>It is always the case that there are benefits available from relinquishing core civil liberties: allowing infringements on free speech may reduce false claims and hateful ideas; allowing searches and seizures without warrants will likely help the police catch more criminals, and do so more quickly; giving up privacy may, in fact, enhance security.

> But the core premise of the West generally, and the U.S. in particular, is that those trade-offs are never worthwhile. Americans still all learn and are taught to admire the iconic (if not apocryphal) 1775 words of Patrick Henry, which came to define the core ethos of the Revolutionary War and American Founding: “Give me liberty or give me death.” It is hard to express in more definitive terms on which side of that liberty-versus-security trade-off the U.S. was intended to fall.

1. Postal Service Act of 1792

2. Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986

Anyway, Facebook can read your DMs, Google can read your email, Ring can take photos from your camera.

We can very easily make those things a crime, but we don't seem to want to do it.

I wish more people would use AI to build alternatives with a clear, binding mission not to exploit the data, not to sell or be funded by investors who expect it to, etc. We have the power to build more than ever. We should use it.

This is a calculated move to normalize such technology. Yes, it will cause controversy in the short term, and these companies knew this was a possibility—but as a result the image in people's minds won't be the gestapo rounding up grannies; it'll kids finding puppies. To call this "unwitting" is simply naive (not surprising for Greenwald).

I see everyone talking about how to stop using products. I even thought about legislation that could help. But that's just it, none of that is possible. You can't even employ a "torches and pitchforks" approach. For any of this to be possible, people would have to coordinate. The means by which people communicate and coordinate are under the influence and control of the very entities that the people are trying to bring under control.

The only way to win this war is by means of economic warfare. And I don't mean "vote with your wallet". If I could spell out what I mean here, then the previous paragraph would have been invalid.

-Active Petitions and Campaigns to Limit Surveillance: End the Surveillance State (Action Network): Petitions call on Congress to permanently end the PATRIOT Act, stop warrantless surveillance, and oppose the expansion of surveillance technology.

-Ban Facial Recognition (Amnesty International & ACLU): Amnesty International is running the "Ban the Scan" campaign, while the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) targets the use of face surveillance, arguing it poses risks to civil liberties and disproportionately impacts marginalized communities.

-Stop Surveillance Data Brokers (Mozilla): Mozilla Foundation is targeting major websites to stop sharing data with surveillance technology firms that track user movement and interactions.

-Protect User Data from Subpoenas (EFF): The Electronic Frontier Foundation is pressuring tech companies to resist lawless DHS subpoenas for user data.

-Oppose Localized Surveillance (ACLU/Action Network): Local petitions aim to limit technologies like Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPRs) that create massive databases of personal movement.

-Federal Legislative Reform: Advocates are pushing for the "The Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act," which aims to restrict intelligence agencies from purchasing data from brokers without a warrant.

Now he's complaining that Nest had video footage without a subscription as if the user wouldn't know this. Nest still processes video for motion detection alerts for people without a subscription. It just deletes the video after processing unless you have a subscription to pay for the storage. Even though I am not a user myself, I'd be surprised if this isn't clear to the people who use the product. I am not at all surprised that Greenwald doesn't understand it though.

How do we build a resilient system that doesn’t rely on single platforms?

This is lurching toward what the US military calls the Common Access Card. This is a security token carried by most US military. It's used for everything from logins to building access to meals.[1]

Merely having a Common Access Card doesn't allow access to anything. The system reading it has to recognize the identity. So there are lots of databases of who's allowed to do what.

Is that where we're going?

[1] https://www.cac.mil/common-access-card/

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/guthrie-doorbell-video-delayed...

I don't use google maps, I use Waze I don't use messenger, I use whatsapp I don't upload my pictures, contacts (sync is enabled by default)

Anyways. What are the options? It will be another free cloud hosted service.

Tailscale has a free tier that's a good option to remotely access your network and cameras.

With respect to Greenwald, I don't think it's remarkable at all.

I have learned, through experience, that sometimes when people want to do things they should not, or against which there is opposition, there is enormous power in simply doing it. If you ignore people enough, you can do anything.

Preventing this requires systems with accountability.

And as HN commenters frequently note, accountability for government, tech, or corporate leaders in general seems culturally missing in the US.

Despite Snowden, nothing here is remarkable. This has grown because it _can_ grow.

Not the same, but ring is a common target for police warrants already

The data is only accessible to us for 3 hours but why would we expect them to shred the drives at the 3 hour mark so it's not accessible to them?

I don't own a smart speaker. It's actually annoying because there are so few options for a music system now. I've previously owned a Sonos but honestly it's just not a polished product. Anyway, my issue with smart speakers is I don't want a cloud-connected always-on microphones in my house. Sorry but no. You simply never know when law enforcement will use such a thing via a warrant nobody can tell you about (ie FISA). It could be targeted to you, individually but there are far worse alternatives.

