Electronic Frontier Foundation has tweeted its
recommendation to watch a short film by Brian Knappenberger and the New York
Times. I believe the film might be
screened in some short film festivals. It is titled “Why Care About the NSA?”
The link for the film is here.
David Sirolta, Kurt Opsahl and Daniel Ellsberg
speak.
One of the reasons given for caring is that most
people don’t really know when they may be doing something “wrong”. Journalists and bloggers may find that this comment particularly applies to them. (My "implicit content" problem might be a good example.) Another is that private companies that track
don’t prosecute, but the government (using data from the National Security
Agency) could. And still a big reason is
the idea that data could be used to go after activists unpopular with government,
especially with the right wing. These
could include union organizers and pro-abortion activists, or
pro-military. Imagine, one woman said,
what “Gunner” Joe McCarthy could have done with a modern NSA.
The New York Times reported Tuesday, in a piece by Nicole Perlroth and John Markoff, that the NSA has developed a "peephole" to penetrate Google and Yahoo!, with the fiber-optic cables from Verizon that connect the data centers, which are themselves heavily secured. The story is here. There are major data bunkers in Loudoun County VA and in North Carolina, for example.
It gets worse (not better). Huffington Post reports, in a staff story that the NSA spies on "porn viewing" in order to find "radicalizers" whom to discredit, link here. An online reputation issue, maybe?
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