Every search you make, email you send, text message, voice chat, location, and most likely the conversations you have in your own home are monitored and stored in a database for whoever knows how long (probably forever). When I hear land of the free, I immediately think bullshit. We are slowly losing our freedoms, what can we do to prevent this? I mean, when Edward Snowden dropped the leaks, people protested, but barely anything changed. What can we do? This post not only applies to Americans, your own government in another country may possibly does the same thing. Feel free to comment!
Well, theoretically they can, and it’s already been proven that they can tap into anyone’s phone, so what’s stopping the NSA from spying this much? The use of proprietary software in literally everything, and companies such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc. secretly working with them, not only that, but the amount of exploits the NSA has on hand is insane.
Is this a purely theoretical capability or is there actually evidence they have this capability?
Listening into a conversation that you’re intentionally relaying across public infrastructure and gaining access to the phone itself are two very different things.
How many zero-day exploits does the NSA have? How many can be deployed remotely and without a nontrivial action by a user?
Scale, capacity, cost, number of employees
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I’m not saying we shouldn’t oppose government surveillance. We absolutely should. But like another commenter pointed out, I’m much more concerned with the amount of data that corporations collect and have.