When I give talks about surveillance in Silicon Valley, techies will say, "Well, I don't care if Google gets my data to show me better ads, but the NSA is full of low-IQ sociopaths who couldn't get a job in tech."
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When I speak in the Beltway, govies say, "I don't care about Uncle Sam gathering data on me - the USG already knows all about me. But those grifters in Silicon Valley would sell their mothers for a nickel."
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What neither gets is that private surveillance is public surveillance - and vice-versa. Why do governments exercise forbearance in regulating the obviously harmful, toxic surveillance industry? Because they rely on raiding private data to do mass surveillance on a budget.
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Today in @wired, @jshermcyber explains how this works in exquisite detail in "Data Brokers Are a Threat to Democracy," a piece on the vast, shadowy private data brokerage industry.
These companies - Acxiom, CoreLogic, and Epsilon - have deep dossiers on billions of people, segmented in categories like "Rural and Barely Making It" and "Ethnic Second-City Strugglers." Sometimes, they're also tech companies - Oracle owns 80 data-brokerages!
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These huge data-troves are raided by stalkers and spies, used to target people illegally based on race, religion and sexual orientation, and are also critical to US government surveillance.
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As Sherman points out, there's not much sense in getting worked up about Americans' data going to China because they're on Tiktok when that same data - and more - is for sale in a vast, sleazy, unregulated smorgasbord.
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ETA - If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
The FCC long epitomized "regulatory capture" - an agency whose leadership worked a revolving door with the industry it oversees; a crooked beat-cop who served as willing accomplice to decades of fraud, leaving Americans to struggle with overpriced, underperforming broadband.
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There have been many terrible FCC chairs and commissioners, but even in that crowded, manure-strewn field, one man stands out as the worst FCC chair in American history, @AjitPai, the former Verizon lawyer who became Trump's FCC chairman.
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Pai set many precedents, such as accepting millions of comments in support of his anti-Net Neutrality order even though they came from dead people, people whose identities had been stolen, and a series of random strings prepended to "@Pornhub.com".
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Today, @ProjectReboot pubished "Unfair Use," an updated version of "IP," my September 2020 column for @locusmag, which I consider to be the most important piece I have written in my 13 years as a Locus columnist.
In the article, I describe how the copyleft/commons/floss world has spent decades fighting a losing battle to get people to stop saying "IP," on the grounds that copyright, trademark and patents aren't property, nor are they similar enough to group them under a single banner.
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Instead, copyfighters insist that people either refer to specific laws ("copyright," "trademark," etc), or, if these disparate concepts MUST be grouped, let them be referred to using the original term-of-art, "authors' monopolies" or "creators' monopolies."
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2.5b people in Earth's 130 poorest countries have not been vaccinated. The 85 poorest countries won't be vaccinated until 2023. The humanitarian cost is unforgivable - and self-defeating, as each infected person is a potential source of new strains.
What happened to the early pledges by governments, the WHO, public health experts and leading research institutions to create global cooperation in vaccine development, eschewing patents and secrecy so that we could rescue our species?
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That dream was smashed.
Many people helped create our #VaccineApartheid, the single individual who did the most to get us here is Bill Gates, through his highly ideological "philanthropic" foundation, which exists to push his pitiless doctrine of unfettered monopoly.
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