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Google: Government Requests For User Data Hit All-Time High In Second Half Of 2015 (zdnet.com)
Stephanie Condon, writing for ZDNet: Government requests for user data from Google hit an all-time high in the second half of 2015, the internet company revealed on Monday. Through July to December 2015, governments from around the globe made 40,677 requests, impacting as many as 81,311 user accounts. That's an 18 percent spike from the first half of 2015, when government requests for data impacted 68,908 users. By far and away, the most requests came from the United States, which made 12,523 data requests for this reporting period. The requests impacted 27,157 users or accounts. Google reports the number of user data requests it has received every six-month period going as far back as the second half of 2009. It started detailing the number of users and/or accounts impacted in the first half of 2011. "Usage of our services have increased every year, and so have the user data request numbers," the company noted. Since the second half of 2010, Google has reported the percentage of user data requests it at least partially complies with. For the second half of 2015, the company produced at least some data for 64 percent of requests. That figure has been about the same since 2013, but it's been trending slightly downward. Google complied with 79 percent of requests from the United States.
The solution to our definition of terrorism isn't some sort of panopticon of surveillance. The soviet attempt to quell unpatriotic behaviour in mass surveillance was only moderately successful in doing anything more than converting droves of citizens against the cause of the state. The chinese solution of blanket surveillance is so broken as to be unusable. with an untenable dearth of bulk garbage collected monthly the only solution is to ignore it, invent your charges, and hope they stick. most citizens have modern, functional VPN to subvert whats essentially a very expensive boilerplate.
the solution to americas terrorism problem is a review and modernization of our foreign policy from the carter doctrine of middle eastern interventionism. democracy as a pretext for dominionism has never been accepted outside of the US citizenry. its a fairy tale we tell ourselves through the nightly news to avoid the uncomfortable truth that we grant ourselves unfettered access to foreign resources through a rudimentary network of hollow dictators and an unspoken drone assassination campaign with no accountability. When youve made a group of people determined with nothing to lose, stripped them of security and purchase in their own land, and then marginalized their self-determination to a handful of platitudes about trade then they can and will strike back in a myriad of unpredictable means. your choice is to either chase the white dragon until you've exhausted all your resources in defense and you can no longer sustain the moral pretext of armed service, or you can stop the madness and focus on issues that kill far more of your citizenry than actual terrorism. heart disease, car crashes, alcoholism, and gun crime.
Good people go to bed earlier.
The big issues of the day are China and the South Sea.
These police deaths, as horrifying as they are to see, are well within the statistical normal. 2 Ambushes don't make a major trend and ambushing cops is not entirely new.
Being a police is a mildy dangerous job. It does not rank in the top 10 most dangerous jobs in America because MOST criminals don't actually shoot back at all. Only 42 officers died last year being shot.
I suspect suicide actually killed more than criminals. This is because as the Dallas Chief suggesting, we are 'Asking our cops to do too much'.
We are asking them to go out into the public under the false pretense than their job is WAY more dangerous and construction work, when it's just not. It's not more dangerous than being a Cabi or deliver truck driver. Being on the road all the time is more dangerous than being a police officer.
That's not by accident, police do have a lot of protection and ppl are scared of them, but police death stats go back a long time and I suspect they are accurate enough. We have stats on all professions, especially death stats because you know people tend to notice when someone dies and why they died. With just that data we can prove beyond any reasonable doubt that being a police officer is not in the top 10 most dangerous professions. I don't know where it ranks.
140 dead out of 1.1 million makes me suspect it ranks quite low in lethal professions. Police also get a ton more benefits than other professions. They have special funds, added support from the public if they die in the line of duty, they get lots of free stuff.
Why are police getting all these perks and acting like their profession is so dangerous when in reality they are getting paid quite well for a less dangerous position and perks that other comparable non education required careers don't tend to offer. On top of that they are given special privileges by the law to protect them from investigation as well as Police Unions. They have proportionally way more charities also.
We are treating police more than nice enough. It's they who are not treating the people, their customers, well. Police training sucks, the Police Union needs to shut it's mouth and listen to the public. 1.1 million workers don't get to tell 332 million citizens how things should be. Police are our public employees. They are going to do the job within the bounds of what citizens say or citizens will get mad and eventually over decades of built up anger or just some bad mental health luck, you have events like this.
When police deaths double from 140 to 280 we can call it a major uptick, but even then. We are talking about 240 people out of 1.1 million. It's not worth national attention and it doesn't represent any real danger or crisis.
The real crisis is the way Americans mindlessly react to things on the media, without double checking, without thinking first, withing considering the repercussions. We are not going to hold the position of the worlds most powerful nation for much longer like this. When words come out of your mouth and you state them as fact, you outta know if they are true. It's not asking too much.
The authorities seem clueless as to how to stop terrorists attacks around the world. What's are all the spying and warrantless requests actually going towards?
First, these requests aren't warrantless. The numbers Google reports are a combination of various types of legal process requests, including warrants, subpoenas, court orders, national security letters, wiretaps, pen registers, trap and trace orders and various kinds of requests from foreign countries (often through the US legal system, but sometimes directly). Google generally doesn't provide any information without legal process, though it makes exceptions for certain kinds of emergency requests from law enforcement (see https://www.google.com/transpa...).
Second, given there are a lot of different kinds of requests, they're for a lot of different things. Subpoenas are usually used to gather information to support a lawsuit. Court orders and warrants are usually used in criminal investigations. National security letters are used for terrorism and similar investigations. Wiretaps, pen registers and trap and trace orders are used in criminal and terrorism investigations.
Though we know that the government is doing a lot of spying that many of us (including me) find highly objectionable, it's not the case that all, or probably more than a tiny fraction, of the requests Google receives fall into that category. It's no surprise that the numbers are rising, either. As more of our communications and data storage moves online, more of what attorneys working on civil suits and criminal investigators looking for evidence needed to prosecute a crime is going to be found online. As one of the biggest repositories of that sort of data, Google is an obvious target to be served with lots of legal process papers.
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