Our Internet Surveillance State by Bruce Schneier.
Nothing like a good rant to get your blood pumping during a snap of cold weather! 😉
Bruce writes:
Maintaining privacy on the Internet is nearly impossible. If you forget even once to enable your protections, or click on the wrong link, or type the wrong thing, and you’ve permanently attached your name to whatever anonymous service you’re using. Monsegur slipped up once, and the FBI got him. If the director of the CIA can’t maintain his privacy on the Internet, we’ve got no hope.
In today’s world, governments and corporations are working together to keep things that way. Governments are happy to use the data corporations collect — occasionally demanding that they collect more and save it longer — to spy on us. And corporations are happy to buy data from governments. Together the powerful spy on the powerless, and they’re not going to give up their positions of power, despite what the people want.
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And welcome to a world where all of this, and everything else that you do or is done on a computer, is saved, correlated, studied, passed around from company to company without your knowledge or consent; and where the government accesses it at will without a warrant.
Welcome to an Internet without privacy, and we’ve ended up here with hardly a fight.
I don’t disagree with anything Bruce writes but I do not counsel despair.
Nor would I suggest any stop using the “Internet, email, cell phones, web browser, social networking sites, search engines,” in order to avoid spying.
But remember that one of the reasons U.S. intelligence services have fallen on hard times is the increased reliance on “easy” data to collect.
Clipping articles from newspaper or now copy-n-paste from emails and online zines, isn’t the same as having culturally aware human resources on the ground.
“Easy” data collection is far cheaper, but also less effective.
My suggestion is that everyone go “bare” and load up all listeners with as much junk as humanly possible.
Intelligence “spam” as it were.
Routinely threaten to murder fictitious characters in books or conspire to kidnap them. Terror plots, threats against Alderaan, for example.
Apparently even absurd threats, ‘One Definition of “Threat”,’ cannot be ignored.
A proliferation of fictional threats will leave them too little time to spy people going about their lawful activities.
BTW, not legal advice but I have heard that directly communicating any threat to any law enforcement agency is a crime. And not a good idea in any event.
Nor should you threaten any person or place or institution that isn’t entirely and provably fictional.
When someone who thinks mining social networks sites is a blow against terrorism overhears DC comic characters being threatened, that should be enough.