I really like this passage:

>It is always the case that there are benefits available from relinquishing core civil liberties: allowing infringements on free speech may reduce false claims and hateful ideas; allowing searches and seizures without warrants will likely help the police catch more criminals, and do so more quickly; giving up privacy may, in fact, enhance security.

> But the core premise of the West generally, and the U.S. in particular, is that those trade-offs are never worthwhile. Americans still all learn and are taught to admire the iconic (if not apocryphal) 1775 words of Patrick Henry, which came to define the core ethos of the Revolutionary War and American Founding: “Give me liberty or give me death.” It is hard to express in more definitive terms on which side of that liberty-versus-security trade-off the U.S. was intended to fall.

We have a branch of government called Congress, here are some things they used to do that made it a crime to read your mail or listen to your phone calls.

1. Postal Service Act of 1792

2. Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986

Anyway, Facebook can read your DMs, Google can read your email, Ring can take photos from your camera.

We can very easily make those things a crime, but we don't seem to want to do it.

I know it seems hard, but just stop using Google, Amazon, Meta products. Tell everyone you know to stop using their products. They have all been acquiring and amassing surveillance for years through their products and now they're just double dipping with AI training to sell you more of it. The more you can get people to realize and disconnect the better.

I wish more people would use AI to build alternatives with a clear, binding mission not to exploit the data, not to sell or be funded by investors who expect it to, etc. We have the power to build more than ever. We should use it.

So, what's currently going on to fight back against all this? Here's what I found. Does signing a petition actually doing something? It's hard to tell but if you are inclined, at least take a look at some current efforts.

-Active Petitions and Campaigns to Limit Surveillance: End the Surveillance State (Action Network): Petitions call on Congress to permanently end the PATRIOT Act, stop warrantless surveillance, and oppose the expansion of surveillance technology.

-Ban Facial Recognition (Amnesty International & ACLU): Amnesty International is running the "Ban the Scan" campaign, while the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) targets the use of face surveillance, arguing it poses risks to civil liberties and disproportionately impacts marginalized communities.

-Stop Surveillance Data Brokers (Mozilla): Mozilla Foundation is targeting major websites to stop sharing data with surveillance technology firms that track user movement and interactions.

-Protect User Data from Subpoenas (EFF): The Electronic Frontier Foundation is pressuring tech companies to resist lawless DHS subpoenas for user data.

-Oppose Localized Surveillance (ACLU/Action Network): Local petitions aim to limit technologies like Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPRs) that create massive databases of personal movement.

-Federal Legislative Reform: Advocates are pushing for the "The Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act," which aims to restrict intelligence agencies from purchasing data from brokers without a warrant.

Glenn Greenwald is back on substack. Yay! For the past few years, he’s mostly done videos on rumble, and he’s fun to watch, but personally I prefer his writing. In case you’ve been under a rock for 10 years, Greenwald was the guy who published Snowden’s revelations. His focus has always been on censorship, surveillance, and hypocrisy in government.

> But the graphic Amazon used seems to have unwittingly depicted how invasive this technology can be

This is a calculated move to normalize such technology. Yes, it will cause controversy in the short term, and these companies knew this was a possibility—but as a result the image in people's minds won't be the gestapo rounding up grannies; it'll kids finding puppies. To call this "unwitting" is simply naive (not surprising for Greenwald).

I don't think people grasp the gravity of the situation.

I see everyone talking about how to stop using products. I even thought about legislation that could help. But that's just it, none of that is possible. You can't even employ a "torches and pitchforks" approach. For any of this to be possible, people would have to coordinate. The means by which people communicate and coordinate are under the influence and control of the very entities that the people are trying to bring under control.

The only way to win this war is by means of economic warfare. And I don't mean "vote with your wallet". If I could spell out what I mean here, then the previous paragraph would have been invalid.

It's a clear violation of the 4th Amendment, but the government acts like they've found a "loophole" because it's private businesses doing the spying.

It’s pretty amazing when you get the worst of both worlds—total surveillance, yet still rampant crime.

Ring camera spyware, Amazons....excuse me Department of Defence/War..whatever the name, they have contracts with Amazon, which had the Super Bowl ad reveiling a new feature called "search party"...which it uses AI face/pattern recognition under the guise "search for missing dogs" to scan all its cameras videos for the "missing dog"... .Now this scans all Ring cameras, inside houses, outside houses, wherever theres a Ring camera....but its really to find people, dissenters, "criminals" in the eyes of the satanic surveillance system. The minds involved always play on the emotions of people to bring this about, such as a child who lost their dog or an "illegal" immigrant who commited a crime...they spread the propaganda, stir up emotions, then get the results...more gullible Americans accepting more surveillance and spying on their neighbors like the psychos did with fake "covid" hysteria. Part of their propaganda the so called missing lady Nancy Guthrie...how convenient, right around the time of Amazons search party, Google Nest has the psyop. With a sherrif saying the videos were not saved, she didnt have a Google Nest subscription..lol, see where thats going?

> This language moves beyond platform-level age gates and toward infrastructure embedded directly into hardware or operating systems.

