and the Silents were the most civic minded generations we ever had
And the mass buy-in resulted in the building of systems, creating of institutions and setting of precedents that were and are being used less than civic purposes. So unfortunately I'm not sure that's sustainable either.
TimTheTinker · 1h ago
The fact that institutions can be corrupt (or corrupted) doesn't invalidate the concept of an institution. Humans must coordinate their efforts to have widespread impact, and institutions are the de-facto way to coordinate effort: from marriage, the nuclear family, and extended families to local clubs, churches, companies, non-profits, and governments at various levels.
Ever since the counter-culture movement of the 1960s, it's been cool to "stick it to the man", which unfortunately translates to anti-institutionalism too often. Tearing things down never yields a positive result when no good institutions exist or are created to fill the vacuum.
potato3732842 · 24m ago
Institutions and organizations ought not to be architected in a manner that makes them useful to the corrupt. This is the defining failure of 20th century western governments. They were so "all in" and had so much public support they shape shifted themselves into these things that are magnets for the corrupt and self serving (and arguably tempt their leaders to become those things).
maigret · 31m ago
Institutions are not corrupt, people are. Corrupt people like to blame the problems onto institutions, that serves them well.
dragonwriter · 2h ago
> It did it; for two generations.
On the specific issue of internal surveillance and its abuses, that is laughable, given the way that accelerated after WWII, with no substantial attempt at checking it until some fairly limited reforms were adopted in the 1970s after the Nixon-era abuses, with those restrictions being fairly flagrantly ignored (and formally weakened) after 9/11.
ndegruchy · 4h ago
So we can't dragnet surveil our own people? Hmm, how about we just buy it from the folks who do it for work? Then _we're_ not doing it. _We're_ just buying a bundle of data from a broker.
Couple this with the idea that we soft-spy on our Allies and then trade that data for their spying on our people and yeah, wow.
bilbo0s · 4h ago
In all honesty it wouldn't even matter.
If the data brokers sell data, then even if they didn't sell it to the government, they would sell it to "PR/Lobbying Firms" who lobby the government. They would sell it to "security contracting firms" who the government contracts with to, um, escort "aid" shipments to widows and orphans in places like Yemen or Colombia, or Nebraska. And so on and so forth.
The fundamental mistake was never about the government. The fundamental mistake was in allowing the data brokers to exist, collect, and sell the data in the first place.
iugtmkbdfil834 · 4h ago
And once there is a cottage industry in place and money is rolling, any attempt to adjust by privacy conscious portion of the population will be neutered or overruled by aggressive lobbying. And that is assuming the amoral entities having access to all that data won't attempt to use it to put a finger on a scale.
potato3732842 · 4h ago
And the lobbying dollars will go twice as far because the existence of the industry benefits the government. Whereas a normal industry has to fight an uphill lobbying battle where the courts and enforcers and legislators extract the maximal pound of flesh at every step the government will bend over backward to make it go easy for the privacy invasion industry.
The only ways these status quos change is when people hate the industry so much that being in bed with it threatens the reelection of the politicians and the legitimacy of the institutions can the tide shift.
bilbo0s · 4h ago
So true.
It's so clear to me now that it was foolish to go after the government for what was, at root, a problem emanating from private industry practices. That was unimaginably dumb. It's clear the issue was obviously the private industry practices the whole time. Those practices are what we should have been trying to stamp out from the start.
jmkni · 3h ago
There is an irony here that the first thing you see when you open this article is a prompt for your email address
Like a number of NGOs, this is another example of US Federal Govt breaking the law by proxy, i.e. paying private orgs to break the law for them.
arminiusreturns · 2h ago
Third party doctrine is what they abuse to do this.
stevetron · 4h ago
Interesting.
This was supposedly in the _charter_ of the department of homeland security. It was supposed to be the controller of all intelligence (all agencies to dump their databases together), from all the spy agencies to prevent the intentional use-case of employing jumbo jet planes as weapons of mass destruction. And forcing all cell phones of every design every where to have GPS. Seems a little bit slow.
m3047 · 2h ago
> And forcing all cell phones of every design every where to have GPS.
