Privacy, encryption vs. Surveillance state

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Just goes to show - when creating alpha numeric passwords, the most important variable for password strength is the length of the password, not the use of numbers, symbols or mixed cases.

d92a3ff8cf16ed1e55312e0ed87a665f--password-strength-password-security.jpg
 

EFF Urges Pennsylvania Supreme Court to Find Keyword Search Warrant Unconstitutional​

SAN FRANCISCO—Keyword warrants that let police indiscriminately sift through search engine databases are unconstitutional dragnets that target free speech, lack particularity and probable cause, and violate the privacy of countless innocent people, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and other organizations argued in a brief filed today to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania.

Everyone deserves to search online without police looking over their shoulder, yet millions of innocent Americans’ privacy rights are at risk in Commonwealth v. Kurtz—only the second case of its kind to reach a state’s highest court. The brief filed by EFF, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL), and the Pennsylvania Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (PACDL) challenges the constitutionality of a keyword search warrant issued by the police to Google. The case involves a massive invasion of Google users’ privacy, and unless the lower court’s ruling is overturned, it could be applied to any user using any search engine.

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today unveiled its new Street Level Surveillance hub, a standalone website featuring expanded and updated content on various technologies that law enforcement agencies commonly use to invade Americans’ privacy.

The hub has new or updated pages on automated license plate readers, biometric surveillance, body-worn cameras, camera networks, cell-site simulators, drones and robots, face recognition, electronic monitoring, gunshot detection, forensic extraction tools, police access to the Internet of Things, predictive policing, community surveillance apps, real-time location tracking, social media monitoring, and police databases.

It also features links to the latest articles by EFF’s Street Level Surveillance working group, consisting of attorneys, policy analysts, technologists, and activists with extensive experience in this field.
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The hub can be found here:

 
Some history of cryptography (not crypto currency) including PGP and the Clipper Chip:
TL;DR:
  • The Cypherpunks' contributions to digital rights and privacy debates left a lasting impact on privacy advocacy and digital rights movements.
  • Their focus on decentralization and privacy laid the foundation for blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Monero and ZCash.
  • The First Crypto War influenced today's cybersecurity and cryptocurrency landscapes through innovations such as PGP and early proof-of-work systems like Hashcash.
  • The Clipper Chip controversy provided lessons and context for balancing privacy rights and national security in ongoing debates about encryption and government surveillance.
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^^^^^
Related, but from the Central Bankers point of view.

 

What Happens When National Governments and Law Enforcement Agencies Use Biometric ID and Surveillance Systems Illegally?

The answer, it seems, is nothing. But some governments, including the UK and Australia, are now modifying their laws to make sure it is no longer illegal.

In October last year, the UK’s Minister of Policing (and former McKinsey & Company consultant) Chris Philip unveiled plans to create a vast facial recognition database out of passport photos of people in the UK. It was as brazen and as egregious an example of mission creep as you’re likely to find. Forty-six million passport holders who had given their facial images for travel purposes alone will soon have that data used by police to conduct facial recognition searches without their consent.

It now turns out that British police departments have been doing this all along, without public knowledge or approval, for years. The covert practice has been going on since at least 2019, according to documents obtained by The Telegraph and Liberty Investigates.

The facial recognition searches were conducted despite the fact that Philip did not raise the possibility of using the passport database in this way until October 2023. Now the UK government wants to make legal a covert practice that has already been going on for years. Also, in December it was revealed that police forces will soon be able to conduct facial recognition searches on a database of Britain’s 50 million driving licence holders, and have already been carrying out similar searches of the UK immigration database, which holds information on foreign nationals.

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Gov agencies having banks search customers transactions.

How is this legal? It ain't. Just one more way the gov violates the People's Constitutionally protected Rights as standard operating procedure.

US gov does today what the stasi could only dream of, and has convinced the majority of people that it's what the Founders intended. Lol


 
For folks who prefer to read:
Federal investigators asked banks to search and filter customer transactions by using terms like "MAGA" and "Trump" as part of an investigation into Jan. 6, warning that purchases of "religious texts" could indicate "extremism," the House Judiciary Committee revealed Wednesday.

Fox News Digital has learned the committee also obtained documents that indicate officials suggested that banks query transactions with keywords like Dick's Sporting Goods, Cabela's, Bass Pro Shops and more.

