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Will Trump's Presidency Bring More Surveillance To The US? (scmagazine.com)
An anonymous reader reports that Donald Trump's upcoming presidency raises a few concerns for the security industry:
"Some of his statements that industry professionals find troubling are his calls for 'closing parts of the Internet', his support for mass surveillance, and demands that Apple should have helped the FBI break the encrypted communications of the San Bernardino shooter's iPhone," writes SC Magazine. One digital rights activist even used Trump's surprise victory as an opportunity to suggest President Obama begin "declassifying and dismantling as much of the federal government's unaccountable, secretive, mass surveillance state as he can -- before Trump is the one running it... he has made it very clear exactly how he would use such powers: to target Muslims, immigrant families, marginalized communities, political dissidents, and journalists."
Edward Snowden's lawyer says "I think many Americans are waking up to the fact we have created a presidency that is too powerful," and the Verge adds that Pinboard CEO Maciej Ceglowski is now urging tech sites to stop collecting so much data. "According to Ceglowski, the only sane response to a Trump presidency was to get rid of as much stored user data as possible. 'If you work at Google or Facebook,' he wrote on Pinboard's Twitter account, 'please start a meaningful internal conversation about giving people tools to scrub their behavioral data.'"
Could a Trump presidency ultimately lead to a massive public backlash against government surveillance?
Edward Snowden's lawyer says "I think many Americans are waking up to the fact we have created a presidency that is too powerful," and the Verge adds that Pinboard CEO Maciej Ceglowski is now urging tech sites to stop collecting so much data. "According to Ceglowski, the only sane response to a Trump presidency was to get rid of as much stored user data as possible. 'If you work at Google or Facebook,' he wrote on Pinboard's Twitter account, 'please start a meaningful internal conversation about giving people tools to scrub their behavioral data.'"
Could a Trump presidency ultimately lead to a massive public backlash against government surveillance?
It might be possible that a group at the NSA with lots of funding, a few smart people and little to no oversight leaked the Podesta emails. They have access to computers in botnets in Russia and Eastern Europe. They certainly have the hacking skills. They have the language skills. People in the intelligence community might not be big Hillary supporters.
I'm taking the Climate Change denier position on the surveillance state.
1. There's no real proof that there is ubiquitous surveillance.
2. If if there was real proof of ubiquitous surveillance, there's no real proof that it's a bad thing.
3. Anyway, it's too late to stop ubiquitous surveillance, so there's no point in trying.
4, Ubiquitous surveillance might actually be good for us.
5. All the privacy advocates are just in it for the money.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Trump likes digging up dirt on people and threatened to put his political rival in jail (let's see if he was lying). This is exactly what people were warning about.
Come on now folks. This too shall pass. If we look at Germany, they had a few rough years from the late 30's to mid 40's. But today Germany is a pretty darn nice place.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Slashdot has editors????