Cell phones need some kind of accurate-enough (GPS is arguably overkill) self-locating ability, because the encryption properties of the modulation make passive transmitter location and ranging determination difficult: they need to know when to switch between cell towers (ENodeB).
Wiener functions are cool, and the RADAR applications were top secret during WW II.
potato3732842 · 4h ago
When have the foreign and domestic intel agencies ever respected their own or anyone else's charter?
nkh · 1h ago
If I wanted to buy the data on myself to see what these brokers have. Is that possible? If so, Where should I go next?
cornhole · 3h ago
I would be more accepting about my personal data being bought if I got paid for it
lenerdenator · 4h ago
Tyranny can always come to you. All you can do is try to be prepared.
sixothree · 4h ago
Even if it is not this particular dataset, are there markets where I can get my own personal information?
jandrewrogers · 2h ago
This is not a retail industry. Companies are created for the specific customers they intend to serve. I can't imagine there being enough revenue to justify creating a company for retail customers, you'd have to deal with a company like Lexis-Nexis. Many of these companies don't know the identity of the people to which the data pertains.
advisedwang · 2h ago
In general no. Databrokers are not interesting in doing retail, and especially not interested in transparency.
kevin_thibedeau · 1h ago
California residents can force the data broker mafia to delete their records.
micromacrofoot · 4h ago
data brokers, absolute scum of the earth imo though
amelius · 3h ago
Why they aren't banned is beyond me. Well, perhaps the article explains it.
Meanwhile, so called "privacy watchdogs" are toothless.
TimeToBuild1 · 3h ago
Nice one
webdoodle · 3h ago
Citizen's United broke the news media, by turning it into a pay per influence business, instead of journalism. Where are the Ida Tarbell's of our time? Most of them have been throttled, censored or completely suspended from most of the social media that they built up over the years, by the same rich parasitic influences that broke Citizen's United.
Want to do something about it? Come to the Billionaire's SummerCamp in Sun Valley, Idaho on July 6th, and complain to the rich parasites themselves.
Protest! Civil Disobedience! Justice!
Or just got back to watching YouTube and delude yourself into thinking it will fix itself.
ashoeafoot · 4h ago
The mighty CIA, unable to protect the military industrial complex. Until further notice, the spy agencies do nothing but rainmaking the American public.
chrisweekly · 4h ago
I think "rainmaking" isn't the right word here.
ashoeafoot · 3h ago
rainmade is the act itself, what is the past to present version of this ?
I'm hoping that a historically overt, abusive administration will kick news orgs out of their default complacency - and that they'll take surveillance seriously again. For a time.
That said, I am sympathetic that mental bandwidth is a real issue ATM.
Additionally, the gradual removal of personal privacy, and the normalization of it, is another attack on a democratic pillar.
It really does seem like structural cracks are widening rapidly. I too hope that our current realities cause a sort of 'wake up' to occur in the minds of those whom are too busy, deep in "my team" politics or otherwise not concerned about what's going on right now.
No comments yet
At this point, the major party in power is doing all they can to undermine democracy and strip-mine the country for their own benefit and that of their few multi-billionaire sponsors.
The other party is attempting to herd a broad coalition of people to maintain democracy.
Yes, it is imperfect, and the country has fallen often far short of perfection through it's entire history.
That is no reason to set the perfect as the enemy of the good. Simply declaring "every form of government is (or all parties are) awful" is a cop-out, and the logical conclusion of that is a complete power vacuum which leads only to the population being ruled by rival gangs & fiefdoms.
"The party not in power also has been doing similar things(in regards to the article) if not worse over the past couple of decades but lets completely ignore that, not criticize them at all, don't even bring it up and blame only the current admin because...<party currently in power is baddd>"
But to answer, you worry more about the guy waving a knife in your face than other people who have knives and may have waved them in your face in the past.
I'm curious what the worse one is. The Clipper Chip? Seems like a light pleasantry compared to what's happening now.
No, you unconditionally need to stop both-siding. When you want to bring a broader issue in the spotlight, do bring the broader issue in the spot light. But when you feel you are inclined to throw in a bothsidism, which is a negative sum contribution to discourse, then the chance that you actually have an insight on the broader issue is quite small.