This is lurching toward what the US military calls the Common Access Card. This is a security token carried by most US military. It's used for everything from logins to building access to meals.[1]

Merely having a Common Access Card doesn't allow access to anything. The system reading it has to recognize the identity. So there are lots of databases of who's allowed to do what.

Is that where we're going?

[1] https://www.cac.mil/common-access-card/

[delayed]

This type of centralization breeds authoritarianism. See also the Iran protests. There’s too many single points of failure in technology. These systems become sources of oppression inevitably.

How do we build a resilient system that doesn’t rely on single platforms?

As a side and probably fully off topic note (although...), I asked ChatGPT an innocent code question while not giving my code. It basically answered with the variable name I had written in my own code (da.ma.st) (a variable inside an object inside an object : data.main.stance). I still have to understand how and why it happened (I am not using anything else than ChatGPT in my browser and I absolutely never provided this chunk of code to the AI).

I further noticed that while I had a chatgpt window open, my dev site window was becoming laggy after many refreshes as if something was deliberately trying to scan it every time it got refreshed. I suspect the AI to scan other open tabs and simply reading through everything it can encounter. It is actually the only explanation up to date (but I unfortunately don't have much time to try to validate this speculative opinion: I will surely give other shots in order to narrow my suspicions).

I tend to think that this kind of data extraction frenziness may be a big problem in the future. Read it as : "let's collect everything, just tell everyone we are not collecting it, and then we'll see what we can get from it." Imagine such data being used in the future versions of governments if things get wild.

There’s more posts that get to the front page complaining about Apple’s frosted glass than the surveillance state being built by every other tech company

https://archive.ph/20260214004458/https://greenwald.substack...

It is remarkable that it took an ad from the same company that makes the product to make (some) people come to the realization of the surveillance they are subjected to and uninstall their cameras. The public is truly clueless despite all the messaging from the EFF and other organizations.

It is also interesting that US seems to be getting the surveillance state without any of the benefits such as low crime rate. In my view it is a valid choice for the country of having more crime Vs more surveillance, but in the US such a choice is not offered.

if you really want users to see an outward sign of your respect for privacy, start building cameras with lens covers, and microphones with mute switches, and a "flag" of some sort that clearly demonstrates the position of the privacy hardware.

Great writeup. Glenn mentions that he stopped using Gemini. While I still use Gemini for technical research and occasional coding/design work via Antigravity, for all day to day queries and prompts I have switched to using Proton's Lumo that is really quite good: use of a strong Mistral model and web search is 100% private, and while chat history is preserved for a while it is stored and processed like Proton Mail.

More good reading that I found helpful are the books: Privacy is Power and Surveillance Capitalism.

> "All of this is particularly remarkable, and particularly disconcerting, since we are barely more than a decade removed from the disclosures about mass domestic surveillance enabled by the courageous whistleblower Edward Snowden..."

With respect to Greenwald, I don't think it's remarkable at all.

I have learned, through experience, that sometimes when people want to do things they should not, or against which there is opposition, there is enormous power in simply doing it. If you ignore people enough, you can do anything.

Preventing this requires systems with accountability.

And as HN commenters frequently note, accountability for government, tech, or corporate leaders in general seems culturally missing in the US.

Despite Snowden, nothing here is remarkable. This has grown because it _can_ grow.

I don't respect Glenn Greenwald after he decided to become a Kremlin spokesperson.

Much ado about nothing, this link has been going around the Fediverse: https://www.resistandunsubscribe.com/

Big Brother… It's a cliché, but I think it's a fitting expression. Is it true that individuals themselves are the only means of self-defense?

I mean, this does not come as a surprise. If you look at the US corporations, not just Amazon or Google but Facebook, or more recently Discord - and our all-time favourite chummer, Microsoft - this all screams of strategic mass sniffing and snooping after people. There is 0% chance that this is done solely on a per-corporate level. This is systematic sniffing.

I think the long term solution will have to be to become as independent as possible on these sniffer-corporations and to get real people into office rather than those lobbyists who work for those corporations. This will require a complete re-design of the whole system though. I am not sure we'll see that in our lifetime.

Just give them fake information when signing up. They want your money more than accurate information.

This probably even has ramifications beyond US residents.

I'm confident Google etc will be compelled (if they haven't already been) to share their dossiers with the US and allies so that there is a file on each individual's psychology, weaknesses, and a how-to manual for gaslighting that person with the goal to silence them or coerce them into acting a certain way.

And by then, the Stasi would look like cute amateurs in comparison.

Those raising these concerns have been dismissed as paranoid for decades, even post-Snowden. And yet, surprising no-one, here we are.

Dropped Alexa years ago. They sure can do the same thing, and listen into every house "to find a missing child". Or some other BS. Or let all Alexas say "This is a national emergency. Do not leave the house. This is ..."

East Germany spent millions to spy on people.

Now people spend millions so the state can spy on them.

Madness.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260215130824/https://greenwald...

Anyone have an archive link?

It's pretty disappointing that there are engineers enabling all of this.

