Re:U.S. will continue to seek Assange’s extradition – U.S. J...
by randomopining on Monday January 04, 2021 @07:45PM
(#25640473)
You realize that the democratic spy agencies have to deal with China, Russia, and terrorists? So you would want us to hold ourselves to the highest standards, while they could play every dirty trick in the book and eventually take us over.
Then we lose our democracy that you and I both cherish.
Also these things don't even impact 99.999% of people.
Re:U.S. will continue to seek Assange’s extradition – U.S. J...
by webmobdev on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @10:04PM
(#25666771)
> So you would want us to hold ourselves to the highest standards, while they could play every dirty trick in the book
Yes. You want democratic values to survive over generations, not "democracies". Spying on your own citizens, to figure out how to manipulate them better through corporates, transfers the power from the people to select corporates and government. It upsets the balance of power that democracy promises. And is thus an attack on its very essence.
Re:U.S. will continue to seek Assange’s extradition – U.S. J...
by sjg007 on Monday January 04, 2021 @08:41PM
(#25640984)
What does spying on Americans have to do with China, Russia and terrorists (who are by definition foreign nationals)..?
Re:U.S. will continue to seek Assange’s extradition – U.S. J...
by randomopining on Tuesday January 05, 2021 @04:24PM
(#25651298)
Dual citizen spies that infiltrate tech companies or the DOD? There’s plenty of those.
Re:U.S. will continue to seek Assange’s extradition – U.S. J...
by webmobdev on Wednesday January 06, 2021 @10:06PM
(#25666785)
So everyone is presumed guilty until their innocence is proven? Does that sound like a working democracy or like China or Russia?
Re:U.S. will continue to seek Assange’s extradition – U.S. J...
by randomopining on Thursday January 07, 2021 @01:44PM
(#25675319)
How is a passive act of surveilling the same as being guilty?
Passive surveilling (esp the mass metadata type) doesn't hurt anybody.
He sabotaged the United States' most ambitious, long-term well-planned program to completely privatise spying around the world (through tech companies that would make money off it - a true capitalist wet dream), thus helping democracies around the world survive a bit more longer.
To this end, Hollywood had also slowly changed the tone of their content to carefully push narcissism to the public, so that people would overshare information about themselves, the people they know and their own activities, publicly on the internet. Private tech companies (like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook etc.) meanwhile slowly moved on to harvesting more and more data, testing the boundaries each time slowly, to create profiles of their users they could analyse for behavioural insights and this allowed them two streams of income - from providing access to personal data of individuals to government agencies and by using this personal data to manipulate the users to sell something.
Another big goal, with the "cloud computing" push is to get government agencies and companies worldwide to store their privileged information on servers online that can be easily accessed. This serves two main purposes - the push to "computing on the cloud" means access to technology can be highly controlled, and denied to other countries. (In today's connected world, US companies can deactivate and cripple nearly all computers, including smartphones and tablets, if it wants, of any country, if it is connected to the internet). The other purpose is that corporate espionage is easier if all data is on the cloud, thus allowing the US and the west to maintain a technological lead over others.
Ofcourse, it's easier to do this with some help with allies and thus we have the "5 eyes" and "9 eyes" program, where other spy agencies of other countries agree to share each others database.
It is a brilliant program but against democratic values.
People like Assange, who help whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, deserve our full praise and support. Democracy cannot survive in darkness and denial of information. The public are not dumb, as some politicians like to think so.