Every search you make, email you send, text message, voice chat, location, and most likely the conversations you have in your own home are monitored and stored in a database for whoever knows how long (probably forever). When I hear land of the free, I immediately think bullshit. We are slowly losing our freedoms, what can we do to prevent this? I mean, when Edward Snowden dropped the leaks, people protested, but barely anything changed. What can we do? This post not only applies to Americans, your own government in another country may possibly does the same thing. Feel free to comment!
I just wish they could fucking do it for my goddamned healthcare data. Switching states, practices, getting your full history of vaccines from a dusty file cabinet 24 years ago at a pediatric clinic…not a goddamned SQL table in sight. Wait days, fax everything, someone in the chain never makes the transfer, and you have to get it to your doctor and possibly multiple medical insurance agencies multiple times.
Oh, and literally everything running on different DBs at hospitals, when they use them. Even if it’s the same company running DBs for different hospital networks.
Same thing for moving states/addresses/voting/mail/licenses. No DBs. The only consolation is that apparently Canada is similarly fucked up and also doesn’t have a country-wide health DB, haha. So painful.
The only real option worthwhile is to get nerdy and play the same game. Change up how and what you connect online as well as running security and privacy based open source firmware + software on your devices. Aside from that, protesting would be another option with some teeth too!
Agreed! It takes a lot of resources, but saying “Fuck You!” my way feels so good…
having my main “phone” unmoved in the same place for the last 3 years and with the lowest interactions possible on it… No SIM, No eSIM, nothing… (plus many other hard tricks)
Measure that you bloddy data horders!
One drop in a full bucket may mean a lot of it is the last drop!
My feeling about that is that I should assume anyone who could monitor my traffic should be assumed to do so and I therefore should apply reasonable defenses regardless. Even if the government doesn’t do it, hackers around the world will. That means the moment it leaves my router, it’s assumed compromised.
Same for smart Internet connected devices. The government might be listening, but I certainly don’t trust the manufacturer to not be listening for the purpose of advertising either.
How many stories broke out recently of ISP router having been compromised by foreign hackers for years? Yeah. The Internet is the wild west.
In point of fact, the alphabet agencies have for years now adopted a “capture now/read later” approach to encrypted traffic they consider to be suspect. “Later” is code for “after we’ve got cost-effective and scalable quantum compute that can break traditional encryption”. So if you haven’t been keeping up with bleeding-edge quantum-resistant cryptography when generating and using your own keys, you’re probably going to have your traffic read by an NSA analyst (or more likely, some sort of NN-based “terrorist detector”) at some point.
<laughs in massive data breaches> Better buckle up Buttercup, because “being in a database” is a reality. Thanks to data breaches such as Equifax, pretty much every US citizen and all their important details are available in numerous databases.
We willingly purchase devices that listen and watch our every move… to be added to private, corporate databases that get sold around like cheap prostitutes. At least with government databases, voting gives at least a teeny, tiny modicum of control.
And even better, while I cant name specific breaches in relation to global populations, it’s a safe bet most everyone else is compromised as well.
On the bright side, at least it makes random identity theft occurring to any one particular individual akin to winning the PowerBall.
If US finally gets its second civil war, its really easy to pick who goes in to the mass graves. You can just use an algorithm.
Same goes for the rest of the world. If ever occupied by Russia, you can be sure you’ll be “calling Zelenskyi” on a daily basis for every anti-Russian post you ever made.
When a regime can literally track what their entire population is doing at any given moment but won’t make easily fileable taxes 😮💨
I feel about the same as every European citizen should, since their governments are obviously doing the same but without the public fanfare.
Our government has completely lost its way. The Founders would be both appalled and ashamed.
Can’t agree more. As a former member of the military, the state of affairs pretty sad to see.
Also, happy cake day :)
Thanks! My wife is a Soldier. We sometimes have interesting conversations about stuff like this.
They had slaves.
We do too.
We just call it outsourced labor and are happy about cheap clothes.
They also raped and tortured their slaves.
Please don’t pretend like people buying the only clothes they can afford is in any way comparable literally owning chattel slaves.
Of course it is. Today’s slaves get raped and tortured as well. Just not by us directly.
Essentially we outsourced the cruelty so we can live in blissful ignorance.
“Just not by us directly” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. What the fuck is this “us” shit? I didn’t choose to enslave anyone and I have no power to free them. Equivocating being forced to participate in capitalism with directly owning a my own fucking plantation is just mystifying history - just edgy nihilism.
The Founders were among history’s monsters and you need to stop trying to protect their legacy by painting us with their brush. Chattel slavery was a uniquely horrible institution and its end mattered.
The Founders were among history’s monsters and you need to stop trying to protect their legacy by painting us with their brush. Chattel slavery was a uniquely horrible institution and its end mattered.
Dude, I’m German. I know a thing or two about facing the past. So don’t act like I’m defending anyone.
I didn’t choose to enslave anyone and I have no power to free them.
As far as I know, only about a third of people in the US back then ever owned slaves. The other two thirds didn’t choose that either. Yet most of them got complacent for a pretty long time.
