Thread by @LibertyBlitz

1/ Thread on my latest post, which discusses the very real and present threat posed to our civil liberties as a result of surveillance capitalism and the increasingly close relationship of tech giants with government.

2/ Government surveillance and loss of civil liberties has been a primary concern of mine since I started writing publicly. The loss of the 4th Amendment in particular became increasingly troublesome after 9/11. I and many others were warning about it before Snowden came out.

3/ One key thing we learned from Snowden was the extent to which private companies, aka the big tech names we love so much, were helping government spy without telling the public. But we had hints of this from much earlier...

4/ Recall all the way back to 2006 when the New York Times published about how a former AT&T employee blew the whistle on how the NSA was using the company to spy on customers.

5/ "The AT&T documents suggest that telephone companies may be helping the government engage in wholesale interception of telephone calls, e-mail messages and Web surfing."
nytimes.com/2006/04/17/opi…

6/ In case you weren't aware, there was one telecom CEO who refused to play ball with government spying. The CEO of Quest. Guess what happened to him? He was thrown in jail.

7/ "Just one major telecommunications company refused to participate in a legally dubious NSA surveillance program in 2001. A few years later, its CEO was indicted by federal prosecutors."
washingtonpost.com/news/the-switc…

8/ So the writing's been on the wall for a long time, play ball with government or else. This is one reason the Snowden docs showed these technology companies compromising customer data in secret. These people aren't going to risk jail to protect your rights.

9/ Which takes us to the present day. We have a situation now where 3 companies, Amazon, Facebook and Google dominate a huge amount of online activity, and in the case of Facebook and Google, their entire business model is essentially citizen surveillance.

10/ There have been several important developments since the Snowden whistleblowing. Crucially, the tech giants have moved from merely violating 4th amendment rights, to more aggressively policing 1st amendment rights, ie free speech.

11/ We've seen Apple, Facebook, Twitter and Google all become judge and jury of what is acceptable speech on the internet given their dominance of the means of communications. What gave them cover to do this?

12/ Russia fear-mongering and fake news hysteria, all driven by the mass media and politicians because the wrong person won the election. So tech companies were given clearance to kill privacy after 9/11, and now free speech rights in practice following the 2016 election. Nuts.

13/ The precedent has now been set. Tech giants are the vehicle by which governments and oligarchs, worried that the plebs are getting restless about the rigged fraud economy, will crack down on the public square and spy on everything you do. This is literally happening right now

14/ So I'm increasingly losing patience for the naive and ignorant people saying...but but "they are private companies," they can do what they want! If a private company spies on you and then passes the info to the government in secret is this just a "private company"? No.

15/ If a private company is taking cues from intelligence agencies to ban certain accounts or certain types of speech, is this just a "private company." No. This is a company doing the government's dirty work to kill your civil rights. Fuck that.

16/ That's where we're at, and even those who complain still have an Amazon Echo in their home, or increasingly, a Ring doorbell surveillance camera (also from Amazon). See article below on how creepy this is.
wjlta.com/2019/01/28/how…

17/ And by the way, I consider Amazon the worst of the worst. Bezos is deep in bed with government/intelligence agencies and angling to get deeper and deeper in bed with them. Here's some of what he's been up to.

18/ You basically can't use the internet without interacting with Amazon, as a Gizmodo journalist recently showed. If you can't use the web and avoid a massive company controlled by the richest guy in the world, we need to redefine what Amazon is.
gizmodo.com/i-tried-to-blo…

19/ Not just a private company. Amazon is essentially a utility from various angles, but a utility with zero restrictions. It has total freedom to do whatever the heck it wants to the public and you can't avoid it. Very, very dangerous. This applies to other tech giants as well.

20/ I'm done with the b.s. and I'm not going to pretend these companies are just private companies. They are for profit quasi-government entities and we need to address the existential threat they pose to what freedom and civil liberties we have left before it's too late.

21/ If you found this thread interesting, check out my latest post for more:
libertyblitzkrieg.com/2019/01/30/two…

22/ Finally, if you get value from anything I do and want to support my efforts, you can do so here: libertyblitzkrieg.com/support-libert…

23/ And Bitcoiners, I love getting BTC, so don't be shy. Thanks.
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