The House Judiciary Committee and its subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government have been conducting oversight of federal law enforcement’s "receipt of information about American citizens without legal process and its engagement with the private sector."

House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan said the documents obtained by the committee indicate that after Jan. 6, 2021, the Treasury Department’s Office of Stakeholder Integration and Engagement in the Strategic Operations of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, distributed materials to financial institutions that outlined "typologies" of "various persons of interest" and provided the banks with "suggested search terms and Merchant Category Codes for identifying transactions on behalf of federal law enforcement."

The materials included a document recommending the use of generic terms like "Trump" and "MAGA" to "search Zelle payment messages" as well as a "prior FinCEN analysis" of "Lone Actor/Homegrown Violent Extremism Indicators."

"According to this analysis, FinCEN warned financial institutions of ‘extremism’ indicators that include ‘transportation charges, such as bus tickets, rental cars, or plane tickets, for travel areas with no apparent purpose,’ or ‘the purchase of books (including religious texts) and subscriptions to other media containing extremist views,’" Jordan detailed in a letter to the former director of FinCEN, Noah Bishoff, a career employee.

"In other words, FinCEN used large financial institutions to comb through the private transactions of their customers for suspicious charges on the basis of protected political and religious expression," Jordan wrote.
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""In other words, FinCEN used large financial institutions to comb through the private transactions of their customers for suspicious charges on the basis of protected political and religious expression," Jordan wrote.

I realize that it was a partisan use of power that half the nation will ignorantly cheer about, but how can any American actually be in favor of such actions that are so clearly a violation of Constitutional limitations on gov power?

What good are Constitutional limitations on gov power, if the bureaucrats in the swamp can just shit all over them whenever they feel like it?
 
... What good are Constitutional limitations on gov power, if the bureaucrats in the swamp can just shit all over them whenever they feel like it?

Snowden on line 2 .... Snowden on line 2 ...
 
Coming soon to a city near you?
San Francisco voters will confront a looming threat to their privacy and civil liberties on the March 5, 2024 ballot. If Proposition E passes, we can expect the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) will use untested and potentially dangerous technology on the public, any time they want, for a full year without oversight. How do we know this? Because the text of the proposition explicitly permits this, and because a city government proponent of the measure has publicly said as much.
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However, the new ballot initiative attempts to gut the 2019 surveillance ordinance. The measure says “..the Police Department may acquire and/or use a Surveillance Technology so long as it submits a Surveillance Technology Policy to the Board of Supervisors for approval by ordinance within one year of the use or acquisition, and may continue to use that Surveillance Technology after the end of that year unless the Board adopts an ordinance that disapproves the Policy…” In other words, police would be able to deploy virtually any new surveillance technology they wished for a full year without any oversight, accountability, transparency, or semblance of democratic control.
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Amazon says DOJ disclosure doesn’t indicate violation of facial recognition moratorium​

The statement came after FedScoop reporting noting that, according to the DOJ, the FBI is in the “initiation” phase of using Rekognition.

ADepartment of Justice disclosure that the FBI is in the “initiation” phase of using Amazon’s Rekognition tool for a project doesn’t run afoul of the company’s moratorium on police use of the software, an Amazon spokesperson said in response to FedScoop questions Friday.

The statement comes after FedScoop reported Thursday that the DOJ disclosed in its public inventory of AI use cases that the FBI was initiating use of Rekognition as part of something called “Project Tyr.” The disclosure is significant because Amazon had previously extended a moratorium on police use of Rekognition, though the company did not originally clarify how that moratorium might apply to federal law enforcement.

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^^^^^^^
Here's some more.................

FBI recruits Amazon Rekognition AI to hunt down 'nudity, weapons, explosives'​

The FBI plans to use Amazon's controversial Rekognition cloud service "to extract information and insights from lawfully acquired images and videos," according to US Justice Department documents.

In its Agency Inventory of AI Use Cases, the DOJ lists the project, code-named Tyr, as being in the "initiation" phase for the FBI, which intends to customize and use the technology "to review and identify items containing nudity, weapons, explosives, and other identifying information."

The DOJ document doesn't mention a start date, and simply says the Feds will be using a Rekognition-based commercial off-the-shelf system purchased pre-built from a third party. The FBI declined to comment, and though Amazon promised The Register a statement in response to our inquiries, that has yet to arrive.