Greenwald demonstrating his technological illiteracy once again. This time, he doesn't say that PRISM is mass surveillance, though he writes about it right next to where he talks about mass surveillance and has never admitted his mistake.

Now he's complaining that Nest had video footage without a subscription as if the user wouldn't know this. Nest still processes video for motion detection alerts for people without a subscription. It just deletes the video after processing unless you have a subscription to pay for the storage. Even though I am not a user myself, I'd be surprised if this isn't clear to the people who use the product. I am not at all surprised that Greenwald doesn't understand it though.

"...While the “discovery” of footage from this home camera by Google engineers is obviously of great value to the Guthrie family and law enforcement agents searching for Guthrie, it raises obvious yet serious questions about why Google, contrary to common understanding, was storing the video footage of unsubscribed users. A former NSA data researcher and CEO of a cybersecurity firm, Patrick Johnson, told CBS: “There's kind of this old saying that data is never deleted, it's just renamed.”..."

Its another copy of their MAC data storage scenario due to a "rogue engineer"

Regular where I live:

I don't use google maps, I use Waze I don't use messenger, I use whatsapp I don't upload my pictures, contacts (sync is enabled by default)

Anyways. What are the options? It will be another free cloud hosted service.

The backlash against the use of Ring cameras began with their tone-deaf superbowl ad. Amazon assumed that customers would buy their surveillance technology. The whole thing reminds me that we have returned to the Gilded Age, when the rich people who run the world strutted about arrogantly, without fear of shame or public disapproval. It’s as if Bezos is telling us “you have no choice. You will buy our product whether you like it or not.”

Will another Progressive Era bring about more equality, or are the billionaires too entrenched?

I can say from direct experience Apple is not any better and at times much worse as they actively lie about their security measures by obscuring loopholes left open for direct government access as well as they cooperate with little to no push back.

The surveillance industry has gotten out of hand. It is also true that there is ample reason to ignore and avoid anything coming out of the OA's author, who has a strong history of Russian-aligned propaganda efforts. Please don't cite him or amplify him further. Propaganda and disinfo ops worldwide are just as big of a problem as accelerating, unchecked, abused surveillance.

Once again we see tech companies capitulating to the US government who is actually doing the things we accuse China is theoretically doing in the future.

I don't own a smart speaker. It's actually annoying because there are so few options for a music system now. I've previously owned a Sonos but honestly it's just not a polished product. Anyway, my issue with smart speakers is I don't want a cloud-connected always-on microphones in my house. Sorry but no. You simply never know when law enforcement will use such a thing via a warrant nobody can tell you about (ie FISA). It could be targeted to you, individually but there are far worse alternatives.

It could be a blanket warrant against, say, people posting negatively against ICE online. Or microphones couldd be used to identify such people based on what it hears. You just have no control.

And once again, Google handed over PII voluntarily to the government recently [1]. Companies don't need to comply with administrative subpoenas. It takes a court order signed by a judge to enforce.

All of this is just another reason why China was correct to keep US tech companies out, basically. But here's where it's going to get much worse for the US and those same companies: when the EU decides enough is enough and creates their own versins that are subject to EU jurisdiction.

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/10/google-sent-personal-and-f...

At this point, it's fair to assume that if the US government wanted to surveil you to a nefarious end, they absolutely could, easily, using things you bought to make your life more convenient.

The keys then become:

1) Implementing policies discouraging them from doing so at the societal level

and

2) Implementing force behind those policies at the personal and societal level

DHS isn't getting paid right now because Kristi "Dog Shooter" Noem managed to screw up so badly that even Congressional Republicans under Trump don't want to own her agency's behavior and carved DHS out of the normal funding bill. There's still a chance for #1 to be achieved. #2 remains to be seen at the societal level, but you can start working on that yourself for the personal level.

Who would have thought that after changing no laws to ban the behavior, firing nobody, and re-upping the post-9/11 laws consistently, that the process would continue? I, for one, am shocked... that anyone might be shocked about this.

He’s not wrong but screw Glenn Greenwald. I assume his solution will be to back the current or next strongman, because strongman rule will save us?

It’s like the “don’t tread on me” militia crowd voting by like a 90% margin for a regime that is now enacting every single one of the things they’ve been afraid of for 50 years: masked cops, opaque detention centers, assaulting (and murdering) people for legally exercising second amendment rights, mass surveillance, social credit systems, and so on.

Or, I guess, like Lenin creating a totalitarian state to enslave the workers to liberate the workers? Or the French Revolution replacing the monarchy with the terror? Many examples in history I suppose.

Reminder: Glen Greenwald doesn’t think Jan 6 was an insurrection and now aligns with people like Tim Pool and Alex Jones.

I know Ring is getting a bad rap for enabling state level surveillance, but the Ring app offers an option to enable end-to-end encryption between the camera and your phone.

The stored video is encrypted with key generated on your phone. You have to be physically close to the camera in order to share the key and complete the set-up. Once encrypted, the video can't be analyzed by AI or used in a broad surveillance effort.

It's entirely possible that the encryption keys have a backdoor, but I doubt it. Although there is no way to verify.