"what is Fivecast ONYX? an AI-powered surveillance platform purchased by ICE for $4.2 million and CBP for additional license costs. according to Fivecast’s own documentation and EFF’s reporting, they do automated collection of multimedia data from social media and dark web, build “digital footprints” from biographical data, tracks shifts in sentiment and emotion, assigns risk scores, searches across 300+ platforms and 28+ billion data points, identifies people with “violent tendencies”"
Glad to know that my tinfoil hat wasn't too tight when social media came to be and this obvious use was predicted. How quickly will not having social media accounts become a crime?
According to Persona's damage control article[0], the subdomain had "onyx" in its name because that's the internal code name for the project, and it's named after the pokémon Onyx. No connection to Fivecast ONYX.
On a macro scale, in Australia if you don't have a paid private health policy, you get slugged with additional tax come tax time. The same could happen here - "oh, you don't have social media? Well the state needs more tax from you to pay for your additional state surveillance"
I'm 99% sure this is one of them. I thought 404media posted a leaked list of the platforms once but I can't find it. Search is dead (this is a general statement)
> How quickly will not having social media accounts become a crime?
Ah, it already is. Just being trialed against people with less rights and no voting power.
Since the last several months, your US visa will be rejected if you do not submit public social media profiles.
If you think the government is spending a hundred billions on this category of tech for vetting a few thousand people, you are a prime candidate to buy a bridge that I can sell you for a discount.
Can I just ask gpt to ask me questions to create my profile directly? I can't be bothered with any social media. Whatever it is supposed to addict me with is missing, I just find it all very boring.
I got into the USA in September last year. On my esta I put a private instagram account I begrudgingly made to talk to some friends, and my LinkedIn. I guess that’s enough data?
Governments in Europe should be seriously scrutinising this with the background conversation of departing American tech going on. Discord users globally were being coerced into handing over their ID to this American surveillance tech. Are we just going to let this go on?
You act like the governments of Europe weren’t the reason Discord decided they needed to get government issued identity information from European users…
I don't like it playing sound, I can't read the blog post in the metro. In fact I will direct my attention to the next thing and not remember reading this later.
I like it. It's like wandering into someone else's house. Their stereo is playing, they're telling you some interesting story. It's their party, I'm just a guest. It reminds me of how the web used to feel.
Please note that Persona primarily operates as a "service provider" or "processor" for its customers. We act as a "business" or "controller" only for specific services, such as identity verification for LinkedIn, FoxCorp, and Reusable Persona. To learn more about how Persona manages your personal data, please refer to our privacy notices, which can be accessed through the following link: https://withpersona.com/legal/privacy-notices
If you wish to exercise your privacy rights related to services where Persona is a "service provider" or "processor," please contact the entity using our service, as they are the "controller" of the data. We will assist the relevant customer to fulfill your data subject rights, but we do not handle such requests directly on their behalf.
For any privacy rights request related to services where Persona acts as a "business" or "controller," including identity verification for LinkedIn, FoxCorp, Reusable Persona, and personal data related to our sales, marketing activities, or website browsing on withpersona.com, please use our Data Subject Request (DSAR) available at the following link: https://withpersona.com/dsar
For all other inquiries, we will respond as soon as possible.
That does not match the very similar reply I got as a California resident asserting my rights under California's "Right to Know" Act , regarding LinkedIn profile data and related
This is the same complete bullshit trying to remove oneself from political donation emails. "Oh, okay, we will remove you from that one." Days later it's a "different campaign." Sometimes it's the exact same people from weeks ago who have just renamed their campaign and started sending again.
We need far stronger laws for all of it, which will never happen because the rot and corruption has fully metastasized.
100% the political campaigns pinging you is endless and you cannot escape it. I have dozens of campaigns pinging me daily and I mark them all as spam as I never signed up for this nonsense. Give me a way to block them all and remove me from their database.
