Questions for an open conversation:
With all of the information about companies and government agencies watching us being available in various ways, are we paranoid to feel uneasy with our privacy? Are the arguments against the monitoring of civilians by governments and companies overstated, or are we right to be afraid?
As I've said before, you should feel outraged at the penetration governments have into your private life in the name of security. As I've said before, you have no practical concerns from domestic surveillance because the NSA's basic approach to finding a needle in a haystack is to make sure the haystack is as big as possible in order to ensure that there's a needle in there somewhere. Look. The NSA has been busted trading your dick pics. The TSA has been busted scanning and trading and chortling over your body scans. Spooks will abuse data. That's what they do. But collectively, the data miners have no real agency or coordination to do anything truly nefarious. The reality of the situation is we have lived in a world where every communication made goes through the NSA since 2003 but even after Russian Intelligence passed the FBI a mash note saying "Hey, this Tsarniev guy is likely to be a problem" he was able to haul a pressure cooker full of nails, ball bearings and fertilizer explosive to a public place and set it off. Tashfeen Malik? Facebooked about supporting Jihad in 2012. These are legit terrorists with ties to recognized militant organizations and a travel pattern involving hotspots and training camps and the vast US surveillance apparatus failed utterly to so much as flag them for warning. How on earth are they going to figure out anything about you?
This would all be true unless you happen to make an enemy at the FBI, CIA, or NSA. Which is mostly a problem for politicians, so you'd think they'd be more concerned about domestic surveillance. Then again it's also a problem for political activists. John or Jane Q Activist starts to get some traction for their cause, which the government is very much against, so now they drill into this persons communications and find something to charge them with. There's always something. Which is a long-winded way of saying that it may not be a personal problem, but it is a political problem. Because it's hard to make political change when anybody who tries gets sent to prison.
Sure - but we're talking Julian Assange. To make an enemy of an entire three-letter bureau requires activism above and beyond the petty stuff that gets abused by spooks - after all, coordination generates paperwork and paperwork ends up in congressional hearings. It is a political problem, but then, it has been since the days of Herb Yeardley.
Further, Assange wanted the TLAs coming after him, thinking it would keep wikileaks and other people involved in the project safer if the heat was focused on him personally. It's unclear if he accomplished anything in doing so, Jacob Appelbaum had to move to Germany after all and he was just doing PR, but he knew what he was doing.
More than five years ago, there was an expose about a new secret datacenter the NSA had built that was top-of-the-line everything. It opened for operations, and was immediately over capacity. The simple fact is that the Three Letter Agencies and their ilk are collecting more data than they can ever hope to process. Existing tools, and tools that are projected to exist 10 years out, are completely inadequate to analyze the data they have already. This data is useless for "discovery". However, if you get pulled over with a kilo of cocaine in your trunk, you can bet someone is going to do some focused searches through all this data and see who you talk to, how often, where you talk to them (geo-location), and who they are linked to. And, in the end, the security cow has left the barn. There is nothing anyone can do about these data collections and data analysis proclivities. Because if the gummint tells 'em to shut down Project XYZ, they'll post a "for rent" sign on the door, pull the curtains, and move all that tech over to a black-budget project. So it doesn't matter, and you are utterly powerless against anything the government wants to do to you. However, you will always be a target for 4chan and that type of loser. And there's nothing you can do about that, either, because none of the companies you deal with electronically actually give a shit about the security of your data. If the bad guys want it, they will get it. Period. Embrace the anonymity of the crowd. Don't stick your head up, and nobody will ever notice you, or think to pull your data.
What does this do to the freedom of speech? Since the time of the civil rights era, have we more or less protection over our freedoms of speech and press? Are the voices and bodies of desenters protected in any meaningful way, or must we assure our own protection as the Westboro Bapist Church does with cameras and law degrees? However truly protected we are, how protected does the American public feel compared to the civil rights era?Embrace the anonymity of the crowd. Don't stick your head up, and nobody will ever notice you, or think to pull your data.
The dictionary definition of Paranoia is It is not paranoid to be worried about the abuse of powers that we do not fully understand. It is not unreasonable to be afraid of forces that have goals that run directly opposite to your own, especially when those forces have significantly more power and resources than you do. Your average Swahili hunter isn't paranoid that there are lions in the bush, he is aware that there are lions in the bush. He is not paranoid of them, he fears them. The scarier part to me is that guys like Alex Jones are being proven correct.an unreasonable feeling that people are trying to harm you, do not like you, etc
The problem is not about privacy. It's about how your Data are used heavily for profit without your consent. Ok! You consented by using the service. So the problem is, that everyone consent too easily to let go of its privacy. And now I have zero leverage to monetize my data -Not that I want to, but I don't want either to be the unwilling working force in the google factory- My data used for charity, nice. For some dude to make a living out of his website, nice. By two or three multi-billion tax-exempted companies, no way. I'll be in that corner, building my Tin Foil Slingshot to start my own war.
There is a silver lining here. As the government and others become increasingly reliant on using this method of surveillance, they will limit their ability to quickly and effectively conduct other forms of surveillance. Their budget is not limited, and even if it was, people will 'forget' how to do this. Here's a good case: The Millennium Challenge 2002 in which a former commander sank a whole carrier group in an exercise simply by not using modern communications. So, if for example you wanted to one day disappear from this system, it will be much easier than it would have been before as 'old fashioned' detective work will be harder to replicate.
It shouldn't be called paranoia when there really is pervasive surveillance of every member of society. I try to educate everyone I can on the importance of taking concrete steps to protect their privacy both online, and offline. For further reading, I highly recommend the following sites: are we paranoid to feel uneasy with our privacy?