Big Tech vs Big Government are the Church vs State of the digital era - they must be kept separate - and preferably somewhat adversarial - so that powers are divided and we the people have some sort of chance.
Separation of church and state is about the government not enforcing or favoring one religion over others. I'm having trouble seeing the analogy applied to separation of big tech and big government. The separation of big tech and big government is a different categorical issue. But does this issue actually exist? At the end of the day, the government holds all the power over big tech as it should. And you do have a chance to say how your government should operate.
Government cannot ask big tech for data on their users.
Big tech is not allowed to lobby for the government to pass certain laws or restrictions or whatever else.
Big tech is not allowed to voluntarily or in any form shape or a communicate any data with the government unless it is strictly related to government business and employees.
The government may not communicate in any form shape or way any data to big tech unless the conditions from the above paragraph apply.
Government may continue to regulate technology companies, but the data they collect on their users is considered strictly not in the domain of any form of government.
Unless we are talking about court cases with discovery and the defendant being able to defend themselves. If someone uses Facebook to commit a crime Facebook should be liable to reveal data about the messages they sent by court order for a *public* trial.
There are severe consequences to what you're suggesting with a net negative to society. Before you know it we'll have Big Tech Banks being a money launderer's wet dream. Kinda like how it is now, except all their data is in a bank the government can't touch or will ever know about.
> There are severe consequences to what you're suggesting with a net negative to society
There are always severe consequences, there are severe consequences if thhe status quo remains as is, there are severe consequences if the status quo changes
We have got banking privacy regulations through the world, we have got religious and government split laws through the world. These both work and are needed
It is due time big tech becomes split from explicit government interference with political aims and goals as shown on the Twitter Papers. This NSA bullshit is also not acceptable
I would believe regulations on banking would apply regardless. You would apply these laws only to places where social media companies are dealing with the people's day today data and interactions, not stuff like banking.
It's the law, it'll be written by a billion lawyers who consider edge cases like this and this little comic will apply.
You're oversimplifying the law. There's no legal speak as to what constitutes Big Tech. What if it's a social media company that does financial transactions?
Overall, you're giving more power to Big Tech and lessening the power of government over Big Tech. They will be able to hide their offenses under the cover of "user's data", which the government is not allowed to see.
> There's no legal speak as to what constitutes Big Tech. What if it's a social media company that does financial transactions?
Again. This is literally what law is all about. All existing law was created from baselines like these, and this is a very very poor excuse to refuse to regulate a massive and dangerous industry.
Refusing the ability for the government to absorb the data of big tech is not empowering them, it's weakening them.
How about things like education, healthcare and social services? Historically these were all functions of the church, not of the state. Those functions coming under control of the state means, in effect, the state transforming into the church - or at least functionally becoming church-like.
We see how big tech is taking on a lot of functions of a state. Big tech companies are a bit like states. They have something like citizenship, taxes, and laws.
. Big tech companies are a bit like states. They have something like citizenship, taxes, and laws.
What taxes, laws, and citizenship is unqiue to tech companies? I assume you mean money to join, rules, and membership. There are business outside of tech that have this
It may be also worth noting that the "Separation of Church and State" people often quote is from a poem that a politician was reciting. To my knowledge that concept has never been codified in law.
It is in the first amendment. That is, the US explicitly can not force all citizens into a single church as was common in England where they were Catholic for half a millennia and then replaced that with the Church of England.
People love to bring up “it’s actually not in the constitution” as if explicitly saying that in anyway detracts from the fact that a foundational principle of the nation /separated/ church from state.
That does prevent forcing a particular religion on people but it does not in any way prevent the mix of religion and government. As just one example, court rooms still have people swear on Christian bibles. I believe it has recently become optional. There are also many government buildings that fund the creation and installation of religious statues and bible verses on plaques in their halls using taxpayer funds. There are many laws derived from Christian ethics and values.
There are also unwritten concepts that are effectively enforced such as prison review boards giving credence to someone that has become a Born Again Christian when considering parole. That is not written anywhere to my knowledge.
But you are right, they can not force someone to be Christian.
>> As just one example, court rooms still have people swear on Christian bibles. I believe it has recently become optional.
You watch too much TV. Most courts do not have you swear "on" anything, you simple raise your hand "Swear or affirm under the pains and penalties of perjury you will tell the truth" some do not even add the "under the pains and penalties of perjury"
if there are any courts in the US still using a Bible they are in the EXTREME minority.
