NSA wooing thousands of laid-off Big Tech workers for spy agency's hiring spree

Re:NSA wooing thousands of laid-off Big Tech workers for spy... by gizmo686 on Sunday February 05, 2023 @03:16PM (#34668809)

Yet it was private companies that managed to get almost everyone to carry around a microphone, video camera, accelerometer, gps device which they also use to store and transmit the majority of their personal conversations.

Granted, they do not snoop on you to the maximum extent the hardware of these devices allow. But, take a look at [0]. Unless you are one of the few people who goes out of their way to limit tracking, do you think that the NSA would be able to get that detailed tracking of everyone's movements.

And this is just the obvious part (which Google is nice enough to share with its users as a feature). Big tech companies have also built detailed models of most people's interests; which is simply not possible without the large amount of data that comes from people actually interacting with them.

All of the NSA's dragnet surveillance is built on the back of private industry, and works because that private industry has convinced people to participate in it.

[0] https://www.google.com/maps/timeline

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:NSA wooing thousands of laid-off Big Tech workers for spy... by soup10 on Sunday February 05, 2023 @04:18PM (#34669520)

It's true that state surveillance infrastructure is mostly built on top of civilian infrastructure, the original post just made it sound like the NSA didn't have its own enormous datacenters and wasn't slurping and processing an extraordinary amount of data.

[ Parent | on HN ]