cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/14393091
NSA ’just days from taking over the internet’ warns Edward Snowden
As if the NSA ever needed legal permission to do whatever the hell they wanted anyway.
Why isn’t he posting on fediverse?
Yeah, I just mean relative to other platforms, there just aren’t many of us.
It’s a good question. Anyone have answers that aren’t so obviously wrong?
Obviously not.
If you’re saying this because Snowden said wait he said on Twitter, I’m sorry but I wouldn’t know. Not because I didn’t try to read the article, I did, but because my custom DNS flagged cointelegraph.com as being malignant and blocked it. True story.
Edit: cointelegraph, not “cointelegram.”
SCARY HEADLINE— oh. It’s just the US again. Not literally the whole internet.
Good thing that all of the giant monolithic internet companies that the NSA will be using for surveillance are used exclusively by Americans. The NSA isn’t interested in foreign intel anyway. /s
These monolithic internet companies all have entities in other countries and are beholden to laws of said countries.
The NSA violates the laws of the US. What makes you think they care about other countries’ laws?
Once this bill passes, there is absolutely nothing stopping the NSA from doing an IP lookup on this comment/my account, and putting me into a “potential domestic terrorist - watch closer” list. A list that will eventually be used later, for some reason or another, so let’s just hope we never get an authoritarian in the White House with stacked courts! That could never happen here, could it?
P.S. If you live in the US, just part of your connection going to another country (be it a CDN or server hosted in Canada, or US server gets overwhelmed and switches to Canada) - full content logs for you.
Cointelegraph is (was at least?) a reputable source for national security news. It’s mainly for OSINT and national security interested folks who know better than to do the majority of their research on a smartphone, so it may not be great on mobile, I don’t know.
Snowden chose Russia because the other option was life as a political prisoner without a chance at a fair trial. Egotist, sure, but at least we know what we know now. Can you imagine how fucked we’d be if he never leaked them?
And regardless of the source, (site or person quoted), what he’s saying is absolutely true. The NSA is about to be able to gather ALL mass communications and look at them whenever, without a warrant which was the only safeguard before.
I’m legitimately about to throw my tech into a fucking dumpster and get a dumbphone and a smartphone with all hardware removed besides what’s required by Briar.
Most will read this and think I’m being overly paranoid. When I talked about the FVEY (now 14EYES) surveillance dragnet before the Snowdon leaks, everyone thought the same.
Since some people are having issues with the site, here it is from the ACLU:
ACLU Statement on Congress Passing Bill that Massively Expands the Government’s Power to Spy on Americans Without a Warrant
This bill would reauthorize Section 702 surveillance for two more years without any of the necessary reforms to protect Americans’ civil liberties
WASHINGTON — The House of Representatives passed a bill today that will reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act for two years, expand the federal government’s power to secretly spy on Americans without a warrant, and create a new form of “extreme vetting” of people traveling to the United States.
When the government wants to obtain Americans’ private information, the Fourth Amendment requires it to go to court and obtain a warrant. The government has claimed that the purpose of Section 702 is to allow the government to warrantlessly surveil non-U.S. citizens abroad for foreign intelligence purposes, even as Americans’ communications are routinely swept up. In recent years, the law has morphed into a domestic surveillance tool, with FBI agents using Section 702 databases to conduct millions of invasive searches for Americans’ communications — including those of protesters, racial justice activists, 19,000 donors to a congressional campaign, journalists, and even members of Congress — without a warrant.
“Despite what some members would like the public to believe, Section 702 has been abused under presidents from both political parties and it has been used to unlawfully surveil the communications of Americans across the political spectrum,” said Kia Hamadanchy, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union. “By expanding the government’s surveillance powers without adding a warrant requirement that would protect Americans, the House has voted to allow the intelligence agencies to violate the civil rights and liberties of Americans for years to come. The Senate must add a warrant requirement and rein in this out-of-control government spying.”
In the last year alone, the FBI conducted over 200,000 warrantless “backdoor” searches of Americans’ communications. The standard for conducting these backdoor searches is so low that, without any clear connection to national security or foreign intelligence, an FBI agent can type in an American’s name, email address, or phone number, and pull up whatever communications the FBI’s Section 702 surveillance has collected over the past five years.
The House passed all the amendments to expand this invasive surveillance that were pushed by leaders of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), the committee closest to the intelligence agencies asking for this power. The bipartisan amendment that would have required the government to obtain a warrant before searching Section 702 data for Americans’ communications failed 212-212.
They already have, and they can do it in secret and hold people without trial. Once you give someone power, it’s hard to take it away.
