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Government Surveillance Growing, According To Google
SternisheFan writes with news that Google has updated is Transparency Report for the sixth time, and the big takeaway this time around is a significant increase in government surveillance. From the article:
"In a blog post, Google senior policy analyst Dorothy Chou says, ' [G]overnment demands for user data have increased steadily since we first launched the Transparency Report.' In the first half of 2012, the period covered in the report, Chou says there were 20,938 inquiries from government organizations for information about 34,614 Google-related accounts. Google has a long history of pushing back against governmental demands for data, going back at least to its refusal to turn over search data to the Department of Justice in 2005. Many other companies have chosen to cooperate with government requests rather than question or oppose them, but Chou notes that in the past year, companies like Dropbox, LinkedIn, Sonic.net and Twitter have begun making government information requests public, to inform the discussion about Internet freedom and its limits. According to the report, the U.S. continues to make the most requests for user data, 7,969 in the first six months of the year. Google complied with 90% of these requests. Google's average compliance rate for the 31 countries listed in the report is about 47%."
They don't like competition.
More and more of people's lives take place on the internet.
Things that used to be ephemeral (telephone calls, letters, etc.) are becoming long-lived (emails, social networking posts, instant messages, etc.) and are useful investigative toosl.
Previously the police needed to get telephone records and then analyze the calling records to form connections. With social networks like Facebook, people do it for them.
Can the authorities abuse their position of power for various nefarious deeds? Absolutely. Are some of their requests legally or ethically dubious? No doubt. Nevertheless, there's plenty of legitimate reasons for governments to request user information and it should come as no surprise that the number of such requests is increasing.
That said, it's nice to see that major players like Google are quantifying the requests and the reasons behind them, as well as pushing back against such demands.
Most things are worse when the government does it.
What did Google expect? That government wouldn't see that social networking sites and Google's press for personal information would be an attractive target?
After all, what once required actually boots hitting the ground, gathering of data, and correllating it together can be fulfilled with a simple, easy and no-fuss request to Google and the like, why wouldn't the government do that? It's cheaper, easier, and faster. And Google keeps demanding more information from you, making it even MORE tempting for government.
Of course, it's not like Google can do anything about it - they depend on knowing lots about you to begin with in order to pay the bills.
Whatever happened to "Don't be evil"? And how many tens of thousands of enquiries from "government agencies" does one have to receive before one is not acting as a subject but rather as an arm of that same government. And, at what point do people have to say "enough"?
I know most people don't care because they don't feel they're doing anything wrong, but for people like me, this is just another show of how over-reaching the government is becoming.
Everyone is innocent, until a government decides otherwise.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I'm certain that the old saying, they attack because they envy our freedoms still apply. I'm certain the middle eastern people's wouldn't feel at home in the "freedom loving" country USA.
I'm only pissed off because these stupid ideas and police state tactics, laws and such are being exported from USA to Europe so that they can comply with USG requests and of course to fill their envy quota of power grabbing from the people. USA is today, is a black hole, sucking away the light.
If you're innocent you have nothing to fear.
But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Although I do see your point, there is a subtle difference. I can choose not to use Google...
Well I seem to recall the following things being quite bad when the government does them:
- Phones
- Electricity
- Television/Radio Decency Standards
- Drug enforcement
- Energy planning
- Political News Reporting
- Overall News Reporting
- Responding to Crises (Katrina, Gulf Oil Spill, Sandy)
- Respect for Personal Property
- Crime Investigation
Road Building, Defense, Fire Departments, and health care usually get tonnes of money thrown at them. For the price paid, Government generally does a terrible job on those as well. But because we overspend, it's arguable they do a good job of it. If you want to see government employees disappointing you, go find some area where they're paid badly, or have budgets that are being scaled back regularly.
I swear they give me mod points to shut me up.
Often this would land them in pretty big trouble, many of these laws have provisions against this.
America's roads and bridges are crumbling as we rebuild them in Iraq.
Defense hasn't been defense in an awfully long time, it's the Department of Offense. And they spend trillions to blow up tents in the middle of nowhere.
Medicare accounts for half of all healthcare spending in this country, and only covers a small portion of us.
Fire departments are run locally, and the only thing on this list which is run reasonably well.
I think it's safe to say that the federal government does things pretty poorly.
Wow, that's quite a spike in user content take down requests in the six months leading up to a major election! I wonder if this will repeat in 2016? My bet is that they will start auto-generating background noise requests in order to render Google's reports useless to the public. Some of those randomly selected users are going to be seriously baffled!
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
*checks tinfoil hat placement*
Just gonna leave this here... http://berkeley.intel-research.net/arahimi/helmet/
Amazing. So people who are underpaid on missions that are underfunded don't perform as well as YOU would like them to? I'll alert the media.
You complain government does things badly, cite some good examples mixed in with some pretty questionable ones, and just know you're right, huh?
You know that outside the "all government is always bad" bubble that there are people in this country who, to this day, would not have electricity or phones were it not for government action. You cite two disasters and throw in one very recent politicized one where most failures have been PRIVATE (power, gas, fuel) and you blame government for not fixing what they don't control? Oh, and your middle crisis was a direct result of private industry hubris and stupidity and you blame government for not fixing their mess? (I blame government for allowing that kind of drilling in the first place, but that's another matter.)
I practically turn purple railing against overly intrusive "law enforcement" tactics by government thugs. I know that law enforcement is the cause of massive amounts of ruined lives and ended lives. I know we need to strip them of their power, badly. I also know that other kinds of things government does actually work, and I really know that a lack of objective analysis coupled with plenty of self delusion leads to some very interesting results. I think the person you most likely voted for in the presidential election learned that the hard way recently.
When you consider that they recently patented finding people likely to be evildoers based on their social connections, well... http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/11/09/1452243/google-patents-guilt-by-association
Fire departments are run locally, and the only thing on this list which is run reasonably well.
They run even better with less government involvement. Several years ago I was a member of a volunteer fire department. Only the chief was a government employee. Everyone else was an unpaid volunteer. We had one pumper truck, and rest of our vehicles were pickup trucks, parked at the home of a volunteer in each neighborhood. What we lacked in professional training and equipment, we made up with really fast response times, which is the single most important factor in fighting fires. I don't understand why volunteer fire depts are not more common.
If you really want to avoid google, it only takes a few host entries and you'll find most sites still work just fine, with no google tracking.
Try that to opt out of your government...
Yeah, it used to be correctly named the Department of War, or as seen in the movies "The War Department". But I believe after WWII, they changed it to "Department of Defense" since there was no longer a current war; now considering the large number of never-ending not-declared-by-congress Wars that we are fighting on multiple fronts, the Department of War would again be the apropos moniker. It's just that it doesn't have the right political flavor for the pretense of moral superiority that "DoD" has.
the following things being quite bad when the US government does them:
FTFY
Many other governments around the world manage these things reasonably effectively. Your government seems more ideological/theological/tribally driven than most, which makes practical approaches to service provision less likely.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
I have to say that I'm not completely sure about that. When the government obtains tons of personal information about you, they can use it against you. When a corporation in the US obtains tons of personal information about you, they'll probably use it to make more money... but the government will also try to get access to that information, and if they do get it (which they probably will), they'll use it against you. In that scenario, it's possible that numerous entities get your information. As long as the government can simply ask corporations for information without a warrant and is able to use it in court against you, I'll have to say that it's getting to the point where it's worse if a corporation gets your information.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!