You may have nothing to fear right now, but you never know who’s going to be in office soon.

The way I always explain it to people - take any additional government power or access to information you either don't care about or actively support. Now imagine whoever you oppose/hate the most taking office and trying to use that against your interests. Are you still OK with them having that power? Same principle applies regardless of what power or who's pushing for it.

It's like due process - you don't want any category of alleged violation not to be subject to due process, and if you don't understand why then it's time to wrongfully accuse you of doing that so you understand the problem.

Like those people that signed up for DNA sequencing for heritage research. Now that info is going to be sold. The problem is it could be used to discriminate for health insurance or other nefarious reasons

I still think DOGE is just feeding all that information to Palantir, and everything else is a pretext to that goal.

What is your definition of Fascist, here?

It seems to get tossed around at everything, these days. Not a fan if the NSA either, nor the Patriot Act, either.

Lol i really cringed at that phrasing about "good people doing bad things". Theyre literally fascists doing fascism to advance their interests, it really doesn't matter if they are vegan and have dogs.

Yeah, so what if I want to hide a bunch of Jews in my attic?

My response is similar, usually the good old 'Do you shut the door when you shit?'.

When we start getting specific, I'll often try and frame data harvesting in a much more visceral way. If they say they don't care that xyz keeps track of everyone they talk to, I ask them to imagine an actual person standing behind them, making notes on a clipboard about every interaction they have with someone, and how that would make them feel.

So the quote was about the American secret service?

Which country? Plenty of countries have at least a nominal right to privacy, but it doesn't end up meaning much when US companies own your country's communications platforms.

Snowden is a brave guy in some ways, but even in spite of his leaks, he's remained a naive US-supremacist libertarian, who evangangelizes tech over political action, defends the OTF, silicon valley, and US-DoD funded crypto tools and privacy apps.

The lesson of 2013 is not that the NSA is evil. It’s that the path is dangerous. The network path is something that we need to help users get across safely. Our job as technologists, our job as engineers, our job as anybody who cares about the internet in any way, who has any kind of personal or commercial involvement is literally to armor the user, to protect the user and to make it that they can get from one end of the path to the other safely without interference,” he told an auditorium filled with the world’s foremost computer and network engineers at a 2015 meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force in Prague. He reaffirmed his view a year later at Fusion’s 2016 Real Future Fair in Oakland, California. “If you want to build a better future, you’re going to have to do it yourself. Politics will take us only so far and if history is any guide, they are the least reliable means of achieving the effective change.… They’re not gonna jump up and protect your rights,” he said. “Technology works differently than law. Technology knows no jurisdiction.”

Weird how Edward Snowden is basically a Boddhisatwa and Julian Assange

Defining someone a Bodhisattva is complex. Snowden & Assange acted with potential benefit & harm. True Bodhisattvas act from pure compassion & wisdom, embodying equanimity. Their actions offer reflection on truth & consequences.

Could you explain what you mean by that please?

We'll be right back after these messages

I'm gonna guess a whole lot of flustered backpedaling amounting to not a lot of anything, but I'm willing to be surprised if someone wants to dig up the video.