On December 19, 2015 5:54:21 PM [email protected] wrote:
Assange is entirely correct. The reason is the distribution
curve for sensors and, in particular, everything -- and I mean
everything -- about "personalization" is simply surveillance.
I may be able to hide from The Man, but I cannot hide from my
friends and neighbors, and they are increasingly festooned with
the infrastructure of total information awareness. Poindexter
was simply ahead of his time. The private sector will do with
bread & circus what the mil sector can not do with black budgets;
the private sector will own 95% of the listening posts and will
buy their freedom of motion with yours.
--dan
It's deeply unsettling for me to admit that Dan correct about this, but
there it is.
I don't use Failbook (as I'm sure you *all* know by now) and yet I have
received disturbing email from the Fuckerberg empire encouraging me to sign
up so that I may "connect" with "people I might know." This is because some
of my friends who use it were not s-m-r-t enough to disallow the harvesting
of their contacts.
One name that was suggested was someone I hadn't spoken with in well over a
decade... there was simply no way they could have had my email address
among their contacts, because that email address didn't exist during the
time I knew them. Failbook is omniscient!
There are several more instances in which my privacy was invaded or
compromised due to the carelessness or ignorance of others, despite trying
to maintain my nearly-zero online footprint online (in my legal name. Of
course I may be selectively found pseudonymously.) That's not counting the
countless Big Data database breaches which have put my medical and
financial PII at risk.
The death of privacy is not going to be 1984'd; we already live within A
Brave New World, and it's being built one narcissistic,
geolocation-enabled, duck-faced selfie and status update check-in at a damn
time. Why would the TLAs waste any more* money on invasive data collection
when people put their info and everyone else's out there, sold for the use
of "free" email and apps? Can't really blame them for plucking the
lowest-hanging fruit.
*In-Q-Tel's ROI on that initial Facebook seed money must be positively
unquantifiable.
-S
