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A comment on NSA Buys Americans' Internet Data Without Warrants, Unclassified Letter Says. Parent comment

Re:NSA Buys Americans' Internet Data Without Warrants, Uncla... by pjc50 on Friday January 26, 2024 @05:18AM (#39140938)
Well, yes. American discourse has got backed into this corner:

- "the government" (broadly defined) is not supposed to be able to spy on people

- there is no general privacy law, only narrowly defined bits for e.g. video rental records and libraries

- corporations spying on people is completely normalized

- reporting the results of your spying to other people is free speech

> If there is no law against the proprietor bundling up his customer data and selling it, it doesn't seem like there is a strong legal case against police using it.

So long as there's a strong "corporations good, government bad" faction this is going to continue to be a problem.

(Weirdly, the "government bad" faction don't seem to be concerned with police accountability at all, except in very narrow cases where one of their own is arrested for blatent crimes)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:NSA Buys Americans' Internet Data Without Warrants, Uncla... by salawat on Friday January 26, 2024 @05:49AM (#39141162)
Technically, if we'd consider corporations part of the government (which we arguably should; many acts of regulation that would be impractical to implement directly through the government are farmed out as the responsibility of corporations as a pre-req of doing business), many surveillance capitalism patterns would become fraught by default.

The "corporations aren't government entities" defies logic. As without government recognition, they aren't even a thing.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:NSA Buys Americans' Internet Data Without Warrants, Uncla... by pjc50 on Friday January 26, 2024 @08:47AM (#39142531)
> if we'd consider corporations part of the government (which we arguably should;

I'm not sure that even the Chinese legal system does that. It makes a nonsense of "part of".

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:NSA Buys Americans' Internet Data Without Warrants, Uncla... by salawat on Friday January 26, 2024 @05:56PM (#39149954)
It does not. If you're a legal fiction, at some level your existential DNA is entwined with your political system's existence.

It doesn't make a nonsense of "part-of" at all; unless you don't want to inherit government centric probibitions to deal with in calculating your business model.

[ Parent | on HN ]