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!
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.
<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.
When a regime can literally track what their entire population is doing at any given moment but won’t make easily fileable taxes 😮💨
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.
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.
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).
This is most likely incidental.
As in, to successfully show text messages to people, somewhere at the ISP, someone has to have a database that shows what messages were sent off from which tower and need to be routed where. Maybe they’re retained for a while for re-send reasons, too. Yeah.
But the point is, that’s not the same reason why your home address is retained at the motor license department.
We humans love to see patterns in things, but we do so even when none exist, as our brains want to desperately simplify information to save space, essentially. But we should not let that fool us into thinking the world is simpler than it actually is: We have a host of reasons to retain data, and this existed long, long, loooong before digital databases. And for good reason. After all, if it cannot be verified that you are you in context X, the state can hardly offer you service Y or protection Z (such as those are in the US in particular, granted).
Your city has to know who you are and where you live. Your motor dep needs to know which license belongs to whom and is attached to which vehicle. Amazon needs to know where to send your parcels. Your phone provider needs to know which phone belongs to which number in their network and where it is right now. Etc, etc, etc. They all do so for individual reasons.
Our government has completely lost its way. The Founders would be both appalled and ashamed.
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.
Exactly: “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.
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.
We love it!!! Ahhhh
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.
If you’re not an American, you’re in their servers too.
Not American, but I think most other people will be in their database as well. Honestly, it frustrated me greatly, but ultimately I try not to worry too much about it since I can’t control it. Privacy is one of my main “pillars” when voting (here in the Netherlands we have way more than 2 choices). A party’s stance on privacy and encryption is a requirement for gaining my vote, and it’s lead me to not vote for someone in multiple occasions. It’s the most influence I can have.
Not a big fan.
Frankly though I think Snowden gets way too much credit. Anyone with any sense that looked at the Patriot Act knew what was going to happen, and people were raising alarm from the beginning. He just confirmed what already should have been very obvious.
Yes. Anyone over the age of like 12 who didn’t know the government was keeping all this data, was incredibly naive.
I honestly think it’s everyone’s responsibility to make their job as hard as possible. Use providers that prioritize privacy and that are located outside the US. Don’t ever use telephony or sms always use end to end encrypted services for conversations, leave your phone at home or turn it off, use a rom without Google play services. Really drive them nuts and use cash for most purchases. This by no means stops everything but it makes it harder. You can’t stop all data collection but you can reduce it and every reduction helps.
I feel about the same as every European citizen should, since their governments are obviously doing the same but without the public fanfare.
We have Ursula… and other trumpets… the noise is so loud in EU
Poison the data as often as possible. I’m getting kicked off more and more services because my data doesn’t match their fingerprinting. I don’t verify any identity. Even the private databases with addresses, cars, employers, etc are all filled with random junk data making them useless. I can’t “pass verification” because the source is stupid. I take that as a small win.
Biggest part was getting tf out of that shithole country. Life is much better now.
I do not like it, uncle-sam-I-am.
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!
