Well, this is terrifying. The experience of slowly becoming not only a "product" but almost an "enemy of the state" has been surreal and disheartening to say the least.

Of course they are.

A pertinent point that Solzhenitsyn made in Gulag Archipelago - he said that in all the time he spent in the gulags, he never once met a person who had not been legitimately convicted of a genuine crime.

The way it worked was simply that the USSR had such an extensive and nebulous set of laws that it was effectively impossible for anyone to obey all of them all the time, and so much information on all its citizens that whenever an official wanted someone disappeared, it was just a matter of checking through their records and finding which law(s) they had broken, then arresting them, trying them and convicting them.

The US oligarchy is actively pursuing the same basic strategy, and for the same basic reasons.

Just my tin-foil hat opinion, but if anyone thinks the US is not heading towards a surveillance State on par with China, then I have a bridge to sell you.

Fairly longwinded article on the US government buying data to skip on getting warrants.

The size and scope of the government effort to accumulate data revealing the minute details of Americans' lives are described soberly and at length by the director's own panel of experts in a newly declassified report. Haines had first tasked her advisers in late 2021 with untangling a web of secretive business arrangements between commercial data brokers and US intelligence community members.  What that report ended up saying constitutes a nightmare scenario for privacy defenders.  “This report reveals what we feared most,” says Sean Vitka, a policy attorney at the nonprofit Demand Progress. “Intelligence agencies are flouting the law and buying information about Americans that Congress and the Supreme Court have made clear the government should not have.”  In the shadow of years of inaction by the US Congress on comprehensive privacy reform, a surveillance state has been quietly growing in the legal system's cracks. Little deference is paid by prosecutors to the purpose or intent behind limits traditionally imposed on domestic surveillance activities. More craven interpretations of aging laws are widely used to ignore them. As the framework guarding what privacy Americans do have grows increasingly frail, opportunities abound to split hairs in court over whether such rights are even enjoyed by our digital counterparts. “I’ve been warning for years that if using a credit card to buy an American’s personal information voids their Fourth Amendment rights, then traditional checks and balances for government surveillance will crumble,” Ron Wyden, a US senator from Oregon, says. 

It's already extremely easy for LE to drum up basically whatever charge and stick it to you, for the majority of citizens with no funds for a lawyer.

We've already got the plate scanners. Everytime I drive by one, my file pops as a red flag and a stop is more than likely, just to "check in" with me, usually with some false pretense like "i thought your window was cracked, my bad, but where you going tonight?" I'm not technically on paper, but I am treated as such. Easy arrest potential with some bs probable cause.

The fact that it will continue to go further doesn't surprise me. Makes the job even easier for them. If you aren't a good consumer, you will be prosecuted.

The hilarious part (in a bleak fashion), is I can't find many other articles discussing this.

Then everyone will panic and go crazy when someone like Trump wins and they have access to all this. History repeats.

I requested my data file from Lexis/Nexus several years ago, and the amount of personal data scraped from EVERYWHERE online was in it. AOL chat convos from the 90s, old, used once, throw away email addresses, pictures shared on social media. The damn thing was several inches thick and arrived in a box. We have zero privacy

Fwiw, this article is from June, but it did not receive enough attention, so I'm glad it's coming back

Just China things.

Hold up

Jokes on them, I'll be dead some day soon.

The title is lierally how the Soviet Union operated and how the CCP operates today