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posted by janrinok on Wednesday September 11 2019, @01:52PM   Printer-friendly
from the with-great-power-comes-great-responsibility dept.

At The Hill,

Washington Monthly Executive Editor Gilad Edelman said the perception of Silicon Valley has shifted dramatically among Democrats and Republicans since the 2016 presidential election.

Edelman told Hill.TV that the industry was relatively insulated from criticism and viewed favorably by both parties until President Trump's surprise victory over Hillary Clinton, saying his win "really scrambled a lot these beliefs and intuitions."

"Silicon Valley seems to have gone from an industry with no enemies to an industry with no friends," Edelman said during an interview on "Rising."

"Democrats realized that whatever the CEOs of Google or Facebook might think, these platforms seems to have facilitated Donald Trump's election," he added. "On the right, the fact that Trump could get elected while breaking from some pretty serious orthodoxies — at least superficially on economic matters — meant that maybe there was more room to criticize corporate business practices than conservatives had previously thought."


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  • (Score: 2) by krishnoid on Wednesday September 11 2019, @03:03PM (4 children)

    by krishnoid (1156) on Wednesday September 11 2019, @03:03PM (#892713)

    I'm still your friend. I kind of have to be, because you know everything about me, but then again, the government does too, and I only return their calls out of civility.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by meustrus on Wednesday September 11 2019, @03:47PM (3 children)

    by meustrus (4961) on Wednesday September 11 2019, @03:47PM (#892746)

    Hah, no, the government does not know everything about you. At least not "the government" as some monolithic entity. Sure, the NSA probably knows everything about you. But they don't share, not even with local cops. Not even with the IRS. Getting information to flow between two government organizations is like trying to get two Microsoft teams to stop cannibalizing each other. It may never happen.

    Social media, on the other hand, tends to share what they know with everyone with two pennies to rub together. And since they can make lots of money off of stealing your data for its own sake, there's a lot more incentive for them to get better at it. Not like the NSA, who have a narrow goal of "finding terrorists" and no open (and potentially collaborative) experimentation outside that goal. No wonder their dragnet is actually terrible at everything.

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    If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
    • (Score: 2, Disagree) by Runaway1956 on Thursday September 12 2019, @12:25AM (2 children)

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Thursday September 12 2019, @12:25AM (#892990) Journal

      Not like the NSA, who have a narrow goal of "finding terrorists" and no open (and potentially collaborative) experimentation outside that goal.

      You should question that seeming presumption. It's fair to say that the NSA has a primary goal of fighting terrorism and other enemies of the state. But, it's possible that isn't even THE_PRIMARY_GOAL. We, the public, only know what the NSA allows us to know about the NSA.

      • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday September 13 2019, @01:21AM

        by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Friday September 13 2019, @01:21AM (#893460) Journal
        The NSA was around before the "war on terror." To believe that fighting terrorism is job one with them is naive. Their job is to promote what they believe is America's political and economic interest, and they have no problem working with terrorists when it suits them, same as Trump has no problem sucking up to terrorists like Putin and Little Kim.
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        SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
      • (Score: 2) by meustrus on Friday September 13 2019, @07:19PM

        by meustrus (4961) on Friday September 13 2019, @07:19PM (#893819)

        The NSA is still primarily about foreign intelligence. And the authorization structure, flimsy though it may be, needs the stated target to be a foreign adversary.

        Good thing, too. Their tech is really, really bad at picking out adversaries from innocents. They'd never get away with pointing it at white Americans, and they know it.

        The point wasn't that it's not pointed at us, anyway. The point is that the program has a narrow goal and very little tolerance for experimentation.

        Government agencies tend to be very bad at inventing things they don't already know exactly what they should look like. Mass surveillance is something nobody knows what it should look like.

        So you get things like cops using facial recognition to find suspects, but only after Facebook made a system they could copy. And I know Facebook didn't do half the work to make that happen. But they did the UI part, the part the government can look at and copy.

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        If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?