Journalists Wary of Travelling to US Due to Palantir Surveillance

They were looking in my spam folder and giving me a hard time for what they ‘found’ there, absolutely bonkers

Cynical? No my friend, it's what authoritarian dictatorships such as Russia and the US have been doing for years, it's their default! [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation_in_the_Russian_...

All it takes is a quick observation that the literal swastika swinging Nazis are all on Trump’s side to see the truth.

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> that the US government has had this capability for decades now, with mass dragnet surveillance of all internet traffic.

This is an important point.

The Bush admin established systems to surveil ~everyone in the US (not suspected of a crime) in bulk. Bulk surveillance is the well known, core component of systems intended to harm people (in bulk).

This got a pass from Bush supporters (inc me at first). It got little-to-no strong pushback elsewhere.

The Obama admin massively expanded Bush era surveillance systems. This got a pass from nearly everyone (excepting a period after the Edward Snowden revelations).

Not holding a reasonable PotUS accountable - this gifts power to the unreasonable ones that follow.

Snowden showed that the tools were available to intelligence agencies operating under questionable rules. Now the coordination of those agencies is led by a Russian agent, and poorly trained keystone cops have access, courtesy of Palantir.

Also note that the IRS and Social Security data is protected and access is a serious crime. So the responsible Feds are long fired or resigned.

Mr. Thiel identifies as Sauron, thank you very much.

In all of these types of stories, "evil" rules for long enough that makes it appealing for those with the same views. Sometimes, it's generations before "good" overcomes. Plus, each one of the "evil" leaders feel like they are special and different. It's easy to understand why. You just need to be able to see it yourself.

There are no evil people, media (books, TV, movies) have plainly evil people so the story is easily digestible and appealing to the masses. But it is completely incorrect framing of how the world actually is.

In reality "evil" people almost always want to genuinely make the world a better place, and they are fighting "ignorant" people who are dragging society down by not conforming to their golden vision. And then "evil" becomes largely a function of who you ask. It's the opposition that labels them evil, not society on the whole.

There are very few leaders ever who are straight up storybook style evil. Almost all of them were/are deranged people who convinced enough people of their ostensibly good vision to begin executing it.

No one came to power because they wanted to turn society into burning rumble while they ate babies during daily random execution time. It's all nuance and complication.

Because it's only evil when your opposition/competition is doing it. You're always the hero in your own story and for you the actions are justified because you're doing it "for good". The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Hitler was also a fan of works of art with themes of peace and harmony.

The world, at the highest levels of competition and leadership, doesn't run on morals, it runs on unscrupulous force, conquest and domination. See: the human history for the past infinity years. Those who tried to maintain peace on morals instead of force, got eliminated form the gene pool. People should remember this more often.

Thiel and Karp have both said in various places that western civilization is worth saving and that it's better that we develop this power than enemies of the West, and I'm not going to lie, I'm inclined to agree with them.

Do you really think Putin, Xi and Khamenei are better stewards of the world than the West?

The West's introspective nature is good and all, but sometimes we unwittingly forget that there is actual evil in the world, and it's much worse than saying mean things on Twitter, or putting facts above feelings.

Students in Iran literally die protesting the regime, meanwhile students here who live a life of luxury and don't know what actual oppression is "protest"/simp for the Iranians (or one of their various proxies)...

They've had these authoritarian toys for a while, but they've been careful to use them more subtly in the past.

This administration is, as with everything else, discarding the "norms" based restraint that previously applied to their use.

> As early as 2010, I was able to look up ANY IMEI/IMSI combo in Proton

Did you mean PRISM? When I think of Proton, I think of a genuine effort to assist people in maintaining security.

Nothing has changed except the standard for denial of entry has been broadened here. There's a long history of denying entry to people for what their views are, this isn't new at all. You can just do a search and find examples of white supremacists, and imams and Islamic scholars, as well as probably other groups being denied entry to not only the US but it happens in Europe too and it goes back across administrations. So in other words, it's not just under the current administration where your political views could get you denied entry to the US.

From my point of view, wheter this is new or not is secondary. What happened is very bad and it is important to talk about it.

What's new is they've started using all of that more aggressively to detain people who objectively, without the shadow of a doubt, have done nothing wrong but somehow displease the party.

Retrieval and association is orders of magnitude better

“Lost in the noise” no more

Generally, in my lifetime (at 37 years old now), wide political awareness starting around 2004, Patriot Act / mass government data conversation was more about "This can be abused!", the most concrete story I had ever even close to the topic was by my junior year english teacher (17 years old) relaying that someone told her someone googled "how do terrorists make a bomb" and the FBI paid them a visit. Here, I'm a bit stunned to see we're investing in screening and detaining visitors if they seem to hold an opinion that doesn't imply any sort of violent threat.

The real danger isn't the capability or even them collecting the information.

