The problem with Facebook is not that government has access to it -- at least, that's not a problem unique to FB (Gmail, as one commenter says, is probably worse in terms of raw access to personal details). The problem with Facebook is that it is personal details specifically organized into a dossier-like format. It's one thing for the NSA, for instance, to be able to tap into the hose of undifferentiated data streaming through the network. It's quite another thing for that data to be specifically organized for the purposes of quickly discovering key information about somebody, such as their social network, their political interests, their latest photos, etc. all indexed and searchable. Think about the cost of taking Gmail's data and turning it into something useable by intelligence organizations -- work that FB "empowers" us to do for them!
What we need are tools that allow us to connect in ways that are difficult not only to detect but also to make sense of (not necessarily encryption, but an ad-hoc format that can't be easily parsed and aggregated). We need the ability to use the network for our own particular, peculiar interests rather than having to fit our interactions into some other authority's template for their interests. The idea that social networking never occurred before Friendster, FB, MySpace is ridiculous -- it just happened more informally before.
I'd like to see a return to this informal mode of using TCP/IP, where the internet itself is the social network rather than merely a transport layer for some centralized system. This may make it harder for everyday people to benefit, but it also means they learn how to drive before they use the roads. Social networking's hyped-up promise has always been to passively connect people, but the promise of the internet has always been to allow people to actively connect (or not connect). Once we have a broader suite of tools for this latter purpose, we'll see people reject centralized dossier services like FB.
> What we need are tools that allow us to connect in ways that are difficult not only to detect but also to make sense of (not necessarily encryption, but an ad-hoc format that can't be easily parsed and aggregated).
Which would also make it much more difficult to use and less useful. We've organized our info this way because we like it and it makes sense, it's no surprise that it's useful to the government as well. In other words, I think the value to us and the value to them are very tightly coupled.
And the thing is, outside of the hardcore techie bubble, most people don't care. So what if the government can see their friends and pictures, even track them to some degree? Why should they care? They're not going to migrate to some convoluted unstructured system just for the abstract and esoteric benefit of privacy.
> Which would also make it much more difficult to use and less useful.
Maybe. As somebody who's worked in content management system design for a great deal of his career, I'm not at all convinced that the ongoing enclosure of information into systems of formatting serves people. Instead, what you find is people jumping through hoops to fit their information into the format chosen by others. Paul Goodman critiqued the tyranny of format 50 years ago, and Douglas Rushkoff authored the natural extension of this critique in his seminal "Program or Be Programmed". The promise of the internet has to be more than giving people text boxes, or I give up. :)
> We've organized our info this way because we like it and it makes sense, it's no surprise that it's useful to the government as well.
Really? The users of FB have decided that this is the way they'd like to organize their information? Surprising. I never recall in my use of FB being given the ability to structure the format as I and my friends see fit. I must have missed something.
In all seriousness, I think we need to look very carefully at this coupling of value you speak of. There are almost certainly areas where the format chosen by an authority (a corporation, a government, any institution really) is that that free individuals would choose. But not every area, and as the information gets more personal, the format becomes more restrictive. I'm not sure where the line between sharing on one's own terms and another's terms gets crossed, but any network that can aggregate detailed information about BILLIONS of people has certainly crossed it. The question is simply whether or not we should be content with this situation.
> The users of FB have decided that this is the way they'd like to organize their information?
In aggregate, by choosing to use Facebook, and by providing feedback and usage data that shapes how it changes. I realize that there is a certain stickyness and network effect at play, but at some level we have chosen this platform and format, and many (most?) are content with it.
I can't really wrap my head around a useful replacement that has no enforced formatting/is difficult to aggregate and parse. If you have any more concrete ideas or examples I would be interested.
>> The users of FB have decided that this is the way they'd like to organize their information?
>In aggregate, by choosing to use Facebook, and by providing feedback and usage data that shapes how it changes.
I simply draw a different conclusion from that than you do. At some level we have chosen it, yes. I'm not denying that, but instead trying to figure out whether that level is necessary. I appreciate the pushback!
A CMS is essentially a collection of keys and values. The format prescribes the keys, and the user fills in the values.
All I'm suggesting is that we design the keys ourselves. If that makes communication more difficult, perhaps it's also true that not all communication needs to be universally legible.
This is interesting, and I had the same thought reading the article. One approach might be for the user to store the information on their own computer, and only when they enter (login) the social network, does their information become available, and only to those that they specifically give access to.
