[leeber]

I get your point, but on the topic of paranoia breeding paranoia, (1) I'm not sure if there is really a causal relationship there, and (2) the government's paranoia a fear of alleged domestic and foreign threats to our safety, well-being, way of life, etc. while the people's paranoia is that the NSA knows what I ate for breakfast.

Despite whether either threat is real or not, I'm less concerned about my facebook privacy being violated and more concerned with foreign and domestic threats of violence.

I have a choice not to use facebook or amazon echo, or whatever. Problem solved on that front. I don't have a choice if somebody wants to fly a plane into dense metro areas with the goal of killing as many people as possible.

Are you telling me that you feel amazon echo is a larger potential threat to your security than alleged terrorist organizations?

[grey-area]

the government's paranoia a fear of alleged domestic and foreign threats to our safety, well-being, way of life, etc.

Ostensibly. In real life these powers have been used for all sorts of activities outside this sort of apparently existential threat - for example spying on lawyers in civil rights cases. It's not clear they are useful against well-organised terror, that terror is actually the existential threat you seem to think it is, or that any usefulness outweighs their dramatic effect on our civil society.

Your fear of the extremely unlikely event of you being killed in a terror attack is being used to blind you to the other consequences of surveillance.

while the people's paranoia is that the NSA knows what I ate for breakfast.

False. The people's paranoia is that these powers will be used to spy on innocents who are rightly or wrongly suspected of any sort of wrongdoing, collect their communications with their politicians, lawyers, and accountants, and undermine the very democracy and open society spy agencies claim to be defending.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/06/intelligence-ag...

You don't have a choice about this, it's already happening, with or without your consent, because our spy agencies are determined to dominate every aspect of your digital life.

[leeber]

Well you might as well go off the grid completely then, don't use anything that could be used to track you like phones, tablets, laptops, stay away from people in general because you never know who the spies are that are trying to catch you. Don't use credit cards, debit cards, etc. Don't keep your money in banks. In fact probably don't even keep currency, buy gold instead. But you won't need that either because the only way for you to be truly safe is to live the jungle and live off the land....until the spies come for you there too. ......or, you could realize that probably NOT everyone is trying to achieve world domination and enslave all of humanity, starting by spying on you with amazon echo.

[grey-area]

If I might suggest an alternative strategy - use tech while being cognisant of its potential for tracking individual lives retrospectively down to a microscopic quotidian level, and oppose the misuse of tech to track populations en masse, by corporations or governments, it's not very hard and it doesn't mean becoming a hermit. As an example of how this device might be misused -

Amazon, get me all the queries from the leeber household for the last 25 years containing the word 'drugs' or 'taxes' - perhaps you are the ex-girlfriend or potential partner of someone at the NSA, perhaps you just annoyed someone with access or got in the way of a project they think is vital for their org.

Amazon, please commence recording all audio activity on the leeber household device, using this handy secret global warrant from the FISA court, you don't need to know why, just that I ticked the box saying it is necessary for an ongoing investigation.

As for Amazon the corporation, this device would put you very much in their hands when you want to know anything about the world, be it about media, products or news, in the same way that relying exclusively on google search does for google. I imagine their motivation is having a huge amount of customer data about trending devices/brands/news etc in order to sell things to you better. Perhaps you'd be happy in the warm, smothering embrace of Amazon corp, but I prefer to limit my exposure to corps to small doses, and ideally not to ones which want to sell me everything I ever wanted, along with a few things I didn't know I wanted.

As for NOT everyone is...trying to enslave all humanity etc, your arguments would have more force if you resisted wrestling with tinfoil men of your own invention and talked about what is government agencies and corps actually do in the real world, instead of credulously repeating their excuses for working towards global realtime surveillance of all communications.

[blumkvist]

I wrote a really long ass post about how naive your line of thinking is, but I decided against posting it.

Do yourself a huge favor and pick a god damn book. I suggest 1984 by George Orwell.