It seems like at every technological step, we're sold the dream and delivered the meme. We always end up with the worst possible combination of players, ideas and outcomes; with the promise of what the said technology delivers in terms of additional freedom or free time never realised. How many more broken social contracts can society endure before it crumbles?
It's "socializing the losses and privatizing the gains"… but now alarmingly supercharged well beyond purely financial realms, and into really basic and fundamental matters of individual physical autonomy and liberty.
> How many more broken social contracts can society endure before it crumbles?
Having any kind of agency in those things would be a start.
If <FAANG bigcorp of your choice> announces with great fanfare "We're building this totally awesome new technology that will make everything better! And the best thing? You won't have to do anything, we will auto-update all your devices/accounts/etc with it for free! Trust us!", then whether you personally believe their enthusiastic predictions or not doesn't really matter a lot - you will get it anyway, unless you spend a lot of energy to deliberately avoid the new technology.
I felt compelled to write this email to 1password today:
Dear 1password,
Please stop trying to "innovate". I really like your password manager. That's all I want. I don't want "automatic watchtower AI phishing prevention" I just want a password manager that works across my devices. Make it simple, make it secure, and don't change it. You have a great product. Adding more features will only make it worse. If you keep this bullshit up I will churn.
The story here is that a FedRAMP-authorized system had 53MB of Vite dev source maps exposed on a production government endpoint. That's not "sold the dream, delivered the meme," that's a specific auditable compliance failure. Meanwhile a fintech engineer explaining that this is all standard legally-mandated KYC infrastructure got flagged to death. The interesting question isn't whether technology betrays us, it's why US law requires this surveillance apparatus in the first place and why the security assessment apparently missed checking for /vite-dev/ on a government system.
Also every technological step? Ever? Really? This wouldn't happen to be typed on a computer from a climate-controlled room on a nice global network or anything?
Except it wasn't a production endpoint and there's no actual security risk in having source maps available. It's more annoying to read source code that has been minified, but if a security professional tells you that minifying source code is something that increases security, you should be wondering what other bullshit they've pedaled you.
I'm not a fan of persona and have gone out of my way to not provide my details to them even before this, and I really dislike Thiel, but... let's be honest about the stuff we're complaining about.
From my understanding, we are pretty close to a Dystopian world where all elites of a certain group collaborate to run a Super Leviathan. We still gotta choose our flavors, which may not be feasible in maybe 5-10 years when those leviathans clash into each other.
Likewise, thank you for the recommendation. I obviously haven't read Goliath's Curse yet, but it seems like Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988) might also be interesting for the same readers.
It's not like this is surprising, there have been plenty of sci-fi books/movies that have predicted this very thing. How many movies have the haves lived above ground/off planet, while the have nots have lived underground or stuck on a apocalyptic planet.
This is just furthering the previous history. Currently, the lords have just been able to keep the serfs appeased to a longer extent. Every time in history or in sci-fi, the serfs reach a breaking point and rise up.
You seem very confident. This seems to imply you feel the haves will know when to leave enough on the table for the have nots to still feel like they are a part of the haves. I'm not so confident in that.
Far more likely is that we head back to a feudal era where data mining tech is used to identify and eliminate potential rabble-rousers. Once enough production is automated, all remaining have-nots are exterminated.
The weak link is that for “the haves” to have, the “have -nots” are needed. To have or to not is just a comparison, a millionaire needs the poor to be rich and to feel special otherwise when everyone is special nobody is.
People in technologically advanced societies have more than enough & the people who are not as advanced can not do anything that will have any effect on the people who own the fighter jets, missiles, robot factories, & "internet" satellites. The current system has no historical precedent. It is very close to an almost perfect panopticon w/ an associated media & police apparatus to keep everyone docile & complacent. Like I said, this time is different.
It will instead eventually fall apart in more thoroughly destructive ways. But not until it does a possibly-unrecoverably (at least in the medium term) amount of damage to civilization, humanity, and life on Earth first.
