A decade ago, I published a book on privacy “Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance.” In the book, and since then, in articles and speeches, I have been dispensing advice to people on how to protect their privacy. But my advice did not envision the moment we are in – where the government would collaborate with a tech CEO to strip-mine all of our data from government databases and use it to pursue political enemies.
In the parlance of cybersecurity, I had the wrong “threat model,” which is a fancy way of describing the risks I was seeking to mitigate. I had not considered that the United States might be swept into the rising tide of what scholars call “competitive authoritarianism” – authoritarian regimes that retain some of the trappings of democracy, such as elections, but use the power of the state to crush any meaningful dissent.
↫ Julia Angwin
Democracy is not nearly as much of a given as many people think, and in this day and age, where massive amounts of Americans’ data and personal information are collected and stored by the very corporations supporting the Trump regime, Americans have to think very differently about where digital threats actually come from.
Nothing protects any American – or anyone visiting America – from ending up in an El Salvadorian concentration camp. Plan accordingly.
Todays theregister.com has an article “Whistleblower describes DOGE IT dept rampage at America’s labor watchdog”, suggesting that the threat of personal information leaking from USG is happening now.
Gumpy people like me were telling people that those COVID-19 apps you were forced by the government to download to your phone so you can show random waiters in restaurants your vaccination status (if you wanted to participate in society) were a massive violation of privacy and were the start of your government-stored data not being private (and not between you and the government agency you gave them to anymore).
We were ignored.
We were called anti-vaxxers (despite being triple-vaccinated).
Well, now we feel vindicated. The private data you give to government agencies is not private anymore.
In other news, some governments have already started to sell the DNA of newborns to private companies:
https://www.reddit.com/r/greece/comments/1jwpgp6/%CE%BF_%CE%AC%CE%B4%CF%89%CE%BD%CE%B9%CF%82_%CE%B3%CE%B5%CF%89%CF%81%CE%B3%CE%B9%CE%AC%CE%B4%CE%B7%CF%82_%CE%B5%CE%BA%CF%87%CF%89%CF%81%CE%B5%CE%AF_%CF%83%CE%B5_%CE%B9%CE%B4%CE%B9%CF%8E%CF%84%CE%B5%CF%82_%CF%84%CE%BF_dna_%CF%84%CF%89%CE%BD/?tl=en
Now that privacy is a thing of the past, everything is on the table.
The government that is cracking down on people’s free expression here is the same government that sabotaged efforts to manage the very real pandemic, repeatedly tried to restrict access to vaccines despite the protests of disabled people, and is still doing so. Pay. Fucking. Attention.
And this doesn’t excuse the Biden administration for the fact they forced citizens to share their medical record with random restaurant waiters, shop assistants, car mechanics etc to participate in society. See. The Whole. Fucking. Picture.
Normaly I don’t care about US problems, but as is tradition with anti-civil-rights US legislation, it eventually found it’s way to every EU country and the UK (as it happened with the DCMA’s “anti-circumvention” provisions).
Those “unlegal immigrants” are the excuse our government is now using to crack down on everyone else’s rights. Pay fucking attention! You in the EU are also in danger of this – in Germany for instance the Christian Democrats are starting to parrot AFD policy lines, and acting like this isn’t fascist and won’t end badly. It is fascist, and it will end badly, just like here.
Yep, that’s true. EU is more and more facist. I think that soon EU policy will be more antihuman than anti-Trumps can dream of. Sadly they don’t see antiprivacy moves and it seems that this Trump thing is using as fog of war to EU moves.
Oh ffs, they don’t need to “crack down on everyone else’s rights” to crack down on illegal immigration, just don’t give people who jump the border asylum and don’t release them to the communities (deport them on the spot instead). If needed, trigger Article 51 of the UN charter and stop processing asylum applications and deport people who jump the border on the spot for all I care. Citizens should have rights unconditionally, but for non-citizens who jumped a country’s border, it’s conditional on that country not having triggered Article 51 of the UN charter. This is the simple fact you people don’t understand.
And yes, there is evidence that people-traffickers and “asylum seekers” are aided by state actors, for example, Turkey attempted a violent push-in to Greek territory in March 2020, and they even used a military vehicle (owned by the Turkish state) to try and tear down a Greek border fence:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Greek%E2%80%93Turkish_border_crisis
If that’s not reason enough to trigger Article 51 of the UN charter, I don’t know what is.
If the mainstream politicians are too politically-correct to do it, then I wouldn’t be surprised if non-mainstream politicians are the ones who end up doing it. Because there is a good chance citizens will demand it eventually (with their vote). Don’t shoot the messenger.