This is an interesting take on the Snowden kerfluffle: a moderate view that says that Snowden should be punished within the context of his alleged crime (essentially amounting to a slap on the wrist compared to the current administration and Republican frontrunners’ plans to hang him, or worse) but also saying that the US government must also be held accountable to the higher crimes committed against the People of the United States.
People always want to cast Edward Snowden as a hero or as a villain, but the presidential hopeful says he has “mixed feelings.”
Honestly, even if you “have nothing to hide”, it’s still a good idea to beef up your security settings. Privacy is a basic human right, and to give up on that right is to give up on freedom itself.
In a post on Wednesday, researchers Alex Halderman and Nadia Heninger presented compelling research suggesting that the NSA has developed the capability to decrypt a large number of HTTPS, SSH, and VPN connections using an attack on common implementations of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange algorithm with 1024-bit primes.
It looks like this whole NSA debacle is going to have adverse effects on the US economy as well. Thanks, Obama!
The spread of knowledge about the NSA’s surveillance programs has shaken the trust of customers in U.S. Internet companies like Facebook, Google, and Apple: especially non-U.S. customers who have discovered how weak the legal protections over their data is under U.S. law. It should come as no surprise, then, that the European Court of Justice (CJEU) has decided that United States companies can no longer be automatically trusted with the personal data of Europeans.
Because the “free world” hasn’t yet figured out that spying on its citizens is exactly the opposite of “freedom”.
The United States makes an improper division between surveillance conducted on residents of the United States and the surveillance that is conducted with almost no restraint upon the rest of the world. This double standard has proved poisonous to the rights of Americans and non-Americans alike. In theory, Americans enjoy better protections. In practice there are no magical sets of servers and Internet connections that carry only American conversations. To violate the privacy of everyone else in the world, the U.S. inevitably scoops up its own citizens’ data.
More reason to distrust Big Telco. AT&T operates with such cavalier arrogance that they won’t even respond to the demand of shareholders!
In a formal response to a motion by shareholders to get a vote requiring AT&T to publish a transparency report the telecom giant has said, essentially, it’s none of your business.