It's already crumbling. That's why we have AI-powered fascism in the first place. Society destabilizes and a significant fraction of the population says "perhaps authoritarianism is a good thing." It's never worth it, though.
I think that's a natural outcome of a model where sociopaths climb to the top, with a layer of sycophants beneath them that shield normal workers from perceiving the amount of depravity going on at the top which would make them unable to continue and tank the business. AI might remove the reliance on regular folks and give sociopaths direct execution of all ideas they have without any moral opposition, and that would explain a lot of the rush for AI everywhere we see nowadays.
This is the part that doesn't get enough attention. The historical check on concentrated power wasn't just democracy or law — it was that executing any large-scale agenda required thousands of people who could refuse, drag their feet, or leak. AI doesn't just automate tasks — it removes the human friction that was always an informal veto on the worst ideas.
The surveillance apparatus isn't new. What's new is that you need fewer people with moral objections in the loop to operate it.
I would be careful with this kind of reasoning, because it suggests corruption within a corporate model is inevitable, giving it implicit permission to continue existing. It's not inevitable.
Or for noticing that Discord, Roblox, OpenAI, Anthropic, Persona, and Palantir all have Zionist Israeli founders / co-founders / CEOs / funding. Or that 98% of US congress members received donations from AIPAC or that the US president is a staunch Zionist / supporter of Israel.
In before I get downvoted and flagged for speaking the truth and noticing patterns.
"We weren’t hacked" is doing PR triage for "we exposed sensitive internal implementation details." Spy company semantics are always incredible. The house didn’t burn down, it just leaked gas.
Enough said. Since the "death of God" (per Nietzsche - the collapse of the metaphysics underpinning our morals and therefore cultural norms and behaviors) the modus operandi has been the utilitarian "get what's yours."
Reprehensible.
Additionally, people are typically only "gifted" on one domain -- if one's gifted enough in the domain of intellect to become a SWE, they're typically lacking elsewhere, whether that be in moral scruples or the ability to discern social things such as when they're working for sociopaths.
Yes, many of them don't. They're fed convincing cover-stories like "we need this to stop CSAM" or "this prevents terrorism", and then put on a security theater about E2EE and military-grade cryptography. They sleep like a baby because most of them genuinely think they're the good guys, hell, even people on HN appear to buy the obvious lie whenever Client Side Scanning or Flock is brought up.
You can hire sociopaths to work the ~1% of jobs that require a complete understanding of your moral bankruptcy. Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Larry Ellison, none of these people ever apologized for their ethical flexibility because it's precisely what qualifies them for such a lucrative job. Persona can be a shell org with 20 evil engineers while their partners absentmindedly do the integration work.
Many tech execs operate under the thesis that china & the democratic party are existential threats that warrant a surveillance/military/police ramp up. Meanwhile, many tech employees are credulous and frequently adopt self-serving geopolitical narratives. The current macro trends don't help (huge defense budgets, bad labor market power, China is in fact more powerful)
surprised nobody responded with the most straightforward, occams razor explanation
they think what they're doing is actually good for society
not everyone is in the hackerspace libertarian / socialist sphere
i used to work for a place that used persona despite it adding extra friction to signups (literally resulting in less paying customers to the dismay of PMs) because it was worth it to combat fraud. theres a tradeoff in everything
What's crazy is I know engineers like this in real life - and they're good engineers! So I know they do exist, but their existence to serve their company or CEO no matter what is completely foreign to me. Like, you're smart enough to understand that large codebase and generally function as a member of society, but you've completely given up your higher level decision making for someone or something that would throw you away in an instant.
All of them are complicit. You only need ~50 greedy sociopaths to work at Persona, and 10,000 dumb-as-rocks engineers hyped to work at Microsoft/OpenAI and "stop the bad guys" or whatever the boogeyman du-jour is.
We saw it with Bitlocker, we saw it with Client Side Scanning, we see it with Salt Typhoon. Most people that work on weaponized surveillance systems are entirely apathetic, or see themselves as righteous. Even when the system is known to be bugged, obviously flawed, or outright controlled by a foreign adversary.