I've been following these discussions the past couple of days on HN, and there are a few calm minds who are very knowledgeable of the law, who's comments have been enlightening and reassuring ('rayiner and others).
But we now live in a completely online world, where nearly all communication and files are conveyed and hosted by third parties, and soon it will take several minutes for even a geek to mentally count up the number of internet-connected computers in their house.
I am comforted by the idea that Jack Bauer and Chloe have timely access to information to stop the bad guys, and that US secret agencies have little motivation or bandwidth to use this information for anything but national security threats (and hopefully kidnapping and such). Bad actors in these agencies can obviously do a lot of harm to individuals, but those cases will probably be personal and few, widespread malicious use of this data by agency employees would be easier to uncover.
What I find most troubling is the ease with which the government can view my information and how I've steadily made it easier for them over the past five years by getting that iPhone, using Dropbox and Gmail. But, my life has seemed safe, prosperous and peaceful over that time and these services I use have had a profound impact on the efficiency and convenience with which I perform my daily routine.
Brilliant, you get comfort from a murdering, torturing, loose cannon nut job, who takes no notice of his superiors. Not to mention making mistakes that kill others. Amazing. Its a live cartoon. Might as well have faith in Batman.
Yeah, I loved 24, but thank god its a wonderful fantasy and not real.
Oh, forgive me, but what was the episode where Jack and co got the bad guys by looking at facebook?
"Those who do not move, do not notice their chains." - Rosa Luxemburg
Of course you don't care about privacy, why should you? You're just a peaceful flock member. never acting against the power of the status quo. But look around and see what happens to the people that actually do confront power and you'll see why privacy is important.
The first link was about a lawyer, who represented the soldier who stole massive amounts of classified material while stationed in a war zone, being detained and searched at the border. The second was about a film maker returning to the country after traveling to a war zone and being detained and searched.
In both cases their laptops/cameras/etc were searched and confiscated for a time. Neither person seems to have been detained overnight.
This is just the government being thorough. This is not disturbing to me.
I would now consider paying for services that offer real private email, social networking and file sharing / cloud backups, where none of those services were controlled by an US controlled entity and where the NSA couldn't snoop around in my private life. However boring my private life is, it is still mine.
I wonder if anyone else would part with cold hard cash though, or is it just me? There maybe a niche there.
Paying with your credit card? That's being tracked. Your back account transactions are being indexed and collated.
They're probably in all of our computers already. I've been operating a windows7 honeypot as my "main" computer for several years, generating what appears to be legit "personal" traffic. You wouldn't believe the shit I've found, and it doesn't appear to be your garden variety cyber criminals or foreign state actors. And I'm not even that smart.
It appears that the honeypot has been compromised in both a domestic botnet running in system memory by "authorities" local to the US, and also that there are background processes in Windows that are inspecting the filesystem for binaries matching certain signatures no matter how the user configures the system, even "stubbing out" the visible processes that would make sense, like their anti-malware and indexing services. Basically a Windows machine is owned from the get go.
Unfortunately this is not exactly my particular area of expertise, so for me it's like glimpsing a shadow through smoke and a moving window, mostly an impression but something that has become more and more sophisticated despite my attempts to prevent it via traditional and modern methods of forensics, and even weird things like audible and inaudible platter noise when there shouldn't be heavy (this is the key for me) disk io.
I should say as well, I am an interested layman when it comes to this stuff. I have a knack for maths and statistical analysis, so please take my comments for what they're worth, which is only anecdotal
I certainly understand the gravity of what I'm alleging, and I wish I had formal training in this stuff so I could publish my observations with some sort of rigour. I will say my methods are pretty crude and consist of:
Process of elimination as far as the processes are concerned. Basically I have been paring back the processes that are visible to me in memory until it should be a bare minimum for a functional Windows kernel in memory, and stubbing out the non-essential processes I find with empty "stubs" so that the hooks are still there but non-functional. Then observing disk io and memory usage, and repeating. Not very scientific, but again, I'm an amateur.
The stuff about disk platter noise is simply recording the audible and inaudible frequencies generated from the platter (I haven't upgraded to a ssd for the system disk yet), and then running regressions on the wave forms to detect anomalies via the noise generated by the platter and the reading head interacting. I was interested in looking into the inaudible frequencies because it seemed like a good way to cloak disk io from the average user.
As far as the botnet stuff, I've done some MITM packet analysis and some simple stuff like tracerts and observing changes in routing. Right now the box is routing all name service through what appears to be another compromised box in the US state of Georgia, though I'm hesitant to do much network topology due to port-scanning being considered the same as cracking.
