Data requests of Silicon Valley companies by the government may increase.
The list of people deemed "suspect" and spied on by the government using private data may grow and the people spied on may become, on average, browner and more Muslim.
Massive surveillance will be a boon for the big tech companies. They already do everything they can to get as much data as possible. Even better, if it’s government sanctioned.
And soon nations might even build enormous surveillance apparatuses by forcing "private" companies to participate in mass data sharing programs. Can you imagine??
It is one thing to say that publicly but real test with be when NSA will come with all their weapons. May be NSA can say give me all your data and we will do something like s/mohammad/target/g.
The bigotry and utter disrespect for the privacy and freedom of own citizens is the larger problem that is not just Tech industry's issue here.
That's the thing: A few people in government and private companies will have full information about citizenry whilst at the same fiercely protecting their own secrets.
That's bad, but it might have good consequences. Governments around the world might start to better protect their information and communications, thus providing better protection against both NSA, spies and other malicious entities.
They are doing that, this scales to ~100-1000s of people per state. I suspect that on the current trajectory they will need to monitor far more and they are dealing with technology that most likely has been compromised by the US but not them.
There needs to be more shunning of NSA collaborators in the tech community. The NSA has only been able to achieve this Orwellian level of surveillance through the cooperation of big tech companies and considers them crucial to their operations. If caving to the NSA has social consequences among the tech community, there will be a lot more resistance against their future demands.
My only real fear is that some of these less-legitimate surveillance practices will discourage US companies from forming and people using US-hosted services, which would be a major blow to the United States' already volatile economy. The tech industry is the only industry that is/was actually doing well during the recession, and now our government is behaving dangerously with the trust that many international firms have given us. With that in mind, it's very alarming to hear that the NSA surveillance extends beyond admitted and known data collection in supposedly secure networks.
Seems like a bad idea to undermine the trust of most of the people (e.g. the tech industry) keeping your country afloat, if you ask me. And I really hope my fear here is unfounded...
Can't wait till profiling companies like Google and Facebook get in bed with the government for "national security" purposes, just like AT&T and friends, assuming it isn't already happening.
This is what I think as well. Every day we hear about these companies doing scummy stuff to get more and more user data.
I am hoping for a massive leak/scandal/Snowden moment when they finally cross the line and something happens that the lobotomized masses actually care about and cannot ignore.
Hopefully we end up with some sane legislation about how much mass surveillance of citizens by private companies is ok.
That's getting wildly speculative. A government potentially flagging a behavior that it's potentially monitoring, and potentially adding it to a potential watchlist for it?
Certainly. Can't have the population forgetting that the world out there is a scary place - think of the starving defense contractors!
If this is a precursor to any push for legislative changes (and increased enforcement powers) then the target is more likely non-state players and the likes of anonymous: Terrorist is a little overused these days and spy is the next best scary label.
The fact that Obama declared on national TV that they only spy on non-US citizens (6.5+bn humans) without a warrant is the biggest news in the internet industry since the mass deployment of broadband a decade ago.
Knock it off. These specific government abuses may well destroy the bulk of the revenue streams for the largest companies in silicon valley. If that isn't on topic for HN, I don't know what is.
There is a good chance that government and companies will be the same at some point. We should be concerned about any kind of entity having these surveillance powers.
I agree it will happen. We will become better and better at building hardware and making that hardware do what we want, it will become easier and easier for a government to create such a surveillance system. Still, efforts to protect the privacy of citizens are worthwhile.
In addition to trying to protect the privacy of citizens, we should also be trying to make our government as transparent as possible. Ideally, the people would have the government under surveillance more closely than the government has the people under surveillance.
The list of people deemed "suspect" and spied on by the government using private data may grow and the people spied on may become, on average, browner and more Muslim.
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