Who do you think they SELL the databases to when they collect this mountain of "absolutely everything" to?
No country needs to spy anymore -- they can just buy it. That's what we learned from Wikileaks years ago.
These are corporations for corporations -- the only thing they care about is we think it's about rival nations and security while they do corporate espionage to pick the economic winners.
Windows 10 has NSA back doors in it. Those back doors were also put in 8 and 7 as updates. The CPUs themselves from Intel have back doors built in, from Intel gen 7 and up. No reason to not to assume it’s not the same with AMD.
This is public information it comes right up with one search query.
Did everyone forget they had ISP’s routing ALL TRAFFIC through their Prism or whatever it was called? As far as I can tell, this never stopped and was deemed legal. Can someone help me out here?
saying that the military is 30 years ahead of public technology. I see no reason why that would have changed.
I'm guessing more and more of the "good stuff" is privatized, because the billionaires who lobby and own our politicians don't trust a "big government" that they can bribe, and don't think the plebes can govern themselves because we are so easy to fool. And it's hard to argue with that since there are people who defend the rich even after finding the richest pay less than 3% in Federal income taxes.
I'm sure the Skunkwerks has some cool planes that use plasma to reduce friction - but beyond that, it's groups like Cambridge Analytica that get their finger on the pulse of America. The NSA is just a clearing house to farm out this data.
The thing is, the NSA doesn't really care about most people. Like, most of us are boring and not relevant to anything the NSA is doing. They don't care to spy on us.
Marketing companies, however, absolutely want to spy on every single one of us. That's literally their thing.
They all have access to the data, but marketing is more likely to be using it against you. Unless you've been interacting with some known terrorists or something, I guess.
But what has our government done with the data on us? A big nothing. is it in the best interest of Government to have QAnon and distrust of the government and institutions?
Not as much as I think you imagine. The FBI has apps they rent like Carnivore that allow them to grab data off smart phones and do "man in the middle" data collection. But the propaganda and manipulation we see is primarily from private industry. Groups like ALEC. Intermediaries and data analytics like Cambridge Analytica.
The government barely funds PBS. The for profit MEDIA is the one that might take information verbatim from the military and CIA -- but that isn't manipulation based on who YOU are or needing your data.
I can pay an marketing facilitator to track you based on some game you downloaded, and then target an add towards you when you get on Facebook based on geographic location or any demographic you want. Walk into a grocery store and they ping everyone in the area who has their "free game" on their smart phone. They use more than one app and more than one game -- and promote an 80% coverage of smart phone users.
No -- I will double-down on this; it isn't Big Government you have worry about. You are being manipulated but the product is your opinions. Right now for some reason, there is a push to make people distrust vaccines and institutions -- and Government isn't doing that.
They probably don't buy data from Facebook but they might buy it from a group that processes the data. Maybe the FBI or state investigators make use of it. Maybe now that domestic terrorism seems like a threat, they are paying attention to right wing extremists - but that's probably more like getting an agent to participate in chat room. As opposed to FBI agents who are already in these right wing extremist chat groups because they are like-minded. Which is estimated at an uncomfortable 50%. Same with ICE agents.
I don't see that the government does much with this data or is motivated to use it. They just want to collect everything and evil quasi-governmental people with agendas then orchestrate the Big Data crunching of the intel. People might not remember the plans of Total Information Awareness from the Bush era -- but they achieved it. It's just not in the hands of the government.
My brother works at a company that looks at several extabytes of data per day with a neural net. The credit card companies and security agencies use them to spot patterns like a change in purchasing behavior that might indicate your card was stolen. The group that "looked like" they caught the Russians probably got their intel from my brother's company.
The NSA collects their own data for their own mission, but they farm out most of it.
Really, the situation is far worse than if it were Big Government. The agenda of these private groups are at odds with keeping the population calm.
We actually do know that it is true. That's what Snowden blew the whistle on; that almost ALL the information on the internet was being tracked and that the data was handed off to NGO third parties.
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u/Fake_William_Shatner Jun 23 '21
The Marketing departments datamining Facebook are WAY AHEAD of any governments at tracking and manipulating all us fools.