Just a decade after a global backlash was triggered by Snowden reporting on mass domestic surveillance, the state-corporate dragnet is stronger and more invasive than ever.
Just a decade after a global backlash was triggered by Snowden reporting on mass domestic surveillance, the state-corporate dragnet is stronger and more invasive than ever.
What “global backlash”?
If there had been such a thing European citizens and companies would have not have spent the next decade putting their data in America’s hands and now be scrambling to decouple as American goes from Hard Neoliberal At Home Fascist Abroad to Full-on Fascist Everywhere.
For people paying attention back then it was painfully obvious back then that one could not trust one’s data in the hands of American companies or in fact any companies from a 4-eyes (meanwhile expanded to 7-eyes) country and yet the rush for putting personal and corporate data in American cloud systems were insane (not helped by the EU approving the US as a “safe haven” for data, something so outrageous after the the Snowden Revelations that I bet a lot of people involved were either customers of Epstein’s “services” or corrupt as fuck).
In fact, that massive surveillance cooperative operation expanding from 4 countries to 7 is also a pretty good indication that there wasn’t really a “global backlash”, otherwise countries like New Zeeland would be wary of joining it as it would get them cut out of international data networks and agreements.
Only countries like China seem to have taken the whole thing seriously and setup their own local stack of consumer and corporate data sharing and storing, and that seems to have been driven at least partly by wanting to do exactly the same as the 4-eyes countries were doing.
It’s kinda hilarious that propaganda in the US talked about “EU is always watching you” as a part of the propaganda against government regulations. While some places over there are starting to see the rise of fascist parties, I think awareness of the US’s fall into fascism is hurting their cause as people are a little more aware than they might otherwise be.
And while I don’t generally like any government monitoring, if I had to choose, I’d choose EU monitoring over US monitoring any day, considering how our democracy has long been secondary to capitalism (with our own special twist of that old socialist phrase, for us “Taking the resources of the many to concentrate in the hands of the few ultra-wealthy”)
Our oligarchs have corrupted the entire system, and our government allows us just enough to survive while funelling all the resources up to the oligarchs. They have more than they could possibly spend, and they still demand more More MORE M O R E.
Back to cameras: In this case, more data, more control, more intimidation, more fear.
The only place in the EU with surveillance anywhere as bad as the US was Britain and they aren’t in the EU anymore.
And this is just State surveillance.
When it comes to Private Sector surveillance, nowhere in the EU are things anywhere close to as bad in the US since EU countries have far tighter Privacy regulations and even outside the EU-wide regulations most countries have had pretty strict Medical and Banking data regulations for quite a while.
That Propaganda in the US is a mix of straight bullshit about government surveillance in Europe - which in reality is not much of a thing outside dictatorships or Britain - and the insiduious take of, anchored on the Hard-Neoliberal Fable that Public Is Bad, Private Is Good, not even considering private sector surveillance and its impact, when that’s a far worse problem in the US than in Europe.
Just another day of headline gore. Anything to get you to click past the headline.