[tick_tock_tick]

> I feel we've been collectively losing the battle to keep our conversations private.

The USA is still doing pretty good but the UK and the EU are staunchly anti privacy. They're pretty good on consumer privacy but don't believe that privacy from the government should exist.

[adra]

This feels pretty opposite to me. I mean sure UK is pretty privacy hostile in practice (CCTVs everywhere), but what does the US have for companies surveillance of people? How much of that data is legal for governments to buy? Maybe the US gov isn't spying on citizens, but how many 5-eyes partners are definitely sending data to them in proxy (by careful surveillance design)?

I guess my question boils down to what specifically does the US do right that the UK and Europe does worse?

[SllX]

Have a Constitution that limits government power.

That said, it has become apparent to me that we need to impose further limitations because apparently the whitelist/blacklist approach we have thus far is insufficient and the Anti-Federalists were much more correct in the long run.

[makeitdouble]

That only works if you have a government willing to limit government power. Otherwise the letter of the constitution will be preserved while everyone in power do basically whatever they want.

[SllX]

That’s true of every conceivable government. Political office is ultimately a position of power and so those who have it seek to maintain and expand it, but I think we roughly have the right mix of institutions serving the right functional roles, but the powers given to Congress could use a textual update, and a right to privacy more clearly spelled out to account for technological and international diplomacy changes that have occurred since 1789.

[makeitdouble]

> I think we roughly have the right mix of institutions serving the right functional roles

This is also an opinion commonly shared among people living in a country. Otherwise you either have a dictatorial state preventing people from leaving/reacting (keeping them dirt poor being an option for that), or the people rioting in the streets for months until something breaks.

[lost_tourist]

Companies can't arrest me and throw me in jail.

[nwsm]

Is TFA not a good enough example?

[makeitdouble]

It's more complicated than that.

First, the TFA is about Apple, not the US. The US gov. also attempted to get backdoors from Apple (only to give up and go for the standard security vulnerabilities instead of getting a clean entry point)

Then cloud data stored on Apple servers is still open game, and Apple syncs message on iCloud by default. There's very little incitive for the US gov to burn political will on this issue when it won't matter for 99% of people using the devices. Except the UK gov doesn't get that privilege as the data is on US servers, not UK ones.

[jen20]

The fact that almost every US telecoms provider is selling your location - and there is no restriction on law enforcement buying it - means that things are not exactly rosy in the US either.

[lozenge]

Has Snowden been forgotten so quickly?