This is all just a hobby, and I'm sure some of the stuff I've mentioned about is either very crazy sounding or perhaps already known to people more knowledgeable than me. I grew up when pcs were still a weird hobby for society, and so this sort of stuff seems like things we should be able to do without fearing repercussions.
Also, I only posted this to give context to what I had posted before, so take it for whatever you want to. I'm interested in non-violent solutions to improving society and I don't want to jeopardize that.
Just looking at the disk activity of reads, inspecting the memory dumps from these periods, and picking out what I can via a hex editor as far as what the "inspection" appears to be looking for via checksums derived from file blocks, which appear to be tied to images and videos. I'm assuming that this is domestic and not foreign, which I certainly could be wrong about. I'm also assuming they're looking for kiddie fiddlers, which I doubt someone like China would be all that interested in, but maybe the PRC is for blackmail purposes.
A lot of this stuff is sort of ephemeral and I don't have any credentials to really convince anyone. That's why I would post this, maybe someone else knows more than me. Like I said, take this as anecdotal and perhaps incorrect... You'll notice a lot of assumptions by me.
Well, the behaviour you are describing just sounds like Microsoft's anti-virus software - and they have a datacenter in Georgia - something to consider.
If you are genuinely concerned I think it is pretty simple to contact real professionals with whatever data you have.
I don't know, the name service resolution terminated in a server with an open smtp relay, which might be what you're talking about but sounds strange. Plus, it's name service resolution for _all_ outbound traffic. Thanks for the tip though. Like I said, I'm just a computer hobbyist
also, I determined that even unplugging the honeypot when "not in use" was not enough, as it appears to be using "bursts" similar to special forces radio techniques, when availability resumes to its cnc system.
For the common man, it would be easier to pay in cash to avoid credit card transaction tracking, rather than setup your own mail server to avoid email snooping.
Unfortunately such a social network would probably be so dominated by tinfoil-hat crazies that it would be unusable. The thing about social networks is of course that the people you want to socially network with need to be there.
On the other hand you would be fully up to date at all times on the evils of vaccines and water fluoridation.
You could just agree to disagree with them without expanding such emotional energy.
Though I wonder when dissemination of vaccines will be more of a science instead of "We know this strand of virus is going around, everyone come here and get a shot of xyz because it is good for you and will protect you all", especially since overdosage of the massess will eventually lead to resistant strands.
It would be really cool to have a personal 23andMe api where people can test themselves without sending data to a 3rd party.
That's certainly the most mature way to handle such disagreements, I don't think there is any disagreement there. However, it's damn hard to accept that line of reasoning when those opinions lead to a decrease in herd immunity and put the lives of immunocompromised individuals, such as myself, and others at risk because of pseudoscience, a single debunked study, and a former porn star. It's not simply unacceptable, it's asinine and infuriating.
And putting oneself in a fit because someone is sharing their viewpoint (as opinion or fact) isn't asinine?
There is also a decrease in "herd immunity" when a population has been flooded with a drug to the point where such immunizations have no effect à la "superbugs".
Your comment seems to misunderstand the difference between vaccinations and antibiotic treatments. Herd immunity disallows an organism a foothold in a population, it is not present to become immune - it is something entirely separate from the emergence of superbugs immune to all or most known antibiotic treatments.
How is the emergence of superbugs immunity to antibiotic treatments entirely separate when they are different strands of organisms that were previously treated?
Vaccinations and treatment are completely different things and vaccines and antibiotics are also completely different things. There are plenty of resources on the Internet that explain these matters - if you can get past the anti-vaccine psuedoscience search engine spam. For example you can find plenty of people trying to blame resistant Whooping Cough on vaccines when the most likely cause is the reduction of vaccination rates, not the presence of vaccinations in the first place.
I'd be the first to admit I am no expert so if you have real interest in the topic I would go looking for someone better qualified to talk to than me.
"When antibiotics are used in an attempt to kill certain bacteria, a few may survive because they happen to have the appropriate genes; thus they will become the predominant strain. For instance, if the antibiotic kills a million bacteria but doesn’t kill five that are resistant, at their incredible multiplication rate—bacteria divide every 20 to 30 minutes—after 15 hours there will be 5 million descendants of those five, all of them resistant to the antibiotic.Some bacteria carry antibiotic resistance genes that can be passed to other species of bacteria.
These transferable genes often carry resistance to many antibiotics.
