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Spying on the Internet is Orders of Magnitude More Invasive Than Phone Metadata
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/07/09/spying-internet-orders-magnitude-invasive-phone-metadata/When you pick up the phone, who youre calling is none of the governments business. The NSAs domestic surveillance of phone metadata was the first program to be disclosed based on documents from whistleblower Edward Snowden, and Americans have been furious about it ever since. The courts ruled it illegal, and Congress let the section of the Patriot Act that justified it expire (though the program lives on in a different form as part of the USA Freedom Act).
Yet XKEYSCORE, the secret program that converts all the data it can see into searchable events like web pages loaded, files downloaded, forms submitted, emails and attachments sent, porn videos watched, TV shows streamed, and advertisements loaded, demonstrates how Internet traffic can be even more sensitive than phone calls. And unlike the Patriot Acts phone metadata program, Congress has failed to limit the scope of programs like XKEYSCORE, which is presumably still operating at full speed. Maybe Verizon stopped giving phone metadata to the NSA, but if a Verizon engineer uploads a spreadsheet full of this metadata without proper encryption, the NSA may well get it anyway by spying directly on the cables that the spreadsheet travels over.
The outrage over bulk collection of our phone metadata makes sense: Metadata is private. Americans call suicide prevention hotlines, HIV testing services, phone sex services, advocacy groups for gun rights and for abortion rights, and the people theyre having affairs with. We use the phone to schedule job interviews without letting our current employer know, and to manage long-distance relationships. Most of us, at one point or another, have spent long hours on the phone discussing the most intimate details about our lives. There isnt an American alive today who didnt grow up with at least some access to a telephone, so Americans understand this well.
But Americans dont understand the Internet yet. Bulk collection of phone metadata is, without a doubt, a violation of your privacy, but bulk surveillance of Internet traffic is orders of magnitude more invasive. People also use the Internet in all the ways they use phones often inadvertently sharing even more intimate details through online searches. In fact, the phone network itself is starting to go over the Internet, without customers even noticing...
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Spying on the Internet is Orders of Magnitude More Invasive Than Phone Metadata (Original Post)
Demeter
Jul 2015
OP
Octafish
(55,745 posts)1. What Hannah Arendt said...
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 the race to eliminate the Department of Education and to 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