My employer isn't particularly bad for society, but let's pretend they are.
My company is a large employer of foreign workers. I already live in fear of being priced out by foreign bodyshop firms. If I decided what we were doing was immoral, and dug my heels in. I'd just be replaced by a H-1B worker. If everyone else in my company decided they wouldn't build the torment nexus, we'd all just be replaced by H-1B workers. It'd be a minor inconvenience to the company, but they'd weather it just fine. Under this system, any kind of collective bargaining becomes impossible, moral, financial, or otherwise.
Organize in your country and advocate for data deletion jubilees, organize in your country to champion new taxes against US digital services, organize in your country to advocate for homegrown solutions over US tech.
If you aren't actively organizing you aren't going to accomplish anything.
Remember that people power trumps monetary power, but you have to commit for people power to work.
Why? Every country on Earth is capable of creating and maintaining software. There is nothing unique about America or Silicon Valley (outside of the massive amounts of corporate welfare), devs can be found anywhere and who better to write software for local citizens than the local citizens themselves?
We know how useful open source software is, there's no reason why this can't be replicated across the planet.
Not because they cannot do it, but because why they're doing it, which in turn becomes what they're doing. America is being perceived as isolationist, so countries solve that by becoming isolationist about what software they use, whether its open source or not is kind of irrelevant, though in several cases the software will primarily be focused on the countries own language.
The better alternative in my eyes is to contribute to existing open source, and only if the US becomes hostile against this, fork said code and move on.
1. Request your data. Email idv-privacy@withpersona.com or privacy@withpersona.com. Under GDPR, they have 30 days to respond.
2. Request deletion. The verification is done. LinkedIn already has the result. There is no reason for Persona to keep your passport scan and facial geometry on their servers. Ask them to delete it.
3. Contact their DPO. dpo@withpersona.com — that’s their Data Protection Officer. If you want to object to them using your documents as AI training data under “legitimate interests,” this is where you do it.
4. Think twice before verifying. That blue badge might not be worth what you’re trading for it. A checkmark is cosmetic. Biometric data is forever.
I get the KYC concerns for API access, but I'm sortof baffled at why they'd need all of the AML stuff, given that they're not payment processors/financial institutions.
Or does Persona provide that by default? Don't know much about their service...
> OpenAI’s disclosures reference biometric data stored “up to a year.” the source > code shows face list retention capped at 3 years. government IDs retained
> “permanently” per Persona’s practices. which is it?
I keep saying this. This is the playbook -- everything is moving to standardize Sam Altman's biometric authentication cryptocurrency company to use internet services. This has been a slow moving strategy for /years/ and every new step over that period only get closer, not further from this goal.
Another downvoted comment asks if this is all LLM output. While I don't think all of it is, chunks of it have LLM smells so I wanted to point those out as the author or other readers may find it useful:
The ASCII flowcharts all contain jagged vertical lines. This is the biggest indicator of LLM output as no human would ever produce that. You can simply see with your eyes that it's wrong if you even glance at it.
> there’s no way for us to prove that they don’t have access to all of that data anyway. we can only assume that they don’t have access to all of that data. but if you want my two cents, they probably do.
This doesn't quite read as LLM output but it makes the whole article look like a conspiracy theory.
> after trying to write a few exploits, vmfunc decided to browse their infra on shodan. it all started with a Shodan search. a single IP. 34.49.93.177 sitting on Google Cloud in Kansas City. one open port. one SSL certificate. two hostnames that tell a story nobody was supposed to read:
> and the company that runs all of this is the same one that takes your passport photo when you sign up for ChatGPT. same codebase. same platform. different deployment. same facial recognition. same screening algorithms. same data model.
> and as always, the information wants to be free. we didn’t break anything. we didn’t bypass anything. we queried URLs, pressed buttons, and read what came back. if that’s enough to expose the architecture of a global surveillance platform… maybe the problem isn’t us.