Staphylococcus aureus is a common germ that normally lives on your skin, but can gain entry to the body and cause abscesses, bone infections, pneumonia or infection of the heart valves. In the 1940s virtually all strains of S. aureus were susceptible to penicillin. Today, more than 90% of S. aureus strains are resistant to penicillin and many other antibiotics that were once effective against these bacteria."[0]
"One alternative, at least for some types of bacteria, is vaccination. Since Hib vaccines were introduced, the number of new cases of invasive Hib infections—both drug-sensitive and resistant—in infants and children in the U.S. has decreased by 99%."[0]
So yes, vaccines and antibiotics are different, but are meant to address the same things. From this most of the what we have seen so far has come from resistance to antibiotics, where vacancies have helping to address that void in some cases that didn't turn out to be accidental inoculation.
No vaccine is 100% effective; no vaccine is 100% safe. As with any drug, there are risks and side effects with vaccines, although serious side effects are mostly rare. However, there is a much higher standard of safety expected of preventive vaccines than for drugs because:
Vaccines are generally given to many people most of whom are healthy. People tolerate far less risk from Haemophilus influenzae type b vaccines than the antibiotics used to treat the diseases it causes, for example.
Many vaccines are given to children at the ages when developmental and other problems are being recognized for the first time. Because something happened at about the same time does not mean that one caused the other. (See Cause or Coincidence)
Some vaccines are mandated by state legislatures in order to protect the health and welfare of the public. Some people think that this violates their civil rights, however."[1]
"Perception of risk depends on people’s experiences and knowledge. A person who experienced an adverse event after vaccination—or thinks that they know someone who did—will perceive vaccines as riskier than a person who has not. Conversely, one who has survived a vaccine-preventable disease—or a physician who has treated that disease—will likely be an advocate for vaccines.
Although concerns about vaccine safety are valid—and necessary—we must carefully examine each claim about the risks of immunizations"[1]
Taking the middle road on these issues is more productive than outright dismissal and becoming enraged, because it acknowledges some truth the individuals experiences/opinions or w/e that might be contrary to someone elses.
I am not the poster who becomes enraged about vaccine-deniers, in case you've got that mixed up. Though I generally find that vaccine-deniers are people such that they have little interest in becoming better informed or having their opinion changed so discussion is fruitless. (Though I hope to meet some that are otherwise one day!)
Not vaccinating people and thus allowing a disease to run rampant in the population, drive up infant mortality, and be present and breeding and thus mutating is not in any way shape or form the same thing as the over-use, mis-use, or inevitable decline in effectiveness of antibiotics. The moral and scientific issues are very, very different. That was what I was taking issue with in my original response.
I find nothing of what you wrote and quoted in the above comment to disagree with.
I don't deny the science behind the vaccines, but the motives of the people who ultimately control the process. The same people have taken away the average person privacy IMHO will as easily take away say his capability to produce children. But I guess it's easier to close your eyes and keep imagining that the elite has the same moral as yours and would never do horrible things.
If you do not deny the science behind vaccines then you probably have a moral responsibility to make sure you and your children are vaccinated. I know how bad it is to have vaccinated people in the population but you only believe or suspect that the people producing that vaccines are part of an evil cabal of elites looking to destroy society.
I think you have to go with the certainty on that one, don't you?
"Big Data" is the buzzword of the day but I think "Big Privacy" will be a bigger trend in the very near future. Right now it's technically possible to put together the resources to give your self a fairly good bit of privacy, just as it's always been possible to write a cron job to do remote backup before Dropbox. However this takes both a bit of technical skill, a good chunk of time and planning, and there's still a chance you'll miss something.
So I believe there's a lot of money to be made in providing instant privacy the same way dropbox provides instant backups. Likewise as statistics + programming = data scientist,
statistics + programming + security = privacy scientist
Sadly this also means that privacy will become a commodity and I can easily imagine a tiered system of privacy based on cost (eg 19.99/mo get's you a secure network + encrypted files, 99.99/mo get's you text re-structuring to avoid stylometeric identification.)
I would also consider paying for this. However, as pointed out in the comments below, a social network like Facebook only works because a majority of the majority of people's friends are there.
But, I think the more interesting point is that even if the system were hosted outside of US jurisdiction, or anyone's for that matter, they'll just find a way to make it difficult for you to access, as they do with thepiratebay - by blocking access through the ISPs. The inconvenience/complication of working around these ISP level filters, means that a lot of people won't know how or can't be bothered to work around them. The same would apply to a social network.