>There are also many government buildings that fund the creation and installation of religious statues and bible verses on plaques in their halls
Pretty sure that is also not true... Governments have allowed the installation of such things but they are often funded by private groups. I would love a citation where the GOVERNMENT paid for out of tax payer money a religious installations is say they last 20 years.. (paid for, not approved)
>>effectively enforced such as prison review boards giving credence to someone that has become a Born Again Christian when considering parole.
Citation...
Parole Boards often require the offender to Admit guilt and ask for forgiveness, this has being interpreted by extreme anti-religious groups as them "requiring people to become born again Christians"
“We can make Christianity the de facto law of the land, have federal holidays be Christian holidays, have the interests of the church intertwined with that of the state, have “secular” state institutions mirror christian sacraments, have our pledge of allegiance essentially be a declaration of our country being Christian — but hey, they can’t make you go to church on Sunday” is not exactly what one might call a strong separation.
American culture is Christian due to it descending from Europeans. No shit.
I never said I wanted to listen to your opinions about the modern state of religion in America. I told you a fact, that church and state are separated by law in this nation and it’s encoded into the bill of rights. That you dislike American culture having evolved from a Christian one is your own axe to grind clearly.
It’s not about the culture, it’s the fact that the separation isn’t actually really all of that separate. If you swap the “secular” elements enshrined in our government to another faith it becomes glaringly obvious that we are respecting an establishment of religion.
* One nation, under Allah, indivisible… (Islam)
* Marriage is a legal institution between one man any many women (Mormon)
* “The office is closed for Yom Kippur next Monday.” (Judaism)
* The right to bodily autonomy begin at birth so there is no moral issue with abortion (Satanic Temple)
Of course the people are descendants of protestants and so our customs would naturally reflect that but so does our government. As a country we were so concerned about escaping state sponsored religion that we didn’t stop to think at all about how codifying norms into law that come from a particular religion end up creating a religious rule in all but name. Like we don’t even pretend to have religious freedom in any meaningful sense — your right to practice the traditions of your faith or have your institutions respected ends where what is acceptable and normal as defined by Christians ends.
Your examples are as much cultural as religious, at least in this era. "Under god" was added to the anthem in the 50s, and I doubt it'll last another decade.
Plural marriage isn't widely practiced or supported for pragmatic reasons.
Holidays are religious artifacts, yet not all of them, and there is no forced participation anymore. (Except in so far as government services are unavailable.)
Abortion rights have and are evolving. As the old, more religious folks die off it should swing the other way soon.
American culture descended from Christian fundamentalism, not Christianity. It’s a huge difference and it shows all over the place in how bigoted US laws are, compared to most of Europe.
No it is from Jefferson, whereby he was remarking that the first amendment "thus building a wall of separation between Church & State" in response to a church writing him a letter about oppression they were feeling at the hands of a state government.
> They're so heavily intertwined that bucketing them into distinct categories that don't talk to each other would be a massive ship to turn around.
never mind, then. the big thing that moral imperatives have in common with the checks and balances necessary for society to be healthy is that none of these things ever require any effort.
I'm not convinced this is entirely true. In the USA maybe it holds some degree of accuracy right now but just looking at China and Tencent shows plenty of evidence for how a tech company might find heavy government interference cumbersome at the very least within certain commercial spaces.
I reflexively agreed, but then I hesitated, because some of my recent discussions with other people suggest that to them, in an abstract, it is just that.. some far fetched abstract impossibility. My most recent like conversation was extra depressing, because I was not only given 'nothing to hide' argument, but it also was followed with 'you gotta trust the system'.
I want to blame politicization and very clear 'us vs them' sentiment, but I am no longer certain that is the entire reason for current craziness. I am not sure non-tech people understand what is at stake.
To me it is an episode of Dark Mirror 'The entire history of you'. And they do not get it why it is a very bad idea to make a new normal.
I would say as a tribe, rather than as a religion. Religion involves some combo of supernatural and ethical beliefs. Tribes are about in-group out-group status and conflict.
Where does this come from? The religious foundations of the current GOP are well attested[1].
The historical conventional wisdom around the US's political parties is that Democrats fall in love (meaning that they abstain from voting over minor political differences), while Republicans fall in line (meaning that they hold their nose and vote for whoever the party ticket is). That's changed a little bit over the the last decade, but not appreciably so.
In my opinion, Republicans are less falling in line and more voting against the other side.
American politics today are about thesis/antithesis, where the thesis is whatever the latest liberal agenda is and the antithesis is everyone who normally disagrees with each other, but is united in a common disagreement with the Democratic Party.
In this environment, there's only one political thesis (not antithesis) that has more than a very small percentage of the vote.
