When Google and Microsoft "Stand Together" against US spying, you know stuff just got real

boing
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To Stand.

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If the government won’t stop spooking the livestock, we’ll have a much harder time being your eternal data overlords in a dystopian digital-feudalism rentier hell. We at Google and Microsoft agree that this makes us sad.

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Standing together they may be, but am I the only one who can’t get the full article to open on chrome?

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That’s because of that pressure cooker you bought from Amazon last month.

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Works for me?

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What if organizations published the number of requests they didn’t receive each day?
“Today we received 0 requests for metadata and 0 for content”.

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Well, I guess they wouldn’t publish anything at all, then.

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I’ve heard of at least one library that prominently posted signs saying “the government has not ordered us to monitor activity on library computers,” and then one day abruptly pulled them all down and replaced them with “we can neither confirm nor deny whether the government has ordered us…”

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And they say nobody loves a smartarse… pshaw.

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PhasmaFelis: I’d not be at all surprised to hear that an agency had ordered replacing the signs stating that the government had not ordered monitoring with the signs saying that the library could neither confirm nor deny. Even if monitoring had not been ordered, to deny that the monitoring had been ordered is a serious security breach. If an agency has the power to gag those it monitors, then surely it has the power to gag those it does not monitor, to avoid just the sort of scenario that you hint at.

And after all, where national security is concerned, freedom of speech is meaningless. National security is a matter of life and death. Dead people have no freedom.

And I can neither confirm nor deny whether any of this post is ironic.

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Makes me glad that I already bought a pressure cooker a long time ago.

But what else do they want?

I say ***fuck it, as long as they let us KNOW ABOUT IT.***, (but they wont. [That’s not how the minds of the paranoid schizophrenic work…])

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Skepticism and Hope make odd bedfellows, but that is how this announcement makes me feel.

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