613
Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest Unwittingly Reveal the Severity of the U.S. Surveillance State
(greenwald.substack.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2026
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“I don’t have anything to hide” is such an insidious little lie. A colloquial fib we feel compelled to utter as a mock defense, like asserting innocence will assuage suspicion.
We all have something to hide. Probably many, many things to hide. Even just in the narrow context of the law, there are hundreds of thousands of laws that apply to any one of us at any given time, and you are almost certainly breaking some of them without even knowing it.
Personal security through privacy is so very, very important. I wish more people could see that.
In a little town in the Netherlands life was good. The planning committee actually had smart people who made sure to plan the town according to the people’s needs. Kosher butchers, for instance, were placed near Jewish community centers. They could do that because the town had kept records on who lived where, including the people’s religion. It really was a utopia.
Then the nazis invaded, got their hands on those registries, and with utmost efficiency cleared the town of all jews.
I don’t know if this story is true. I read it (probably much better worded) a few years ago. But it honestly doesn’t matter if it’s true.
It's plausible and that's enough.
The point is whether or not it happens, as a parable it's validity is sound. Point is, if even if the current government has nothing but good intentions and would never use the information to do anything you don't agree with, and you are in perfect agreement with the current government. There is always the risk of either the government changing or someone stealing the information from the government that could weaponize it in ways you would never want.
what's crazy to me is the people who defend this type of stuff, are the ones that are also terrified of gun registration... because you know if one day a gun ban were put in place, having a list of where all the guns are would make confiscation easy and legal. But they don't realize that it's just as likely for them to hunt people who spoke out against the government, or were the wrong race.. or hell, just possibly see that you have a gun because you took it home on a ring cam.
100%.
And today Germany still makes you register your religion. You'd think they would have learned....
You can clear your denomination from your file. I don’t know if it survives in a changelog, though.
And easy to debunk. Take their phone, ask the pin. 9 out of 10 won't. Open bank app ask pin again. You won't get that far.
Let me put things this way:
Even if one's relaxed about data mining of private data for the purpose of serving you custom adverts, there are plenty of other use cases which can actually cost you money, not to mention the risk when the Authorities start running crime-predictive models sold to them by slimy Tech Investors with high enough rates of false positive that you run the risk of being tagged a "Terrorism" for some stupid shit like buying more bleech than the average person.
Even you think you're above board on everything and about as boring and uninteresting a person as possible, there are plenty of ways in which others known everything about you might come around and bit you in the ass in very concrete ways.
Every time I hear that I always say the same thing.
It isn't enough that you have nothing to hide.
All that's required is that the general public think they have access to information that someone might want to hide.
Once the public thinks that data can exist or is accessible all that's required is for them to lie or fabricate the required data.
"It would be very unfortunate if there was questionable content 'found' on your phone"