Silicon Valley Is Worried That Trump Is Going To Grab Them By The Data:
“I have to take Trump at his word, I have to take his campaign promises seriously,” said Maciej Ceglowski, owner of Pinboard, a bookmarking site. “He said he would find and deport illegal immigrants. He said he wanted aggressive vetting of Muslims. If you are making those policies, and you are serious about pursuing them, you can force Facebook to do a lot of the work for you. You can have them detect users with languages set to Spanish or Arabic.” Facebook, Apple, and Twitter did not reply to requests for comment from BuzzFeed News, nor did Google or Microsoft.
During the course of his campaign, Trump expressed disgust at Apple, for refusing to create a backdoor that would let the FBI unlock an iPhone used by the attackers in San Bernardino. (The phone was ultimately unlocked with the help of a third-party private company that the FBI refused to name.) Trump told CNN during a debate that he would “penetrate the internet” to prevent ISIS from using it to recruit fighters and “close down parts of the internet.” Trump has, at times, expressed an interest in enhancing surveillance of Americans, saying at times that government should be tasked with with monitoring mosques and that police should create “demographics units.”
“We ought to start [surveillance] up again, and we ought to start it up this morning,” he told the Breitbart News Daily radio show last year.
Could President Trump Really Turn the NSA Into a Personal Spy Machine?:
Trump would not be able to authorize surveillance on, say, Hillary Clinton by himself, Moss said: at minimum, the order would have to go through a court (whether that particular court is essentially a rubber stamp is another issue, though). And on top of the legality of such an operation, there are the layers of lawyers and other institutions that handle such things.
“There’s the internal bureaucracy that’s designed to try to limit some of the more egregious or crazy ideas that might come from a political appointee,” Moss said. “You couldn’t just willy-nilly start spying on any particular American citizen you wanted,” he added. Foreign targets don’t have the same sort of protections, however.
So the personal army theory is arguably off the table. But of course the president still has exceptional power to shake-up the agency, put different people in charge of it, and adjust some of the legalities around its work.
Donald Trump won the presidency. Now, among so much else, the United States and the world will have to contend with a vast, largely unaccountable system of surveillance which will be at his control.
The growth of that system isn’t confined to any ideology. It’s grown vastly under the Obama administration, and likely would’ve continued to grow under Hillary Clinton, and the American deep state is existentially invested in its maintenance and growth.
Under Trump this system will be at the hands of someone who has a history of eavesdropping on his guests at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, is reportedly tracking his “enemies” and has expressed plans to punish them. On the campaign trail he said he would “bomb the shit” out of ISIS in Middle Eastern countries (and then take their oil), and late last year he told radio host Hugh Hewitt that he’d be inclined to support the NSA’s vast metadata collection despite the fact he neither uses computers nor understands digital technology.
Trump also enters office in a country where surveillance, including digital surveillance, disproportionately affects minorities (part of a long, shameful history) and where speech, especially political speech, is increasingly surveilled. Trump’s administration will probably embolden a largely unaccountable FBI, NSA, and local authorities who target black people, muslims, latinx immigrants, and other marginalized groups.
As Conor Friedersdorf wrote in The Atlantic three years ago, a tyrant has all the infrastructure he needs. Trump has won and we’re now faced with the question of what he will do with that infrastructure.
This is what it will be like to protest in 2020, when the state is watching your every move:
Surveillance has always been legal in the U.S., but before the proliferation of technology, it required manpower. Someone had to be actively surveilling you, driving a car behind yours, clicking a camera, jotting down notes on your every move. Now, tracking people is cheaper and easier than ever.
In 2020, law enforcement agencies are using this data in smarter, more precise, and creepier ways. Technologies were developed long ago to track you and your friends via your Facebook feed. So were databases where pictures of faces are stored indefinitely for use with facial recognition software. Cameras watching our moves on subways and in traffic and on the street have been inconspicuously recording for decades.
Now, technologies work in sync to build a comprehensive profile of every citizen. The state is aware of all your online and offline movements, but that’s only the beginning. They can now use all the information they’ve amassed over the years to predict what you’ll do next—where you’ll go, and with who, and why.
Source: fusion.net
How Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter Helped Police Target Black Activists
Calling it a “stroke of luck” that the BPD renewed their Geofeedia contract only days before the protests, the study reveals that law enforcement used facial recognition software to identify specific protestors from social media photos. They then matched that information to outstanding warrants and arrested protestors “directly from the crowd.”
Top Verizon lawyer says it’s too easy to give your location information to cops:
Your cellphone provider has a homing beacon in your pocket tracking your location with incredible precision. In a surprising op-ed, the top lawyer for Verizon, one of the biggest wireless providers out there, says that phone companies know so much about their customers’ whereabouts that the Supreme Court should consider making it harder for the police to get their hands on it.
Source: fusion.net