The danger is when the fascists take charge and start abusing it.

And the new thing here is just that.

I once had a firepit conversation with the Floc coordinator of a small US city's PD. A big part of the value he saw in Floc was being able to query the data within some window (maybe 30 days?) then no longer being responsible for it. If the government had the data, then they'd need to respond to FOIAs for the data. Not only would that be an administrative cost, but it would also show the public how invasive the mass surveillance is. He clearly was not concerned about civil rights, he just wanted the convictions.

He was also proud of paying more for some kind of exclusive license to the data, that Floc wasn't going to sell his surveillance data to other entities. I never really believed that.

> why should only private actors have that data?

I'm not sure if you consider governments and police to be private actors?

I spoke with a sophisticated ANPR city-wide tracking vendor recently at a conference. From their video showing the system following vehicles in real-time, with detailed movement tracking, speed measurement, lane position, estimating model, age, demographic etc. when they couldn't see the registration plate, from all sorts of vantage points, it looked to me like they would know where basically everyone who drives is at all times as they moved around.

So, as a privacy advocate, I asked them about tracking and knowing where every driver is all the time, and they assured me: "It's ok. We send all this data immediatel;y to the police. The police are responsible for keeping the data safe. They only use it when they decide it's appropriate."

I was there interested in privacy and traffic monitoring, but there was almost nobody to speak with who seemed to think about privacy, except in a checkbox sort of way, e.g. "when you're in public there's no legal right to privacy" and "our systems are fully compliant with data protection".

It is a crime to stalk people. When we catch people doing it, we should stop them.

I was taught many, many times growing up in the U.S. that people had a right to privacy, to free speech, to being considered innocent until proven guilty.

When governmental organizations police the speech of individuals for things that are critical of the regime, we lose our right to free speech.

When they download the contents of your phone when you travel, you lose the right to privacy.

When people are denied a writ of habeas corpus, when they are trafficked to countries that are not from and have never been to, we are considered guilty unless we have people "on the outside" who are capable of fighting for our return.

They aren't even trying to make an argument for this, outside of the cult of personality of the current regime, the belief that He can do no wrong. If you "both-sides" this you allow the trends to continue.

> to be sure there's an argument to made though since you are technically "in public" when driving — your privacy protections might be on shaky legal grounds

I'm curious to hear this argument. When I'm walking around a city, I'm in public as well. But I don't have to tell everybody who I am, and I would find facial recognition cameras spread around the city as a privacy violation.

Open what up? This event isn't about finding some needle in a hackstack, but about power structures using unaccountable "AI" to create chilling effects on the freedom of speech. The public having a go-to list of journalists who committed wrongspeak about Israel wouldn't particularly change much, beyond facilitating the extension of this authoritarian dynamic into the corporate world in a uniform way.

see the novel kiln people and the transparent society essays by David Brin

Biggest abuse would be home burglars. Pick a juicy target, wait till all vehicles are away and strike.

I am not actually sure they are a journalist, but more a blogger? Happy to be proven wrong

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Every thread getting littered with these hall monitor complaints about titles is worse than clickbait could ever be.

On the other hand, you could aim for becoming a mole or whistleblower.

You mean you are worried about personally causing harm in that job? Or you are worried about saving face?

> Closely related to this, I have been continually frustrated with the insistence of the left wing that it borders on immoral to take a job as a soldier, police officer, prison guard, or bailiff, and that there's no reason to raise any of their pay.

I've been thinking a lot about this same thing. I've seen a marked rise in the number of complaints about how "everyone in law enforcement is MAGA" and the like, and can't help but think: "this is what you wanted, right?"

There have been a lot of people trying really hard to make law enforcement (and adjacent roles) entirely unpalatable, and it appears they've been largely successful! I think what they failed to take into account is that they were only making those roles unpalatable tothose who already think like them in other ways, and forgot that there are a lot of people out there with fundamentally different beliefs who are not dissuaded by ACAB-adjacent arguments. Or, worse yet, are actively attracted to the way the role is being portrayed!

So in the end, it seems like they achieved their goals, but perhaps overlooked how those goals might have some unintended consequences.

I never really understood the argument, either. If you think policing is rife with prejudice and abuse of power, why are you trying to demonize the whole job? Why wouldn't you be signing up for it, instead? After all, if you think it's being done wrong, the best way to right that wrong is by doing it yourself and setting a better example.

I think the fact that people prefer to publicly demonize an entire thing, instead of doing the hard work of making it right, is one of the most insidious features of modern social media.

If you're going to revolt against the state you gain nothing from first spending years getting employment in it. On the contrary, along the way you become more vulnerable to the state.

And yes, it's immoral to become a cop, just as it was immoral to become a european camp guard in the forties. There might be some mitigating factor like efficiently using it for infiltration and subversion because you didn't understand the morality of it until you were already employed, or being threatened into such a position.