I’m not American, it just happens that where I live everyone is quoting from Gramsci’s cultural hegemony at the moment. ^^

My point is you don’t need to leak to matter, or do anything illegal. The simple fact that powerful institutions are staffed with people who share your ideology is helpful to you. (I do have a lot of respect for leakers though)

If all people who share your opinions think like you then that institution will be left to your opponents.

Joining would be praxis. You don’t have to be a double agent or anything, just be a sympathetic voice in meetings and such. Simply making the institution politically diverse and preventing it from being an echo chamber of like-minded people is already making a change in the world.

As an example, in 1923 Hitler attempted a coup, but got off with an amazingly light eight months of prison. The reason is the judiciary at the time were quite sympathetic to him; they didn’t do anything illegal, yet had they been SPD supporters instead Hitler might have gotten a life sentence for his high treason.

My (probably incomplete) understanding is: phones have a GNSS chip (such as GPS, Galileo, or Glonass), but getting location from that takes a long time and a lot of battery. So they estimate location based on other information such as what cell tower they are connected to and the list of available wi-fi networks. This requires a database with all that info, which Google built through its Street View cars.

So the location provider is a service to which your phone sends all the info it has and which replies with an estimate of your location; which means it handles a lot of sensitive data.

“4 chords” is a cool mashup but it’s not really a valid point in this conversation.

The songs in “4 chords” don’t use the same 4 chords, because they are higher and lower than that. So you might say they use the same progression, but that’s not true either, because they’re not always constantly in the same order. So the best you can say is “it’s possible to interpret pitch- and tempo-adjusted excerpts of these songs back-to-back”, which isn’t a very strong claim.

In fact there’s a lot of things separating the songs in “4 chords”; such as structure, arrangement, rhythm, lyrics, or production. Another fact is that it’s perfectly possible to use these four chords in a way that you’ve never heard before and would likely find bizarre – it’s a bit of meme, but limitation really can breed creativity.

This isn’t to defend the lack of creativity in the big music industry. But there’s more to it than just saying “4 chords” to imply all musicians do is follow an established grid.