 
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The RCS standard will replace SMS, the protocol behind basic everyday text messages, and MMS, the protocol for sending pictures in text messages. RCS has a number of improvements over SMS, including being able to send longer messages, sending high quality pictures, read receipts, typing indicators, GIFs, location sharing, the ability to send and receive messages over Wi-Fi, and improved group messaging. Basically, it's a modern messaging standard with features people have grown to expect.
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On its own, the core RCS protocol is currently not any more secure than SMS. The protocol is not encrypted by default, ... The RCS protocol by itself does not specify or recommend any type of end-to-end encryption. ...

But what’s exciting about RCS is its native support for extensions. Google has taken advantage of this ability to implement its own plan for encryption on top of RCS using a version of the Signal protocol. As of now, this only works for users who are both using Google’s default messaging app (Google Messages), and whose phone companies support RCS messaging (the big three in the U.S. all do, as do a majority around the world). ... Google’s implementation of encrypted RCS also doesn’t hide any metadata about your messages, so law enforcement could still get a record of who you conversed with, how many messages were sent, at what times, and how big the messages were. ...

Apple stated it will not use any type of proprietary end-to-end encryption–presumably referring to Google's approach—but did say it would work to make end-to-end encryption part of the RCS standard. ...

 

Global Spyware Scandal: Exposing Pegasus Part Two (full documentary) | FRONTLINE​

FRONTLINE PBS | Official
Jan 10, 2023


Part two of a two-part docuseries: FRONTLINE and Forbidden Films investigate Pegasus, a powerful spyware sold to governments around the world by the Israeli company NSO Group. 53:17


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The shady companies helping governments hack citizens’ phones

A pair of reports by the world’s biggest internet firms shed more light on the murky cyberweapons market and put more pressure on government to take action.​


Named for the winged horse of Greek mythology and often sent by text message, Pegasus can burrow into your phone without your knowledge or even your click, hiding for days or weeks inside, surreptitiously recording everything—messages, photos, encrypted chats, and video and audio—in real-time. Exactly where your data is going often remains a mystery, lost in a tangle of servers. But the deadly impacts of Pegasus and other cyberweapons—wielded by governments from Spain to Saudi Arabia against human rights defenders, journalists, lawyers and others—is by now well documented. A wave of scrutiny and sanctions have helped expose the secretive, quasi-legal industry behind these tools, and put financial strain on firms like Israel’s NSO Group, which builds Pegasus.

And yet business is booming. New research published this month by Google and Meta suggest that despite new restrictions, the cyberattack market is growing, and growing more dangerous, aiding government violence and repression and eroding democracy around the globe.

“The industry is thriving,” says Maddie Stone, a researcher at Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) who hunts zero-day exploits, the software bugs that have yet to be fixed and are worth potentially hundreds of millions to spyware sellers. “More companies keep popping up, and their government customers are determined to buy from them, and want these capabilities, and are using them.”

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The Government Really Is Spying On You — And It’s Legal​

Consumer data has become a lucrative commodity, and the US government is buying.

The freakout moment that set journalist Byron Tau on a five-year quest to expose the sprawling U.S. data surveillance state occurred over a “wine-soaked dinner” back in 2018 with a source he cannot name.

The tipster told Tau the government was buying up reams of consumer data — information scraped from cellphones, social media profiles, internet ad exchanges and other open sources — and deploying it for often-clandestine purposes like law enforcement and national security in the U.S. and abroad. The places you go, the websites you visit, the opinions you post — all collected and legally sold to federal agencies.

In his new book, Means of Control , Tau details everything he’s learned since that dinner: An opaque network of government contractors is peddling troves of data, a legal but shadowy use of American citizens’ information that troubles even some of the officials involved. And attempts by Congress to pass privacy protections fit for the digital era have largely stalled, though reforms to a major surveillance program are now being debated.

On today’s episode of POLITICO Tech, Tau and I discussed the state of our personal privacy and the checks on all this government surveillance. I asked what differentiates the U.S. from authoritarian states like China when it comes to data collection, how our digital footprints will impact policy areas like abortion and what broader implications we can expect for civil liberties. He didn’t sugarcoat his responses.

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In a milestone judgment—Podchasov v. Russia—the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has ruled that weakening of encryption can lead to general and indiscriminate surveillance of the communications of all users and violates the human right to privacy.

