PrivacyYea this wasn't a secret. I am coming to the conclusion that lemmy is just bots pretending to be stupid people.
Snowden told us this was happening over a decade ago
Yeah apparently this stuff is way worse than what Snowden exposed. I can only imagine, probably a shit ton of manipulation, torture, murder, and targeted assassination of US citizens besides just the 24/7 wholesale spying on every adult and child.
If they're admitting to this, just imagine everything they're not.
Several senators are on record saying the public would be shocked if they knew what their government was doing in regards to spying on Americans and even Congress itself. This is post-snowden as well so it is apparently way worse than the horrible shit that was already exposed.
One of those senators (Ron Wyden) is the one that asked the question Patel was answering in this hearing.
The timeline definitely says something about the shift of the Overton window within the government itself, with what they're willing to admit and normalize. Hopefully the same Overton window doesn't shift as radically for the people.
I'm only surprised that they are paying for it.
They can buy the data, then raid the vendors and confiscate whatever will make up for the cost. Or they can just raid whoever refuses to sell data to them and keep the cooperative vendors in business.
Back in the Before Trump Times, the US Congress actually passed laws that restrained the intelligence services' ability to use their unique capabilities to spy on Americans.
OFC they left the out that if anyone could buy the info off-the-shelf, that could hardly be illegal now, could it?
They don't want to do anything unethical.
Companies deserve our taxdollars after all
Okay surely there is some kind of business plan where your data can be poisoned. Probably lots of them.
Off the top of my head --
You register a SIM in a cheap phone but not a burner -- using your own name, credit card, etc. You send it to (company). They put the phone and a few random others in a car/bicycle basket/truck. Retrieve a week later, compensate the driver, re-randomize, repeat.
Maybe you register a debit card or low-limit credit card, and send it in. The company's driver/bicyclist/trucker occasionally buys ~$5 in small items at convenience stores: candy, a coffee, etc. Top up an extra $X/mo to keep the random txns flowing.
I'm sure people will think of more. I'm sure there is some price point that makes sense for some potential customers. People who really really want to throw USA off their trail, criminals, privacy nuts, libertarians, Linux users, etc
adnauseum i guess. it clicks on ads and shit in the background to generate revenue for the websites and obscures tracking and personal advertising. It is built ontop ublock origin.
The United States is subsidizing privatized tracking of US citizens. This isn't just a sale it's an exchange of massive amounts of money for data the government could have just collected on it's own but it's so captured it's just icing on the cake to be able to fleece the taxpayer as well.
