Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations

[.:neuko:.]

Apparently, The Guardian has been "flogging" this alarming bit of news for 3 days now--at least, according to some of the members of its own forum. For me however, it's the first I've heard of it, and it grabbed my attention like a deer caught in the headlights.

I take a strong view of internet privacy and I don't think anyone can afford to ignore the views raised by this "whistle-blower"; and that's coming from someone who normally ignores the papers/tabloids.

In the very least, I would URGE you to read this (preferably all of it), especially if you care about your rights to privacy over the internet, as well as freedom of expression, intellect and debate.

I know that government attempts to police the internet are nothing new these days; however in all my life I've never come across claims of global internet surveillance on such a grand scale. It makes the likes of corporate proposals such as SOPA, PIPA (mostly bills motivated by corporate interests as opposed to fears of terrorism, but still...) seem insignificant by comparison. As far as I'm concerned, the day the internet becomes a fully policed "state" is the day that democracy is dead.

Also, here's a video:

[Hood Rat Music]

Honestly, I'm not surprised. It's been going on for years, they've been trying to make it legal between ACTA, SOPA, PIPA, CISPA and other bills. Sadly now, it's fully illegal but they're still doing it, and the American people don't care all that much.


I'm still watching the video, just bumping the thread up because this NEEDS to be talked about/shared.

[A32m]

A news story in regards raised a pretty good point, we have blinds in our homes for a reason. The same goes for the internet. Not only does this pose a threat to the right of privacy, but also can lead to the ability of gathering private information go to the wrong hands.

We do so many useful things using the medium called the internet, two major concerns would be money and personal files. Do you want elites peaking into your funds? Looking into our anime folders and mocking us? Definitely not!

Also it causes lag to the user not aware of being eavesdropped, because the bandwidth is consumed to receive information from a connection :P.

Just to finalise my point, Ancient Rome was in a similar security surveillance like state (without modern communication), and what happened to Rome because of this?

[nslay]

I saw a funny comment on The Register the other day, it reads

I did enjoy one comment I saw somewhere on the interwebs (sorry can't remember where) - that the public would be much more accepting of this behaviour if the NSA gave away a browser, search engine, provided a free mapping service and hosted email.

This of course alludes to Google.

It's not just the NSA, but it's also Google, Facebook, MySpace, Internet Advertisers, etc... The former has the power to pull this off. The latter have set up traps in the form of free services to harvest your information and devalue privacy. The use of these services eventually becomes the norm and privacy ceases (ceased) to exist because we didn't know any better.