With the rise of the Internet spying has become as ubiquitous as
motherhood and apple pie, no longer the dark world of official spies.
The Internet has made covert spying available to everyone along
with sanctimonious deniability just like the world of spooks.
Running a mail list is spying. Running a hosting service is spying.
Running a website is spying. Running a blog is sphing. Running a
network is spying. Running an email service is spying. Running a
keyserver is spying. Running an anonymizer is spying. Running
an academic data collector is spying. Offering free apps is spying.
Offering free comsec is spying.
Open source is spying. Lurking on fora is spying. Prowling Twitter,
Facebook, Reddit, Slashdot, SM, chat, OTR, Tor, the surface
net and deepnet gamut, is spying.
Baiting and arguing and flattering to induce dislosure is spying.
Hanging, recording, videoing, texting, at gatherings, conferences,
Blackhats, Defcons, RSAs, protests, squats, mash-ups, is spying.
Leaking and sharing in the public interest is spying.
Defending leakers and hackers and protestors is spying.
Accusing and blaming official spies is counterspying, that
is spying.
Journalism is spying, along with every profession, they all
spy.
Watching porn is spying, and how!
The public is not indifferent about spying, it is the principal
public past-time and often full-time. Thanks to the Internet and
a slew of personal devices spying has become better than
sex, better than gambling, better than drugs and liquor,
done openly and secretly, here there and everywhere.
Damn fine way to boost the digital economy, and if done well
earns a freedom of information award and a place in the
harem of a billionaire.
At 01:51 PM 10/26/2013, you wrote:
Excuse me but is public indifference considered
to be a new phenomenon is that really what it
is? Remember Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers?
Levels of domestic and international
surveillance have intensified logarithmically in
the post-war period; just imagine what J. Edgar
would have done if he could Hoover up data the
way the NSA does. The highest echelons of this
behemoth of a security apparatus have taken on a
life of its own independent of the governmental
controls that are supposed to monitor its
activities. Quite presciently Norman Mailer
wrote about this ages ago in reference to the
CIA; he described how the various entities and
fronts that it created began to take on their
own economic realities far removed from any
governmental controls and now, far beyond what
Mailer might have imagined, the government
officially and openly sub-contracts security and
policing to companies effectively working
outside the law. All this just increases daily
despite shut-downs and economic crises (after
all its sucking up tax dollars just like all the
data its accumulating). Indifference is an inaccurate description of wha!
t the public is feeling right now. What might
be more accurate is a profound sense of
cynicism, confusion and fear because the world
most of us live in is littered with enormous
uncertainties and where survival is high on the
daily agenda; and because politicians and
government leaders are baffling in terms of
their levels of incoherence; and because the
omnipresent cloud of some kind of terrorist act
lingers in the not far distance (and never mind
the kind of atrocities that occur daily enabled
by the same systems that govern the
surveillance apparatus). So, indifference is
not quite appropriate when you start thinking
about the future and how it appears or
manifests itself stitched into peoples daily
routines. This is not to belittle or diminish
the importance of what Snowden has done; the
impact of his act is hard to quantify as its
ramifications will be still felt years from
now; the Pentagon Papers had a shock value when
they came out also and the NY Times eagerly pub!
lished them (and the Times then still had
journalistic stature). But, indeed now the
times they are achanging. The real
indifference lies not with the public but
rather with the shamble of what we politely
call the Fifth Estate and the obscene level of public discourse
bye for now
allan
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