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xchrom

(108,903 posts) Fri Jun 27, 2014, 05:04 AM Jun 2014

This Is Why You Should Care That the Government Can Know Everything About You

http://www.alternet.org/books/why-you-should-care-government-can-know-everything-about-you

Halfway across the ornate sitting room, Julian Assange stands with his back to the door, drinking a bottle of beer. It is early on a summer evening, June 22, 2013, and the Embassy of Ecuador in London is hosting a small party to acknowledge the one-year anniversary of his arrival in need of asylum. While Assange stands chatting calmly about the future of his anti-secrecy enterprise, Wikileaks, few people in the room know that he is worried. Sarah Harrison, his principal researcher and confidant, is only hours away from slipping out of Hong Kong with Edward Snowden, who, at that moment, is fast becoming the most hunted man in the world.

Close friends and supporters of Assange mill around the room, helping themselves to the buffet and arguing about software and the state of the world - in that order. Assange himself, with his longish white hair and black jeans, looks slightly out of place in the scene, bordered as it is by stiff-legged, gilt-painted settees. After a year, however, he's completely at home here, laughing and joking with the security guys, lawyers, and hacker guests, talking thoughtfully about the escalating struggle for control of electronic information.

"There's a completely new creation in the world," he says. "And the battle is on for access to it."

He's talking about the electronic "pocket litter" that each of us collects as we cruise the Internet and use our cell phones each day. Behind us, we leave a digital trail that reveals our interests, our politics, our friends, their friends, our health worries, our finances and fears. As he speaks, Assange is thinking of Snowden and what he had recently revealed about the practices of the National Security Agency (NSA) in the United States.

6 replies

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This Is Why You Should Care That the Government Can Know Everything About You (Original Post) xchrom Jun 2014 OP

Nice article that CLEARLY says why dragnet surveillance is bad. Pholus Jun 2014 #1

+1 woo me with science Jun 2014 #5

Big K&R! nt riderinthestorm Jun 2014 #2

K&R woo me with science Jun 2014 #3

Where's it all lead to? Octafish Jun 2014 #4

A government with the mindset that it's entitled to know everything about us, but we should know winter is coming Jun 2014 #6

Pholus

(4,062 posts)

1. Nice article that CLEARLY says why dragnet surveillance is bad.

Reply to xchrom (Original post)

Fri Jun 27, 2014, 05:32 AM

Jun 2014

I like that it highlights that "I have nothing to hide" types really aren't thinking things through very well:

I work for a small nonprofit organization law firm in Washington, DC, that defends whistleblowers: the Government Accountability Project (GAP). Ordinary people come to us after they report appalling things in the places where they work and are dismissed, disciplined, or demoted in retaliation. They're hoping we can tell the world what they told us (at the very least) and get them their jobs back (at best). Most of our clients are federal government employees. We work with food inspectors, for example, who report animal cruelty in processing plants and toxic chemical additives to your food. Our clients are UN police officers who witness and report rape and sexual abuse by peacekeeping forces. Office workers and agents at the FBI and the NSA come to us to document gross waste and abuse. As do traders and risk managers who see pervasive fraud at multinational banks and FDA officials who report drug trials faked by pharmaceutical companies. At truly repressive institutions such as the World Bank, our sources remain anonymous, but they also contact us by phone and email.

As a result, at GAP, our emails are not boring, and we do not want the NSA collecting them, much less reading them. Since the Snowden disclosures, we ask our clients to meet us outside the office, downstairs, and around the corner at Starbucks. We have to talk face to face as if we were subversives. To be safe, whistleblowers facing retaliation must provide their evidence on paper now, not by email.

woo me with science

(32,139 posts)

5. +1

Reply to Pholus (Reply #1)

Sat Jun 28, 2014, 07:27 PM

Jun 2014

riderinthestorm

(23,272 posts)

2. Big K&R! nt

Reply to xchrom (Original post)

Fri Jun 27, 2014, 06:35 AM

Jun 2014

woo me with science

(32,139 posts)

3. K&R

Reply to xchrom (Original post)

Sat Jun 28, 2014, 04:19 PM

Jun 2014

Octafish

(55,745 posts)

4. Where's it all lead to?

Reply to xchrom (Original post)

Sat Jun 28, 2014, 05:01 PM

Jun 2014

The Big Round Up.

The goal of wholesale surveillance, as Arendt wrote in "The Origins of Totalitarianism," is not, in the end, to discover crimes, “but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.”

via Chris Hedges

For those wondering about race to eliminate the Department of Education and buy high school history textbooks from Texas:

“The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.” ― Hannah Arendt

winter is coming

(11,785 posts)

6. A government with the mindset that it's entitled to know everything about us, but we should know