S. 702 Dead. Or IS It?

The US Senate will not pass the SAVE Act.  They may pass a renewal of S. 702, the "We Spy on YOU!!!" law which offers a workaround to all that silly paperwork they have to fill out in order to get around the Fourth Amendment, ya'know.  But if they pass it, the President will veto it, unless they pass SAVE.

So the "We Spy on YOU!!!" thing is dead?

Nope.

In an report about another "Cloud People" club* (you are NOT in it), the New American mentions a couple of factoids.

...The most troubling part of the report, however, is not the eccentric agenda. It is the overlap between nominally private data companies and public power.

Dialog’s chairman, Auren Hoffman, is not just a conference organizer. He is a data-industry operator and investor: the founder of SafeGraph and LiveRamp, companies tied to location data and identity resolution, and a general partner at Flex Capital, a seed-stage venture firm with a broad portfolio across the digital economy. That makes him a connector as much as an entrepreneur, someone whose network sits at the intersection of data infrastructure, venture capital, and political access.

Alongside Thiel, another Palantir co-founder, Joe Lonsdale, is also listed in the report. Lonsdale is another Trump donor. He helped fund Trump’s 2024 campaign through Elon Musk’s America PAC. He then advised the administration on “government spending and efficiency” through the now-infamous DOGE.

Buried beneath the loud political theater of long-promised government efficiency, DOGE’s true mission had been spelled out early: to “modernize government software” in line with an “AI First Agenda.” The result was not so much the exposure and cutting of government “waste, fraud and abuse” as the digitization of government itself. That is what DOGE appears to have successfully achieved.

Once that happened, the Trump administration contracted Palantir to fuse datasets on every American, potentially creating detailed profiles on every citizen....

So S. 702 is dead, but it is also UN-dead, under a different protocol.

Now don't you feel better?

*Some of the attendees/members include:

Ted Cruz (Senator from Jerusalem) and:

Senator Cory Booker (D-N.J.)
Peter Goettler, president of the Cato Institute
Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL)
Representative Jim Himes (D-Conn.)
Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and Middle East envoy
Tom Lue, general counsel and head of governance at Google DeepMind
Souad Mekhennet, former Washington Post reporter
Wes Moore, governor of Maryland
Neal Mohan, CEO of YouTube
Jared Polis, governor of Colorado
Rick Warren, evangelical pastor
Ezra Klein, political commentator 

John Arnold, Centaurus Advisors and Arnold Ventures; $2.8 billion
Nicolas Berggruen, Berggruen Holdings and Berggruen Institute; $2.9 billion
Mike Cannon-Brookes, Atlassian; $7.7 billion
Scott Cook, Intuit; $4.4 billion
Marcos Galperin, MercadoLibre; $6.8 billion
Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn and Greylock Partners; $2.7 billion
Henry Kravis, KKR; $12.2 billion
Joe Lonsdale, Palantir, 8VC, and OpenGov; estimated $2.8 billion
Elon Musk, Tesla, SpaceX, X, and xAI; $1.3 trillion
Eric Schmidt, Google and Schmidt Futures; $40.1 billion
Barry Sternlicht, Starwood Capital Group; $3.1 billion
Peter Thiel, Palantir, Founders Fund, and PayPal; $27.8 billion

There's plenty to read and learn at that link above.  Take the three minutes.  Your childrens' future is important to you, right?