Also, you do have a choice. You can buy clothes that are maybe not morally pure, but at least better. You could buy a Fairphone. You could become politically active or at least vote for the better candidates/parties. Sure, that won’t turn the world into utopia over night, but at least you can make it a bit better.
We all have to face the fact that our actions and inactions cause suffering, and some of that is indeed not in our power to change. But your stance of essentially giving up and pointing at the other crime as ever worse is hypocritical.
As Adorno said: there’s no right living in the wrong. And we are so wrong currently the slave population in this world is higher than ever in the US: https://www.un.org/en/delegate/50-million-people-modern-slavery-un-report
As far as I know, only about a third of people in the US back then ever owned slaves.
Okay? We’re talking about the Founders, and they owned slaves. They were directly responsible for it, they had their own plantations. Comparing that to bystanders and voting and buying local and being complacent is absurd.
Are you perhaps under the impression that all Americans in 1776 were Founders? Because generally when USians talk about our Founders we’re talking about the people at the Constitutional Convention and terroist organizations like the Sons of Liberty.
Exactly: “Essentially we outsourced the cruelty so we can live in blissful ignorance.”
If you’re not an American, you’re in their servers too.
Entire world, how do you feel about being stored in a database by US government agencies like the NSA?
Feels bad, man.
It’s fine, since we’re also stored in countless private databases for advertisement purposes, and statistically speaking at least one of those is so insecure, that it’s practically public knowledge anyway.
I do not like it, uncle-sam-I-am.
It’s not like my opinion will make any actual difference, so I’ve made my piece with it.
*peace
Thanks. I got autocowrecked.
Conversations in my home? Wut?
The rest, yeah, without active precautions. How do you figure “they” are recording inside my home though?
And what do you do about it? Decide which conveniences you will give up for the sake of more privacy. https://lemmy.ml/c/privacy, skim and start working out your own personal balance of convenience vs privacy.
Well, theoretically they can, and it’s already been proven that they can tap into anyone’s phone, so what’s stopping the NSA from spying this much? The use of proprietary software in literally everything, and companies such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc. secretly working with them, not only that, but the amount of exploits the NSA has on hand is insane.
theoretically they can
Is this a purely theoretical capability or is there actually evidence they have this capability?
it’s already been proven that they can tap into anyone’s phone
Listening into a conversation that you’re intentionally relaying across public infrastructure and gaining access to the phone itself are two very different things.
The use of proprietary software in literally everything
- Speak for yourself. And let’s be real, if you’re on Lemmy you’re 10 times more likely to be running Linux.
- Proprietary != closed source
- Do you really think that just because something is closed source means that it can’t be analyzed?
the amount of exploits the NSA has on hand
How many zero-day exploits does the NSA have? How many can be deployed remotely and without a nontrivial action by a user?
what’s stopping the NSA from spying this much?
Scale, capacity, cost, number of employees
—-
I’m not saying we shouldn’t oppose government surveillance. We absolutely should. But like another commenter pointed out, I’m much more concerned with the amount of data that corporations collect and have.
Europeans go 10 minutes without talking about how terrible the US is challenge (impossible)
It is pretty bad though.
We do it far more about our own countries too but vous ne vous en rendez pas compte, car vous ne parlez que l’anglais
I’m actually trilingual, but whatever.
English [Simplified] doesn’t count as a second language 😂
…is this the part where I remind you that what we now think of as a British accent and British spellings were added by the British after the American colonies declared independence, and we kept the old way while British scholars were talking about how the word “color” didn’t look French enough without a U, or are you just here to troll
Going to need a sauce on that. Keep the high fructose corn syrup to a minimum, there’s a good chap
TBF, classical Latin probably doesn’t either. Busted!
I can understand a couple of loons from Aberdeen but apparently that doesn’t count either ffs
Not a fan of government or corporate surveillance.
My concern is mostly about whoever holds the keys in the long run. They collect it all today, hold it forever, who knows what regime comes to power in the next decades and uses that information for targeting.
we are so close …
and a lot of so call communists on lemmy ease their way to that direction without ever lived in a real communist regime… but they make a lot of noise and love downvoting here… just watch them…
I think we’re more likely to have a Christofascist regime than a communist one anytime soon, but such a data hoard is going to be dangerously abused in any authoritarian environment.
I feel I overestimate such people who only take heed to alphanumericals and not what one might call backdoor communication. Case in point.
what does this mean mate? have you read to much 50 shades of gray or please tell me what should I get out of your comment… Thanks!
I’ll respond by saying what you say kind of proves my point. The sky is the limit when it comes to communication, it never was any different, but the stereotype with the NSA is that they sit down and think “alright, let’s see what this person has said today” while taking it at face value. The picture is a sort of example/jab at that stereotype. If I were to communicate in a way the NSA would call “covertly”, it would be beyond them, I would be “hiding in plain sight”.
how is the image related?
It’s an example/jab/whatever you want to call it at the fact only certain communications matter to those who “are said to eavesdrop… but at face value” which is relevant to the people described. Imagine a message existing in any picture that uses shades and it’s beyond them and the original inquiry still comes up.
How do you feel about being stored in the NSA database? Personally, I’m not a fan.
