> For instance, the Church of Scientology, U.S. Navy, and the Washington State Military Department told Prism that they are no longer working with the network.
That first one took me by surprise. What a random hodgepodge of organizations.
Man, I wish something like this would have happened to me when I was younger and spunkier. For years, I've had so many scenarios planned in my head for how something like that would play out! Even today, I might not just ignore it even though my propensity to give fucks has waned over the years.
It seems likely that every tightly clique is trying to infiltrate every other such clique - it's endless battle between mafias, political parties, cults (Tulsi Gabard's connections to Krishna cult), intelligence agencies and so-forth, each trying to use the other.
But naturally, there significant limits on how much and how long each of infiltration be effective. A infiltrator from X sent to gain control of Y and gaining complete control there of will often identify with Y since leading it give them more power (Stalin was likely a agent of the Czarist secret police before the revolution but he probably wasn't taking orders from them in 1935 etc).
people believe in scientology as much as they believe in a literature club. If you listen to someone like Tom Cruise's statements he says "I have gotten to where I am today because of Scientology". He doesn't name off specific procedures, treatments, practices, etc. Partially because they are barred from naming them.
But if you're looking for a club you can advance it, I highly suspect Scientology is as quid pro quo as anything else out there. In other words, it's more of a social function than a religion.
This is an interesting way of putting it, but matches my thoughts. I think most such organizations (political parties, religions, businesses, large organizations of many types) consist of true believers at the bottom of the pyramid, and moving up the ranks are folks who recognize that they can advance by understanding the game and utilizing the group mind to maintain credibility among the true believers, while displaying ambition to elites to advance the groups goals. At some point in the hierarchy are folks whose primary or only function is to advance the groups goals using middle ranks to maintain legitimacy with the believers.
Scientology is what happens when a science fiction writer acts out a dystopian plot in real life instead of writing a novel.
Read Stranger in a Strange Land, read about Hubbard and Heinlein's friendship, and look at the timeline of when Scientology started and Stranger in a Strange Land was published.
That may be true however today it is 2026 not 1961, LRH fell off the earth in 1980, and it is feasible that after the raids in 1977 and/or upon gaining tax-exempt status in 1993, some sort of deal was cut with the US state/intel apparatus to co-opt the church for another purpose
Edited title to be more sensationalist - this is a Seattle local thing
> The Seattle Shield website states that its mission “is to provide a collaborative and information-sharing environment between the Seattle Police Department and public/private partners in the Seattle area. Seattle Shield members assist Seattle Police Department efforts to identify, deter, defeat or mitigate potential acts of terrorism by reporting suspicious activity in a timely manner.”
You have Trump. You see how he is surrounded by the superrich.
You have Palantir.
You still think this is "sensationalist"? I don't think so. The assumption
here is that you wish to isolate this onto Seattle only. I think this is global
instead. By focusing only on Seattle we lose the wider picture. Anyone remembers
how people were surprised that Facebook connects offline-data to accounts? It's
why they are more accurately called Spybook.
“ The notice lists a few examples of attacks on Jewish targets in other U.S. cities last year; it does not mention widespread anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian attacks throughout the country.”
Why would it mention it on an anniversary of an attack on Israel?
Reminder if you work for any of these companies (not unlikely on this site) you are actively enabling this. If your first reaction is doubt, deflection, rationalization or discomfort, there are ways out.
Or perhaps when Amazon facilities security encounters someone doing destructive or harmful things, then sharing that information with other companies in the city is a perfectly reasonable measure?
This is functionally no different than sharing your encounters with disruptive people on NextDoor.
Are those things you are personally struggling with with (if you are considering quitting open source contribitions wholesale: don't let this make you) or is this rationalization at play?
> All suspicious activity reported must be behavior based. It is important to keep in mind that suspicious behavior, such as taking photographs or videos, is not a criminal act by itself, but may be a precursor to criminal activity.
the number of times I've been harassed by police for taking photos... even in small towns in the middle of nowhere people are paranoid.
Huh, it seems to try to take my back button and it pretends that there is history if I open it in a new tab, but if I click on it from HN it lets me go back. But I can also see it trying to create history. Maybe it's a Brave feature idk.
Having a coalition of mega corporations all allied with each other isn't any better than having a strong government. Both are dangerous to personal liberties. I think we're due for a break up of these companies. No more Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc. We the people need to start taking power back.
