If the linked article has a paywall, you can access this archived version instead: https://archive.ph/zyhax
The court orders show the government telling Google to provide the names, addresses, telephone numbers and user activity for all Google account users who accessed the YouTube videos between January 1 and January 8, 2023. The government also wanted the IP addresses of non-Google account owners who viewed the videos.
“This is the latest chapter in a disturbing trend where we see government agencies increasingly transforming search warrants into digital dragnets. It’s unconstitutional, it’s terrifying and it’s happening every day,” said Albert Fox-Cahn, executive director at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. “No one should fear a knock at the door from police simply because of what the YouTube algorithm serves up. I’m horrified that the courts are allowing this.” He said the orders were “just as chilling” as geofence warrants, where Google has been ordered to provide data on all users in the vicinity of a crime.
The scary thing isn’t that this sort of thing is technically possible. It’s that the cops try this lazy-ass investigative method because they know full well the information oligopolies readily play ball and provide the data more often than not.
And that my friends is the very definition of Fascism: when big business is in cahoots with the authorities. Don’t take my word for it: Benito Mussolini, the very dude who invented Fascism, said it himself in 1932:
“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”
I’ve known Big Data would eventually lead us to full-blown fascism since Scott McNealy inadvertently spilled the beans about the future of privacy in 1999. Everybody dismissed McNealy back then and said nobody would stand for this. But I instantly realized he was telling the naked truth as it would happen that day. And I’ve been called a nutcase and a conspiracy theorist ever since, for a full quarter of a century.
And now here we are: everybody is finally coming to the same realization - too late to do any goddamn thing about it.
This is sad…
From your own link.
I remember the term for the fascists in Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here was corporatists. That novel was contemporaneous with the rise of fascism as I recall, and it’s a chilling look at how America might have gone fascist back then. It’s pretty relevant to what’s happening now.
Re: Fascism, Mussolini’s full explanation/description is a very good read. Here’s a version that a search turned up:
https://sjsu.edu/faculty/wooda/2B-HUM/Readings/The-Doctrine-of-Fascism.pdf .
Another: http://media.wix.com/ugd/927b40_c1ee26114a4d480cb048f5f96a4cc68f.pdf (Soames).
Got to hand it to the guy, he was well-educated and could write, which is more than you can say for his modern-day imitators, especially the loud, orange one.