After reading the story, I feel the main point is not about immigration enforcement. The main point here is that the government agencies bought anonymized marketing data and used them for law enforcement purpose.
On the one hand I do feel the danger here. On the other hand, it seems there's no legal barrier to prevent government agencies from purchasing data available for regular corporations.
IMHO, the scandal here is not that the data was sold or bought. That's bad, but that was going to happen as soon as it had been collected.
So the collection is the real scandal here, and it's a harder problem to solve too, because the responsibility is distributed on thousands of people and companies, and because to some degree the users are actually complicit (through wilful ignorance, or through knowingly accepting it for whatever reasons).
The good news is there would be technical fixes for this problem. "Simply" don't use any of the currently infringing apps. Which -- yes -- means fundamentally changing the way we build, distribute, and fund mobile and web apps. It's not easy in practice, but the technical aspect of it is not complicated.
It's gonna be harder to avoid carriers from triangulating a coarse location, but that's an "easy" think to regulate since there are not so many of them. Again, "easy" in big quotes, because of course politically that's gonna be difficult. The regulators want this information to be collected.
Just for those unaware, the first cases of cellphone "tower dumping" for triangulation was for bank robbery cases. It was used to find unknown suspects who were near cases across time.
Fast-forward to today, where selling access to LEO is a 7-figure business for all of the telcos.
I don't underestimate that, but I'm amazed how many crimes still go unsolved with criminals leaving their digital crumbs. I highly doubt that many criminals are smart enough to simply leave the phone behind when committing the crime.
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
Even if they were, I don't see the general problem in this instance. If a staff member disagrees with a President so vehemently that they're willing to participate in an impeachment then there's little reason to assume that they're going to simply return to work and do as instructed from then on. Even if they operated entirely in good faith, nobody in politics just says "Well schucks, I guess my gut was wrong on this one. My bad."
Gross mischaractarization, that applies to individuals. The executive branch has the power to resist a subpoena. You can call that poor sportsmanship but your same article acknowledges that this bottleneck is real enough that a third choice is usually persued. Except, without a cooperative House and Senate that too can be negated. The reality is that if the Dems had a case they'd be winning in the courts.
> Honest question, you don't see a danger to our system of checks and balances if the executive gets to block impeachment investigations?
No, because its pretty clear that there is no system of checks and balances curbing executive abuse except when the systematic overrepresentation designed into the Constitution fails, barring the rare and unstable condition of a partisan disalignment (which has happened only a handful of times in US history), because the systematic factional overrepresentation in the Senate and in the Electoral College are aligned (and the overrepresentation is stronger in the Senate than the Electoral College.)
There would only be a system of checks and balances for executive abuse if the decisive actor in removal were the House rather than the Senate.
Absolutely ludicrous. The House and the Senate are both part of the legislative branch. If the legislative branch doesn't see enough of a problem to unify, and no compelling cases can be pushed through the judicial branch, why should half a branch of government be able to remove the most powerful member of another branch?
Both parties play the electoral college and both the college as well as pandering have existed since before Trump, Obama, Clinton, etc. The Democrats lost to Trump for the same reason Obama beat the Republicans, they didn't play as well as the other team.
Not in the current environment no. Historically impeachment has been an optics move by the opposing party, that held true here. If you can't get the legislative branch to act with unity or get a useful case through the SCOTUS then most likely the stakes aren't actually that high in the immediate present.
On a more basic level, nothing the current POTUS has done to defend himself is something that the legislative branch couldn't take off the table in time. The country isn't burning down, the economy is fine, by any metric of genuine significance this is just an extremely unpopular president (not that I would claim he's trying to be popular).
The problem with the American system is that, short of staging a coup or actually burning the country down, pivoting before problematic people leave is hard. In my opinion this has the benefit that anything that seems like good legislation from the position of the currently weaker party will still seem like good legislation when they become the strong party again.
In terms of consequences I'm more concerned about things like both parties having noticed that executive orders are an easy way to circumvent the legislative process. My hope is that after election season is over, we'll see more challenges to executive orders that will result in firmer precedents for what a POTUS can and cannot do with an executive order.
Thanks to non-separation of head of state and head of government, a protest against unethical behavior by the president can be conveniently claimed to be insubordination when it suits him. Examples: Yovanovitch, Vindman.
Gotta love the rationalization too. “Oh we allowed your data to be sold on the public market so we’ll just get it there”
Please don't post generic ideological comments to HN. It leads to generic ideological discussion, which leads to repetitive flamewar, which is tedious, which is off topic here.
This comment seemed like generic "doesn't affect me" flamebait at first; after a 2nd reading I'm not sure if that's the right interpretation. The format of 3 repeating dismissive statements followed by a final statement about falling victim to the previously dismissed problem could be interpreted as a variation on Martin Niemöller's famous poem "First they came ..."[1]. In this interpretation, the comment in line #4 about "those Union meetings" might be a clever reference to "Then they came for the trade unionists" in original poem.
It's always nice to know that someone here will get the reference even if I go to bed right after posting. It's important that this crowd here knows these things.
I'm sorry to be critical, but that reference is not just obvious, it's an internet trope that passed being a cliché years ago and is an implicit Godwinning of the thread. Comments of that form are intrinsically off topic here.
I don't think that's an accurate reading of the comment you're responding to. On the contrary, the poster seems to be making a slippery-slope argument about the specific issue the article is about: the bleedover from surveillance capitalism to empowering law enforcement, and the reasons people might support this now but regret it later.
I don't see how this is ideological but the other top comment in this thread isn't. They both convey an emotional sentiment without any real information or substantive insights. Why do people who make blunt but direct posts get chastised while people who are parroting alarmist talking points without adding citations or evidence get a pass? It seems like an obvious enforcement bias.
Hmmm... I'm not sure if you're attacking or defending my statement here. :P
But I'd like to say I disagree with the "without any real information" part of your argument.
Looking at these things without taking into account prior similar cases will lead to sub-optimal decisions, because if you don't take into account that similar stories have played out before, you'll have to take the industry's word for it that "this data will only be used to sell you stuff." And later you'll have to take the government's word for it that "we'll only use this to defend the border." And so on.
But we have seen these things play out before. That is why "First they came for..." was written. We can already predict how this going to go from here. And personally, I don't like the way it's going.
Government is just doing what government inherently does - attempting to exert control over anything legible to it. The underlying problem is the longstanding insecurity of cell protocols that creates these irresistible databases of everyone's location in the first place.
Hiding the location of a radio itself is likely infeasible (with sector antennas, each tower actually knows a signal strength and a rough vector).
However, what is avoidable are fixed IDs like IMSI and IMEI that allow persistent tracking of the "same device" or "same user" across every tower. The routing functions of IMEI could easily be replaced with a nonce that changed for every registration. The billing functions of IMSI could be replaced with blinded tokens. And the persistent identity of phone numbers could be provided by independent parties like with email, ideally over a (non-wireless) mix network.
On the one hand I do feel the danger here. On the other hand, it seems there's no legal barrier to prevent government agencies from purchasing data available for regular corporations.