These all absolutely stink of LLM writing patterns.
Stand in a hospital and say that credibly. I recommend the maternity ward.
Our consumer markets are a wreck. We have no federal watch dog exercising any authority. We have unchecked intelligence agencies actively trying to enslave the world. Our desire for convenience is not the problem, the people taking advantage of it are.
Why a hospital? There's very little convenience at play when it's a life and death situation.
It is what drives the market quite a bit at least. It's why we've produced over 2 billion cars and use them every day to pollute our own air so we don't have to walk two blocks. Most home appliances are convenience personified, the dishwasher, the microwave, the clothes dryer. It's why we have supply chains up the wazoo to bring products from all corners of the globe to everyone's nearby supermarket, a large amount of it getting thrown away when it's expired unsold. We fly across countries for something as pointless as a business meeting. Hell people now even order a taxi for their food, so they don't have to go out to get it.
Modern life is like at least 60% wastefulness in the name of convenience. Of course people with the option to do so will exploit the one thing that's easily exploitable, that's like water flowing downhill.
Maternity is most often not "life and death." Is the maternity ward just a convenience? Or is the cost worth the benefit? You don't seem to be doing any form of honest analysis.
> Most home appliances are convenience personified, the dishwasher, the microwave, the clothes dryer.
Yes, because, those save time. It's worth having a point of view that other people saving their time, and thus freeing it for more worthwhile endeavors is ultimately a net positive for all of society. You pass these off as mere conveniences. It's a rather bleak misanthropic outlook you seem to have acquired.
> Modern life is like at least 60% wastefulness in the name of convenience.
People own cars to drive more than two blocks. You're only making the most ridiculous version of the argument and you don't have very much to back it up.
Thank god for noscript. Did see or hear any of that and dumped the text-only version of the article and HN discussion right to my local hard drive for off-line reading.
On mobile the cat sits in the middle of the screen and does not respond to touch input. The author has been told about the distracting elements and refused to acknowledge it.
General Alexander (former Director of NSA) admitted, around DEF CON XX (circa 2012), that the intelligence community defines "intercept" as when a human analyst catalogues a piece of information.
Reading between these lines, some decade+ later... we swim beyond seas of deception, in these interceptionless databases of humanity. Less than just a number, only weights held in artificial minds.
Except everything I said was factual, and nothing was conspiratorial. If you disagree, please point out where I was factually incorrect. Otherwise, you should probably change your username to ignoramus or denierofreality or something similar. Unless you want to be viewed as a hypocrite that is.
This is the most important section, as the above ones any privacy-conscious person would assume most anyway. I did mention before that we need an open-source platform that tracks the people who work and build such systems. Those are the enablers who have no morals or ethics - a greedy corporation is always greedy, but when the average employee is willing to work full time on building such systems, they need to be exposed publicly, just as they are working relentlessly on violating private people's privacy. It isn't about public humiliation; it's about basic human decency and maintaining a minimum ethical code to abide by. These individuals shouldn't be hired or dealt with, not even a simple connection on LinkedIn.
These individuals are dangerous. They are like rats among us and should be exposed, and I bet some of them are reading this as well.
The right wing went full censorship and surveillance after the Charlie Kirk assassination. It is probably not a coincidence that they targeted Discord first, because the suspect was in a Discord group.
They promised freedom of speech and liberty and this is what we get.
> The right wing went full censorship and surveillance after the Charlie Kirk assassination.
No, earlier. US tech is mostly surveillance tech, with Thiel being sponsor and broker for authoritarian right. The doge operation started around day 1, and was a breach into the government to steal data that was yet out of reach for certain plotters.
The right wing went full censorship and surveillance long before the Charlie Kirk assassination. Anyone who believed that the right wing (or the left wing, for that matter; let's not pretend that censorious dipshittery is not bipartisan) was honestly promising freedom of speech as opposed to merely freedom of speech they like and censorship of speech they don't like was at best willfully blinding themselves to the actual actions of politicians.
