logoalt Hacker News

WarmWashtoday at 2:41 PM2 repliesview on HN

>It is likely that the US will get a live feed from each AI provider that they are inspecting in real time to identity things of interest, terrorist attacks or foreign government planning or even foreign companies competitive to key US companies.

My favorite conspiracy is that three letter agencies keep pushing the conspiracy that they are omni-present with access to everything. Same as parents telling their kids Santa is watching, and leaders telling adults God is watching. Its extremely effective control and millennia old at this point.

The reality is much more banal that they still need warrants and tech companies hate playing police/evidence servant for the government (it consumes a ton of resources and pays nothing).


Replies

thewebguydtoday at 3:02 PM

> warrants

The snowden leaks revealed that's not the case.

The three letter agencies can just issue national security letters without a judge ever seeing it, and those come a long with a gag order (plus other workarounds like just buying data from brokers, and how US communications can get swept up just by virtue of communicating with a foreign national outside the US).

You're right, they aren't omniscient in the way we imagine of a room full of people monitoring everything in real time. But to pretend they aren't passively collecting massive amounts of data is dangerous. Snowden showed us PRISM, with all major tech companies participating. They do effectively have a live, unrestricted wiretap to the internet and if you happen to be a person of interest, they will just send out NSLs and get all your communications that are not fully E2EE without you even knowing thanks to the gag order.

show 1 reply
roystingtoday at 2:56 PM

> The reality is much more banal that they still need warrants and tech companies hate playing police/evidence servant for the government

I will not elaborate how I know, but that is not even directionally correct. But these are not even secret things that can’t be known simply through the Snowden, Wikileaks, and Vault7 releases. So why are you telling yourself this? Are you still wet behind the ears or something?

There are people who know exactly how governments do not in fact need warrants and the tech companies don’t even really know they are servants to the government, let alone which one. That’s how things are done. The less surface area the better.

show 2 replies