> Your guy lost, learn from your mistakes and carry on
As a bystander I can say on behalf of the ones that have been "othered" by means of political marketing, there is no guy. The pressing issue at play is the rule of law, separation of powers, due process, fair elections, and basic respect for human rights. If anyone feels they should continue to shout while waiving the merchandise of their favorite team, if anyone thinks this is the right moment to continue behaving like a spoiled hooligan, then they lose the aforementioned basic prerequisites of democracy, and with that, the democratic constitutional state.
The spell is broken if the press can stop wasting our mental bandwidth on the day to day distractions, and start to open themself to the big picture. And yes, doing a postmortem of how they got there is going to be an exercise in self-confrontation across the whole political spectrum.
So, your solution here is for people who think the current administration is particularly bad to either not complain or accept any whataboutisms you have?
Your ‘both administrations’ quip is a vacuous justification for the current administration’s actions. If this is the basis for your justification, then, regardless of the truth of your claim, you’d be inconsistent to then praise this specific administration for anything positive. Thus, outside of nihilist generalizations about the overall structure of the US, you can’t meaningfully contribute to this conversation. Without giving a positive justification for the administrations behavior, your contributions are ‘logical nonsense.’
I’d rather simply complain about the doublespeakers in office at the moment and say it is wrong to do so, and there is no ‘logical nonsense’ in that.
It did it; for two generations. The GI's and the Silents were the most civic minded generations we ever had. But those were our grandparents (or great grandparents) now, and living memory has finally faded. Here's hoping it doesn't take another Passchendaele or Hiroshima to reignite it.
And the mass buy-in resulted in the building of systems, creating of institutions and setting of precedents that were and are being used less than civic purposes. So unfortunately I'm not sure that's sustainable either.
Ever since the counter-culture movement of the 1960s, it's been cool to "stick it to the man", which unfortunately translates to anti-institutionalism too often. Tearing things down never yields a positive result when no good institutions exist or are created to fill the vacuum.
On the specific issue of internal surveillance and its abuses, that is laughable, given the way that accelerated after WWII, with no substantial attempt at checking it until some fairly limited reforms were adopted in the 1970s after the Nixon-era abuses, with those restrictions being fairly flagrantly ignored (and formally weakened) after 9/11.
Couple this with the idea that we soft-spy on our Allies and then trade that data for their spying on our people and yeah, wow.
If the data brokers sell data, then even if they didn't sell it to the government, they would sell it to "PR/Lobbying Firms" who lobby the government. They would sell it to "security contracting firms" who the government contracts with to, um, escort "aid" shipments to widows and orphans in places like Yemen or Colombia, or Nebraska. And so on and so forth.
The fundamental mistake was never about the government. The fundamental mistake was in allowing the data brokers to exist, collect, and sell the data in the first place.
The only ways these status quos change is when people hate the industry so much that being in bed with it threatens the reelection of the politicians and the legitimacy of the institutions can the tide shift.
It's so clear to me now that it was foolish to go after the government for what was, at root, a problem emanating from private industry practices. That was unimaginably dumb. It's clear the issue was obviously the private industry practices the whole time. Those practices are what we should have been trying to stamp out from the start.
No comments yet
This was supposedly in the _charter_ of the department of homeland security. It was supposed to be the controller of all intelligence (all agencies to dump their databases together), from all the spy agencies to prevent the intentional use-case of employing jumbo jet planes as weapons of mass destruction. And forcing all cell phones of every design every where to have GPS. Seems a little bit slow.
Cell phones need some kind of accurate-enough (GPS is arguably overkill) self-locating ability, because the encryption properties of the modulation make passive transmitter location and ranging determination difficult: they need to know when to switch between cell towers (ENodeB).
Wiener functions are cool, and the RADAR applications were top secret during WW II.
Meanwhile, so called "privacy watchdogs" are toothless.
Want to do something about it? Come to the Billionaire's SummerCamp in Sun Valley, Idaho on July 6th, and complain to the rich parasites themselves.
Protest! Civil Disobedience! Justice!
Or just got back to watching YouTube and delude yourself into thinking it will fix itself.