What makes you say that when preachers are actively testing the laws regarding non-profit status, widely reported to support GOP legislators who are using their religion as the basis for their platforms on abortion.
I don't think so. Big Government uses Big Tech as a tool in its arsenal. There is no greater surveillance tool. Trying to keep them separated is like trying to keep Big Government separated from the Military Industrial Complex. They are two sides of the same coin.
That's what he's saying. He's not saying that Big Government and Big Tech are separated, he's saying that Big Government and Big Tech ought to be separated.
In the West we fight pretty hard to keep the Church and State separated, but this isn't a natural state of being. The Divine Right of Kings, the Pharoahs were gods, Sharia law, the Japanese Emperor is the direct descendant of Amaterasu, the Spanish Inquisition, etc etc etc. History is rife with Church and State being two sides of the same coin. In fact in recent years certain government leaders have been pretty effective at intertwining the US government with Christianity, despite the separation of Church and State being enshrined in the First Amendment; prayer in schools, the repeal of Roe v Wade, etc.
The link between big government and big tech (and big ag, big auto...) ought to be fought with similar gusto as we attempt to protect the separation we've won between church and state.
I think this misses the bigger problem. Much like the MIC, big tech is a matter of national security. If the USG doesn’t get involved with their own home grown tech companies, nothing is stopping other state powers from doing so.
Freedom of religion came at a time when long-distance communication traveled very slow, in a country with oceans for borders. In a typical (old world) situation religious consolidation makes sense for a state, religion is the only thing that significantly threatens state power besides other states. This was even more true 300 years ago. Today’s tech companies aren’t a challenger to state power; people mostly hate Mark Z. & Jeff B., rather tech is the very fabric that the state is made of.
> That's what he's saying. He's not saying that Big Government and Big Tech are separated, he's saying that Big Government and Big Tech ought to be separated.
Right, and I'm saying they can't be (as I said, two sides of the same coin).
I think this desire comes from a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of power. It's beyond wishful thinking.
Yeah but big government put a ton of money into creating these technologies in the first place- why do you think they did it? They’re getting value for their money. Information technology is technology of control.
Those two categories are both random af. Are local police "Big Government" according to even half of the people who use the phrase "Big Government"? Are banks that utilize AI "big tech"? What about government intelligence agencies that have venture wings and invest in these companies? How quick a revolving door between the two blurs your distinction? Are you imagining pitched legal battles between the two based on public court filings? How likely are the filings themselves falsely suggesting some schism between the two that doesn't exist?
They have been since WWII. In the recent years the CIA has been quite busy in silicon valley. [1] Prior to that many projects funded by DARPA were tested and refined by the general public. The internet was one of the projects.
I don’t understand why politicians don’t worry that if the NSA are allowed to do this they will have a lot of information on many people in public life including them. Do they not understand the NSA will be harvesting representatives data together with the rest of the citizens?
Personally I would struggle to resist reading Biden’s/Trump’s emails, whereabouts and digital footprint for a day, it would be pretty interesting to say the least.
My guess is that they think they're above the rest of everyone. There's a bigger national security issue here than what you suggested (blackmail of politicians) and that's manipulation of a country's populous. Selling ads is selling ideas and psychological manipulation, at the root of it (convince people to buy something, often things they don't need). Many ads sell feelings (e.g. coke and car companies don't sell you products, they sell you feelings and prestige, respectively). Or there are political ads. Politicians may like this because they get control over their populations but the problem is that adversaries also can get this control. It is a dangerous game to play. Worse, politicians are not immune to these same manipulations. People often overestimate how good they are at defending themselves from propaganda because they are only counting the propaganda that is not targeted at them and not the propaganda that does work (propaganda doesn't mean bad either). Since native advertising is so prolific these days most people don't know how they're being influenced and just think propaganda is the standard old Army ad or Uncle Sam and not things like Kurzgesagt or Vsauce (again, propaganda doesn't mean bad, but rather influential).
<< selling ads is selling ideas and psychological manipulation
Yep and social media got unfettered access to real thoughts and patterns of almost entire internet population for a while. I would be stunned if they were not able to distill a way to determine when a given message works best ( not just what message works best for a given task ).
Marketing always had people divided into various groups they could sell to. Adtech, made into real science.
<< People often overestimate how good they are at defending themselves from propaganda because they are only counting the propaganda that is not targeted at them and not the propaganda that does work (propaganda doesn't mean bad either).
Being aware helps, but you are right. I found myself nodding, when upon reflection it was clear I was being manipulated based on later facts.
> I would be stunned if they were not able to distill a way to determine when a given message works best
This is called microtargeting[0].