No one is going to save us. I've recently been moved to direct action and started participating in a local indivisible.org group. It's had untold positive impacts on my personal mental state being with people trying to make things better, or at least slow the damage for now. Much of that is from going out and talking to random people on the street, handing out information and having conversations. Also quitting social media at the same time, save one exception for HN.
Looks like a nothingburger? It's unfunded. An email describes a protest without giving a framing that the site would prefer. Then it turns out that nobody knows what it does, but it might do something bad.
I'm all for transparency and accountability but my assumption is that the bad things being done by LEO and intelligence are far worse than this.
My take away from the article was that this likely isn't the only public-private intelligence network propped up by local PDs; that was pretty alarming to me.
Would it shock your conscience to learn that Microsoft security operations probably have contacts with the Redmond PD and that they occasionally discuss concerns?
The existence of a mailing list or something of that sort isn't particularly worrying. I don't think it's reasonable to expect a firewall between police departments and local businesses any more that it would be reasonable to expect one between PDs and local residents.
I would be alarmed if it turned out that Amazon was giving the Seattle PD direct, warrantless access to data about their consumers, or something like that. But there's no evidence presented here of anything particularly sketchy going on.
There were a lot of articles describing Snowdon / Manning and Wikileaks releases as exactly "nothing burgers", in those journals of note that people read to tell them what to think about matters - but I'm not sure what a "nothing burger" means - pulverised cattle flesh flattened into an oval, that doesn't exist?
The validity of the term should be separate from the pernicious use by people who would like you to stop paying attention to things that matter.
I think there’s lots of stuff in this space that is worth paying attention to, including for example just how complete a profile companies like Experian have assembled on US citizens, or Flock and LPR generally.
This just seems a lot of fluff with nothing substantial, hence a nothingburger.
That's actually a very logical stance: China is much less interested in what you're doing as an individual citizen—and much less able to act on what they know—than the United States is. For the same reason, Chinese citizens should trust the United States with their data more than China.
Not so surprising - we kind of suspected this. Anyone remembers Snowden or Assange?
We have to accept the fact that presently all democracies are merely simulation of a democracy. At the least in the USA; other countries may be a bit better, e. g. Switzerland or the scandinavian countries are somewhat better (though also not to be trusted - see how Sweden pursued Assange).
Perhaps this is how things always end? Democracies are kind of like an obsolete model when you compare it to authoritarianism (assuming the USA would still be a democracy rather than a tech-corporate-fascist country run by a corrupt elite of superrich).
You've got the good guys and the bad guys mixed up. No Meta "engineer" knows what morals or ethics even are, much less actually apply them in real life.
Ah the new dark pool. Does anyone remember those from the trading? I still remember ARCA (good rebate back in the day), ECN (very fluid and very cheap), and a few dark pools that I used to get out of a trade quickly.
> For instance, the Church of Scientology, U.S. Navy, and the Washington State Military Department told Prism that they are no longer working with the network.
That first one took me by surprise. What a random hodgepodge of organizations.
4chan validated in their protests against Scientology was not in my bingo card.
For people like me who had no idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Chanology
At this point I'm waiting for the aliens appearance in the Epstein files.
Such a low level of expectation of ethical level for non human beings is not fair.
Scientologists being involved with intelligence agencies doesn't surprise me even a bit, it makes a lot of sense as a CIA cutout.
Infiltration of government institutions has been doctrine for the group since the 1970s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White
Those weirdos followed me around Ybor near Tampa when I said something negative about them online in public. IT WAS WEIRD! But I gave no Fs
Man, I wish something like this would have happened to me when I was younger and spunkier. For years, I've had so many scenarios planned in my head for how something like that would play out! Even today, I might not just ignore it even though my propensity to give fucks has waned over the years.
Any belief system or club that validates sociopathy as a "higher" state of evolution or enlightenment will worm it's way into intelligence agencies.
It seems likely that every tightly clique is trying to infiltrate every other such clique - it's endless battle between mafias, political parties, cults (Tulsi Gabard's connections to Krishna cult), intelligence agencies and so-forth, each trying to use the other.
But naturally, there significant limits on how much and how long each of infiltration be effective. A infiltrator from X sent to gain control of Y and gaining complete control there of will often identify with Y since leading it give them more power (Stalin was likely a agent of the Czarist secret police before the revolution but he probably wasn't taking orders from them in 1935 etc).
Now I want to play Steve Jackson's Illuminati...
https://www.sjgames.com/illuminati/
Scientology is essentially a scheme to get private/incriminating information from very important people. Why the surprise?
damn I wonder how many scientology believers in intel actually believe in scientology...