As I understand it, the US has no controls over the NSA spying out side of the US. So, you'd have less protection. Even if they did, as a result of this, and knowing how other governments bend to US will, I wouldn't trust anything connected to the internet at all.
Privacy wise, the internet is dead. Just, forget it. The war is lost. They can, there for, they will. And that's that.
I mean, does any one seriously think these abilities and powers will be go, or be given up?
I'm curious if my friends, family, and co-workers that rolled their eyes at me or laughed at me when I explained why I deleted my facebook account years ago even remember the conversation, or what their response was, when they read the latest revelations about the government having access to their databases.
Deleting your Facebook account isn't a solution to this problem. Gmail may contain even more personal information. Dropbox contains your files and is essentially giving them access to documents you would have stored offline 10 years ago. The problem is that none of these services are safe anymore and we need specific legislation detailing what the government can and can't do with the information we have stored on them.
The bigger problem for me is that as my data is being stored in the US by US companies and my countries laws don't apply - and the safeguards provided by the US constitution also don't apply. The NSA/FBI can do whatever they want with my data and have said as much[1]:
"He said reports about Prism contained "numerous inaccuracies". While admitting the government collected communications from internet firms, he said the policy only targets "non-US persons"."
I think we might start to see companies having data centres in multiple countries and allowing you to store your data in the one you choose or the one that follows your countries laws. Otherwise there will be an exodus of users from US internet companies.
The best approach is to keep profiles/accounts on all of those services and use them periodically to create a "clean" trail. Meanwhile, if you need any actual privacy, find alternate/private channels.
Considering the enormous amount of data being collected and the relative ease of setting up a clean trail, this kind of spying makes it even easier for low/moderate-suspicion individuals to achieve secure communications.
For high suspicion individuals, this kind of surveillance makes it easy to create disinformation that appears to be real intel.
The workflow required to leave a realistic "clean" trail while simultaneously engaging in secure communication could be designed into a purpose-built linux distro.
I didn't mean to imply that it was a solution to the problem. Just pointing out the problem seen long before today by many - for most of us here, this issue is not new. It's been discussed and debated for years. There's just now concrete proof that is irrefutable.
I'm more excited about these recent revelations than shocked and appalled, because now it is finally a national conversation with real outrage behind it. I've been waiting for this for years. Being called crazy, paranoid, anti-American, etc for years for voicing concerns about this has led me to a position of vindication on some level; however small or petty that may be.
The internet provides us with a mechanism of connecting with other people. The only advantage these internet services offer us is data redundancy, and the convenience of having an application accessible from wherever we are.
- In the case of a social network, have it decentralised and have user profiles and information hosted on the user's computer, and only accessible when logged into the social network and only by those that you have granted permission for.
- Messaging could be directly between users, over an encrypted channel. If user A sends a message to user B it does not arrive until they connect their device to the internet. Only then does the secure exchange of a message occur. Group messaging is a more difficult problem.
- Cloud storage: if storage devices get bigger, smaller and cheaper there's no reason why it couldn't become normal for people to have physical backup solutions built into their devices. Alternatively, completely encrypted cloud storage where only the user has the keys could become the norm.
The problem lies in consumer acceptance, education and also convenience. If nobody understands the technologies they use to power their lives, it's hard to communicate why things should be done alternatively. The EFF does a fantastic job of trying to protect our rights when it comes to technology, but I don't think consumers get it. More needs to be done. The analogy of a man coming into your house and reading your mail that's been posted through your door springs to mind. And finally, it has to be easy to do all these things in a private way. Better tools need to be created to allow us to securely store our information, communicate and perform tasks.
Deleting FB alone might not be a solution, but it's a part of it.
Out of these, I only have a gmail account. No personal data in it is real. I never email anyone I know in person from that account, nor I give it to anybody who knows me.
I think I'm on the safe side.
I operate similarly with my phone and basically everything else.
Going back even further, there used to be a time when "Internet Citizens" were primarily weird geeks. Us weird geeks used to tell people "eventually, this will be everywhere, connecting everything and everyone" and in exchange, we received ridicule by "ordinary" people. Those weird geeks and their technology - They would sure like if everybody was on their tech mumbo jumbo thing.
Fast forward ten years and an increasing number of people vomit their entire life online, constantly.
First it was the iMac era, then the iPhone era, now the iPad era. With every era, a new demographic is being pushed into this new data reality and our calls from the beginnings go unheard.
The thing is - we would really like to say "told you so", but it seems overly cynical by now. Especially considering that it's not just our wildest dreams, but also our worst nightmares coming true at an exponential pace.