It could be a blanket warrant against, say, people posting negatively against ICE online. Or microphones couldd be used to identify such people based on what it hears. You just have no control.

And once again, Google handed over PII voluntarily to the government recently [1]. Companies don't need to comply with administrative subpoenas. It takes a court order signed by a judge to enforce.

All of this is just another reason why China was correct to keep US tech companies out, basically. But here's where it's going to get much worse for the US and those same companies: when the EU decides enough is enough and creates their own versins that are subject to EU jurisdiction.

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/10/google-sent-personal-and-f...

More good reading that I found helpful are the books: Privacy is Power and Surveillance Capitalism.

The keys then become:

1) Implementing policies discouraging them from doing so at the societal level

and

2) Implementing force behind those policies at the personal and societal level

DHS isn't getting paid right now because Kristi "Dog Shooter" Noem managed to screw up so badly that even Congressional Republicans under Trump don't want to own her agency's behavior and carved DHS out of the normal funding bill. There's still a chance for #1 to be achieved. #2 remains to be seen at the societal level, but you can start working on that yourself for the personal level.

I further noticed that while I had a chatgpt window open, my dev site window was becoming laggy after many refreshes as if something was deliberately trying to scan it every time it got refreshed. I suspect the AI to scan other open tabs and simply reading through everything it can encounter. It is actually the only explanation up to date (but I unfortunately don't have much time to try to validate this speculative opinion: I will surely give other shots in order to narrow my suspicions).

I tend to think that this kind of data extraction frenziness may be a big problem in the future. Read it as : "let's collect everything, just tell everyone we are not collecting it, and then we'll see what we can get from it." Imagine such data being used in the future versions of governments if things get wild.

1. A retired US citizen emailed a DHS attorney urging mercy for an asylum seeker he had read about. Five hours later he received an email from Google advising him the federal government had served Google with a subpoena demanding information about him. Then they followed up by knocking on his door. The federal government's concerted effort to intimidate citizens should concern every American.

https://archive.ph/b9ON8

2. NYT: https://archive.ph/W5FwO ICE’s New Surveillance State Isn’t Tracking Only Immigrants

A memo from a Department of Homeland Security official reviewed by CNN and sent to agents dispatched to Minneapolis last month asked them to “capture all images, license plates, identifications and general information” on “agitators, protesters, etc. so we can capture it all in one consolidated form.” And the official reportedly provided such a form, called “intel collection.”

3. Moreover, ICE officers have traveled to the homes of protesters. Not to arrest them, because they have done nothing illegal. Rather, ICE was trying to intimidate them by letting them know ICE knows who they are and where they live. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/us/minneapolis-ice-agents

I think the long term solution will have to be to become as independent as possible on these sniffer-corporations and to get real people into office rather than those lobbyists who work for those corporations. This will require a complete re-design of the whole system though. I am not sure we'll see that in our lifetime.

1984 is here and we are allowing it bit by bit by normalizing at every small step stuff that would've been madness ten years before.

I'm confident Google etc will be compelled (if they haven't already been) to share their dossiers with the US and allies so that there is a file on each individual's psychology, weaknesses, and a how-to manual for gaslighting that person with the goal to silence them or coerce them into acting a certain way.

And by then, the Stasi would look like cute amateurs in comparison.

Those raising these concerns have been dismissed as paranoid for decades, even post-Snowden. And yet, surprising no-one, here we are.

These corporations have nothing in mind but profits and would sell your sould if it meant a tick up in their bottom line.

East Germany spent millions to spy on people.

Now people spend millions so the state can spy on them.

Madness.

Will another Progressive Era bring about more equality, or are the billionaires too entrenched?

It’s like the “don’t tread on me” militia crowd voting by like a 90% margin for a regime that is now enacting every single one of the things they’ve been afraid of for 50 years: masked cops, opaque detention centers, assaulting (and murdering) people for legally exercising second amendment rights, mass surveillance, social credit systems, and so on.

Or, I guess, like Lenin creating a totalitarian state to enslave the workers to liberate the workers? Or the French Revolution replacing the monarchy with the terror? Many examples in history I suppose.

Home of the Brave.

Its another copy of their MAC data storage scenario due to a "rogue engineer"

The stored video is encrypted with key generated on your phone. You have to be physically close to the camera in order to share the key and complete the set-up. Once encrypted, the video can't be analyzed by AI or used in a broad surveillance effort.

It's entirely possible that the encryption keys have a backdoor, but I doubt it. Although there is no way to verify.