I mean, it shows how much intel agencies can "screen for high intelligence individuals" ?
people believe in scientology as much as they believe in a literature club. If you listen to someone like Tom Cruise's statements he says "I have gotten to where I am today because of Scientology". He doesn't name off specific procedures, treatments, practices, etc. Partially because they are barred from naming them.
But if you're looking for a club you can advance it, I highly suspect Scientology is as quid pro quo as anything else out there. In other words, it's more of a social function than a religion.
This is an interesting way of putting it, but matches my thoughts. I think most such organizations (political parties, religions, businesses, large organizations of many types) consist of true believers at the bottom of the pyramid, and moving up the ranks are folks who recognize that they can advance by understanding the game and utilizing the group mind to maintain credibility among the true believers, while displaying ambition to elites to advance the groups goals. At some point in the hierarchy are folks whose primary or only function is to advance the groups goals using middle ranks to maintain legitimacy with the believers.
Religion is all about social function, at least from social science perceptives I guess.
Scientology is what happens when a science fiction writer acts out a dystopian plot in real life instead of writing a novel.
Read Stranger in a Strange Land, read about Hubbard and Heinlein's friendship, and look at the timeline of when Scientology started and Stranger in a Strange Land was published.
That may be true however today it is 2026 not 1961, LRH fell off the earth in 1980, and it is feasible that after the raids in 1977 and/or upon gaining tax-exempt status in 1993, some sort of deal was cut with the US state/intel apparatus to co-opt the church for another purpose
No, shady deals and intel capture fits perfectly fine with the original dystopian novel in the real world.
Edited title to be more sensationalist - this is a Seattle local thing
> The Seattle Shield website states that its mission “is to provide a collaborative and information-sharing environment between the Seattle Police Department and public/private partners in the Seattle area. Seattle Shield members assist Seattle Police Department efforts to identify, deter, defeat or mitigate potential acts of terrorism by reporting suspicious activity in a timely manner.”
That network is shared with police departments in cities outside Seattle per the article.
I encourage people imagining this as some high-scale surveillance dragnet to look at the Seattle Shield website and form their opinions https://seattleshield.org/default.aspx?MenuItemID=53&MenuGro...
You have Trump. You see how he is surrounded by the superrich.
You have Palantir.
You still think this is "sensationalist"? I don't think so. The assumption here is that you wish to isolate this onto Seattle only. I think this is global instead. By focusing only on Seattle we lose the wider picture. Anyone remembers how people were surprised that Facebook connects offline-data to accounts? It's why they are more accurately called Spybook.
Interesting. You should write an article about this and post it on HN. This article is about an unfunded website run by someone at the Seattle PD.
“ The notice lists a few examples of attacks on Jewish targets in other U.S. cities last year; it does not mention widespread anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian attacks throughout the country.”
Why would it mention it on an anniversary of an attack on Israel?
Bias alert!
Reminder if you work for any of these companies (not unlikely on this site) you are actively enabling this. If your first reaction is doubt, deflection, rationalization or discomfort, there are ways out.
Or perhaps when Amazon facilities security encounters someone doing destructive or harmful things, then sharing that information with other companies in the city is a perfectly reasonable measure?
This is functionally no different than sharing your encounters with disruptive people on NextDoor.
If you make open source used by any of this companies for this network, would you also characterize it as actively enabling this?
If your retirement fund owns stocks of the s&p 500, does that make you an enabler?
Are there really ways out?
Are those things you are personally struggling with with (if you are considering quitting open source contribitions wholesale: don't let this make you) or is this rationalization at play?
No
Yes
Maybe
Interesting they have not contacted me about how they are going to be paying their subscription fee
I hope they dont think im doing all of this for free
> All suspicious activity reported must be behavior based. It is important to keep in mind that suspicious behavior, such as taking photographs or videos, is not a criminal act by itself, but may be a precursor to criminal activity.
I couldn't help but remember when the police talked to David Hobby (aka Strobist) for photographing a tree.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/02/chronic...
Have a look at your local branch here: https://globalshieldnetwork.com/programs-2/
archive that won't hijack your back button https://archive.is/Td9AR
archive.is is one of the domains of archive.today, which used its end users for a DDOS attack on a blog. This caused English Wikipedia to deprecate it with the end goal of blacklisting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archive.today_guidan...
