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.
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.
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.
It’s not like my opinion will make any actual difference, so I’ve made my piece with it.
*peace
Thanks. I got autocowrecked.
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.
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.
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.
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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
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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.
If you’re not an American, you’re in their servers too.
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.
<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.
How do you feel about being stored in the NSA database? Personally, I’m not a fan.
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
I don’t worry about it, currently.
I know any country I’d want to live, they are doing the same thing. Just perhaps not as effectively.
That’s no excuse, it sucks. But it doesn’t disturb me outright that the US gov is doing it.