And even more than that - we really like people getting onto "our thing", so calling for caution now has a whiff of asking for exclusivity after our nice little in-crowd thing was blown out of proportion.
No. They didn't care then and they don't care now. The government can data mine my facebook page as much as they want - it's my library lending record I'm worried about...
Will these NSA spy revelations hurt US internet companies? If I am German or Russian or Brazilian... do I really want to go out of my way to feed the U.S. intelligence beast?
On the other hand, there are relatively few governments worldwide that I would trust more (or distrust less, I guess) than that of the US to abuse this kind of information. The US isn't perfect, but a lot of places out there are worse.
``Being stabbed by a handsome gentleman is awful, but being stabbed by an ugly man is worse, so thank God I'm only being stabbed by a handsome gentleman!''
Being Brazilian, I am not so worried if the US government has access to my data, my main concern is about the Brazilian government having access to it.
The average German, Russian, or Brazilian probably thinks about the importance of their relative privacy with respect to their government even less than the average US citizen does. And the average US citizen does not really care. (This NSA thing is essentially an "inside the beltway" issue, not a ballot box thing.)
Government spying on my Facebook account is bothersome in regards to privacy limits of power but it is Facebook and anything I put there I should expect to be public at some point.
Are there public databases that collect information on officers/ agents?
If not what kinds of information would be valuable (to the public) to collect/ what kind of processes would be good to use(crowd-sourcing, web-scraping, .gov apis, etc)?
Lets be honest. Most people scream about privacy violations but in turn are more than willing, hell you cannot shut them up, to tell you all about themselves, their stuff, their friends, and such.
Even with legislation do you expect it not to be easy for any agency to just gather the information? At worst we will get an "Online Users Bill of Rights" which will only codify their rights to our privacy.
Assange is an exemplary case of how secret services operate. Containment plan is generally to discredit an inconvenient person via a character attack, which directs attention to a single person (and boy do the crowd loves gossip and celebrities), overshadowing whatever sensitive information there is to disclose. Make this person an unreliable source before they have anything to say.
He's been labeled a rapist, a crackpot, or even an agent of the evil, with little regard to atrocities exposed by the Wikileaks.
Yet like our beloved RMS, if you read the early texts, it is clear that they had seen it coming way before us - sane, normal people.
I wonder whether the time has come to build some better tools for protecting privacy. Looking at the common implementations of encryption the publicly available free stuff has some fairly awful interfaces. It's especially a mess if you're looking at securely communicating with a website - I can't think of a single browser that supports anything like a decent standard of encryption for that.
+ We haven't committed any crime — then there's nothing to worry! And so spying on certain accounts is fine, if they need to investigate, track and analyze data for Intelligence.
+ I'm perfectly fine if they take my data — till its serving in the good interests of my family and people's safety.
+ It should only be in the good interests of our system and society.
+ But such credible data, should not be misused by the govt bodies or elected representatives!
Who is to decide what is in the "interest" of your family and people's safety? This is subjective and cedes power to whoever is in control of the surveillance mechanism. The surveyor may have motives that are not as benevolent as you would like to think.
Or worse still, what if the definition of what is "safe" changes, following some sort of incident (9/11?)
Once they have amassed all this data about you they can mine it to their heart's content and use it to make predictions - those books you read before the "incident" that seemed innocent now get you flagged as a potential terrorist.
Just because we voted people in doesn't mean they're gods as soon as they enter office.
And positivity is useless if you just think everything can be fine as long as you have a positive outlook. That's foolishness. You SHOULD have alacrity towards this issue, but if you don't, that's your choice.
In ten years, you will look back and wish you did something. Mark my damned words.
What we need are tools that allow us to connect in ways that are difficult not only to detect but also to make sense of (not necessarily encryption, but an ad-hoc format that can't be easily parsed and aggregated). We need the ability to use the network for our own particular, peculiar interests rather than having to fit our interactions into some other authority's template for their interests. The idea that social networking never occurred before Friendster, FB, MySpace is ridiculous -- it just happened more informally before.
I'd like to see a return to this informal mode of using TCP/IP, where the internet itself is the social network rather than merely a transport layer for some centralized system. This may make it harder for everyday people to benefit, but it also means they learn how to drive before they use the roads. Social networking's hyped-up promise has always been to passively connect people, but the promise of the internet has always been to allow people to actively connect (or not connect). Once we have a broader suite of tools for this latter purpose, we'll see people reject centralized dossier services like FB.