Bruce Schneier: NSA Surveillance and What To Do About It
Good video from Bruce Schneier. A few choice excerpts follow:
Follow that guy last month. The death of ephemeral conversation. Systems that never forget (9:40) …a public-private-surveillance partnership (9:58) … We have built systems that spy on people in exchange for services. Surveillance is the business model of the internet (10:13)
This is truely the golden age of surveillance. Because everything we do is surveillable (11:37)
Metadata equals surveillance (12:09). Okay, there’s sort of an easy thought experiment: imagine you’d hire a private detective to eavesdrop on somebody. That detective will put a bug in his car, his home, his office; and you’d get a report of the conversations he had. If you ask that same detective to put someone under surveillance you’d get a different report: where he went, who he spoke to, what he read, what he purchased, what he looked at – right, that’s all metadata. Fundamentally metadata equals surveillance data. (12:40)
We have built an insecure internet for everyone. We basically enabled the Panopticon, and all the losses of freedom and liberty and individuality that come with that. (16:47)
He talks about Yahoo having given the Gov more info than Google. What he doesn’t say – or know – is that Yahoo has been in bed with the Gov since its inception. I used to own a Yahoo Group back in 2000. One day I decided to ask CISI (the Canadian CIA equivalent) to give me Freedom of Information request information. They proceeded to give me the run-around … until I got specific. Then they knew I knew what it was that I was after. They couldn’t handle that. So, they proceeded to tell Yahoo to suspend my Yahoo Group account for two days straight. It was inaccessible for the whole time. I can only surmise that they downloaded all the contents as well as all the subscribers and all of their activity on the Yahoo network. I alerted my subscribers to this fact. …. but the damage was done.