> Being aware helps, but you are right. I found myself nodding, when upon reflection it was clear I was being manipulated based on later facts.
Well I can't stress enough that this isn't always a bad thing. Propaganda can even be beneficial. It can help people band together for important things (e.g. informing people about climate change). But we also should be aware that we are often manipulated. I think it is fine when it is for the good (hard to define though, which is problematic) but not okay for bad purposes. Paved with good intentions after all.
I think they understand it very well and it's part of the reason they don't push back on NSA power grabs. As Chuck Schumer said "let me tell you - you take on the intelligence community - they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you."
I thought the whole shitshow in 2016 with Obama accidentally spying on the Trump campaign would have, at the very least, lit a fire under the GOP's feet to reign in the government's surveillance apparatus.
Who am I kidding? They don't want the boot off their face, they want it on their foot.
Why would they do that?. The swamp part of the GOP and the swamp part of the DNC are within a hairs breath of being the same establishment. They just market different things to different customers. They're like a megacorp selling all natural bullshit under one brand and rot your organs energy drinks under another brand. The Bernies and the AOCs and the MTGs and other "out there" politicians they let make noise are just market research so the swamp people know what positions they may need to adopt in the future to keep their products marketable to the masses.
The GOP has classically been stronger by leading from behind. That is, playing victims. They often garner more strong support this way. DNC just is ineffective when in power (they win when they have popular candidates because higher turnout but reps are more consistent voters). There's an old Simpsons joke here. Both sides do talk about government overreach and happily expand the military industrial complex and expansion of spying on US citizens (US is not alone or particularly unique here albeit the most powerful). There are outliers on both sides, mind you, but there is a common trend (that leads to conspiracy thinking). Some might call this Bread and Circus or Divide and Rule, but I think we can all recognize that there are political games being played.
Partially reiterating a sibling comment, but the GOP hates Trump. All of the Trumpy elements of the current House just refused to confirm the speaker in return for holding a new "Church" committee, so I'd say that faction of the Congressional GOP is as suspicious of our spy agencies as it ever has been.
This is not a cynical enough point of view. Right now, the intelligence community pays attention to the opinions of Congresspeople and other officials, and runs operations to monitor their activities and weaken (or strengthen) their power or influence.
US intelligence agencies are political entities masquerading as law enforcement, and their motivations are largely internal, rather than controlled by the executive (as we saw during the Trump years.)
Any reasonably smart politician these days has upped their OPSEC and switched up their coms. The same goes for most people in power. I doubt they use the same consumer grade stuff your friends and family use.
Yes but they are learning and have more reason than most to up their game. After it was shown that Hilary's campaign was trying to spy on Trump's office, I am sure this was a lesson to them and others.
> Personally I would struggle to resist reading Biden’s/Trump’s emails, whereabouts and digital footprint for a day, it would be pretty interesting to say the least.
This law doesn't allow them to do that. It allows the NSA to collect stored communications between people who are not US citizens who live outside the US without a warrant. Biden and Trump are both US citizens living in the US, so they fail both criteria. The scandal in 2019 was that the FBI could search for mentions of Americans in these foreigners' communications.
…had they stopped? Or even slowed down? I’ve presumed that no one being held accountable meant USGov de facto granting permission for this to continue unabated, just please be more careful about being caught.
Yes they’d stopped. The narrative they hadn’t is peddled by the same people who don’t realize that Bush era torture was also shutdown by congressional oversight. America isn’t perfect but it’s damn sure answerable to its citizens when they decide something is worth having answers for
It's not the premise of the article that it ever had. The IC has, and always has had, the broad authority to collect information on foreign nationals abroad, without a warrant. The issue here is much more subtle than that.
They collect data on Americans domestically, too, then just play a stupid word game where they claim it's not "collecting" until they actually query their pile of data on you, which is ridiculous.
This is about the reauthorization of all of Section 702, which is the statute that allows the IC to compel US providers to provide information about foreign surveillance targets on foreign soil.
I'm guessing you're referring to Snowden, but there are plenty of others like Reality Winner that have gone to jail (Reality got the longest sentence ever for this type of crime).
I see this as a consequence of monopolization of the sector, it's made it significantly easier to turn these few corporations into de facto wings of their organization.
The conspiratorially minded wonder if they had a hand in forming the monopolies in the first place.
It’s further upstream, the monopolization of telecom. Lot of talk about Snowden since his big drop but the whistleblowing from Mark Klein in 2006 is at least just as big of a deal
> Mark Klein is a former AT&T technician and whistleblower who revealed details of the company's cooperation with the United States National Security Agency in installing network hardware at a site known as Room 641A to monitor, capture and process American telecommunications.
