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Can you inagine a world without any personal privacy? Because it's here.

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40hz:
Bruce Schneier posted a sobering op-ed piece on CNN titled: The Internet is a surveillance state. In it he paints a bleak picture of how an unsooken alliance between business and government (each in it for their own agendas) brought about a monitoring system that surpassed anything George Orwell had nightmares about.

His conclusion?
Welcome to an Internet without privacy, and we've ended up here with hardly a fight.
--- End quote ---

Some highlights:

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This is ubiquitous surveillance: All of us being watched, all the time, and that data being stored forever. This is what a surveillance state looks like, and it's efficient beyond the wildest dreams of George Orwell.
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Maintaining privacy on the Internet is nearly impossible. If you forget even once to enable your protections, or click on the wrong link, or type the wrong thing, and you've permanently attached your name to whatever anonymous service you're using. Monsegur slipped up once, and the FBI got him. If the director of the CIA can't maintain his privacy on the Internet, we've got no hope.

In today's world, governments and corporations are working together to keep things that way. Governments are happy to use the data corporations collect -- occasionally demanding that they collect more and save it longer -- to spy on us. And corporations are happy to buy data from governments. Together the powerful spy on the powerless, and they're not going to give up their positions of power, despite what the people want...

--- End quote ---

I'm generally not too big a fan of CNN or their writers for reasons too numerous to go into. But every so often, they do remember what they're here for. And this article is 'spot on' IMO.

Read the full article here.

Then go someplace you imagine is still private so you can sit quietly and feel sick. :huh:

Renegade:
+1

To paraphrase myself from a Basement thread:

"Nineteen Eighty-Four"! The news is a much better dystopian story! :P
-Renegade (March 16, 2013, 05:25 AM)
--- End quote ---

TaoPhoenix:
I'd just like to separate the "Author" and the "Distributor". You can have opinions of what CNN tends to carry, but Bruce Schneier has been in the game enough to read no matter what outlet he shows up in.

Tinman57:
  Basically I've been saying the same thing for the last 10 years, and have been "boo'ed" over it too many times to count.  So I just sit behind my computer wearing my tin-foil hat and watch as the world goes to hell in a handbasket....

Renegade:
  Basically I've been saying the same thing for the last 10 years, and have been "boo'ed" over it too many times to count.  So I just sit behind my computer wearing my tin-foil hat and watch as the world goes to hell in a handbasket....
-Tinman57 (March 18, 2013, 07:50 PM)
--- End quote ---

Yep. Pointing out the obvious is only acceptable if the other person has already noticed it. Otherwise, it's heresy.

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