True. The free speech narratives are mere tools against opposition by promoting the most childish and stupidly rigid interpretations thereof, not something they really believe in. The whole conservative project is doomed from the start as it has to confront science and progress like the emancipation by women, lgbt people and certain ethnicities.
> or the left wing, for that matter;
Both sides is uncalled for. Far left and the horse shoe, sure, but a) far left is very fringe, and b) lets not equate them with a well funded actual insurrection of oligarch and white nationalists with a paramilitary.
> > or the left wing, for that matter;
> Both sides is uncalled for. Far left and the horse shoe, sure
How so? Leftist censorship became quite popular on college campuses. The ACLU supported that, and got cold feet about promoting free expression more generally when it involves organizations or causes it doesn't like.
I'm a lefty, but I absolutely believe that both the left and right are deep in the "ends justify the means" weeds with respect to censorship and free expression. I blame partisanship. People used to have respect for someone taking a principled stand that didn't necessarily align with their overall political position. Now, that's just seen as a weak maneuver in the all-important "my team vs your team" culture war.
> The whole conservative project is doomed from the start as it has to confront science and progress like the emancipation by women, lgbt people and certain ethnicities.
I have no idea what you're talking about. There is no scientific or natural law that says that every human should have equal rights. You can totally make a stable society that discriminates on color of skin or possession of certain documents or account balance. It's been done many times. Science does not tell you whether votes should be extended all the way to ducks but not chickens, nor whether unauthorized presence in a country should enable arbitrary search and seizure. Plus, "conservative" covers a lot of ground and someone can legitimately be extremely conservative and completely opposed to (eg) white nationalism at the same time.
Sure, conservatism is always going to drag its heels to recognize and accommodate the sorts of progress in science and other understanding that I'm guessing you're thinking of, but progressives can just as easily go too far too fast and be blind to the tradeoffs and principles involved. The "conservative project" can't be doomed; it will always be a different point on a continuum from the "progressive project", and we'll always be able to argue over where the right point is.
Well, at least until we're all dead or so infantilized by our technology that we stop even asking the questions.
Author was doing such a good write-up, until I saw repeated AI syntax "its not x, but y" and "a is b. b is c. and, c is the final thing in this series of short, punchy sentences". Really tired of this. Why is it so hard to just write naturally? Maybe I'm just easily triggered
likely not. Being able to read and understand is a matter of skill though. There are many technical terms there that may make it unreadable for non-technical audience. But you can solve that by having an AI explain it to you.
I'm interested in reading this, but it's unreadable on my laptop (and loud). From ChatGPT:
Here’s a 5-sentence summary of the article “the watchers: how openai, the US government, and persona built an identity surveillance machine that files reports on you to the feds” from vmfunc.re:
The blog presents an investigation into how the identity verification company Persona allegedly operates a large surveillance-oriented system that collects detailed biometric and identity data, screens users against watchlists, and generates Suspicious Activity Reports to government agencies. It describes finding thousands of unprotected source files from a FedRAMP-authorized government endpoint, revealing code for facial recognition, politically exposed person detection, and multiple verification checks, suggesting the system is far more invasive than publicly acknowledged. The research asserts that this infrastructure has been running for years and was discoverable through publicly accessible tools like certificate transparency logs and DNS without unauthorized access. The authors raise 18 pointed questions about data retention, transparency, and how the system passed security assessments, urging Persona and OpenAI to respond in detail. An addendum notes that Persona’s CEO is now in direct correspondence with the researchers and has committed to answering those questions publicly, while core findings remain unaddressed.
Please don't post LLM output on HN. If an article is unreadable, we accept a link to an archived version of the original content (on a site like Archive.org or Archive.today), not a summary, because then people comment in response to the summary, which may not be an accurate representation of the original content.
Glad to know that my tinfoil hat wasn't too tight when social media came to be and this obvious use was predicted. How quickly will not having social media accounts become a crime?
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