This is correct. Every country in the west has laws that allows their 3 letter agencies to show up and demand various things from vendors and force the vendors to not say a thing at penalty of jail time. This is known and the laws are on the books.
It is actually worse than you think.
I have a video (I cannot find it right now but will post on the forums if I find it again) of a presentation where the presenter describes all of the components in a typical computer and the sheer amount of firmware in the computer. Here is the summary:
You install Linux on bare metal.
Well, you think Linux is actually installed on bare metal and is actually talking to all of the hardware in your computer.
That is not what is happening at all. Linux doesn’t actually talk to any of the raw hardware any longer. Virtually every single component in a typical computer has firmware built into it. Linux does not talk to the actual raw hardware, instead, it talks to the interfaces that the device firmware presents to your Linux install.
What that means is that your Linux bare metal install is basically firewalled off in a kind of pseudo virtual machine that is in a Matrix (the movie) kind of situation where it talks to all of these interfaces that the matrix of firmware provide to the os. It is the sea of firmware that is in charge, not our Linux environment and the firmware can (and do) whatever the hell they want. You think your nic is ONLY sending packets your OS is requesting? You have no idea, the firmware on the nic can do (and probably does) all kinds of nifty things.
That isn’t even the half of it.
After the 2016 American elections, we have been in a perpetual process of discovery of just how little freedom we all have. Government agencies don’t even have to call up vendors to do anything. They just have have to make contact with those in various companies that are politically aligned with them who will hand over information about us with enthusiasm.
It’s all rotten to the core.
Sorry to be a bummer on this one dude. There is an upside, but that is a different topic.
What would be the upside? That the folks secretly collecting data and making graphs of my bodily functions might have to look at a fart graph, and in so doing be disgusted with themselves for being a part of that?
This is a real life master class on the true nature of our species and how it works. There are rules that our species follows, it just wasn’t the rules you were told about.
There is truth and trust out there and you can find it. I simply cannot tell you where it is and how to find it as it is against forum rules.
Roughly speaking, we are in a civil war in the west. Learn to cherish your family, it is the only answer in a civilisation wide civil war.
That can be partially mitigated by having signatories in different (multiple) jurisdictions. So at least it would require two evil governments cooperating, with two hammers.
So that’s why Purism has been blatantly promoting Flatpaks, and built their PureOS Store exclusively on Flatpak technology. Flatpak is short for Flatulence Package!
There is one flaw in this plan. The warrant has to be issued. You have to be an active target.
Otherwise the US would have an easier time catching all those loose criminals. The gov’t has to be aware of the crime. So this tells me that illegal farts are not being reported, only collected.
The AI Fart Bot monitoring the Fart Graph can’t report an illegal fart without a warrant. It can only keep adding to the Graph. Of course once the warrant hits, it has all the history of illegal farts to choose from. (No one reads your Fart Graph without a warrant, but can they read meta-Fart data without a warrant?)
e.g. You may have read news reports how they were able to catch the murderer by tracing where the murderer’s phone went to dump the body. But they could only do that after a warrant was issued, not before.
I was discussing this in a generic way. Kernels have not spoken directly to hardware since the late 80s really, just pointing out the scale of the problem.
