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Secretive White House Surveillance Program Gives Cops Access to Trillions of US Phone Records (www.wired.com)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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the White House has, for the past decade, provided more than $6 million to the program, which allows the targeting of the records of any calls that use AT&T’s infrastructure

the program takes advantage of numerous “loopholes” in federal privacy law

the DAS program has been used to produce location information on criminal suspects and their known associates, a practice deemed unconstitutional without a warrant

(This website is a bit annoying.)

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Yeah but can you trust the people you talk with not to install shitty stupid apps

You can't, but the threat exists regardless of what service you use.

Regarding my phone number being leaked, I'm okay with that risk. It's relatively easy to ignore/block unknown contacts and I'm not in any threat should someone discover it. For anyone who absolutely needs anonymity, they may want to wait until user names are rolled out and use another service for now.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (2 children)

For anyone who absolutely needs anonymity, simplex may already be better.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

While I agree with your statement in general, I think its still early and dangerous to be recommending simplex as a viable alternative. It hasn't stood the test of time nor been independently audited. I'm keeping my eye on it as it seems like a viable alternative, but I'd hesitate to recommend it to anyone who may be at risk.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

Hence the "may already..." depending on use case obviously. You can't really recommend anything to someone who may be at risk, certainly not Signal. Not that I have anything against Signal (I use it daily and have been for years) but anonymous it isn't, not in big part of the world anyway.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

What’s important when you’d like to have absolute privacy or anonymity is, to realize that you can’t. “Use this, and no one can read your message.” is a typical mistake. “This service is world most secure” etc. is just a lie. Anyone who claims that privacy can be simple/easy is either a liar or doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

A rare example of honest/true statements, on the other hand, can be seen on the Cock.li website: http://rurcblzhmdk22kttfkel2zduhyu3r6to7knyc7wiorzrx5gw4c3lftad.onion/

How can I trust you?

You can't.

In this specific case about the US, though, what’s most important is obviously to somehow stop this unconstitutional surveillance by the government (only making AT&T happy and rich). Please, don’t waste a lot of money to invade normal people’s privacy when you already have trillions of debts 😢