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Worth Reading: Trevor Pott's editorial on NSA PRISM and its real ramifications
wraith808:
I can't help but think that this is a test bed for something much larger and more insidious.
-Stoic Joker (June 14, 2013, 06:40 AM)
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That's more like the SJ I know... let your cynicism flow!
40hz:
I can't help but think that this is a test bed for something much larger and more insidious.
-Stoic Joker (June 14, 2013, 06:40 AM)
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That's more like the SJ I know... let your cynicism flow!
-wraith808 (June 14, 2013, 07:38 AM)
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SJ is a network systems person like me. So he knows what's possible. But I don't think that's cynicism. I think that's just experience talking. ;D
And FWIW I agree with him on that worry. I also think this is just the tip of the iceberg - and a harbinger of what's to come if it doesn't get stopped right now. :tellme:
app103:
Data mining, for fun, surveillance, and profit...
Silicon Valley builds amazing spy tools, is horrified when they’re used for spying
“What I would like to see right now is for people at these internet companies to stand up and say the truth, all of it, about their dealings with the NSA.” – Michael Arrington
Arrington, along with the rest of Libertarian-leaning Silicon Valley, is right to be wary of the way the government is able to use technology to track our every move. He’s also right to criticize the double-speak of any Valley company that prevaricates on its true level of involvement in programs like PRISM.
The only odd thing is why Arrington doesn’t go even further in connecting the dots fully between Silicon Valley and government snooping.
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a bit of history...
As the Financial Times’ April Dembosky reminds us, the relationship between the Valley and Homeland Security is nothing new. The Internet started out as a government project, designed to keep communication lines open in the event of a nuclear attack. In 1999 the CIA established In-Q-Tel, a venture capital fund to invest in technology companies that might be useful to the folks in Langley or Fort Meade.
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And then it gets rather interesting...and quite revealing...
According to CrunchBase – the technology investor database founded by Arrington himself – Cloudera, iMove, 3vr, and Mocana – all share one additional investor in common: SV Angel, one of the Valley’s most prolific “micro VC” firms. And whose name do we find on the firm’s list of limited partners? One Michael Arrington. (In a neat piece of symmetry, SV Angel’s co-founder, Ron Conway, is an investor in Arrington’s CrunchFund.)
Once you start digging into the data, the connections get really entertaining: Arrington is also an LP in Benchmark, which invested alongside In-Q-Tel in data-storage company Decru. And in Andreessen Horowitz, which co-invested with In-Q-Tel in Silver Tail Systems and Platfora. CrunchFund also invested in Facebook, which boasts Palantir’s Peter Thiel as a board member, and from where former data team leader Jeff Hammerbacher left to head up technology at Cloudera.
Data mining is fun!
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The only people who love big data more, and who care about our privacy less, than the NSA are the outraged Libertarians of Silicon Valley.
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CWuestefeld:
Data mining, for fun, surveillance, and profit...
-app103 (June 14, 2013, 07:06 PM)
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Two crucial differences are that
* in the private sector it's pretty much impossible to put together a database as comprehensive as what the government can gather by force
* if you talk about the data collection of the private sector, you're not in immediate danger of becoming a non-person
app103:
if you talk about the data collection of the private sector, you're not in immediate danger of becoming a non-person
-CWuestefeld (June 14, 2013, 07:52 PM)
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Does your definition of "private sector" also include those companies that are contracted by or heavily invested in by the government, that either develop the technologies used or do the actual collecting, storing, sorting, or analysis of the data??
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