Welcome to the fish bowl
Privacy is dead. Get used to it. But there is hope: And the only real privacy you have from the government is in the fact that there’s just so much data that they’ve very unlikely to focus in on you. You are a proverbial needle in a data haystack.
Like I’ve said before, we’re innocent. For now. When they start looking, you’ve probably done something.
June 6th, 2013 at 7:46 pm
Well, we (or at least I) have been complaining for years about these spam- and robo-callers that keep calling calling calling in spite of being on the Do Not Call List.
Perhaps Teh iWon is collecting all that phone data so he can do something about that…
June 6th, 2013 at 7:49 pm
Or you’re a member of the Tea Party.
June 6th, 2013 at 8:13 pm
What do you mean by “done something”? Owned a gun? Attended a Tea Party? Didn’t buy health insurance? Opened a roadside lemonade stand without a business license? They will simply make what we are already doing illegal. Then we’re criminals.
June 6th, 2013 at 9:11 pm
If they start looking, you’ve definitely “done something” – remember Three Felonies a Day? They can find something – probably multiple somethings – to charge you with, and they’ll charge you with everything they can just to get you to plead to one. Remember, they print money, they can afford to take you to court until you’re completely broke.
June 6th, 2013 at 10:36 pm
Orwell was a bloody optimist.
June 7th, 2013 at 12:57 am
“What have you got to hide?”
In this age of voluminous laws, we all have many things to hide, even if we don’t know it.
June 7th, 2013 at 8:55 am
If they want you, they’ll get you. That’s a given. So I try my best to avoid having them want me. As best as possible, I don’t use words they don’t like — though there’s nothing I can do about having said “pressure cooker” five years ago.
I guess that means they’ve won. But so far, I haven’t lost.
June 7th, 2013 at 9:42 am
Yep watch those words. I’m sure they have filter looking for key words to get you lots of unwanted attention if you say the wrong thing. Even if your joking.
June 7th, 2013 at 12:47 pm
wastme,
You mean I shouldn’t say Allah Akhbar ammonium nitrate pressure cooker airplane?
June 7th, 2013 at 2:33 pm
Just think of what would happen if this Abuse of Power got into the hands of President…..Hillary Rodham Clinton in Jan 2017.
June 7th, 2013 at 2:39 pm
All this “data” has not uncovered one terrorist. The data won’t show that. What it WILL show is which group you, as an individual, belong.
1.) friend of Obama
2.) low information, don’t vote, don’t care
3.) ENEMY OF OBAMA.
Guess which list people that read this blog belong? Up until now, I had doubted the reality that the “camps” the tinfoil hat brigade at Alex Jones blog had ID’d were really for people. Now I wonder.
June 7th, 2013 at 7:21 pm
when everyone is a suspect, no one is a suspect.
June 8th, 2013 at 2:34 am
OK before I go on I should explain that I am somewhat of an expert on Big Data (this is the type of data that the “NSA” is using) and in-fact designed a BigData platform for a government agency.
Please let me explain why “Big Data” will NEVER help find 1 man, 5 men, or even a conspiracy of men.
The major differnce in big data and regular data is something called Structured data (regular data) and unstructured data (big data) but really it is better defined as an “explicit” data set (regular data) vs a correlated data-set (big data)
Ok what does this mean?
Big Data is used to find information about a large body …. in this case we call it “the US citizen”
if you are using corrlatevie datasets you are usually seeking out patterns of behavior, BUT here is the catch, those patterns are only usefull to help understand what a body of data is trending towards.
let me give you an expample query that one would use….
Find all the people who tweeted about #gun control and said the words “tea party”
Or maybe find social trends as they react to certain events…. like:
“find how many people re-tweeted Ron pauls tweet in the area of Boston”
WELL WHO THE HELL CARES ABOUT THAT SHIT you say?
These guys
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/10/obama-campaign-tech-staff
Don’t kid yourself though, this shit is about to get very real for most of you. I have seen technology that would make you crawl into a hole and never come out. (or in my case, pull every BofA account i had and have my lawyer send then a data destruction order, seriously that company is scary with your data)
Let me let you in on a little secret…. I have worked at most of the big telcos and major e-com companies.
Verizon will sell you data to anyone…
Amazon actually have a sales team for that shit….
Microsoft won’t sell your data but folds under nothing more than a request.
CenturyLink is trying to sell theirs
Sprint can’t find a buyer
Google not only sells theirs but even helps you find he information.
Only 2 places are really good with your data
1) Dell will tell you to go pound sand without a court order
2) AT&T will even get their legal team to fight court orders if they are not specific enough.
I have alot of respect for AT&T’s privacy policy and practices. they don’t screw around with your PPI.
Good luck out there.
June 8th, 2013 at 8:48 am
What have we to hide? That’s NOT the question. They, our PUBLIC SERVANTS, have NO “delegated power” for and are expressly forbidden (4th Amendment) to search without probable cause and a warrant.
June 8th, 2013 at 1:43 pm
If you think you can hide in a haystack – or even in a pile of other needles – you aren’t aware of the state of the art in software parsing, interpretation and pattern recognition.
For example: up until recently, the utility of bugging all the restaurants within a quarter-mile of your espionage target made no sense primarily because who could listen to all that boring audio? Use voice recognition to pull out every spoken word, now it’s just a giant text file, much easier to search. A few keywords and grammar interpretation, and now you might catch bits of relevant information. Voice recogntion and tracking means you can follow a particular person, his eating habits, patterns, mood etc. and he thought he was being covert by paying in cash?
Security by obscurity is dead dead dead. It is no longer that we’re all visible to Sauron, he now has a way to get around the limitation of his attention span so he can see and *notice* nearly everything.