In 2017, the landscape of digital communication in Russia faced a pivotal moment when the government required Telegram Messenger LLP and other “internet communication” providers to store all communication data—and content—for specified durations. These providers were also required to supply law enforcement authorities with users’ data, the content of their communications, as well as any information necessary to decrypt user messages. The FSB (the Russian Federal Security Service) subsequently ordered Telegram to assist in decrypting the communications of specific users suspected of engaging in terrorism-related activities.

Telegram opposed this order on the grounds that it would create a backdoor that would undermine encryption for all of its users. As a result, Russian courts fined Telegram and ordered the blocking of its app within the country. The controversy extended beyond Telegram, drawing in numerous users who contested the disclosure orders in Russian courts. A Russian citizen, Mr Podchasov, escalated the issue to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), arguing that forced decryption of user communication would infringe on the right to private life under Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR), which reads as follows:
Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence (Article 8 ECHR, right to respect for private and family life, home and correspondence)

EFF has always stood against government intrusion into the private lives of users and advocated for strong privacy guarantees, including the right to confidential communication. Encryption not only safeguards users’ privacy but also protects their right to freedom of expression protected under international human rights law.

In a great victory for privacy advocates, the ECtHR agreed. The Court found that the requirement of continuous, blanket storage of private user data interferes with the right to privacy under the Convention, emphasizing that the possibility for national authorities to access these data is a crucial factor for determining a human rights violation [at 53]. The Court identified the inherent risks of arbitrary government action in secret surveillance in the present case and found again—following its stance in Roman Zakharov v. Russia—that the relevant legislation failed to live up to the quality of law standards and lacked the adequate and effective safeguards against misuse [75]. Turning to a potential justification for such interference, the ECtHR emphasized the need of a careful balancing test that considers the use of modern data storage and processing technologies and weighs the potential benefits against important private-life interests [62-64].

In addressing the State mandate for service providers to submit decryption keys to security services, the court's deliberations culminated in the following key findings [76-80]:
  1. Encryption being important for protecting the right to private life and other fundamental rights, such as freedom of expression: The ECtHR emphasized the importance of encryption technologies for safeguarding the privacy of online communications. Encryption safeguards and protects the right to private life generally while also supporting the exercise of other fundamental rights, such as freedom of expression.
  2. Encryption as a shield against abuses: The Court emphasized the role of encryption to provide a robust defense against unlawful access and generally “appears to help citizens and businesses to defend themselves against abuses of information technologies, such as hacking, identity and personal data theft, fraud and the improper disclosure of confidential information.” The Court held that this must be given due consideration when assessing measures which could weaken encryption.
  3. Decryption of communications orders weakens the encryption for all users: The ECtHR established that the need to decrypt Telegram's "secret chats" requires the weakening of encryption for all users. Taking note again of the dangers of restricting encryption described by many experts in the field, the Court held that backdoors could be exploited by criminal networks and would seriously compromise the security of all users’ electronic communications.
  4. Alternatives to decryption: The ECtHR took note of a range of alternative solutions to compelled decryption that would not weaken the protective mechanisms, such as forensics on seized devices and better-resourced policing.

In light of these findings, the Court held that the mandate to decrypt end-to-end encrypted communications risks weakening the encryption mechanism for all users, which was a disproportionate to the legitimate aims pursued.
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:popcorn:
 
Related:

Law Enforcement Caught Snooping on Private Land... Again​

Mar 7, 2024

Tom Manuel is a forester who owns timberland in East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana. First and foremost, the land is part of his private forestry business/tree farm. Similar to most non-industrial, private forest owners, Tom also manages the property for wildlife conservation, recreation, and multiple other uses as well.

https://ij.org/case/louisiana-open-fi...

When his kids were young, his family spent time on the property learning about tree farming, hunting, camping, and riding four-wheelers. Tom, an avid outdoorsman, also enjoys hunting on the land. And the land is marked accordingly: Boundaries are fenced and painted, entrances are gated and posted. It’s a private place—and Tom wants to keep it that way.

But Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries (LDWF) game wardens have other ideas in mind. Twice in December 2023, they entered Tom’s land without consent, a warrant, or probable cause and confronted first him and then his brother. They were interrogated but both were complying with hunting laws and neither was given a citation.

