OK, then post some articles about abuses by those other governments and I'll upvote those too. In the mean time though, what are you accomplishing by detracting from this? If you saw a post about GCHQ abuses for example would you be inclined to comment "but India etc. are just as bad!"?
If you do business is the US you most certainly do NOT have to give unfettered “god mode” access to all of your user’s data to the government with no oversight
If you're some tiny no one they don't bother you until they want something (and then you better comply). If you're tiktock, you give them access to the whole platform.
They also have access at the network/ISP and the data centre levels.
As bad as PRISM is/was there’s simply no comparison to giving god-mode credentials to actors in the CCP who can browse user data at will, and use it to suppress anything they see fit.
I would still make more sense to set an example and control the behavior of people you are indirectly accountable for in a democracy. No matter how much of a joke that sounds in context of any agency able to survey almost all your communications.
And it does sound like a joke already. Maybe having a strong democracy would actually be a good defense against autocracies that behave like China.
Maybe stop security agencies posing a security threat in the med to long term because nobody really believes in democracy anymore.
The only difference is whether it is "our" or "their" guy doing the dirty. But if they're doing us dirty, they're not "our" guy no matter what nationality they are...
Sorry, that's not correct. "U.S. government officials have disputed criticisms of PRISM in the Guardian and Washington Post articles and have defended the program, asserting that it cannot be used on domestic targets without a warrant."
Per the article, FISA grants infinite warrants without challenge, in secret.
Saying "but we got a warrant" is both meaningless and misleading. The CCP also have a secret court issue secret "warrants" to surveil the whole population without any oversight.
It's like that meme of Ron Swanson saying he has a permit...
And that is without getting into the fact the search happens before anyone considers the warrant.
First you state that PRISM isn't used domestically. Then you admit that it is used domestically. I have no idea why you're mentioning warrants from the 1800's. "The feds were getting warrants to open mail in the 1800's." Are you trying to suggest it is used only infrequently?
While the number of times PRISM is used domestically is unknown, the attempts to keep the number unknown is eyebrow raising.
"Wyden repeatedly asked the NSA to estimate the number of Americans whose communications had been incidentally collected, and the agency’s director, Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, insisted there was no way to find out. Eventually Inspector General I. Charles McCullough III wrote Wyden a letter stating that it would violate the privacy of Americans in NSA data banks to try to estimate their number." https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligenc...
You do not need a warrant for international communications performed by non-citizens (whether inside or outside the country)
You do need a warrant for communications done by citizens domestically. PRISM did not change that, it has been the same for centuries. So even if PRISM captures domestic communication, a warrant is still needed to view it. There has never been a time in US history when then feds didn't have access to warrants to tap communications.
PRISM is precisely a submission & storage system for data requested via warrants. People have the impression that it's a backdoor, but that's not what the Snowden docs actually described it as.
The "backdoor", if any, would only be the rubber stamp courts that allow pretty broad warrants for plenty of dumb things, but that could absolutely be fixed if half the country didn't totally buy into "I have nothing to hide" bullshit, and were as militant about defending the 4th amendment as they were the 2nd, but I guess the inalienable right to privacy just isn't as cool as putting a hole in a steel target 100 yards away with a machine.
