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IRS Busted in Mass Surveillance Program
So the IRS has been busted buying data from a company that claims to have decent geo-tracking data racked and stacked for 25% of adults in America. Two things: The video linked here is from a guy who is usually better on tech and privacy — I think that he’s a bit out of his depth. Perhaps he is intentionally understating the obvious. The way he goes on about the poor innocent Muslims makes me think that there’s a serious lack of understanding, however. Also caution — a bit of language. FEDs are Purchasing Location Data From Multiple Apps to Track People – YouTube
So his questions about why on earth the IRS would need such info about these particular strata really miss the obvious point alluded to above — which feeds into my second point. What he either misses or pretends not to notice in this video is what seems obvious to me. The government and Big Tech are colluding in what I call “internal rendition”, an analog to “extraordinary rendition”, in which battlefield or terror-suspect prisoners were shuffled (“rendered”) to other countries for abusive interrogation because our own agencies are largely forbidden to carry out such uh questioning. It’s a legalistic dodge that only a lawyer could love.
“Internal rendition” then is the government conducting forbidden operations against individual citizens at home, and the citizenry as a whole, by outsourcing the work to Big Tech. The tech overlords have the power to do, but not to bless, which complements the government’s position quite nicely. The end result is a massive domestic surveillance program, utterly illegal, dressed up in legal clothing. “Secure in papers and possessions,” like the first amendment, does not restrict the activities of private companies. Unless you are a Christian baker.
The video above questions why app developers would sell this data. The truth is, many of these developers don’t even know it’s happening. They incorporate handy, useful, and tested libraries instead of reinventing every wheel each time. Those libraries (snippets of code for doing things) are part of an application’s “upstream”, the stuff that others made and which an app developer gets to use. “Upstream” is where most of the sale happens. App developers are pikers compared to the makers of handy app widgets like the Facebook Like button.
I’ve written before about the Facebook SDK for Android. I’ll link the video here, and reserve the first comment below for a link to something I wrote if I can find it. Note: The presentation linked immediately above is almost unwatchable — stick with it because the information is invaluable. These awkward presentation dorks are exactly who you want to listen to for this stuff. I’m grateful for their work.
It all points to a massive internal surveillance operation with the government and Big Tech (as well as finance, media, education, and the like, but gov and tech are the tentpoles) being carried out against the American people. Without our knowledge. Without our consent. Dressed up in arcane legalism. This two-part recipe for spying on the citizenry is exactly fascism. Which is why I’ve felt so free to use the term these days.
Not every contract is enforceable. Contracts of adhesion like coercive EULAs and so forth. Not every law is Constitutional just because it passed — and not even by dint of having been affirmed by the Supreme Court. The Roberts dodge to re-write ObamaCare on the fly was a clearly unconstitutional remedy for a clearly unconstitutional law. There are three ways to determine what is constitutional — I do not admit the validity of the “whatever five SCOTUS justices say it is” approach. Dred Scott was not constitutional for a while and then suddenly unconstitutional. Those fellows may make a thing enforceable, but not constitutional.
Each of us has a duty (some sworn, some merely levied by reality) to weigh laws for their constitutionality, and here’s the kicker — you don’t have to be an expert to get it right. What is going on between big tech and the government is clearly unconstitutional. If not so, the government would simply do it themselves. They would pass a surveil-you-all bill, and would proudly announce their protection of wE thE CHilbrEn. They aren’t scooping up data from teenage girl’s makeover apps to fight terrorism under the (shaky enough) Patriot Act. This is unrestricted domestic surveillance.
So the video linked above about the IRS misses the obvious answer to his own numerous questions about why the IRS would need certain information about certain types of people. It’s because the IRS is just another category of accounting for the government to let contracts, and the data is all going into ever-larger datasets. It’s as much information as possible about as many people as possible. Nobody is being targeted in the collection phase. That would imply that some people are left alone, and that’s just not happening.
Every single thing* on or in your phone is spying on you. More to follow.
Published in General
First comment reserved for whatnot.
I think that in the end we will find that government has been purchasing or using cut out companies and compliance regulations to collect everything about us. Including our phone calls.
Good term. I haven’t finished reading yet, but this is exactly what they did with Trump. The CIA couldn’t legally spy on Trump so they got the British, the Australians to do it (enlisting the Russians, Italians and Maltese) and share it back to them through standing channels.
And technically, engaging civilians to do it (through whatever inducement) is illegal, too.
When do We the People get to Prosecute? I say round up the entire IRS and throw them all in Hoosegow for Life. They all knew what was going on and did nothing.
They outsource to corporations what they know they can’t do constitutionally. We saw so much of this in the last two years of pandemic. No no . . . it’s not the government forcing you to get a vaccine! It’s the corporation you work for! Therefore it’s okay! No, no, it’s not the government censoring information, it’s a private tech company. Therefore it’s okay!
Too many citizens buy into that kind of underhanded crap.
I consider the fact that the IRS has backed off using ID.me as a win, but it’s only temporary. They’ll be back with more insidious surveillance methods.
Yup. And as people have pointed out, the lawless have a much tighter “turning radius” than the law-abiding. Laws can be broekn with inpunity for a day, with trepidation for a month to a year, and with a likeliehood of being censured or something for longer timeframes.
Who got fired for the OSHA “mandate” o whatever that terrified American industry into terrorizing and punishing their employees?
Nobody. It’s just one of those things. The worst criminals pay no price for repeated attempts, and therefore eventually succeed.
A couple of the losers there were other pharma companies still producing vaccines that the market may have chosen to get.
Instead, they got shivved in the middle of testing.
I remember back in the day when conservatives would be outraged over the government manipulating the market. But that apparently only is important if we are enacting tariffs against countries that utilize slave labor and engage in genocide.