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The US surveillance state is poised to grow more powerful under a Trump administration.
Though President-elect Donald Trump still has nearly two months until he's sworn in, his picks for Attorney General and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency are a sign that many surveillance reforms could be overturned or changed, such as the NSA's collection of telephone metadata on all Americans — a program that was reformed after it was exposed by Edward Snowden.
Trump recently appointed Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions for Attorney General, and Kansas Rep. Mike Pompeo for CIA Director. Both have advocated for the increased domestic spying that was implemented by former President George W. Bush after 9/11, according to Bloomberg.
"Congress should pass a law re-establishing collection of all metadata, and combining it with publicly available financial and lifestyle information into a comprehensive, searchable database," Pompeo wrote with coauthor David Rivkin, Jr. in a Wall Street Journal editorial in January.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 02 2016, @01:27AM
Trump's already checked out. He's only taken 3 of the daily security briefings. [nytimes.com] He spends his time on twitter, watching fox news and right now, as I'm typing, he's holding a rally in front of a half-empty stadium [twitter.com] in Cincinnati because he misses the ego stroking of all the campaign rallies.
Unless its super high-profile, he just does not care. So what we have left are the statements of the people who he's installed to do the actual work of running the government. We should take them at their word because they have been very clear and consistent about their intentions.
(Score: 5, Informative) by edIII on Friday December 02 2016, @02:20AM
We need a +1 Scary-As-Fuck
If you listen to what these shitheads have been saying for years, that is incredibly frightening. Trump is already authoritarian, bombastic, and deeply ignorant of how the Internet works. Combine that with security hawk tendencies (a fucking literal wall) and I don't see why he would say no when literally everyone around him can play him like a flute just by mentioning "the bad hombres, sir, sign here, yep those bad hombres are going to be real sorry, and here... initial here, yes sir, fucking them up... this IS about shutting down parts of the Internet, you're so smart sir, I'm so glad I voted for you. Twice.".
Say hello to key escrow and absolutely zero privacy. If you were afraid before of some people, be even more fucking afraid now folks.
The Rise Of The Algorithms. Get ready to play Russian Roulette SQL query style :)
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