The game wardens think they have unlimited power to invade private land under an old Supreme Court rule called the “open fields doctrine.” The rule says that the U.S. Constitution’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures do not extend to land outside the immediate area around a home. But the wardens are ignoring that the Louisiana Constitution is different—it protects all “property” from warrantless searches.

To vindicate his property rights for himself and all other users of private property in Louisiana, Tom has partnered with IJ to file a suit in Louisiana state court that aims to put a stop to these warrantless intrusions once and for all.


5:41
 
In Alabama if you are hunting or fishing, a Game Warden can search you, all your gear, your boat and vehicle for any reason or no reason. You give them the right to do so when you purchase a license. Not sure about their ability to enter private property with out cause.
 
Alaska high court rules against warrantless aerial police surveillance of private citizen

Alaska law enforcement agencies do not have the right to conduct aerial surveillance of private property with high powered telephoto technology without first obtaining a search warrant.

This was the March 8 ruling of the Alaska Supreme Court in the case, State of Alaska v. John William McKelvey.

Back in 2012 the Alaska State Troopers received a tip that McKelvey had a grow operation on his property located in rural Fairbanks. After initially flying over the property and taking photos with a telephoto lens, the Troopers then obtained a search warrant. The central issue in this case concerned the validity of the search warrant and whether the Troopers’ use of aerial photos violated the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and the Alaska Constitution’s rights to privacy and freedom from unreasonable searches.

According to the Alaska Supreme Court’s ruling, the State Constitution protects Alaskans from law enforcement aerial surveillance by requiring a warrant prior to taking pictures of private property from the sky.

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Imagine a world in which the internet is first and foremost about empowering people, not big corporations and government. In that world, government does “after-action” analyses to make sure its tech regulations are working as intended, recruits experienced technologists as advisors, and enforces real accountability for intelligence and law enforcement programs.

 
Digital ID will be used to determine compliance with govco mandates and coerce compliance or you are cut out from participating in the economy:

 
This may be in play on the border for now but in the future could be your street, mayhaps your back yard.

U.S. GOVERNMENT SEEKS “UNIFIED VISION OF UNAUTHORIZED MOVEMENT”​

AS THE IMMIGRATION crisis continues and the Biden administration pursues a muscular enforcement strategy with an eye to public opinion and the 2024 presidential election, the Department of Homeland Security prospers. One obscure $6 billion program has grown silently: a network of over 1,000 surveillance towers built along America’s land borders, a system that it describes as “a unified vision of unauthorized movement.”

A broad outline of the Biden administration’s plan to solve the immigration crisis in America was unveiled this week, including 5,800 new border and immigration security officers, a new $4.7 billion Southwest Border Contingency Fund, and more emergency authority for the president to shut down the border when needed. Moving forward on these programs will “save lives and bring order to the border,” President Joe Biden said in his State of the Union address last week.

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^^^^^
We're all hobbits now living under...........................
 

Google's Legal Conundrum: Ordered to Disclose YouTube User Data Amid Privacy Fears​

Federal investigators in the United States have issued a mandate compelling Google to provide extensive user data from viewers of specific YouTube videos, setting off a firestorm of privacy concerns and constitutional debates. The implications of the court orders, obtained by media, have sparked a critical discourse on the balance between law enforcement needs and individual privacy rights.

The case under scrutiny in Kentucky involved undercover authorities targeting an individual known by the online handle “elonmuskwhm”, suspected of engaging in bitcoin transactions that could potentially violate money laundering laws and regulations on unlicensed money transmission. During early January engagements with the suspect, agents sent YouTube tutorial links related to drone mapping and augmented reality software. These publicly available videos, watched by over 30,000 people, became the cornerstone of the controversial order for Google to provide not only the names, addresses, and phone numbers of Google account users who watched the videos but also the IP addresses of those who viewed them without being logged in.

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Australia’s Digital ID Bill is being amended to bring private sector identity service providers into the system within two years, in an attempt to gain enough Senate votes for approval, InnovationAus reports.

Opposition parties the Coalition and Greens had signaled they would not support the version of the bill which was approved in the lower house. Rolling the system out incrementally would be a “Big Government” approach, according to the Coalition.

The Labor Party holds only 26 of 76 seats in the upper house, so must gain the support of at least one other party to pass the legislation.

Assurance that private sector identity verification and service providers can be accredited within two years could knock down a hurdle to that support.