Huh, it seems to try to take my back button and it pretends that there is history if I open it in a new tab, but if I click on it from HN it lets me go back. But I can also see it trying to create history. Maybe it's a Brave feature idk.
Why do our browsers even allow that?
When done properly you don't even notice! It is very beneficial when needed. But, as we know, very awful when done improperly.
For websites like Gmail when you open an email
To enable JavaScript crapware
How bad are things in Seattle that they are resorting to this? What the hell happened to my hometown?
Where is the "I did that" sticker with trump pointing at this article.
:(
Established in 2009. Who started as president that year?
established and operating since 2009- "Why did Trump do this?"
Having a coalition of mega corporations all allied with each other isn't any better than having a strong government. Both are dangerous to personal liberties. I think we're due for a break up of these companies. No more Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc. We the people need to start taking power back.
No one is going to save us. I've recently been moved to direct action and started participating in a local indivisible.org group. It's had untold positive impacts on my personal mental state being with people trying to make things better, or at least slow the damage for now. Much of that is from going out and talking to random people on the street, handing out information and having conversations. Also quitting social media at the same time, save one exception for HN.
https://indivisible.org/get-involved/find-a-group/
Looks like a nothingburger? It's unfunded. An email describes a protest without giving a framing that the site would prefer. Then it turns out that nobody knows what it does, but it might do something bad.
I'm all for transparency and accountability but my assumption is that the bad things being done by LEO and intelligence are far worse than this.
My take away from the article was that this likely isn't the only public-private intelligence network propped up by local PDs; that was pretty alarming to me.
Would it shock your conscience to learn that Microsoft security operations probably have contacts with the Redmond PD and that they occasionally discuss concerns?
The existence of a mailing list or something of that sort isn't particularly worrying. I don't think it's reasonable to expect a firewall between police departments and local businesses any more that it would be reasonable to expect one between PDs and local residents.
I would be alarmed if it turned out that Amazon was giving the Seattle PD direct, warrantless access to data about their consumers, or something like that. But there's no evidence presented here of anything particularly sketchy going on.
Yes, large businesses have contacts with local PD in the area. This is what BIDs basically are as well
I think this is a good point: this is what they're letting us on.
Do you mean unfounded?
Unfunded. It's in the article
There were a lot of articles describing Snowdon / Manning and Wikileaks releases as exactly "nothing burgers", in those journals of note that people read to tell them what to think about matters - but I'm not sure what a "nothing burger" means - pulverised cattle flesh flattened into an oval, that doesn't exist?
The validity of the term should be separate from the pernicious use by people who would like you to stop paying attention to things that matter.
I think there’s lots of stuff in this space that is worth paying attention to, including for example just how complete a profile companies like Experian have assembled on US citizens, or Flock and LPR generally.
This just seems a lot of fluff with nothing substantial, hence a nothingburger.
As an American, I genuinely trust my data with China more than I do with the United States.
That's actually a very logical stance: China is much less interested in what you're doing as an individual citizen—and much less able to act on what they know—than the United States is. For the same reason, Chinese citizens should trust the United States with their data more than China.
Please tell me they're using Workplace.
Not so surprising - we kind of suspected this. Anyone remembers Snowden or Assange?
We have to accept the fact that presently all democracies are merely simulation of a democracy. At the least in the USA; other countries may be a bit better, e. g. Switzerland or the scandinavian countries are somewhat better (though also not to be trusted - see how Sweden pursued Assange).
Perhaps this is how things always end? Democracies are kind of like an obsolete model when you compare it to authoritarianism (assuming the USA would still be a democracy rather than a tech-corporate-fascist country run by a corrupt elite of superrich).
I'm convinced Meta is a cult with Total control. It will go to any lengths to make money.
https://globalshieldnetwork.com/team/erin-nicholson/
What in the decomposed-dissident gang-stalked tarnation is this?
So what you're saying is that everyone that works at Amazon and Facebook are now at grave risk because the bad guys now think they're informants?
You've got the good guys and the bad guys mixed up. No Meta "engineer" knows what morals or ethics even are, much less actually apply them in real life.
Come to think about it, the one person I know that works at Meta is the absolute worst person I know.
I love this comment, I just couldn't ever frame it so well :)
Not any more than the average citizen of East Germany.
It's bad guys all the way down.
Ah the new dark pool. Does anyone remember those from the trading? I still remember ARCA (good rebate back in the day), ECN (very fluid and very cheap), and a few dark pools that I used to get out of a trade quickly.