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We live digital lives now, flitting from Facebook to YouTube, checking our iPhones and BlackBerries, and chatting with our loved ones on Skype. Very few of us worry too much about tweeting our personal opinions on politics or chatting with a new social network "friend" on the other side of the world, whom we barely know and often forget in a matter of a few hours or days.
Yet all these interactions have become fodder for a new industry that secretly vacuums up the data and preserves it forever on high-end servers that hold many petabytes (a million gigabytes) of information. This industry offers new tools to search that data and reconstruct our past, and even our real-time movements via our mobile phones, in a way that could well come back to haunt us.
The new cyber-industrial complex spying on us
Article Source: Guardian Unlimited
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- Public Discussion (5)
Therein lies the rub: apart from the massive violation of individual privacy, or the risk of abuse by corrupt officials, these tools could easily allow security agencies to jump to the wrong conclusion. Indeed, these tools have the potential to make computer cables as dangerous as police batons.
"What we are seeing is the militarisation of cyberspace. It's like having a tank in your front garden," says Assange.
You have been warned and you have a choice: you can avoid the wonderful world of the internet (unlikely, since you are reading this online) and digital data (virtually impossible if you pay for electricity or go camping) – or you can join the movement to say there need to be limits to how government authorities use our information against us. And if you choose the latter, check out WikiLeaks and Privacy International.
- 4 votes
#1 - Sat Dec 3, 2011 11:34 AM ESTI keep asking myself, who are the "they" that monitored cyberspace prior to Brownback's high school visit, where the student was accused of saying "he blows" on twitter. I doubt it was his office, as was reported in the US. What more proof does one need that we are all being monitored?
Am I paranoid, or realistic?
- 2 votes
#2 - Sat Dec 3, 2011 11:58 AM ESTThe "they" are the puppeteer's of our government. The monied corporate interest.
Am I paranoid, or realistic?
As stally put it, "Both:)"
Be afraid of what money is buying since citizen v. Be afraid of corp. lobbiest. Be afraid of Alec. Be afraid...........Then fight back! I do not know about you but when I get scared, it get ticked. Ask any parent that cannot locate their child where they should be. They get worried and upon finding the child get ticked because the child went somewhere else without telling said parent. They give them a hug and then a lecture.
It does not take violence. Just a group like OWS that may not be huge yet but big enough to be bigger then the money interest.
Private data accumulators sell their services - to marketing groups as well as government (which its-self does not have the authority). Having to opt-out from such data collection (be it Face-book, bank, or any other commercial service) is the beginning of getting wrapped-up for anyone's motive.
Volunteering to OPT-IN, to contribute to a worthwhile cause, should be a choose-able option.
#3 - Sun Dec 4, 2011 5:30 AM ESTYou're in Easy Mode. If you prefer, you can use XHTML Mode instead. |