The amendments also add transparency requirements for law enforcement accessing the biometric data held by the ID system. Annual reports to the Attorney General will be passed on to parliament.

Language has been added to clarify that the digital ID is voluntary, in response to dissenting remarks in a Senate committee report expressing concern about requirements being added in the future, according to iTnews. Businesses will be required to maintain a method of service access that does not rely on digital ID.

Greens Spokesman David Shoebridge told The Australian Financial Review that “Genuine voluntariness and genuine consent” are necessary to ensure the bill does not create “more a loophole than a protection.”

New rules will also require explicit consent from an individual who has deactivated their digital ID for it to be reactivated.
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The EU Commission has repeatedly stated that EU citizens will not face discrimination or exclusion for not using its new digital identity wallet. However, the Greek government just signaled its intent to do just that.

Unbeknown to most EU citizens, digital identity is now a legal reality across the 27-nation bloc. On February 28, the European Parliament gave its final approval to the European Commission’s Digital Identity Regulation with a comfortable majority of 335 votes to 190, with 31 abstentions. The EU Council of Ministers gave its blessing on March 26. According to the Commission, the next step will be its publication in the Official Journal and its entry into force 20 days later, which by my calculations will be in just three days’ time.

The EU regulation obliges all member states to make a digital identity wallet available to every citizen who wants one. That is how the new system is currently being market — as an optional benefit for citizens who want to use one. ...
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As with the vaccine certificate, the initial goal regarding the digital ID wallet is to achieve as broad an uptake in as short a time as possible. And the government of Greece just provided a hint of how that might be achieved: by making access to certain public services and spaces — in this case, sports stadiums — contingent on possession of the digital ID wallet. ...

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Biometric locks are not protected information. Use number codes or geometric designs. They cannot compel you to disclose those locks as it is information in your head.
 
A far-remote Canadian municipality has imposed mandatory QR codes for people to enter and exit. Yes! you heard it right, the decision was taken by a local body government of Îles-de-la-Madeleine island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Prior to this, the visitors to the archipelago in Quebec province were asked to pay a $30 fee as well, as per reports. Residents of Îles-de-la-Madeleine have been expressing their anger on social media and some of them even dubbed the move as the "very first QR Code prison of Canada." However, it is to be added that these codes only apply to tourists entering and exiting the island contrary to the claims made online.

With this, the Canadian township Îles-de-la-Madeleine has reportedly become the first country in the world to make QR codes mandatory for visitors. Residents of the remote island won't have to go through the QR code sign-up protocol but would need to present their drivers' license as a proof. Notably, the municipality has a population of 12,000 people and is the first in Canada as well to bring QR codes for visitors' entry or exit.

The decision to impose a mandatory QR code has not gone well with the residents of the municipality, who have launched an online campaign asking fellow Canadians to oppose it. Many of them didn't like the change and that these QR codes would "sweep the nation," if citizens didn't take a stand. To address such concerns, according to a report by The Counter Signal, an official said that the QR codes were necessary for visitors to leave after paying the mandatory charges.
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https://www.msn.com/en-in/travel/ne...-qr-code-requirement-for-visitors/ar-AA1nMRds
 
Like privacy? Don't want a surveillance state? Well, here's a little food for thought.

A second Trump term would be a surveillance nightmare​

It’s darkly ironic that Donald Trump’s upcoming appearance at the Libertarian Party’s national convention was announced the same week his stunning interview with Time magazine was published, in which he indicated all the ways a potential second term would imperil our personal liberties.

Reading through the interview, I was struck by the scope of the surveillance state — and widespread intrusion into Americans’ personal lives — that will be required for Trump to accomplish his agenda.

Take immigration, for example. Trump said he would tap state police forces to aid a mass deportation plan that his advisers have said will involve rounding up most of the roughly 11 million undocumented people in the United States, holding them in camps along the southern border, and deporting them. Aside from the monumental resources that authorities would require to search for and apprehend that many people, it also stands to reason many of them, once apprehended, would be subjected to intense surveillance already deployed against people at risk for deportation, like ankle monitors and strict curfews.

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There are only a handful of DC critters that care about the privacy and the surveillance state and most of them are in the GOP. That article is dumb to focus just on Trump. Is the author purporting that Biden would be any better? That's not supported by the track record of his current administration.
 
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