Slashdot Mirror
How Tech Vendors Help Governments Spy On Their Citizens
jfruhlinger writes "Most Slashdotters — even those living in democratic countries — would probably be unsurprised to know that their governments are spying on them. But most people are not aware of how complicit security vendors, who publicly work to protect the public from such electronic eavesdropping, are complicit in such monitoring. All this and more is revealed in the latest Wikieaks document dump, the Spy Files."
Can you come up and say that wikileaks hasnt done anything useful now ?
Read radical news here
Every government, including the American one, has limited resources. Every government, especially the American one, has bureaucratic constraints. Think of the slowest, dumbest Fortune 500 company you can, and then think of the slowest, dumbest PHB within that corporation, and then multiply that by 1000. That's the caliber of people who work for governments. It's the nature of the beast: create a system where ass-kissing, not merit, determine career progress, and then divorce that entirely from a mitigating profit motive, and you have government.
These are the people who are buying the services/products of these surveillance companies. These are the people who don't read the user manuals of the products/services that these companies sell. These are the people who boss around the "technical" staff who are tasked with reading the user manuals but who frankly don't get paid enough to put up with this shit.
That is the reality of the surveillance net.
Now, consider that these days you, me, and every Tom, Dick, and Harry out there has access to virtually the same tech the governments and their corporate enablers do. Consider that even the cost factor for said tech is racing to zero. That is, the governments and companies are not using some secretly acquired alien technology that uses physics that the rest of the world doesn't grasp yet. You and I can understand the same physical laws and technology that the governments and the corporations in their employ do. And we do.
So why don't we turn it all around and crowd-source surveillance of them? Why not minutely track the exact location of every Congressman sneaking off to boink a 20 year old intern? Why not put Jamie Dimon's cell phone conversations on a streaming service, available to anyone in the world to listen to? Why not put them under the same microscope that they want to put us under?
After all, if the technological balance of power is at or near parity, then the deciding factor becomes how many people can you get to make sense of the data; and there are vastly more of us than there are of them to do that.
Let's once and for all shatter this venomous illusion of authority and competence that governments and corporations have cultivated and exploited for millenia. Let's excise the incalculable damage they have done to human advancement and win a better world for ourselves.
I for one am so very tired of the stunted one they have forced on us.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Oh! Oh! People doing things without permission!
What the hell do you think that "regulation" of the security industry is going to do except guarantee that the only companies allowed into it are ones that are willing to cooperate with the intelligence agencies of the goverments doing the regulating?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Just dont do anything to make them wanna fire/investigate you and you will be fine.
Isn't this another way of saying, "do whatever your government tells you to, without objection"?
I'm not sure that attitude is compatible with democracy. Sometimes the boat needs to be rocked.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I'm pretty sure they're convinced that they're spying on their enemy.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
dont you find it weird that governments are spying on their own citizens MORE than they spy on the enemy ? and even do it more effectively ?
Don't you realize WE are now enemies of the government? When DOJ/FBI puts out pamphlets saying that loners/Constitutionalists/Teapartiers are terrorists, you KNOW we are now considered the enemy of this current regime...
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
I think it takes a certain amount of confidence in one's own point of view to go blowing whistles.
To do what Assange has done takes quite a bit more of it.
Ego is not the primary problem, even if the people who think they have something to hide want to distract us by pointing at the ego.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.