The death of antitrust law in the US can be tied directly to a bunch of federal judges that practically nullified it with the "consumer welfare" excuse decades ago. Modern tech companies are constructed to maximally exploit this loophole.
The CIA also has In-Q-Tel to fund tech companies and develop surveillance tech. I believe Facebook got some seed money off them early on but their Wikipedia article doesn't list them.
Neither of these are tied together in an obvious way, though. Like, the government doesn't directly create monopolies to obfuscate surveillance; in the world where we had hundreds of viable tech platforms and maximum ownership caps, we'd still have surveillance. Because the government is itself a monopoly. But they prefer working with monopolies because they're easier to regulate and comply with the law more. And monopolies also improve the economy, the failure of which is the number one killer of politicians.
Whilst true, they want to be seen as angelic since they're following some laws. Can't be inferring people's pattern of life based of smartphone metadata without been seen as 'the good guys'!
Not to copy another comment that basically is saying "what do you propose?"
There are people who want a revolution or civil war. What happens after, assuming they win? They form another government, why won't the same situations they don't like occur again?
Oh because we should have laws about this and enforcement. We have that now and if there isn't a law, like against stock trading, you can vote for that but people don't.
The same situation with occur again the only difference being a economic and human disaster of a war.
a) Education on the importance of privacy in a democratic nation on its stability and survival.
b) Political Accountability. Actually have people removed from office that support such approaches.
c) Have actual felony penalties on such violations by the NSA and anyone assisting in coverups with no statute of limitations (or statute starts after declassification).
d) Blanket civil and criminal immunity for whistleblowers related to above violations. Plus financial bounty.
e) Automate the declassification process. (Add checks extra here.)
f) Introduce an Independent Counter-Surveillance and Privacy Agency. (Similar agencies exist in other countries.) It should have the ability to oversee the de-classification process, act as a check and balance on the N.S.A; its sole mandate to protect the privacy and data of inhabitants of the U.S.A. and U.S. nationals.
N.B. The necessity of such an agency becomes even more paramount for the U.S. now that individuals' social network data lie abroad and contemporary issues go beyond the jurisdiction of the FBI.
Given broad awareness of this taking place I wonder just how effective it still is. Surely motivated bad actors are now making using of encryption and hiding their activity away.
No, it won't. It also won't change anything for US nationals who deliberately move their communications to platforms "hosted in Switzerland", which has always been a funny privacy move, because the US IC has blanket de jure authority to surveil foreign services; it's only the US providers that have these procedural protections.
The statute we're talking about here, 702, is what enables the IC to compel American communications providers to cough up data (about ostensibly foreign targets).
Section 702 is not about Americans. It's only about foreign nationals (with an FI value). So the opposite is true: it will affect non-US nationals and it will not affect US nationals.
NSA still refuses to answer the question of how many American citizens were "incidentally" surveilled under Section 702. If that number was zero, I don't think stating that would be quite so difficult.
Don't want to be too pessimistic but I think total surveillance is almost inevitable with increasing technological capabilities. Governments will do it and so will companies. I don't see how to stop this.
Given the amount of FISA abuse that has occurred, it's time to just admit that people in power cannot be trusted to not abuse the system.
They should either abolish it or change the law to put real penalties in place for abusing the system. Puting all of this machinery in place and then not providing a means to hold powerful people accountable for their actions when they abuse it is just asking for trouble.
Reminds of a bit of European Union https://europa.eu/europass/en
Apparently the EU now started competing with businesses and they try to capture everyone's data. And people love it...
This is why people like Donald Trump get elected, he promises to do thing like "drain the swamp". Of course he is doing it out of self interest but when people promise to help put an end to this horror, other get behind them.
Camera in bathroom is like having targeted implant on your phone or computer.
Whereas, this mass surveillance is more like putting cameras on some public sewer tunnels to see what passes through the pipes. And then 99.999% of the time not checking the recording before it gets wiped.
Incorrect. They need a warrant to (legally) even collect phone call audio - they can't tap your line ahead of time, and then get a warrant when they want to listen to the recordings.
Unless you meant the metadata of who you called. But that's not the police collecting that data, but the phone company doing it voluntarily for billing purposes. If the company didn't keep those records, the police couldn't (legally) compel them to without a warrant.
I think the legal position is that only data access requires a warrant, not data retention. The in.es.ā. argues this, local police don't have that access - they buy things like location data on the private market though
Except that it doesn't actually keep them from doing it unlawfully. As long as they believe they're acting within the law (despite being wrong) they can do it with no consequences.
