🌎🧑‍🚀🔫👨‍🚀

Whooo! Number one baby! Nobody does evil and fucked up better!

The irony is I remember growing up with numerous stories about how expression is locked down in China and everything there is surveilled and if you speak poorly against the government you’ll get arrested etc. And thank goodness we are free in America to express ourselves even if it’s against the government because, my gosh, I might not like what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it!

And as if with no sense of irony and not even a remote bit of critique, all those stories about surveillance in China (true or not, I don’t know) were actually true, are currently true, or are becoming true here in the USA. And in many cases they’re just sold as commodities back to us e.g. ring doorbell cameras.

And a final thought: the USA used to be able to justify many of its foreign interferences on a sort of moral high ground, including freedom of expression and all that. That mask was slipping but now with Trump2 seems to have just fallen off. The pretense has given away to crass might makes right international relations. I consider the USA becoming a hyper surveilled state to be part of this story.

I just want to ask on behalf of people who don't care about this, "why should I care about this"?

Because every time I bring up how much we're being spied on by the government or Amazon or Google, et al, people just shrug it off. At best, they'll admit it's a problem - for people who should be worried about it. Meaning, "I've got nothing to hide". If nothing else, Americans lack (or choose to reject) the basic concept of a shared society. If there's a threat that the government is spying on people, we believe it's the "other" people, not "us".

Threats to our privacy is largely hypothetical for the majority of people. I'd even argue that the whole premise of privacy is no longer what it was just 15-20 years ago. I've even had people argue with me that they 'want' to be tracked so the ads they see are relevant to them.

So, I could see some Americans read this story and be in full support of this. They believe in a spy state as a means of protection. Ironically, these are also often the same people flying "Don't Tread On Me" flags.

They really shouldn't call it spyware. What they're talking about is investment in the cyber mercenary industry

This is the original article

https://www.wired.com/story/us-spyware-investment/

I love democracy

Cheaper than to rely on the NSA because people have terrible privacy practices anyway?

In the case of AE Industrial Partners, investment performance reports show that the firm was backed by several US pension funds—among them the Contra Costa County Employees' Retirement Association, Baltimore Fire & Police Retirement System, Houston Firefighters' Relief and Retirement Fund, and the New Mexico Educational Retirement Board—providing cash that could help support the deal with Paragon, which could reach $900 million.

Daymn. Firefighters unknowingly profiting from for-profit cyber mercenaries

What do they define as an "investment"

No way, the country that literally spies on everyone has the best software for spying!? Who would have thought.

Damn

Apple, Google, Microsoft, Intel, AMD all report to it, so basically, yea. Then there are hidden spywares which they use to try to claim the above companies are independent.

"See, we used Pegasus, Apple really denied us access, they did, but he gave me a great gift, I like it, it's true. But I don't want people to lose trust on Tim Apple, so we say we used a spyware. Oogle too, I love oogle, I use it everyday. I can ask them to delete my history and hide articles on their search engine. Very good folks. I love them. They're doing great work for this administration. But they are not spyware. The Russians and Chinese make spyware. We're the good guys. My friends tell me we're the best everyday.

Thank you for you attention in this matter"